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00:44 - Pandemic Life
\n\n13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment
\n\n29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Everyone should journal. Reflect on the past and bring it to the present.
\n\nDamien: Bringing magic into non-magical environments.
\n\nAaron: Ritual, intention, reflection, alignment.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 277 of Greater Than Code. I am Damien Burke and I'm joined with Aaron Aldrich.
\n\nAARON: Hi, I am Aaron and I am here with Mandy.
\n\nMANDY: Hello, everybody. I'm Mandy Moore and today, it's just the three of us!
\n\nSo if you came expecting more than that, I'm sorry.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWe’re what you get today, but hopefully, we can have a great conversation and we were thinking that we would talk about all the things. I'm doing big hand gestures right now because there's been so many things happening since 2020 that are still happening and how our perspectives have changed.
\n\nFor one, I, myself, can tell you I have grown so much as a person in 2 years. And I'm curious to hear how the two of you have been living your lives since the pandemic.
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] Where to begin.
\n\nAARON: I know. It's such a good topic because I feel like everyone's had so much to change, but at the same time, it's like, okay, so 2 million years ago at the beginning of this pandemic.
\n\nI'm now my third place, third job since the beginning of the pandemic as well and wow, I came out as non-binary in the middle of the pandemic [laughs]. So that was a whole thing, too.
\n\nI think the question I asked earlier is how much have you radicalized your politics over the course of the past 2 years? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. That's been bouncing around in my head since you said it off mic.
\n\nEvery time I hear the word pandemic now, I think about, “Oh man,” I hesitate on how far to go into this. [laughs] Because I look at the techno-anarchist crypto bros and I can I say that disparagingly and I will say that disparagingly because I was like them. [laughs] I filled out a survey today and they asked like, “How do you rate yourself as on a conservative and liberal scale?” I'm like, “Well, I think I'm super conservative.” And I still do and every time I align with any political policy, it's always an alignment with people who call themselves socialists and leftists and why is that? [laughs] Hmm.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut anyway, that was the part I was trying not to go back into. [laughs]
\n\nOne of the big realizations in living in a pandemic is that healthcare is not an exclusive good.
\n\nMANDY: What?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: That is to say that I cannot, as an individual, take care of my own health outside of the health of the community and society I live in. Didn't know that. In my defense, I hadn't thought about it, [laughs] but that was an amazing realization.
\n\nAARON: No, I think that was a big thing. I think so much of the pandemic exposed the way our systems are all interconnected. Exposed the societal things. Like so much we rely on is part of the society that we've built and when things don't work, it's like, well, now what? I don't have any mechanism to do anything on my own. What do we do?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. It's so fundamental in humanity that we are in society. We are in community. We only survive as a group. That's a fundamental aspect of the species and as much as we would like to stake our own claim and move out to a homestead and depend on no one other than ourselves, that is not a viable option for human beings.
\n\nAARON: Right, yeah. Even out here in rural Vermont with animals and things, we're still pretty dependent on all of the services that are [chuckles] provided around. I'm still on municipal electric service and everything else. There's still dependence and we still rely on our neighbors and everyone else to keep us sane in other ways.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and I feel like people in rural areas—and correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't lived in a rural area in maybe ever—have a better understanding of their independence. You know your neighbors because you need to depend on them. In the city—I live in Los Angeles—we depend on faceless institutions and systems.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And so, we can easily be blind to them.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. I think it mixes in other ways. I get to travel a bit for work and visit cities, and then I end up coming back out into the rural America to live. So I enjoy seeing both of it because in what I've seen in city spaces is so much has to be formalized because it's such a big deal. There are so many people involved in the system. We need a formal system with someone in charge to run it so that the average everyday person doesn't have to figure out how do I move trash from inside the city outside the city.
\n\n[laughter]
\nWe can make that a group of people's job to deal with.
Here, it's much more like, “Well, you can pay this service to do it, or that's where the dump is so can just take care of it yourself if you want.” “Well, this farm will take your food scraps for you so you can just bring this stuff over there if you want.” It's just very funny. It just pops up in these individual pockets and things that need group answers are sometimes like pushed to the town. You get small town drama because like everyone gets to know about what's happening with the road and have an opinion on the town budget as opposed to like, I don't know, isn't that why we hire a whole department to deal with this? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, but small town drama is way better than big town drama. The fact that half of LA's budget goes to policing is a secret. People don't know that.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Between the LA Police Department and LA Sheriff's Department, they have a larger budget than the military of Ukraine. That's the sort of thing that wouldn't happen – [overtalk]
\n\nAARON: Don't look at the NYPD budget then.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which is bigger still, yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat's not the sort thing that would happen in a small town where everybody's involved and in that business.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. It happens in other weird ways, but it's interesting. This is stuff that I don't know how has, if it's changed during pandemic times. Although, I guess I've started to pay attention more to local politics and trying to be like, “Oh, this is where real people affecting decisions get made every day are at the municipal levels, the city level.” These are things that if we pass a policy to take care of unhoused, or to change police budget, this affects people right now.
\n\nIt's not like, “Oh, wow, that takes time to go into effect and set up a department to eventually go do things.” It's like, “No, we're going to go change something materially.” It's hard to compare the two because the town I'm in rents a police officer part-time from the next [laughs] municipality over. So the comparison to doesn't really work.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Everybody knows exactly how much that costs, too.
\n\nAARON: We do. I just had to vote on it a couple Tuesdays ago.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: So then I think back to how that has impacted – I'm always trying to bring this podcast more into tech because I feel guilty about that. [laughs] About just wandering off into other things.
\n\nBut I think about how that impacts how I work in the organizations I work in. Hmm. I recognize I'm learning more about myself and how much I can love just sitting down with an editor and churn out awesome code, awesome features, and awesome products. That brings me so much joy and I don't want to do anything else.
\n\nAnd what we do has impact and so, it's so beneficial to be aware of the organization I'm in what it's doing, what the product is doing, how that’s impacting people. Sometimes, that involves a lot of management—I do a lot of product management with my main client now.
\n\nBut also, in other places, you would look at, “Well, okay, I don't need to manage the client's finances”. Not because that's not as important, it's because other people are doing it and I trust how they're doing it. That's something I haven't had elsewhere. The advantage of being with a very small organization is that I have these personal relationships and this personal trust that I couldn't get at one of the vampire companies. What'd they call them? FAANG?
\n\nAARON: Yeah, FAANG. We've been talking about this because FAANG, but Facebook and Google changed their name. So now, is it just MAAN?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nAARON: I mean Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, right?
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm all for the right of individuals to choose what they're called; I don't know if I'm willing to extend that to Facebook and Google.
\n\nAARON: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Remember, was it Altria?
\n\nAARON: Oh, Philip Morris.
\n\nDAMIEN: Philip Morris, right?
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: They were just like, “Oh, everything we've been doing is so horrible and harming to society for the past several decades, we'll just change our names and people will forget about it.”
\n\nAARON: That was Philip Morris. Altria didn't do any of that.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Altria didn't do any of that.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nYeah, I remember that.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. I'm curious because I think it's changed for me a bit over this time, too. But I'm curious for folks that have had a sensitivity change to the types of company, not necessarily types of companies, but like, I'm more sensitive to who I'm working for. I think my list of no, I won't work for the X company [chuckles] has probably grown throughout the pandemic and I'm definitely much more critical.
\n\nPart of it's probably because as in tech we're sort of at an advantage, it is high demand right now and we can be a bit picky about where we work, but I definitely have been [laughs] lately. Much more careful about I'm not just willing to work with anyone. I want someone that's got reasonable values. I interview other companies a lot more and I want to make sure product is not causing harm generally speaking and make sure I get a lot more value alignment out of leadership team and things like that. I don't know if other people have had a similar experience.
\n\nMANDY: Unfortunately, I haven't had that experience. I'm still working for whoever will give me money.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I wish I could do that and I'm currently looking. I mean, I've been trying to break into a full-time DevRel career for I guess, 2 years now and I guess, I'm actively looking. Oh, here we go. If you’re hiring, let me know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI guess I am. I'm looking for that job that I'm really feeling fulfilled in is right now I'm not feeling that and I think it's because of the pandemic, I've really stopped to think about what I want in my life and how I want to feel. I want to be happy, I want to be passionate about my job, and I want to wake up and not feel scared to open my computer because – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow.
\n\nMANDY: Are they going to tell me they no longer need my service?
\n\nDAMIEN: Right.
\n\nMANDY: And it's been demoralizing really, for me recently, especially because I tried to join a developer relations Slack group just a few months ago and they rejected me flat out and they're like, “You do not work in dev full time. You cannot be a part of our group,” and I'm like, “Oh.” So now I'm like, “Hmm, what do I do in tech?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI thought I'd been doing DevRel before DevRel was cool. I'm going to humble brag for a minute, but I have single-handedly put this podcast together and put you people together that you didn't even know and you love each other. You get that vibe. I can tell who's going to get – you're going to love this person and you're going to like – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh man, you not only put this podcast together, but you are the sustaining force. You are the heart of it. You are the thing where that all the panelists that are connected to. You are one who gets all of the mechanical, everything besides talking in mics. You do everything else and you're maintaining all these relations with these developers.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: I never even wanted to be on mic. I just started doing it because everybody was busy and I was like, “I guess I have to step up.” [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Whatever it takes to get it done, right?
\n\nMANDY: Well, yeah. I feel like the topics on this show that we talk about are important and they're even important outside of tech that hence, the whole name: Greater Than Code. There are more things out there than our jobs and our work and I just want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled and I want to be passionate about something and so does my dog.
\n\nAARON: That was a shift for me, too. That was definitely one of the roles I was in during the pandemic and realized my struggle with it so much was it was clashing with that. It wasn't fulfilling for me, it was clashing with my core values, and it was just like, “You know what, I can't do this anymore.” [chuckles] I'm no longer in a place where I have the energy to do a thing I don't like doing, or don't have some care for.
\n\nThere's always something you don't like doing. There's always some crap around every job that like don't like to do or you have to deal with something, but I'm no longer at a place where I can have a whole job that rubs me the wrong way.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. It's hard for me. I should feel great about this, but I'm known as the podcast girl. If you have a tech podcast, you should talk to Mandy, but I'm not just a podcast editor! I do so much more than that. I do operation, I do product management, I do writing; there's so much more that encompasses who I am in tech than the podcast girl.
\n\nI feel like not a lot of people know that and maybe that's my fault because I guess, I haven't really done a good job of putting myself out there to be like, “Hey wait. But I'm –” because for me, it's still a hustle as a single mom. I have to pay the bills. So it's like, I wish I could be more discerning with the jobs that I take and who I work for, but I don't know. I'm just one of those people of the universe. What will be, will be and if it's meant to be, it'll come to me. [laughs] So I don't ever really actively seek and that's probably half of my problem.
\n\nDAMIEN: Mm. That's funny because I didn't know all those things about you. I pitch you as a podcast producer and again, I live in a LA, I'm involved in the entertainment industry at a slight level, and the word producer there is very, very powerful and very important. A producer is an executive. A producer is person who gets things done, who makes it happen. I'm not entirely sure what a producer does, even though I've done it.
\n\nMANDY: I'm not even sure what a – [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Right, because it's never the same thing.
\n\nMANDY: No.
\n\nDAMIEN: It's whatever it takes and that skill.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: That being able to be know enough about a movie, or theatrical production, or a podcast, to know what it takes, to be able to manage, and sustain and get it done. That's really what it comes down to: get it done.
\n\nMANDY: That's why it's so hard for me. Everyone's like, “Do you have a resume?” And I'm like, “I don't know what to put on it!” Like, you tell me you need this done, I'll get it done. If I don’t know how to do it, I'll figure it out because that's what I've done for 13 years. Like I got hired as Avdi Grimm’s virtual assistant because an Indeed.com ad came out and was like, “I need somebody to answer emails for me,” and I'm like, “Don’t know why you can't do that yourself, but sure.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd then from there, he had a podcast and was like, “Can you edit my podcast?” And I was like, “Sure,” and then I'm Googling what is a podcast.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI had no clue. So I got here, I think a lot out of luck from being at the right place and talking to the right person at the right time. But I have busted my ass to just learn what people need me to learn and do what people need me to do. I guess, that's maybe what I should just put on the resume. I'll do what you need me to do. I make it happen.
\n\nDAMIEN: No, no, no. You put on the resume what your next job is going to be doing.
\n\nMANDY: [laughs] Yeah, so, it's hard when people ask me for my resume. I have like three resumes and I'm like, “This does not, no.”
\n\nAARON: It's almost more a portfolio at this point, right. I made this thing happen. I made this thing happen. Here's this other thing that I did. Here's another thing I made happen.
\n\nDAMIEN: Resumes are horrific. They're not good for anybody and the only people who use them are people who need to filter quickly out of large groups and they're not even good for that. I've long aspired to be at a place in my career where I don't need a resume and I might be there. Steve Jobs didn't have a resume. Didn't need a resume. He didn't send his resume to the board to get that job at Apple back. It's ridiculous.
\n\nMANDY: Well, that's the thing for me. I get most of my work from word to mouth.
\n\nDAMIEN: Right.
\n\nMANDY: So until I really lost a big client and I was like, “Oh, I don't have a resume. Don't you know who I am?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: But like, they should.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAARON: Just say the portfolios level. I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right? This is...
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nAARON: [laughs] Kind of the same thing. It’s sort of how my resume is morphed in DevRel proper. It's gone from I still kind of have the resume that's like, “Yeah, I worked into these things internally that might not surface otherwise, but also, here's my speaking portfolio and all the things that I have done over the past 3 years. [laughs] You might know me from all of this stuff instead of what's on this resume.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Of course, once I was getting comfortable enough to want to speak, that's when the whole world shut down.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So I have no videos of myself speaking anywhere whatsoever.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I think there might be a few podcasts that you appear on.
\n\nMANDY: There's a few episodes as of late that I have ventured to be on out of keeping the show alive.
\n\nDAMIEN: And every episode of this podcast, and I think several others, are shits near portfolio, right?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: Then I'd have a really wrong resume. [laughs]
\n\nAARON: We'll figure it out.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nAARON: You just need the highlights.
\n\nMANDY: But I don’t know, a lot of other things have changed for me over the course of the past 2 years. Just in my personal life, I've gotten sober and that was a really hard thing to do during a pandemic.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: When everybody else was out hoarding toilet paper, I was like, “Oh my God, I need beer,” [laughs] and actually, I did. While everybody was stocking up on those other necessities, I was buying cases of beer and putting them in my garage because I was like, “Oh great, the world's ending and I guess, if that's going to happen, I might as well be drunk.” And then – [overtalk]
\n\nAARON: I mean, it's a fair argument in your defense.
\n\nMANDY: But then it became a bad problem because when you're home all day and I was home, I worked from home before this. But everything is so damn depressing and you keep the news on the television and next thing you know, it's lunch time and cracking a beer and I'm like, “Whoa, this is… [laughs] where did this come from?”
\n\nSo no, I got sober and I don't drink anymore and honestly, I have never felt better. I've also become a runner. I got a treadmill and I run a 4, or 5 miles a day and I've lost a good amount of weight, probably a lot from alcohol bloat.
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: But it's more for me. It's not even about losing a weight because I don't even own a scale because it's more about how I feel.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: It's what is about how I feel. So when I went to the doctor's office for my yearly checkup on Monday and I got on the scale because they make you, I said, “Whoa,” [laughs] because I didn't even know.
\n\nFor me, it's about how I feel and I think that that's really, what's brought a lot of things into perspective for me is that at our time here on earth is fine. I want to be here for my daughter especially. She's 13 and I want to be healthy for her. I want to be here for my friends. I ask myself why I'm still in York, Pennsylvania and I haven't left because I do have people around here that I care about.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: And other than that, I could take it, or leave it. But because the people who I love are here, that's why I haven't left.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So that's another thing, the things like the pandemic has just really set me into a lot of personal development work and self-discovery. I journal every day. I read self-help books, which is so weird to me because I was one of those people that were like, “Who are those people that read self-help books?” and now I'm one of them.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nI want to be Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle’s best friend.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThose two women are my people. Elizabeth Gilbert. I can give you so many names of people and great authors that just inspire the hell out of me and 2 years ago, I was not that at all.
\n\nAARON: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for getting at our time on earth is finite and so, in refocusing on what matters to us. Another way I had a friend put it to me, it's like optimistic nihilism. Look, at the end of the day, we're all going to be dead and none of this matters. So you might as well do what makes you happy, right? [laughs] You might as well do the things that are fulfilling and meaningful and try to make other people have a good time, too. You might as well.
\n\nDAMIEN: I always thought it was ridiculous that nihilism had such a negative connotation. It was like, “No. Okay. I can believe that and be –” [overtalk]
\n\nAARON: No pressure. At the end of the day, we're all going to die so, no pressure. Do what do what you need to do. Doesn't matter if you succeed, or fail.
\n\nMANDY: That's like, I'm one of those people that would rather spend their money on experiences.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Because I don't care how much money I die with.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'd rather use it now and take my kid Disney world, which I did 3 years ago.
\n\nDAMIEN: Nice.
\n\nMANDY: And enjoy those experiences rather than have a bank account full of dollars that I can't use.
\n\nDAMIEN: High score.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, high score.
\n\nDAMIEN: Shout out to thriving in hand wavy.
\n\nI feel embarrassed about this and I don't talk about it much because so many people are suffering. People I love are suffering. People I work with and deal with on a daily basis are suffering, and bad things are happening. This is the best year of my life. This is better than last year and last year was better than the year before. I just keep getting better and my life just keeps getting more awesome. I don't know if I was going anywhere with that, but solidarity with Mandy, I guess. You bought a treadmill. I bought a rower.
\n\nMANDY: I feel like honestly, the universe gives back what you put out and I guess, I’ve become real – a lot of people are like, “You're like, woo-woo witchy now,” and I'm like, “Aha, yeah.” I kind of like that. So I feel like if you manifest things, you can make that happen and yes, there's things happening. Yes, yes, there are so many bad things happening, but sometimes out of self-preservation, you just have to tune all of that out and just be in your immediate dwell. For me, sometimes I'll go a week without watching news and I feel guilty about that a lot, but it's just like, you know what, if something's going to happen, it's going to happen.
\n\nAARON: I think the best way someone put that to me was anxiety is not activism.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nAARON: Right, so just sitting around making yourself anxious and stressed out about everything and whatever emotion you have, making yourself feel bad doesn't improve the situation, it just also makes you feel bad. So it's okay to take a step back and do the self-care that you need to do because just feeling bad isn't fixing the problem either. So step back, find what you can do. Maybe there's stuff you can do here, in your immediate space that you can take action on.
\n\nMANDY: Exactly. And also, for drinking other people's problems away, – [overtalk]
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAARON: You can’t drink other people’s – disassociating from other people's problems isn't effective.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: No. Let me tell you, I tried.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: That's such a great statement. Anxiety is not activism, but also the opposite is true. Joy is activism, rest is activism, thriving in a world that doesn't want you to thrive is an act of resistance and activism. Shout out, living a good life.
\n\nAARON: That's been a good conversation. I think that's easy to forget and I've seen it come up a couple times over the past couple years of what they have been of taking those moments for joy are really important. They can be radical in and of themselves.
\n\nMANDY: Keep a gratitude journal. There are so many great apps that every day before I go to sleep, I just write one sentence and it gives you an option even to have a picture. So you can snap a picture. Even if it's just like this candle, this candle is burning right here and it smells so good and it's making me happy today. So I'm grateful for the candle.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I'm up to approximately 2 years of daily journaling.
\n\nA buddy of mine got together. We built a daily journaling app based on Morning Pages from The Artist's Way. It's called Early Words. Shout out earlywords.io if you want to join and journal with me. But every day, 750 words. I do it first thing in the morning most days. Stream of consciousness. It has absolutely changed my life. It makes me feel good. It made me a better writer. Not because the writing is good, but because it's taught me to turn off the editor. Writing does have to be good for me to write it.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Big proponent of journaling.
\n\nAARON: I believe in it. I just don't remember to do it. But that's my own problem.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Can we go back? Can we talk about witchcraft?
\n\nAARON: All right, I’m in.
\n\nDAMIEN: A friend of mine asked me oh my God, maybe it was a year ago. Maybe it was several months ago. I have no idea. She asked me like, “Do you actually believe in witchcraft? Those magic woo-woo stuff?” It's like, “Well, let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up in the morning, I make a potion with dried leaves that energizes me. At night, I make a different potion with dried flowers that calm me down and helps me sleep. My literal job is making sand think. Do I believe in witchcraft? I mean, yeah.” [chuckles]
\n\nMANDY: I mean, it's a full moon today so I have a whole jug of water out charging. I do. I literally have a jug of water on my deck charging for full moon water energy and I use it like, I'll put a little bit in my bath water. I'll put it a little bit of it – I'll cook with it. When I boil some water, put it in there. Does it help? I don't know, but it makes me feel better!
\n\nDAMIEN: Okay. Wait. It makes you feel better?
\n\nAARON: Sounds like it’s helping.
\n\nDAMIEN: Doesn’t that means it helps?
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. It does.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I believe in the power of intention and ritual. There's a reason why humans developed rituals over time and sometimes, it's just for us to feel the right thing. But like, feelings are important?
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] But like, feelings are important.
\n\nAARON: I don’t want to say something controversial on the Greater Than Code podcast such as feelings are important. But they are. Sometimes, while you go through a certain step and it centers you, or you go through a certain set of steps and it makes you feel better, or it helps you process the anxiety you're feeling, or it's like, nope, I need to get centered in my five senses again so I can come back into my body and be here instead of going off on an anxiety spiral.
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely.
\n\nAARON: What is witchcraft? I actually love this from Terry Pratchett, one of my all-time favorite authors who does the Discworld series of novels, as a very specific approach to witchcraft, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, magic and whatever. But their daily thing is checking on all the people of the village and doing all the work that nobody wants to do. So it's like, how are the elderly doing? Do they need help with anything? Making sure and so takes their bath, making sure this person's animals are taken care of, making sure this sort of thing.
\n\nSometimes, it's about appearances and going through the ritual to make sure the community is coming along. Sitting with the dead, all that kind of stuff. And that's witchcraft, that's the bread and butter of witchcraft is knowing the right herbs and poultices to put together, being the heart and soul of the community and being able to get people and helping each other, and move the resources around as needed and that sort of thing. So yeah, I believe in that. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. There was there's a great story and about Anton Mesmer, I learned this shout out to Mary Elizabeth Raines who taught me hypnosis. I learned this when she told me this story when I was doing my hypnosis training about Anton Mesmer, who's considered the [31:10] of hypnotism. He introduced hypnotism to the to the white people.
\n\nThe word mesmerism and magnetic person, magnetic personality, all this comes from Mesmer. He had salons where people would hold onto metal rod that he had “magnetized” and be healed and fall out and screaming have spirit and all that. But Mesmer was very popular and very powerful and the king of France did not like this. The king of France put together a blue-ribbon commission. I don't know if he called it a blue-ribbon commission. Probably not because he spoke French, but put together a commission of scientists to discredit Mesmer. One of these scientists was Ben Franklin, by the way.
\n\nSo they did a double-blind study. They did a proper double-blind test. They had Mesmer come out and magnetize a tree. That was a thing he did. He would magnetize trees, people would come out and hug the trees and then they'd be healed. So they did a study. They had to magnetize the tree and they brought people out who were sick and they said, “Hug that tree. That’s magnetized and you'll be healed.” Some of the trees Mesmer had magnetized, some he hadn't and it turns out it didn't matter. People were still healed and so, they all came to conclusion, “All right. See, Mesmer’s not doing anything. It's all placebo effect.”
\n\nMesmer was run out of town and lived in exile for the rest of his days. Nobody bothered to ask why were the people healed? Everybody knows placebo effect is a real effect. Nobody's like, “How do we make it more effective? Why is it working this way? What do we do it? What do we do with that? How can we use that?”
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nAARON: No, I think it's a super interesting thought. The placebo effect is a powerful and interesting concept overall. We did ourselves a disservice to not understand it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. To dismiss it as if it doesn't exist. Not only does it exist, it's increasing.
\n\nAARON: Hmm.
\n\nDAMIEN: Because people are getting more powerful.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I'm drinking this Zenify Stress Relief Drink.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nAnd does it work? I don't know, but it's delicious and you know what? It makes me happy. You know why? Because it's not alcohol.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo it's not having a negative effect on me. I'm not getting drunk and doing stupid things. Is it taking away? My stress? Eh. I mean, but I love it. I love it and it makes me feel good. It's a treat. It's a special drink. I have one a day and it's one of those things that instead of missing my case of White Claw Seltzer. I know, I know, I wasn't even a bougie – well, I wasn't even a good drinker. That's what made it a problem. [laughs]
\n\nAARON: This is far too affordable.
\n\nMANDY: I was not a discerning drinker, so. [laughs] No, I have my one bougie drink that I have and it makes me feel good. Does it relieve my stress? I don't know, but I don't care either.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. If it works, it works.
\n\nOne of the great things about placebos is they don't – well, I was going to say they don't have to be expensive, but sometimes it works better when they're expensive. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Moon water is free.
\n\nDAMIEN: Moon water is, yeah. But, well, it's not free actually. You had to put an effort and intention.
\n\nMANDY: True.
\n\nDAMIEN: And I think if you didn't, it wouldn't be as effective.
\n\nAARON: Effort and intention go a long way.
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] That's a root of magic, isn't it?
\n\nMANDY: Why can't I just get paid for effort and intention? [laughs]
\n\nAARON: I mean, if I put my effort and intention into this money tree.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI've always thought it would be nice if real world jobs worked like Animal Crossing. Like, “Oh, so I can just go pick some stuff up and then you're just going to give money and then we can just move on? Great.” “Now look, I dug up a bag of money. If I just plant this bag of money, I'll get more money. It's fine.” [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm trying to bridge that gap. That's such a great question like when effort and intention is so well, literally magical, why does it seem to not have the impact we want in nonmagical environments, I'll call them?
\n\nAARON: Mm.
\n\nDAMIEN: I asked that question because I want to know what to do about that. I want to bring magic to nonmagical environment, to city council, to retail stores. I almost named an online retail store; I don't want to name it. [laughs] But it's a city council to corporate interactions. And there's no reason you can't. Corporations are people. Governments are people. I think requires dealing with them in individually in ways that we're not used to.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. It's a good question. You've got to be really thinking about…
\n\nMANDY: My wheels are turning.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is effort and intention are always going to make the most effect for you because most of it is about aligning your thought processes. It's about taking the, I don't know, I'm just taking this into making the best decision I can to like, okay, if I can focus on this is my goal and my aim and what I'm after, suddenly all of the patterns emerge around that. Oh, now I'm ready for that opportunity, or oh, now this thing is working out, and oh, now this is what is working out because I've focused on my intentions and where I want to put my efforts.
\n\nI think there's room for these things in other groups. Gets back to what I was thinking about ritual, about how humans are tuned for ritual to tell themselves story. We’re tuned for storytelling and ritual and all this sort of thing. So I think there's room from a tech perspective, I'm thinking about what comes to mind quickly is incident management stuff. Sorry, I'm coming off of SRECon this week so, everything's going to be around that.
\n\nDAMIEN: Our apologies.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt’s all right.
\n\nAARON: It was fantastic, but it's a different podcast. [laughs] But think about that, right? When you're coming in and doing instant reports, it’s so powerful is it to set the intention of the meeting, or any meeting that you have and say, “We are here for this purpose. This is what we're looking to find. We're not looking to do –” Back when Chef had lots to say about this, they'd have those things like we're not here to determine what could have, or should have happened. We're here to find out what did and move the thing.
\n\nSo it's all about setting the intent of that gathering and what outcomes you're after and it focuses the whole conversation can make that meeting more powerful because you've set the focus right off the bat. I think there's room for that other places, too.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's such a beautiful way of saying it. You described it as setting an attention.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nS: Whereas, in corporate speak, I would describe it as setting an agenda.
\n\nAARON: Right, and an agenda is one thing. It's kind of like, “Hey, here's kind of the stuff we're going to do,” but to be like, “We are gathered for this purpose to [laughs] cover this thing.”
\n\nDAMIEN: No, no.
\n\nAARON: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Dearly beloved, dear colleague.
\n\nAARON: Right? Yeah, right.
\n\nDAMIEN: We are gathered here for this purpose.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. I mean, we say it this way in personal stuff, why don't we –? Like, it's useful. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: It really is.
\n\nDAMIEN: Because how are you ever going to get something done if you don't know what you're there for?
\n\nAARON: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, you're going to get something done. If you don't have a destination, any road you take is fine.
\n\nAARON: If you don't have any intention set, it's a series of meetings that could have been emails.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd then maybe that's the power of it, in a nonmagical space, is forcing yourself to go through this thought process of why am I doing this? Why are we here? What do we want to accomplish? Can probably trim so much of the cruft from all of our meetings and engagements.
\n\nDAMIEN: That was my favorite sentence as a product manager: what is it you're trying to accomplish? [chuckles]
\n\nAARON: I say that a lot,
\n\nDAMIEN: But it is a very, very powerful question.
\n\nAARON: Especially when you have children asking to use dangerous tools.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhat is it you're trying to accomplish? Maybe we don't need to bust out razor blades. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: So from an SRE standpoint, when you get together for – what do you call that meeting? An incident review postmortem? Postmortem is a bit – [overtalk]
\n\nAARON: Yeah, yeah. Post-incident report. There's a handful of names for that reason, but post-incident review.
\n\nMANDY: Retrospective.
\n\nDAMIEN: Retrospective, yeah. So the question is, what is it you are trying to accomplish?
\n\nAARON: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame.
\n\nAARON: And not blaming.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame so that I look good in my next performance review.
\n\nAARON: Well, that's what was so important about doing that because that's the shift we're, largely as an industry, trying to make. Finding a person to blame doesn't learn anything about what happened and will teach us nothing for next time.
\n\nSo if we set the intention of like, we're trying to learn from this incident and how we can improve or what we can do better, or maybe there's nothing. Maybe this was just a fluke and let's find that out. That's what we're here to learn. But we're not here to point fingers, or find a root cause because root causes are for plants.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAARON: Again, that's a whole other podcast. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: At the beginning of the pandemic, I owned zero plants. Now, I think I'm the proud plant mother of 20? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow.
\n\nAARON: That's amazing.
\n\nMANDY: I know.
\n\nAARON: My problem is I can't keep things alive.
\n\nMANDY: Well, mostly they're all thriving because I set the intention that I was not going to mess this up.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: There you go. Do you give them moon water?
\n\nMANDY: I do.
\n\nDAMIEN: Apparently, it's working.
\n\nMANDY: I do.
\n\nDo we want to do some reflections?
\n\nDAMIEN: Sure. Let's do it.
\n\nMANDY: I'll start us off.
\n\nWith this conversation, we were just having about the intention and stuff. This is why I think everybody should journal, including CEOs and leaders. Get out a journal, what do you want, and then look back at some of the stuff. I don't it often, but I go back and I'm like, “Oh yeah.” Just reflecting on what you've written in the past and bringing that to the present can really help you put stock in all the things that you want and should be accomplishing.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. This bringing magic into nonmagical environments and journaling is part of that. A shout out to journaling. Another plug for earlywords.io that I own. Come journal with me because it is a magical thing. It is a ritual I do daily. That clears my mind. That is a practice of the listening to myself. It is a practice of letting go and not controlling what's coming out.
\n\nAlong with that and all the other sort of ways I know of being that I can call magic, I can call hypnotism, I can call NLP, I can call ontological coaching I've done a lot, bringing that into environments where I haven't because they're so useful there and we talked about some of the ways they are and so, we really confirmed more ways of doing that.
\n\nAARON: I think the things I'm thinking about after this conversation are ritual, intention, and reflection are the big things that are standing up. I think this pandemic, for instance, and how things have changed is because I've had just so much time to have to sit alone by myself and reflect on what's going on externally and internally. But yeah.
\n\nAnyway, just about setting intentions, of understanding the directions you want to go before going, making sure you're aligned with your goals, and you're not just accidentally wandering down paths that you don't want to be down and turning around and finding out your miserable 10 months later.
\n\nI think I've thought a lot about the power of even small rituals just to interrupt our standard thought processes and align ourselves with those kind of things. There's been a lot from basic health stuff of here are the rituals I can go through when I'm feeling anxious and I know they'll calm me down to writing in a journal, or directing a group to [laughs] let's align our thought processes. It can be super useful.
\n\nDAMIEN: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome.
\n\nWell, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we just had a panel only episode and I'd love to do more of these in the future. They're really cool. We didn't come to the show with much of an agenda and hopefully, you dear listener, appreciate it. If you would like to give us some feedback, we'd appreciate it. Tweet at us. Join our Slack.
\n\nAARON: Hire Mandy.
\n\nDAMIEN: Tell your friends.
\n\nMANDY: DM me. [chuckles] Tell your friends.
\n\nDAMIEN: Tell your enemies.
\n\nMANDY: Tell your enemies, too! [chuckles] We’ll see you all next week.
","summary":"Greater Than Code panelists Mandy Moore, Damien Burke, and Aaron Aldrich talk about how life has changed for them during the pandemic and realize the power of joy, happiness, and fulfillment as activism while discussing the power of ritual, intention, reflection, and alignment.","date_published":"2022-04-06T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/3a831c16-e5d8-40c2-b2a5-05f3c12c2d83.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55576611,"duration_in_seconds":2780}]},{"id":"cd0f1c30-e3d3-4cfe-8418-380edb45723e","title":"276: Caring Deeply About Humans – Diversify The Medical Community with Jenna Charlton","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/caring-deeply-about-humans","content_text":"01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech\n\n\nThe User is Everything\n\n\n04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User\n\n\nBuilding For Themself\nBother(!!) Users\nWalking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton\n\n\n09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing)\n\n\nPreparation\nIdentifying Bias\nGetting Things Wrong\nGamifying/Winning (Developer Dogs & Testing Cats)\nOvertesting\n\n\n23:15 - Working With ADHD\n\n\nAlerts & Alarms\nMedication\nUnderdiagnosis / Misdiagnosis\nPresentation\nMedical Misogyny and Socialization\nMasking\nFinding a Good Clinician\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Being a super human.\n\nJacob: Forgetting how to mask.\n\nJamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code.\n\nJenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.\n\nJACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers.\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton. \n\nJenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr.\n\nWelcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles]\n\nJENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: We're so excited to have you.\n\nJOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nJENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!”\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: I wish I could take credit for that. \n\n[laughter]\n\nBob is definitely the one responsible.\n\nJAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it.\n\nJENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde.\n\n[laughter]\n\nI also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling.\n\nJAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything. \n\nI'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them.\n\nJAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career?\n\nJENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life. \n\nSo I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me.\n\nBut I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change.\n\nJAMEY: That's amazing.\n\nJENNA: Thank you. [laughs]\n\nJACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails. \n\n[laughter] \n\nAs work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus?\n\nJENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference. \n\nI feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example. \n\nShe's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up. \n\nBut I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today. \n\nI always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them. \n\nSo I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it.\n\nJAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually.\n\n[laughter]\n\nIt's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs]\n\nJENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses.\n\nJAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something. \n\n[laughter] \n\nSo I'm so happy. [chuckles]\n\nJENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles]\n\nJOHN: Aw.\n\nJAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: Oh, thank you.\n\n[laughter]\n\nBig warm hugs. [laughs]\n\nJOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else. \n\nSo do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for them?\n\nJENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I’ve answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over. \n\nNow, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is. \n\nThere have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation.\n\nJAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening.\n\nJENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold?\n\nJAMEY: Mm.\n\nJENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea. \n\nI know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red.\n\nJOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you’ve got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever.\n\nJENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them.\n\nJOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview?\n\nJENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs]\n\nSo I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation.\n\nJOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on?\n\nJENNA: Oh, absolutely. \n\nWhen I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders’ need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors’ needs. \n\nAnd when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it.\n\nJENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats?\n\nJAMEY: Elaborate.\n\nJACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about.\n\nJAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job.\n\nCats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation. \n\nSo what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse.\n\nSo testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I’ve got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again. \n\nDogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nJAMEY: I think that's really insightful.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree.\n\nJENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.”\n\nJENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she’ll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles]\n\nJACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter. \n\nFor some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nJENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you.\n\nJACOB: Yeah.\n\nJENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that?\n\nJENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it. \n\n[laughter]\n\nMost of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again. \n\nSo I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those. \n\nThe most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing. \n\nAlso, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs]\n\nSo all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We’ve got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs]\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way.\n\nJENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.” \n\nSo it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it’s the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy.\n\nJENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still. \n\nSo there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different. \n\nI guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs] \n\nSo let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don’t know. \n\n[laughter]\n\nIt didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age. \n\nMost people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term.\n\nJACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life. \n\nSo when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense.\n\nJENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs]\n\nJACOB: Yeah, me too.\n\nJENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel.\n\nJENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face.\n\n[laughter]\n\nFor those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4’ 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable. \n\n[laughter] \n\nBut I can’t reach them any better than they can! \n\n[laughter]\n\nSometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be. \n\nThat got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs]\n\nJENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great.\n\n[laughter] \n\nEspecially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nBut I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay. \n\nI've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way.\n\nJAMEY: Definitely.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be.\n\nJENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces.\n\nJAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back.\n\n[laughter]\n\nI did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults. \n\nI think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently. \n\nSo I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it?\n\nJENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits. \n\nSo finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate. \n\nI know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge. \n\nIt is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different. \n\nLike I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.” \n\nI have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard. \n\nSo I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt.\n\nJAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks. \n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nJENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right?\n\nJACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly.\n\nJENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child. \n\nJACOB: Yeah, I know.\n\nJENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now.\n\nJAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that? \n\nThey said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that. \n\nJENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don’t know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking. \n\nBut my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked. \n\nOne of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition. \n\nI said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong.\n\nJAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nJENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor.\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nSo I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare.\n\nJENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations. \n\nI think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I’m 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there. \n\nNo offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die.\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles]\n\nJENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right? \n\nJAMEY: Yeah. Totally.\n\nJENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles]\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nJAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff.\n\nJENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty. \n\n[laughter]\n\nThat whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think?\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term.\n\nJACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that.\n\nJAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nJENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss. \n\nAll of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me. \n\nIf you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full.\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug?\n\nJENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That’s my big plug. Support your testers!\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJENNA: Yes!\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great!\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful.\n\nJENNA: Aw, thank you.Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.","content_html":"01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech
\n\n04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User
\n\n09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing)
\n\n23:15 - Working With ADHD
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Being a super human.
\n\nJacob: Forgetting how to mask.
\n\nJamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code.
\n\nJenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.
\n\nJACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers.
\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton.
\n\nJenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles]
\n\nJENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: We're so excited to have you.
\n\nJOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nJENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: I wish I could take credit for that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBob is definitely the one responsible.
\n\nJAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it.
\n\nJENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling.
\n\nJAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything.
\n\nI'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them.
\n\nJAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career?
\n\nJENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life.
\n\nSo I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me.
\n\nBut I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change.
\n\nJAMEY: That's amazing.
\n\nJENNA: Thank you. [laughs]
\n\nJACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAs work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus?
\n\nJENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference.
\n\nI feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example.
\n\nShe's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up.
\n\nBut I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today.
\n\nI always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them.
\n\nSo I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it.
\n\nJAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses.
\n\nJAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I'm so happy. [chuckles]
\n\nJENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Aw.
\n\nJAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: Oh, thank you.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBig warm hugs. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else.
\n\nSo do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for them?
\n\nJENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I’ve answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over.
\n\nNow, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is.
\n\nThere have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation.
\n\nJAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening.
\n\nJENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold?
\n\nJAMEY: Mm.
\n\nJENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea.
\n\nI know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red.
\n\nJOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you’ve got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever.
\n\nJENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them.
\n\nJOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview?
\n\nJENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs]
\n\nSo I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation.
\n\nJOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on?
\n\nJENNA: Oh, absolutely.
\n\nWhen I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders’ need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors’ needs.
\n\nAnd when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it.
\n\nJENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats?
\n\nJAMEY: Elaborate.
\n\nJACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about.
\n\nJAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job.
\n\nCats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation.
\n\nSo what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse.
\n\nSo testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I’ve got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again.
\n\nDogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that's really insightful.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree.
\n\nJENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.”
\n\nJENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she’ll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles]
\n\nJACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter.
\n\nFor some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nJENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah.
\n\nJENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that?
\n\nJENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMost of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again.
\n\nSo I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those.
\n\nThe most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing.
\n\nAlso, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs]
\n\nSo all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We’ve got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way.
\n\nJENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.”
\n\nSo it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it’s the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy.
\n\nJENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still.
\n\nSo there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different.
\n\nI guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs]
\n\nSo let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don’t know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age.
\n\nMost people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term.
\n\nJACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life.
\n\nSo when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense.
\n\nJENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs]
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, me too.
\n\nJENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel.
\n\nJENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nFor those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4’ 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I can’t reach them any better than they can!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be.
\n\nThat got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs]
\n\nJENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEspecially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay.
\n\nI've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way.
\n\nJAMEY: Definitely.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be.
\n\nJENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces.
\n\nJAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults.
\n\nI think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently.
\n\nSo I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it?
\n\nJENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits.
\n\nSo finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate.
\n\nI know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge.
\n\nIt is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different.
\n\nLike I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.”
\n\nI have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard.
\n\nSo I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nJENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right?
\n\nJACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly.
\n\nJENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, I know.
\n\nJENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now.
\n\nJAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that?
\n\nThey said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that.
\n\nJENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don’t know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking.
\n\nBut my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked.
\n\nOne of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition.
\n\nI said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nSo I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare.
\n\nJENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations.
\n\nI think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I’m 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there.
\n\nNo offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles]
\n\nJENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right?
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. Totally.
\n\nJENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff.
\n\nJENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term.
\n\nJACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that.
\n\nJAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nJENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss.
\n\nAll of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me.
\n\nIf you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full.
\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug?
\n\nJENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That’s my big plug. Support your testers!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNA: Yes!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great!
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful.
\n\nJENNA: Aw, thank you.
Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.
","summary":"Jenna Charlton is a super human. They are deeply rooted in what is human in tech and believes the user is everything. They chat with the panel about software testing and give an awesome metaphor of Developer Dogs and Testing Cats, and then dive into a super helpful conversation about ADHD and how to best work with a diagnosis.","date_published":"2022-03-30T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/cd0f1c30-e3d3-4cfe-8418-380edb45723e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62447221,"duration_in_seconds":3350}]},{"id":"1e6802a3-2404-4812-b2b2-2ef97a81b4b2","title":"275: Making Change Happen – Why Not You? with Nyota Gordon","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/making-change-happen-why-not-you","content_text":"01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable!\n\n\nAcknowledging The Unspoken\nGetting Checked\n\n\n07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony\n\n10:35 - News & Social Media\n\n\nAddiction\nFiltering\nBias\n\n\n18:54 - The Impact of AI\n\n23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens\n\n\nChelsea Cirruzzo’s Guide to Freelance Journalism \nCasey’s GGWash Article About Ranked Choice Voting \nFirst Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers\n\n\n40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency\n\n\n@selfcare_tech \n\n\nReflections:\n\nCasey & John: “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths.” – Nyota\n\nDamien: You can be the expert. You can be the journalist. You can be the first mover/leader. Applying that conscientiously.\n\nNyota: Leaving breadcrumbs.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript: \n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 275 of Greater Than Code. I'm Damien Burke and I'm here with John Sawers.\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Damien. And I'm here with Casey Watts.\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're all here with our guest today, Nyota Gordon.\n\nNyota is a technologist in cybersecurity and Army retiree with over 22 years of Active Federal Leadership Service. She is the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 a Cyber Resiliency Training Firm that thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. \n\nWelcome, Nyota! So glad to have you.\n\nNYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.\n\nCASEY: Yay! All right. Our first question—we warned you about this—what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nNYOTA: My superpower is to hear, pull out people's ideas, and make them more clear, more actionable, and more profitable.\n\nDAMIEN: Ooh.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, that's one of my friends told me that. \n\nAnd how did I get it? I'm a words person. So I listen to what people say, but I also listen to what they don't say.\n\nCASEY: What they don't say.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Can you think of an example?\n\nNYOTA: Like that. Like when you did that quiet thing you just did, I saw that mind blown emoji because there's a lot in unspoken. There's a lot in body language. There's a lot in silence. When the silence happens, there's a lot when someone changes the topic, like that stuff is a lot. [chuckles] So I listen and I acknowledge all of that. Maybe we all hear it, or don't hear it depending on how you're processing what I'm saying, but we don't always acknowledge it and respect it in other people,\n\nDAMIEN: You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing.\n\n[laughter] \n\nDo you ever have an experience where things that are not said do not want to be heard?\n\nNYOTA: Absolutely. But that's part of acknowledging and so, you can tell when people are like, “I do not want to talk about that.” So then I would do a gentle topic change and not a hard left all the time, because you don't want to make it all the way weird, but it may be like, “Oh, okay so you were talking about your hair, like you were saying something about your hair there.” I try to be very mindful because I will get in your business. Like, I will ask you a million questions. I'm very inquisitive and maybe that's one of my superpowers too, but I'm also aware and I feel like I'm respectful of people's space most times.\n\nCASEY: I really like that in people when people notice a lot about me and they can call it out. When I was a kid, my family would call me blunt, not necessarily in a bad way, but I would just say whatever I'm thinking and not everyone likes it right away. But I really appreciate that kind of transparency, honesty, especially if I trust the person. That helps a lot, too.\n\nNYOTA: I was just saying that to my mom, actually, I was like, “You know, mom, I feel like I need a different quality of friend,” and what I mean by that is my friends just let me wild out. Like I ask them anything, I say anything, but they don't kind of check me. They're like, “Well, is that right, Nyota?” Like, Tell me, why are you saying it like that?” But they just let me be like ah and I'm like, “Mom, I need to be checked.” Like I need a hard check sometimes. So now you're just letting me run wild so now I'm just seeing how wild I can get. Sometime I just want maybe like a little check, a little body check every now and then, but I try to be mindful when it comes to other people, though. It's the check I want is not always the check that other people want.\n\nCASEY: Right, right.\n\nDAMIEN: What is it like when you're being checked? What happens?\n\nNYOTA: It's hard to come by these days so I'm not really sure [chuckles] when I'm getting my own, but I'll ask a question. I'll just kind of ask a question like, “Well, is that true?” people are like, “This world is falling apart,” and you know how people are because we are in a shaky space right now and I'm like, “But is that absolutely true for your life?” How is everything really infecting, impacting what have you being exposed to in your own life? \n\nSo as we have the conversation about COVID. COVID was one of my best years as far as learning about myself, connecting with people better and more intimately than I ever really have before and we're talking virtually. So things are going on in the world, but is it going on personally, or are you just watching the news and repeating what other people are saying?\n\nJOHN: That's such a fascinating thing to do to interrupt that cycle of someone who's just riding along with something they’ve heard, or they're just getting caught up in the of that everything's going to hell and the world is in a terrible place. Certainly, there are terrible things going on, but that's such a great question to ask because it's not saying there's nothing bad going on. You're not trying to be toxically positive, but you're saying, “Let's get a clear view of that and look at what's actually in your life right now.”\n\nNYOTA: That part, that part because people are like, nobody's looking for crazy Pollyanna, but sometimes people do need to kind of get back to are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?\n\nDAMIEN: That's such a great way of framing it: are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: It reminds me of boundaries. The boundary, literally the definition of who I am and who I care about. It might include my family, my partner, me. It’s may be a gradient even. [chuckles] We can draw the boundary somewhere on that.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, and I think we also get to speak even more than boundaries about is it in harmony? Because I feel like there are going to be some levels that are big, like my feelings are heard, or I'm feeling like I just need to be by myself. But then there are these little supporting roles of what that is. I think it's as you see, some parts are up and some parts are down because sometimes when it comes to boundaries, it's a little challenging because sometimes there has to be this give and take, and your boundaries get to be a little bit more fluid when they have to engage with other people. It's those darn other people. [chuckles]\n\nDAMIEN: But being conscientious and aware of how you do that. It's a big planet with a lot of people on it and if you go looking for tragedy, we're very well connected, we can find it all and you can internalize as much of it as you can take and that's bad. That is an unpleasant experience.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And that's not to say that it's not happening out there and that's not to say that it's not tragic, but you get to decide if it's happening to you, or not.\n\nNYOTA: Right.\n\nDAMIEN: And that’s separate from things that are directly in our physical space, our locus of control, or inside of the boundaries that we set with ourselves and loved ones, et cetera.\n\nNYOTA: Because it's so easy to – I say this sometimes, guilt is a hell of a drug because sometimes people are addicted to guilt, addicted to trauma, addicted to a good time and not even thinking of all the things that come with those different levels of addiction. So I think we get fed into this news and this narrative, like we were speaking of earlier a of everything's bad, this is a terrible place, everyone's going to hell. Whatever the narrative is the flavor of the moment and there's so many other things. It's a whole world, like you said. It's a whole world and I think the world is kind of exactly what we're looking for. When I was in the military, every town is exactly what you need it to be.\n\n[laughter]\n\nBecause if you're looking for the club, you're looking for the party people in little small towns. But I could tell you where every library was. Don't call me nerdy because I am, but I don't care. All right. I could tell you where every library was. I could tell you where every place to eat. I could tell you all of those things, but then you'll ask me like, “Where's the club?” And I was like, “There's a club here?” Because that's not what I'm looking for. That's not the experience that I'm looking for. So I would dare say every place is exactly what you're looking for, what you want it, what you need it to be.\n\nCASEY: We're talking about the news a little bit here and it reminds me of social media, like the addiction to news, the addiction to social media. In a way, it is an addiction. Like you keep going to it when you're bored, you just reach for it. That's the stimulus, that’s your dopamine. \n\nI think of both of those, news and social media, as a cheap form of being connected to other humans. A bad, low quality, not a deep connection kind of thing. But what we all would thrive if we had more of is more connections to others, which like community, authentic relationships with people. But that's harder. Even if you know that and you say that's your goal, it takes more work to do that than to pick up Facebook app on your phone. I deleted it from my phone six months ago and I've been happier for it.\n\n[laughter]\n\nNYOTA: Like delete, delete? Like delete?\n\nCASEY: Well, it is on my iPad in case I have to post a shirt design into a Facebook group. I'm not gone gone, but I'm basically gone and I know that I don't interact on it and it's boring. I don't post anything. I don't get any likes. I don't even want to like anyone's post and they'll say, “Oh, you're on.” I don't do anything. Like once every three months, I'll post a design.\n\nNYOTA: Is that for every social media channel?\n\nCASEY: I'm still on Twitter.\n\nNYOTA: Twitter.\n\nCASEY: I'm still on Twitter and LinkedIn kind of for business reasons. But if I could drop them, I think I would, too.\n\nNYOTA: Did you say if you could?\n\nCASEY: If I could drop them and not have business repercussions.\n\nNYOTA: Mm.\n\nDAMIEN: This sounds like a great idea to make more profitable.\n\nNYOTA: [laughs] I'm thinking does a lot of your business come from –? I feel like LinkedIn is social, but.\n\nCASEY: I wouldn't say that I get new business from these necessarily, but I do end up with clients and potential clients and people I've talked to before saying, “Ph, I saw that thing and now that I saw you wrote a blog post about doing surveys for an engineering org, now I want to talk to you.”\n\nNYOTA: Mm, okay. \n\nCASEY: Like that is pretty valuable and when I'm writing something like a blog post, I want to put that somewhere. But anyway, I am happier that I'm off of Facebook and Instagram, which I wasn't getting as much value out of. Other than connection to people, the shallow connection to people and instead I switched to messaging people. I have text message threads and group chats and those are much more intimate, much more stuff being shared, more connection to those individuals.\n\nNYOTA: I agree with that. What about you John? Like what is your relationship with social media right now?\n\nJOHN: So I've always been sort of arm’s length with Facebook. So it's been just like eh, I check in every week, maybe just sort of see. I scroll until I lose interest, which is 10 minutes the most and then those are my updates. That's all I see and then occasionally, I'll post a meme, or something. I don't really do a lot there. Usually, I keep it around just for the people that I'm in touch with that are only on Facebook and I only have connection to them.\n\nBut you bring up an interesting point about there's a positive and a negative to being able to filter your social media. For example, with Reddit and Twitter, you only see the stuff for people you're following and/or the subreddits that you're subscribed to. So you can very much customize that experience into something that isn't full of most of the crap people experience on Twitter, or Reddit. \n\nSo there's that positive there because you can craft a world that's maybe it's all kitten pictures, maybe whatever, and post about programming, whatever it is. But you do have the problem of filter bubbles so that if you are in something that's a little bit more controversial, you do end up with that echo chamber effect and lots of people jumping in, or if you're in a sub that's interesting to you, that's also very contentious and the threads go off the rails all the time, but you can control that. You can see like, “Well, no, get it out of here. I don't need to deal with that static.” \n\nI rely on that a lot to sort of focus in on what I'm using it for, whether it's keeping up with specific friends, or specific topics and then trying to filter out as much of the things I don't want as possible.\n\nNYOTA: Is Facebook's your only social media channel?\n\nJOHN: No, I'm on Twitter. I don't usually post a lot, usually just retweet stuff and read it.\n\nNYOTA: That's kind of lame a little bit. I'm not saying, I’m just saying that your social media choices – \n\n[laughter] \n\nDAMIEN: Wow. \n\nNYOTA: But I think you're are right, though. I'm a lot better off for it because I did find myself going down a social media rabbit. It was easy for me to cut off the news. I actually stopped watching the news in 2007 when I became an officer. They were like, “As an officer, you have to watch the news. You have to be aware of what's going on in the world,” and I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then I walked away from that lady and I was like, “I'm not watching the news anymore.” \n\nDAMIEN: Hmm. \n\nNYOTA: Because I felt like she was trying to trick me in some kind of a way, but you get what you need. If it's something that I need to know, it comes to me it. It comes to me like. Believe me, it'll come to you. She was a little bit too adamant about what I needed and how the news was a part of it. It just felt a little not right and so, I actually stopped.\n\nDAMIEN: The news is a very specific thing like that word, the news [chuckles] Is anything new about it? [chuckles] The news is a group of organizations, a group of media organizations that are all very much alike. The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC. These are all organizations that operate the same, they cover the same things, and they do them in largely the same way along of course, some political partisan differences. But it's not new and for most people, it does not serve them, or inform them.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. It's very divisive.\n\nDAMIEN: I used to get my news from Jay Leno. [laughter] That was better than CNN more and funnier, too.\n\nNYOTA: That part. [laughs] I think it's just interesting how it's such a whole world with a whole bunch of people with various levels of experiencing, bumping into each other, and like you're saying, this is what everyone's reporting on. Nothing else happens? Nothing good happens anywhere else? \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nNYOTA: Nothing? See, that's not true. \n\n[laughter]\n\nLike that can't be real for me and so, I'm not going to be able to include that in where I spend my time.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I used to have NPR on in the car whenever I was in the car, I was like, “Oh, it'll keep me inform,” blah, blah, blah. But eventually, I was like, “You know what? They still talk about the same crap. They're just from a perspective I agree with slightly more.” But even when they do human interest stuff, or stuff that isn't about a war, or some sort of crisis in Washington, it's still so negatively biased. Even the stuff that's theoretically positive, it still has this weird you should be concerned about this vibe to it and eventually, I was realizing that there's no room for that in my life.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. We talk about how harmed full Facebook is to society and individuals. But this is not again, new. [chuckles] Facebook optimizes for engagement, which causes harm as a byproduct. It's the AI-fication of what media has been doing ever since there has been mass media.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. It's interesting because there was a moment in there. So I even got on social media because I was always gone. I lived wherever I lived while I was in the military and so, it was a way to let my family know, “Okay, I'm here. Look, I ate this.” [chuckles] All of those things. So there was a part where Facebook made a drastic turn on my feed and I was like, “Ohm this is so bad!” And then I was like, “Okay, wait, wait. Who's bad? Who is this coming from?” \n\nSo I cleaned up my whole Facebook feed and then it became a happy place again and then now where it is, it's a place where it's only seven people out of the thousand Facebook friends I have. I was like, “Okay, well that's not it either. That's not it.” So it's just interesting how AI has such a impact of what we listen to, or what we talk about. \n\nSo now it's these days I'm like new shoes, new shoes, new shoes. Because I want that to come up on my – I don't even – you know what I'm saying? Because I know that you're listening, so I'll get it later. So now I almost treat it like an administrative assistant so I can look it up later.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Hilarious.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: Please target some ads around shoes to me.\n\nNYOTA: I did. Yeah, because they're listening.\n\nCASEY: And it works, doesn't it? I know. \n\nNYOTA: Yes. \n\nCASEY: I know it works.\n\nNYOTA: Yes.\n\nCASEY: That still blows some people's minds. If you could say the name of a product and you'll see it the next day. If you have your ads on, it's listening and your phone is listening. Everyone’s phone is listening.\n\nNYOTA: Yes, yes. Because you're looking at something like – I don't even really listen to the music. What is it? Spotify! And then it's like, you're listening to Spotify, but why is my mic on? You want to hear me sing the song? Why does my mic have to be on? I don't understand that part. Like why? They'll be like, “Oh, she has a great voice on her.” Is that why you're listening? \n\n[laughter]\n\nWhy are you listening? I don't understand that part. So I don’t know.\n\nDAMIEN: There’s a deal coming your way.\n\nNYOTA: [laughs] Come on. Let's go.\n\nJOHN: I assume the public reason for it is so that you can do voice searches and like, “Hey, play me some more Rebecca Black,” or whatever. But who knows what else they're doing with it once you've got it turned on, right? It could be whatever.\n\nDAMIEN: Actually listening in on people is not the technically most effective way of getting those results. If you say the brand name of a shoe, it's probably because the people around you are talking about it and what do they search on Google? What ads have they seen? It's easier to say, “Oh, you're in the room with these people who are interested in these things,” or “You're in conversation with these people who are interested in these things. Let me show you these things without honing through massive amounts of audio data.”\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Both are possible and that one's easier. I'm sure they both happen and at what frequency, that's hard to study from beyond outside, but we know it's all possible and we know it's happening. \n\nIf this is news to anyone listening, you can look this up. There are a million articles about it and they explain why and how, and some people did some empirical tests and I don't have any handy, but I've read it over and over and over on the internet and the internet's always right.\n\nNYOTA: That's what I heard [laughs] and not from the news.\n\nCASEY: I have these Google Home Minis in my house and all of them, the mics are off. So if ever the power cable gets jingled, it says, ‘Just so you know, the mic's off and I have to say it for a really long time. This is a very long recorded message. So that you'll want to turn your mic back on,” and it says that. Can you believe it?\n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: That's not the actual text of the message, right? I have to check.\n\nNYOTA: These little home speakers are cool in all the worst ways, but the best ways, too. So my Alexa, I'll be asking her whatever and then I'll say, “Thank you, Alexa,” and she'll say, “You're very, very, very, very welcome,” like she's singing, yes. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. You people have corporate spying devices in your homes. It’s unbelievable. \n\nNYOTA: But you have one, too. It's just your phone. So we all have them.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. She promises me she doesn't listen unless I ask.\n\nNYOTA: That's what mine said! \n\nCASEY: Mine said it!\n\n[laughter]\n\nI don’t trust them either. I don't even trust that the mic off necessarily works. Part of me is tempted to go in and solder the mic off. I never want the speakers to have the mic. I will not use that feature at my house. But I do want speakers in every room enough that I'm willing to take the risk of the switch not working.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. At this point, I think I've just big brothers watching, or at least listening, [chuckles] Big brother really like, “Oh, I need to turn that off. She's talking about the big brother. We’ll blush over here.” [laughs]\n\nCASEY: I want to go back to something I was thinking on the news. Sometimes I hear, or I know about things in the world because I'm someone who's in the world sometimes and the topics I want to hear in the news don't always come up. Like, DC Rank the Vote is happening and there was eventually an article about it and another article. I wrote one, eventually. Anyone can be a freelance journalist. So if the news isn't covering stuff you want it to.\n\nNYOTA: I like that.\n\nCASEY: You can literally write the news, too. \n\nNYOTA: Mm.\n\nCASEY: They might even pay you for it.\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] You can write the news, too. Say it again, Casey.\n\nCASEY: You can write the news, too.\n\nThere's a really cool freelance journalism guide, that I'll put in the show notes, by someone in D.C. Chelsea Cirruzzo, I think. I didn't pronounce check that, but she wrote an awesome guide and it led me to getting an article published in Greater Greater Washington, a D.C. publication about ranked choice voting. I was like, “Why is no one talking about this? It's happening here. It's a big problem.” So I wrote about it. Other people write about it, too and they have since then, but you can be the change you want in the world. You can. Journalism is not as guarded and gated as it might seem.\n\nNYOTA: That's so interesting because I think what's interesting is we know that. We know that we can contribute, we know that we can write, but then you're like, “Wait, I can contribute! I can write!” \n\nCASEY: Mm.\n\nNYOTA: So I think that’s, thank you for that reminder.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. But the how is hard and without a guide like Chelsea's, I'm not sure I would have broken in to do it. I needed her to go through it and tell me this is the process, here's the person in the org, what they do, what they expect and how you can make it easy for them, and you need the pitch to have this and that, has to be timely and like –. All that made sense. I'm like, “Oh sure, sure, sure.” But I couldn't have come up with that on my own, no way.\n\nNYOTA: But she bundled it together like that.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: I would have never imagined that's a thing you can do because that's an entire degree program. That's a post-graduate degree program, if you'd like, and I see people who've been doing this for 20 years and do it poorly and they seem like smart people. [chuckles] So what makes me think I could do it?\n\nNYOTA: Because we can do whatever we want.\n\nCASEY: I mean, these publications do have editors and it's their job to help make the quality, at least meet the low bar at minimum that the publication expects. But if you are really nerded out on ranked choice voting, or something, you might be the local expert. If you're thinking about writing an article, you might be the best person to do it actually.\n\nNYOTA: Mm, that's good. That's the quota right there.\n\nCASEY: So what are you nerding out about lately? Anyone listening to this, think about that to yourself and is there an article about it you can just share? I like that. I don't have to write every article ever. If not, you can think about writing it.\n\nNYOTA: I like that. \n\nDAMIEN: And what strikes me is like where the bar is for local expert. Like I believe a 100% that you're the local expert on ranked choice voting because I know enough about ranked choice voting to know that people don't understand it. [chuckles]\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nAnd after I wrote the article, I found a group of people and so, now there's like 10 of us at this level where we get it and we're advocating for it. But I'm one of the top 10 at that point still, sure. And there are details of it that I know, details other people know that I don't know, and we're all specialists in different nuanced details and together we're stronger and that's a community, too. It's been a lot of fun advocating for that in D.C.\n\nJOHN: That's awesome.\n\nNYOTA: It's interesting the visual that I'm getting in my head, like you're over here dancing by yourself and then you back up and they're like, “Oh shoot. Other people are dancing to this same song,” and then you look and you'd be like, “Look, y'all, we're all dancing,” but you're still the lead dancer and they're the backup. \n\n[laughter]\n\nI don't know why I got that visual. \n\nCASEY: I like this image. \n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I want to give the other organizers some credit. I think they're the lead. But I found them eventually. I couldn't have found them if I didn't write the article probably. I looked it up. I Googled it once, or twice. They have a website, but I don't know, it didn't come up for me right away, or it did, but I didn't know how to contact them and getting into breaking into that community is its own barrier.\n\nNYOTA: That's unfortunate. But you're the lead to me. I mean, you're Casey. I mean [laughter] they're okay. \n\nCASEY: Thank you. \n\nNYOTA: I mean they're okay for what they're doing, but they're not you, so. No shade on what they're doing.\n\nCASEY: Sure.\n\nJOHN: I just posted a link to a talk by Derek Sivers about how the first followers are actually more important than the first leader and it's a fantastic talk. It's pretty short, but really amusing and it makes such a fantastic point. Like Casey, you were out there, you posted the article and then all these other people show up. So now I've got this like group of 10 and then those people – you and they are all doing outreach and they are expanding that group of people that are up to speed on this stuff and are advocating for it. So there's this nucleus and it's expanding and expanding.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and each person we get, then they can bring in more people, too and it's a movement, it's growing. I think we'll have it soon. There's literally already a bill passed in D.C. It's passed a committee and now it's gone to the bigger committee, the whole process, but there's a real bill that's been passed some steps.\n\nNYOTA: You might as well do a TEDx. I mean, you might as well.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Good idea. Yeah, yeah.\n\nNYOTA: But they just let anybody do them. I have one. They just give them out. They're like, “Let Nyota do it.” “Okay. I'll just – let me do it.” You can do it. You have something to talk about, it’s the same. It's like the news. Why not you? \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nNYOTA: You're already talking about it.\n\nCASEY: True.\n\nNYOTA: I mean, you get a TEDx, you get a TEDx.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Look at this, Nyota inspiring us.\n\nDAMIEN: I'm inspired. Why not me?\n\nNYOTA: No, really.\n\nDAMIEN: I'm serious. That is not sarcasm. I mean that very sincerely. I'm thinking about all the things I want. I'm going to call Casey later on and go, “Okay. You know how to bring ranked choice voting to a government. How are we going to bring it to another one?” And I think about all the other – \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: I'm actually trying to bring ranked choice voting to my neighborhood council. I pushed to an amendment to our bylaws, which has to be approved by another organization, which I can't seem to get ahold of. [laughs] But we're doing it and why shouldn't we be doing it? Why not us?\n\nNYOTA: Why not?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Oh, I've got resources to share with you. We'll talk later, Damien.\n\nJOHN: Well, that's also great because that again, is going to spread. Once the local organization is doing it, people start getting experience with it. They're like, “Oh yeah, we did it for this thing and it worked out great. Now I sort of understand how it works in practice. Why the heck aren't we doing it for the city council and for the governor?” And like, boom, boom, boom.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Ranked choice voting is interesting because as much as people don't understand it, it's really simple [chuckles] and I think overwhelmingly, people need experience with something to understand it.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And we have a lot of experience with plurality voting in this country, in my country at least. We have almost none with ranked choice voting.\n\nNYOTA: I think it's interesting how people get so excited about presidential elections and that sort of thing, but your life really happens at your local elections. \n\nCASEY: So true. \n\nNYOTA: Your quality of life is your local elections, like you're talking about these roads being trashed. Well, that's at the local. Biden and Kamala, they have nothing to do with those potholes all along this road. I think so people miss that. You're like, “Those elections are great. Presidential election, awesome.” But your local elections? Those are what matter for where you live and I'm like, “Why are people missing that?”\n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nDAMIEN: I think it goes back to the news. \n\nCASEY: Sure. That's a part.\n\nNYOTA: Darn you, news. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Right, because national news is leveraged. \n\nNYOTA: Mm.\n\nDAMIEN: The national broadcast is made once and broadcast to 300 million people in the country. Local news does not have that leverage.\n\nCASEY: True.\n\nNYOTA: Mm. They need to get their social media presence together then because people are listening to Instagram.\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking about everyone's mental model of how change happens, too and I don't think a lot of people have a very developed mental model of what it takes to make change happen. \n\nI do a workshop on this actually and one of the examples I use is for gay marriage in the US. You can see the graph; you can look it up. We'll include in the show notes, a picture of gay marriage over time and it's like one’s place, one’s at another place, like very small amount. Just maybe not even states like counties, or some lower level, a little bit of traction, a little bit of traction, a little traction. Eventually, it's so popular that it just spikes and it's a national thing. \n\nBut along the way, you might look here from the news that when it became a national thing, that's the first time, that's the first thing you heard about it. But along the way, there was all these little steps. So many little steps, so many groups advocating for it, and the change happened over time. \n\nI also think about the curve of adoption. It's a bell curve. For the iPhone, for example, some people got it really early and they were really into this thing. Like PalmPilots were really the earlier edge of smart devices. Some people had that; they're really nerdy. \n\nSome people are still holding out on the other end of the bell curve. Like my mom's best friend, she still has a flip phone and she doesn't have any interest in a smartphone. I don't blame her. She doesn't need it. But she's the lagger, the very far end lagger of on this model and to get change to happen, you’ve got to start on whoever is going to adopt it sooner and actually like get them involved. Like the smaller states, the smaller counties that are going to support gay marriage or whatever the issue is, get them to do it and then over time you can get more of the bell curve.\n\nBut a lot of people think change happens when you get the national change all of a sudden, but there's so much earlier than that. So, so, so much. Like years. 30, 40, 50, a 100 years sometimes. [chuckles]\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. This is the dance that John was talking about that he posted about this.\n\nCASEY: The first follower, yeah.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, first followers. But you get to be the first leader if you allow it. If you really want change like you're saying. Instead of looking for someone to follow, [chuckles] we get to decide how we want to live.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. This seems true at work. If there's a cultural norm you don't like, you can change it by getting your allies on board and aware of it, socializing it and more and more people and gradually over time and eventually, that thing's not happening anymore. \n\nLike, I don't know. An example is eating at your desk over lunch. Not the best social norm. I don't want that at places I work. I want people to take a break, rest, and be better off afterwards. But you can get it to happen gradually by getting more people to go to lunch room, or go out of the office and you can change the culture in the office with enough dedication and time if you put your mind it.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. But what we don't get to do is complain about it. Right? [chuckles]\n\nCASEY: Mm.\n\nWhenever I have some kind of conflict, I think about do I want to accept it and stop complaining, or do something about it?\n\nNYOTA: Mm. \n\nCASEY: Or I guess the third option is neither and then I'm just frustrated. I don't like to choose that one if I can ever avoid it. [chuckles] Do something, figure out that I can do something like work on it, or accept it, which is kind of giving up. But you can't do every change you ever think of. \n\nNYOTA: No.\n\nCASEY: It's not really giving up. Acceptance does not mean giving up, but it does mean you can put your mind down and focus on other stuff.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. That's triage. That's what that is. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Triage. Yeah, yeah.\n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: That third option is really important because I choose that a lot. It's important to know that and acknowledge it. [chuckles] It's like, oh no, I've chosen to be frustrated. Okay.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. Good.\n\nCASEY: And you can, yeah. Sometimes when I choose to be frustrated, it’s that I'm still working on it. I'm working on figuring out if I can do anything, or not. I don't know yet.\n\nDAMIEN: For me, it's I'm not willing to do, or figure out what it is to do, but I'm also not yet willing to accept it so I just shouldn't to be frustrated.\n\nCASEY: Sure, yeah, yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And the frustration. If I acknowledge that and recognize that, the frustration can better lead me to go, “Okay, no.” Making the change stinks. But [chuckles] the frustration is worse and lasts longer, so.\n\nNYOTA: And then you start speaking from your frustration, which is even worse [laughs] and then it bleeds over.\n\nCASEY: Not effective.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, it bleeds over into other things and because now you're saying stuff like, “See, this is what I'm talking about.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nNo, I don’t. No, I don't see what you’re – no. Are we talking about the same thing? Because now you're just frustrated all over the place.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\n[laughter]\n\nNYOTA: What are you talking about again? Are you talking about work?\n\nCASEY: When someone's in that situation, I have to ask them, “Would you like to be effective at this?”\n\nDAMIEN: Ooh.\n\n[laughter]\n\nNYOTA: Oh, that's a shank.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: They might not want to be. They might just want to vent. That's fine. It helps me set my standards, too. Like, do they want support, or do they want to vent?\n\nNYOTA: I'm going to write that down.\n\nCASEY: I mean, it sounds pointy. Here's my blunt side showing. I meant it. You can answer yes, or no. It’s why it's a question. I'm not going to give you obvious answer question. I expect one.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. That's good right there because I'm just getting to the part where I'm like, “Do you want me to help, or you just want me to listen?” Because I'll be like, “Oh, I know the answer to this!” And they'll be like, “Oh, I don't. You always trying to help!” First of all, stop talking to me then.\n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: Can you tell my friends that?\n\nNYOTA: Right? \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nNYOTA: Like don't come to me because I just want to help. I’ve got a solution and if you don't want a solution, don't talk to me.\n\nCASEY: Sure, sure. That's the kind of support you're offering. \n\nNYOTA: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: You're offering that support and if they want it, great. If they don't, sounds like you're setting the boundary. Good. \n\nNYOTA: Right, right. Oh, I don't have a – no, I have no problems setting a boundary. Yeah, no problems because the thing is this is your third time. Like at some point, you need to either want to do something, or quit talking to me about this. \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nNYOTA: Like that part.\n\nCASEY: I'm pretty patient supporting friends like that, but there is a limit to the patience. Yeah, three. That sounds like pretty good. I might even go to six for some people before I start telling them no. \n\nNYOTA: Mm.\n\nCASEY: [laughs] I mean, “You have to do something, or complain to someone else.”\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. Like, are you going to do something – are we still talking about this like?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Some people need the support, but it's not necessarily me they're going to get it from because I don't have that much energy and time to put toward that.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. I just think that's important to, but my friends know that already. Like, don't talk to me about your allergies, or don't talk to me about your fitness, or you can't fit your clothes. For me, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit them. I won't allow myself to do that. \n\nCASEY: Some people do.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, so – [overtalk] \n\nDAMIEN: I'm sorry. Buy clothes you can't fit?\n\nNYOTA: No, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit my old ones. \n\nDAMIEN: Ah, okay.\n\nNYOTA: Right. \n\nDAMIEN: I know that one.\n\nNYOTA: I only buy new clothes because I want new clothes.\n\nDAMIEN: Mm.\n\nNYOTA: I put that around myself like, it's not because I don't want to go outside and walk, or you know. But then I don't allow myself to get too thin in the other direction either, because that means I'm doing something that's probably not that healthy, like not eating real food. I will just eat potato chips and that's it. [chuckles]\n\nSo I have to – like, if it's too far to the left, or to the right, then I know that I'm doing something that's not healthy. I’ve got to reel myself in. I don't have any other checkers. I'm my own self-checker. I don't have a spouse that's going to be like, “Hmm, those jeans look a little snug.” [chuckles] I don't have it. [laughs] It's just – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Well, what I'm hearing, though is it's going to be, you set a high bar for checking people. So for somebody to check you, they're going to have to be really insightful and not candy-coated.\n\nNYOTA: I don't like candy.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\n[laughter]\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Like direct.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, because I don't need a bunch of like, “Oh, Nyota. How are you today?!” You don't really have to be like, “Oh, so I heard what you said about that.” I don't think that – that's not right, or however the check comes, like however it comes. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nNYOTA: But I want that because I know I'm not right about everything. I know that and I don't pretend to be all-knowing. I just want somebody to kind of reel me in sometimes like reel me in. Please reel me in.\n\n[laughter]\n\nBecause I'll just keep – I'm a habitual line stepper. You know what I'm saying because now I'm just going to keep on seeing what you're going to let me slide with. Even as a kid, my mom was like, “You're always everywhere.” Like, “You're always – like, “We could never find –” I was the kid that why they came out with those harnesses for kids.\n\n[laughter]\n\nThat's –\n\nCASEY: What an image. \n\nNYOTA: Yeah. I'm that kid because I just want to see, I want to go look, I want to go what's over here. Like what's around. Are you going to let me slide? Are you going to let me say that one? What else you’re going to let me slide with? It's that so that's why they created those harnesses for kids like me. [chuckles]\n\nDAMIEN: Your bio says your firm thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. What's the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness?\n\nJOHN: I was just going to ask that. I want to know!\n\nNYOTA: I think it's resiliency. \n\nDAMIEN: Mm?\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. So cybersecurity is that resiliency within organizations and then that wellness of people is that resiliency that's within humans. When those two come together, it's a healthier—I can't say fully healthy. It's a healthier work environment because when we get to show up to work healthy, resilient, drinking water, getting rest, being able to have emotional intelligence, social intelligence; all of those things are what I count as being resilient. And then when you can show up to work that way, then you're not showing up to negatively impact the network because you're not focused. You're not paying attention. You're clicking on every link because it looked like it – it seemed fine. But had you been like you had one moment of awareness to pause, you would see oh, this is not right. When I put my mouse over that, I see that the link at the bottom is not where I'm supposed to be going. So that place is resiliency at work.\n\nDAMIEN: That is an extremely advanced view of security, maybe it's from your time as an officer, but the general view of security is it's this wall you put up and you make the wall really secure, you make the wall really strong and really tall, and that way you keep everything out. It's like, well, no. Anybody who has gone to office training school knows about defense in depth.\n\nNYOTA: Right.\n\nDAMIEN: Knows you can't maintain any particular perimeter indefinitely. The French found that out to much of their chagrin. [laughs] \n\nNYOTA: Oopsie.\n\nDAMIEN: That's a Emmanuel line reference. That's not news.\n\n[laughter]\n\nTo go all the way to like – and I see where you're going with this. Phishing emails don't work on people who are calm and relaxed when nothing's urgent.\n\nNYOTA: Yes.\n\nDAMIEN: Where they can go, where they can stop and think, and have that wherewithal and that energy and that reserve.\n\nNYOTA: Right, even at home. Especially how all of these scams are on the rise, Navy, federal, IRS, all kinds of people. If you're just one moment aware, you'd be like, “Wait, have I ever engaged my bank in this way?” \n\nDAMIEN: Hm mm.\n\nNYOTA: Like ever? Have they ever called me and asked me for my six digit? They called me and I didn't call them? Like, I just think if you just take a breath and then think part of being resilient is being able to take more breaths.\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. Yeah. Wow.\n\nCASEY: Ooh, I like that line.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. We know that one of the biggest vulnerability to cybersecurity posture of anything that happens is people because we are normally that vulnerability, we're normally that weakness in the network because we are human. So anything that we get to do to reinforce ourselves, guard ourselves up, it's always going to have a positive second, third, fourth order of effects.\n\nDAMIEN: How does upper management react to that when you come in and say, “We're going to improve your cybersecurity, give your employees more days off”?\n\nNYOTA: So I'm actually new having this conversation within leadership, but they already have leadership corporations, they already have this structure in place. Just haven't heard anyone tie it together specifically to their cybersecurity posture. \n\nSo there's already a lot of wellness initiatives, you can talk to counselors. I think we already have these initiatives in place, but they're just kind of ethereal, they're kind of out here, but to say, “Now tie that not just to our bottom line, because employees are less willing to have turnover, but let's tie it to the security of the network because our employees are aware and they're more vigilant.” So it's just kind of helping them to see the work that we're already doing within corporations. We get to laser focus that into a place. \n\nCASEY: Hmm. I like it that this gives way to measuring the outcome of those programs, too. You can correlate it, too.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, instead of like, “Oh, we're happy at work. We're skipping and holding hands down the hallway.” Well, that may not necessarily be what you want, but you do want less infractions on the network. More opportunities to be successful but not having to spend so many manhours undoing cybersecurity risk.\n\nCASEY: I want to zoom out. I want to go meta with you. You're helping them become more resilient. How do you make sure your changes there are resilient? When you leave, they persist? You can Mary Poppins out and they're still the way they were before you arrive. \n\nNYOTA: Mm, that's a good question. So during the time that we work together, they also buy a bundle of coaching. They have opportunity to come back for where I can do, like, “Hey, y'all it's time for the refresh,” and not in a lame way. I'm actually creating on workshops now and it involves coloring books. Because when we were in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the places we colored, and I just feel like coloring saves lives and when I'm saying people, I'm talking about mine, because it is very calming and not those crazy ones that are really small and you have to have a pen. So I'm talking about a 5th-grade coloring book with big pictures where it's relaxing and you're talking amongst your peers. It involves that. \n\nSetting them up with skills to be able to well, if you do nothing else, make sure you're playing the gratitude game in the mornings. What is the gratitude game? I play this game with myself. Every morning when I wake up, I say three things that I'm grateful for, but it can't be anything that I've ever said ever before. \n\nDAMIEN: Mm hm.\n\nNYOTA: I play this game. It's always making you search for the gratitude, always looking for that shiny light. There's always a better today, a better tomorrow, and so, even if there's something as that and drink water, because there's a lot of things that happens when you're dehydrated. There's a lot of clarity that doesn't happen when you're thirsty and so, even if it's just those two things and reminding people, just those two things have even had an impact on my life. Do you see my skin popping? Do you?\n\n[laughter] \n\nI'm just saying. Water is your friend. [laughs] So just those, just kind of even a pop in, a retraining. Hey, remember. Remember sleep, remember relaxing, remember get up and walk around your cube, and the filter water is so much better. It tastes so much better than bottled water. I'm just, it's better. I'm holding up my filtered water. Picture here, I keep it at my desk while I work if I'm on a lot of calls in a row.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: I can go through water.\n\nNYOTA: And that's why you're alert. I don't think people understand that being dehydrated really makes you lethargic and you're like, “Are they talking? I see their mouth moving. I can't pay attention. What is happening. What is that?” And being dehydrated is not good. Don't do that. Just take a little sip of water. We’re talking about water, just take a little sip of your water. Go get some water. [chuckles] If you're listening, get some water. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Reminders help. I'm going to post one of my favorite Twitter accounts, @selfcare_tech.\n\nNYOTA: Ooh. Please.\n\nCASEY: And they do a water reminder probably every day. Something like that. So I'll just be on Twitter and I'm like, “Oh yeah. Thanks.”\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] See, we can turn social media even to our good.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. We can find some benefit.\n\nNYOTA: But we get to decide and I think that's another thing that people don't. Like, they negate the fact that you get to decide. You get to decide where your life is, or isn't. You get to decide where you're going to accept, or not accept. You're going to decide if I work at this job, it's for my greater good, or not. We get to decide that. You've already created your life up to this point. So what does it look like later? We've created this life that we have and people take responsibility for that. Who do you get to be tomorrow? Who do you get to be today? \n\nThe thing is we always get what we ask for. So I've been asking for a bold community, I've been asking for a community that pushes and pulls me and here comes Casey, here comes Andrea, here comes you guys and I'm like, “I think that's so interesting.” We do get what we ask for you.\n\nCASEY: It sounds like you're manifesting the world around you. I like that word.\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I don't even mean it in a metaphysical spiritual sense, but even just saying. Back when I was an engineering manager and I wanted to become a PM, I told people I wanted to be a product manager and by telling a lot of people, I got a lot more opportunities than I would have.\n\nNYOTA: Yes.\n\nCASEY: Telling people was very powerful for that. \n\nNYOTA: And in my Christian Nyota way, that's what happens. Miracles come through people. So give people an opportunity to be your miracle.\n\nJOHN: So we've come to the time on our show where we do reflections, which is each of us is going to talk about the things that struck us about this conversation, maybe the things will be thinking about afterwards, or the ideas we're going to take forward. \n\nCasey, do you want to start us off?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nI wrote down a quote from Nyota. She said earlier in this episode, “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths,” and I just think that applies anywhere the word resilience applies and I want to meditate on that for over the week.\n\nJOHN: I’m right there with you. That is really sinking in and applicable in so many ways. I love it.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and involving taking some breaths while you do that, huh? \n\n[laughter] \n\nI am really inspired by this conversation. The ideas of you can be the expert, you can be the journalist, you can be the first mover, the first leader. Realizing that in my life, I’m going to be looking for ways I want to apply that conscientiously. How to make sure not to try apply it everywhere. [laughs] But I get to decide. I get to decide who I am and who I'm going to be in this world and what this world is going to be like for me, so that's awesome. \n\nNYOTA: That is good. I like that one, too. \n\nAnd along those lines for me, it's like when Casey's like, “I mean, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, but when someone had created this bundle for you to be able to follow, I really heard when we do things, leave breadcrumbs so someone can come behind us and also be able to support. Because if you don't – leave some breadcrumbs. \n\nSo I thought that was – she was like, “I knew these things but she had created this framework for you to be able to do it, too,” and I heard leave some breadcrumbs. So I really like that. \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. \n\nJohn, do you have a reflection for us? \n\nJOHN: No, I mean, really, it's the same as Casey's. [laughs] Yeah, that statement is really going to sit with me for a while. I like it a lot. \n\nCASEY: I'm going to make a t-shirt of it. \n\nNYOTA: [laughs] I love a good t-shirt.\n\nDAMIEN: Well, Nyota. Thank you so much for joining us today.\n\nNYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be amongst such caring, intelligent, thoughtful people and so, I appreciate you all for having me.Special Guest: Nyota Gordon.Sponsored By:Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join.","content_html":"01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable!
\n\n07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony
\n\n10:35 - News & Social Media
\n\n18:54 - The Impact of AI
\n\n23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens
\n\n40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey & John: “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths.” – Nyota
\n\nDamien: You can be the expert. You can be the journalist. You can be the first mover/leader. Applying that conscientiously.
\n\nNyota: Leaving breadcrumbs.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 275 of Greater Than Code. I'm Damien Burke and I'm here with John Sawers.
\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Damien. And I'm here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're all here with our guest today, Nyota Gordon.
\n\nNyota is a technologist in cybersecurity and Army retiree with over 22 years of Active Federal Leadership Service. She is the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 a Cyber Resiliency Training Firm that thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness.
\n\nWelcome, Nyota! So glad to have you.
\n\nNYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.
\n\nCASEY: Yay! All right. Our first question—we warned you about this—what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nNYOTA: My superpower is to hear, pull out people's ideas, and make them more clear, more actionable, and more profitable.
\n\nDAMIEN: Ooh.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, that's one of my friends told me that.
\n\nAnd how did I get it? I'm a words person. So I listen to what people say, but I also listen to what they don't say.
\n\nCASEY: What they don't say.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Can you think of an example?
\n\nNYOTA: Like that. Like when you did that quiet thing you just did, I saw that mind blown emoji because there's a lot in unspoken. There's a lot in body language. There's a lot in silence. When the silence happens, there's a lot when someone changes the topic, like that stuff is a lot. [chuckles] So I listen and I acknowledge all of that. Maybe we all hear it, or don't hear it depending on how you're processing what I'm saying, but we don't always acknowledge it and respect it in other people,
\n\nDAMIEN: You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDo you ever have an experience where things that are not said do not want to be heard?
\n\nNYOTA: Absolutely. But that's part of acknowledging and so, you can tell when people are like, “I do not want to talk about that.” So then I would do a gentle topic change and not a hard left all the time, because you don't want to make it all the way weird, but it may be like, “Oh, okay so you were talking about your hair, like you were saying something about your hair there.” I try to be very mindful because I will get in your business. Like, I will ask you a million questions. I'm very inquisitive and maybe that's one of my superpowers too, but I'm also aware and I feel like I'm respectful of people's space most times.
\n\nCASEY: I really like that in people when people notice a lot about me and they can call it out. When I was a kid, my family would call me blunt, not necessarily in a bad way, but I would just say whatever I'm thinking and not everyone likes it right away. But I really appreciate that kind of transparency, honesty, especially if I trust the person. That helps a lot, too.
\n\nNYOTA: I was just saying that to my mom, actually, I was like, “You know, mom, I feel like I need a different quality of friend,” and what I mean by that is my friends just let me wild out. Like I ask them anything, I say anything, but they don't kind of check me. They're like, “Well, is that right, Nyota?” Like, Tell me, why are you saying it like that?” But they just let me be like ah and I'm like, “Mom, I need to be checked.” Like I need a hard check sometimes. So now you're just letting me run wild so now I'm just seeing how wild I can get. Sometime I just want maybe like a little check, a little body check every now and then, but I try to be mindful when it comes to other people, though. It's the check I want is not always the check that other people want.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right.
\n\nDAMIEN: What is it like when you're being checked? What happens?
\n\nNYOTA: It's hard to come by these days so I'm not really sure [chuckles] when I'm getting my own, but I'll ask a question. I'll just kind of ask a question like, “Well, is that true?” people are like, “This world is falling apart,” and you know how people are because we are in a shaky space right now and I'm like, “But is that absolutely true for your life?” How is everything really infecting, impacting what have you being exposed to in your own life?
\n\nSo as we have the conversation about COVID. COVID was one of my best years as far as learning about myself, connecting with people better and more intimately than I ever really have before and we're talking virtually. So things are going on in the world, but is it going on personally, or are you just watching the news and repeating what other people are saying?
\n\nJOHN: That's such a fascinating thing to do to interrupt that cycle of someone who's just riding along with something they’ve heard, or they're just getting caught up in the of that everything's going to hell and the world is in a terrible place. Certainly, there are terrible things going on, but that's such a great question to ask because it's not saying there's nothing bad going on. You're not trying to be toxically positive, but you're saying, “Let's get a clear view of that and look at what's actually in your life right now.”
\n\nNYOTA: That part, that part because people are like, nobody's looking for crazy Pollyanna, but sometimes people do need to kind of get back to are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?
\n\nDAMIEN: That's such a great way of framing it: are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: It reminds me of boundaries. The boundary, literally the definition of who I am and who I care about. It might include my family, my partner, me. It’s may be a gradient even. [chuckles] We can draw the boundary somewhere on that.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, and I think we also get to speak even more than boundaries about is it in harmony? Because I feel like there are going to be some levels that are big, like my feelings are heard, or I'm feeling like I just need to be by myself. But then there are these little supporting roles of what that is. I think it's as you see, some parts are up and some parts are down because sometimes when it comes to boundaries, it's a little challenging because sometimes there has to be this give and take, and your boundaries get to be a little bit more fluid when they have to engage with other people. It's those darn other people. [chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: But being conscientious and aware of how you do that. It's a big planet with a lot of people on it and if you go looking for tragedy, we're very well connected, we can find it all and you can internalize as much of it as you can take and that's bad. That is an unpleasant experience.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And that's not to say that it's not happening out there and that's not to say that it's not tragic, but you get to decide if it's happening to you, or not.
\n\nNYOTA: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: And that’s separate from things that are directly in our physical space, our locus of control, or inside of the boundaries that we set with ourselves and loved ones, et cetera.
\n\nNYOTA: Because it's so easy to – I say this sometimes, guilt is a hell of a drug because sometimes people are addicted to guilt, addicted to trauma, addicted to a good time and not even thinking of all the things that come with those different levels of addiction. So I think we get fed into this news and this narrative, like we were speaking of earlier a of everything's bad, this is a terrible place, everyone's going to hell. Whatever the narrative is the flavor of the moment and there's so many other things. It's a whole world, like you said. It's a whole world and I think the world is kind of exactly what we're looking for. When I was in the military, every town is exactly what you need it to be.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBecause if you're looking for the club, you're looking for the party people in little small towns. But I could tell you where every library was. Don't call me nerdy because I am, but I don't care. All right. I could tell you where every library was. I could tell you where every place to eat. I could tell you all of those things, but then you'll ask me like, “Where's the club?” And I was like, “There's a club here?” Because that's not what I'm looking for. That's not the experience that I'm looking for. So I would dare say every place is exactly what you're looking for, what you want it, what you need it to be.
\n\nCASEY: We're talking about the news a little bit here and it reminds me of social media, like the addiction to news, the addiction to social media. In a way, it is an addiction. Like you keep going to it when you're bored, you just reach for it. That's the stimulus, that’s your dopamine.
\n\nI think of both of those, news and social media, as a cheap form of being connected to other humans. A bad, low quality, not a deep connection kind of thing. But what we all would thrive if we had more of is more connections to others, which like community, authentic relationships with people. But that's harder. Even if you know that and you say that's your goal, it takes more work to do that than to pick up Facebook app on your phone. I deleted it from my phone six months ago and I've been happier for it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNYOTA: Like delete, delete? Like delete?
\n\nCASEY: Well, it is on my iPad in case I have to post a shirt design into a Facebook group. I'm not gone gone, but I'm basically gone and I know that I don't interact on it and it's boring. I don't post anything. I don't get any likes. I don't even want to like anyone's post and they'll say, “Oh, you're on.” I don't do anything. Like once every three months, I'll post a design.
\n\nNYOTA: Is that for every social media channel?
\n\nCASEY: I'm still on Twitter.
\n\nNYOTA: Twitter.
\n\nCASEY: I'm still on Twitter and LinkedIn kind of for business reasons. But if I could drop them, I think I would, too.
\n\nNYOTA: Did you say if you could?
\n\nCASEY: If I could drop them and not have business repercussions.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm.
\n\nDAMIEN: This sounds like a great idea to make more profitable.
\n\nNYOTA: [laughs] I'm thinking does a lot of your business come from –? I feel like LinkedIn is social, but.
\n\nCASEY: I wouldn't say that I get new business from these necessarily, but I do end up with clients and potential clients and people I've talked to before saying, “Ph, I saw that thing and now that I saw you wrote a blog post about doing surveys for an engineering org, now I want to talk to you.”
\n\nNYOTA: Mm, okay.
\n\nCASEY: Like that is pretty valuable and when I'm writing something like a blog post, I want to put that somewhere. But anyway, I am happier that I'm off of Facebook and Instagram, which I wasn't getting as much value out of. Other than connection to people, the shallow connection to people and instead I switched to messaging people. I have text message threads and group chats and those are much more intimate, much more stuff being shared, more connection to those individuals.
\n\nNYOTA: I agree with that. What about you John? Like what is your relationship with social media right now?
\n\nJOHN: So I've always been sort of arm’s length with Facebook. So it's been just like eh, I check in every week, maybe just sort of see. I scroll until I lose interest, which is 10 minutes the most and then those are my updates. That's all I see and then occasionally, I'll post a meme, or something. I don't really do a lot there. Usually, I keep it around just for the people that I'm in touch with that are only on Facebook and I only have connection to them.
\n\nBut you bring up an interesting point about there's a positive and a negative to being able to filter your social media. For example, with Reddit and Twitter, you only see the stuff for people you're following and/or the subreddits that you're subscribed to. So you can very much customize that experience into something that isn't full of most of the crap people experience on Twitter, or Reddit.
\n\nSo there's that positive there because you can craft a world that's maybe it's all kitten pictures, maybe whatever, and post about programming, whatever it is. But you do have the problem of filter bubbles so that if you are in something that's a little bit more controversial, you do end up with that echo chamber effect and lots of people jumping in, or if you're in a sub that's interesting to you, that's also very contentious and the threads go off the rails all the time, but you can control that. You can see like, “Well, no, get it out of here. I don't need to deal with that static.”
\n\nI rely on that a lot to sort of focus in on what I'm using it for, whether it's keeping up with specific friends, or specific topics and then trying to filter out as much of the things I don't want as possible.
\n\nNYOTA: Is Facebook's your only social media channel?
\n\nJOHN: No, I'm on Twitter. I don't usually post a lot, usually just retweet stuff and read it.
\n\nNYOTA: That's kind of lame a little bit. I'm not saying, I’m just saying that your social media choices –
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow.
\n\nNYOTA: But I think you're are right, though. I'm a lot better off for it because I did find myself going down a social media rabbit. It was easy for me to cut off the news. I actually stopped watching the news in 2007 when I became an officer. They were like, “As an officer, you have to watch the news. You have to be aware of what's going on in the world,” and I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then I walked away from that lady and I was like, “I'm not watching the news anymore.”
\n\nDAMIEN: Hmm.
\n\nNYOTA: Because I felt like she was trying to trick me in some kind of a way, but you get what you need. If it's something that I need to know, it comes to me it. It comes to me like. Believe me, it'll come to you. She was a little bit too adamant about what I needed and how the news was a part of it. It just felt a little not right and so, I actually stopped.
\n\nDAMIEN: The news is a very specific thing like that word, the news [chuckles] Is anything new about it? [chuckles] The news is a group of organizations, a group of media organizations that are all very much alike. The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC. These are all organizations that operate the same, they cover the same things, and they do them in largely the same way along of course, some political partisan differences. But it's not new and for most people, it does not serve them, or inform them.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. It's very divisive.
\n\nDAMIEN: I used to get my news from Jay Leno. [laughter] That was better than CNN more and funnier, too.
\n\nNYOTA: That part. [laughs] I think it's just interesting how it's such a whole world with a whole bunch of people with various levels of experiencing, bumping into each other, and like you're saying, this is what everyone's reporting on. Nothing else happens? Nothing good happens anywhere else?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: Nothing? See, that's not true.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLike that can't be real for me and so, I'm not going to be able to include that in where I spend my time.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I used to have NPR on in the car whenever I was in the car, I was like, “Oh, it'll keep me inform,” blah, blah, blah. But eventually, I was like, “You know what? They still talk about the same crap. They're just from a perspective I agree with slightly more.” But even when they do human interest stuff, or stuff that isn't about a war, or some sort of crisis in Washington, it's still so negatively biased. Even the stuff that's theoretically positive, it still has this weird you should be concerned about this vibe to it and eventually, I was realizing that there's no room for that in my life.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. We talk about how harmed full Facebook is to society and individuals. But this is not again, new. [chuckles] Facebook optimizes for engagement, which causes harm as a byproduct. It's the AI-fication of what media has been doing ever since there has been mass media.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. It's interesting because there was a moment in there. So I even got on social media because I was always gone. I lived wherever I lived while I was in the military and so, it was a way to let my family know, “Okay, I'm here. Look, I ate this.” [chuckles] All of those things. So there was a part where Facebook made a drastic turn on my feed and I was like, “Ohm this is so bad!” And then I was like, “Okay, wait, wait. Who's bad? Who is this coming from?”
\n\nSo I cleaned up my whole Facebook feed and then it became a happy place again and then now where it is, it's a place where it's only seven people out of the thousand Facebook friends I have. I was like, “Okay, well that's not it either. That's not it.” So it's just interesting how AI has such a impact of what we listen to, or what we talk about.
\n\nSo now it's these days I'm like new shoes, new shoes, new shoes. Because I want that to come up on my – I don't even – you know what I'm saying? Because I know that you're listening, so I'll get it later. So now I almost treat it like an administrative assistant so I can look it up later.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Hilarious.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Please target some ads around shoes to me.
\n\nNYOTA: I did. Yeah, because they're listening.
\n\nCASEY: And it works, doesn't it? I know.
\n\nNYOTA: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: I know it works.
\n\nNYOTA: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: That still blows some people's minds. If you could say the name of a product and you'll see it the next day. If you have your ads on, it's listening and your phone is listening. Everyone’s phone is listening.
\n\nNYOTA: Yes, yes. Because you're looking at something like – I don't even really listen to the music. What is it? Spotify! And then it's like, you're listening to Spotify, but why is my mic on? You want to hear me sing the song? Why does my mic have to be on? I don't understand that part. Like why? They'll be like, “Oh, she has a great voice on her.” Is that why you're listening?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhy are you listening? I don't understand that part. So I don’t know.
\n\nDAMIEN: There’s a deal coming your way.
\n\nNYOTA: [laughs] Come on. Let's go.
\n\nJOHN: I assume the public reason for it is so that you can do voice searches and like, “Hey, play me some more Rebecca Black,” or whatever. But who knows what else they're doing with it once you've got it turned on, right? It could be whatever.
\n\nDAMIEN: Actually listening in on people is not the technically most effective way of getting those results. If you say the brand name of a shoe, it's probably because the people around you are talking about it and what do they search on Google? What ads have they seen? It's easier to say, “Oh, you're in the room with these people who are interested in these things,” or “You're in conversation with these people who are interested in these things. Let me show you these things without honing through massive amounts of audio data.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Both are possible and that one's easier. I'm sure they both happen and at what frequency, that's hard to study from beyond outside, but we know it's all possible and we know it's happening.
\n\nIf this is news to anyone listening, you can look this up. There are a million articles about it and they explain why and how, and some people did some empirical tests and I don't have any handy, but I've read it over and over and over on the internet and the internet's always right.
\n\nNYOTA: That's what I heard [laughs] and not from the news.
\n\nCASEY: I have these Google Home Minis in my house and all of them, the mics are off. So if ever the power cable gets jingled, it says, ‘Just so you know, the mic's off and I have to say it for a really long time. This is a very long recorded message. So that you'll want to turn your mic back on,” and it says that. Can you believe it?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: That's not the actual text of the message, right? I have to check.
\n\nNYOTA: These little home speakers are cool in all the worst ways, but the best ways, too. So my Alexa, I'll be asking her whatever and then I'll say, “Thank you, Alexa,” and she'll say, “You're very, very, very, very welcome,” like she's singing, yes. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. You people have corporate spying devices in your homes. It’s unbelievable.
\n\nNYOTA: But you have one, too. It's just your phone. So we all have them.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. She promises me she doesn't listen unless I ask.
\n\nNYOTA: That's what mine said!
\n\nCASEY: Mine said it!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI don’t trust them either. I don't even trust that the mic off necessarily works. Part of me is tempted to go in and solder the mic off. I never want the speakers to have the mic. I will not use that feature at my house. But I do want speakers in every room enough that I'm willing to take the risk of the switch not working.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. At this point, I think I've just big brothers watching, or at least listening, [chuckles] Big brother really like, “Oh, I need to turn that off. She's talking about the big brother. We’ll blush over here.” [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I want to go back to something I was thinking on the news. Sometimes I hear, or I know about things in the world because I'm someone who's in the world sometimes and the topics I want to hear in the news don't always come up. Like, DC Rank the Vote is happening and there was eventually an article about it and another article. I wrote one, eventually. Anyone can be a freelance journalist. So if the news isn't covering stuff you want it to.
\n\nNYOTA: I like that.
\n\nCASEY: You can literally write the news, too.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm.
\n\nCASEY: They might even pay you for it.
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] You can write the news, too. Say it again, Casey.
\n\nCASEY: You can write the news, too.
\n\nThere's a really cool freelance journalism guide, that I'll put in the show notes, by someone in D.C. Chelsea Cirruzzo, I think. I didn't pronounce check that, but she wrote an awesome guide and it led me to getting an article published in Greater Greater Washington, a D.C. publication about ranked choice voting. I was like, “Why is no one talking about this? It's happening here. It's a big problem.” So I wrote about it. Other people write about it, too and they have since then, but you can be the change you want in the world. You can. Journalism is not as guarded and gated as it might seem.
\n\nNYOTA: That's so interesting because I think what's interesting is we know that. We know that we can contribute, we know that we can write, but then you're like, “Wait, I can contribute! I can write!”
\n\nCASEY: Mm.
\n\nNYOTA: So I think that’s, thank you for that reminder.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. But the how is hard and without a guide like Chelsea's, I'm not sure I would have broken in to do it. I needed her to go through it and tell me this is the process, here's the person in the org, what they do, what they expect and how you can make it easy for them, and you need the pitch to have this and that, has to be timely and like –. All that made sense. I'm like, “Oh sure, sure, sure.” But I couldn't have come up with that on my own, no way.
\n\nNYOTA: But she bundled it together like that.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: I would have never imagined that's a thing you can do because that's an entire degree program. That's a post-graduate degree program, if you'd like, and I see people who've been doing this for 20 years and do it poorly and they seem like smart people. [chuckles] So what makes me think I could do it?
\n\nNYOTA: Because we can do whatever we want.
\n\nCASEY: I mean, these publications do have editors and it's their job to help make the quality, at least meet the low bar at minimum that the publication expects. But if you are really nerded out on ranked choice voting, or something, you might be the local expert. If you're thinking about writing an article, you might be the best person to do it actually.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm, that's good. That's the quota right there.
\n\nCASEY: So what are you nerding out about lately? Anyone listening to this, think about that to yourself and is there an article about it you can just share? I like that. I don't have to write every article ever. If not, you can think about writing it.
\n\nNYOTA: I like that.
\n\nDAMIEN: And what strikes me is like where the bar is for local expert. Like I believe a 100% that you're the local expert on ranked choice voting because I know enough about ranked choice voting to know that people don't understand it. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nAnd after I wrote the article, I found a group of people and so, now there's like 10 of us at this level where we get it and we're advocating for it. But I'm one of the top 10 at that point still, sure. And there are details of it that I know, details other people know that I don't know, and we're all specialists in different nuanced details and together we're stronger and that's a community, too. It's been a lot of fun advocating for that in D.C.
\n\nJOHN: That's awesome.
\n\nNYOTA: It's interesting the visual that I'm getting in my head, like you're over here dancing by yourself and then you back up and they're like, “Oh shoot. Other people are dancing to this same song,” and then you look and you'd be like, “Look, y'all, we're all dancing,” but you're still the lead dancer and they're the backup.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI don't know why I got that visual.
\n\nCASEY: I like this image.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I want to give the other organizers some credit. I think they're the lead. But I found them eventually. I couldn't have found them if I didn't write the article probably. I looked it up. I Googled it once, or twice. They have a website, but I don't know, it didn't come up for me right away, or it did, but I didn't know how to contact them and getting into breaking into that community is its own barrier.
\n\nNYOTA: That's unfortunate. But you're the lead to me. I mean, you're Casey. I mean [laughter] they're okay.
\n\nCASEY: Thank you.
\n\nNYOTA: I mean they're okay for what they're doing, but they're not you, so. No shade on what they're doing.
\n\nCASEY: Sure.
\n\nJOHN: I just posted a link to a talk by Derek Sivers about how the first followers are actually more important than the first leader and it's a fantastic talk. It's pretty short, but really amusing and it makes such a fantastic point. Like Casey, you were out there, you posted the article and then all these other people show up. So now I've got this like group of 10 and then those people – you and they are all doing outreach and they are expanding that group of people that are up to speed on this stuff and are advocating for it. So there's this nucleus and it's expanding and expanding.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and each person we get, then they can bring in more people, too and it's a movement, it's growing. I think we'll have it soon. There's literally already a bill passed in D.C. It's passed a committee and now it's gone to the bigger committee, the whole process, but there's a real bill that's been passed some steps.
\n\nNYOTA: You might as well do a TEDx. I mean, you might as well.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Good idea. Yeah, yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: But they just let anybody do them. I have one. They just give them out. They're like, “Let Nyota do it.” “Okay. I'll just – let me do it.” You can do it. You have something to talk about, it’s the same. It's like the news. Why not you?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: You're already talking about it.
\n\nCASEY: True.
\n\nNYOTA: I mean, you get a TEDx, you get a TEDx.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Look at this, Nyota inspiring us.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm inspired. Why not me?
\n\nNYOTA: No, really.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm serious. That is not sarcasm. I mean that very sincerely. I'm thinking about all the things I want. I'm going to call Casey later on and go, “Okay. You know how to bring ranked choice voting to a government. How are we going to bring it to another one?” And I think about all the other –
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm actually trying to bring ranked choice voting to my neighborhood council. I pushed to an amendment to our bylaws, which has to be approved by another organization, which I can't seem to get ahold of. [laughs] But we're doing it and why shouldn't we be doing it? Why not us?
\n\nNYOTA: Why not?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Oh, I've got resources to share with you. We'll talk later, Damien.
\n\nJOHN: Well, that's also great because that again, is going to spread. Once the local organization is doing it, people start getting experience with it. They're like, “Oh yeah, we did it for this thing and it worked out great. Now I sort of understand how it works in practice. Why the heck aren't we doing it for the city council and for the governor?” And like, boom, boom, boom.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Ranked choice voting is interesting because as much as people don't understand it, it's really simple [chuckles] and I think overwhelmingly, people need experience with something to understand it.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And we have a lot of experience with plurality voting in this country, in my country at least. We have almost none with ranked choice voting.
\n\nNYOTA: I think it's interesting how people get so excited about presidential elections and that sort of thing, but your life really happens at your local elections.
\n\nCASEY: So true.
\n\nNYOTA: Your quality of life is your local elections, like you're talking about these roads being trashed. Well, that's at the local. Biden and Kamala, they have nothing to do with those potholes all along this road. I think so people miss that. You're like, “Those elections are great. Presidential election, awesome.” But your local elections? Those are what matter for where you live and I'm like, “Why are people missing that?”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: I think it goes back to the news.
\n\nCASEY: Sure. That's a part.
\n\nNYOTA: Darn you, news. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Right, because national news is leveraged.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm.
\n\nDAMIEN: The national broadcast is made once and broadcast to 300 million people in the country. Local news does not have that leverage.
\n\nCASEY: True.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm. They need to get their social media presence together then because people are listening to Instagram.
\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking about everyone's mental model of how change happens, too and I don't think a lot of people have a very developed mental model of what it takes to make change happen.
\n\nI do a workshop on this actually and one of the examples I use is for gay marriage in the US. You can see the graph; you can look it up. We'll include in the show notes, a picture of gay marriage over time and it's like one’s place, one’s at another place, like very small amount. Just maybe not even states like counties, or some lower level, a little bit of traction, a little bit of traction, a little traction. Eventually, it's so popular that it just spikes and it's a national thing.
\n\nBut along the way, you might look here from the news that when it became a national thing, that's the first time, that's the first thing you heard about it. But along the way, there was all these little steps. So many little steps, so many groups advocating for it, and the change happened over time.
\n\nI also think about the curve of adoption. It's a bell curve. For the iPhone, for example, some people got it really early and they were really into this thing. Like PalmPilots were really the earlier edge of smart devices. Some people had that; they're really nerdy.
\n\nSome people are still holding out on the other end of the bell curve. Like my mom's best friend, she still has a flip phone and she doesn't have any interest in a smartphone. I don't blame her. She doesn't need it. But she's the lagger, the very far end lagger of on this model and to get change to happen, you’ve got to start on whoever is going to adopt it sooner and actually like get them involved. Like the smaller states, the smaller counties that are going to support gay marriage or whatever the issue is, get them to do it and then over time you can get more of the bell curve.
\n\nBut a lot of people think change happens when you get the national change all of a sudden, but there's so much earlier than that. So, so, so much. Like years. 30, 40, 50, a 100 years sometimes. [chuckles]
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. This is the dance that John was talking about that he posted about this.
\n\nCASEY: The first follower, yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, first followers. But you get to be the first leader if you allow it. If you really want change like you're saying. Instead of looking for someone to follow, [chuckles] we get to decide how we want to live.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. This seems true at work. If there's a cultural norm you don't like, you can change it by getting your allies on board and aware of it, socializing it and more and more people and gradually over time and eventually, that thing's not happening anymore.
\n\nLike, I don't know. An example is eating at your desk over lunch. Not the best social norm. I don't want that at places I work. I want people to take a break, rest, and be better off afterwards. But you can get it to happen gradually by getting more people to go to lunch room, or go out of the office and you can change the culture in the office with enough dedication and time if you put your mind it.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. But what we don't get to do is complain about it. Right? [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Mm.
\n\nWhenever I have some kind of conflict, I think about do I want to accept it and stop complaining, or do something about it?
\n\nNYOTA: Mm.
\n\nCASEY: Or I guess the third option is neither and then I'm just frustrated. I don't like to choose that one if I can ever avoid it. [chuckles] Do something, figure out that I can do something like work on it, or accept it, which is kind of giving up. But you can't do every change you ever think of.
\n\nNYOTA: No.
\n\nCASEY: It's not really giving up. Acceptance does not mean giving up, but it does mean you can put your mind down and focus on other stuff.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. That's triage. That's what that is. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Triage. Yeah, yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: That third option is really important because I choose that a lot. It's important to know that and acknowledge it. [chuckles] It's like, oh no, I've chosen to be frustrated. Okay.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. Good.
\n\nCASEY: And you can, yeah. Sometimes when I choose to be frustrated, it’s that I'm still working on it. I'm working on figuring out if I can do anything, or not. I don't know yet.
\n\nDAMIEN: For me, it's I'm not willing to do, or figure out what it is to do, but I'm also not yet willing to accept it so I just shouldn't to be frustrated.
\n\nCASEY: Sure, yeah, yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And the frustration. If I acknowledge that and recognize that, the frustration can better lead me to go, “Okay, no.” Making the change stinks. But [chuckles] the frustration is worse and lasts longer, so.
\n\nNYOTA: And then you start speaking from your frustration, which is even worse [laughs] and then it bleeds over.
\n\nCASEY: Not effective.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, it bleeds over into other things and because now you're saying stuff like, “See, this is what I'm talking about.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo, I don’t. No, I don't see what you’re – no. Are we talking about the same thing? Because now you're just frustrated all over the place.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNYOTA: What are you talking about again? Are you talking about work?
\n\nCASEY: When someone's in that situation, I have to ask them, “Would you like to be effective at this?”
\n\nDAMIEN: Ooh.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNYOTA: Oh, that's a shank.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: They might not want to be. They might just want to vent. That's fine. It helps me set my standards, too. Like, do they want support, or do they want to vent?
\n\nNYOTA: I'm going to write that down.
\n\nCASEY: I mean, it sounds pointy. Here's my blunt side showing. I meant it. You can answer yes, or no. It’s why it's a question. I'm not going to give you obvious answer question. I expect one.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. That's good right there because I'm just getting to the part where I'm like, “Do you want me to help, or you just want me to listen?” Because I'll be like, “Oh, I know the answer to this!” And they'll be like, “Oh, I don't. You always trying to help!” First of all, stop talking to me then.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Can you tell my friends that?
\n\nNYOTA: Right?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: Like don't come to me because I just want to help. I’ve got a solution and if you don't want a solution, don't talk to me.
\n\nCASEY: Sure, sure. That's the kind of support you're offering.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: You're offering that support and if they want it, great. If they don't, sounds like you're setting the boundary. Good.
\n\nNYOTA: Right, right. Oh, I don't have a – no, I have no problems setting a boundary. Yeah, no problems because the thing is this is your third time. Like at some point, you need to either want to do something, or quit talking to me about this.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: Like that part.
\n\nCASEY: I'm pretty patient supporting friends like that, but there is a limit to the patience. Yeah, three. That sounds like pretty good. I might even go to six for some people before I start telling them no.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm.
\n\nCASEY: [laughs] I mean, “You have to do something, or complain to someone else.”
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. Like, are you going to do something – are we still talking about this like?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Some people need the support, but it's not necessarily me they're going to get it from because I don't have that much energy and time to put toward that.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. I just think that's important to, but my friends know that already. Like, don't talk to me about your allergies, or don't talk to me about your fitness, or you can't fit your clothes. For me, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit them. I won't allow myself to do that.
\n\nCASEY: Some people do.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, so – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm sorry. Buy clothes you can't fit?
\n\nNYOTA: No, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit my old ones.
\n\nDAMIEN: Ah, okay.
\n\nNYOTA: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: I know that one.
\n\nNYOTA: I only buy new clothes because I want new clothes.
\n\nDAMIEN: Mm.
\n\nNYOTA: I put that around myself like, it's not because I don't want to go outside and walk, or you know. But then I don't allow myself to get too thin in the other direction either, because that means I'm doing something that's probably not that healthy, like not eating real food. I will just eat potato chips and that's it. [chuckles]
\n\nSo I have to – like, if it's too far to the left, or to the right, then I know that I'm doing something that's not healthy. I’ve got to reel myself in. I don't have any other checkers. I'm my own self-checker. I don't have a spouse that's going to be like, “Hmm, those jeans look a little snug.” [chuckles] I don't have it. [laughs] It's just – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, what I'm hearing, though is it's going to be, you set a high bar for checking people. So for somebody to check you, they're going to have to be really insightful and not candy-coated.
\n\nNYOTA: I don't like candy.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\nNYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: Like direct.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, because I don't need a bunch of like, “Oh, Nyota. How are you today?!” You don't really have to be like, “Oh, so I heard what you said about that.” I don't think that – that's not right, or however the check comes, like however it comes.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nNYOTA: But I want that because I know I'm not right about everything. I know that and I don't pretend to be all-knowing. I just want somebody to kind of reel me in sometimes like reel me in. Please reel me in.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBecause I'll just keep – I'm a habitual line stepper. You know what I'm saying because now I'm just going to keep on seeing what you're going to let me slide with. Even as a kid, my mom was like, “You're always everywhere.” Like, “You're always – like, “We could never find –” I was the kid that why they came out with those harnesses for kids.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat's –
\n\nCASEY: What an image.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. I'm that kid because I just want to see, I want to go look, I want to go what's over here. Like what's around. Are you going to let me slide? Are you going to let me say that one? What else you’re going to let me slide with? It's that so that's why they created those harnesses for kids like me. [chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: Your bio says your firm thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. What's the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness?
\n\nJOHN: I was just going to ask that. I want to know!
\n\nNYOTA: I think it's resiliency.
\n\nDAMIEN: Mm?
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. So cybersecurity is that resiliency within organizations and then that wellness of people is that resiliency that's within humans. When those two come together, it's a healthier—I can't say fully healthy. It's a healthier work environment because when we get to show up to work healthy, resilient, drinking water, getting rest, being able to have emotional intelligence, social intelligence; all of those things are what I count as being resilient. And then when you can show up to work that way, then you're not showing up to negatively impact the network because you're not focused. You're not paying attention. You're clicking on every link because it looked like it – it seemed fine. But had you been like you had one moment of awareness to pause, you would see oh, this is not right. When I put my mouse over that, I see that the link at the bottom is not where I'm supposed to be going. So that place is resiliency at work.
\n\nDAMIEN: That is an extremely advanced view of security, maybe it's from your time as an officer, but the general view of security is it's this wall you put up and you make the wall really secure, you make the wall really strong and really tall, and that way you keep everything out. It's like, well, no. Anybody who has gone to office training school knows about defense in depth.
\n\nNYOTA: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Knows you can't maintain any particular perimeter indefinitely. The French found that out to much of their chagrin. [laughs]
\n\nNYOTA: Oopsie.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's a Emmanuel line reference. That's not news.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nTo go all the way to like – and I see where you're going with this. Phishing emails don't work on people who are calm and relaxed when nothing's urgent.
\n\nNYOTA: Yes.
\n\nDAMIEN: Where they can go, where they can stop and think, and have that wherewithal and that energy and that reserve.
\n\nNYOTA: Right, even at home. Especially how all of these scams are on the rise, Navy, federal, IRS, all kinds of people. If you're just one moment aware, you'd be like, “Wait, have I ever engaged my bank in this way?”
\n\nDAMIEN: Hm mm.
\n\nNYOTA: Like ever? Have they ever called me and asked me for my six digit? They called me and I didn't call them? Like, I just think if you just take a breath and then think part of being resilient is being able to take more breaths.
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. Yeah. Wow.
\n\nCASEY: Ooh, I like that line.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah. We know that one of the biggest vulnerability to cybersecurity posture of anything that happens is people because we are normally that vulnerability, we're normally that weakness in the network because we are human. So anything that we get to do to reinforce ourselves, guard ourselves up, it's always going to have a positive second, third, fourth order of effects.
\n\nDAMIEN: How does upper management react to that when you come in and say, “We're going to improve your cybersecurity, give your employees more days off”?
\n\nNYOTA: So I'm actually new having this conversation within leadership, but they already have leadership corporations, they already have this structure in place. Just haven't heard anyone tie it together specifically to their cybersecurity posture.
\n\nSo there's already a lot of wellness initiatives, you can talk to counselors. I think we already have these initiatives in place, but they're just kind of ethereal, they're kind of out here, but to say, “Now tie that not just to our bottom line, because employees are less willing to have turnover, but let's tie it to the security of the network because our employees are aware and they're more vigilant.” So it's just kind of helping them to see the work that we're already doing within corporations. We get to laser focus that into a place.
\n\nCASEY: Hmm. I like it that this gives way to measuring the outcome of those programs, too. You can correlate it, too.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah, instead of like, “Oh, we're happy at work. We're skipping and holding hands down the hallway.” Well, that may not necessarily be what you want, but you do want less infractions on the network. More opportunities to be successful but not having to spend so many manhours undoing cybersecurity risk.
\n\nCASEY: I want to zoom out. I want to go meta with you. You're helping them become more resilient. How do you make sure your changes there are resilient? When you leave, they persist? You can Mary Poppins out and they're still the way they were before you arrive.
\n\nNYOTA: Mm, that's a good question. So during the time that we work together, they also buy a bundle of coaching. They have opportunity to come back for where I can do, like, “Hey, y'all it's time for the refresh,” and not in a lame way. I'm actually creating on workshops now and it involves coloring books. Because when we were in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the places we colored, and I just feel like coloring saves lives and when I'm saying people, I'm talking about mine, because it is very calming and not those crazy ones that are really small and you have to have a pen. So I'm talking about a 5th-grade coloring book with big pictures where it's relaxing and you're talking amongst your peers. It involves that.
\n\nSetting them up with skills to be able to well, if you do nothing else, make sure you're playing the gratitude game in the mornings. What is the gratitude game? I play this game with myself. Every morning when I wake up, I say three things that I'm grateful for, but it can't be anything that I've ever said ever before.
\n\nDAMIEN: Mm hm.
\n\nNYOTA: I play this game. It's always making you search for the gratitude, always looking for that shiny light. There's always a better today, a better tomorrow, and so, even if there's something as that and drink water, because there's a lot of things that happens when you're dehydrated. There's a lot of clarity that doesn't happen when you're thirsty and so, even if it's just those two things and reminding people, just those two things have even had an impact on my life. Do you see my skin popping? Do you?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'm just saying. Water is your friend. [laughs] So just those, just kind of even a pop in, a retraining. Hey, remember. Remember sleep, remember relaxing, remember get up and walk around your cube, and the filter water is so much better. It tastes so much better than bottled water. I'm just, it's better. I'm holding up my filtered water. Picture here, I keep it at my desk while I work if I'm on a lot of calls in a row.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I can go through water.
\n\nNYOTA: And that's why you're alert. I don't think people understand that being dehydrated really makes you lethargic and you're like, “Are they talking? I see their mouth moving. I can't pay attention. What is happening. What is that?” And being dehydrated is not good. Don't do that. Just take a little sip of water. We’re talking about water, just take a little sip of your water. Go get some water. [chuckles] If you're listening, get some water. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Reminders help. I'm going to post one of my favorite Twitter accounts, @selfcare_tech.
\n\nNYOTA: Ooh. Please.
\n\nCASEY: And they do a water reminder probably every day. Something like that. So I'll just be on Twitter and I'm like, “Oh yeah. Thanks.”
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] See, we can turn social media even to our good.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. We can find some benefit.
\n\nNYOTA: But we get to decide and I think that's another thing that people don't. Like, they negate the fact that you get to decide. You get to decide where your life is, or isn't. You get to decide where you're going to accept, or not accept. You're going to decide if I work at this job, it's for my greater good, or not. We get to decide that. You've already created your life up to this point. So what does it look like later? We've created this life that we have and people take responsibility for that. Who do you get to be tomorrow? Who do you get to be today?
\n\nThe thing is we always get what we ask for. So I've been asking for a bold community, I've been asking for a community that pushes and pulls me and here comes Casey, here comes Andrea, here comes you guys and I'm like, “I think that's so interesting.” We do get what we ask for you.
\n\nCASEY: It sounds like you're manifesting the world around you. I like that word.
\n\nNYOTA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I don't even mean it in a metaphysical spiritual sense, but even just saying. Back when I was an engineering manager and I wanted to become a PM, I told people I wanted to be a product manager and by telling a lot of people, I got a lot more opportunities than I would have.
\n\nNYOTA: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: Telling people was very powerful for that.
\n\nNYOTA: And in my Christian Nyota way, that's what happens. Miracles come through people. So give people an opportunity to be your miracle.
\n\nJOHN: So we've come to the time on our show where we do reflections, which is each of us is going to talk about the things that struck us about this conversation, maybe the things will be thinking about afterwards, or the ideas we're going to take forward.
\n\nCasey, do you want to start us off?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nI wrote down a quote from Nyota. She said earlier in this episode, “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths,” and I just think that applies anywhere the word resilience applies and I want to meditate on that for over the week.
\n\nJOHN: I’m right there with you. That is really sinking in and applicable in so many ways. I love it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and involving taking some breaths while you do that, huh?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI am really inspired by this conversation. The ideas of you can be the expert, you can be the journalist, you can be the first mover, the first leader. Realizing that in my life, I’m going to be looking for ways I want to apply that conscientiously. How to make sure not to try apply it everywhere. [laughs] But I get to decide. I get to decide who I am and who I'm going to be in this world and what this world is going to be like for me, so that's awesome.
\n\nNYOTA: That is good. I like that one, too.
\n\nAnd along those lines for me, it's like when Casey's like, “I mean, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, but when someone had created this bundle for you to be able to follow, I really heard when we do things, leave breadcrumbs so someone can come behind us and also be able to support. Because if you don't – leave some breadcrumbs.
\n\nSo I thought that was – she was like, “I knew these things but she had created this framework for you to be able to do it, too,” and I heard leave some breadcrumbs. So I really like that.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nJohn, do you have a reflection for us?
\n\nJOHN: No, I mean, really, it's the same as Casey's. [laughs] Yeah, that statement is really going to sit with me for a while. I like it a lot.
\n\nCASEY: I'm going to make a t-shirt of it.
\n\nNYOTA: [laughs] I love a good t-shirt.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, Nyota. Thank you so much for joining us today.
\n\nNYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be amongst such caring, intelligent, thoughtful people and so, I appreciate you all for having me.
Special Guest: Nyota Gordon.
Sponsored By:
02:03 - Arpit’s Superpower: Tenacity
\n\n05:03 - Managing People vs Servers
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Meeting minutes and clear communication is a form of active listening.
\n\nMae: Thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime.
\n\nArpit: Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr
\n\nMandy: Tenacity.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale.
\n\nMAE: Also here with us is our show creator, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Thanks, Mae! I’m Mandy and today, I’m here with our guest, Arpit Mohan.
\n\nFrom unscrewing his childhood Tamagotchi to taking apart a computer, Arpit has always tinkered with technology. But while working on a mobile game that went viral seemingly overnight, Arpit realized he was on to something big: a way to put customizable app tools directly into developers’ hands. So he and two co-founders created Appsmith, an open-source project built by engineers for engineers. With Appsmith, Arpit can do what he loves most: using technology to help people accomplish more.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Arpit.
\n\nARPIT: Thank you so much for having me. Super glad.
\n\nMANDY: We like to kick off the show by asking all of our guests: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nARPIT: One of my superpowers is I am tenacious. I am really, really tenacious. You give me a problem to work on, you give me something, especially a measurable problem to work on, and I will ensure that it'll get done. I'll keep thinking about it. I'll keep chipping away at it. At some point of time, it'll get done.
\n\nMaybe because I'm a little competitive by nature and to me, it seems that most problems, or most things are accomplishable if you just kind of stick with the problem, you continue to work on it, and that's what I've done right from childhood.
\n\nSo yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've always excelled at.
\n\nJOHN: You say that you've always had that from childhood. When did you realize that that was the thing that you were doing that was different from maybe how other people approach problems?
\n\nARPIT: Well, once I graduated from university from my undergrad, that's when I started up our first company back in 2010 and while every startup founder hopes and wishes that you only have to ever start up once in your life and that's the one startup that becomes a unicorn, a billion-dollar company, gives you the exit so you can retire on a beach. Unfortunately, that did not pan out for us.
\n\nWhile the first startup was a mild success, lukewarm success, I would call it at best, me and my other co-founder, we kind of kept at it for about 12 years now and so, Appsmith is actually officially the third company that we are working on and maybe I think the 30th, or 40th product. I just lost count of number of products that we've built, we've launched, we've failed at miserably for a large part of them and seen a lot of success with some of them like the mobile game in the past.
\n\nSo a lot of startup founders tend to start up once, or twice and then give up and maybe move on to a corporate job. But that's when I realized that if you keep at something, if you keep continue to do something, you start to fractured luck and at some point, lady luck does smile at you. So I think just the startup journey is when I realize that tenacity is something that a lot of people lack.
\n\nMAE: I love it. Arpit, I keep – are you familiar with Tenacious D?
\n\nYeah, absolutely. Tenacious D, a fantastic movie. Love the music especially at the end where he kind of sings with the devil, I think. It's a really, really good song.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAlthough, I wouldn't probably tattoo on myself, but yeah, I love the movie and the actor. Jack Black, right?
\n\nMAE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kept wanting to call you Tenacious A so, that's your name for me now.
\n\nARPIT: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDY: So Arpit, we invited you on the show today because you wanted to talk about managing people versus servers and I'm interested in this topic because, because I want to figure out what do you mean by that?
\n\nARPIT: Yeah. So as engineers, there's always a lot of mind space and thought that goes into how we write, or manage a code, manage our infrastructure, and manage our server. But managing servers is actually the easy part of up because if a server does not work, or it's not to your liking, you can always reboot the server. You can get a different server and with AWS, or Azure, or any other cloud, it happens with the click of a button.
\n\nUnfortunately, or fortunately, people are much trickier. You can't just reboot a person and that's what actually makes managing people, working with people, leading people a much more interesting experience and it also is a lot of learning that happens with everybody that you work with because the same person evolves over time.
\n\nSo even if I'm working with you, Mandy, over here, we may be working together for 5 years, but the Mandy of 5 years ago is a very different person from what she is today. An Ubuntu system 16.04, you keep it on for the next 30 years, that is exactly what you will have.
\n\nSo the amount of learning that you have when you're managing a server is constant, or it plateaus up after a while. But the interesting part about people is that there's always something new to learn about your colleague, your partner, or just humans in general. That's what I find very, very interesting about the difference between servers and people and why they might be two slightly different sides of the coin.
\n\nBut I think there is a lot to be learned, or a lot to be derived from engineering principles when we deal with people. For example, there's a lot of literature around how to manage a distributed system. A distributed system is nothing but a cluster of servers, or a lot of servers that form a cohesive unit and operate as one. So when you do a google.com search, you are actually hitting some large cluster of servers posted by Google, but is presented to you as a single Google search. All these servers are operating as a cohesive unit.
\n\nWe can derive a lot of learnings from how a company, or engineers manage these large clusters of servers and how we can cohesively manage a large group of people to act as one towards a common goal, towards a common outcome, and that is something that I find very fascinating.
\n\nMAE: I agree completely. I love and am fascinated people. And I would add to your list of always new things to learn as also about one's self. Like we too are changing and/or most people don't have a good lock on exactly [chuckles] who they're, what they're doing. So a lot of constantly changing variables is super fun place to be.
\n\nHave you, Arpit, taken this analogy any steps further of like – and so, there's this system upgrade that we apply, or I don't know, have you explored any deeper into this analogy?
\n\nARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. This is something I've thought about a lot and something that I try to practice in our day-to-day job.
\n\nAppsmith is an open source project. We deal with a lot of people, a lot of contributors, and a lot of community users as well on a daily basis and we are globally distributed across the planet. So a lot of learnings that I've had as a distributed systems engineer, I've tried to apply it to Appsmith the project and to the work that we do on a day-to-day basis.
\n\nOne of the immediate examples is that whenever you have a distributed system, a very important aspect of it is having a consistent language, or an interface where two microservices can talk to each other. So if I have a service, a microservice A and a microservice B, for them to communicate with each other, there is a predefined interface that is well defined. This applies to people as well, that whenever you are interacting with multiple other folks in the team, if you don't have a shared language, you don't have a shared understanding of the topic at hand, the problem at hand, that's when things start to go awry.
\n\nSo one of the first things to actually do, whenever you start working with anybody for that matter, is establish a level, a consistent language and a consistent interface so that both the parties are always on the same page. They're always if I say X, you understand exactly what I mean and it’s not like you have a different version of X in your head as compared to what I have.
\n\nA lot of times, for humans especially, the illusion of communication is that it has happened and that's what I do whenever a new contributor, or a new person joins the team, that's the first thing that we kind of sit and do is, “Oh, what's our terminology. What's the level of understanding that we have with each other?” And we just spent the first few days, or weeks just establishing the shared level of understanding with anybody new in the team. It begins with something as basic as having a consistent language. So that's one of the principles.
\n\nMAE: I suspected that you are going to have some more detail on that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'm so glad I asked and honestly, I would love to hear the outline of how to translate distributed server management to very human focused, human serving management practices. This is super cool.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Actually, before we dive into that, there's one follow-up I'd love to get before we jump off is you have any techniques, or things that you do on a basis to verify that everyone's gotten onto that same page, that the two either individuals, or teams, or groups, or whatever have gotten to that point, or have maintained that sync on their understanding of what they're working on?
\n\nARPIT: Yeah, actually, there are a few tactical things, or signals that you pick up on. The first is going back to the basis of all human knowledge, which is the written word. At the end of a particular discussion, or a meeting that you have with somebody, if you share the meeting notes, or minutes of the meeting with the other person. Immediately, the words that are used in the minutes are typically a translation of what the writer has understood, or what the writer is taking away.
\n\nIf there are differences, or discrepancies in the keywords that are being used. For example, let's say, we are talking about an authentication system. In an authentication system, a user role, or a user policy in different systems might be interchangeably used. They might mean the same thing, or different things to you, or me, or whatever, but inherently, if wherever we are talking about roles—like in Google Drive, you have an editor role and a commentator role, and a viewer—versus a policy like a commenter policy, or a viewer policy.
\n\nSo immediately, if the writer is using the word policy, then you know that oh, the keywords that are being used are not the same. That means we're not yet on the same page. That means the writer is probably thinking of something else. They may, or may not be on the same page. We don't know yet. You kind of have to dig deeper and be like, “Oh, why did you use the word policy? What did you actually understand when we talked about the roles when we were talking about?”
\n\nSo the written word is the first thing that I would probably look out for.
\n\nJOHN: Hmm.
\n\nARPIT: The other one is following up where you constantly have, again, it goes back a little bit with distributed systems.
\n\nSo a TCP handshake, the HTTP protocol that we have, a TCP handshake, it's literally a handshake. So there's a SYN and then there's an ACK. The client establishes a connection and the server then acknowledges that the connection has happened.
\n\nDuring a conversation, you always try to get an acknowledgement from the other person that, did you understand what I just said, or am I making sense to you, or is this too complicated? So on and so forth. So you look for other signals like a head nod, a confused expression, wide eyes, or just a verbal confirmation that hey, am I making sense? Like right now, did this make sense to you guys?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It immediately struck me that you're talking about an active listening behavior there that's verifying that the right things are being communicated. But it also struck me that meeting minutes are a larger form of active listening for the meeting and not just for an individual set of exchanges and in between two people. Thinking about it that way is actually really helpful to me because it's something I'm practicing to get better at and lumping that meeting summary under that category makes it feel better to me as a thing that I can do.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah. Meeting minutes are typically treated with a little bit of – are given, for lack of a better word, a very step treatment, step sisterly sort of treatment where it's just like, oh, this is what we talked about. But I think just if you go through a bunch of the past X meetings, you'll start to see your trend show up and overall, it represents the shared understanding of the entire group and how that understanding has evolved over a period of time. So we go back and read a lot of fast reviews just to see that oh, how have we evolved in our thought, or in our language.
\n\nMAE: Another one on the initial and maybe this is going to show up in some of your later examples. I apologize if [chuckles] that's the case, but one thing I've tried to adopt, or encourage to some success is a user manual. Even though a lot of people are still figuring themselves out, generally do have an awareness of here are some ticks I have, here are some things that I respond well to, when I hear this, it makes me think that. Those sorts of translations also can go a long way. So it's very similar to your suggestion, just instead of an interpretation of what just got said, a meta level of it.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's still the beauty of interacting with other people is that nobody gives you that user manual and with every person, it's an investigative exercise to figure your version of that person's user manual, or the persona that you are to me, like what me is to Arpit is very different from what me would be to her partner, or to her colleague, or to her parent, for example.
\n\nSo everybody has very different user manuals of me, or of a person and they're very different persons and for everybody that you meet, it's literally an investigation. It's a detective investigation to figure this person out and that's why I absolutely love meeting new people because it presents a new challenge. It presents like oh, what do I know of this person, or what side of this person do I know of, or are being presented to, and how can I deeper that understanding of this persona, or this person?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That's fantastic.
\n\nSo you were about to go into of your overall schema for this. I'd love to hear about the rest of it.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, yeah. We want to hear! We want to hear!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nARPIT: Okay. So the other one is whenever you have a group of services together, you have something called a consensus algorithm that is at play. For example, you have the Raft consensus algorithm, or the Paxos algorithm that is used. Different systems like Redis, or Zookeeper, or et cetera. Depending on the system, they choose a consensus algorithm.
\n\nThe one thing that is common across all these consensus algorithms is that there is basically, a leader and a follower, or a main, a node and you have other backup nodes, or follower nodes, which basically translates to, there is always a single source of truth in the system. So regardless of how many people that you are organizing, or working with, there needs to be a single source of truth.
\n\nThat's why I am very anti-anarchy as a governance model because I don't think that works. What works really, really well is a democracy where the backup nodes, or the followers, they elect a leader and when the leader no longer exists, maybe at the end of their term, or et cetera, the backup nodes, or the follower nodes choose to elect another leader from amongst themselves. So one of the followers gets promoted to the post of a leader and this happens in literally every single organization and every single governance model, if you will.
\n\nThe leader plays very critical role because the leader is literally answerable to the external system about the happenings that are happening inside the cluster. So if you try to persist data into a cluster of servers and one of the backup nodes does not perform well, or let's say, it's a rogue server, or a rogue person. You don't hold the server, or the follower node responsible. You actually hold the leader responsible and you say that, “Oh, as a leader, you didn't do your job and ensure that the data got persisted correctly. So I'm going to replace you as a leader because you no longer a good leader.”
\n\nThat is true of teams as well that regardless of what everybody else is doing in the team, if you are leading a team, you are responsible for their outcome. You need to take responsibility for their output and their outcome and act like that. And you are the interface for the team to the external world, because the external world will only talk to you. They're not going to talk to a hundred other people that stand beside you; they'll only talk to you.
\n\nSo that's the other consensus algorithms and how we elect a new leader and that's why democracy rocks. Most successful nations have democracy because it's literally the best consensus that we've come up with.
\n\nThe third one is the concept of independent failures. In a distributed system when you have multiple services doing different parts of the workflow. For example, if I try to initiate a refund flow. Now a refund flow needs to go to the order system, cancel the order, go to my payment system, initiate a payment refund, and then maybe talk to the notification system and notify the user that the refund is complete. So there are three different subsystems that are at play in order for the refund to actually successfully happen and this is where the concept of independent failures in a distributed system crop up.
\n\nWherein, an order system will actually be focused on accomplishing its job and it relies on the notification system to have done its job. It's not like if the notification system fails, we are going to not cancel the order. The order is canceled. So there's this shared sense of trust that a distributed system must take doing its services so that each server does its job properly and independently without necessarily having to rely on another server.
\n\nThis is true of people as well and this is what I tell a lot of folks within the team. The top priority is to get your job done first, without worrying about what somebody else is doing. So once you've got your job done, you've delivered what you needed to deliver, then focus on what everybody else is doing. Don't try to unnecessarily distract yourself and focus on what is X doing, or what is Y doing unless you've completed what your deliverable is, because there are other people in this shared trust model who are relying on you to do your job well.
\n\nThis is again, why high trust teams operate a lot more efficiently and are able to move a lot faster rather than a trustless system, or a trustless team, because of the shared sense of trust and the corollary to this obviously is the independent failure is the concept of failing early. For example, if I expect somebody else to do their job and I'm dependent on their output for me to complete my job successfully, I better have a backup plan. What happens if the other person does not, or the other team does not deliver on time? Do we have a backup?
\n\nIn the engineering world, people use mock data, or mock APIs so that they can get their job done and while they wait for somebody else, or some other team to deliver. Similarly for teams, or human teams as well is invariably most software projects, I think a ridiculously large number of software projects are delayed, which means that there are some teams which are almost always behind schedule.
\n\nThe way to kind of move forward is to always have, or formulate a backup plan for yourself, your team so that even if the other team does not deliver on time, you are still able to move forward and still have your team's output, or your personal output ready and deliverable so that you can then quickly integrate with the other team once they've given, or they've delivered their output. So you shouldn't be beholden to them and say that, “Oh, team X and delivered. So therefore, I'm stuck.” That's not an excuse. That's how we, again, large teams work well with each other.
\n\nBy the way, as an interesting aside, little bit tangential is something that I learned from airplane engines, or seeing how airplane engines are maintained. It's a different engineering discipline. The beauty of an airplane engine, if you ever kind of look at it, is they're geared for quick maintenance.
\n\nWhen a flight lands, because there's a dollar cost attached to how long the aircraft is parked in the bay and the maintenance needs to happen really, really quickly, every part that can potentially fail is literally within one arm's length inside the engine of a human. So they can literally put their arm in, reach for a part, take it out, and replace it for maintenance. The deep maintenance only happens every once in a while.
\n\nMy learning from this was for teams is that part, or everything that can potentially fail in the entire ecosystem should literally be within one arm's length of us as a team being able to change it, or fix it.
\n\nSo instead of having deep processes and deep overarching fixes, as a team, always try to focus on, it's called inversion of control, or dependency, is inverting that control and saying that, “Oh, if there's something that's changing a lot, how do we ensure that we can actually change something really, really quickly and adapt to the situation versus having to necessarily fall back to large overarching code refactors, or large overarching processes that need to be hauled over versus, “Hey, what's the quick thing that we can do, what's the smallest unit of work that we can do in order to actually improve our entire system, or our process as a team”?
\n\nSo that was my takeaway from literally sitting in tons of flights and seeing the maintenance happen outside.
\n\nJOHN: So it sounds to me like microservices are a part of that because you've got sort of smaller pieces of code that you don't have to go 15 class layers deep in defined where the thing is going wrong on You have the small encapsulated service that it's easy to get to in metaphorically.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why if you look at frameworks like Spring, or I think React also, I think does some parts of this is the whole dependency injection and in version of control where it surfaces. Even if there is a class that is like 15 layers deep, they actually allow you to expose it at the top level so you can just swap out your class at the top which again, sort of maps to what you're seeing in the microservices also. That you can have a cluster of lots of microservices talking in a mesh network to each other a lot, but you’re literally one git push away from changing, or improving something in one microservice, or one workflow.
\n\nJOHN: Do you have anything in the same toolbox that helps manage once you have a large collection of microservices with their complex interactions, then you get that sort of next order complexity arises out of the system with emergent behavior and whatnot? Do you have anything that helps you, or the team deal with that layer of complexity?
\n\nARPIT: Sort-ish of, yes. I think this is something that was actually popularized by Spotify, the Spotify Squads, which is essentially a source code, or as an Appsmith, we call them quads, is a self-contained unit of frontend engineers, mobile engineers, backend engineers, product managers, designers, and QAs put together so that they are able to accomplish a unit of work, or they're able to take a feature from idea to production largely on their own without necessarily having to talk to other people.
\n\nSo if you have a lot of microservices, or a lot of different services that are talking to each other in a complex mesh network, one of the ways basically follow Conway’s law and divide the entire team, or your group of people as well to be responsible for a smaller set of microservices.
\n\nSorry, you're familiar with Conway law, right?
\n\nMAE: I was going to say, I know a lot of people have done Conway's game of life and that, but in case there are people who didn't, I was going to ask if you'd be willing to go into it more.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah. Okay. So Conway’s law is actually very interesting. What Conway’s law states is that if you want to find out about the organization hierarchy, or the organization structure of a company, you actually don't need to talk to the people. You actually go look at the code that they've written, or produced because the code is a representation of the organization structure.
\n\nSo if you see a code base that has a lot of microservices with a lot of interfaces between them, then you can be rest assured that the entire, this company, or this organization is organized into a set of smaller teams that are communicating with each other through a shared interface, or through a shared understanding, again.
\n\nOn the other hand, if you see a very monolithic code base with classes randomly talking to each other, or randomly imported, or pulled into each other, then you can be rest assured that this is a much more fluid organization. It's a more cohesive large block where people are just talking to each other a lot more.
\n\nA very good example of this is Jeff Bezos back in the day. This is early, early days of AWS. There's this famous memo of his wherein he went in and he is literally told everybody in AWS, or Amazon, the two large pizza rule and he said, “No team is going to be larger than what two large pieces can feed,” which essentially limited it to anywhere between 10 to 20 people, depending on their appetite.
\n\nSo this ended up with AWS where now every service in AWS, whether it's EC2, IAM, S3, et cetera, they are actually smaller teams that communicate with each other only via the API and he said that, “Oh, don't you dare talk to this other team without an API.”
\n\nEventually, the organization reformed itself in order to meet that code structure that Jeff Bezos wanted. So Jeff Bezos didn't say, “Oh, I'm going to change the organization structure.” He basically wanted the code, or the services in such a manner and he basically sort of – you move one lever and the other one will automatically move.
\n\nSo if you want to make a code change, change your teams, or you change your teams and you'll change the code, whichever you think is the lesser of the evil, or easier thing to do and just do that because the other one will automatically happen. That's the Conway’s law.
\n\nSo to your point about the microservices is again, organize the people and the services will automatically happen where one team handles two, or three services and just get those two, three services running with their uptime with 5 nines, 6 nines, whatever you want.
\n\nMAE: I have to admit, Arpit when I read some of this description, I have this very visceral reaction to people trying to treat humans like systems and vice versa like, there's certainly things to be learned and applied across, but this is the best most humane human application of these things that I have ever heard and I'm very excited about it. Especially for how you opened up in saying your opener, I should say it more clearly, was about how people are complex and it's hard and it's more of a complexity than figuring out code and for many reasons and layers. So seeing a self-learning algorithm application of how to deal with human systems, love it.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah. No, no, absolutely and most of these things are cross-disciplinary in nature and this basically stems from the idea that the history of software is the history of teams. There is no good, or great software that is ever built by a single person, it's always built by teams of people. So it's important that the code, or the server is just the tool and you never hear, I don't know, like da Vinci ever praise his paint brush for Mona Lisa, right? The paint brush is just a tool.
\n\nThat's why I think focusing on the team and how teams collaborate, or how people collaborate with each other is how we will get to better and better software, to better abstraction level, layers, et cetera. Better team organization, or better people organization is how we are going to get to better software.
\n\nBut that in no way means that we can't learn from our engineering disciplines, or what other people have done, whether it's the aircraft industry, or what F-1 is doing to make their cars faster, or what surgeons are doing to make surgeon be safer and apply them and their processes and principles to actually running our own software teams, or tech teams itself.
\n\nMAE: I have thought often about how the energy with which we build things, it does show up not only structurally, but just where it finds itself directionally. So to put that into practice is pretty cool.
\n\nYou're reminding me also of Jess Kerr’s RubyConf keynote, I think it's 2019. It's a collective problem solving and she's come up with this term “somathesis” and I think that you would really love her work and anybody enjoying hearing about innovation and team dynamics, and how to apply our own discipline to the human aspects back so that there really is two-way communication. We really do have an API with what we're building to ourselves.
\n\nARPIT: Nice. That sounds like a very interesting – I haven't heard her keynote yet, but I'm definitely going to give it a watch after this show. So thank you so much for the pointer.
\n\nThe last thing that I wanted to mention as well was when we look at again distributed systems and clusters of server, the reliability and uptime is almost always given a higher preference to simply speed, or speed of response, or speed of your SLA on how quickly did the service respond to my ACP request, or TCP request.
\n\nThat correlates again, very, very highly with teams and people as well, is that regardless of how good coder you are, a good an artist you are, or et cetera, if you are unreliable, or your uptime so to speak is not really there, it's very hard again, to establish that human trust.
\n\nThere's this this book I was reading about how SEAL teams operate because the Navy SEALs are literally the highest functioning team that exists out there and they operate in some very, very adverse conditions and there was this book about how do seals organize themselves and how do they operate.
\n\nThe way the SEAL team members select who's going to be on their team is where they basically draw a quadrant. If you have performance on one axis and trust on the other axis, how much do I trust this person in the middle of a firefight versus performance wise how good of a sharpshooter are you, or something like that. They'll prefer somebody who is of mediocre performance, but higher trust over somebody who is of higher performance and mediocre trust, or low trust.
\n\nBecause at the end of the day, when you're in an adverse situation, or when things go south, what you really want next to you is not the best sharpshooter, but what you want is somebody you can actually trust and software teams are a far cry from what the Navy SEALs do.
\n\nWe have very, very cushy jobs and thank God for it. But you don't want to go into a meeting with a customer, or you're presenting to your CEO in the all-hands and you have your partner who throws you under the bus when something doesn't work. There's a demo effect and things don't work and you don't want to be thrown under the bus in front of everybody.
\n\nSo what you'd rather do is work with somebody who is more reliable, who has “greater uptime”, again for a person, it's how quickly are they responding to you, do they communicate back that hey, I'm getting delayed on X, can we push this meeting forward? Even something as small as, “Hey, I'm running late by 5 minutes on this meeting. Can we push the meeting by 5 minutes, or 10 minutes?”
\n\nThat's a very, very, a small signal of reliability and trust and are invariably the people, correlation, or causation, who will actually end up getting much better performance reviews. They're the ones actually get promoted because again, consensus algorithm, they are the ones who will get elected to be the next leader. They're the people that the team trusts.
\n\nSo what do you want to do in any team is, if you are an engineer in a team, or a new engineer in a team, the first thing to do is not show off how good a coder you are, or how good your code is, but what you want to actually do when you're a new person in a group is establish trust. Like, can you trust me as a human? We have a lizard brain right from Neanderthals to homo sapiens to whatever is that we'd much rather be with people that we trust more than anything else in this world. Reliability and uptime and how do you be the reliable person that, “Oh, I've told Arpit to do X, we know that X will be delivered” so they can then move on and live their lives. So you want to be that person in the team.
\n\nMAE: Yes! Everyone who's about to be, or is new to a team. We'll hear you say that one again. Arpit, what would you do? What would you want?
\n\nARPIT: Build trust, establish trust, forget everything else.
\n\nJOHN: Definitely.
\n\nMANDY: This seems like a great time to move on to reflections. Who'd like to start us off?
\n\nJOHN: I can go first. I've got two things that are takeaways.
\n\nOne is the realization I had earlier about how meeting minutes and clear communication after some group conversation is a form of active listening and ensuring that communication has happened the way you thought it did, which is great in increasing the fidelity of the understanding throughout the team. I love that.
\n\nAnd then the other one was, I've been familiar with Conway's law for a long time, of course. It's been around for since 70s, I think at least, maybe even the 60s. But the way you phrased it, where you were saying that you can start with the structure of the code and have that influence the teams, or you could start with the teams and have that influence the structure of the code.
\n\nJust that idea that you could say, “Okay, well, I kind of think the architecture's going to end up looking like this. That means I'm going to build these teams that do these things and then that will just naturally flow out of the fact that the teams are structured that way is such a fascinating flip to the normal way of thinking about how software is going to get built in multi-team environment. So that's definitely going to stick with me for a while.
\n\nARPIT: Awesome.
\n\nMAE: John, you stole mine!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThose are definitely on my list, but so many of them. I'm definitely going to re-listen to this and Arpit, I want you to write a book, or I don't know, make a movie. This is great! I love it.
\n\nSo I think the only thing I could add to what you were saying, John, is I loved thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat was really well done.
\n\nARPIT: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I really, really want to write a book at some point. That's on my bucket list to kind of do short eBook someday. I hope I can do that.
\n\nFor me, the takeaway is literally this RubyConf talk that you shared because to be honest, I haven't heard a lot about people speaking about the confluence between engineering disciplines and team management principles and human disciplines itself. So I think that's definitely a takeaway for me is to listen to what she said and learn from what she's talking about in the keynote.
\n\nMAE: And I've been saving up a reading list, too. So I’ll write you after this and we can compare some notes. Also, when you write the book, Arpit, you need to sign it as Tenacious A.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nARPIT: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. At that point, I'll probably tattoo it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNot just sign it. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: And then you'll have to come back on the show to talk about it again.
\n\nJOHN: Yes, yes.
\n\nARPIT: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
\n\nThis has been a really, really fun, very free-flowing, very casual conversation. So thank you so much to all of you for doing that and for having me on the show. It has been a true pleasure.
\n\nMANDY: Thank you.
\n\nI just want to say my reflection was just in the beginning when you described your superpower being tenacity, I haven’t thought of that word in such a long time.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd it’s such a great word. Determination and tenacity, I love the words so that was a great takeaway for me. But again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was wonderful to have you and we will see everyone next week.
Special Guest: Arpit Mohan.
Sponsored By:
02:28 - Kerri’s Superpower: Having an Iron Butt
\n\n\n\n06:39 - On The Road Entertainment
\n\n15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography
\n\n25:42 - Working On The Road
\n\n27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts
\n\n\n\n30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases
\n\n\n\n35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties
\n\n38:40 - Recording Adventures
\n\n41:46 - Focus / Music
\n\n42:22 - Directed Riding vs Wandering/Drifting
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Taking time to enjoy yourself is SO important.
\n\nJamey: Get started! Create a map, now.
\n\nCoraline: Permission to go down rabbit holes: wander aimlessly, and explore.
\n\nAaron: If I’m not having fun, why am I doing this? Resetting expectations to your purpose.
\n\nChelsea: Making “it didn’t always look like this!” stories accessible to folks.
\n\nKerri: It’s a marathon. You can’t do a lot of things in a single step. We have traveled far from where we began.
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 072: Story Time with Kerri Miller
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nCORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 273 of Greater Than Code. You may remember me, my name is Coraline and I’m very, very happy to be with y'all today and to be with my friend, Jamey Hampton.
\n\nJAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm also excited to introduce my good friend, Aaron Aldrich, and it's our first time co-hosting together so I'm excited about that, too.
\n\nAARON: Oh, Hey, it's me, Aaron Aldrich. I'm also excited. I'm so excited to host with all these people and I will introduce you to Chelsea.
\n\nCHELSEA: Him folks. I'm Chelsea Troy and I am pleased to introduce Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Hey, everybody. It's Mandy. And today, I am here with one of my favorite people! It's Kerri Miller, and you may know Kerri as an engineer, a glass artist, a public speaker, a motorcyclist, and a lackwit gadabout based in the Pacific Northwest.
\n\nGenerally, she's on an epic adventure on her motorcycle somewhere in North America. Will she meet Sasquatch? That's what I want to know and that's why she's here today because we're not going to talk about tech, or code today. We're going to catch up with Kerri. If you're not following Kerri on these epic adventures, you need to be because I live vicariously through her all the time and you need to, too. Kerri is a prime example of living your best life.
\n\nSo without further ado, Kerri, how are you?!
\n\nKERRI: Oh my gosh. With an intro like that, how can I be anything but amazing today? Can I just hire you, Mandy just to call me every morning and tell me how exciting I am?
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKERRI: No. I'm doing really, really well. The sun actually came out today in the Pacific Northwest. I've been telling people lately that if you want to know what living in Seattle is like, first go stand in the shower for about 4 months [laughs] and then get back to me. So to have the sun bright and it’s 53 outside, it’s amazing.
\n\nAARON: 53 does sound amazing. It's been like so far below freezing for so long here that I've lost track. Every once in a while, I go outside and it's like 30 and I'm like, “Oh, this is nice!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: Are we going to ask Kerri the superpower question? Because I feel like she's come on and answered it a bunch of times already. [laughs] We could ask her about Sasquatch instead.
\n\nMANDY: I mean, I thought her superpowers were having epicly awesome adventures, but maybe she has a different answer.
\n\nKERRI: Well, in the context of this conversation, I think that my superpower is being able to sit on a motorcycle for ridiculously long amounts of time.
\n\nCORALINE: Kerri, would you say you have an iron butt? Is that what you call that?
\n\nKERRI: Yes. I mean, of course, the joke being that I belong to a group called the Iron Butt Association, which is dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding. So the only requirement to join, besides having the defective gene that makes you want to sit on a motorcycle for hours and hours on end, is to be able to ride a 1,000 miles on a motorcycle in 24 hours, which once you do it once, you very quickly decide if you ever want to do it again and if you do decide you want to do it again, you are one of the ingroup.
\n\nAARON: What's a reference point for a 1,000 miles? That's a number that I only know conceptually.
\n\nKERRI: Let's see. It is a 1,000 miles almost exactly from Seattle to Anaheim to the front door of Disneyland. It's a 1,100 miles from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida.
\n\nCORALINE: Oh, wow.
\n\nKERRI: It's 2,000 miles from my house in Seattle to Chicago.
\n\nJAMEY: What made you feel like you wanted to sit on a motorcycle for that long?
\n\nKERRI: I don't really have a short answer for that, but I'll give you an honest answer. I mean the short answer is the jokey one to say, “Oh, I've got a defective gene. Ha, ha, ha.”
\n\nBut when I was in – I grew up in the country and had a lot of a lot of struggles as a teenager and the way that I escaped from that was to go get in my car and drive around the back roads of New England. Dirt roads, finding old farmsteads and farm fields and abandoned logging roads and that gave me this real sort of sense of freedom.
\n\nWhen I moved out to Pacific Northwest—no real friends, no family out here—I spent a lot of time in my car exploring Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of those same vibes of being by myself and listening to my good music and just driving around late nights.
\n\nWhen I got into to motorcycling, I rediscovered that joy of being by myself, exploring things, seeing new things, and if I wasn't seeing something new, I was seeing how had changed this week, or since last month, or since last few years since I've been through a particular region. And my motorcycling is basically an extension of that, it's this sort of urge to travel. A desire to be by myself under my own control, my own power, and to learn and discover new stories that I'm not learning just by sitting in my apartment all day.
\n\nI work from home. I've worked remotely for 8, or 9 years now, so anytime I get to leave the apartment is a joy and adventure, but doing so for longest ended periods of time just lets me see more of the world, expand my own story, and learn the story of others as I travel.
\n\nBeing a single solo lady on a motorcycle, I'm instantly the object of interest wherever I stop and it doesn't help that I have rainbow stickers and all sorts of stuff all over my bikes. My motorcycle helmets are crazy pink, rainbow reflective, got unicorn horns, and things all over my bike, so people see me as being super approachable.
\n\nEvery time I stop for gas, or to get a burger, or a soda, or something, people come up to me and they want to tell me their stories. It's usually about the motorcycle, they're really interested about. It's usually middle aged and old men come up to me to say, “Oh, I had a motorcycle when I was in college and then I got married and had a kid.” You can kind of see them deflate a little bit.
\n\nOr I've had lots of kids come up because it's covered with stickers and a lot of the stickers, they're all kind of at a kid eye level. They see them and they get really excited, they want to come over and talk to me. With rainbow bandanas and everything, I think I look safe as a biker. I'm not dressed in black and skulls and so, people see me as approachable and they want to come up and talk. So there's a lot of those great interactions that I get to have with people along the way.
\n\nCORALINE: And you said at the beginning, when you were driving around the Pacific Northwest, you were listening to your good music. Do you also listen to music on the motorcycle and some of those have fancy speakers in the helmet and all that sort of stuff where you just go quiet and just listen to the road?
\n\nKERRI: Honestly, over the course of the day, because I will ride 18, 20 hours a day if you just let me go and if I'm trying to make distance, I'll do that. It's kind of a mix, but for the most part, I actually do listen to something.
\n\nThe last few years, I've really embraced and tried to understand and integrate into my personal identity, having ADHD and how does that manifest for me and I found that if I'm riding my motorcycle and I'm not listening to something, my mind wanders. But weirdly, if I'm listening to something, then I'm paying attention and focused, patrolling the motorcycle and being safe and then whatnot, which seems paradoxical. But that's just how my brain works. So I pretty much always have something going.
\n\nUntil recently, I had a Spotify playlist with about 1,800 songs on it that was rotating through. I tried to do audiobooks and podcasts, but that's a little tricky with all the wind noise and whatnot. I'm trying to protect my hearing.
\n\nOther than that, I also listen to a lot of FM radio, which is great. So I have opinions on country music now, which I never thought I was going to have opinions on that at before. Yes, country music is great. It's all over. Even in Seattle, we have country music, bars, and whatnot, but you don't just walk down the street in Seattle and hear country music. You’ve got to kind of seek it out and so, I haven't been exposed to it.
\n\nSo listen to a lot of FM country as I cross the vast planes of America and I've also used that to discover a lot of this rebirth that's happened in the last decade of community radio. A lot of small communities have their own low power, super local FM radio you can only pick up for 20 miles at a stretch.
\n\nSo if I'm passing through a town and I see a sign for K, B, C, or whatever it is for some small town, I immediately tune to it. it’s always somebody who's just like, they're not a trained professional. They never went to broadcasting school. They don't have that trained radio voice. They're just talking about sheep that got out, or here's a problem with the town water supply, or whatever it is, what local road is closed. That's just an amazing way of even as I'm passing through a place, if I'm not stopping, I kind of get a little bit of a flavor for that.
\n\nAARON: Well, just thinking that FM radios generally got to give you more of a flavor for the local area that you're at. I always thought of that as the frustration of FM radio when traveling, like, “All my radio stations keep changing. I don't know where to tune!” But at the same time, that's pretty cool. I love that as a positive of what do they listen to over here? What do they listen to over this part of the country? I would imagine even just where different musical genres are on the dial would probably shift around. Or maybe not. Maybe that's just my…coming up with things, but.
\n\nKERRI: Yeah. You do learn that there are some patterns, like all of the NPR stations, they're all down in the 800s and also, a lot of the religious radio and the top end of the dial seems to be a lot of rock. The big rock stations seem like 107, whatever the end, or something.
\n\nThe best ones, though are the ones that have local commercials because you get a lot of the same like, law firms and drugs that I don't know if I have even the condition, but I should really talk to my doctor, see if it's right for me. But then you'll get local car places, or I got one when I was down south, somewhere in Louisiana and it was for a combination, an airboat rental and barbecue joint? It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing and the guy had this amazing regional accent, which I never hear up here in the Northwest. We have our own accent, but I got a little taste of this real Southern accent and it was the owner. It was clearly the owner just reading a little script that he wrote, “Come on down and rent a jet boat, bring your dog and your dog can go on it and then we'll have barbecue waiting for you when we get off the dock,” and I'm like, “I'm sold.” Like, “I'm going to turn around, go see this guy right now. This is amazing,” and I actually have that business.
\n\nI keep a map of every interesting place I hear about as I travel and I put a pin there I'm like, “Someday, I'm going to be coming back by this place and I'm going to be hungry for lunch and I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop here.” So advertising works, I guess, is what I'm saying.
\n\nJAMEY: Will you share that map with us?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKERRI: I really should. I really should. It's a lot of fun actually because you read these websites, or roadside attractions, or you hear about some abandoned theme park, or something and it's like, that's kind of a cool thing. You read the article and you move on your day, but I add it to my maps and those maps are my GPS unit. As I'm writing, I've got this old screen in front of me and if I see a little pin appearing on the map in front of me, I can say, “Oh, there's this old waterpark over here,” or “Oh, there's that resort over there that I always wanted to see,” or a particular weird statue, or the birthplace of James Kirk, or whatever it is. So I don't have to remember if the computer could do it for me.
\n\nJAMEY: I was going to ask if you go to things like the world's largest ball of twine and like –?
\n\nKERRI: Every time.
\n\nJAMEY: Okay, cool.
\n\nKERRI: Every time.
\n\nJAMEY: I'm glad that I understand you enough to know that you would do that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCORALINE: Kerri, have you been in the Mystery Spot?
\n\nKERRI: I have been in Mystery Spot.
\n\nMANDY: What is Mystery Spot?!
\n\nCORALINE: I remember Mystery Spot is some kind of a place where they say gravity is out of whack and everything feels sideways and you're super disoriented. They have this whole mythology around it. I've never been myself, but I did pretend that I'd been there by putting a bumper sticker on my car 15 years ago.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThere's this amazing song called Mystery Spot Polka. Can't remember where I read that, but I think that's how I learned about it.
\n\nMANDY: I will put that in the show notes.
\n\nCORALINE: I will find Mystery Spot Polka. It is incredible.
\n\nMANDY: So Kerri, what are some of the coolest places you have visited? Can you give us a top three rundown?
\n\nCORALINE: And I really hope that cracker barrel is in that top three, Kerri.
\n\nJAMEY: But which cracker barrel?
\n\nCORALINE: Oh, cracker barrels are the same everywhere you go. I really believe there's only actually one cracker barrel, the canonical cracker barrel, and it's multidimensional, so.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. You teleport into it?
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKERRI: Well, interestingly enough, I won't call this a danger, but one of the side effects of traveling as much I have in the last 4, or 5 years is strange, random flashbacks to stretches of road and you can't remember where they are. So you were just asking about this and I'm thinking about, “Okay, two places I could talk about,” and then I suddenly, unbidden, had this memory of a stretch of road. I can't remember where that is. I don't even know what state that's in. It was an amazing piece of pavement that I really enjoyed riding and, in that moment, I had this amazing moment.
\n\nIf I skip way ahead to the end of the conversation where I sum everything up and tell you why I ride, or what I get out of doing this is that it's cemented for me, this concept of the impermanence of everything because if I'm having a great day on the bike, it's beautiful afternoon, the temperature's perfect. It's not going to last. The sun is going to go down, the pavement is going to be bad, traffic is going to pick up, it's going to start raining. So I need to enjoy this moment, this curve, this hour, this half hour, this 5 minutes, whatever it is. Something, conversely, if it's bad, if it's raining, or it's dark, or heck, if it's snowing, it's like, this is not going to last. I'll go through this and everything will be great.
\n\nBut once every six weeks, or so, I make a really bad decision on the motorcycle, for instance, like that rain's probably going to clear up, that's not going to be a rainstorm. Nah, this wind is going to die down, it'll be fine. I'll be riding through something and it makes me just completely miserable. 110 degrees, or sideways rain, or whatever, and I think, “Yes, this is it. This is the moment. This is the thing that I'm going to be remembered for. This is the dumb thing that I did,” but it never lasts. I always survive and I walk away with this just amazing memory and this amazing about that time I rode through a rainstorm, or illegally parked my motorcycle in front of the Alamo to just get a photo, [laughs] things like that if it happened.
\n\nCHELSEA: Kerri, do you collect souvenirs of any kind from some of these travels, or is it specifically photos? Do you post about them specifically anywhere? Maybe you do a whole bunch of things. I've certainly seen a number of your posts, but I guess I'm wondering, I'm imagining myself in these situations collecting stickers, or something like that. Do you have things like that that you look for in these places?
\n\nKERRI: One of the neat things that I enjoy about traveling my motorcycle is that I just simply can't, I can't buy anything. It's not any space for it. My gear is all pretty well packed tightly. Souvenirs are kind of out unless I'm willing to pay extra ship from home. So it's kind of rare. Although, I have occasionally gotten, if I know that I'm going to be visiting a friend in a day, or two, I'll stop and pick something up and usually, it's a food item that I haven't seen before. In fact, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see I'm always posting about weird foods, or energy drinks. 90% of the time it's weird stuff I found in a weird gas station on the side of the road, especially when it comes to energy drinks.
\n\nAnd it's much more about having that experience of a place at the end of the day. I don't take as many photos as I'd like, or I think that I should. Although, certainly, I do take more than I used to. I've been working on landscape photography with my iPhone because again, I choose not to travel with a full camera rig. Well, I’ve got my iPhone, how can I take photos with that? That turns out to be much more about composition and seeing a moment and grabbing it than having the right lens, or light conditions being just right, or whatever.
\n\nCHELSEA: Ooh. So I'd be very interested to hear some of your tips for phone photography, because this is a thing. We all have our phones on us and I imagine if I just a little more about how to frame my photos sometimes, I could get something a lot better.
\n\nKERRI: Some of the basic tips are just photography one-on-one, like how do you compose a shot in terms of the rule of three where you break it up, and you'll see in phones, a lot of times you have the option turn on a grid. So you're looking at a grid and then help you understand how much space something is going to take up in the final shot. You want to line up your horizon, for example, if I'm taking a picture of say, like a harbor. I've taken a lot of photos of lighthouses for reasons I can get into later. So I'm trying to take really nice photos of lighthouses, the sea kind of wants to be right around and take up the lower third of the shot and then two-thirds is the sky.
\n\nIt's about how much of the frame gets filled with different elements will psychologically suggest the viewer, what their importance is, or how they relate to the person who's taken the photograph. So just some basic rules around that. I try to do things where, especially when doing landscape photography, because the iPhone lens is just horrible for this. It’s really meant to take photos of your friends at parties, or your car in the driveway. It's not meant to take landscaping vistas, but you can do some tricks.
\n\nActually, I found that zooming in a little bit, not a lot, but just a little tiny bit just brings it a little bit closer and the final result just feels a little different. And then if also, you continue to follow those rules of composition, you can get some good landscape.
\n\nPutting something in the foreground is really great. So my motorcycle is in a lot of my shots because of that, because it gives some depth to the photo. It helps to not just be like, especially if you're doing a wide-open plane like you do, it's like, oh yes, here's some bars of color. It's like, oh, now here's something to give me perspective and humanize the scale of a landscape. It's just little things like that and that's all stuff that I've learn just because I'm just a naturally curious person. So I'm like, “Well, how do I take better photos of that?” So I went off and did 4 hours of research and audited a class online somewhere.
\n\nCORALINE: Have all, or most of your travels been continental US, or have you ever gone on a motorcycle trip on another continent, or?
\n\nKERRI: It depends. Is New Zealand a continent?
\n\nJAMEY: Well, it's not in the continental US.
\n\n[laughs]
\n\nKERRI: Yes. Starting closer to home, though. North America, I've done. So I've done US, Mexico, and Canada. Right when COVID hit, I was actually in Baja, California down at the Southern tip at the Tropic of Cancer on my motorcycle. I rode there all the way from Long Beach, California and I've been up to Alaska through Canada twice now.
\n\nJAMEY: I'm sorry. I was going to tell a Jerri Alaska story actually, because I was in Alaska – [overtalk]
\n\nKERRI: Oh, please.
\n\nJAMEY: Not too long ago and I posted a landscape photo from our rental car on Twitter and I did not label where I was and Kerri was like, “Where are you in Alaska?!” And then we were talking about this and she recommended that I eat fireweed ice cream, which I did and it was wonderful.
\n\nKERRI: Oh, was it great?
\n\nJAMEY: [laughs] It was great. So I was going to suggest that your superpower could be recommendations.
\n\nKERRI: Oh, thank you. That's super flattering, actually. I sometimes think when I finally get tired of tech, I just want to be a tour guide, or something, or write a travel novel, or something.
\n\nJAMEY: Oh yeah. You’d be great at that.
\n\nKERRI: Yeah. I love being a hostess and I love – whenever somebody's like, “Oh, I'm traveling,” or “I'm going here,” or I see somebody post photos from someplace I've been, I'm like, “Wait, here's this restaurant, you should go here and make sure you talk to this person and do this.”
\n\nA year after I got my first bike, no, not even a year. Oh my gosh, it was 5 months after I got my first motorcycle, I went to New Zealand for a conference and said, “Well, hassle in traveling to New Zealand is actually traveling to New Zealand. So I might as well take some time.” I took two weeks and rented a motorcycle and just did a couple thousand kilometers all over the South Island in New Zealand.
\n\nSo those are the four countries I've ridden in.
\n\nI was going to rent one – I'd been to Berlin a few times and I thought, “Oh, I'll rent a BMW when I'm in Germany, that'd be cool and ride around.” But unfortunately, I got sick while I was in Germany, the one time I was going to do that. So I stayed my hotel and felt bad.
\n\nJAMEY: How different is motorcycle on the other side of the road in New Zealand? [chuckles]
\n\nKERRI: I only rode on the wrong side of the road twice.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, the shop I rented from actually, they rent to a lot of Americans, I guess. So they put arrows on the windscreen to say, “Drive pass” to help remind us. But it's funny because every single rental car down there, the left side of the car is the one that's completely trashed because when you're riding, we start driving on the wrong side of the road. The side you're not used to. Now, it's like your entire concept as a driver of the opposite side of the car is now completely inverted and so, it's like trying to do something with your left hand when you're right-handed. It's just like, how do left-handed people survive?! Like, what are you doing? [laughs]
\n\nCORALINE: I was in South Africa a number of years ago and we drove out to this wildlife preserve and the only car I was able a rental, that was not a stick shift because I don't know how to drive stick shift, [chuckles] was this giant club van. So not only I had driven the wrong side of the road, but I was in the largest vehicle I had ever driven. [laughs] Had no idea where the other side of the car might be was, just terrified of exactly that the whole time.
\n\nKERRI: See, you called it a Clubvan, but all I can imagine, the image that popped in my brain was a party bus.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo imagine you driving around South Africa in a party bus.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCORALINE: That would have been amazing. Yeah.
\n\nKERRI: Very different trip.
\n\nAARON: I just want to bring it back to lighthouse pictures because as a native New Englander, I need to know why you're taking pictures of all these lighthouses.
\n\nKERRI: Well, as another native New Englander, hi.
\n\nAARON: Hi.
\n\nKERRI: How are you?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo. So why am I taking photos of lighthouses? One of the things about the Iron Butt Association, which again, is this group dedicated to promoting this, is not just the pure endurance of can you ride a 1,000 miles in 24 hours? Can you ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours? What are the limits of safe endurance events?
\n\nWe also do a number of collection style things. We call them tours. I'm doing a lighthouse tour. So you go to lighthouses and I've got this little passport, my lighthouse passport I got from the United States Lighthouse Society. When they're open, you can get a little rubberstamp in your book to prove that you were there. When they're not open, I take a photo of my motorcycle next to the lighthouse and that's the proof that I've been there.
\n\nThe challenge is I have to visit 60 in 12 months.
\n\nAARON: Okay.
\n\nKERRI: And that's the bare minimum. So there's advancing levels of difficulty and they're merit badges for adults, really.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\n60 in 12 months I'm at 25, or 30 now and I scoured the West Coast. I'm going to also hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic next month when I'm down there in Florida. There are other challenges like go to 120, or 180 again, over the course of different time periods. You have different difficulty levels.
\n\nI've also done one which is visiting national parks because national parks have a similar passports stamp program where you can go get these timestamped little cancellations to say I was in the Redwood National Forest, or I was at Wounded Knee, or not Wounded Knee, Little Bighorn, or Devils Tower, or whatever. The challenge there is to visit say, 50 of them, but now you have to do 25 different states.
\n\nOf course, I've upped the ante and we have the silver level, which is you also have to combine that visiting one park in Washington, California, Florida, and Maine, in addition to those 50 and 25 states. So I did two of those last year and then year before that, I added Alaska just for fun, which is the gold, or insanity level. So it's just these little different ways of encouraging people to go out and travel and see more in the country on their motorcycle.
\n\nCORALINE: You work from the road, right?
\n\nKERRI: Yeah, I do actually.
\n\nCORALINE: I would love hear about how that works with such an aggressive travel schedule.
\n\nKERRI: That takes a lot of discipline and balance, which I am surprised I managed to pull off [chuckles] given how much I can normally do it without adding to traveling. Usually, what I do is I have days where I am in one place and days when I'm traveling. So for example, on February 28th, I'm going to be heading out for 2 months on the road and my first stops going to be San Diego. I will take that weekend and ride down to San Diego, which again, only 1,300 miles so that's a day and I've rented a little place down in Ocean Beach, a block from the shore and they have Wi-Fi in this little tiny one-bedroom studio. I'll work there and I'll kind of explore San Diego. I'll work all day and, in the evenings, I'll go over ride on the hills, or go up to Legoland, or whatever I want to do in that part of the world. And then Friday night, Saturday, I'll hit the road again for a couple days.
\n\nThis is actually how I initially started traveling these long, long distances was trying to say like, “Okay, I really want to go to Austin, Texas, but it's going to take me four riding days, or whatever to get to Austin, Texas. How do I manage do that and still work from the road?” So well, 2 days away is Denver, Colorado. So why don't I go to Denver? I'll work there for a few days and then next weekend, then I'll skip on. So it's like setting up a series of base camps as if I was attacking Everest so I can break up these big trips.
\n\nBut as I wanted to travel further and further distances overall, I had to actually physically travel, or do longer distances in the same amount of time. Speeding isn't going to do that safely and it actually really doesn't get you there that much faster in the end. So the only way to do that was to figure out how to ride longer more hours in the day, figure that out.
\n\nJAMEY: Can you talk about these motorcycle scavenger hunt things that you do?
\n\nKERRI: Yeah. Thanks for asking. I assume you noticed the trophies on the wall behind me.
\n\nSo these are competitive scavenger hunt style rallies. We call them rallies. A lot of people, when you say motorcycle rally, they think about Bike Week in Daytona, or Sturgis out in South Dakota. That's none of this. It is a scavenger hunt and there's a timer on it say, 36, or 60 hours where the night before you get a list of here's all the different places that you could possibly go, you call them bonus locations and at 4:00 in the morning, everyone's released and you're like, “Okay, go, be back in a day and a half.”
\n\nYou go and you take photos of these different places to prove that you went there and every place gets you a certain number of points. The harder it is to get there, or the further away it is, the more points that you would get for going there. You can do combinations for visiting certain places, visit three clown theme places and get the clown bonus, or whatnot. Like a pinball machine, if you will, where you score the right combination, you get more points.
\n\nSo it's a timed competitive thing to who can the most amount of points because you can't visit all of the – they'll give you 80, or a 100 places you could possibly go. You can't go to all of them in the time allotted. So can you construct an efficient route that is also one that you have that you the physical capability to travel in the allotted time and earn enough points to place well? They typically last, 36 hours is one level. We have a few that do 60.
\n\nI'm doing one this summer that is 9 days long. So we'll be leaving Cheyenne, Wyoming and four days later, we have to be in State College, Pennsylvania where we'll all stop for 10 hours and then we'll turn around and head back to Cheyenne. I actually just put in my application for the Olympics of the Iron Butt Association is called the Iron Butt Rally, which is an 11-day version of the countrywide scavenger hunt – [overtalk]
\n\nCORALINE: Oh, wow.
\n\nKERRI: With locations all over North America and Canada. We call it, it’s sort of the Olympics. It happens every 2 years. You actually have to apply to be accepted to enter because otherwise, you'd have a lot of folks that say, “Oh, I could do that,” and they don't really know what they're getting into and it's a little bit unsafe if you haven't done it before and you don't really understand what it takes to do.
\n\nThat's what's coming up my horizon for those and they're very competitive events, although at the end of the day, it's made-up internet points. There are no sponsorships, there's no recognition besides outside of this group of 300, or 400 similarly weirdo people who like riding their motorcycles longways. But no, I've had quite a bit of success competitively in that and that just scratch all the right itches because it's riding a motorcycle. Plus, it's basically a traveling salesman problem. It's a directed graph problem and you work with GitHub all day long and like, “Oh, I understand how to traverse a graph, this is easy.”
\n\nCORALINE: Speaking of that, Kerri as a long-time software engineer, do you do anything, do you have any software, any kind of tools that you develop for keeping track of all this?
\n\nKERRI: Yeah, I do a lot with spreadsheets, believe it, or not. The tooling, it’s tricky because at the end of the day, you still have to ride the motorcycle and you can't really automate that. So a lot of the stuff I'm able to do with software is really around using software for planning and analysis.
\n\nFor example, there's a number of different databases around you asked about the collection of the lighthouses and one of the things that I'm around the country collecting this year is pressed pennies. Now a pressed penny machine, actually I think they're fascinating because a pressed penny machine is the only machine still in active production that interacts with the penny in any way, shape, or form. There's no vending machines. There's nothing who deals with the penny besides coin counting machine. Besides the penny smasher, you put a penny, 2 quarters and it smashes a little design in.
\n\nAgain, I've got to go collect a 100 of these from 20 states and 5 of them have to be on the other side of the Mississippi, all these weird rules, but how do you find them? There's one at every cracker barrel. There's eight at Disney, one at SeaWorld. There's some obvious things like that, but it turns out, there's almost 4,000 of these machines in the United States and there's a database for these on this weird creaky, old website written in ASP. It's actually an IP address. It doesn't have a domain name.
\n\nJAMEY: That's legit.
\n\nCORALINE: Dark web got pennies. That's amazing.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKERRI: If only there was crypto involved here, it'd be perfect.
\n\nSo I got to break out some scripting the other day and actually write a little script that went into kind of scrape these old web pages and then parse CHTML and kind of strip out, look, here's the address for the place and store them because you want the name of the place and the address so you can find it. You’ve got to take that and ship it over to Google API, actually get an actual latitude, longitude, and then reform it into the XML format that my GPS device – it's this whole chain of Rube Goldberg machine of how to get this data into a place that I can actually use it.
\n\nCORALINE: I think the story of the entire internet is made. [laughs]
\n\nKERRI: Right.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nKERRI: So fast forward to the end of that and now I happen to be the maintainer for a website that maps pressed penny machines across the United States, based on this data that I'm scraping from somebody else's website.
\n\nAARON: All because you have a DNS name.
\n\nKERRI: Exactly, exactly. But this actually turned to be really, really crucial because a whole bunch of people in my riding community said, “I really wanted to do that penny collecting hunt and you have 12 months to do it and I'm going to go out to the West Coast.” So I was like, I thought, “I have plenty of places to stop, but I could never find the machines.” It's just like, “Oh, okay. So my putting this information into a format that other people could actually easily digest, that's the value that I'm adding here.” It's inspired at least a dozen people to go out and start collecting smashed pennies. So I've got to be responsible for some uptick in sales on these vending machines.
\n\nJAMEY: They should sponsor you.
\n\nAARON: I love the weirdness of these machines that interact with a coin that's so bad at being currency, we just sort of toss them out to the extent that I was at Disney World not too long ago and the machines have their own supply of pennies because people just don't have pennies. So [chuckles] this machine just has a stock of pennies and you can swipe a credit card and be like, “Give me the smashed pennies,” and it charges you a dollar in 1 cent and then goes through and does it.
\n\nKERRI: God, it's fabulous. A lot of people have heard the story that pennies are actually – it costs more to make a penny than a penny is actually worth in terms of currency. It's wild. But every time I start thinking, “We should get rid of the penny,” I'm like, “That sounds like the craziest, insane conspiracy theory position to ever take.”
\n\nAARON: But also, the penny is real bad at being currency. [laughs]
\n\nKERRI: Yeah. Yeah.
\n\nMID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor.
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\n\nKERRI: Way back at the beginning of this conversation, somebody asked me and sorry, I forgot who asked me about some of the best places I've been and the strangest things I've seen. I kind of got derailed on some poet nonsense, but I realize that I really am a sucker for world's largest ball twine kinds of things. I had this great opportunity.
\n\nSo collecting pennies, lighthouses, and national parks, I'm always just getting off the main roads and things. I see a lot of stuff. I found out that I'm a sucker basically for weird local foods like the fireweed ice cream. Anytime I see something advertised on a menu that I've never heard of before, that's the thing I'm going to order.
\n\nCinnamon rolls because when you travel up the Alaskan highway from Dawson Creek, BC up to Alaska, every 60 miles, or so, there's a gas station and a little bakery. So you can get your gas, you can get coffee, and you can get a cinnamon roll and they all claim to have the best cinnamon roll on the Alaskan highway. I stop every 60 miles and get a cinnamon rolls. After about 5 hours, I really just want to fall over and vomit because I'm sick of cinnamon rolls. But now when I travel, if I see some place advertising cinnamon rolls, I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to stop because that's my thing because I like cinnamon rolls because that's reminds me of Alaska.”
\n\nSo I get to go to a lot of these really great small towns and just seeing a lot of how, especially in the central part of the country, so many towns are struggling with just having jobs for people and keeping local economies going that a lot of them will do these sorts of things. They'll have interesting, strange festivals, or hold the film festival about corn, or soy, or they'll paint their water tower, or something.
\n\nLast year, as I was traveling across North Dakota one time, I saw off on the horizon on a hill—first of all, yes, a hill in North Dakota so that was notable—a giant cow. A giant Holstein cow. This a 100-foot-tall fiberglass cow and so, I said to my riding partner, I'm like, “We're going the cow, right?” And she's like, “Yeah, we're going the cow.”
\n\nSo get off the highway and we rode this little windy dirt road at the top of this hill. It was just this huge giant fiberglass cow that they put on top of the hill 20, 30 years ago and now it's like the 4-H Club with the FFA kids take care of it and repaint it every few years. They collect like, they ask for donations. $5 each and the little two because we're passing through and that's part of our job. That's how I'm interacting with the community and plus man, I got a ton of pictures of this giant cow.
\n\nIt was right at sunset, we were on this hill, and it was actually really beautiful, the prairie, it was spread out for us and it was about an hour east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. So it's right where the planes start to break up into the what's called Missouri Breaks where the rivers have really broken up the land quite a bit. So it was just gorgeous. It was just absolutely beautiful and I never would've seen that if I didn't stop because there was a giant cow. That's my giant cow story.
\n\nCORALINE: Kerri, have you ever considered writing down your stories and the stories of the people that you meet along the way and the amazing places you've been? I hate to say the B word, but it would make a pretty interesting book.
\n\nKERRI: Well, I'll throw back another B word at you, which is blog. I keep a travel blog at motozor.com. Lately, I've been writing more about, because I haven't been doing as much non-directed travel, so a lot of my travel lately has been around these sort of competitive rallies that I've been riding in, which are interesting in themselves because they're like, “Go take your photo with the giant cow,” or “Go to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada, or whatnot, take a photo there.”
\n\nI've been writing quite a bit about those sorts of travels, but I also have a huge backlog of articles that I've written for that over the years of all the different trips I've taken to New Zealand, Alaska down into Baja, and the multiple times I've been across the country.
\n\nThe one that I'm working on, that I haven't finished yet because I'm trying a new thing, which is incorporating a series of interview video interviews with my riding partner, is trying to tell the story in written form of the trip that she and I did last summer, where we rode to all 48 states in 10 days starting in New England ending in Washington.
\n\nJAMEY: Kerri, I have an important question to ask you, but I'm contractually obligated to ask you. How many miles at a time would you say that you live your life? [laughs]
\n\nKERRI: Well, I guess, I supposed to say one quarter of a mile at a time. [chuckles]
\n\nJAMEY: Well, Kerri was also a guest on my Greater Than Code spinoff, fast and furious show, Stationary & Sassy, so.
\n\nKERRI: Which I love.
\n\nJAMEY: I had to pull it back. [laughs]
\n\nKERRI: I'll answer that in an obliviously serious way.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI can go an entire take of gas without putting my foot down. That's kind of fun. One of my current challenges right now is can I ride through the entire state of Oregon, north to south, without getting gas? Because it's 304 miles from the Washington-Oregon border to the California-Oregon border and Oregon doesn't let you pump your own gas and it irritates me. They usually, if they see you're on a motorcycle, they're like, “You got it?” I'm like, “Yeah, I got it. I'm not from here. I pump gas.”
\n\nSo the challenge right now is can I cross Oregon without having to stop for gas and then actually weirdly, mentally breaks up my day. It's kind of weird motorcycle Pomodoro of like, “Okay, I can go 3 hours before I need to stop.” So my day gets broken up into these chunks of where are the stops that I have to make versus the ones I want to make, or excuse me, the ones I want to make versus the ones I have to make.
\n\nJAMEY: You heard it here, folks. Kerri lives her life 304 miles at a time.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKERRI: I live my life a quarter tank at a time.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHELSEA: Kerri, you mentioned earlier that you listen to music while you're riding because you find that it helps you focus on riding. I find a similar thing with work, whether it's fulltime job work, or side work, I have a much easier time focusing—for the audience, I'm a programmer as well—if I've got something on. I like to listen to Boston Nova, or I also go on turntable.fm, I'm in a heavy metal room there that's kind of fun.
\n\nI'm curious as to whether you find that music helps you focus anywhere off the motorcycle as well.
\n\nKERRI: Yes. I am very susceptible to the emotional resonance of music, if that makes any sense whatsoever. There are kinds of music that I just can't listen to before I go to bed, like heavy metal gets me going, jam music. I'm a really huge Phish fan, which surprise, from Vermont, and I wear a lot of tie dye. Of course, I'm in the Phish.
\n\nBut that's the music I like to listen to when I'm riding and when I'm working. But I do a lot of chill hop stuff now. I've gotten into that and I'm finding my way back to a lot of again, country music. But there's this entire alt Nashville scene that's happened in the last 10 years. I completely missed that. I'm kind of getting caught up on these days. My Bandcamp catalog, I think I'm keeping at least three of their engineers paid for; I buy so much stuff on Bandcamp these days.
\n\nCORALINE: I definitely get what you said about sensitivity to the emotional music definitely resonates with me as a musician. It's kind of weird to admit, but when I'm doing writing, I listen to Steely Dan [laughs] and I actually learned from a friend of mine that William Gibson listened to Steely Dan while he was writing all the seminal cyberpunk novels and thought that's kind of interesting, maybe good company, right?
\n\nKERRI: Hey, Fagen and Becker, great albums.
\n\nIt's the stereotypical thing that Rush is this big band in programming circles and fun fact, the drummer for Rush was a huge motorcycle guy to the point that they actually had a trailer on their tour bus that he would carry two bikes on the trailer. So he would ride between concert stops. The band do their show and they'd leave on the bus and he got on his motorcycle and like, “See you in Chicago, guys,” “See you in Milwaukee,” “See you in Madison.” The band went along.
\n\nHe had some personal and his wife passed away and his daughter fairly tragically and he wrote an entire book about it, where he didn't really quit the band. Although, they basically shut Rush down for a period of time so the band could work through that. But he took that time and went on the road just writing his motorcycle around. He wrote several books about dealing with grief through riding his motorcycle. I found that to be a really fascinating book and it's one of those touchstones, the Canada motorcycle riders. What little we read, that's definitely a book that everyone recommends to me at some point like, “Oh, have you read this book?” I’m like, “Yes, I’ve read that book.”
\n\nAARON: It's Neil Peart for anyone who needs to look that up.
\n\nI relate to the music as a distraction preventative [laughs] as someone who also deals with ADHD. It just makes sense to me. It's like, “Oh yeah, without it, there's so many places for my brain to go,” but if you have music on the back and it's like, “Oh, great. All right. That's where my brain is going to go when it gets distracted, it's just going to listen to this, then I'll go back to riding the bike.” [chuckles]
\n\nKERRI: Exactly. Exactly.
\n\nCORALINE: Kerri, you said a word earlier when you were contrasting the way you were riding when you started out and being kind of exploratory versus, I think the word you used is directive there, or a sweet spot for you between directed activity, directed riding versus wandering, maybe even drifting—not a car movie reference. But is there a balance that rejuvenates you, or that energizes you?
\n\nKERRI: Yes. I've talked to other motorcycle riders about this, where you say, “My gosh, there's so many great things that we see along the way,” and we say, “I would love to stop here.”
\n\nSo for example, when we're doing these rallies where we're collecting things, for example, you stop to take a picture, or something, and then you’ve got to go. You only really stop for 5 minutes because you have this timetable and a schedule that you're trying to execute, or if you're trying to ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours, you can't stop. Your gas stops, you’re timed down to like oh, 5 minutes. So you'll see things. You're like, “Man, I wish I could stop,” or “I wish I had come back here and take this in and give something,” the respect that you want to give it, or really, really dive deep and taste a place, if you will.
\n\nIt's a really common thing in the long-distance thing. Other motorcycles will sometimes say like, “Well, you don't see anything that way.” It's like, “Well, actually, I see a lot. I see way lot more in my days than you see,” but you don't get to stop so you have to kind of try and balance that.
\n\nThat's one thing that I really like about these collection things that I do is, collection challenges, I carry satellite tracker, of course so I can plot out everywhere that I've been. I've been looking at the one for my lighthouse trip so far up and down the West Coast. It's just amazing, I'm going out to every little inlet, point, and little peninsula sticks out into the ocean because that's where the lighthouses are and the things that I've gotten to see through doing that.
\n\nSo one of the reasons that I've gotten into those sort of challenges rather than the pure and endurance is just because it does reward that exploration. While, at the same time, being fairly directed because the directed part of it is researching and planning at home, like finding where are the lighthouses, where are the national parks I need to go visit? What are the hours are things open? Making that plan versus executing on the plan and the execution plan, getting to explore things, I think it's really a lot about the framing of the trip for me.
\n\nIn February, I'm going down to San Diego and then I'm going to, what's called a 50cc, which is coast to coast in 50 hours. So I'll be leading San Diego and within 50 hours, I'm going to be in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Aha. Somehow, I'll do that. I'm not going to be able to stop and see anything along the way, but because I know that's the kind ride I'm embarking on, it becomes okay. It's this weird personal permission structure to give a pass to things that I would really like to see along the way versus say, if I'm doing a lighthouse trip –
\n\nI did one several months ago down to Disneyland, but I went down the California coast and I found myself like, “Oh, I'm not making any miles. This is so slow. Why is this taking me 3 days to get down to Los Angeles when it normally takes me 1 and a half at most?” So I had to stop and I ended up stopping in this little tiny town. I can't even remember the name of the place, but it's somewhere in Northern coast, California, and there's a little tiny coffee shop there. It's like Two Girls Coffee, or something like that. I just stopped, I got a coffee, and I sat outside. They had a table, it was a nice day, and I was just like, “I'm just going to sit here for 30 minutes and I'm just going to recenter myself and really think about what am I doing here? What do I want to be accomplishing and what set of skills do I need to bring to this moment to maximize how much fun I'm going to have? If I'm not having fun, then why am I doing it?”
\n\nSo just being able to sit there in sunshine for a little bit and just say, “The point of what I'm doing here is to explore and it's to have this experience. It's not get someplace fast. It's not to get someplace far away. It's to explore and see things.” I was so much happier after that and I had a great conversation with a hippie in the parking lot so that was pretty great.
\n\nMANDY: Bonus. [laughs]
\n\nWell, we usually end this conversation with reflections.
\n\nI know, for me, I just want to say that everything you described just makes me feel so happy. I've been on a really big journey to improve my life and just what you said in the last few minutes about just taking time to enjoy, not being in a hurry, slowing down, and recentering yourself. That is all just so important to remember the whole cliché of stopping and smelling the roses. Like just enjoying your life even if it's a quarter tank at a time.
\n\nJAMEY: I keep thinking about this map that Kerri says that she has, which I actually legitimately would really like to see. But a lot of what Kerri was talking about was resonating with me. I also like to explore and I think about keeping track of places, but I don't have a map and I've been thinking about it for a while. I think it's one of these sunk cost things where I'm like, “Well, if I wanted to do a map, I should have been like doing it already,” but that's not how that works in real life. So if I want to have a map, I should start it now and I think that's my call-to-action. [chuckles]
\n\nKERRI: When people ask my advice like, “Oh, what motorcycle should I get,” or “What's the best motorcycle to do this, or that?” I always say like, “Oh, well the best motorcycle to do the ride you want to do is the one you have.” I think that's really true of so many things in life is that the trick is just to get started and it's not about the fancy equipment. It's not about the gear. You could just do it. If you just give yourself permission to go do a thing, you can just go do it.
\n\nCORALINE: I was thinking about how that kind of philosophy relates to how my life circumstances, job situation has changed so much for the past year since I retired from software engineering and the relief of not having to be productive, not having to hit goal, not having to have constraints that I'm not in control of, governing things, and permission to go down rabbit holes.
\n\nSo when you were talking about the giant cow, I was liking that to well, if you were in a hurry to get somewhere, you wouldn't have stopped there. But because you weren't, you had a richer experience. You saw something you hadn't seen before. You hadn't experienced before. I really think that's a lesson we can take all over the place and give ourselves permission, like you said, to wander aimlessly and to explore. That's something that I definitely intend to do in my life and your story of doing that is very inspirational so thank you, Kerri.
\n\nAARON: I was just latching onto two bits that I really liked.
\n\nFirst off, if I'm not having fun, then why am I doing this is probably life lessons to live by. [chuckles] But I also appreciated the moment of resetting your expectations to your purpose. Like, why am I doing this thing? Let me remember, because I had a reason I'm doing it and if I'm not enjoying it right now, where's the mismatch? I like that.
\n\nBecause so often, it's easy, for me anyway, to stumble into doing something and finding yourself like, “Why am I doing this?” and then stepping back and be like, “Okay. All right. I chose to do this because of this and if this is my purpose, then I can let go of this other pressure that I'm putting on myself to go further every day when that's not the reason I'm here.” It doesn't make sense to put that pressure on myself then.
\n\nKERRI: I feel like that chain, that returning to the beginning point is also a good career skill. You have to get serious about it, or bring this into work realm. But as a senior engineer, staff engineer, and principal, blah, blah, blah, so often, it's not how efficient can I make this loop. It's also going back, is this doing the right thing to do? Like, “Why are we doing this? Is there a better way to solve this sort of problem?” So it's that lesson of what I learned on the road coming back into work, but it's also because work is life as well and if work isn't fun and whatever, then why am I doing it? But that skill comes back into my personal life so there's this free flow of influence going back and forth.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. That purpose revisit thing is something that I've just been thinking about from events standpoint from doing conferences over the past couple years, like so much had to go back to first principles because it was like, okay, well what was the reason for us doing this? Just recreating the same motion in a different environment isn't necessarily going to get us the same results. What is the reason we're doing this? Let's revisit that and make sure we're still in alignment with it all. I think we can do that more often in our lives, too. Like, “What is the reason I'm doing this thing?” [chuckles] “Okay, it's not accomplishing that anymore. Let's get rid of this practice and try something else,” or not. Maybe the answer is to keep it.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I think about apropos of what a couple of other folks were mentioning about how easy it is to get caught up in the details when trying to start something as opposed to just picking early anything and getting started. Occasionally, folks will ask me questions like that about blogging and one of the things that I like to do is keep some URLs on hand of some of my earlier pieces, just because it makes it really clear that it didn't always look like this. I just started and it wasn't what people see. I think folks sometimes see someone who's several years down the road of having started something and feeling like they can't start because it won't look like that immediately and it won't. [laughs]
\n\nBut I imagine that having those kinds of stories on hand, what I'm thinking about is how to make those sorts of stories more accessible to folks. Because a lot of what we see understandably about how to do something is from the folks who have mastered it to some degree and it's not as clear where to look to find folks who also are just starting and what to expect your journey to look like right at the beginning.
\n\nMANDY: Kerri, do you want to leave a us with any parting thoughts?
\n\nKERRI: A lot of people, when I tell them I rode a 1,000 miles in a day, they're like, “You can't do that.” It’s like, “I’ve done it 12 times.” It’s like, “What are you talking about?” But to kind of carry on to Aaron and to what Chelsea just said, it's a marathon. You can't do a lot of big things in a single step. You have to make that first step and then the second step and then the third step and then you're walking and you're doing the thing.
\n\nI don't really talk about motorcycling with people who don't motorcycle and everybody who I motorcycle would talk about this. We all do it and so, it's not remarkable. Sometimes I think it's important to realize that what we do accomplish in our lives is fairly remarkable and magic to a lot of people. As software engineers, what we do is frankly, astounding some days and it's important to remember that we have traveled far from where we began when we first started doing this sort of stuff and we may return to that when we change careers, or jobs, or languages, or technologies.
\n\nReturn to that place of not knowing and that can be uncomfortable, but there is so much joy and discovery you can have if you just take that time, and stop and understand and pay attention to your story of where you started, where you're going, and how far along you've actually come. You can't look up the mountain and be intimidated by that. You should turn around and look back down the mountain to see how far you've come.
\n\nMANDY: That was lovely. Thank you so much and thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us yet another few stories. The first time you were on the show, I distinctly remember the title being Story Time with Kerri Miller and you never disappoint. I'm so glad that you took time to join us and talk about your motorcycling adventures with us [chuckles] non-motorcycling people. It is super fascinating and it's definitely an awesome topic outside of – that we can relate a lot of the concepts to the tech field, software engineering, development, and all that.
\n\nSo dear listener, if you have a cool hobby like Kerri that you want to come on the show and talk about, we’d love to talk to you because this has frankly been amazing and I really enjoyed this episode. So thank you again and we’ll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Kerri Miller.
","summary":"A girl, a bike, and an open road.\r\n\r\nKerri Miller joins the show to regale us with stories about her epic motorcycling adventures. ","date_published":"2022-03-02T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9d391248-c8ba-4821-bb65-8be975b46f7e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68580958,"duration_in_seconds":3549}]},{"id":"90167a38-f479-4bb9-9cc4-ecb37f06af2e","title":"272: People First – Self-Awareness and Being Excellent To Each Other with Ashleigh Wilson","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/people-first","content_text":"02:14 - Ashleigh’s Superpower: Ability To See “The Vision”\n\n\nThe Queen’s Gambit\n\n\n03:35 - Intentionality: “People First”\n\n\nCall Me Out: Intention vs Impact\n“This Doesn’t Make Sense” Log\nEmotional Fitness Surveys\n“Dare To Lead” Book Club\n\n\n10:55 - Listen\n\n\nDigging in to Defensiveness / Uncomfortableness\nLittle Things Add Up\nBuilding Connections and Relationships\n\n\n15:10 - Building Trust – Why is vulnerability not professional?\n\n\nAlleviating Fear\nNorth Star: Being Excellent To Each Other\nSelf Awareness & Emotional Intelligence\nDiscernment\nMaslow’s Hierarchy of Needs\n\n\n21:02 - Personal Growth and Development\n\n\nBrené Brown\nGlennon Doyle\nMorning Pages\nThe Holistic Psychologist: Future Self Journaling\n\n\n27:24 - Intersexuality and Identity: How do you show up?\n\n\nPrivilege\nGender\nSomatics\nSafety\nSolidarity\n\n\n36:37 - Making and Dealing With Mistakes\n\n\nTaking Feedback\nLead With Gratitude\nEgo Checks\n\n\n40:05 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)\n\n\nVisibility and Understanding\nHealth and Wellness Benefits\nSacred vs Safe Spaces / Safe vs Brave Spaces\nDan Price\n\n\n45:52 - Fundraising & Venture Capital (VC)\n\n\nThe House of Who\n\n\nReflections:\n\nMandy: Eating a shame sandwich in order to learn and grow.\n\nChanté: North Star = Being excellent to each other. \n\nAshleigh: Celebrating intersections of identity.\n\nAaron: The “This Doesn’t Make Sense” log.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.\n\nMANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm here with our new panelist, Aaron Aldrich. \n\nWelcome, Aaron!\n\nAARON: Thanks! And hey, I'm Aaron. I use they/them pronouns and I am also here with Chanté Martínez Thurmond.\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone, Chanté here. I use she/her/ella pronouns and I am so glad to introduce our guest today, Ashleigh Wilson. \n\nWelcome, Ashleigh.\n\nAARON: Thank you for having me!\n\nHello, Ashleigh here and I use she/her pronouns.\n\nCHANTÉ: Ashleigh is the Founder and CEO of Auditmate, the world's first elevator and escalator auditing system.\n\nAfter discovering that customers were an afterthought to most companies, Ashleigh left the corporate world and founded Auditmate under a \"people first\" mentality. Ashleigh knows discrimination first-hand as a queer woman working in the tech industry and she aims to create a space where everyone has permission to be human.\n\nWhat a great bio.\n\nASHLEIGH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.\n\nCHANTÉ: It's a pleasure. \n\nAshleigh, the first question we ask our is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nASHLEIGH: My superpower is my ability to see the vision and it's a bit of a witchy. I don't know where it comes from, but the best visual representation I've ever seen of it as if anyone has seen The Queen’s Gambit and when she can move the chess pieces on the ceiling? When I'm in the zone, and it's often when I'm half sleep, it just connects and I'm like, “Oh, this is how it works,” and I can just see the path forward. I can't force it. [chuckles] I don't get to choose when it happens. It just happens, or it doesn't. But when I get those deep downloads on the vision and the path forward, and then I think the skill that's been learned to couple with that is then how to make a plan to execute it because the vision can be one, but that execution does not work alone. [chuckles]\n\nAARON: That's awesome. I like that and I like that you mentioned the skill that gets paired with that. I can relate to a superpower can't exist in a vacuum; it needs some way to be harness and used. [chuckles]\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely.\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that, too. Aaron, where you're going with that, because what it makes me think about Ashleigh, just reading your bio and kind of getting a preview of some of the things you care about, how have you been intentional about building a people first organization, or a startup in this space and using that superpower and maybe either finding people who compliment you there, or who are distinctly different? But I'd love to hear how you've been intentional about that.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think it starts with first of all, when you feel othered in any organization, like coming in and being able to set the culture is like, “Oh, I'm going to do all of these things.” But as Aaron mentioned earlier, it's not in a vacuum and so, I think the intentionality has been, what is the mission? What is the north star? How do we treat each other? And then at every new hire at every new customer acquisition, it then iterates, iterates, iterates, and iterates. You have to be willing to learn, to take feedback, and to eat a shame sandwich every once in a while, when you screw it all up and you have to admit it [chuckles] because it happens every single time. I've been called to the carpet. \n\nI think one of the biggest ways that I've been intentional is being communicative about call me out, call me out. I'm never going to know all of the things all the time and I think that my team knows me well enough to know my intentions, but it comes in intentions versus impact conversation. I can only know my intentions unless you tell me how this impacts you. I can't know and so, creating a culture of my team being able to call me out and be like, “Hey, your intention was good. The impact sucked. Let's talk about it.” [chuckles]\n\nAARON: What's that like practically to get folks like on that side and able to call you out because I know for – I'm thinking about it and I know I can to jump into any corporate culture, even startup and be like, “Yeah, I feel comfortable calling out my boss on this.” [chuckles]\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't think we feel like we have a corporate culture at least yet. \n\nAARON: Yeah. \n\nASHLEIGH: But that also took time in creating. So one way that we did it was we have something called that this doesn't make sense log so that people can just document either things in the system, or things in the culture, or things in policies that just are kind of dumb. Like why do we do this this way? This doesn't make sense. This makes my job harder than it should be. The we need to get X done, but you're making us do Y and Z that don't go toward the greater mission. \n\nAnd then also we created an emotional fitness survey for every employee so that each person – and it's left in one place so each person says, “I want to receive praise publicly, or privately,” or “If I need to get feedback, I want to receive it like this,” or these just different questions on how people to be communicated to. I think setting up those conversations as people log in and it's okay to speak up, it's okay to push back, I expect you to push back on me makes people feel more comfortable, but it takes a while. It does.\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that. I use something very similar to that for my own consulting business in my firm and it's been something that we really lean into helpful to just make sure that it's transparent and it's a nice reminder as a leader that your answers to questions can change. Giving people permission to say, “You know what, how I'm showing up today is different than how I showed up yesterday, because life.” [chuckles]\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.\n\nCHANTÉ: So I really love that. \n\nThe other sort of burning thing that I have for you is, because I read that you had been in this business so I'm guessing that you had learned from people and maybe it was a family business. I might have missed that part. I'm curious how doing it your way this time with these sort of principles is different than the way maybe you were mentored to do it, or what you've seen in the past and why that's important.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't know that I had ever seen it modeled before. I was raised in the elevator industry and before that, my stepdad was in the elevator industry and my dad was salesman of any type, door-to-door salesman selling vacuums to cleaners, to cars, to whatever the case may be and I've never fallen in line. \n\nI was always the kid in school that was like, “Why do you do it that way? When you can do it this way? Why are we doing this? That doesn't make sense and that doesn't feel good?” And people are like, “Well, we don't really care how you feel,” and I'm like, “But why it doesn't feel good?” Like why do people want to work where it doesn't feel good? This doesn't make sense to me.” That feeling in my tummy has always been so wrong that it's either a hard yes, or a hard no and I'm like, “How do you operate in a hard no all the time?” Why do we expect people to operate in these visceral responses to this?\n\nJust watching how teams have responded and how you almost want to beat the individuality out of people to get performance to a certain standard, or something, like that somehow makes it better for everybody to be like that whole homogeny equals happiness saying? It was never true to me and so, I think I always had this if I feel like this, there has to be someone else that feels like this. I cannot be the only one that wants to show up as my true self and talk about feelings in business meetings! I cannot be the only one. This has to exist.\n\nI started a Dare to Lead book club at the Elevator office, which [chuckles] I'm sure you can imagine how that went over. Everybody showed up and I was like, “Oh, so y'all want to act like this is okay and that everyone seems okay. But then look at all of these white cis men in my Dare to Lead book club. Huh.” So it just kind of gave me the affirmation that I needed to say, “People do want to feel good. People do want to talk about and this does actually help the bottom line.”\n\nCHANTÉ: I personally love it. What I do for my day-to-day is focus on culture and focus on diversity, equity, inclusion accessibility, and organizations, whether it's on teams, products, services, and offerings. I think that people underestimate what it takes to build something that's special, especially there's not a culture budget. There's a budget for recruiting. There's a budget for performance stuff and for growth. But I'm like, “But what is the fascia? What is the stuff that keeps it together?” And it is the culture. \n\nI often like to say, as we're thinking about the future of work and building the next iteration of what work should be in decentralized teams working from home, we do need to lean into the sort of the soft skills that are actually aren't that soft, but they're those emotional intelligence stuff. That makes a huge difference. \n\nSo is there any advice you might have to leaders like you who are like, “Okay, I guess I might read a Dare to Lead book,” or “I might start to prioritize this”? Where can they start, or what are practical things that you've learned along the way in leading your company in this fashion?\n\nASHLEIGH: Listen. Listen is the first one. Listen when you get defensive, because those moments when your team says something to you that seems so small, insignificant, and annoying because you have all of these big things to do and all of the – you're pushing the company forward and there's this little voice that someone was brave enough to say this little thing that you're like, “Ugh.” \n\nThat defensiveness, that feeling, whatever that small thing is, is probably a big thing, or will become a big thing and being able to own up to whatever it is that's making you defensive, or uncomfortable and truly listening in and digging into what is the root cause of that? Because it's generally, I don't know if you know the saying like something about the wrapper, it's never the wrapper. You get into a fight about the wrapper on the counter, that's never the wrapper. It's not throwing away the wrapper. It's the underlining way of how we are making people feel and for me, it's been about being able to truly dig into those things.\n\nThe doesn't make sense log came from one of those experiences. My team, we were in these meetings and they would bring up these little things and be like, “Hey Ashleigh, well, what about this?” And I'm like, “It's not the time for that. We're talking about Z. Why are you bringing up A? We're in this super deep meeting about Z and you're talking about A,” and then they were like, “You're not listening to us. You say that you are people first, but you're not hearing us,” which is like a dagger to the heart. It's gutting and I had to sit with it for days because I was like, “I know I'm people first. I know my intention is right. How am I not translating it? How are my actions not matching my intentions?” \n\nWhen I boiled down to it, it was people didn't have an easy way to bring up little things to me and so, those little things would start to get bigger and then they would bring them up in big meetings because my schedule is booked. We don't have water cooler talk. We don't have walking by someone's desk and being like, “Hey, what's happening with blah, blah, blah?” That stuff doesn't exist and so, these little things were starting to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because there wasn't an easy place to just discuss them. So creating one log alleviated so much pain and made people feel heard about, “Hey, this one email has a misspelling and no one's paid attention to it.” Just little stuff.\n\nAnd then the second thing is that we've been starting is more personal time. We started what I call an AuditMate lounge, which is on Fridays and it's just meant to be logging on and just hanging out with each other. It's water cooler time. You can be working, you can be doing other things, but this is not a business meeting. This is not meant to get things done. It's meant to just hang out.\n\nAARON: I like that. I just started working at a new company this month and similar to the team I'm on at least, the DevRel has similar like, “Oh, we're just going to hang out for a bit because I'm around,” [chuckles] and whatever. I've really appreciated it because it's something that I feel like when you're in an office, it's easy to lose track of all the time that you spend just being around those people and building those relationships because it's just rolled into, “Oh, I was getting a coffee,” or “Oh, we went to get lunch,” or “Oh, we went to do this,” and “Oh, I walked by a desk and said ‘Hey’ for a few minutes.” \n\nBut especially with COVID with everyone remote and at home, or remote companies, it's so easy to forget about that stuff and forget about building those connections that are more than just, “Hey, we work on this thing together.” It's like, “Oh yeah, also, we're people. We should hang out and talk about what people do,” [chuckles] which is sometimes just nothing.\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely and it's how we build trust!\n\nAARON: Hmm. Yeah. I think that's a big thing, too.\n\nMANDY: What are your favorite ways to build trust?\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, well, I never really thought about it like that. \n\nI'm a Scorpio moon and rising so I like all of the deep things like, “Hi, I'm Ashleigh. Tell me about your trauma.” So I think the biggest way [chuckles] that I like to build trust is just in deep conversation, really getting to know each other, being vulnerable, and being able to just take the mask off.\n\nMANDY: Do you think you can do that too much, though with coworkers? Where do you find that balance? Because I struggle with that myself. Like how do you be open and completely vulnerable, but professional at the same time?\n\nASHLEIGH: Why is vulnerability not professional?\n\nMANDY: That's a great question. \n\nASHLEIGH: I think that's where – and I don't have an answer to it. It's kind of what I'm rambling. But why is vulnerability pegged with femininity and why is vulnerability loaded into being unprofessional, or too much, or too whatever? I think that the vulnerability that I don't want to expose too much is if it's loaded with fear because feelings aren't facts and I don't want to unload fear onto my team if there's something that I'm nervous about. I feel like it's my responsibility to hold those things and to alleviate some fear. \n\nBut I think unpacking with my team that we can be vulnerable and that is actually more professional because it does make us more efficient. It does make us more trusting, I guess, would be the proper word there. The personal things that I don't share as far as vulnerability is there's some personal life stuff that I don't share, but not because it's not professional, but because it's sacred more.\n\nAARON: I think you mentioned something interesting about fear that gets at an interesting balance. From a leadership perspective, you have some responsibility about the vulnerability that you share and what you're able to be vulnerable with your team that maybe different than you want from an individual contributor on that team. \n\nYou probably want to hear the fears of your team like, “Tell me what you're worried about so I can either alleviate those, or we can work to be in a good place.” But at the same time, sounds like you have some responsibility that I can't unload that on you because I'm the one who's supposed to be [laughs] taking care of that. How does that play out me besides just that one generic scenario? Are there ways you find that balance difficult to walk, or?\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, like fundraising. My team needs to trust that I'm going to pay the bills. I don't want them to be worried about having money for payroll, or that we're going to be set up for our next raise, or that, right? There's some basic survival stuff that can be so linked to trauma of if we don't feel like we're going to have food on our tables for our family, if we don't feel like we're going to have continual pay, if we don't – those sort of things that are just human nature. We can't think and we can't perform because it is my duty to take care of my family and if I can't take care of my family with this company, I need to go do what I need to go do. \n\nSo that's where it's my responsibility to those fears – especially when you are rational, if I'm having imposter syndrome about raising money as a queer woman and it's irrational because, maybe not irrational but loaded because of statistics, I shouldn't unload that on them, or I need to have someone, a mentor, someone that I can go to because they need to be expressed, but that could get bigger and bigger and bigger when shared with my team. \n\nSo I really think about our north star is being excellent to each other. When my vulnerability is serving to them is when I share and not just when it's serving to me, because it'll make me feel better to express that I'm scared about funding, but it will not make my team feel better. It will, in fact, make them feel worse.\n\nCHANTÉ: What I hear is this dance we have to do as folks who have founded companies, or leaders of those companies to have what I consider again, that emotional intelligence. It's like – [overtalk]\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.\n\nCHANTÉ: Because self-awareness is huge and when you get a chance to – when you know your traps, or the traumas and the triggers that keep you stuck, or actually help to get you to another place, you can notice them in others and then the regulation is really important as well to really build relationships that are trusting and then discern it. It's like timing is everything to be like, you have to be able to read the room. You have to be able to be perceptive, read people's faces, and understand that they may have disassociation. They might be smiling, but they actually might be scared shitless [laughs] as you're like, “Oh, we're raising around.”\n\nI love how you how you kind of introduce this thought around Maslow's hierarchies of needs. People want to be able to put food on the table and be able to take care of their responsibilities whether that's a family, or a spouse, significant other, friend, or community and that is why we work. [chuckles] We need the money because we're in this capitalistic system. \n\nSo I just love how you're doing that and where my mind takes me is how did you have the wisdom to do that? Who has been either an example that you admire, do you have a coach, do you have a community? Where are you learning these awesome things? Because I feel like you're so in touch with this emotional intelligence piece that so many people are missing.\n\nASHLEIGH: Thank you. I appreciate that. \n\nI did not used to be, [chuckles] to be quite honest and I learned about emotions getting freshly sober at like 24 from Brené Brown. I had no idea. I had no idea. I quit drinking and remember starting to read one of her books and saying that an emotionally intelligent person knew 30 emotions and I was like, “Wait, there's more than happy and sad? You're telling me there's 30? That I should be able to name 30 and know what they feel like in my body?”\n\nCHANTÉ: Right, and according to her new book, she has even more stuff.\n\nASHLEIGH: [laughs] Yeah.\n\nCHANTÉ: I think there's like 80 plus.\n\nASHLEIGH: I'm like, “Wait, what?”\n\n[laughter] \n\n“This is a thing?” And that's when it kind of dawned on me, when people would say to me, “You don't get it. You don't get it,” and I'm like, “I don't get what?” And then I was like, “Oh, I'm not going to be able to know what you're feeling until I know what I'm feeling. Cool, great. I have a lot of work to do.” [chuckles] \n\nSo that's when I think I started unpacking and learning. I was raised by an alcoholic and then became one and then getting sober at a young age was like, “Oh, this is mine and that's yours and I didn't know that I ended and you started.” So really learning and starting to place those things for me and then just reading a lot, a lot of Eastern spirituality, I read a lot of Buddhism books, a lot of yoga books, a lot of Brené Brown vulnerability, shame, rumbling type books. And then I think it's just kind of been like I'll take this from that and really, it just leads from what feels good and what doesn't.\n\nMANDY: Personal growth is essential. I'm in the same boat almost. I, too, am sober and it has changed my life. Over the past 2 years, I have done so much work on myself that sometimes I'm doing too much, but I learned – [overtalk]\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally. That’s a thing. [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: Brené Brown is one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle, too.\n\nASHLEIGH: I was just going to mention her. Yes, oh my God!\n\nMANDY: I love Glennon. Yeah. So personal growth is, I mean, journaling. Every day, I make it a habit and a practice to sit down and just write out my thoughts and my feelings. I highly, highly suggest to anybody who will listen to me to do the same thing.\n\nASHLEIGH: Same. [chuckles]\n\nMANDY: Morning Pages are a wonderful thing. If you can do it in the morning, just get everything out of your head. Even the dumbest little thoughts, “dumbest little thoughts.” I mean, there are no dumb thoughts, but just getting all the, I call it taking the trash out.\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, I like that.\n\nMANDY: And just even snippets of any weird dreams, or just little nagging thoughts that are in the back of my head. Getting all those things out is just so essential.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. And do you know The Holistic Psychologist?\n\nMANDY: I do.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, and her future self-journaling has also been really helpful at times, like sitting down in the morning and saying, “My future self will feel like this and this is how my future self will take care of me today” has also been really powerful along those same lines.\n\nCHANTÉ: Mandy, I loved your question earlier when you were like, “How do you know? Some people are not comfortable in doing that.” So I feel like what's also really true about organizations and teams is just you can have somebody who's kind of the sage, or most wise elder on the team who's like, “I've been through this, I've walked this path,” and then there's people who are like, “Huh, vulnerability.” And then the magic of that leader in the room is finding, or recognizing the spectrum of that and being all these things are actually welcomed and everybody's experience matters. \n\nSo how do you do that for your team? I'm imagining you have people who are newbies on this journey with you, or people who are like, “This is the best.” Maybe they gravitated and wanted to join you because they recognize parts of themselves in you, but how do you manage that part for your team and kind of carry and make room for the full spectrum of folk?\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think I'm still learning that one. I think we're always learning that one as our teams constantly change and evolve. The emotional fitness survey helps. I definitely call people out and I'm like, “Okay, how does this feel to everyone? Everyone has to talk, I'm waiting and I will for you to talk,” which I know can be jarring for folks that don't want to share in a group. \n\nSo really making sure to get everyone's input, that everyone gets used to speaking up in front of the group, and that it is just around Robin mentality, but then also developing those one-on-one relationships so people feel kind being like, “Hey, I'd rather share with you my idea after the call,” or whatever the case may be. But I think it's my job to hold space, it's my job to shut up sometimes and pass the mic, and it's my job to push and to pull. \n\nSo to really, really look at those levers of who's ready for more and who has the potential to and wants to develop that potential. Maybe it's fear, or maybe it's something that's blocking them that I can help them see. And then for other folks they're like, “Hey, I'm good. I'm chilling. I want to be right here. I don't want to be the big boss. I want to be your right-hand human and let me stay where I'm at.” I'm in my lane. Go away.” So I think it's just really listening to folks and then also help to see what may blocking our views.\n\nCHANTÉ: I think I shared that the work I do is diversity, equity, and inclusion accessibility stuff and I often lead a lot and facilitate a lot of conversation around helping leaders and their teams recognize their identities, or intersectionality and recognizing social location and how that plays out with power privilege. \n\nOne of the things we read about you is that you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I'm guessing that that's a very prominent identity for you because you shared it online openly. Thank you. But I know there's other parts to you. So what are the identities that you lead with? We could start with the most obvious and kind of learn more about you from there.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. So I lead with queer always. Queer is through and through who I am. I realize the privilege I have with the way that I present to the world. In most instances, I will always be safe and I think that it's my responsibility as a VC-backed founder to take that space and I don't really own that for me. I have the privilege of being safe and so, let's make this known and let's make room for more folks while I'm here. I can elbow folks out of the way so that we can keep some more space.\n\nBut the other parts of me. Gender, I don't really know right now, I'm kind of at the point that I think it's really garbage shit right now. So I don't really know. [laughs] I struggle. I've been in the dance with gender for a while and it's like, I feel like I would be taking up too much space to come out as non-binary and I know that non-binary, you don't have to look a certain way. I realize I have a lot of cis presenting privilege and it's not about that for me. I finally have landed on the conclusion that I don't give a crap about gender at all. It's more genderless and even non-binary feels too boxy for me. I don’t know, I'm kind of ambiguous on that right now. [chuckles]\n\nAARON: Actually, I'm just generally agnostic you.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I feel that.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. And I loved your response. I'm really into somatics and noticing bodies because bodies show up in space. [chuckles]\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. \n\nCHANTÉ: People are triggered by bodies sometimes and recognizing it could be that your race, your ethnicity, it could be your age, or your ability, or where you grew up and accent. Are there any other parts of you that you feel like are prominent, or that you lead with, or maybe don't lead with? I’m curious just to hear more about it.\n\nASHLEIGH: I'm pretty heavily tattooed and I also dress kind of funky in most instances. You can't tell right now, but half my hair is orange and half my hair is red. I'm loud, I'm vocal, and I'm very little, but I'm big in spaces. [laughs] I think that makes me different because most of the spaces that I operate in, I've been in this. Oh, the elevator world, it is 98% white men and I'm joking kind of about the industry, but I'm not going to shrink myself anymore. You will be uncomfortable by me. Don't let the crop top fool you. I am a CEO [chuckles] and I'm not going to change my crop top. Like, sorry.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. See, this is why I'm asking. I mean, I love it. You just naturally went to like, “Okay.” So those are the things that that's how you're showing up.\n\nASHLEIGH: Mm hm.\n\nCHANTÉ: Right, and what's true for the industry and what you're in and you kind of already went there, I think it's dope and I think the context matters because you're like, “Yeah. Am I in a room with other queer people who are leading tech companies, or am I in a predominantly male, cis, able-bodied, privileged, born and educated in United States industry where I'm blending elevator technology,” whatever? So thank you for that. \n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. \n\n[chuckles]\nA lot of times I walk into the room and it's like, either I'm uncomfortable, or they're uncomfortable. So I'm like, “You're going to be uncomfortable today. I'm sorry. I'm going to make you feel things and I'm going to make you recognize your privilege because guess what, we all must be painfully aware of our privilege and if I am in a room all full of white people, all of able-bodied people, all of privileged people in some sense, let's talk about this. Why are we not? Why are we not talking about the humans that are impacted by the work that we're doing? Hello.”\n\nAARON: It sounds like that was a big influence for your people-centric company, too.\n\nASHLEIGH: Mm hm.\n\nAARON: I don't want to put that experience on you, [chuckles] but – [overtalk]\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally. \n\nAARON: I don't want to ask it from a place of naivety and say like, “Oh, did this affect it?” It sounds very obviously your identity and being counterculture to the elevator and escalator world has influenced your company and where you want to go with that and how you want to show up.\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely, a 100% being in that space and being different and just being like, “You know what, if I don't own this, I'm going to feel terrible forever and I don't want to because that's great.” It's great and I can walk into the sun in San Francisco and feel fantastic and so, why do I not feel that same confidence level in this boardroom?\n\nAARON: Right.\n\nASHLEIGH: You're not going to make me feel small. I'm sorry, you're not.\n\nAARON: I think that's a big – I don’t know if I'm seeing so much of a shift. It's a big portion of… I don’t know I want to go with that, but I really like that. You're not going to make me feel small. I like the idea of showing up and you know what, this is me and just because you are uncomfortable, I’m not going to diminish myself.\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely and the reason that I do that is me doing that shows other people that it's safe. At least if I'm in the room, you're safe to be who you are if I'm here. \n\nAARON: Mm. \n\nASHLEIGH: And so that's why I put queer on my LinkedIn, that's why I lead with that because I know I'm safe and so, if I have – I feel responsible to it.\n\nAARON: I know you mentioned you can show up and be safe and create that safety in that environment. Has that been something you had, or had modeled for you, or is that something you had to go out and create this space where you could be that beacon of safety?\n\nASHLEIGH: I think it's been modeled in my queer community. I don't think it had been modeled in corporate culture. I'm also not lost on how privileged I am to be safe and I'm not the bearer of safety and realize that there's many more intersections that go into that and that I'm here to listen and to learn and I don't know everything. [chuckles] Absolutely not. \n\nSo it's important to just be really vulnerable about what we don't know and to say, “Hey, I'm going to fuck it up and there's going to be ways that I am not aware of my unconscious bias yet. So please teach me and if you don't have emotional capacity to teach me, I'm not saying that it's your responsibility, but if you can call me out, please do.”\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a really important thing. I feel like being in solidarity with others who are othered. For me, it's like oh shit, we have Black history month coming up around the corner and I have some friends who are Black and queer, or Black, queer, and disabled and they're just like, “Oh, which one should I lead with first?” And I'm like, “All of them.” You shouldn't have to choose any of them over the other parts of yourself, because they're all valid and they all inform your lived experience in this particular body that you're in. \n\nI want people to see the complexity and the wholeness of others and just be like, “That is dope.” I love how you said when people have the capacity to teach you, you invite it, but you're not demanding it because so many times we've – I think we all can speak to this on this call. We're all in community. \n\nBut it is, some of us have more resource and more ability to show up for each other at other points in time because we're going through something [chuckles] that the whole world doesn't know. It is likely because of our identity, our social location, our privilege, and the unique things we're kind of going through as we navigate life. It's really important to just constantly communicate that as well, that you're inviting this kind of calling out, or calling in and that people don't have to educate you. But I hear the willingness to want to show up and learn, which I think is literally a key. [laughs] The willingness. Yeah, awesome.\n\nAARON: It's at least half of the battle, right?\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes.\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.\n\nMy friends and I were having a discussion about community here and it was like, you cannot have a community space that never once is going to screw up, or have an issue, or be called out, or called in. How you move through that, or what, I don't know. If you continue to be a safe space, it’s not in not getting called out. It's how you deal with it. It's how you take that feedback from someone, or the community group and say, “One, thank you for telling me, let's be grateful that someone had the bravery to even speak up and two, then you get to say, is this mine, or not?” \n\nDon't lead with the buts, or the whys I did it, or the here's my intent. Don't lead with that. Lead with gratitude that someone felt safe enough to come forward. Someone felt that you were worth getting their feedback, because guess what, if they didn't believe that you would change, they probably wouldn't even tell you. They would just leave. They would just deem the space as unsafe and go. So that in itself, how you take feedback will determine how your community and your company thrives, both.\n\nMANDY: And then apologize and move on.\n\nASHLEIGH: Bingo. Yes.\n\nAARON: And make material changes to show that you've learned.\n\n[laughter]\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, yeah. \n\n[laughter]\n\nASHLEIGH: Good pointer. And then act also important. But [laughs] yes.\n\nAARON: That lesson of taking feedback, I think and understanding the value of that is so huge and it's a hard lesson. This is probably the hardest lesson I'm dealing with my kids for instance, is like, “Hey, that first call out, I wasn't really upset with you, but then when you acted super defensive and flipped out, that's the problem that I have. That's not okay.” \n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.\n\nAARON: The initial action was just like, “Hey, we need to change this. Let's alter our behavior. Move on. But all the other stuff, that was not good that. That, we need to work on.”\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely.\n\nAARON: Yeah. It’s a tough lesson. I think it requires an ego check. Like decentering and recognizing oh, this call, it’s not about me. [laughs]\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely. Yes, and it's not easy work. You’ve got to eat it. It's not fun.\n\nAARON: Right.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've had to learn not everything's about me.\n\n[laughter]\n\nMID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor. \n\nI hear people say the VPNs have a reputation for slowing down your internet speed, but not with NordVPN, because it's the fastest VPN in the world. I don't have to sacrifice internet speed for better security. \n\nWith NordVPN, my internet traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, which protects my data and privacy. I can also have it on up to six devices like my laptop, phone, TV, iPad—all my devices are protected.\n\nGrab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc, or use the code GTC to get a huge discount on your NordVPN plan plus one additional month for free. Plus, a bonus gift! It's completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money back guarantee.\n\nAARON: A thing I wanted to get back to a little bit. I loved when Chanté was talking about folks who said that were Black, queer, and disabled and this multiple identities and leading with all of them. I think especially industry wise, or big corp wise anyway, we create these interest groups of this is the Black community interest group. This is the pride interest group. This is the disabled workers' interest group. \n\nI feel like it misses so much of the you of intersectionality. I'm wondering if you've seen that both, in your space and your identity and being able to create that space of vulnerability yourself, if you've noticed a benefit of that.\n\nASHLEIGH: No, I think that's interesting and I like the note here that employee resources groups can be really great and really crappy. I totally agree. \n\nAARON: Yeah. \n\nASHLEIGH: Often, it feels to me that the goal is visibility and understanding at the end of the day. We get great visibility in employee resource groups. We feel seen with people that are like us in some way, or another. But really, we want to have this intersectionality so how do we get both? My gosh. \n\nHow do we have the representation, which is so important? How do we have the understanding, which is so important? And then how do we move past the feelings of not feeling seen so that we can see others? Because if we don't think it's possible to be seen, we're probably not able to see others and we need an on-staff therapist, really. Let's just be honest. \n\n[laughter]\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. \n\nASHLEIGH: Put them on payroll.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCHANTÉ: I’ve got to get that idea. Now you're talking my language. I'm telling you, I'm telling you if I had it my way, all organizations would offer that as their employee health and wellness benefit is to have somebody who's like on-site and depending on the ratio of people, if you have too many, you got to get several organizational psychologists and folks who are well-versed in trauma. \n\nASHLEIGH: Totally. Yeah.\n\nCHANTÉ: But it makes me think of the conversation I often talk about, which is the difference between sacred space and safe space. \n\nAARON: Ooh.\n\nCHANTÉ: The sacred space is like those ERGs. It's like, yeah, we're going to have our unique identities where we can show up, talk to each other, see each other, and be like, “Oh my God, that really sucked,” or “That was really good. Good job in there.” \n\nThe places where we're like – the safe spaces are harder because we have to make sure that everyone, when we say psychological safety, they're like, “Yes, I know what that means,” and that people are committed to doing some kind of work, which is why I'm like, “Organizations need to focus more on culture.”\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.\n\nCHANTÉ: And this is where the like magic can happen, or where it can all fall apart. The sacred versus space is so huge. So, so huge because we can't have enough of people like you, Ashleigh. The world needs so many CEOs like you, then the world would be better and different and I wouldn't mind going to corporate work. [chuckles] But the reality is that you are few and far between. It's based on your identities, based on your lived experience, which is why it is so important to talk about it and to spend time with this episode getting into it.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I also really like the idea of what's the difference between a safe space and a brave space, which plays into that a bit, too. I think in order to be safe, we have to be brave and it's kind of like what comes first vulnerability, or the courage? All the nuance in that, that ends up being this mushy gushy and I completely agree, we need it all and it's possible and I'm a firm believer in it's possible.\n\nThe people that keep telling me that people first companies can't be profitable. I think it's bullshit. I think it's absolute bullshit. When we focus on people, the profits will come. If we're all safe, if we all believe in the mission, if we're all there because we want to be there, guess what? It will happen in and it will continue to happen and the foundation will be more sturdy and we'll be able to pivot easier because guess what? We move as a pack and I don't know, I guess, I'm just here to prove them all wrong.\n\nCHANTÉ: I feel like I love that and I'm also really sad that we have to work really hard to prove that people matter over productivity, [chuckles] that people matter over profits. \n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.\n\nCHANTÉ: My favorite, well, one of my favorite people to follow is Dan Price. He's the CEO of Gravity Payments and he's the guy who went viral when he basically gave up parts of his salary and paid everyone a livable wage. He tweets every day and of brings attention to this. It's just like you're right, Ashleigh that people first companies are rare and I can't believe that that's still happening in 2022, but the ones who are, stick out. There are definitely folks who people fall in line to submit their resume and want to work for you and you have no issue with hiring great talent and probably keeping it. It's the organizations and corporations that are literally extracting people's best parts of themselves in hope of getting a profit for their shareholders.\n\nASHLEIGH: That just sounds so icky, doesn't it? [chuckles]\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. Yeah. It does. \n\nI haven't looked to see who your community is in terms of being venture backed, but when you went out, fundraised, started your company, and you said you were going to be people first, what were the reactions? Did it take you many tries to find folks to fill your cap table who believed in that, too?\n\nASHLEIGH: So our first funding round, it was mostly retired elevator people that want to see the industry turn around, that believe in the industry and feel really crummy about where it's at now and how lost it is. Our entire first round was completely private and then after that, the next round was mostly those people coming in again. \n\nI wanted to go non-VC for as long as possible because I know I'm niche, I know I'm different, and if you don't get the vision, I don't want to waste my time trying to explain to you what we're doing, because we're too different. So if you're not with me, I don't have the time to sit here and convince you. The industry is a $100 plus billion a year industry and if you don't see that and don't get it, then bye.\n\nBut then we ended up taking on some VC funding this round because I got tagged in a LinkedIn post that someone was like, “Where are all the PropTech women?” 98% of the people pitching this VC were all men. \n\nWe ended up getting a meeting because I've always turned down any VC meeting. We just hit it off and then we went out to lunch and we were very similar. He was a founder himself and so, he understood what I was doing. I was like, “Hey, I'm not building this company to report to venture capitalists and so, if you're someone that expects me to work for you and not to work for my employees, we're not the right fit.” He was like, “No, that's what I expect you to do. Call me if you need me. Otherwise, I'm out of your hair.” I was like, “Great, okay! We can do this.” \n\nAnd then we ended up getting a couple more folks. I think it was really because I got on the phone with them and I was like, “I'm not taking your money,” and they were like, “Excuse me?” I was like, “I'm not taking your money. My round is full. I'll talk to you only because Zane wants me to talk to you. Otherwise, I don't have a conversation with you,” and they were like, “Please extend your round,” and I was like, “Okay, I guess.” So how could this happen?\n\nCHANTÉ: Wow, that’s – [overtalk]\n\nASHLEIGH: Is it because I’m being a jerk? [laughs]\n\nCHANTÉ: No, it sounds like it happened because you were more aware of who you were and you were sticking to your values and principles, actually. That's what it sounds like from my seat. So speaking of that, are your values of the company reflections of your personal values, or are they collective –? [overtalk]\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, a 100%.\n\nCHANTÉ: To the folks who work with you?\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, I think both and we found each other. But building out the values and the mission and the vision was something that I spent a lot of money doing with The House of Who, who is a great organization and the East Bay. They're a branding company and they really helped me articulate the vision, the values, and the mission in a really eloquent way right in the beginning. \n\nI think everyone probably looked at me like I was bonkers for spending money on branding before I had any sort of software, or [chuckles] any sort of anything. But for me, it was so important that we had a way to articulate this to the team in an eloquent way that got people on board and really said, “This is who we are and this is who we're going to be.” How do we know what we do before we know who we are? It's not possible. So at that point, the people that align and that gravitate to what our values and vision are, I think we just kind of find each other.\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. I loved hearing a little bit about your journey, especially when it comes to venture capital, because I think lot of us just get a weird icky feeling from even hearing about venture capital. So it's always good to hear the good stories.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: But since we are coming up on the hour, I was hoping that we could go into reflections and this is where we talk about something that stood out to us, maybe a call-to-action for ourselves, or the listeners. I can start. \n\nThere was something at the beginning of the show that you said, that I had to write down, was just eating a shame sandwich once in a while. I'm not going to try to say that ten times fast.\n\n[laughter]\n\nYou invited people to call you out and I love that. That's something I always try to do and model. It's the best way to learn, when invited, saying, “If we're talking, I'm going to ask you this. If I'm wrong, can you please let me know? Because I want to learn. I want to grow.” I think that's something that's super important and something that I try to do, especially with children that I'm around. My child, other children that are friends with her, just be like, “I was wrong. I was wrong. I'm sorry and it's just such a good thing to do, just to be humble in that ability to say I was wrong and I learned.” Thank you for that.\n\nCHANTÉ: The thing I really love that you said, and I haven't really heard this often, is you said your north star is being excellent to each other and I feel like most people have a north star of growing, or making an X number of profit, or whatever. I just love that. It is because it really does, I think eliminate your value of being people first and demonstrates that that's where you're going to put your time and money. \n\nNot only if I had the money, I'd be like, “Okay, Ashleigh, when you're having your next route, I want to invest in you.” But I feel like leading with that and saying that often tells people who might be interested in a job what you're about, tells your clients what you're about, and obviously, the communities in what you're serving. I just love that. So thank you for sharing it.\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. \n\nChanté, my favorite part of today was you talking about the intersections and celebrating the intersections of identity and I've had so many conversations with friends about the different lanes into the intersection, but I really like that you focused on the intersection. So that intersection as a whole was very cool to me.\n\nAARON: I think one of the things I'm going to take with me was your this doesn't make sense log. I love this concept. This speaks to me on so many different levels. \n\nOne is the way to raise all these little things that get missed without having to work up all of the energy to try and give someone feedback in a one-on-one meeting, or whatever else. But also, as someone who deals with ADHD and from an engineering mindset, just this place to be like, “Hey, I ran across this and it makes no sense. Can we revisit this?” Because the answer might be, “Oh, here's this explanation for why we do it that way,” and you're like, “Oh, now it makes sense to me,” or it might be like, “You're right. Let's figure out a different way to do that.” I just love that there's just this running place that anyone can just dump these thoughts as they run across them is really cool.\n\nMANDY: Awesome. \n\nWell, Chanté, Aaron, Ashleigh, it's been such a great conversation and thank you all so much for showing up and being vulnerable and having this discussion. It's been great. So with that, I just want to thank you again, thank the audience, and we'll see next week.Special Guest: Ashleigh Wilson.Sponsored By:NordVPN: Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc or use the code GTC to get a huge discount off your NordVPN plan + 1 additional month for free! It’s completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Promo Code: GTCTest Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers based in the United States and Canada. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater","content_html":"02:14 - Ashleigh’s Superpower: Ability To See “The Vision”
\n\n\n\n03:35 - Intentionality: “People First”
\n\n10:55 - Listen
\n\n15:10 - Building Trust – Why is vulnerability not professional?
\n\n21:02 - Personal Growth and Development
\n\n\n\n27:24 - Intersexuality and Identity: How do you show up?
\n\n36:37 - Making and Dealing With Mistakes
\n\n40:05 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
\n\n45:52 - Fundraising & Venture Capital (VC)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Eating a shame sandwich in order to learn and grow.
\n\nChanté: North Star = Being excellent to each other.
\n\nAshleigh: Celebrating intersections of identity.
\n\nAaron: The “This Doesn’t Make Sense” log.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nMANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm here with our new panelist, Aaron Aldrich.
\n\nWelcome, Aaron!
\n\nAARON: Thanks! And hey, I'm Aaron. I use they/them pronouns and I am also here with Chanté Martínez Thurmond.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone, Chanté here. I use she/her/ella pronouns and I am so glad to introduce our guest today, Ashleigh Wilson.
\n\nWelcome, Ashleigh.
\n\nAARON: Thank you for having me!
\n\nHello, Ashleigh here and I use she/her pronouns.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Ashleigh is the Founder and CEO of Auditmate, the world's first elevator and escalator auditing system.
\n\nAfter discovering that customers were an afterthought to most companies, Ashleigh left the corporate world and founded Auditmate under a "people first" mentality. Ashleigh knows discrimination first-hand as a queer woman working in the tech industry and she aims to create a space where everyone has permission to be human.
\n\nWhat a great bio.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
\n\nCHANTÉ: It's a pleasure.
\n\nAshleigh, the first question we ask our is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nASHLEIGH: My superpower is my ability to see the vision and it's a bit of a witchy. I don't know where it comes from, but the best visual representation I've ever seen of it as if anyone has seen The Queen’s Gambit and when she can move the chess pieces on the ceiling? When I'm in the zone, and it's often when I'm half sleep, it just connects and I'm like, “Oh, this is how it works,” and I can just see the path forward. I can't force it. [chuckles] I don't get to choose when it happens. It just happens, or it doesn't. But when I get those deep downloads on the vision and the path forward, and then I think the skill that's been learned to couple with that is then how to make a plan to execute it because the vision can be one, but that execution does not work alone. [chuckles]
\n\nAARON: That's awesome. I like that and I like that you mentioned the skill that gets paired with that. I can relate to a superpower can't exist in a vacuum; it needs some way to be harness and used. [chuckles]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that, too. Aaron, where you're going with that, because what it makes me think about Ashleigh, just reading your bio and kind of getting a preview of some of the things you care about, how have you been intentional about building a people first organization, or a startup in this space and using that superpower and maybe either finding people who compliment you there, or who are distinctly different? But I'd love to hear how you've been intentional about that.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think it starts with first of all, when you feel othered in any organization, like coming in and being able to set the culture is like, “Oh, I'm going to do all of these things.” But as Aaron mentioned earlier, it's not in a vacuum and so, I think the intentionality has been, what is the mission? What is the north star? How do we treat each other? And then at every new hire at every new customer acquisition, it then iterates, iterates, iterates, and iterates. You have to be willing to learn, to take feedback, and to eat a shame sandwich every once in a while, when you screw it all up and you have to admit it [chuckles] because it happens every single time. I've been called to the carpet.
\n\nI think one of the biggest ways that I've been intentional is being communicative about call me out, call me out. I'm never going to know all of the things all the time and I think that my team knows me well enough to know my intentions, but it comes in intentions versus impact conversation. I can only know my intentions unless you tell me how this impacts you. I can't know and so, creating a culture of my team being able to call me out and be like, “Hey, your intention was good. The impact sucked. Let's talk about it.” [chuckles]
\n\nAARON: What's that like practically to get folks like on that side and able to call you out because I know for – I'm thinking about it and I know I can to jump into any corporate culture, even startup and be like, “Yeah, I feel comfortable calling out my boss on this.” [chuckles]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't think we feel like we have a corporate culture at least yet.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nASHLEIGH: But that also took time in creating. So one way that we did it was we have something called that this doesn't make sense log so that people can just document either things in the system, or things in the culture, or things in policies that just are kind of dumb. Like why do we do this this way? This doesn't make sense. This makes my job harder than it should be. The we need to get X done, but you're making us do Y and Z that don't go toward the greater mission.
\n\nAnd then also we created an emotional fitness survey for every employee so that each person – and it's left in one place so each person says, “I want to receive praise publicly, or privately,” or “If I need to get feedback, I want to receive it like this,” or these just different questions on how people to be communicated to. I think setting up those conversations as people log in and it's okay to speak up, it's okay to push back, I expect you to push back on me makes people feel more comfortable, but it takes a while. It does.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that. I use something very similar to that for my own consulting business in my firm and it's been something that we really lean into helpful to just make sure that it's transparent and it's a nice reminder as a leader that your answers to questions can change. Giving people permission to say, “You know what, how I'm showing up today is different than how I showed up yesterday, because life.” [chuckles]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.
\n\nCHANTÉ: So I really love that.
\n\nThe other sort of burning thing that I have for you is, because I read that you had been in this business so I'm guessing that you had learned from people and maybe it was a family business. I might have missed that part. I'm curious how doing it your way this time with these sort of principles is different than the way maybe you were mentored to do it, or what you've seen in the past and why that's important.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't know that I had ever seen it modeled before. I was raised in the elevator industry and before that, my stepdad was in the elevator industry and my dad was salesman of any type, door-to-door salesman selling vacuums to cleaners, to cars, to whatever the case may be and I've never fallen in line.
\n\nI was always the kid in school that was like, “Why do you do it that way? When you can do it this way? Why are we doing this? That doesn't make sense and that doesn't feel good?” And people are like, “Well, we don't really care how you feel,” and I'm like, “But why it doesn't feel good?” Like why do people want to work where it doesn't feel good? This doesn't make sense to me.” That feeling in my tummy has always been so wrong that it's either a hard yes, or a hard no and I'm like, “How do you operate in a hard no all the time?” Why do we expect people to operate in these visceral responses to this?
\n\nJust watching how teams have responded and how you almost want to beat the individuality out of people to get performance to a certain standard, or something, like that somehow makes it better for everybody to be like that whole homogeny equals happiness saying? It was never true to me and so, I think I always had this if I feel like this, there has to be someone else that feels like this. I cannot be the only one that wants to show up as my true self and talk about feelings in business meetings! I cannot be the only one. This has to exist.
\n\nI started a Dare to Lead book club at the Elevator office, which [chuckles] I'm sure you can imagine how that went over. Everybody showed up and I was like, “Oh, so y'all want to act like this is okay and that everyone seems okay. But then look at all of these white cis men in my Dare to Lead book club. Huh.” So it just kind of gave me the affirmation that I needed to say, “People do want to feel good. People do want to talk about and this does actually help the bottom line.”
\n\nCHANTÉ: I personally love it. What I do for my day-to-day is focus on culture and focus on diversity, equity, inclusion accessibility, and organizations, whether it's on teams, products, services, and offerings. I think that people underestimate what it takes to build something that's special, especially there's not a culture budget. There's a budget for recruiting. There's a budget for performance stuff and for growth. But I'm like, “But what is the fascia? What is the stuff that keeps it together?” And it is the culture.
\n\nI often like to say, as we're thinking about the future of work and building the next iteration of what work should be in decentralized teams working from home, we do need to lean into the sort of the soft skills that are actually aren't that soft, but they're those emotional intelligence stuff. That makes a huge difference.
\n\nSo is there any advice you might have to leaders like you who are like, “Okay, I guess I might read a Dare to Lead book,” or “I might start to prioritize this”? Where can they start, or what are practical things that you've learned along the way in leading your company in this fashion?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Listen. Listen is the first one. Listen when you get defensive, because those moments when your team says something to you that seems so small, insignificant, and annoying because you have all of these big things to do and all of the – you're pushing the company forward and there's this little voice that someone was brave enough to say this little thing that you're like, “Ugh.”
\n\nThat defensiveness, that feeling, whatever that small thing is, is probably a big thing, or will become a big thing and being able to own up to whatever it is that's making you defensive, or uncomfortable and truly listening in and digging into what is the root cause of that? Because it's generally, I don't know if you know the saying like something about the wrapper, it's never the wrapper. You get into a fight about the wrapper on the counter, that's never the wrapper. It's not throwing away the wrapper. It's the underlining way of how we are making people feel and for me, it's been about being able to truly dig into those things.
\n\nThe doesn't make sense log came from one of those experiences. My team, we were in these meetings and they would bring up these little things and be like, “Hey Ashleigh, well, what about this?” And I'm like, “It's not the time for that. We're talking about Z. Why are you bringing up A? We're in this super deep meeting about Z and you're talking about A,” and then they were like, “You're not listening to us. You say that you are people first, but you're not hearing us,” which is like a dagger to the heart. It's gutting and I had to sit with it for days because I was like, “I know I'm people first. I know my intention is right. How am I not translating it? How are my actions not matching my intentions?”
\n\nWhen I boiled down to it, it was people didn't have an easy way to bring up little things to me and so, those little things would start to get bigger and then they would bring them up in big meetings because my schedule is booked. We don't have water cooler talk. We don't have walking by someone's desk and being like, “Hey, what's happening with blah, blah, blah?” That stuff doesn't exist and so, these little things were starting to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because there wasn't an easy place to just discuss them. So creating one log alleviated so much pain and made people feel heard about, “Hey, this one email has a misspelling and no one's paid attention to it.” Just little stuff.
\n\nAnd then the second thing is that we've been starting is more personal time. We started what I call an AuditMate lounge, which is on Fridays and it's just meant to be logging on and just hanging out with each other. It's water cooler time. You can be working, you can be doing other things, but this is not a business meeting. This is not meant to get things done. It's meant to just hang out.
\n\nAARON: I like that. I just started working at a new company this month and similar to the team I'm on at least, the DevRel has similar like, “Oh, we're just going to hang out for a bit because I'm around,” [chuckles] and whatever. I've really appreciated it because it's something that I feel like when you're in an office, it's easy to lose track of all the time that you spend just being around those people and building those relationships because it's just rolled into, “Oh, I was getting a coffee,” or “Oh, we went to get lunch,” or “Oh, we went to do this,” and “Oh, I walked by a desk and said ‘Hey’ for a few minutes.”
\n\nBut especially with COVID with everyone remote and at home, or remote companies, it's so easy to forget about that stuff and forget about building those connections that are more than just, “Hey, we work on this thing together.” It's like, “Oh yeah, also, we're people. We should hang out and talk about what people do,” [chuckles] which is sometimes just nothing.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely and it's how we build trust!
\n\nAARON: Hmm. Yeah. I think that's a big thing, too.
\n\nMANDY: What are your favorite ways to build trust?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, well, I never really thought about it like that.
\n\nI'm a Scorpio moon and rising so I like all of the deep things like, “Hi, I'm Ashleigh. Tell me about your trauma.” So I think the biggest way [chuckles] that I like to build trust is just in deep conversation, really getting to know each other, being vulnerable, and being able to just take the mask off.
\n\nMANDY: Do you think you can do that too much, though with coworkers? Where do you find that balance? Because I struggle with that myself. Like how do you be open and completely vulnerable, but professional at the same time?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Why is vulnerability not professional?
\n\nMANDY: That's a great question.
\n\nASHLEIGH: I think that's where – and I don't have an answer to it. It's kind of what I'm rambling. But why is vulnerability pegged with femininity and why is vulnerability loaded into being unprofessional, or too much, or too whatever? I think that the vulnerability that I don't want to expose too much is if it's loaded with fear because feelings aren't facts and I don't want to unload fear onto my team if there's something that I'm nervous about. I feel like it's my responsibility to hold those things and to alleviate some fear.
\n\nBut I think unpacking with my team that we can be vulnerable and that is actually more professional because it does make us more efficient. It does make us more trusting, I guess, would be the proper word there. The personal things that I don't share as far as vulnerability is there's some personal life stuff that I don't share, but not because it's not professional, but because it's sacred more.
\n\nAARON: I think you mentioned something interesting about fear that gets at an interesting balance. From a leadership perspective, you have some responsibility about the vulnerability that you share and what you're able to be vulnerable with your team that maybe different than you want from an individual contributor on that team.
\n\nYou probably want to hear the fears of your team like, “Tell me what you're worried about so I can either alleviate those, or we can work to be in a good place.” But at the same time, sounds like you have some responsibility that I can't unload that on you because I'm the one who's supposed to be [laughs] taking care of that. How does that play out me besides just that one generic scenario? Are there ways you find that balance difficult to walk, or?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, like fundraising. My team needs to trust that I'm going to pay the bills. I don't want them to be worried about having money for payroll, or that we're going to be set up for our next raise, or that, right? There's some basic survival stuff that can be so linked to trauma of if we don't feel like we're going to have food on our tables for our family, if we don't feel like we're going to have continual pay, if we don't – those sort of things that are just human nature. We can't think and we can't perform because it is my duty to take care of my family and if I can't take care of my family with this company, I need to go do what I need to go do.
\n\nSo that's where it's my responsibility to those fears – especially when you are rational, if I'm having imposter syndrome about raising money as a queer woman and it's irrational because, maybe not irrational but loaded because of statistics, I shouldn't unload that on them, or I need to have someone, a mentor, someone that I can go to because they need to be expressed, but that could get bigger and bigger and bigger when shared with my team.
\n\nSo I really think about our north star is being excellent to each other. When my vulnerability is serving to them is when I share and not just when it's serving to me, because it'll make me feel better to express that I'm scared about funding, but it will not make my team feel better. It will, in fact, make them feel worse.
\n\nCHANTÉ: What I hear is this dance we have to do as folks who have founded companies, or leaders of those companies to have what I consider again, that emotional intelligence. It's like – [overtalk]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Because self-awareness is huge and when you get a chance to – when you know your traps, or the traumas and the triggers that keep you stuck, or actually help to get you to another place, you can notice them in others and then the regulation is really important as well to really build relationships that are trusting and then discern it. It's like timing is everything to be like, you have to be able to read the room. You have to be able to be perceptive, read people's faces, and understand that they may have disassociation. They might be smiling, but they actually might be scared shitless [laughs] as you're like, “Oh, we're raising around.”
\n\nI love how you how you kind of introduce this thought around Maslow's hierarchies of needs. People want to be able to put food on the table and be able to take care of their responsibilities whether that's a family, or a spouse, significant other, friend, or community and that is why we work. [chuckles] We need the money because we're in this capitalistic system.
\n\nSo I just love how you're doing that and where my mind takes me is how did you have the wisdom to do that? Who has been either an example that you admire, do you have a coach, do you have a community? Where are you learning these awesome things? Because I feel like you're so in touch with this emotional intelligence piece that so many people are missing.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Thank you. I appreciate that.
\n\nI did not used to be, [chuckles] to be quite honest and I learned about emotions getting freshly sober at like 24 from Brené Brown. I had no idea. I had no idea. I quit drinking and remember starting to read one of her books and saying that an emotionally intelligent person knew 30 emotions and I was like, “Wait, there's more than happy and sad? You're telling me there's 30? That I should be able to name 30 and know what they feel like in my body?”
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right, and according to her new book, she has even more stuff.
\n\nASHLEIGH: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I think there's like 80 plus.
\n\nASHLEIGH: I'm like, “Wait, what?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\n“This is a thing?” And that's when it kind of dawned on me, when people would say to me, “You don't get it. You don't get it,” and I'm like, “I don't get what?” And then I was like, “Oh, I'm not going to be able to know what you're feeling until I know what I'm feeling. Cool, great. I have a lot of work to do.” [chuckles]
\n\nSo that's when I think I started unpacking and learning. I was raised by an alcoholic and then became one and then getting sober at a young age was like, “Oh, this is mine and that's yours and I didn't know that I ended and you started.” So really learning and starting to place those things for me and then just reading a lot, a lot of Eastern spirituality, I read a lot of Buddhism books, a lot of yoga books, a lot of Brené Brown vulnerability, shame, rumbling type books. And then I think it's just kind of been like I'll take this from that and really, it just leads from what feels good and what doesn't.
\n\nMANDY: Personal growth is essential. I'm in the same boat almost. I, too, am sober and it has changed my life. Over the past 2 years, I have done so much work on myself that sometimes I'm doing too much, but I learned – [overtalk]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally. That’s a thing. [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: Brené Brown is one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle, too.
\n\nASHLEIGH: I was just going to mention her. Yes, oh my God!
\n\nMANDY: I love Glennon. Yeah. So personal growth is, I mean, journaling. Every day, I make it a habit and a practice to sit down and just write out my thoughts and my feelings. I highly, highly suggest to anybody who will listen to me to do the same thing.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Same. [chuckles]
\n\nMANDY: Morning Pages are a wonderful thing. If you can do it in the morning, just get everything out of your head. Even the dumbest little thoughts, “dumbest little thoughts.” I mean, there are no dumb thoughts, but just getting all the, I call it taking the trash out.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, I like that.
\n\nMANDY: And just even snippets of any weird dreams, or just little nagging thoughts that are in the back of my head. Getting all those things out is just so essential.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. And do you know The Holistic Psychologist?
\n\nMANDY: I do.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, and her future self-journaling has also been really helpful at times, like sitting down in the morning and saying, “My future self will feel like this and this is how my future self will take care of me today” has also been really powerful along those same lines.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Mandy, I loved your question earlier when you were like, “How do you know? Some people are not comfortable in doing that.” So I feel like what's also really true about organizations and teams is just you can have somebody who's kind of the sage, or most wise elder on the team who's like, “I've been through this, I've walked this path,” and then there's people who are like, “Huh, vulnerability.” And then the magic of that leader in the room is finding, or recognizing the spectrum of that and being all these things are actually welcomed and everybody's experience matters.
\n\nSo how do you do that for your team? I'm imagining you have people who are newbies on this journey with you, or people who are like, “This is the best.” Maybe they gravitated and wanted to join you because they recognize parts of themselves in you, but how do you manage that part for your team and kind of carry and make room for the full spectrum of folk?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think I'm still learning that one. I think we're always learning that one as our teams constantly change and evolve. The emotional fitness survey helps. I definitely call people out and I'm like, “Okay, how does this feel to everyone? Everyone has to talk, I'm waiting and I will for you to talk,” which I know can be jarring for folks that don't want to share in a group.
\n\nSo really making sure to get everyone's input, that everyone gets used to speaking up in front of the group, and that it is just around Robin mentality, but then also developing those one-on-one relationships so people feel kind being like, “Hey, I'd rather share with you my idea after the call,” or whatever the case may be. But I think it's my job to hold space, it's my job to shut up sometimes and pass the mic, and it's my job to push and to pull.
\n\nSo to really, really look at those levers of who's ready for more and who has the potential to and wants to develop that potential. Maybe it's fear, or maybe it's something that's blocking them that I can help them see. And then for other folks they're like, “Hey, I'm good. I'm chilling. I want to be right here. I don't want to be the big boss. I want to be your right-hand human and let me stay where I'm at.” I'm in my lane. Go away.” So I think it's just really listening to folks and then also help to see what may blocking our views.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I think I shared that the work I do is diversity, equity, and inclusion accessibility stuff and I often lead a lot and facilitate a lot of conversation around helping leaders and their teams recognize their identities, or intersectionality and recognizing social location and how that plays out with power privilege.
\n\nOne of the things we read about you is that you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I'm guessing that that's a very prominent identity for you because you shared it online openly. Thank you. But I know there's other parts to you. So what are the identities that you lead with? We could start with the most obvious and kind of learn more about you from there.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. So I lead with queer always. Queer is through and through who I am. I realize the privilege I have with the way that I present to the world. In most instances, I will always be safe and I think that it's my responsibility as a VC-backed founder to take that space and I don't really own that for me. I have the privilege of being safe and so, let's make this known and let's make room for more folks while I'm here. I can elbow folks out of the way so that we can keep some more space.
\n\nBut the other parts of me. Gender, I don't really know right now, I'm kind of at the point that I think it's really garbage shit right now. So I don't really know. [laughs] I struggle. I've been in the dance with gender for a while and it's like, I feel like I would be taking up too much space to come out as non-binary and I know that non-binary, you don't have to look a certain way. I realize I have a lot of cis presenting privilege and it's not about that for me. I finally have landed on the conclusion that I don't give a crap about gender at all. It's more genderless and even non-binary feels too boxy for me. I don’t know, I'm kind of ambiguous on that right now. [chuckles]
\n\nAARON: Actually, I'm just generally agnostic you.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. I feel that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. And I loved your response. I'm really into somatics and noticing bodies because bodies show up in space. [chuckles]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: People are triggered by bodies sometimes and recognizing it could be that your race, your ethnicity, it could be your age, or your ability, or where you grew up and accent. Are there any other parts of you that you feel like are prominent, or that you lead with, or maybe don't lead with? I’m curious just to hear more about it.
\n\nASHLEIGH: I'm pretty heavily tattooed and I also dress kind of funky in most instances. You can't tell right now, but half my hair is orange and half my hair is red. I'm loud, I'm vocal, and I'm very little, but I'm big in spaces. [laughs] I think that makes me different because most of the spaces that I operate in, I've been in this. Oh, the elevator world, it is 98% white men and I'm joking kind of about the industry, but I'm not going to shrink myself anymore. You will be uncomfortable by me. Don't let the crop top fool you. I am a CEO [chuckles] and I'm not going to change my crop top. Like, sorry.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. See, this is why I'm asking. I mean, I love it. You just naturally went to like, “Okay.” So those are the things that that's how you're showing up.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Mm hm.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right, and what's true for the industry and what you're in and you kind of already went there, I think it's dope and I think the context matters because you're like, “Yeah. Am I in a room with other queer people who are leading tech companies, or am I in a predominantly male, cis, able-bodied, privileged, born and educated in United States industry where I'm blending elevator technology,” whatever? So thank you for that.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely.
\n\n[chuckles]
\nA lot of times I walk into the room and it's like, either I'm uncomfortable, or they're uncomfortable. So I'm like, “You're going to be uncomfortable today. I'm sorry. I'm going to make you feel things and I'm going to make you recognize your privilege because guess what, we all must be painfully aware of our privilege and if I am in a room all full of white people, all of able-bodied people, all of privileged people in some sense, let's talk about this. Why are we not? Why are we not talking about the humans that are impacted by the work that we're doing? Hello.”
AARON: It sounds like that was a big influence for your people-centric company, too.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Mm hm.
\n\nAARON: I don't want to put that experience on you, [chuckles] but – [overtalk]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.
\n\nAARON: I don't want to ask it from a place of naivety and say like, “Oh, did this affect it?” It sounds very obviously your identity and being counterculture to the elevator and escalator world has influenced your company and where you want to go with that and how you want to show up.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely, a 100% being in that space and being different and just being like, “You know what, if I don't own this, I'm going to feel terrible forever and I don't want to because that's great.” It's great and I can walk into the sun in San Francisco and feel fantastic and so, why do I not feel that same confidence level in this boardroom?
\n\nAARON: Right.
\n\nASHLEIGH: You're not going to make me feel small. I'm sorry, you're not.
\n\nAARON: I think that's a big – I don’t know if I'm seeing so much of a shift. It's a big portion of… I don’t know I want to go with that, but I really like that. You're not going to make me feel small. I like the idea of showing up and you know what, this is me and just because you are uncomfortable, I’m not going to diminish myself.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely and the reason that I do that is me doing that shows other people that it's safe. At least if I'm in the room, you're safe to be who you are if I'm here.
\n\nAARON: Mm.
\n\nASHLEIGH: And so that's why I put queer on my LinkedIn, that's why I lead with that because I know I'm safe and so, if I have – I feel responsible to it.
\n\nAARON: I know you mentioned you can show up and be safe and create that safety in that environment. Has that been something you had, or had modeled for you, or is that something you had to go out and create this space where you could be that beacon of safety?
\n\nASHLEIGH: I think it's been modeled in my queer community. I don't think it had been modeled in corporate culture. I'm also not lost on how privileged I am to be safe and I'm not the bearer of safety and realize that there's many more intersections that go into that and that I'm here to listen and to learn and I don't know everything. [chuckles] Absolutely not.
\n\nSo it's important to just be really vulnerable about what we don't know and to say, “Hey, I'm going to fuck it up and there's going to be ways that I am not aware of my unconscious bias yet. So please teach me and if you don't have emotional capacity to teach me, I'm not saying that it's your responsibility, but if you can call me out, please do.”
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a really important thing. I feel like being in solidarity with others who are othered. For me, it's like oh shit, we have Black history month coming up around the corner and I have some friends who are Black and queer, or Black, queer, and disabled and they're just like, “Oh, which one should I lead with first?” And I'm like, “All of them.” You shouldn't have to choose any of them over the other parts of yourself, because they're all valid and they all inform your lived experience in this particular body that you're in.
\n\nI want people to see the complexity and the wholeness of others and just be like, “That is dope.” I love how you said when people have the capacity to teach you, you invite it, but you're not demanding it because so many times we've – I think we all can speak to this on this call. We're all in community.
\n\nBut it is, some of us have more resource and more ability to show up for each other at other points in time because we're going through something [chuckles] that the whole world doesn't know. It is likely because of our identity, our social location, our privilege, and the unique things we're kind of going through as we navigate life. It's really important to just constantly communicate that as well, that you're inviting this kind of calling out, or calling in and that people don't have to educate you. But I hear the willingness to want to show up and learn, which I think is literally a key. [laughs] The willingness. Yeah, awesome.
\n\nAARON: It's at least half of the battle, right?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.
\n\nMy friends and I were having a discussion about community here and it was like, you cannot have a community space that never once is going to screw up, or have an issue, or be called out, or called in. How you move through that, or what, I don't know. If you continue to be a safe space, it’s not in not getting called out. It's how you deal with it. It's how you take that feedback from someone, or the community group and say, “One, thank you for telling me, let's be grateful that someone had the bravery to even speak up and two, then you get to say, is this mine, or not?”
\n\nDon't lead with the buts, or the whys I did it, or the here's my intent. Don't lead with that. Lead with gratitude that someone felt safe enough to come forward. Someone felt that you were worth getting their feedback, because guess what, if they didn't believe that you would change, they probably wouldn't even tell you. They would just leave. They would just deem the space as unsafe and go. So that in itself, how you take feedback will determine how your community and your company thrives, both.
\n\nMANDY: And then apologize and move on.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Bingo. Yes.
\n\nAARON: And make material changes to show that you've learned.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Good pointer. And then act also important. But [laughs] yes.
\n\nAARON: That lesson of taking feedback, I think and understanding the value of that is so huge and it's a hard lesson. This is probably the hardest lesson I'm dealing with my kids for instance, is like, “Hey, that first call out, I wasn't really upset with you, but then when you acted super defensive and flipped out, that's the problem that I have. That's not okay.”
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally.
\n\nAARON: The initial action was just like, “Hey, we need to change this. Let's alter our behavior. Move on. But all the other stuff, that was not good that. That, we need to work on.”
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely.
\n\nAARON: Yeah. It’s a tough lesson. I think it requires an ego check. Like decentering and recognizing oh, this call, it’s not about me. [laughs]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Absolutely. Yes, and it's not easy work. You’ve got to eat it. It's not fun.
\n\nAARON: Right.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've had to learn not everything's about me.
\n\n[laughter]
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\n\nAARON: A thing I wanted to get back to a little bit. I loved when Chanté was talking about folks who said that were Black, queer, and disabled and this multiple identities and leading with all of them. I think especially industry wise, or big corp wise anyway, we create these interest groups of this is the Black community interest group. This is the pride interest group. This is the disabled workers' interest group.
\n\nI feel like it misses so much of the you of intersectionality. I'm wondering if you've seen that both, in your space and your identity and being able to create that space of vulnerability yourself, if you've noticed a benefit of that.
\n\nASHLEIGH: No, I think that's interesting and I like the note here that employee resources groups can be really great and really crappy. I totally agree.
\n\nAARON: Yeah.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Often, it feels to me that the goal is visibility and understanding at the end of the day. We get great visibility in employee resource groups. We feel seen with people that are like us in some way, or another. But really, we want to have this intersectionality so how do we get both? My gosh.
\n\nHow do we have the representation, which is so important? How do we have the understanding, which is so important? And then how do we move past the feelings of not feeling seen so that we can see others? Because if we don't think it's possible to be seen, we're probably not able to see others and we need an on-staff therapist, really. Let's just be honest.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Put them on payroll.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I’ve got to get that idea. Now you're talking my language. I'm telling you, I'm telling you if I had it my way, all organizations would offer that as their employee health and wellness benefit is to have somebody who's like on-site and depending on the ratio of people, if you have too many, you got to get several organizational psychologists and folks who are well-versed in trauma.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Totally. Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: But it makes me think of the conversation I often talk about, which is the difference between sacred space and safe space.
\n\nAARON: Ooh.
\n\nCHANTÉ: The sacred space is like those ERGs. It's like, yeah, we're going to have our unique identities where we can show up, talk to each other, see each other, and be like, “Oh my God, that really sucked,” or “That was really good. Good job in there.”
\n\nThe places where we're like – the safe spaces are harder because we have to make sure that everyone, when we say psychological safety, they're like, “Yes, I know what that means,” and that people are committed to doing some kind of work, which is why I'm like, “Organizations need to focus more on culture.”
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: And this is where the like magic can happen, or where it can all fall apart. The sacred versus space is so huge. So, so huge because we can't have enough of people like you, Ashleigh. The world needs so many CEOs like you, then the world would be better and different and I wouldn't mind going to corporate work. [chuckles] But the reality is that you are few and far between. It's based on your identities, based on your lived experience, which is why it is so important to talk about it and to spend time with this episode getting into it.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I also really like the idea of what's the difference between a safe space and a brave space, which plays into that a bit, too. I think in order to be safe, we have to be brave and it's kind of like what comes first vulnerability, or the courage? All the nuance in that, that ends up being this mushy gushy and I completely agree, we need it all and it's possible and I'm a firm believer in it's possible.
\n\nThe people that keep telling me that people first companies can't be profitable. I think it's bullshit. I think it's absolute bullshit. When we focus on people, the profits will come. If we're all safe, if we all believe in the mission, if we're all there because we want to be there, guess what? It will happen in and it will continue to happen and the foundation will be more sturdy and we'll be able to pivot easier because guess what? We move as a pack and I don't know, I guess, I'm just here to prove them all wrong.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I feel like I love that and I'm also really sad that we have to work really hard to prove that people matter over productivity, [chuckles] that people matter over profits.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: My favorite, well, one of my favorite people to follow is Dan Price. He's the CEO of Gravity Payments and he's the guy who went viral when he basically gave up parts of his salary and paid everyone a livable wage. He tweets every day and of brings attention to this. It's just like you're right, Ashleigh that people first companies are rare and I can't believe that that's still happening in 2022, but the ones who are, stick out. There are definitely folks who people fall in line to submit their resume and want to work for you and you have no issue with hiring great talent and probably keeping it. It's the organizations and corporations that are literally extracting people's best parts of themselves in hope of getting a profit for their shareholders.
\n\nASHLEIGH: That just sounds so icky, doesn't it? [chuckles]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. Yeah. It does.
\n\nI haven't looked to see who your community is in terms of being venture backed, but when you went out, fundraised, started your company, and you said you were going to be people first, what were the reactions? Did it take you many tries to find folks to fill your cap table who believed in that, too?
\n\nASHLEIGH: So our first funding round, it was mostly retired elevator people that want to see the industry turn around, that believe in the industry and feel really crummy about where it's at now and how lost it is. Our entire first round was completely private and then after that, the next round was mostly those people coming in again.
\n\nI wanted to go non-VC for as long as possible because I know I'm niche, I know I'm different, and if you don't get the vision, I don't want to waste my time trying to explain to you what we're doing, because we're too different. So if you're not with me, I don't have the time to sit here and convince you. The industry is a $100 plus billion a year industry and if you don't see that and don't get it, then bye.
\n\nBut then we ended up taking on some VC funding this round because I got tagged in a LinkedIn post that someone was like, “Where are all the PropTech women?” 98% of the people pitching this VC were all men.
\n\nWe ended up getting a meeting because I've always turned down any VC meeting. We just hit it off and then we went out to lunch and we were very similar. He was a founder himself and so, he understood what I was doing. I was like, “Hey, I'm not building this company to report to venture capitalists and so, if you're someone that expects me to work for you and not to work for my employees, we're not the right fit.” He was like, “No, that's what I expect you to do. Call me if you need me. Otherwise, I'm out of your hair.” I was like, “Great, okay! We can do this.”
\n\nAnd then we ended up getting a couple more folks. I think it was really because I got on the phone with them and I was like, “I'm not taking your money,” and they were like, “Excuse me?” I was like, “I'm not taking your money. My round is full. I'll talk to you only because Zane wants me to talk to you. Otherwise, I don't have a conversation with you,” and they were like, “Please extend your round,” and I was like, “Okay, I guess.” So how could this happen?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Wow, that’s – [overtalk]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Is it because I’m being a jerk? [laughs]
\n\nCHANTÉ: No, it sounds like it happened because you were more aware of who you were and you were sticking to your values and principles, actually. That's what it sounds like from my seat. So speaking of that, are your values of the company reflections of your personal values, or are they collective –? [overtalk]
\n\nASHLEIGH: Oh, a 100%.
\n\nCHANTÉ: To the folks who work with you?
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, I think both and we found each other. But building out the values and the mission and the vision was something that I spent a lot of money doing with The House of Who, who is a great organization and the East Bay. They're a branding company and they really helped me articulate the vision, the values, and the mission in a really eloquent way right in the beginning.
\n\nI think everyone probably looked at me like I was bonkers for spending money on branding before I had any sort of software, or [chuckles] any sort of anything. But for me, it was so important that we had a way to articulate this to the team in an eloquent way that got people on board and really said, “This is who we are and this is who we're going to be.” How do we know what we do before we know who we are? It's not possible. So at that point, the people that align and that gravitate to what our values and vision are, I think we just kind of find each other.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. I loved hearing a little bit about your journey, especially when it comes to venture capital, because I think lot of us just get a weird icky feeling from even hearing about venture capital. So it's always good to hear the good stories.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: But since we are coming up on the hour, I was hoping that we could go into reflections and this is where we talk about something that stood out to us, maybe a call-to-action for ourselves, or the listeners. I can start.
\n\nThere was something at the beginning of the show that you said, that I had to write down, was just eating a shame sandwich once in a while. I'm not going to try to say that ten times fast.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYou invited people to call you out and I love that. That's something I always try to do and model. It's the best way to learn, when invited, saying, “If we're talking, I'm going to ask you this. If I'm wrong, can you please let me know? Because I want to learn. I want to grow.” I think that's something that's super important and something that I try to do, especially with children that I'm around. My child, other children that are friends with her, just be like, “I was wrong. I was wrong. I'm sorry and it's just such a good thing to do, just to be humble in that ability to say I was wrong and I learned.” Thank you for that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: The thing I really love that you said, and I haven't really heard this often, is you said your north star is being excellent to each other and I feel like most people have a north star of growing, or making an X number of profit, or whatever. I just love that. It is because it really does, I think eliminate your value of being people first and demonstrates that that's where you're going to put your time and money.
\n\nNot only if I had the money, I'd be like, “Okay, Ashleigh, when you're having your next route, I want to invest in you.” But I feel like leading with that and saying that often tells people who might be interested in a job what you're about, tells your clients what you're about, and obviously, the communities in what you're serving. I just love that. So thank you for sharing it.
\n\nASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely.
\n\nChanté, my favorite part of today was you talking about the intersections and celebrating the intersections of identity and I've had so many conversations with friends about the different lanes into the intersection, but I really like that you focused on the intersection. So that intersection as a whole was very cool to me.
\n\nAARON: I think one of the things I'm going to take with me was your this doesn't make sense log. I love this concept. This speaks to me on so many different levels.
\n\nOne is the way to raise all these little things that get missed without having to work up all of the energy to try and give someone feedback in a one-on-one meeting, or whatever else. But also, as someone who deals with ADHD and from an engineering mindset, just this place to be like, “Hey, I ran across this and it makes no sense. Can we revisit this?” Because the answer might be, “Oh, here's this explanation for why we do it that way,” and you're like, “Oh, now it makes sense to me,” or it might be like, “You're right. Let's figure out a different way to do that.” I just love that there's just this running place that anyone can just dump these thoughts as they run across them is really cool.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome.
\n\nWell, Chanté, Aaron, Ashleigh, it's been such a great conversation and thank you all so much for showing up and being vulnerable and having this discussion. It's been great. So with that, I just want to thank you again, thank the audience, and we'll see next week.
Special Guest: Ashleigh Wilson.
Sponsored By:
00:58 - Paul’s Superpower: Participating in Scary Things
\n\n02:19 - EventStorming
\n\n08:35 - Regulation: Avoiding Overspecifics
\n\n15:32 - Facilitation and Knowledge Sharing
\n\n24:20 - Key Events
\n\n34:22 - Collaboration & Teamwork
\n\n39:29 - Remote EventStorming and Facilitation
\n\n\n\n47:38 - EventStorming vs Event Sourcing
\n\n51:14 - Resources
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Eventstorming and its adjacence to Technical Writing.
\n\nDamien: You can do this on a small and iterative scale.
\n\nJess: Shared understanding.
\n\nPaul: Being aware of the limitations of ideas you can hold in your head. With visualization, you can hold it in more easily and meaningfully.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDY: Welcome to Episode 271 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here today with a guest, but returning panelist. I'm happy to see Jessica Kerr.
\n\nJESSICA: Thanks, Mandy. It's great to see you. I'm also excited to be here today with Damien Burke!
\n\nDAMIEN: And I am excited to be here with both of you and our guest today, Paul Rayner.
\n\nPaul Rayner is one of the leading practitioners of EventStorming and domain-driven design. He's the author of The EventStorming Handbook, co-author of Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, and the founder and chair of the Explore DDD conference.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Paul.
\n\nPAUL: Thanks, Damien. Great to be here.
\n\nDAMIEN: Great to have you.
\n\nAnd so you know, you are prepared, you are ready for our first and most famous question here on Greater Than Code?
\n\nPAUL: I don't know if I'm ready, or prepared, but I can answer it, I think.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: I know you have prepared, so I don’t know if you are prepared.
\n\nPAUL: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Either way, here it comes. [chuckles] What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nPAUL: Okay. So a couple of weeks ago, there's a lake near my house, and the neighbors organized a polar plunge. They cut a big hole in the ice and everyone lines up and you basically take turns jumping into the water and then swimming to the other side and climbing out the ladder.
\n\nSo my superpower is participating in a polar plunge and I acquired that by participating with my neighbors. There was barbecue, there was a hot tub, and stuff like that there, too. So it was very, very cool. It's maybe not a superpower, though because there were little kids doing this also. So it's not like it was only me doing it.
\n\nJESSICA: I'll argue that your superpower is participating in scary things because you're also on this podcast today!
\n\nPAUL: [chuckles] Yeah, there we go.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that is very scary. Nobody had to be fished out of the water? No hospital, hypothermia, any of that?
\n\nPAUL: No, there was none of that. It was actually a really good time. I mean, being in Denver, blue skies, it was actually quite a nice day to jump into frozen.
\n\nMANDY: So Paul, you're here today to talk about EventStorming. I want to know what your definition of that is, what it is, and why it's a cool topic to be talking about on Greater Than Code.
\n\nPAUL: Okay. Well, there's a few things there.
\n\nSo firstly, what is EventStorming? I've been consulting, working with teams for a long time, coaching them and a big part of what I try and do is to try and bridge the gap between what the engineers, the developers, the technical people are trying to build in terms of the software, and what the actual problem is they're trying to solve.
\n\nEventStorming is a technique for just mapping out a process using sticky notes where you're trying to describe the story of what it is that you're building, how that fits into the business process, and use the sticky notes to layer in variety of information and do it in a collaborative kind of way.
\n\nSo it's really about trying to bridge that communication gap and uncover assumptions that people might have, expose complexity and risk through the process, and with the goal of the software that you write actually being something that solves the real problem that you're trying to solve.
\n\nI think it's a good topic for Greater Than Code based on what I understand about the podcast, because it certainly impacts the code that you write, touches on that, and connects with the design. But it's really optimized for collaboration, it's optimized for people with different perspectives being able to work together and approach it as visualizing processes that people create, and then working together to be able to do that.
\n\nSo there's a lot of techniques out there that are very much optimized from a developer perspective—UML diagrams, flow charts, and things like that. But EventStorming really, it sacrifices some of that rigor to try and draw people in and provide a structured conversation.
\n\nI think with the podcast where you're trying to move beyond just the code and dig into the people aspects of this a lot more, I think it really touches on that in a meaningful way.
\n\nJESSICA: You mentioned that with a bunch of stickies, a bunch of different people, and their perspectives, EventStorming layers in different kinds of information.
\n\nPAUL: Mm hm.
\n\nJESSICA: Like what?
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. So the way that usually approach it is, let's say, we're modeling, visualizing some kind of process like somebody registering for a certain thing, or even somebody, maybe a more common example, purchasing something online and let's say, that we have the development team that's responsible for implementing how somebody might return a product to a merchant, something like that.
\n\nThe way it would work is you describe that process as events where each sticky note represents something that happened in the story of returning a product and then you can layer on questions. So if people have questions, use a different colored sticky note for highlighting things that people might be unsure of, what assumptions they might be making, differences in terminology, exposing those types of unknowns and then once you've sort of laid out that timeline, you can then layer in things like key events, what you might call emergent structures. So as you look at that timeline, what might be some events that are more important than others?
\n\nJESSICA: Can you make that concrete for me? Give me an example of some events in the return process and then…?
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. So let's say, the customer receives a product that they want to return. You could have an event like customer receive product and then an event that is customer reported need for return. And then you would have a shift in actor, like a shift in the person doing the work where maybe the merchant has to then merchant sent return package to customer.
\n\nSo we're mapping out each one of these as an event in the process and then the customer receives, or maybe it's a shipping label. The customer receives the shipping label and then they put the items in the package with the shipping label and they return it.
\n\nAnd then there would be a bunch of events that the merchant would have to take care of. So the merchant would have to receive that package and then probably have to update the system to record that it's been returned. And then, I imagine there would be processing another order, or something like that.
\n\nA key event in there might be something like sending out the shipping label and the customer receiving the shipping label because that's a point where the responsibility transfers from the merchant, who is preparing the shipping label and dispatching that, to the customer that's actually receiving it and then having to do something.
\n\nThat's just one, I guess, small example of you can use that to divide that story up into what you might think of as chapters where there's different responsibilities and changes in the narrative. Part of that maybe layering in sticky notes that represent who's doing the work. Like who's the actor, whether it's the merchant, or the customer, and then layering in other information, like the systems that are involved in that such as maybe there's email as a system, maybe there's the actual e-commerce platform, a payment gateway, these kinds of things could be reflected and so on, like there's – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Probably integration with the shipper.
\n\nPAUL: Integration with the shipper, right. So potentially, if you're designing this, you would have some kind of event to go out to the shipper to then know to actually pick up the package and that type of thing. And then once the package is actually delivered back to the merchant, then there would be some kind of event letting the merchant know.
\n\nIt's very hard to describe because I'm trying to picture this in my mind, which is an inherently visual thing. It's probably not that interesting to hear me describing something that's usually done on some kind of either mirror board, like some kind of electronic space, or on a piece of butcher's paper, or – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Something with a lot of sticky notes.
\n\nPAUL: Something with a lot of sticky notes, right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which, I believe for our American listeners, sticky notes are the little square pieces of brightly colored paper with self-adhesive strip on the back.
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. The stickies.
\n\nDAMIEN: Stickies. [chuckles]
\n\nI have a question about this process. I've been involved in very similar processes and it sounds incredibly useful. But as you describe it, one of the concerns I have is how do you avoid getting over specific, or over described? Like you can describe systems until you're talking about the particles in the sun, how do you know when to stop?
\n\nPAUL: So I think there's a couple of things.
\n\nNumber one is at the start of whatever kind of this activity, this EventStorming is laying out what's the goal? What are we trying to accomplish in terms of the process? With returns, for example, it would be maybe from this event to this event, we're trying to map out what that process looks like and you start with what you might call the happy path. What does it look like when everything goes well? And then you can use pink stickies to represent alternate paths, or things going wrong and capture those. If they're not tied back to this goal, then you can say, “Okay, I think we've got enough level of detail here.”
\n\nThe other thing is time boxing is saying, “Okay, well, we've only got half an hour, or we've only got an hour so let's see how much we can do in that time period,” and then at the end of that, if you still have a lot of questions, then you can – or you feel like, “Oh, we need to dig into some of these areas more.” Then you could schedule a follow up session to dig into that a little bit more.
\n\nSo it's a combination of the people that are participating in this deciding how much level of detail they want to go down to. What I find is it typically is something that as you're going through the activity, you start to see. “Oh, maybe this is too far down in the weeds versus this is the right level.” As a facilitator, I don't typically prescribe that ahead of time, because it's much easier to add sticky notes and then talk about them than it is to have a conversation when there's nothing visualized.
\n\nI like to visualize it first and lay it out and then it's very easy to say, “Oh, well, this looks like too much detail. So we'll just put a placeholder for that and not worry about out it right now.” It's a little bit of the facilitation technique of having a parking lot where you can say, “Okay, this is a good topic, but maybe we don't need to get down in that right now. Maybe let's refocus back on what it is that we're trying to accomplish.”
\n\nJESSICA: So there's some regulation that happens naturally during the meeting, during interactions and you can have that regulation in the context of the visual representation, which is the EventStorming, the long row of stickies from one event to the other.
\n\nPAUL: Right, the timeline that you're building up.
\n\nSo it's a little bit in my mind, I watched last year, I think it was on Netflix. There was a documentary about Pixar and how they do their storyboarding process for their movies and it is exactly that. They storyboard out the movie and iterate over that again and again and again telling that story. What's powerful about that is it's a visual medium so you have someone that is sketching out the main beats of the story and then they're talking it through.
\n\nNot to say that EventStorming is at that level of rigor, but it has that kind of feel to it of we're laying out these events to tell the story and then we're talking through the story and seeing what we've missed and where we need to add more detail, maybe where we've added too much detail. And then like you said, Jess, there's a certain amount of self-regulation in there in terms of, do we have enough time to go down into this? Is this important right now?
\n\nJESSICA: And I imagine that when I have questions that go further into detail than we were able to go in the meeting, if I've been in that EventStorming session, I know who to ask.
\n\nPAUL: That's the idea, yeah. So the pink stickies that we said represent questions, what I like about those is, well, several things. Number one, it democratizes the idea that it's okay to ask questions, which I think is a really powerful technique. I think there's a tendency in meetings for some people to hold back and other people to do all the talking. We've all experienced that. What this tries to do is to democratize that and actually make it not only okay and not only accepted, but encourage that you're expected to ask questions and you're expected to put these sticky notes on here when there's things that you don't understand.
\n\nJESSICA: Putting the questions on a sticky note, along with the events, the actors, and the things that we do know go on sticky notes, the questions also go on sticky notes. All of these are contributions.
\n\nPAUL: Exactly. They value contributions and what I love about that is that even people that are new to this process, it's a way for them to ask questions in a way that is kind of friendly to them. I've seen this work really well, for example, with onboarding new team members and also, it encourages the idea that we have different areas of expertise.
\n\nSo in any given process, or any business story, whatever you want to characterize it as, some people are going to know more about some parts of it than others. What typically happens is nobody knows the whole story, but when we work together, we can actually build up an approximation of that whole story and help each other fill in the gaps.
\n\nSo you may have the person that's more on the business, or the product side explaining some terminology. You can capture those explanations on sticky notes as a glossary that you're building up as you go. You can have engineers asking questions about the sequence of events in terms of well, does this one come before that one?
\n\nAnd then the other thing that's nice about the questions is it actually as you're going, it's mapping out your ignorance and I see that as a positive thing.
\n\nJESSICA: The known unknowns.
\n\nPAUL: Known unknowns. It takes unknown unknowns, which the kind of elephant in the room, and at least gets them up as known unknowns that you can then have a conversation around. Because there's often this situation of a question that somebody's afraid to ask and maybe they're new to the team, or maybe they're just not comfortable asking that type of question.
\n\nBut it gives you actually a map of that ignorance so you can kind of see oh, there's this whole area here that just has a bunch of pink stickies. So that's probably not an area we're ready to work on and we should prioritize. Actually, if this is an area that we need to be working on soon, we should prioritize getting answers to these questions by maybe we need to do a proof of concept, or some UX work, or maybe some kind of prototyping around this area, or like you said, Jess, maybe the person that knows the answers to these questions is just not in this session right now and so, we need to follow up with them, get whatever answers we need, and then come back and revisit things.
\n\nJESSICA: So you identify areas of risk.
\n\nPAUL: Yes. Areas of risk, both from a product perspective and also from a technical perspective as well.
\n\nDAMIEN: So what does it take to have one of these events, or to facilitate one of these events? How do you know when you're ready and you can do it?
\n\nPAUL: So I've done EventStorming [chuckles] as a conference activity in a hallway with sticky notes and we say, “Okay, let's as a little bit of an icebreaker here –” I usually you do the story of Cinderella. “Let’s pick the Disney story of Cinderella and we'll just EventStorm this out. Just everyone, here are some orange sticky notes and a Sharpie, just write down some things that you remember happening in that story,” and then everyone writes a few. We post it up on the hallway wall and then we sequence them as a timeline and then we can basically build up that story in about 5, or 10 minutes from scratch.
\n\nWith a business process, it's not that different. It's like, okay, we're going to do returns, or something like that and if people are already familiar with the technique, then just give them a minute, or so to think of some things that they know that would happen in that process. And then they do that individually and then we just post them up on the timeline and then sequence them as a group and it can happen really quickly. And then everything from there is refinement. Iteration and refinement over what you've put up as that initial skeleton.
\n\nDAMIEN: Do you ever find that a team comes back a week, or a day, or a month later and goes, “Oh, there is this big gap in our narrative because nobody in this room understood the warehouse needed to be reordered in order to send this thing down”?
\n\nPAUL: Oh, for sure. Sometimes it's big gaps. Sometimes it's a huge cluster of pink sticky notes that represents an area where there's just a lot of risk and unknowns that the team maybe hasn't thought about all that much. Like you said, it could be there’s this third-party thing that it wasn't until everyone got in a room and kind of started to map it out, that they realized that there was this gap in their knowledge.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Although, you could completely miss it if there's nobody from the warehouse in the room and nobody has any idea that you need to tell the warehouse to expect this return.
\n\nPAUL: Right and so, part of that is putting a little bit of thought into who would need to be part of this and in a certain way, playing devil's advocate in terms of what don't we know, what haven't we thought of. So it encourages that sense of curiosity with this and it's a little bit different from –
\n\nSome of the listeners maybe have experienced user story mapping and other techniques like that. Those tend to be focused on understanding a process, but they're very much geared towards okay, how do we then figure out how we're going to code up this feature and how do we slice it up into stories and prioritize that. So it's similar in terms of sticky notes, but the emphasis in EventStorming is more on understanding together, the problem that we're trying to address from a business perspective.
\n\nJESSICA: Knowledge pulling.
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. Knowledge pulling, knowledge distillation, those types of idea years, and that kind of mindset. So not just jumping straight to code, but trying to get a little bit of a shared understanding of what all is the thing that we're trying to actually work on here.
\n\nJESSICA: Eric Evans calls it knowledge crunching.
\n\nPAUL: Yes, Eric called it knowledge crunching.
\n\nDAMIEN: I love that phrase, that shared understanding. That's what we, as product teams, are generating is a shared understanding both, captured in our documentation, in our code, and before that, I guess on large sheets of butcher paper. [laughs]
\n\nPAUL: Well, and it could be a quick exercise of okay, we're going to be working on some new feature and let's just spend 15 minutes just mapping it out to get a sense of, are we on the same page with this?
\n\nJESSICA: Right, because sometimes it's not even about we think we need to know something, it's do we know enough? Let's find out.
\n\nPAUL: Right.
\n\nJESSICA: And is that knowledge shared among us?
\n\nPAUL: Right, and maybe exposing, like it could be as simple as slightly different terminology, or slightly different understanding of terminology between people that can have a big impact in terms of that.
\n\nI was teaching a workshop last night where we were talking about this, where somebody had written the event. So there was a repair process that a third-party repair company would handle and then the event that closed that process off, they called case closed. So then the question becomes well, what does case closed mean? Because the word case – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] It’s like what's the definition of done?
\n\nPAUL: Right, exactly.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBecause that word case didn't show up anywhere earlier in the process. So is this like a new concept? Because the thing that kicks off the process is repair purchase order created and at the end of the process, it's said case closed. So then the question becomes well, is case closed really, is that a new concept that we actually need to implement here? Or is this another way of saying that we are getting a copy of that repair purchase order back that and it's been updated with details about what the repair involved? Or maybe it's something like repair purchase order closed.
\n\nSo it's kind of forcing us to clarify terminology, which may seem a little bit pedantic, but that's what's going to end up in the code. If you can get some of those things exposed a little earlier before you actually jump to code and get people on the same page and surface any sort of differences in terminology and misunderstandings, I think that can be super helpful for everyone.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Some people say it's just semantics. Semantics’ meaning, its only meaning, this is only about out what this step actually means because when you put it in the code, the code is crystal clear. It is going to do exactly what it does and whether that clarity matches the shared understanding that we think we have oh, that's the difference between a bug and a working system.
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] That's beautiful. It's only meaning. [laughs]
\n\nJESSICA: Right? Yeah. But this is what makes programming hard is that pedanticness. The computer is the ultimate pedant.
\n\nDAMIEN: Pedant. You're going to be pedantic about it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPAUL: I see what you did there.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: And that is the occupation, right? That is what we do is look at and create systems and then make them precise.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: In a way that actually well, is precise. [laughs]
\n\nJESSICA: Right, and the power of our human language is that it's not precise, that it allows for ambiguity, and therefore, a much broader range of meaning. But as developers, it's our job to be precise. We have to be precise to the computers. It helps tremendously to be precise with each other.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and I think that's actually the power of human cognition is that it's not precise. We are very, very fuzzy machines and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise will be greatly disappointed. Ask me how I know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPAUL: Well, and I think what I'm trying to do with something like EventStorming is to embrace the fuzziness, is to say that that's actually an asset and we want to embrace that and expose that fuzziness, that messiness. Because the processes we have and work with are often inherently complex. We are trying to provide some visual representation of that so we can actually get our head around, or our minds around the language complexities, the meanings, and drive in a little bit to that meaning.
\n\nJESSICA: So when the sticky notes pile on top of each other, that's a feature.
\n\nPAUL: It is. Going back to that example I was just talking about, let's say, there's a bunch of, like we do the initial part of this for a minute, or so where people are creating sticky notes and let's say, we end up with four, or five sticky notes written by different people on top of each other that end up on the timeline that all say pretty much the same thing with slight variations.
\n\nJESSICA: Let’s say, case closed, request closed.
\n\nPAUL: Case closed, repair purchase order closed, repair purchase order updated, repair purchase order sent. So from a meaning perspective, I look at that and I say, “That's gold in terms of information,” because that's showing us that there's a richness here.
\n\nFirstly, that's a very memorable thing that's happening in the timeline – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Oh and it has multiple things.
\n\nPAUL: That maybe means it's a key event. Right, and then what is the meaning? Are these the same things? Are they different things? Maybe we don't have enough time in that session to dig into that, but if we're going to implement something around that, or work with something around that, then we’re going to at some point need some clarity around the language, the terminology, and what these concepts mean. Also, the sequence as well, because it might be that there's actually multiple events being expressed there that need to be teased apart.
\n\nDAMIEN: You used this phrase a couple times, “key event,” and since you've used it a couple times, I think it might be key.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCan you tell us a little bit about what a key event is? What makes something a key event?
\n\nPAUL: Yeah, the example I like to use is from the Cinderella story. So if you think about the story of Cinderella, one of the things, when people are doing that as an icebreaker, they always end up being multiple copies of the event that usually is something like shoe lost, or slipper lost, or glass slipper lost. There's something about that event that makes it memorable, firstly and then there's something about that event that makes it pivotal in the story.
\n\nFor those that are not familiar with the story [chuckles]—I am because I've EventStormed this thing maybe a hundred times—but there's this part. Another key event is the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic at the start and she actually describes a business policy. She says, “The magic is going to run out at midnight,” and like all business policies, it's vague [laughter] and it’s unclear as to what it means because – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: The carriage disappears, the dress disappears, but not the slipper that fell off.
\n\nPAUL: Exactly. There's this exception that for some bizarre reason, to move the plot forward, the slipper stays. But then the definition of midnight is very hazy because what she's actually describing, in software terms, is a long running process of the clock banging 12 times, which is what midnight means is the time between the first and the twelfth and during that time, the magic is slowly unraveling.
\n\nJESSICA: So midnight is a duration, not an instant.
\n\nPAUL: Exactly. Yes, it's a process, not an event.
\n\nSo coming back to the question that Damien asked about key events. That slipper being lost is a key event in that story, I think because it actually is a shift in narrative. Up until that point in the story, it's the story of Cinderella and then after that, once the slipper is lost, it becomes the story of the prince looking for Cinderella. And then at the end, you get the day tomorrow, the stuff that happens with that slipper at the end of the story.
\n\nAnother key event would be like the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic.
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] It seems like these are necessary events, right? If the slipper is not lost, if the fairy godmother doesn't do magic, you don't have the story of Cinderella.
\n\nPAUL: Right. These are narrative turns, right?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nPAUL: These are points of the story shifts and so, key events can sometimes be a narrative shift where it's driving the story forward in a business process. Something like, let's say, you're working on an e-commerce system, like order submitted is a key event because you are adding items to a shopping cart and then at some point, you make a decision to submit the order and then at that point, it transitions from order being a draft thing that is in a state of flux to it actually becomes essentially immutable and gets passed over to fulfilment. So there's a shift in responsibility and actor between these two as well just like between Cinderella and the prince.
\n\nJESSICA: A shift in who is driving the story forward.
\n\nPAUL: Right. Yeah. So it's who is driving the story forward. So these key events often function as a shift in actor, a shift in who's driving the story forward, or who has responsibility. They also often indicate a handoff because of that from one group to another in an organization. Something like a sales process that terminates in contract signed. That key event is also the goal of the sales process.
\n\nThe goal is to get to contract signed and then once that happens, there's usually a transition to say, an onboarding group that actually onboards the new customer in the case of a sales process for a new customer, or in e-commerce, it would be the fulfillment part, the warehousing part that Jess was talking about earlier. That's actually responsible for the fulfillment piece, which is they take that order, they create a package, they put all the items in the package, create the shipping label, and ship it out to the customer.
\n\nJESSICA: And in domain-driven design, you talked about the shift from order being a fluid thing that's changing as people add stuff to their cart to order being immutable. The word order has different meanings for the web site where you're buying stuff and the fulfillment system, there's a shift in that term.
\n\nPAUL: Right, and that often happens around a key event, or a pivotal event is that there's a shift from one, you might think of it as context, or language over to another. So preorder submission, it’s functioning as a draft order, but what it's actually typically called is a shopping cart and a shopping cart is not the same as an order. It's a great metaphor because there is no physical cart, but we all know what that means as a metaphor.
\n\nA shopping cart is a completely different metaphor from an order, but we're able to understand that thread of continuity between I have this interactive process of taking items, or products, putting them in the shopping cart, or out again. And then at some point that shopping cart, which is functioning as a draft order, actually it becomes an order that has been submitted and then it gets – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, the metaphor doesn't really work until that transition. You have a shopping cart and then you click purchase and now what? [laughs] You're not going to the register and ringing it up, that doesn't make any sense. [chuckles] The metaphor kind of has to end there.
\n\nJESSICA: You’re not leaving the cart in the corral in the parking lot.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPAUL: Well, I think what they're trying to do is when you think about going through the purchase process at a store, you take your items up in the shopping cart and then at that point, you transition into a financial transaction that has to occur that then if you were at a big box electronic store, or something, eventually, you would make the payment. You would submit payment. That would be the key events and that payment is accepted and then you receive a receipt, which is kind of the in-person version of a record of your order that you've made because you have to bring the receipt back.
\n\nDAMIEN: It sort of works if the thing you're putting in the shopping cart are those little cards. When they don't want to put things on the shelf, they have a card, you pick it up, and you take it to register. They ring it up, they give you a receipt, and hopefully, the thing shows up in the mail someday, or someone goes to the warehouse and goes gets it.
\n\nPAUL: We've all done that. [chuckles] Sometimes it shows up. Sometimes it doesn't.
\n\nJESSICA: That's an interesting point that at key events, there can be a shift in metaphor.
\n\nPAUL: Yes. Often, there is.
\n\nSo for example, I mentioned earlier, a sales process ending in a contract and then once the contract is signed, the team – let's say, you're signing on a new customer, for a SaaS service, or something like that. Once they've signed the contract, the conversation isn't really about the contract anymore. It's about what do we need to do to onboard this customer. Up until that point, the emphasis is maybe on payment, legal disclosures, and things like that. But then the focus shifts after the contract is signed to more of an operational focus of how do we get the data in, how do we set up their accounts correctly, that type of thing.
\n\nJESSICA: The contract is an input to that process.
\n\nPAUL: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: Whereas, it was the output, the big goal of the sales process.
\n\nPAUL: Yes, exactly. So these key events also function from a systems perspective, when you think about moving this to code that event then becomes almost like a message potentially. Could be implemented as say, a message that's being passed from the sales system through to the onboarding system, or something like that. So it functions as the integration point between those two, where the language has to be translated from one context to another.
\n\nJESSICA: And it's an integration point we can define carefully so that makes it a strong boundary and a good place to divide the system.
\n\nDAMIEN: Nice.
\n\nPAUL: Right. So that's where it starts to connect to some of the things that people really care about these days in terms of system decomposition and things like that. Because you can start thinking about based on a process view of this, based on a behavior view of this, if we treat these key events as potential emergent boundaries in a process, like we've been describing, that we discover through mapping out the process, then that can give us some clues as to hmm maybe these boundaries don't exist in the system right now, but they could. These could be places where we start to tease things apart.
\n\nJESSICA: Right. Where you start breaking out separate services and then when you get down to the user story level, the user stories expect a consistent language within themselves. You're not going to go from cart to return purchase in a case.
\n\nPAUL: [laughs] Right.
\n\nJESSICA: In a single user story. User stories are smaller scope and work within a single language.
\n\nPAUL: Right and so, I think the connection there in my mind is user stories have to be written in some kind of language, within some language context and mapping out the process can help you understand where you are in that context and then also understand, like if you think about a process that maybe has a sales part of the process and then an onboarding part, it'll often be the case that there's different development teams that are focusing on different parts of that process.
\n\nSo it provides a way of them seeing what their integration point is and what might need to happen across that integration point. If they were to either integrate to different systems, or if they're trying to tease apart an existing system. To use Michael Feathers’ term, what might be a “scene” that we could put in here that would allow us to start teasing these things apart. And doing it with the knowledge of the product people that are part of the visualization, too is that this isn't something typically that engineers do exclusively from a technical perspective.
\n\nThe idea with EventStorming is you are also bringing in other perspectives like product, business, stakeholders, and anyone that might have more of that business perspective in terms of what the goals of the process are and what the steps are in the process.
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\n\nJESSICA: As a developer, it's so important to understand what those goals are, because that lets us make good decisions when we're down in the weeds and getting super precise.
\n\nPAUL: Right, I think so. I think often, I see teams that are implementing stories, but not really understanding the why behind that in terms of maybe they get here's the functionality on delivering and how that fits into the system. But like I talked about before, when you're driving a process towards a key event, that becomes the goal of that subprocess. So the question then becomes how does the functionality that I'm going to implement that's described in this user story actually move people towards that goal and maybe there's a better way of implementing it to actually get them there.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, it's always important to keep that in mind, because there's always going to be ambiguity until you have a running system, or ran system, honestly.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah!
\n\nDAMIEN: There's always going to be ambiguity, which it is our job as people writing code to manage and we need to know. Nobody's going to tell us exactly what's going to happen because that's our job.
\n\nPAUL: Right.
\n\nJESSICA: It's like if the developer had a user story that Cinderella’s slipper fell off, but they do didn't realize that the goal of that was that the prince picked it up, then they might be like, “Oh, slipper broke. That's fine.”
\n\nPAUL: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: It’s off the foot. Check the box.
\n\nPAUL: Let's create a glass slipper factory implementer object [laughter] so that we can just create more of those.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, yeah. What, you wanted a method slip off in one piece? You didn't say that. I've created crush!
\n\nPAUL: Right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah. So I think sometimes there's this potential to get lost in the weeds of the everyday development work that is happening and I like to tie it back to what is the actual story that we're supporting. And then sometimes what people think of as exception cases, like an example might be going back to that merchant return example is what if they issue the shipper label, but the buyer never receives it. We may say, “Well, that's never going to happen,” or “That's unlikely.” But visualizing that case, you may say, “That's actually a strong possibility. How do we handle that case and bake that into the design so that it actually reflects what we're trying to do?”
\n\nJESSICA: And then you make an event that just triggers two weeks later that says, “Check whether customer received label.”
\n\nPAUL: Yes, exactly.
\n\nOne thing you can do as well is like – so that's one possibility of solving it. The idea what EventStorming can let you do is say, “Well, that's one way of doing it. Are there any other options in terms of how we could handle this, let's visualize.” With any exception case, or something, you could say, “Well, let's try solving this a few different ways. Just quickly come up with some different ideas and then we can pull the best of those ideas into that.” So the idea when you're modeling is to say, “Okay, well, there's probably more than one way to address this. So maybe let's get a few ideas on the table and then pick the best out of these.”
\n\nJESSICA: Or address it at multiple levels.
\n\nPAUL: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: A fallback for the entire process is customer contact support again.
\n\nPAUL: Right, and that may be the simple answer in that kind of case. What we're trying to do, though is to visualize that case as an option and then talk about it, have a structured conversation around it, say, “Well, how would we handle that?” Which I think from a product management perspective is a key thing to do is to engage the engineers in saying, “Well, what are some different ways that we could handle this and solve this?” If you have people that are doing responsibility primarily for testing in that, then having them weigh in on, well, how would we test this? What kind of test cases might we need to handle for this? So it's getting – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: How will we know it worked?
\n\nPAUL: Different perspectives and opinions on the table earlier rather than later.
\n\nJESSICA: And it's cheap. It's cheap, people. It's a couple hours and a lot of post-its. You can even buy the generic post-its. We went to Office Depot yesterday, it's $10 for 5 little Post-it pads, [laughter] or 25 Office Depot brand post-it pads. They don't have to stay on the wall very long; the cheap ones will work.
\n\nPAUL: [laughs] So those all work and then it depends if you have shares in 3M, I guess, with you.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOr Office Depot, depending which road you want to go down.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: Or if you really care about that shade of pale purple, which I do.
\n\nPAUL: Right. I mean, what's been fascinating to me is in the last 2 years with switching to remote work and that is so much of, 95% of the EventStorming I do these days is on a collaborative whiteboard tool like Miro, or MURAL, which I don't know why those two product names are almost exactly the same. But then it's even cheaper because you can sign up for a free account, invite a few people, and then just start adding sticky notes to some virtual whiteboard and do it from home. There's a bunch of things that you can do on tool like that with copy pasting, moving groups of sticky notes around, rearranging things, and ordering things much – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: And you never run out of wall.
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. The idea with the butcher’s paper in a physical workshop, in-person workshop is you're trying to create a sense of unending modeling space that you can use. That you get for free when you use online collaborative whiteboarding tool. It’s just there out of – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: And you can zoom in.
\n\nPAUL: And you zoom in and out. Yeah. There's a – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Stickies on your stickies on your stickies.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'm not necessarily recommending that, but you can do it.
\n\nPAUL: Right. The group I was working with last night, they'd actually gone to town using Miro emojis. They had something bad happen in the project and they've got the horror emoji [laughter] and then they've got all kinds of and then copy pasting images off the internet for things.
\n\nJESSICA: Nice.
\n\nPAUL: So yeah, can make it even more fun.
\n\nJESSICA: Okay. So it's less physical, but in a lot of ways it can be more expressive,
\n\nPAUL: I think so. More expressive and just as engaging and it can break down the geographical barriers. I've done sessions where we've had people simultaneously spread in multiple occasions across the US and Europe in the same session, all participating in real-time. If you're doing it remote, I like to keep it short. So maybe we do like a 2-hour session with a 10- or 15-minute break in the middle, because you're trying to manage people's energy and keep them focused and it's hard to do that when you just keep going.
\n\nMANDY: I kind of want to talk a little bit about facilitation and how you facilitate these kind of workshops and what you do, engage people and keep them interested.
\n\nPAUL: Yeah. So I think that it depends a little bit on the level of detail we're working at. If it's at the level of a few team members trying to figure out a feature, then it can be very informal. Not a lot of facilitation required. Let's just write down what the goal is and then go through the process of brainstorming a few stickies, laying it out, and then sequencing it as a timeline, adding questions. It doesn't require a lot of facilitation hand.
\n\nI think the key thing is just making sure that people are writing down their questions and that it's time boxed. So quitting while people are still interested and then [laughter] at the end, before you finish, having a little bit of a conversation around what might the next steps be. Like what did we learn? You could do a couple of minutes retrospective, add a sticky note for something you learned in this session, and then what do you see as our next steps and then move on from there with whatever action items come out of that.
\n\nSo that one doesn't require, I think a lot of facilitation and people can get up and running with that pretty quickly.
\n\nI also facilitate workshops that are a lot more involved where it's at the other end of the spectrum, where it's a big picture workshop where we're mapping out maybe an entire value stream for an organization. We may have a dozen, 20 people involved in a session like that representing different departments, different organizational silos and in that case, it requires a lot more planning, a lot more thinking through what the goal of the workshop is, who would you need to invite? Because there's a lot more detail involved and a lot more people involved, that could be four, or five multi-hour sessions spread over multiple days to be able to map out an entire value stream from soup to nuts.
\n\nAnd then usually the goal of something like that is some kind of system modernization effort, or maybe spinning up a new project, or decomposing a legacy system, or even understanding what a legacy system does, or process improvement that will result inevitably in some software development in certain places.
\n\nI did a workshop like that, I think last August and out of that, we identified a major bottleneck in the process that everyone in the workshop, I think it was just a bunch of pink stickies in one area that it got called the hot mess.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt was one area and what was happening was there were several major business concerns that were all coupled together in this system. They actually ended up spinning up a development team to focus on teasing apart the hot mess to figure out how do we decompose that down?
\n\nJESSICA: Yes.
\n\nPAUL: As far as I know, that effort was still ongoing as of December. I'm assuming that's still running because it was prioritized as we need to be able to decompose this part of this system to be able to grow and scale to where we want to get to.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. That's a major business risk that they’ve got. They at least got clarity about where it is.
\n\nPAUL: Right. Yeah, and what we did from there is I coached the developers through that process over several months. So we actually EventStormed it out at a much lower level. Once we figured out what the hot mess was, let's map it out and then they combined that with some flow charting and a bunch of other more engineering, kind of oriented visualization techniques, state machines, things like that to try and get a handle on what was going on.
\n\nDAMIEN: We'll get UML in there eventually, right?
\n\nPAUL: Eventually.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYou can't do software development without some kind of state machine, sequence diagram.
\n\nJESSICA: And it’s approximating UML. You can't do it. You can't do it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYou will either use it, or you will derive a pigeon form of it.
\n\nPAUL: Right. Well, I still use it for state diagrams and sequence diagrams when I'm down at that technical level. What I find is that there's a certain level of rigor that UML requires for a sequence diagram, or something like that that seems to get in the way of collaboration. So EventStorming sacrifices some of that rigor to be able to draw in everyone and have a low bar of entry to having people participate.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's a huge insight. Why do you think that is? Is it the inability to hold that much information at a high level of rigor, or just people not used to working at that sort of precision and rigor?
\n\nPAUL: I think that when I'm working with people that are not hands-on coders, they are in the everyday, like say, product managers, or stakeholders, to use those terms. They're in the everyday details of how the business process works and they tend to think of that process more as a series of steps that they're going through in a very specific kind of way. Like, I'm shipping a certain product, or supporting the shipping. or returning of certain types of products, those kinds of things.
\n\nWhereas, as developers, we tend to think of it more in terms of the abstractions of the system and what we're trying to implement in the code. So the idea of being able to tell the story of a process in terms of the events that happen is a very natural thing, I find for people from a business perspective to do because that's how they tend to think about it.
\n\nWhereas, I think as programmers, we're often taught not so much to think about behavior as a sequence of things happening, but more as the structure we've been taught to design in terms of structures and relationships rather than flow.
\n\nJESSICA: Yet that's changing with event sourcing.
\n\nPAUL: I think so. EventStorming and event sourcing become a very natural complement for each other and even event-driven architecture, or any event-driven messaging, whatever it happens to be. The gap between modeling using EventStorming and then designing some kind of event-driven distributed system, or even not distributed, but still event-driven is much more natural than trying to do something like an entity relationship diagram and they'd get from that to some kind of meaningful understanding of what's the story of how these functions and features are going to work.
\n\nJESSICA: On the topic of sacrificing rigor for collaboration, I think you have to sacrifice rigor to work across content texts because you will find contradictions between them. The language does have different meaning before and after the order is submitted and you have to allow for that in the collaboration. It's not that you're not going to have the rigor. It's more that you're postponing it, you're scoping it as separately. This meeting is about the higher level and you need completeness over consistency.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I feel like almost you have to sacrifice rigor to be effective in most roles and in that way, sacrifice is even the wrong word. Most of the things that we do as human beings do not allow for the sort of rigor of the things that we do as software engineers and things that computers do.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And it's just, the world doesn't work that way.
\n\nPAUL: Right. Well, and it's the focus in EventStorming on exploration, discovery, and urgent ideas versus rigor is more about not so much exploring and discovery, but about converging on certain things. So when someone says pedant and the other person says pedant, or vice versa, that tends to shut down the conversation because now you are trying to converge on some agreed upon term versus saying, “Well, let's explore a bunch of different ways this could be expressed and temporarily defer trying converge on.”
\n\nJESSICA: Later in Slack, we’ll vote.
\n\nPAUL: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: Okay. So standardize later.
\n\nPAUL: Yes. Standardize, converge later, and for now, let's kind of hold that at arm’s length so that we can uncover and discover different perspectives on this in terms of how the story works and then add regulator when we go to code and then you may discover things in code where there are implicit concepts that you then need to take back to the modeling to try and figure out well, how do we express this? Coming up with some kind of term in the code and being able to go from there.
\n\nJESSICA: Right. Some sort of potential return because it hasn't happened yet.
\n\nPAUL: Exactly. So maybe it's a potential, maybe it's some other kind of potential return, like pending return, maybe we don't call it a return at all.
\n\nJESSICA: Or disliked item because we could – or unsatisfactory item because we could intercept that and try to like, “Hey, how about we send you the screws that we're missing?”
\n\nPAUL: Right. Yeah, maybe the answer is not a return at all.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nPAUL: But maybe the case is that the customer says they want to return it, but you actually find a way to get them to buy more stuff by sending them something else that they would be happy with. So the idea is we're trying to promote discovery thinking when we are talking about how to understand certain problems and how to solve them rather than closing off options too soon.
\n\nMANDY: So, Paul, I know you do give these workshops. Is there anything? Where can people find you? How can people learn more? How can people hire you to facilitate a workshop and get in touch with you?
\n\nPAUL: Okay. Well, in terms of resources, Damien had mentioned at the beginning, I have an eBook up on Leanpub, The EventStorming Handbook, so if people are interested in learning more, they can get that. And then I do workshop facilitation and training through my company, Virtual Genius. They can go to virtualgenius.com and look at what training is available. It's all online these days, so they can participate from anywhere. We have some public workshops coming up in the coming months. And then they can find me, I'm @ThePaulRayner on Twitter, just to differentiate me from all the indefinite articles that are out there.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: Sounds good. Well, let's head into reflections. I can start.
\n\nI just was thinking while we were talking about this episode, about how closely this ties into my background in professional writing, technical writing to be exact, and just how you have this process to lay out exactly what steps need to be taken and to differentiate when people say the same things and thinking about, “Well, they're saying the same things, but the words matter,” and to get pedantic, that can be a good thing, especially when you are writing technical documents and how-tos. I remember still, my first job being a technical writer and looking at people in a machine shop who it was like, first, you do this, then you do this, then you do this and to me, I was like, “This is so boring.” But it makes sense and it matters. So this has been a really good way for me to think about it as a newbie just likening it to technical writing.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Technical writing has to tell that story.
\n\nDAMIEN: I'm going to be reflecting on this has been such a great conversation and I feel like I have a lot of familiarity with at least a very similar process. I brought up all my fears that come from them, which is like, what if we don't have the right person in the room? What if there's something we didn't discover? And you said something about how you can do this in 5 minutes and how you can do this in 15 minutes and I realized, “Oh, this process doesn't have to be the 6-hour things that I've participated in and facilitated in. It can also be done more smaller and more iteratively and I can bring this sort of same process and thought process into more of the daily work.” So that's super helpful for me.
\n\nJESSICA: I want to reflect on a phrase that Paul said and then Damien emphasized, which is shared understanding. It's what we're trying to get to in EventStorming across teams and across functions. I think it's also like what we're constantly trying to get to as humans. We value shared understanding so much because we're trapped in our heads and my experience in my head is never going to be the same as your experience in your head.
\n\nBut at some point, we share the same physical world. So if we can get that visual representation, if we can be talking together about something in that visual world, we can pass ideas back and forth more meaningfully. We can achieve this shared understanding. We can build something together. And that feels so good.
\n\nI think that that constant building of shared understanding is a lot of what it means to be human and I get really excited when I get to do that at work.
\n\nPAUL: I think I would just add to that as well is being human, I'm very much aware of limitations in terms of how many ideas I can hold in my head at any one time. I know the times where I've been in the experience that many describe where someone's giving me a list of steps to follow and things like that, inevitably I'm like, “Well, I remember like the first two, maybe three,” and then everything after that is kind of Charlie Brown. What, what, why? [laughter] I don't remember anything they said from that point on.
\n\nBut when I can visualize something, then I can take it in one go. I can see it and we're building it together. So for me, it's a little bit of a mind hack in terms of getting over the limitations of how many things I can keep in my mind at one time. Also, like you said, Jess, getting those things out of my mind and out of other people's minds into a shared space where we can actually collaborate on them together, I think that's really important to be able to do that in a meaningful way.
\n\nMANDY: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Paul. We really enjoyed this discussion. And if you, as listeners, would like to continue this conversation, please head over to Patreon.com/greaterthancode. We have a Slack channel. You can pledge and donate to sponsor us as little as a dollar and you can come in, hang out, talk with us about these episodes. If not, give me a DM on Twitter and let me know, and I'll let you in anyway because [laughter] that’s what we do here at Greater Than Code.
\n\nPAUL: Because Mandy’s awesome.
\n\nMANDY: [laughs] Thank you, Paul.
\n\nWith that, thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you again next week.
Special Guest: Paul Rayner.
Sponsored By:
How to Trust Again – Justin Searls
\n\nWhy has trust become so rare in the software industry? Developers don't trust their own ability to program, teammates don't trust each other to write quality code, and organizations don't trust that people are working hard enough to deliver on time.
\n\nThis talk by Justin Searls is a reflection on the far-reaching consequences distrust can have for individuals, teams, and organizations and an exploration of what we stand to gain by adopting a more trustful orientation towards ourselves and each other.
\n\n01:57 - Justin’s Superpower: Having Bad Luck and Exposing Software Problems
\n\n04:05 - Breaking Down Software & Teams
\n\n12:49 - Trust Building
\n\n29:14 - Power Politics & Privilege
\n\n42:06 - Personal Growth & “Bring Your Whole/True Self”
\n\n\n\nHow to Trust Again – Justin Searls
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
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\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers based in the United States and Canada. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 270 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-panelist, Mae Beale.
\n\nMAE: And I'm joined with another panelist, Chelsea Troy.
\n\nCHELSEA: Hi, I'm Chelsea and I'm here with our guest, Justin Searls.
\n\nHe's a co-founder and CTO at Test Double, a consulting agency on a mission to improve how the work writes software. His life's work is figuring out why so many apps are buggy and hard to use, why teams struggle to foster collaboration and trust, and why it's so hard for organizations to get traction building great software. The Test Double Agents work with clients to improve in all of these ways and more.
\n\nHi, Justin! How are you today?
\n\nJUSTIN: Hello. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.
\n\nCHELSEA: Of course.
\n\nSo we like to kick off our sessions by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nJUSTIN: Well, one superpower might be that I like to give counterintuitive answers to questions and [laughs] my answer to this would be that I have really, really bad luck software and hardware. My entire life has just fallen over for me left and right. Bugs come and seek me out. In college, I was in the computer science program and so, I was around a lot of computers, like Linux data centers and stuff, and I think I went through either personally, or in the labs that I used 20 hard drive failure years in 4 years. People started joking that I had an EMP around me.
\n\nSo I started to just decide to lean into that not so much as an identity necessarily, but as a specialty of root cause analysis of like, why do things fail? When I see a bug, what does that mean? And to dig in to how to improve quality in software and that then extended to later in my career, when I was working on delivery teams, like building software for companies and institutions. That meant identifying more root causes about what's leading to project failure, or for teams to break down.
\n\nNow I'm kind of moving, I guess, popping the stack another layer further. I'm starting to ask what are the second and third order consequences of software failing for people having for others? I see this in my family who are non-software industry family members, when they encounter a bug and I'm watching them encounter a bug, their reaction is usually to think that they're the ones who screwed up, that they're stupid, that they just can't figure it out. I'm literally watching software that somebody else wrote far away just fail and that's just no good, right?
\n\nSo I think that the fact that I just so easily expose problems with software and sometimes the teams that make it almost effortlessly, it's really given me a passion and a purpose to improve and find opportunities to just make it a little bit better.
\n\nMAE: When you talk about software and/or teams breaking down and you're mentioning bugs. So I'm assuming that that's mostly what you mean by breaking down? I'm curious if you have kind of a mental model of software always breaks down these four ways. Teams always break down these three ways. I don't know if you have any reference texts, or things that you've come across as far as like a mental model for what is the world of breaking down? How do we characterize it?
\n\nJUSTIN: That's a great question and I feel like having been basically doing this for 15 years now, I should be prepared with a better answer.
\n\nI've always resisted building I guess, the communicative version of an abstraction, or a framework for categorizing, simplifying, and compartmentalizing the sort of stuff that I experience. In some ways, my approach [laughs] is the human version of machine learning where I have been so fortunate, because I've been a consultant my entire career, to be exposed to so many companies and so many teams that that has developed in me a pattern recognition system that even I don't necessarily understand—it's kind of a black box to me—where I will pick up on little smells and seemingly incidental cues and it'll prompt me to develop a concern, or ask a pointed question about something seemingly unrelated, but that I've come to see as being associated with that kind of failure.
\n\nI think your question's great. I should probably spend some time coming up with quadrants, or a system that distills down some of this. But really, when I talk about bugs, that is a lagging indicator of so many things upstream that are not necessarily code related. One of the reasons I want to be on the show here and talk to you all the day is because I've been thinking a lot about trust and interpersonal relationships starting with us as individuals and whether we trust the work that we're doing ourselves, or trust ourselves to really dive in and truly understand the stuff that we're building versus feel like we need to go and follow some other pattern, or instructions that are handed to us.
\n\nTo kind of try to answer your question more directly, when I see teams fail, it usually comes down to a lack of authentic, empathetic, and logical targeted relationships where you have strong alignment about like, why are we in this room? Why are we working together? How do we best normalize on an approach so that when any person in any role is operating that is consistent with if somebody else on the team had been taking the same action that they would operate in the same way so that we're all marching in the same direction?
\n\nThat requires shared values and that requires so many foundational things that are so often lacking in teams as software is developed today, where companies grow really fast. The pay right now is really, really high, which is great, but it results in, I think a little bit of a gold rush mentality to just always be shipping, always be hustling, always be pushing. As there's less time for the kind of slack that we need to think about—baking in quality, or coming back to something that we built a couple weeks ago and that maybe we've got second considerations about. Because there's that kind of time, there's even less time sometimes for the care and feeding that goes into just healthy relationships that build trust between people who are going to be spending a third of their life working together.
\n\nCHELSEA: You mentioned picking up on little smells that then lead you to ask pointed questions. I think that's really interesting because that kind of intuition, I've found is really essential to being a consultant and figuring out how to ask those questions as well. Can you provide some examples of situations like that?
\n\nJUSTIN: Yeah. I'll try to think of a few.
\n\nI had a client once that was undergoing—this is 10 years ago now—what we called at the time, an agile transformation. They were going from a Waterfall process of procuring 2 year, $2 million contracts and teams to build big design upfront systems that are just thrown over a fence, then a team would go and work on it, and then it would go through a proper user acceptance testing onto something more agile, I guess. Adopting Scrum and extreme programming, interpersonal process, and engineering practices. That was just meant to be more, I guess, iterative of course, innovative, collaborative, more dynamic, and able to let the team drive its own destiny.
\n\nAll that sounds great and you walk into the team room and they just invested millions of dollars into this beautiful newly restored historic building. I sit down with everyone and I look at them and they've got the cool desks at the time and cool open office because those were still considered cool. I sat down and I couldn't help, but—[chuckles] this is real silly. I couldn't help but notice that there was a pretty strong smell, [laughs] body odor throughout the whole room and it wasn't one person. I'm not picking on somebody here.
\n\nIt was that the interpersonal relationships were so afraid, the fear of failure was so strong, and the deadline pressure that had been exerted from on high was so overwhelming that there was no safety in the room. People were just scared at their job all day long and it was having a material impact that only an outsider who's walking in at 2:00 PM on a Friday detect because everyone else had acclimated.
\n\nSo I walked in and I was like, “Well, what do I –?” [laughs] Obviously, I'm not going to be like, “Hey, it stinks in here.” I’ve got to figure out a way to understand why do people feel unsafe and maybe I didn't have that sentence go through the voice in my head, but it definitely put me on a path towards to maybe the less privileged people in the room, the people who are not the managers to understand what's really going on, what pressures are they under?
\n\nMAE: I love that the example includes legit real smell. So many times, especially in our industry and part of what this podcast is counteracting, is getting in touch with the fact that we are people and humans. Anyway, I love that you brought [chuckles] that home that way.
\n\nAlso, I wanted to say from earlier, I wasn't trying to corner you into expecting to have a philosophy. I thought you might and it was worth asking. But I recently got asked a similar question about my management philosophy and which authors do I appreciate most, or something. I've been a manager for 25 years and I'm like, “Uh. I don't know. I figure out what is needed and then I deal with that.” I don't understand how to answer. So I just want to give some – pay you back and apologize. I didn't mean to get you – [overtalk]
\n\nJUSTIN: Not at all and it becomes one of those you know it when you see it.
\n\nI struggle with this a lot because somebody introduced the concept years ago of beginner's mindset to me where sometimes if I'm a beginner at something, the best person to help me is not the expert—the person who's been doing it for 20 years. It’s somebody who's just a few hours, or a few days, or a year, or two ahead of me because they can still remember what it felt like to be where I am right now.
\n\nBecause I talk a lot, because I tweet a lot, because I show up in a lot of places, and I have an outward facing sales role to potential clients and candidates, I meet a lot of people who come to me and they're like, “How do I learn how to code?” And I'm like, “I can tell you the 15-year version of this story, but it's probably going to be really depressing.” I've taken as a responsibility to like try to—and I need to do a much better job of this—be armed with either resources, or people that I trust, that I can refer folks to so that I'm not totally leaving them hanging.
\n\nMAE: I love that and yes. Speaking of teaching people how to code and what you said, there's a name for it that I'm forgetting about being a teacher. If you are closer to the student, you actually are a more effective teacher.
\n\nSo there's just two comments.
\n\nThe first one is I'm a part of RailsBridge I helped found the Southeast regional chapter. So if anybody, any listeners out there still want to learn how to code, or are having that same, I don't know how to tell you about my [chuckles] zigzag story and ideally, they wouldn't all be depressing, [laughs] but I'm sure they all include some real low moments. But RailsBridge, which is bridgetroll.org, has recurring events where people can go all over the country and obviously, in pandemic times it's not as much in person, but yeah.
\n\nAnd on the comment about teaching and when you mention talking to the people with the least privilege in the room, I'm just really sensitive and appreciative of your sensitivity to power politics and how much they impact so much of what is happening and trust. So for anybody out there who's being asked to help new people and you feel like you're still the new person, you're probably in a better position to help. So just want to offer some encouragement there. I have personally found a lot more confidence in helping people who are just behind me and that anytime you're teaching, you're learning. So just want to put those in.
\n\nI love that actually your answer, instead of a quadrant, is really just the one word of trust and I appreciated the ways in which you were mentioning trust can be different things. Trust in what you're building. Trust in who's asking you to do it.
\n\nChelsea asked for a couple examples and I interrupted. So I apologize, but what are some trust building exercises that you have encouraged, or examples? Maybe even continuing that same story. Six months later, was it a fresher air in there and what are some things they did to make that happen?
\n\nJUSTIN: Yeah, that story, like so many teams and companies in our industry, didn't undertake the redemption arc that I wish I could convey. I think in fact, to see a big picture problem and the desire to connect that with a big picture tidy solution, a future state where it's all rainbows and unicorns and everyone really getting along well.
\n\nSometimes that sets, for me personally and when I see consultants who are less experienced, who can see that end state in mind and they know maybe the top three hit list of stuff that needs to happen to help that organization get to where they need to be. We can sometimes set the bar so high for ourselves in terms of expectations of like, what does it mean to help them become better, that we can't help, but lose sight of the value of just incremental improvement.
\n\nIf I can just help restore relationship between two people on a team. I had one client years and years ago, [laughs] they were also undergoing a pretty big transition and they brought me in a – I think that what they thought they were hiring me for was to be a test-driven development coach to teach them that particular practice of TDD.
\n\nThey got, instead on day one, there was a room of 30 interdisciplinary cross-functional teams—some developers, some non-developers, and stuff—and I could just tell that they were like, it was a big epic rewrite from a Perl codebase that, I think they were moving to no JS and Angular as well as a chewing of cloud infrastructure at the same time, as well as Agile software practices at the same time.
\n\nThey were overwhelmed, they've seen this fail before, they felt a ton of pressure from the business, and they didn't even really understand, I don't think, the future business model. Even if they were successful, it wasn't clear this was going to solve systemic problems for the company. And I'm like, “Well, I can teach you all TDD. [laughs] But instead what my commitment to you all will be is that six months from now, you'll either have been successful and learned all of these things and built the thing as the business has asked you to do and then the business takes off, or I will have helped equip you with skills and ways of thinking about this industry and our work that will set you up to get much better jobs next time.”
\n\nAgain, the company didn't totally come together. It didn't take off like a rocket ship. The team was successful in the rewrite, which doesn't happen very often. But then you saw almost a diaspora of dozens of highly skilled people—and this was in Central Ohio—who then went to venture backed startups, some went to big, established enterprise-y kind of companies, some left the region and went elsewhere.
\n\nThat turned into, if I had to count, probably eight, nine additional Test Double clients [laughs] down the road where they came in and they could spot in a minute, this is a way that an outside perspective, who is here to help us at a moment of tremendous need, can move the needle just a little bit. By setting expectations realistically, being humane about it, and focused on what's best for the people involved because at the end of the day, all companies are is collections of humans. That was, I guess, more my orientation.
\n\nCHELSEA: So Justin, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. I appreciate what you just shared.
\n\nI worked at Pivotal Labs for a while—original labs when it was sort of a generalist’s enablement.
\n\nJUSTIN: Sure.
\n\nCHELSEA: Very heavy on that kind of thing.
\n\nOne of the things that we ran into relatively frequently was similar to what you've just described wherein one of two things would happen. Either the clients were successful and there was a vastly improved, I guess, software delivery culture among the people that we were working with, or if that didn't work out, then there were individuals who took to it very well and had gained variety of skills that allowed them to go elsewhere.
\n\nIt happened enough times that then we would have to establish trust with potential new clients around this whole additional access, which was effectively, is this going to cause a diaspora of all of these engineers, designers, and PMs that I've managed to scrape together for this project?
\n\nDo you find Test Double ever facing that, or how do you address either beforehand if product owners are aware of it, or after it happens, how do you address that with clients?
\n\nJUSTIN: That's a fantastic question. Pivotal Labs was one of the companies that we looked at.
\n\nWe started Test Double 10 years ago. I was at the time, just starting to speak at user groups and conferences and I spent a lot of time with the people at the Boulder office at Pivotal Labs. Great people. I really appreciated the focus and the rigor and in fact, made to answer a question earlier about process, or abstraction about like, “Hey, boil it down for me.”
\n\nPivotal Labs sold a very branded, very discreet process for like, this is the way to build software and, in a sense, some of the decisions that we made when we started Test Double were a response against that. Just to say we trust the people closest to the work to make the right decisions based on tremendous experience and skills. Frankly, as we get bigger and more successful, having some somebody like me at the top of an organization who only talks at the beginning of a client relationship, which is the moment that we know the least and I've got the least amount of context, for me to go and say, “Well, this is the way that we got a test,” or whatever it is would just be ineffective and inappropriate.
\n\nSo to answer your question, Chelsea. Fortunately, our brand power, isn't nearly as strong as Pivotal Labs so no client has ever come to us in advance with that as a question to say, “Hey, I'm worried that you're going to train our people in this particular methodology and then they're going to leave for higher paying jobs,” or something. That's never come up in advance.
\n\nIn fact, one of the things that we talk a lot about is that because our consultants join client engineering teams to work with them inside of their own process, using their own tools, and their own system is we just try to be model citizens of somebody on that team. We trust our clients like, “Whatever your process is, it's apparently working for you. So let's just try it and if we have ideas for how to make that better, we will listen, we'll write them down.” But then only once we've built trust and rapport with the people on that team, will we start to share, “Hey, I've got a rainy-day list of a few things that you might want to try.”
\n\nWhat that's actually done is has a detoxifying effect where from a context of high trust, the incongruity, the distrust, the kind of backchannel frustrations that our people pick up on because we're kind of “in the trenches” with our client folks, we're able to have multiple pathways into that client organization to help make it a better place to work.
\n\nWe got one of the best poll quotes that I've ever seen on our website recently. One of our clients is Betterment. They're a great financial management firm in New York where it's kind of an autopilot savings vehicle. The director of engineering, Katelyn, there said that she saw on the teams where testable people were deployed, attrition actually went down and I think it's because we help those teams to perform better.
\n\nAn old friend of mine named Leon Gersing, he used to have a thing he’d say. He'd said, “You can either change where you work, or you can change where you work.” Meaning you can either make the place that you're at better, or you can go find gainful employment elsewhere and we're in the make the place where people work better business, wherever possible as a first avenue.
\n\nMAE: You're reminding me of a book that I'm reading right now called What Got You Here Isn't Going to Get You There. Are you all familiar with it?
\n\nJUSTIN: I was so proud of my wife, because she asked for that on Audible earlier this week because I'm the person with the Audible credit and I'm like, “Oh, this is quoted in business leadership contexts left and right and all over the place. So it'll give us a touchstone to talk about.”
\n\nMAE: Yeah. Well, the TLDR is so much of especially management focused and leadership focused thought is about things that you should do and this book is probably along your lines, Justin of giving the counterintuitive answer. This is here's 20 things that you might want to consider not doing and then replace it with the good behavior because that is such a stretch in real life to actually do that. It's how about you just pick a couple of these that you're a repeat offender and just stop. Just try to not do it. That's the main first thing and I've found that, a refreshing take on how to think about how to guide in ways that are building more trust and offering more safety. So definitely recommend that book.
\n\nI don't know that it came out of this book, but the person who recommended it to me, my VP Scott Turnquist, who is amazing, shared that there are really four categories of things that can help build trust and it's definitely all done incrementally. So picking up on that word you said earlier, Justin, too. But the four kind of axes are credibility, reliability, intimacy, and selfless motivation. If you can demonstrate those recurringly, that is how to establish and/or course correct into a state of increased trust.
\n\nSo anyway, that was partly why my original statement was like, do you have this down? Because I've heard some things lately that I've been thinking about.
\n\nJUSTIN: I really appreciate your perspective there and it makes me feel better because one of my commitments in life is to never write a book. But if I were to write a book, I'd probably have to come up with a tidy quadrant, a Harvard Business Review two by two, or something like that to I guess, support the good work at the people at CliffsNotes and Blinkist to boil down years’ worth of work into a 13-minute podcast.
\n\nI think that the advice as you expressed, it is completely valid and there's one thing that I think is a core ingredient to trust. Trust of ourselves, trust of people that we work with directly, and then trust of leadership and the people who run the organizations that we're a part of.
\n\nThe hardest, in my opinion, is authenticity. If you're not, I think you said credible. If you combine credible, intimacy, vulnerability, those are really useful words to prompt what I mean when I say authenticity. If I'm talking to somebody and I can lock eyes with them and I believe that what they're saying is what they actually feel and it's their true self and they believe it, then all sorts of other background processes in my head of trying to read the tea leaves of what's going on here, all the passive analysis I might do to try to understand what's the subtext that this person's operating from. That's just the form of kind of armor, or a guard that it depletes my cognitive ability to talk to the person.
\n\nAuthenticity is a signal that we pick up on as humans and this is why it's a miracle that we have video chat in this era and it's why I really relish one-on-one in-person interactions when I can have them. Authenticity is a signal that I can drop that guard a little bit. It's that I can really look and really listen to what the person's saying and take it at face value. The problem with just saying, “Oh, okay, well just be authentic. Just be your true self,” is that that is useless advice and way more likely to trigger somebody's defenses, or their self-doubt.
\n\nWhen I think about authenticity in the context of a team, or an organization is that the people who are maybe not in a position of power, people who report up the chain, if they don't come across as authentic to their leaders, the leaders should not look at that as a failing of the person, but as a failure of their ability to figure out how to promote and draw out authenticity from the people who report to them. Maybe they don't have safety in the room to speak their true mind. Maybe they feel like the things that make them different from the other people that they work with are a liability, or a risk and so, they can't really bring their true self to work.
\n\nIt's the leader's job, when they spot inauthenticity, rather than go on a hunt like a political backchannels to try to figure out why is this person lying. What's under here? Figuring out what is it about the person's context, the environment, kind of the system that they are operating in. What could possibly be an explanation for why I can't develop an authentic connection with this person? And until you run out of every single possible explanation in that investigation, including self-reflection of what is it that I'm individually doing and how I communicate to this person that's getting in the way. Only then is it really useful to start thinking about maybe this person's not a good actor, maybe they're being duplicitous, or something. Because once you've hit that button, it is really hard to go back.
\n\nSo when we talk about authenticity, we often talk about the individual's responsibility to present it, to be it. If you can fake authenticity, then you can do anything, right? That is advice. It's fine. I hope that everyone feels the safety. Like I'm a cishet white dude who's pretty powerful in my little corner of the small pond. I have no problem just spouting off and being my true self and so, I should just tell other people to do that too. That's not fair.
\n\nI think that what is better advice for people who are maybe not in positions of power is to be really good at detecting authenticity. When you detect authenticity and people are making their true selves known to you and you're feeling a connection with them, whether they're peers, or managers, spend more time with them, invest into those relationships, and use those people as anchors of trust. So that when you're failing to make that connection elsewhere, when you have doubts about others in the organization, you can have more points of perspective on how to best address it.
\n\nMAE: I read an article yesterday that says, “Laziness Doesn't Exist.” That's the title of it and it essentially says that that same thing of what's the context in which this is happening. People don't procrastinate for fun. In fact, it usually takes more work and starting from a place of what shoes are you in, but I especially love the in what way am I impacting that person's ability to be themselves?
\n\nAlso, I must have said the word authenticity, because this list is credibility, reliability, intimacy, selfless motivation, but authenticity and credibility in all of these things do also have to do with the thing that I loved you bringing up about identity, power politics, and what happens and your environment is not allowing you to be credible. So another way in which people can as good peers, mentors, managers, and above can do is in what way am I bolstering these people's credibility?
\n\nSo always flipping it back to how are we the perp [laughs] and that's very similar to social justice, racial justice. The more we see how we are perpetuating and disenfranchising, regardless of our identity, that's where there's some hope for the humans in my mind.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I appreciate that you've both brought up, Justin and Mae, is the degree to which power gradients play a role in the way that we deal with these things. There are demographic power gradients with regard to race, with regard to gender. There are also power gradients with regards to our position in the company, with regard to technical privilege, with regard to our level of skill, with regard to the size of our network.
\n\nWe also, I think live in this individualist culture that has a tendency to place the responsibility on individuals to do what they can to resolve. For example, what you were saying, Justin, about how we effectively coach people to just be authentic. Maybe that coaching works fine in some context, but that's a subset of the context in which we're asking people to apply it and asking individuals to resolve this from the bottom up sometimes as opposed to looking for the systemic reasons why this is a thing that has to be solved in the first place.
\n\nI'm curious as to whether you have thoughts on what a person can do, who finds themselves in a position of power, in a position of leadership in a company, for example, to address those sorts of questions with other folks who are working there.
\n\nJUSTIN: I think one thing that can be helpful – and I realize your question is about what can a leader do. One thing that can be helpful is for those leaders to empathize and put themselves in the shoes of people who might not have the same privileges as you described and what would it take to—I'm waiting outside my area of expertise here—would be to think about what are the things that are in a given person's sphere of direct control, what isn't, what am I setting up, and what am I communicating in terms of expectations that I have of them?
\n\nAn example that came up a lot in our industry was the number of drink up events in tech in the early 2010s where there was sort of an assumption that everyone likes alcohol and when people in public drink alcohol, good things happen, which turns out isn't true, but it can also be the case.
\n\nThere are invisible expectations that we communicate because I'm a big fan of granting people autonomy to solve problems in their own way, to approach work the way that they feel is best. Our company has been remote from day one and a big part of that was we want people in control of everything from where they work to their home network, to the computers that they use. Because when I had that control pulled away from me in the role as developer, it just sapped my motivation, my drive, my engagement, my sense of control over the stuff that's right in front of me.
\n\nWhen I now in a role of influence over other people, whenever I speak, I have to think about the negative space of what are the expectations that I might be conveying that are not explicit. I need to be careful of even expressing something like hobbies, or shows that I like, or stuff – especially in this remote world, we want to develop connectedness.
\n\nBut a challenge that I keep running into is that our ability to find mutual connection with people about stuff other than work, it rides the line really closely of communicating some other allegiance, or affiliation whether that's we talk about sports a lot because that's an obvious one, but even just interest in hobbies.
\n\nSo I find myself – and I realize Chelsea, I'm doing a really poor job, I think of answering the question as you asked it. I find myself only really able to even grapple with like what can leaders do to set the tone for the kind of environment that's going to be inclusive and safe for other people by really digging in, empathizing with, calling up, and dredging up what their own experience was when they were not in a position of power.
\n\nIf I have a secondary superpower, is I had a real rough start to my career. I was in really, really, really rough client environments that were super hostile. I had a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company scream at me until his face was red in a room one-on-one with a closed door on a regular basis. The sorts of stuff that developed callus on me, that I look back at a lot of those experiences and I'm like, “I learned a bunch.” It's supercharged my career as an individual because it strengthened me.
\n\nSo the challenge that I have is what can I take from those really, really harsh experiences and translate them for people who are coming up in a way that they don't have to go through the same trials and tribulations, but that they can take away from it the lessons that I learned. And for me, it's all about not just safety for the sake of safety, but safety by which myself and others can convey the useful growth that people want to see in themselves, their skills, and their abilities that isn't diluted. That can convey the truth, the difficulty, and the challenge and how hard –
\n\nProgramming is really, really hard for me and I've been doing it for a long time. A lot of stuff about this is just not easy. The relationships are not easy. Like you're going to run into situations where there's massive differences between where people stand on stuff and what those perspectives look like. Navigating that is hard enough without adding a whole layer of toxicity and hostile work environment.
\n\nSo what's a way to promote that learning environment without just totally insulating somebody from reality. That's been, I think a challenge and attention that I see a lot of other like-minded leaders in tech trying to figure out how to create.
\n\nMAE: You reminded me of a meme that someone shared with me that says, “What doesn't kill you can just regulate your nervous system, trap itself in your body, steal your sense of self, make you wish it did.” I don't know what makes you stronger means, but let's stop glorifying trauma as a life lesson we've been blessed with. [chuckles] Definitely along the same lines.
\n\nJUSTIN: Yeah. Relatable.
\n\nMAE: There's a thing, too about putting oneself in another's shoes and this is a place where I'm someone that can read people really well, but that makes that tricky. Because I start to trust my sense of it and I have a similar architecture going if I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. So what's the read between the lines thing.
\n\nBut without a lot of exposure to a lot of very different people, and most people have not had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people, when they put themselves in the other person's shoes, they come up with a different conclusion. So I will feel hurt by people who do things that were I to put myself in their shoes would not have done that to me, or if they did, it's because of X, Y, Z about who they are, or what they think, or what is their whole context and environment.
\n\nAll of that is there's a tactic that we use at True Link Financial called “don't cross the net.” So you say and claim the story I tell myself about that is dot, dot. When leaders, who haven't had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people and a lot of different ideas, try to empathize and find themselves limited in that, there are other options which include one of the things you said earlier. Making it so that people can say the things on their mind so whether, or not that's persons being their authentic self this is a whole another level, but creating a place where we expect that we're all messing up and that it's okay to talk about uncomfortable things is one of my real soapboxes.
\n\nIt's totally okay. Yes, we are all racist. We are all sexist. We are all homophobic. There is no way to not be as a result of being in the culture we're in. We could do things to mitigate it. We can do things to name it. But if we just start from yes, we're all failing. This for me, it lowers the stakes because so many people feel that if someone brings up, “Hey, that's kind of sexist,” or “This is not supporting me in this way,” or “My credibility is not being seen because of this.” In the absence of already, yo, we're going to talk about some negative stuff sometimes, that's an introduction of negativity to the “positive, happy rainbow unicorn workplace” that you were talking about before.
\n\nSo one of my hopes and dreams is that we get some clouds to rain on the land to allow things to actually grow [chuckles] and this includes, yo, we are not perfect. And we are definitely doing things we don't intend all the time.
\n\nJACOB: That made me think about authenticity again, because sopen about imperfection. I'm a neurodiverse person so I probably am autistic. If someone were to say to me at work, “We really want you to bring your authentic self,” probably the thing I would think is you don't want that person, [laughs] or at least without getting to know me a lot better.
\n\nThere's a concept called masking where it's basically, there are behaviors and traits that are exhibited by neurotypical people that just come naturally to them. By learning the hard way, I've sort of learned to do them, even if they don't feel natural at all like making eye contact, smiling at people when talking, things like that. So I think that complicates authenticity for me, which is that I'm intentionally not hiding, but choosing what parts of myself to show and what parts I just don't want to bring to work. [laughs] I don't have a clean answer for that, or a solution to that, but I think that just complicates things for me.
\n\nJUSTIN: I thank you so much for sharing that and I think it's a really important perspective to bring, which is I talked earlier about sure, plenty of people's true, authentic selves, even if they were to bring them, they might be in a job, or in a space, or in a team where that wouldn't be understood as such, or appreciated, or literally safe. It's hard to tell people, “Hey, you should feel safe” when the truth when spoken would be an unsafe thing. That would be setting people up for risk, for danger, and it would be a seed of distrust, which is what we're all here to talk about avoiding. So I really appreciate you sharing that.
\n\nWhen I talked about empathy earlier, Mae, in my brain, all that really comes through it is the E-M part of that word, like the root for emotion. I never really have been able to assume that I can get somebody's context, their perspective, and the moment that they're in into my brain well enough to role play and do a re-dramatization in black and white, sepia tones and slow motion, like this is what Justin would do if he was here.
\n\nThat's one reason why we trust people at our company to just do the work, because we know that they're going to have such a richer amount of data and context than we'll ever have. But one thing that I'm grateful for is that I've been able to experience what I feel like is a pretty broad range of emotion. [laughs] I'm a real emotionally volatile person. I go super high highs, super low lows and I'm just like, it's how I've been. I can't help it. So when I'm empathizing with people, I'm just trying to get in the mindset of how do they likely feel right now so that I can understand and try to do a better job, meeting them where they are.
\n\nA big part of that is learning there are differences and so Jacob, of course, it’s like if I worked with you, I understand that it might not be productive to bring all of yourself to work all the time. But I would hope to develop a trusting relationship with you where you can share enough so that I can know what are the boundaries that are going to be productive for you, productive for me so that we can make a connection and it's something –
\n\nTo make this a little bit more personal. I don't know where my career is going to go next. I founded Test Double with my partner, Todd. I was only 26 years old and we've been doing this for 10 years now. 2 years ago, we embarked on a journey of transferring a 100% of the equity of the company to our employees. So we're on an employee stock ownership plan now, it's ESOP, or any of the stuff, it is complicated because it's well regulated. We have to have outside auditors, a valuation firm, we have a third-party trustee to make sure that our people and the value of the company is transferred appropriately, treated right, and managed well.
\n\nSo it's naturally raised, especially in my circle of friends and family who realize that, this means that there's not an end date, but there's a moment at which I can start thinking about what my life is going to be next. The people who knew me when I was 25, 26, who look at me now, it's not that I've changed radically, or my identities are radically different, or anything. It's like, I am a very different kind of person than I was at 26, than I was at 20 before I got into this industry.
\n\nI have changed in healthy ways and in maladaptive ones and in response to maybe drama and stress such that the ideal retirement that I would've imagined earlier in my life looks a lot different now where I've just kind of become habituated. I'm a really, really different person than I used to be and I'm grateful for that in almost every way. I feel like I've grown a lot as a person, but the thing about me that I really look at as an area of change is that I just work too much. [chuckles] I'm online all the time. I'm very focused on – I've optimized productivity so much that it's become ingrained in me.
\n\nI understand that whatever I do next, or even if it's just changing my role inside my company, I need to find a way to create more space for slower paced asynchronous thought and learning how to, in the context of a career, not just bring your true self – I'm kind of curious Chelsea, Mae, and Jacob's perspectives. That true self might be changing [laughs] intentionally. There's a directionality and the growth isn't just learning new skills necessarily, but it might be changing core things about ourselves that will alter the dynamic of the relationships that we bring to work.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. I have two thoughts on that, that I can share.
\n\nThe first is the extent to which bringing my true self is a productive thing to do at work. So for example, my career prior to tech, I did a variety of different things to make ends meet, really a wide variety of things. I graduated directly into one of the bigger recessions. I won't tell you the exact one, because I don't feel like being aged right now, but [chuckles] it wouldn't take too much research to figure it out. I was trained to do a government job that was not hiring for the next 18 months at a minimum. I needed to figure out what to do and was trying to make ends meet.
\n\nIn my first year of employment, I got laid off/my job ended/something like that on four separate occasions in my first year of work and that resulted in, I do not trust when managers tell me that everything is fine. I have not ever effectively and that is something that I don't foreground that in work discussions for a variety of reasons. I don't want to scare other people. I don't want them to think I know something that they don't know about what's going to happen because I don't usually.
\n\nWhen managers tell me, “Oh, everything's great, we're doing great,” all that kind of stuff, I just don't listen. I don't. My decisions do not take that's statement into account and I find that that's the kind of thing that I think about when I'm asked to bring my whole self, my authentic self to a place is that there are things that just sort of similar to what Jacob is saying. I'm like, “Trust me, trust me on this you don't want that.” So that's kind of the first thought in that realm.
\n\nThe second thought that I have around this is the degree to which work should really encompass enough of our lives to require, or demand our authenticity. So I had a variety of full-time jobs in tech and then I quit one of those full-time jobs and I was an independent consultant for a while bolstered chiefly, and I was lucky for this, by folks who had read my blog and then folks who had worked with me when I was at Pivotal. So the consulting effect of people knowing what it's like to work with you is real.
\n\nThat experience felt very different from a full-time position insofar as at the external validation of my work was naturally distributed in a way that it's not in a full-time position and I found that distribution is extremely comforting. Such that even though I now have a full-time job, I also continue client work, I continue teaching, and I continue writing and doing workshops and those kinds of things.
\n\nThis is not the chief reason that I do that, but one of the nice things about it is the diversification of investment in the feedback that I'm receiving and validation that I'm receiving. In order to do that, I have an amount of energy that I put to each of the things in my life and part of it is work, of course. But another reason that I think it works for me is that I no longer have to expect all of my career fulfillment from any one position, from any one employer, from any one place, which has worked out very well because I think that we pedal this notion implicitly that you bring your whole self to work and in return, work provides for your whole career fulfillment.
\n\nBut most places really kind of can't and it's not because they're terrible places to work. It's just because the goals of a company are not actually to fulfill the employees, they’re just not. That's not the way that that works. So it has allowed me and I think would allow others to approach the role that a given employment situation plays in their life, from what I think is a more realistic perspective that ends up helping keep me more satisfied in any given work relationship. But it doesn't necessitate that I – I guess, for lack of a better term, it limits the degree of emotional investment that I have in any one thing, because I'm not expecting all of my fulfillment out of any one thing.
\n\nBut I think that to say that explicitly sometimes runs at best, orthogonal and at worst, maybe contraindicates a lot of what we talk about when we talk about bringing our whole selves to work and looking for those personal connections at work. I think there is pragmatic limit past which we maybe impose more guilt than we need to on ourselves for not doing that.
\n\nJUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that.
\n\nI think Mae used the phrase “lower the stakes” earlier and I think that one of the problems with authenticity, the phrase “bring your whole self-trust” is that the stakes are super high because it seems like these are bullion contracts between parties. For example, you said that you don't trust managers. If I was filling out a form, like a personality inventory, or something, it's like, “Do you trust managers?” I'd say no and I think 90% of people would say no.
\n\nIt’s sort of the economy right now. I think the economy approval rating of is the economy good, or bad is at 23%. But individuals are saying at roughly 60% levels, that they are individually doing okay in this economy. I would say the same. Like, do I trust my manager? Oh, hell yeah. I completely trust my manager right now.
\n\nAnd to lower the stakes even further, when I've been talking about trust, it's not so much about where do I find fulfillment, or who what's my identity, or who am I being, it's about a snap orientation. It's the most immediate sphere. “Oh man, this PostgreSQL query is really slow and I can't figure it out.” Is my snap reaction, or my orientation to think, “I believe in myself enough to dig into this to figure it out”, or is it doubt myself and just kind of get lost in a sea of a thousand Stack Overflow tabs and just slowly lose my whole evening?
\n\nWhen in a team, maybe working with them and we were in planning, or something, or maybe we're in a higher stake, let's say, a code review session and somebody makes a comment about something that I did. Is my snap reaction to doubt their motivations and think “Ah, they're just trying to passive aggressively shoehorn in their favorite architecture here,” or this is politics and gamesmanship, or is my snap reaction is to be like, “Nope, let's try to interpret the words that they're saying as literal words and take it on its face”?
\n\nLike I said, I'm a highly emotionally volatile person, the weather vane shifts with me all the time and sometimes I can control it and sometimes I can just merely observe it. But the awareness of the out has been really helpful to understand [chuckles] when I hear a leader say something about the company, my reaction is I think that they've got ulterior motives and that they are probably not speaking in literal truth.
\n\nIf that's my snap reaction, I'm just trying to communicate that as that's a potential blind spot. Because I have a long rut of past companies that I worked for that had mission statements and vision statements that were kind of bullshit and that no one really believed in, that were just in a bronze plaque on a wall, or whatever. That's baggage that I carry. I just have to acknowledge that baggage and try to move forward. The best I can do is just be present in every moment that I'm in and to understand when I have a snap reaction, am I oriented towards what might lead me to a good outcome, or a bad one?
\n\nMAE: Holy moly, so many amazing things have been shared today and Jacob, especially kudos to you for walking us into a deeper level of authenticity. Love it. Thank you.
\n\nI'm, to answer some of your questions, Justin very similar to Chelsea in that tech was not my first rodeo. I didn't become a programmer until I was 37 years old and I am now 45. I'm totally fine with aging myself. Prior to tech, I did put a lot more of my identity in my job and I would usually do that job pretty much all of the hours possible and I've always worked for mission driven organizations.
\n\nA lot of the things that we're talking about as far as job fulfillment and whether, or not it's a good environment, or if it's a toxic environment, there's a lot of privilege in what we're talking. My parents were paper mill workers and it was not pretty. They had me when they were 19, so they didn't have another option. That was the highest paying gig in our region and they had no education. So it was never an option to even change that.
\n\nSo I am someone who wants to put my whole self into what I do. It's a very working-class mode and gaining identity through what it is I'm able to do. It's also a pretty capitalist [laughs] mentality that I work to move around. But as a manager, when I am a manager, or in management, or managing managers, I'm never encouraging this everybody needs to bring their whole self to work.
\n\nAlthough, I had this really instructive experience where one person truly did not want to have any of their self at work, that they truly only wanted to talk about work at work. We're not a family, nicely nice. I don't want to crochet together, or whatever. That is the most challenged I've ever been as a manager because my natural things are always to figure out what people need and want, and then amalgamate that across the group and see how we can do some utilitarian math and get it so that people are being encouraged in ways they would like, they are not being disadvantaged, and they have space to say when that's happening.
\n\nBut even still, I'm always going with the let's be buddies plan and it's not for everyone. So figuring out how to not have all of your eggs in any basket, no matter how many hours the job is, is definitely a tactic that has been successful for me. But what happens is I then am involved in so many things [chuckles] in all of the moments of life. So I still do that, but I do it by working more, which isn't necessarily the best option.
\n\nThe thing about the mission that I just wanted to pivot for a second and say is, we are no longer in a world where we allow failure. This is a little bit back to my earlier soapbox. The energetic reality is whatever anybody's mission statement is, that is the thing they are going to fail at, like the seamstress never has the best hemmed clothes. So when we write off anyone, or any company based their flawed attempt at the mission, we're discounting that flaws exist, [chuckles] contradictions exist. It's about where are we orienting and are we incrementally moving toward that, or away from it and not in this moment, are we this thing that we have declared because it's more of a path is how I see it than the declaration of success.
\n\nJUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, too. Because I think that one thing we didn't touch on is the universe – and we're talking a Greater Than Code podcast so it's software industry adjacent at least. The universe of people who got to stay home during this whole pandemic. The universe of people who are “knowledge workers”, or “white collar”, especially if you look at the population of the world, is vanishingly small.
\n\nThere was a season in my life where I was the person that you just described managing, where I just viewed myself as I was burnt out. I always wanted to be a mercenary. I had this mindset of I show up at work. “You want some great code? I'll sling you some great code.” Like I was a short-order cook for story points and feature development and that was the terms, right?
\n\nI didn't want to bring my feelings to work. I didn't want to make friends with people because then God forbid, it would be harder to leave. I didn't have that available to me as a capacity at that time, but I went long enough and I realized it's not that I was missing something, or not being fed in some way by not having this emotional need filled at work. It was that I was failing to acknowledge when you say privilege, the literal privilege, that I get to wake up in the morning and think for a job [laughs] and the impact that I can have when I apply all of the skills, capabilities, and background asynchronous thoughts that are not literally in my job description.
\n\nWhen I can bring those things to bear, I'm going to have a much, much bigger impact because what am I except for one person thinking and staring at a matted piece of glass all day, but somebody who is in a small community, or a group of a bunch of people who are in the same mode.
\n\nSo when I'm in a meeting, I can just be the mercenary jerk who's just like, “Hey, I'm just doing this,” and feeling like that's an emotionally neutral thing. When in fact, that negativity can be in an emotional contagion that could affect other work negatively, or and I'm not exactly –
\n\nMy friends who know me, I'm a stick in a mud, I'm a curmudgeon, I'm super negative. I complain constantly and I have taken it upon myself to strive to be a net increase in joy in the people that I talk to and that I interact with at work. Because it is a resource that is draining all of us all day long on its own and it needs to be filled up somehow. I have the capacity right now to take it upon myself to try to fill that tank up for the people that I interact with.
\n\nSo I want to touch on that because I just think it's super lucky that I get to work on a computer and talk out of a screen all day long. If I didn't have that, we wouldn't be having this conversation, I suppose, but I'm just here to make the most of it, I guess.
\n\nMAE: I love that. And you reminded me of Sandi Metz’s closer, Lucky You.
\n\nJACOB: Tell us about it.
\n\nMAE: She gave the closing talk a couple years ago and it's called Lucky You and it goes through how did we all come to be sitting in this room right now and what about redlining? What about the districting? What about all of these things that led to us to experience being here as lucky? I know you weren't saying it in that way, Justin, but it reminded me of that piece, too, which is relevant, but the talk is completely amazing and I definitely recommend it.
\n\nJUSTIN: I think I mentioned it once before. The thing that brought me and our marketing director, Cathy, to think that this would be a great forum to talk a little bit about trust at work is that we're about out to – and I think that actually the day that this podcast publishes is the day that we're going to publish a new conference talk that I've prepared called How to Trust Again and we're going to post it to Test Double’s YouTube channel. So we might not have a direct link for the show notes necessarily, but it'll probably be at the top of that as well as the top of our blog when the show goes live.
\n\nI hope that anyone [laughs] who enjoyed this conversation will also enjoy the kind of high paced, frenetic, lots of keynote slide style that I bring to communicating about a lot of these topics while still understanding that it's just like n equals one. I'm sharing my experience and hopefully, as food for thought to maybe help you look back at your own experience and understand what connects from my experiences, my perspectives, and my context that might be useful and I hope that you'll find something.
Special Guest: Justin Searls.
Sponsored By:
00:51 - Nikema’s Superpower: Connecting To People Through Authenticity & Vulnerability
\n\n28:02 - Seeing People For Their Whole Selves; Facilitating Safe Spaces
\n\n51:38 - Impostor Syndrome Isn’t Natural; The Tech Underclass
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: Connecting through authenticity.
\n\nArty: Even when you’re scared, stand up and speak.
\n\nChanté: Our youth is our future.
\n\nNikema: Making real connections with other people.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 269 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Martínez Thurmond.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Hello, everyone, and I'm here with our fabulous friend and co-host, Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Hi, and we are here with our guest, today, Nikema Prophet.
\n\nNikema Prophet is a software developer and a community builder based in California. Her current projects are a book to be released in 2022 and hosting conversations on Twitter that highlight Black and neural diversion perspectives in the tech industry.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Nikema.
\n\nNIKEMA: Thank you for having me.
\n\nDAMIEN: What is your superpower and how does you acquire it?
\n\nNIKEMA: My superpower is connecting to people through authenticity. I acquired it by practicing standing up and speaking—speaking from my heart in front of others—and I had to overcome very painful, debilitating shyness to do that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that you started with that because Nikema, it doesn't seem like you're shy and I think even on your Twitter account, you're louder on Twitter than you are in person. I find your presence to be really lovely and a voice that our community so very much needs.
\n\nWhen I found out you were going to be on the show, I got excited and did my research and did all the things we normally do and found a whole bunch of stuff about you. But before we get into those exciting parts, I am a person who loves to orient people to who you actually are to bring you into the room and just tell us a little bit more like, who are you besides the titles? Where are you living? Where are you from? The things that you do for joy, and if your job is one of those things, tell us about those.
\n\nSo just curious, who you are and then we can get into the things that you're doing now.
\n\nNIKEMA: I really do need to sit down at some point and write down the story that I want to tell about myself because I tend to make it very long. So I'm going to try to keep it brief. [chuckles]
\n\nBut I am Nikema Prophet. I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. So I'm definitely a California girl. Sacramento is the capital city, but it's not super exciting [chuckles] as a place to grow up. There's a lot of government jobs. People say, “Get that state job, get those benefits, you're good.” Government jobs, healthcare, a lot of that.
\n\nBut I grew up and probably starting when I was a preteen, like 12, 13, I decided that I wanted to be a professional dancer. So that was my life goal. No plan B. I'm going to be a dancer. I'm going to get out of this small town and I'm going to go dance, which is funny because I did say that I am very shy [laughs] so I always struggled with being self-conscious and I never felt like I was really dancing full out, as we say. I always felt like I was holding back, but I think looking back it was the dance that saved me in a way. It gave me something to look forward to. It got me moving.
\n\nAlso, my parents were really cool about this, looking back on it, because we didn't have money for daily dance classes, or anything like that. They allowed me to go to schools that had arts program. So there were some magnet schools, or something like that that had these art programs.
\n\nSo actually, through elementary school, I was in the so-called gifted and talented program, which is a term that I really dislike [chuckles] because even at the time, it felt like it was segregation. [chuckles] It felt like it was money kind of rerouted to mostly white kids. The way that my program worked, it was we were our own class in a school that had gifted classes and regular classes. So it was very segregated, like we were in our own class, we would go from grade to grade with mostly the same kid, and my class was mostly white kids. I was always one of less than a handful of Black children in the classroom and the surrounding school, the so-called regular kids, were not that demographic. They were busing in the GATE kids to go to this school.
\n\nSo I left the GATE program in middle school to go to a school that had an arts program. I'm a December baby so I was kind of always older than most of the kids, because my birthday was, I don't know where the cutoff was, but if you weren't 5 by a certain day, then you would go the next year to kindergarten, or something like that. So I was always kind of older. I went to this school, left the gate program because I wanted to dance and ended up having just 1 year of middle school because I had one semester of 7th grade, then one semester of 8th grade because I had already had like those gifted classes. The classes were too easy once I got to the regular program.
\n\nSo I decided back then and my parents supported me in going to these schools where I could dance and I could take daily classes for free. I said that I think it saved me because it was regular physical activity. I always struggled with depression and I was even starting to be medicated for it in high school and thinking back, if I didn't have that dance practice, I think I'd probably be in much worse shape than I was and it wasn't good. [laughs]
\n\nSo I think now as an adult, I'm grateful that I did have that one thing that I was holding onto, which was like, I'm going to go dance. Also, it was that one thing where I kind of had to force myself to, even if it wasn't full out, even if it wasn't what I felt was my best effort, it was still performance. It was still putting yourself out there and I still deep down inside knew that I wanted the attention of other people. I didn't want to be hidden and yeah, I didn't want to be hidden away. I wanted to be noticed. I do look back at that as dance is what saved me in my adolescence [chuckles] because I was a bit troubled.
\n\nSo I did have a major accomplishment when after high school, I was accepted to two dance programs. One was Cal Arts in California, California Institute of the Arts, and the other was The Ailey School in New York. Of course, I took The Ailey School because it's Ailey. I don't know if there are dance people who are listening to this, but Alvin Ailey was a very influential Black choreographer and the company, the Alvin Ailey dance company is amazing. So I was super excited to number one, get out of Sacramento and go to where the real dancers are like New York and Ailey School.
\n\nI actually graduated high school early, too. I graduated in January of that year. I didn't even attend my graduation because I hated school so much. Took the rest of that year off and I went to that summer program at The Ailey School, the Summer Dance Intensive. That was cool. I'd never been around so many Black dancers in my life. So many people of color. It was so amazing to me to be in a ballet class and almost everyone was Black. That was not my experience in Sacramento.
\n\nAnd then I was going to start the regular semester in school in that fall and that was fall of 2001 and in fall of 2001, 9/11 happened in New York. So that rocked my world. I was living in New Jersey at the time and getting to school became very difficult and I eventually dropped out. I didn't even finish that first semester of dance school and at the time, I kind of thought, “I'm not giving up on my dream. This is just too hard, but I'm going to go back to dancing. I'll keep it up. I'll dance outside of school.”
\n\nAnd I tried that for a while, but it's really hard to do that just on your own without the support, the structure, and the financial aid because it was a post-secondary program. I took out loans and things like that to attend. So doing that all on your own is pretty hard and that was pretty much the beginning of the end as far as dance was concerned.
\n\nAfter leaving The Ailey School, I never danced full-time again. I came back to it like taking classes here, or there, but I never went back to full-time professional dance career aspirations. So that was a turning point in my life. I didn't want to leave New York. So I tried to struggle through it, tried to make it there. [laughs] Didn't actually work.
\n\nI haven't talked to anything about my tech background, but that was always in the background. Like my no plan, B plan was to be a professional dancer, but I also always really loved computers. We had a computer in the house when I was in elementary school, which looking back that was a privilege. Most people didn't. I think we had internet, AOL. [chuckles] I remember those discs they would send in the mail, we had that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: [chuckles] I remember those, too. Those were fun. [laughs]
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah. I was in a Twitter Space yesterday and Gen Z folks were in there and they were like, “Yo, you used to dial to the internet?” Like, “You actually made a phone call to connect to the internet?” And then – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: I still remember the sound.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah, and then they were like – two of them were talking and they were like, “Girl, Google it, it's crazy.” [laughs] So it's wild to think we used to measure internet in hours and if you had 10 hours and that was up, then you were off the internet. So I thought that was – [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I remember before somebody would, at your house, they would pick up the phone and then disrupt the connection.
\n\nNIKEMA: Oh, oh, right, right, right. Or you have the one phone line for calls and internet so you can't. Yeah. So it was just funny, the generational difference of always knowing high speed broadband and all that. It's like, we measured this in hours [laughs] and we had to dial a number to get on.
\n\nSo we had a computer and internet access when I was pretty young and I would make webpages and stuff back then. Even through middle school and high school, I would take computer classes, but that was not the thing I wanted to do as a career and I was also looking at it more from a visual arts perspective, because I'm also a visual artist.
\n\nBack when I was making webpages, I think the class I was in was web design and I think back then, my web design class in high school was on the colorful IMAX. I think it was the first version of IMAX. So it was web design and back then when I was looking at careers where I could use those skills, I thought it was graphic designer. I didn't know anything about a web developer. I don't even know if they were calling it that back then, but I thought graphic designers were the people who made websites. But I also took a programming class in high school, which was in the math department.
\n\nSo I always had an interest and even in New York, when I left dance school, I wanted to major in computer science, which I turns out, I didn't have the math prerequisites to even get into that major. I ended at pre-calculus. That's all to say that while I wanted to be a dancer and that was my only goal, I always had an interest in tech and I always had an interest in programming. I used to make my own websites back when we did have that home computer and the dial-up internet. So it was always something that in the background I enjoyed doing. It wasn't I want to do this as a career because I was going to be a dancer.
\n\nSo 9/11 was one of those life changing moments and then the next one came. While living in New York, I got pregnant. I was actually in school when I got pregnant and life in New York was kind of almost stabilizing because I had a job as a pharmacy tech. I was in school. My parents—here's another privilege alert. My parents had bought me a co-op, something like a condo. I don't think they call it that out here; I never heard the term until I got to New York. I had a co-op studio apartment where I could walk to my classes at Brooklyn College.
\n\nThings were starting to stabilize and then I got pregnant and I decided okay, I'm pregnant and I'm going to have this baby. So that was another life-changing moment and I was pregnant for a while [laughs] and I decided that I needed to go home. I needed to go be where my loved ones were and I needed that support from my family.
\n\nSo left the apartment vacant [laughs] and went home and while I was pregnant, I started my web developer certificate at the junior college because I was like, “Okay, the dance thing is probably not going to happen and I'm going to have to support a baby now. This is a career that I could do and I could be a mother and I can work from home.” My child was born in 2007 so I was thinking about remote work in 2007 and almost banking on it, like this is what I'm going to do.
\n\nI was enrolled in that web developer program, which was something like a 1-year certificate. You could do the associate’s degree, if you wanted to. But I didn't, I did the certificate and it took me 4, or 5 years to complete that certificate, that 1 year certificate because I was primarily a mom.
\n\nI had a baby in 2007 and then I had a baby in 2008. So for several years, it was chaos and two babies and I don't know. I almost want to say it was almost – I don't know what it's like to have twins, but I felt like it was probably worse to have one a year apart because it's like they're both babies, but they're at slightly different developmental levels and you just have just all babies. [laughs]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I can relate, Nikema because I do have twin boys and it is really hard. Like you're describing here, I had to be with my family and I needed to take time off to be a mom first and it was really humbling. I have a sibling who I’m really close with in age and my mom always says, “I don't know what was worse: having the two of you so close in age, or you having twins.” [laughs] So it's debatable. I don't know. But either way, it is very tough.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah. So I was depending on – and that's part of why it took so long because I was a mom and online classes were not as widely available as they are in 2022 back in 2007. I just took all the online classes I could and the ones that weren't online were hybrids so it was a few hours. My mom would watch the kids, or something while I go to school for a couple hours a week.
\n\nThere was a lot of privilege in my story, but there's also a lot of struggle [chuckles] because I was not diagnosed with ADHD until last year [chuckles] and that's not something that you just catch. It's been with me my whole life. Having to go through school, go through jobs, and all these things with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, it makes the late diagnosis bittersweet. Because you've built up this idea of yourself and oh gosh, I'm going to start crying. But you built up this idea of yourself and it's always been hard, but you didn't know that it wasn't supposed to be that hard, you know?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right.
\n\nNIKEMA: So I'm going to – [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I can relate, too. I'm another late ADHD diagnosed person. I was in my early 20s, but it was like, are you kidding me that I have been unnoticed by all these adults? That no wonder I was struggling to do my homework and get it turned in, literally doing 50 versions of the homework. [chuckles] Staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning as a kid to do you my homework and always struggling with feeling like I wasn't perfect.
\n\nJust, I can really relate and understand, too and I think the tears are welcomed because I know it to be true about our listeners, that folks in our community identify with neurodivergence and where you feel society tells you, it's like this bad thing, it's a label, and it's shaming, but I also feel it could be very liberating. And once you know what is going on in the background of your [laughs] of your life, you can make connections and start to really get into your brilliance. So just want to say thank you for being so honest.
\n\nNIKEMA: That's my superpower, right? It's a double-edged sword because I can't turn it off. Actually, okay, so superpower. Another jump. [laughs]
\n\nI was in some program and they asked what's your mutant superpower, which is that superpower that you can't turn off, I guess. That's probably not the best way to it, but it's a double-edged sword because it's like, I am vulnerable and I am authentic and I can't turn it off. [laughs]
\n\nSo it's pretty much what you see is what you get. Fake until you make it never was good advice for me, because I can't like, if I’m trying to present myself in a way that doesn't align with what I think is true, it just doesn't work. It's going to come off really strange, but I've learned to embrace the tears because I used to fight it so hard. [chuckles] That was also recently that I learned that tears have a function, like you're releasing some endorphins and [laughs] there's an actual physiological reason why it's okay to cry and it's actually helpful. But I used to fight it so hard and I would be so because I couldn't control it and I would just cry in front of everybody and that's why it's a mutant superpower. So it's like, it's not all good. [laughs] There's some downsides to it.
\n\nDAMIEN: So I can speak from the other side of that. As a person who, for decades, successfully repressed my emotions and feelings, it's not better on that side.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd so, the mutant superpower that you can't turn off is a thing that I am actively learning currently and [laughs] it's not easy and it is very, very useful.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, though.
\n\nI did also learn that this is how I connect with people, which is weird. I learned that people appreciate it when you're authentic and raw. I always thought that was so weird. I'm like, “I am such a mess and you're thanking me [laughs] for this.” Like, “Why?”
\n\nSo the ADHD being late diagnosed, I relate to everything that Chanté said. I was always a perfectionist, I was always a procrastinator, and it's like, I would do excellent work, but it would all be done the day before it was due and it would kill me to get it done. Now as an adult and knowing what executive dysfunction is, I'm like, “Oh, okay. I didn't start because I couldn't start [chuckles] and it wasn't my fault.”
\n\nThere's so much kind of shame that you can build up when you're thinking that I should be able to do these things that I can't do. Why can't I do these things and I don't like the high functioning label, but I know it's one that people know. But people who are masking their symptoms in a way, which I think gets girls turn out to end up masking because they're not identified. They weren't looking for that.
\n\nI've said to people before, there was no way in the 80s and 90s, they were going to look at this quiet Black girl and say, “She has ADHD.” No way. No way anybody would've identified that. Girls tend to end up masking. So people are looking at you from the outside and thinking, “This is a so-called normal child.” [laughs]
\n\nCHANTÉ: [inaudible].
\n\nNIKEMA: Oh, yeah. That's another thing, other people's expectations of you. If you're capable of doing harder schoolwork and all of these things, why aren't you capable of just getting started on this assignment? Like you can do it, are you just not trying hard enough? So you start to kind of internalize that judgment of I should be able to do this and that's why an adult, it's so painful to look back at all of those years where it's like I really wasn't getting what I needed. I wasn't getting the support I needed. I wasn't getting the recognition of what's going on that I needed and you think it didn't have to be this hard and it's not supposed to be this hard right now.
\n\nI think I'm also a bit teary because I'm currently undermedicated [laughs] and I'm dealing with that. Even if I can tell myself it's not supposed to be this hard, it's hard to believe that I do deserve that grace, I do deserve to have the support that I need, and that it's okay when you come up against things that you're physically unable to do, because I don't think we think enough of mental struggles as physical struggles, too. But the brain is part of the body, right? We could go on about – see, my brain goes all over the place.
\n\nNow I'm thinking about, [chuckles] how our health insurance works and how I'm paying hundreds of outside of my health coverage to get therapy and how I'm paying thousands of dollars outside of my health coverage to get my teeth taken care of. Teeth are part of the body, right? Isn't your brain part of your body?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhy is that not covered? Modern dentistry again, it's a gift, but it's out of pocket for [chuckles] most of us, if we want to say things like, “The treatments that could save your teeth are cosmetic and not covered for the poorest of people.” That makes me so angry. [laughs] I'm liking that this is a demonstration of an ADHD mind at work because I'm all over the place.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I like it. I welcome it. [laughs] It's completely fine.
\n\nARTY: One thing I'm thinking just listening to this and you talking about authenticity, masking, this pressure in society to wear a mask. In a world that becomes increasingly more fake, propagandized, and all of these things where people become almost not real to us, that seeing you being yourself, being in tune with what's going on with you, with your struggles, being will to cry, being willing to stand up and say what you really feel, and stand up for what you believe in. It's refreshing in a way that you look around where everything kind of becomes not real and you stand out as a beacon of light just by being in alignment with yourself and other people connecting with you. You give them permission to take their own masks off. You give them permission to admit their own struggles. Because we all have struggles, right? We all have these things that are hard for us, but it's easy to fall under that same pressure of having to wear a mask all the time. You being in tune with your authenticity is so powerful in terms of the weight that you influence the world and there's no reason you need to change. You just keep on being your beautiful self.
\n
CHANTÉ: Yes! [laughs]
DAMIEN: Yes.
\n\nNIKEMA: Man. Now I'm crying again, but thank you so much for that. It took so much to step out into the world and say, “Here I am, this is me,” because like I said, I was so shy. I would get butterflies every time I had to raise my hand in class and I would cry. [chuckles] Like I said, when I would do any kind of public speaking, I would be sweating, shaking, crying. It has been a hard road
\n\nDAMIEN: And in a world are emotions are forgotten, making them visible and feeling them and allowing people to see them is a revolutionary act like when you do that, you are setting a path. You're blazing a path for people to follow, to get us to a place where there isn't so. It's not because it's not like people don't have emotions. It's not like you're the only one feeling things. It's just that other people don't have the courage to be seen, to not hide it.
\n\nNIKEMA: I want to thank you for bringing that up because it reminded me of something that I used to say, which is for Black women, we're not seen as soft. [chuckles]] We're not seen as being in need of comforting and protecting. So I used to say that I'm radically soft [chuckles] and again, it's the mutant superpower. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off and just not let it all out. [chuckles]
\n\nBut I do appreciate what Arty said about giving other people permission to be themselves because I've been running a lot of Twitter Spaces lately and I always feel so honored with people say, “Yeah, this is my first time speaking in a space.” Because to me, that means that I have facilitated a safe space for people and I always celebrate them and I always just feel so honored when people are willing to step up and be seen that way because I know how hard it is. But being radically soft, maybe I should put that back in my bio [chuckles] because – [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that. Yes.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that and I can relate, too. I like where you were going with the whole conversation, which I think is worth noting and talking about a minute because I grew up – Nikema, I'm half Black, I'm half Mexican. My mom's an immigrant. So on both sides of my family, I always felt like there was no time to be sensitive, soft, and to be in my feelings. I actually got called out a lot as a kid because I was very emotional and I was like, “I just thought I was highly empathetic and intuitive and what the hell's wrong with y'all?” [laughs]
\n\nBut it was something that I got made fun of and ridiculed for and eventually, tried to suppress, which I felt really impacted my image of myself and what I felt like I should be projecting into the world. And ultimately, my self-confidence to the point where, like you said, you hit a breaking point because I was masking all the time and trying to basically posture myself to be something. I was highly gifted and talented and was in these advanced classes, just like you, and it's interesting.
\n\nI never thought anything about technology. I loved it just like you're describing it and I find myself interwoven into the community, not a technologist, but somebody who's recruiting and focusing on the culture and the talent of those organizations.
\n\nSo one of the things that as I was reading about you and just hoping that we can weave into the conversation is your approach to seeing people for their whole selves. I really appreciated when I read that about you and saw that you had been taking effort, once you got into technology, to build it seemed like a community, or spaces where you were going to allow people to show up and be their full selves, which in my mind and from my point of view, I'm assuming that's like okay, then if we're going to do that, we need to know who you are, the unique identities and intersectionalities that you bring to the conversation, or to the space.
\n\nI'm just curious if we could go down that path a little bit, because I want to know how you've turned these, I put in air quotes, “adversities” into a power, into something that's really great.
\n\nSo tell us about that. How you've used all this stuff about yourself and your experiences thus far to do what you're doing right now, which is you've built a few different products and I'll let you talk about that in technology.
\n\nNIKEMA: I will talk a little bit about my founder journey, I guess, because I did start a company. This was also a part of my coming out because even through college I was always overlooked and pushed aside by stronger personalities. Whenever I had a group project, it was just always a bad time [chuckles] because I never felt insecure about my skills, or my ability to contribute. But I did have a problem with like standing up and like making sure that my contribution was included.
\n\nSo I finished my web developer certificate and I was like, “I'm going to go get a job now,” and I was again, thinking I can get a job as a developer and I can work from home. I could still take care of my babies; still take care of my kids and I could do this job from home. Back then, remote work was not widely available like that. It was almost more of a perk [chuckles] and reserved for more senior people, people who had more career experience than someone who had just be coming in from junior college. But still, that's what I thought I was going to do. I'm going to work from home.
\n\nI was having a hard time finding that kind of job [chuckles] and I was also feeling like I didn't get enough practical hands-on experience in my program. So I started going into the community. I started going to meetups. I volunteered for some nonprofits helping kids, teaching kids tech classes. I joined a startup weekend and I joined this startup weekend as a developer because I'm like, “I'm going to practice these skills.
\n\nI need to get hands-on skills to get a job.” Didn't actually get to do any development work. But this was important because I'd never taken that much time away from my kids before and I took a whole weekend to build a startup. That's what the point of startup weekend was to start with an idea and build a product and pitch it.
\n\nMy team won, which was like, wow. The entrepreneur switch turned on in my brain, it was like, “Oh, my contributions matter, my work matters, and I can start solving these problems that I care about because no one else seems to be working on them.” And when that happened okay yeah, we won.
\n\nVery quickly after we won, the person who came up with the idea for our startup decided that she was CEO. She also decided that she was going to fire the rest of the team, take our prizes, and go off and build a startup for real with a friend of hers and I was like, “That's not going to happen.” [chuckles] I was so angry. I was like, “This is the first weekend I took away from my kids. This was the first time I felt like my work was being recognized and that my work mattered and you're going to try to take that from me? Hell no.” Like, “No, that's not going to happen.”
\n\nI could go on about that story. I don't really want to, but I will say that I alerted the organizers of the startup weekend. We ended up being disqualified, but that was also my origin story as a founder. So I decided to go and try to build something to solve my problems and my company that I ended up forming is called PopSchools. It's still a company. I'm still paying taxes on it. That started my founder journey.
\n\nMy company was eventually called PopSchools and in the first iterations, it was like a school alternative, an alternative school. I was homeschooling my kids at the time. Didn't really feel like they were getting the best experience out of that and I didn't want to put them back in school because I didn't feel like they were getting a good experience in regular school either.
\n\nAt first, it was a school alternative program. Then the later iterations, were a co-working space that is family friendly and age inclusive. So students would be first class citizen in this co-working space. They would have a homeschooling program and an afterschool program for kids who weren't homeschooling and also, a workspace for parents. So kids are taken care of, kids are doing their thing in a rich environment that is accommodating to them, and parents also have a place to do their remote work because I'm still on this remote work thing. I don't want to go sit in an office.
\n\nThat was a later iteration. Then I kind of played with, well, I had ideas about education, school choice, and all of those things. But also, I learned over time that if you are not financially stable, or somewhat financially well off, you don't really have school choice. You could have the best programs in the world, but not everybody is able to homeschool and not everybody was able to give up the services that they're going to get by having their kids in public school.
\n\nIt's really interesting that I felt very vindicated when this pandemic hit, because I'm like, “All of you people who did not understand what I was doing [chuckles] a couple years ago, were just kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, sucks to be you’ when it came to the options for school and homeschooling,” and how homeschooling was not the experience that I thought it should be. All those people who didn't understand got firsthand experience and what it's like to have to homeschool [laughs] and what it's like to not have that support in place for a family that's not in a public school.
\n\nSo I felt vindicated because I'm like, “Now you all understand, you understand what I've been going through,” and I kind of feel like it's a good time to pick up [laughs] that project. Because like I said, a lot of people understand why there's a need for it now and a lot of people also found that school can be damaging this to some kids. Some people found that their kids were better when they didn't have to go to school. They were better mentally. They felt safer. I've heard things about the racial trauma. A lot of schools that are – the school to prison pipeline is a thing I don't want to get into that, but some schools are great and a lot of schools look just like prisons. So being home was a relief for some of these kids.
\n\nDAMIEN: I want to repeat something you said: school can be damaging for children and that there's a trope in this country of children hate going to school, right? Like, “Oh, they're pretending to be sick to not go to school. They’re ditching school. They don't want to be at school.” So the question is why. Nobody stops to ask why are we doing this to our children, putting them environments that they don't want to be in? What harm is that causing? Why don't they want to be in these environments and why are we not asking those questions?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. The question I've been grappling with, and I feel like this is appropriate group of folks to talk to and pose the questions, what is the purpose of school? Is the purpose of school to be childcare because we live in an industrialized society that demands adults to be awake [chuckles] and at work, at their attention at desk at dawn and then to dusk? Is that the purpose of school to be a holding place for those children and/or is it to allow for children to have a social and emotional experience with one another, to learn how to be friends, to learn about people who are their neighbors, and then to build a community? Is it to prepare children for a job that they're going to take in this industrialized world? And if our industrialized world is changing because of the applications of technology and where we're going with the future of work, do they need to be at school all those hours, or is there a new version of what education should look like?
\n\nI think I'm just really frustrated, Nikema because I could really appreciate you saying now people understand. I felt the same way because I was a person who had to stay home with my kids for a while and not have an income. I so much dreamed and longed of a place where I could take my children that was healthy, welcoming, supportive communal while I was working for a few hours to hustle, or do whatever and it could possibly be a stimulating, positive, welcoming, loving experience for my children. But there wasn't one that existed.
\n\nSo I do think timing is everything. Maybe this is the right time to resurrect those efforts. But I love the question of what is the purpose of school and maybe we don't get to answer that question today, but I think it's worth just pinning and asking to you and to the listeners today.
\n\nNIKEMA: I love that because that was exactly what I was pitching [chuckles] back when I was trying to be the WeWork of homeschooling [chuckles] and I could also get into VC, tech startups, and my beats with that because I was watching, I was like, “These white men have very ordinary ideas. They're not really reimagining anything, but they are being funded in the millions.” And I could see – I like to call out that tech claims to be tech leaders and VCs claim to be data-driven. But if we're all data driven, I can look and see that as a Black woman, my chances of being venture funded at the level that I would need to be are slim to none. My chances are slim to none. Black people as a whole get a fraction of a percent of all venture capital.
\nSo why should I put out this energy to pitch my ideas and ask for funding when chances are, I won't get the funding that I need going down that road?
But that was exactly what I was pitching and back then, I would try to get people to imagine if your kids weren't in school, where would they be? Okay, home [chuckles] is an option, but you quickly find out if you start homeschooling after being in school, the world is not set up for children. Children are not welcome everywhere and you might think, “Okay, well, what about the library?” The library is the library. It's not a place for children to be children so much, like you're supposed to be quiet. [laughs] They have children areas. It's not a place where you could be instead of being at school. You could go to a park. You could do that, but it's a park.
\n\nSo if you think about it, if school didn't exist, where in the world, where in your world are kids going to be accommodated? There aren't really places to go and so, that's why I was like, “Homeschooling is very exclusive.” It's not something everybody can do and there are a lot of subgroups and not even subgroups, but maybe the dominating narrative of what a homeschooler is that I did not align with. I don't want to be aligned with religious fundamentalists. I don't want to be aligned with child abusers and people who want to keep their kids home because they want to shelter them from the world and they want to teach them their own worldview. I don't want to be aligned with that.
\n\nIt probably is a good time to look at this again and it's sad in a way because when I needed it the most is when I was really trying to go hard [chuckles] to start this and get backing for it. But my kids are old now. They're teens now and it was really that age group when they were 7, 8, 9, pre-teen where it's like, where do these kids go if they're not in school? What can they do? Because I don't necessarily want to put them in just classes. I want them to have a rich experience and back then, I was really into self-directed education. So I was like, “If it's not a class, if it's not school, there's literally nothing.” [laughs] There's nothing they could do, but go play at the park, or hang out in the library for a few hours, or stay home.
\n\nSo PopSchools was very homeschool, alternative school and it always had that aspect of like, “I need a place where I can go with my kids [chuckles] and I could do my work.” We had some things happen where even outside of being in school, my kids still weren't safe. [chuckles] So I was like, “I need to be somewhere where I know my kids are safe,” but I didn't have any money. I had less than $0 all the time [chuckles] and it's not really a position to start a business from. I did have a network and I did meet some great people in tech, VC, and all that and they were like, “Nikema, go get a job.” [chuckles] Like, “You need to get yourself stable, take care of your needs, and then once you're okay, then you can start working on that business. You can start putting your energy, time, and money into building the business that you want to build.” So I did that. I went out and got a job.
\n\nThere's a lot of extra to story, too that I don't want to get into. But I think it was 2019 when I started this public Twitter job campaign where I was like, “Watch me get this job.” I think I was documenting my job search, documenting my interviews, and counting my rejections and I did finally get a group of offers in, I think it was 2019. Two were for solve engineering. One was for a community manager role. I took the community manager role because I was very much wanting to be in tech and in community. I don't want to be heads down in code because like I said, my superpower is connecting to people. So it's probably not the best use of if we're talking about, like Chanté said, the whole person [laughs] to sit me in front of a computer to code. I want to be in the community with people.
\n\nSo I took that community manager role—it was also the highest base pay out of all my offers—and I connected with the hiring manager. So that was my choice and that was the last offer to come through. I took that and I worked there for a year. I just left in October of 2021. I was there for a year and a couple months and oh, I skipped over a lot. But talking about the whole person and I feel very strongly about equity and inclusion, I will say in tech, but specifically for people who are career switchers and so-called non-traditional technologists. I care a lot about that because I see things from this unique perspective, because I have experience as a student, I have experience as a founder, I have experience as just a parent, a single parent, someone coming from not a lot of money.
\n\nI have this unique way of seeing things and I can see very clearly when things are set up to exploit people and it pisses me off. It makes me angry and I had to learn how to that energy towards something productive. Because just throwing it out there and trying to scream into the void, it seems like no one's hearing you and it seems like the things that you're calling out are just being ignored. That's a waste of energy.
\n\nSo I had to learn how to direct it and I started directing it by helping individuals and again, by showing up. Showing up and speaking, even if nobody's listening. I told myself, “When you're in these rooms with people that you admire and people who are influential, stand up and say something because nobody else has that perspective. Nobody else is going to say what you're going to say.” And it's not even possible. It's not possible for someone to speak your perspective and I had to learn that you need perspective is valuable.
\n\nThere's a quote, and I really need to find out who said it first, [chuckles] but it's, “You're an expert in your own experience,” and I latched onto that because there's a lot of – it's another one of my pet peeves is this imposter syndrome thing. But there's a lot of people who are being made to feel like they're always going to be – I call it the tech underclass. You're always going to be lesser [chuckles] than the people who have degrees, or the people who've been in this for years, and the people who are already in the industry. Here you are coming from your non-traditional background and you're always going to be lesser than those folks, and you are going to have imposter syndrome, get used to it.
\n\nSo I latched onto that idea of I'm an expert in my own experience and my experience is value. Bringing that up and speaking it out is adding value. It is doing a service and it's a service that nobody else can do. That's when I started kind of committing to myself that even if I'm scared, I'm going to stand up and speak. I'm going to let people know that I was in the room.
\n\nBut I do want to talk about imposter syndrome. So my beef with imposter syndrome is not that it's not a thing. I'm sure it is, [chuckles] but I feel like it's being thrust upon us. I feel like people are saying, “You're a woman in tech. You're a person of color in tech. You have no degree and you're trying to get into tech and you're going to feel like a fraud,” and I don't feel like a fraud. Why are you introducing that to me?
\n\nI feel like another part that bugs me about it is that it's shifting the blame onto the individual for some actual, rational reactions to a hostile environment. If you're telling me, “Hey, it's natural, it's normal, it's okay to feel like you don't belong here,” you're kind of saying it's a me thing, but it shouldn't be natural and okay for me to feel like I don't belong here. Like, why is this environment not including me? I'm actually reacting to people pushing me out of this space, discriminating against me, and showing their bias against me. So what's wrong with me for noticing that? What's wrong with me for feeling that?
\n\nWhy aren't we talking about the folks that are making this an unwelcome place? That are making people feel bad? Who are saying out loud, “We don't want you here”? It's putting the attention in the wrong place. Instead of saying, “It should not be okay, that should not be a normal thing to feel like you're not good enough and you don't belong.” I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. This is how I think of it. The actual definition is you are capable and skilled, but you feel like you're a fraud and someone's going to find you out. I don't think that should be normalized and encouraged, and I feel like it is being normalized and encouraged that it's normal to feel like you don't belong here.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, it's rampant and it's something that a lot of people go through. The question is why? What is it about those environments that's causing that and why is it some people experience it and some people don't? I've seen the opposite of imposter syndrome. It is mindboggling.
\n\nARTY: Well, there's this general first principle of whatever we focus on and grows and when we have these concepts, like imposter syndrome, that we learn about as these psychological concepts that then we internalize into ourself. Does that end up amplifying the experience of like if now I'm thinking about, “Oh, I have imposter syndrome and now I'm having all these feelings where I feel this certain way, too.” Do we end up amplifying those things even more by creating that frame and then as you said, normalizing it? It's like, “Oh, it's totally okay that you feel that way. You're supposed to feel that way. That's a normal thing.” Then we end up not dealing with the fundamental problems that we're actually creating these sort of tech, underclass, second class boundaries with the way we sort of create our group collective and we are pushing people out and then normalizing the fact that they feel unincluded.
\n\nI totally agree. It's putting attention on the wrong aspect of things such that as opposed to focusing on the things that are potentially corrective, that might improve the inclusivity of the culture and us thinking about how we're creating mental groups and how we can create more inclusive mental groups, instead we're normalizing the exclusion.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah. I almost titled my book, The Underclass, [chuckles] and I decided against that because again, I want to be positive [chuckles] and I'm probably still going to say some of the same things that I plan to say in that book. But this whole thing about – and this is part of the rage [laughs] that I have to redirect is because I went through a coding bootcamp that cost $30,000, up to $30,000 of potential future income for a lot of the students that attended that school and I saw the messages coming from the leadership and the people who were really gathering these people up and funneling them into bootcamps.
\n\nFirst off, I saw a lot of just wrong, [ chuckles] like wrong advice being given out and I saw a lot of cultural incompetency because a lot of these bootcamps are run by white men and a lot of the students are not that. So I'm like, “Here I am with this perspective, I'm a founder, I've talked to investors, I've been a student. I know how to code.” [chuckles] From that perspective of, I have a viewpoint that most students don't. So I'm seeing absolute wrong advice being given out. Like when we're talking about looking for that first job, your first job at tech, you're so-called breaking into tech, which I hate that term. We're not breaking in, let us in. [chuckles] Why should we have to break in?
\n\nDAMIEN: Open the door.
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah. There are so many jobs that are not being filled. Why? Why are we gatekeeping? But wrong advice, like, “It's a numbers game. You might have to do hundreds of applications.” That's giving people wrong advice [chuckles] and it's giving people advice that you yourself never did. I know for a fact. These are people who have strong networks –
\n\nOh, most egregious wrong advice. Part of the problem is these people were better marketers than people who could run a school. But there was a thread on Twitter. I remember seeing it. It was a young Black woman. She was graduating high school, she was going to college, and I think trying to decide about what college to go to and someone comes into this thread and recommends Lambda School to her and I'm like, “Absolutely fucking not. How could you?” Like, “How could you?” [chuckles] Like, “How could you tell a Black woman with all of this going for herself, who's going to be on a path to like –” I don't know.
\n\nI'm just saying you're suggesting something very low value and especially low value to a Black woman because the people who ran that school did not have the cultural competency to give advice to anyone other than white men, I'd say. Maybe abled white men. [laughs] I don't know, but just wrong advice. A lot of anti-intellectualism anti-degrees like, “Oh, this is better than a degree education.” Absolutely not. Credentials matter more for people of color, for people who are minoritized in tech. Your certificate from an unaccredited school means absolutely nothing compared to a degree in computer science.
\n\nSo it's rage-inducing for me to see that people are being exploited and pointed towards these programs that are not going to do what they're advertised to do for them and they're not even capable of knowing that they're giving the wrong advice. I opted out of career services when I was in a bootcamp because I saw the kind of advice they were giving and that's part of my, I guess, I'm going to call it activism today is I really want people to know what's really up. I want them to not devalue themselves and not allow others to devalue them. Because these people who know good and well what's up, they know good and well how things work, are leading them astray and they're leading them into jobs that are going to underpay them and they're not going to be satisfying and they are misleading. Misleading in what it takes to get to where we're all trying to go.
\n\nI would just like to say to whoever's listening to this and you're maybe getting into tech, don't be discouraged, but also, do your due diligence. Before you start agreeing to pay anything that's tens of thousands of dollars, even thousands of dollars, see who these people are, see what the outcomes are, and talk to the students who have gone through that program. Talk to the students who weren't successful. Talk to the ones who were successful because a lot of these success stories are skewed.
\n\nWhen I went to bootcamp, it was better than free for me. I never had an income share agreement. I had a scholarship. I had a stipend. So I was actually getting paid to attend. I always like to say that you could take my story and make it look like a bootcamp success story, but you would not be seeing the 20 years before that when I started to learn how to code. You could tell that story in a way that doesn't show that part. You could say, “Nikema was this single mom with no job who joined Lambda school did 15 weeks, then got a six-figure job the next year.” That would be true, [chuckles] but that would not be a Lambda success story. That is, Nikema worked her ass off [chuckles] for decades before Lambda was even thought of to get to where she is today and I feel like that story is left out.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Nikema, that is such an amazing point to make and I want to run the balance of the time we have left, but I just want to say – I think we have a few minutes to get into reflections, but I just want to say before we do that, that having conversations about diversity and inclusion in tech doesn’t means really nothing to me. We need to have conversations about equity and accessibility because equity is actually what you're kind of describing here.
\n\nWe have to be able to see the whole person and this is why sometimes it's important to call out the institutional and systemic racism that's widely pervasive in the industry and beyond that is happening all over our country, all over our world. and it is such, I hope a deeper conversation that needs to be had. I'm here for it if you want to come back, or we can continue the conversation on Twitter Spaces, or something. I'm there for that, invite me. But there's a lot here and I really appreciate you giving that advice because we do need to have open, honest, authentic conversations show who you really are.
\n\nI'm looking forward to getting folks' reaction, but I really want to move us into reflection, if that's okay, just to respect everyone's time.
\n\nNIKEMA: That's okay with me.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Anybody want to go first? Anybody, Arty, Damien, you have a reflection?
\n\nDAMIEN: I can go first.
\n\nReally, the thing I'm going to be taking away from this—and Nikema, thank you so much for joining us here—is that connecting through authenticity and the power of that. It's not the first time I've heard words of that nature, or that idea, but getting to witness it in-person has been a really powerful experience and that's going to be something that sticks with me for a while. So thank you.
\n\nARTY: Yeah, I think you gave a very good demonstration of your superpower here, though of just being yourself, standing up, and saying what you believe and what you think and stuff. I can even see how those things just affected me and affected people in this room and being able to connect with you so that we could have a very real conversation.
\n\nI think the thing that I'm going to be taking away from this conversation is you talked about even when you're scared, you stand up and speak and you're going to let people know that you're in the room and that you are an expert in your own experience and nobody else has your unique perspective. I feel like that's something that all of us have so much power in ourselves to stand up and speak in our own authenticity for our own experiences and be in the room. Even when we're scared, to go after and do it anyway because by doing so, too it gives other people permission to do the same. It creates opportunity for other people to take their mask off and create space for them to be themselves and for them to stand up. It's kind of like a chain reaction that happens. So if we can all start to do that and all start to create space for people to do that, that's the kind of stuff that one person at a time changes the world.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Thank you for those. I'm really appreciating, Nikema your authenticity and your rawness. I think it's beautiful. It just really resonated with me. So I felt like I was listening to a version of myself, just listening to your story.
\n\nWhat I think I wrote down, the aspiration that you had about children and making sure that they feel like where in our world are they first class citizens. That really stuck out to me because I think that our youth is our future and I'm really committed in this portion of my life to building and doing whatever I can to make sure we build a future that is inclusive, equitable, and accessible to everyone. I think we’ve got to lean in and look at our youth and I hope that they're learning from some of our – not necessarily failures, but some of our places in our lives as adults where we fall short of kind of build world that's fair and awesome.
\n\nSo I really want to take that and do something with it and I'm really inspired. Thank you.
\n\nNIKEMA: Thank you for letting me speak like, I can go on and on, so. [chuckles] I appreciate it.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Thank you. Do you have any reflections before we close off the conversation?
\n\nNIKEMA: Yeah, just last thing. I just wanted to say thank you again and I really appreciate and I have come to enjoy my story. It’s because of the things you told and it’s because I recognize that it is how I connect with others and that is the good side of the mutant superpower is that I do get to make real connections with other people.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.
","summary":"Nikema Prophet talks about authenticity and power, seeing other people for their whole selves, facilitating safe spaces, becoming a founder, thoughts on education and homeschooling, and how impostor syndrome should not be normalized.","date_published":"2022-02-02T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/030eedb5-edc7-49dc-b964-a52ccb046648.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62670557,"duration_in_seconds":4047}]},{"id":"58497e8d-949c-4c7b-b8b7-38584c092283","title":"268: LGBTQA+ Inclusion","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/lgbtqa-inclusion","content_text":"01:56 - Episode Intro: Who is Casey Watts?\n\n\nHappy and Effective\n\n\n02:25 - “Gay” vs “Queer”\n\n\nCultural vs Sexual\nBlack vs black\nDeaf vs deaf\n\n\n06:11 - Pronoun Usage & Normalization\n\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 266: Words Carry Power – Approaching Inclusive Language with Kate Marshall \nSpectrum of Allyship\nAmbiguous “They/Them”\n\n\n16:36 - Asking Questions & Sharing\n\n\nRing Theory\nDon’t Assume\nTake Workshops\nFind Support\nSet Boundaries\nOvergeneralization\nDo Your Own Research – Google Incognito\n\n\n28:16 - Effective Allyship\n\n\nReactive vs Proactive\nParenting\nCalling Out Rude Behavior – “Rude!”\nOvercoming Discomfort; Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable\nRecognizing Past Mistakes: Being Reflective\n\n\nStratejoy\n\nCelebrate Progress\nApologize and Move On\n\n\nMicroaggressions: Prevention & Recovery\nhappyandeffective.com/updates\n\n\n\nReflections:\n\nMannah: The people on this show are all willing to start and have conversations.\n\nCasey: I will make mistakes. I will find more support.\n\nMandy: Reflection is always a work in progress. It’s never done. Keep doing the work. People are always evolving and changing.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript: \n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.\n\nCASEY: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 268. I'm Casey, and I'm here with co-host, Mannah.\n\nMANNAH: How's it going? I'm Mannah and I'm here with Mandy Moore.\n\nMANDY: Hey, everybody. It’s Mandy and today, I'm excited because we are doing a panelist only episode. So our host and panelist, beloved Casey Watts, is going to take us through Casey did a LGBTQ panel for Women Who Code Philly a couple weeks ago and it went really great. He offered to do a show to talk about the subject in more depth on the show. So we're here to do that today. \n\nSo without further ado, why don't you give us a little intro, Casey?\n\nCASEY: Sure. I'm going to start by talking about who I am a little bit and why I'm comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. My name's Casey, I'm a gay man, or a queer man. We can get into the difference between gay and queer [chuckles] in the episode. I live in D.C. and I really like my community groups that I'm in to be super inclusive, inclusive of people of all kinds of backgrounds and all the letters in LGBTQIA especially.\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. So right there, you just gave us an in. Can we get into the difference between gay and queer?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I love it. \n\nPeople lately use the term “queer” as an umbrella term that represents all the letters in LGBTQIA especially younger people are comfortable with that term, but it is reclaimed. Older people, it used to be a slur and so, like my cousin, for example, who's older than me hesitates to use the word queer on me because she knows that it used to be used to hurt people. \n\nBut queer people like this as an umbrella term now because it is just saying we're not the norm in gender identity, or sexual, romantic orientation, that kind of stuff. We're not the norm. We're something else. Don't assume that we're the norm and then it's not describing all the little nuances of it. It's just like the umbrella term. So I'm definitely queer and I'm gay. \n\nAnother distinction that I really like to make and that's cultural versus specifically what the term means. So I'm gay and that I'm attracted to other men, but I don't hang out at gay bars and watch RuPaul's Drag Race like the mainstream gay man does in media and in life. I know a lot of people who love that I'm not comfortable there. I don't like it. I think drag queens are fun I guess, but they're also really catty and mean and I don't like that, and I don't want that to rub off on me personally. Instead, I hang out in groups like the queer marching band which has a ton of lesbian women, bisexual, biromantic people, asexual people, intersex people, and trans people and has all the letters in LGBTQIA and I love that inclusive community. That's the kind of group I like to be in.\n\nSome of the gay men there talk about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it's like a minority of that large group. I love being in the super inclusive cultures. So I'm culturally queer, but I'm sexually romantically gay. So depending on what we're talking about, the one is more important than the other. \n\nI have a story for this. Before the pandemic, I got a haircut at a gay barber shop. It's gay because D.C. has a lot of gay people and there's a gym above the barber shop that's pretty explicitly gay. They cater to gay people. They have rainbows everywhere. \n\nI got my hair cut and this woman just kept making RuPaul’s Drag Race references to me that I didn't get, I don't get it. I don't know what she's saying, but I know the shape of it and I told her I don't like that and I'm not interested in it. Please stop. She didn't because she was assuming I'm culturally gay, like most of her clientele and it was really annoying and she wasn't seeing me, or listening to what I was saying and I was not seen. But she's right I was gay, but I'm not gay culturally in that way. \n\nDoes that make sense? That's kind of a complex idea to throw out at the beginning of the episode here. A lot of people take some time to get your head around the cultural versus sexual terms.\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. That is interesting especially because with so many identities, I guess that’s true for every identity where there's a cultural element and then there's some other thing. For instance, I’m a Black man and no matter where I hang out, or what I’m interested in, I’ll always be a Black man, but there is associated with both masculinity and specifically, Black masculinity.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and I like the – lately, I've been seeing lowercase B black to mean a description of your skin color and uppercase B Black to mean a description of the culture and I like that distinction a lot. It's visual. \n\nDeaf people have been using that for years. My aunt’s deaf so my family has a deaf culture. I'm a little bit deaf culture myself just by proxy, but I'm not deaf. I'm capital D Deaf culturally in amount. Her daughter, who she raised, my deaf aunt, is culturally Deaf way, way more than the average person, but not fully because she's not deaf herself. \n\nSo there's all spectrum here of cultural to experiencing the phenomenon and I was happy to see, on Twitter at least, a lot of people are reclaiming capital B black. And for me, it's capital Q Queer and lowercase G gay. That's how I distinguish into my head—culturally queer and I'm sexually gay.\n\nMANNAH: So one of the things, I've been thinking about this since our intro and for those of you listening, our intro is scripted and as simple as it was like, “Hey, my name is Mannah,” and passing it off to Mandy. Generally, when I introduce myself – I just started a new job. I introduced myself with my pronouns, he/him, because I think it's more inclusive and I want to model that behavior and make sure that people around me are comfortable if they want to share their pronouns. I do think that this is championed by the queer community and as a member of that community, I'd just love to hear your take on people being more explicit with that aspect of their identity. \n\nCASEY: I love the segment. Pronouns is a huge, huge topic in this space lately especially. I like to start from here, especially with older audiences that we used to have mister and miss in our signatures and in the way we address letters and emails, and that's gone away. So including pronouns is a lot like just saying mister, or miss, but we've dropped the formality. I'm glad to be gone with the formality, but we still need to know which pronouns to use and it's nice to have that upfront. I like and appreciate it. I try to include pronouns when I remember it and when I'm in spaces where that's a norm. I like to follow that for sure every time there. \n\nBut I'm not always the first person to introduce it. Like if I was giving a talk and there were 30 older white men in the audience who've never heard of this idea, I might not start with he/him because I want to meet them where they're at and bring them to the point where they get it. So I'm not always a frontrunner of this idea, but I love to support it, I love to push it forward, and help people understand it and get on board. \n\nIt's like there's different stages of allyship, I guess you could say and I really like helping people get from a further backstage to a middle stage because I don't think enough people are in that space and there are plenty of people getting people who are in the middle stage to the more proactive stage. Like, “We should use pronouns!” You hear that all the time in spaces I'm in. \n\nIt's possible I can get pushback for that kind of thing, like even meeting people where they're at, and that frustrates because I want to be effective. I don't want to just signal that I'm very progressive and doing the right things. I want to actually be effective. I give workshops on this kind of thing, too. That's where we're coming from for the today's talk.\n\nMANDY: I think on the last show, it might have been Kate Marshall who said that normalizing pronouns is really important to do, but not just when there's an obvious person in the room who you're not sure. Maybe we even started off on the wrong foot on the show by not saying, “Hi, I'm Mandy, my pronouns are she and her.” Just adding that in to normalize it would be a really good step, I think. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, love it. Here's where I like to come with my role. Say, “Plus one, I love that idea. Let's do it now.” I like to activate the idea once it's in the room, but it takes someone brave to bring it up in the first place and it's a different amount of social energy, maybe in a different head space you have to be in to be that first person. But being the second is also very important and I like to help people understand that, too. If you're the second person, that's still being helpful. Maybe you can become the first person in some groups, but I want to celebrate that you're the second person even. That's great. \n\nYeah, I think that's a good change we could do.\n\nMANNAH: You mentioned allyship and I think that that is why am so proactive in introducing myself with pronouns because I do present as a traditional man. Well, maybe not traditional, but I present as a man and I have the ability to deal with some of that pushback. \n\nWe talk about superpowers on the show. I feel like one of my superpowers is I am willing to engage in those conversations, even if they are difficult.\n\nCASEY: Mm hm.\n\nMANNAH: So I can use my powers for good by starting that conversation perhaps, or starting to build that norm. Whether, or not I am doing it for anyone in particular, it is important for me to do it wherever we are. So I think that just wherever we can make spaces more inclusive with the way we can conduct ourselves and our language, it's important.\n\nCASEY: I have a framework to share that's kind of related to that. \n\nSo there's a spectrum of allyship—that's my title for it anyway—that goes from an active detractor all the way over to an active supporter of an idea. In this case, the active supporter would be getting pronouns to happen in a space where they're not happening. And then in the middle, maybe you're neutral, not doing anything. In the middle on either side, there's a passive – like you're not doing anything, but you kind of support the idea. You're kind of against the idea, but you're not taking any action. And then on the active part, there's even a split between and being proactive and reactive. \n\nSo for pronouns, I guess the way I'm self-describing here is I'm a reactive pronoun person. For better, or worse, that's where I'm at on that spectrum and that's where I like to help move things along. So I can talk to people who are more maybe passively against the idea because I'm not so far on the right.\n\nI like to use the spectrum for another purpose, which is moving people from one space to the next is valuable and often invisible. If you can get someone to be loudly against pronouns to just be quiet, that's a step forward. You've persuaded them a little bit to go in that direction, or if they’re there to neutral, or neutral to passively supportive, but quiet about it. A lot of this kind of progress with people who aren't active supporters is invisible and that can be really frustrating for people; it feels like you're not making any progress. \n\nSo for people who are allies and want to be allies, there's a step forward you can do for yourself, which is getting yourself from being reactive to being proactive. But you're not just helping the people in the room, but helping people who could be in the room, or might be in the future. Reactive to proactive.\n\nMANDY: I've been doing that a lot with just actually referring to everybody as they/them no matter if I already know how they present, or not. That, to me, is just the most inclusive way to refer to people in general.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, that's generally a safe practice, but there are people who don't want to be called they/them.\n\nMANDY: Hmm.\n\nCASEY: For example, I have some friends who… Let's imagine a trans man who wants to be considered he/him, they are very invested in this and they want the – If you keep calling them, they/them, even if they correct you, “He/him is my pronouns,” then they're going to be upset about that, pf course. But it is a safe, starting point because the ambiguous they is just generally, it’s good grammar, the APA endorses it even. You're allowed to use they when it's ambiguous by grammar rules. But if you know someone's pronouns and it isn't they/them, it's generally better to use those because they prefer it.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. That's what I meant. If somebody says to me, “I would prefer you call me she/her, he/him.: But when I'm first, like if I'm even talking to say my dad and I'm talking about work, I would be like, “I have a friend, they did this.”\n\nCASEY: Yeah. That's ambiguous day and that's perfectly appropriate there.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. But as far as like addressing somebody on a regular basis who wants to be referred to as one, or the other, I have no problem doing that. I've just been training myself to use ambiguous terms because I see and I think it's wonderful. My daughter's 12 and almost all of her friends are non-binary. So when I meet them, or I'm talking about her friends for me, it's just more, I don't want to say easy. I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing it, like taking the easy way out, but I'll just be like, do the they/them stuff to have the conversation and then once I find out more, we can transfer over to the he/him, she/her as I'm corrected, or being asked to do one, or the other. \n\nCASEY: Right, right. It's definitely safer to assume you don't know than to assume someone's gender based on how they looked, for sure and the ambiguous they is perfect for that. Even for people who use they/them as pronouns, there's a switch in my head at least—you probably feel it, too—from ambiguous to specific. Like now I know they/them is their pronouns.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've had no problem. When my daughter has brought new people over, who I know are non-binary, I will say to them even if I already know, because she's told me, I'll be like, “What pronouns do you prefer?” And every single time these are 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, they're like, “Thank you for asking.”\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Because a lot of times, I feel it's not very accepted yet. So when I hear, or when they hear me say, “How would you like me to refer to you?” They smile so big.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, you’re treating them like the individual person they are.\n\nMANDY: Exactly, and they're like, “Thank you,” and now I'm known as the cool mom. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Ah. Great. [laughs] \n\nYeah. If I could snap my fingers and change a behavior of mine, that would be one. I would consider everyone's pronouns unknown until they tell me and it also varies by context. I don't even want to trust secondhand. Like if Mandy, you said he for Mannah before I met him, I wouldn't assume that's his pronouns. If maybe you are assuming, or maybe you heard it from someone and they were assuming, or maybe based on context, it's different. I want to hear it from the person, ideally.\n\nMANDY: Yes.\n\nCASEY: I also don't necessarily want to go around asking for pronouns actively all the time. I'd rather us offer them upfront, or have them in our usernames, or something so it's less verbiage in the air about it. I like it to be normalized. We don't have to think about it. That's a dream state. \n\nBut for now, I'd rather ask people directly than assume anything. But it's a hard habit because I've been trained from school and everything, since a young age, to assume someone’s gender and not to use they at first. That's what we've been trained and I love this trend of untraining that. Ambiguous they is accepted and we should start with that. \n\nMANDY: I love seeing people proactively put pronouns in their Zoom profiles, or their Zoom names and at conferences, I love the conferences having badges, or stickers. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nMANDY: I love that.\n\nCASEY: It's helpful.\n\nMANNAH: I want to change directions slightly and go back to something you said about the spectrum and how we move people – I don't remember the exact words you used, the two polar opposites.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANNAH: But how to move people towards a more inclusive mindset, let's say and wherever you are on that spectrum, you might not know how to move forward and the way to kind of deal with that, you might have questions. I just want to hear from you how you would like to be approached with questions around how do you feel about pronouns, or whatever it might be relating to your culture, or your, I guess, I'm going to say sexual identity. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nMANNAH: People are unsure how can they approach you with questions in a way that's respectful and a way that will allow them to learn more about you? \n\nCASEY: Good question. I feel like you're reading my mind a bit here. \n\nI want to start with another framework that you might have heard of. It's the circles of grief Ring Theory. Like if someone just lost their parent, then you need to pour support into that person who's closest to them and if you're outside like a more distant family member, or a friend, pour support in and then the grief gets stumped out. That's the framework, generally. So there's a lot of rings. People who are closer to it are affected more directly and people who are outside are affected more indirectly. \n\nThat applies to asking people personal things, too. So I'm directly affected by being queer and I've been discriminated against and people have said bad things to me before. To ask me about it and to bring up those feelings could harm me in some way so you can't just assume everybody's comfortable talking about their experience. Like, “Tell me about how you feel about your dead mother.” It wouldn't be sensitive either because they're experiencing the pain directly, but sometimes people do want to talk about that and they're comfortable, they processed it, and they want to help spread the word. \n\nSo I'm one of those people; you can ask me anything. Even if you don't know me, you can DM me on Twitter. Anyone listening, ask me a question about queer things. I'll point you to a resource, or answer it myself. I'm offering because I'm comfortable at this point. But a lot of people aren't and, in that case, you could ask if someone's comfortable, that's not a bad idea, or you could ask people who are in further circles out. \n\nLike you don't need to ask a queer person about queer experiences if you can read about it in an article online, or watch a documentary, or talk to friends who have other queer friends and they know some things about it. It's not as good as secondhand experience hearing from someone with firsthand experience, but you're causing less harm by making the ideas come up again. \n\nSo you have a range of ways you can find out more about what it's like to be queer and I encourage you to think about all the different ways you can learn about a thing. You don't have to depend on the person who has [chuckles] this negative experience to do it. \n\nAnother way you can learn more is by doing workshops, like the ones that I facilitate. So I was thrilled to have a good audience at Women Who Code Philly, actively asking question and learning things, and that's a space where you're supposed to ask questions and learn.\n\nI've heard of some people have peers they can talk to like peer support; people you can go to, to ask questions like that. Like my cousin asks me questions sometimes about her kids and that's like peers. Some companies actually have support groups like a weekly, or monthly meeting for people in the company to ask these questions that they have [laughs] and they don't know where to ask them and they can all learn from it. \n\nI've seen in some Slacks, there's a Diversity 101 channel in one of the Slacks I'm in people can ask questions like when would you, or would you not use this word? That's a space dedicated to asking questions like that and if someone like me wants to go in and contribute, I can answer questions there, but I don't have to. I know I'm welcome to, and I know I'm not pressured to, and that's a great middle ground and that's a lot of options. You’ve got to figure out what works for you, who you have around, who you can offer the support to, and who you can ask for the support from. Both directions.\n\nMANDY: It's great to have someone like you offering to do that and take on because it is of emotional labor and sometimes when people are curious, I know for me as being bisexual, some people are just like trying to – they're asking out of curiosity, but it's more like, “Give me the dirty details,” or something like that. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nMANDY: Sometimes it's like, “We just want to know because I don't – so I want to know what it's like for you,” and I'm like, “I'm not going to share just because –” right now, I am in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Normally, if I was in a single state, a lot of people just try to ask questions that sometimes can be, I find it more inappropriate and they want to know because they're interested in the salacious details, or something like that.\n\nCASEY: Right.\n\nMANDY: That rubs me the wrong way and I can usually tell when somebody is asking, because they're genuine, or not.\n\nCASEY: There's a big difference between asking to get to know you as a person in the context you're in with the background you have versus asking for salacious gossip. [laughs]\n\nMANDY: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: And the one is much more kind than the other. It sounds like you've done a good job setting boundaries in these situations saying, “That's not appropriate. I'm not answering that. Sorry about it,” or something like that.\n\nMANNAH: Not sorry.\n\nCASEY: Not sorry.\n\nMANDY: Well, in the same token, it's something that bothers me, too because I feel like a lot of times, I just don't even tell people that I'm bisexual.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Because it's easier to not answer the questions because once you open that can of worms, then everybody comes at you and wants to know this and wants to know details. “Have you ever done this?” Or, “Have you ever done that?” It rubs me the wrong way again. \n\nCASEY: Right. \n\nMANDY: So sometimes I feel almost resentful. I feel resentful that I can't be my full self because it causes people to just ask and the whole conversation, or the whole time I spend with them is focused on this one thing and it's like for me, it's just not a big deal. \n\nCASEY: Right, right, right. Like on my Twitter profile—I like to use this as an example—I list out like 10, 15 things about myself on my Twitter profile and there is one little rainbow flag emoji in there at the end and I'd rather you talk about any of the other things probably. I'm willing to share that I'm queer and rainbow I affiliate with, but so much more to me, [chuckles] I'd rather you learn about me before that. \n\nMANDY: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: But it's the newest, novelist thing to those people who don't otherwise get exposed to it. They fixate on it sometimes and that, they might not realize, can be harmful. It can hurt people like you. It does hurt people. [chuckles]\n\nMANDY: It absolutely does. It makes me uncomfortable. So it's not an aspect that I talk about much, especially living in rural/suburban Pennsylvania. It's something that I just kind of, aside from my internet friends and tech community, that a lot of people still don't know about me. \n\nCASEY: Right. I can imagine not wanting to share. I used to not share my sexuality either in a lot of contexts and still when I go somewhere like the south, if I go to a place that has more bigotry around, I'm not holding my partner's hand there. I might get attacked even, that happens still in certain environments, they don't get it. \n\nOkay, I want to acknowledge that people asking these questions might have good intentions and they're making a mistake and I want to explain what I think the mistake is. \n\nMANDY: Yes.\n\nCASEY: People want to be treated as individuals, but you can go too far in that extreme and treat someone like an individual and ignore their background. Like it doesn't matter that you've been queer. It doesn't matter that you're Black. It doesn't matter, I'm just going to treat you like an individual. Ignoring all this background is its own kind of overgeneralization in a way is ignoring that background and context. And then there's another way you can do an exaggeration, which is only focusing on that background in context and ignoring the person's individual traits and their individual experiences. \n\nThe best thing to do is to treat them like an individual who has this context and background putting them both together. So maybe these people are trying to understand you better by understanding this context. Maybe—I'm being very generous— [chuckles] some of these people are probably not this, but some people honestly want to know more about your context to understand you and that's thoughtful. They're just going about it in a way that's not the most helpful, or kind to you and I appreciate those people. But then there are other people who want to use the background and context to overgeneralize and just treat you as a member of this group, a token member, and that is a problem, too. \n\nSo it's like two ingredients and if you put them together, that's the best and a lot of people focus on one, or the other too much. The individual experience versus the group background context experience.\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. That was really well put. I do think that as I said earlier, I'm someone who is very willing to have these. However, the downside of that is that becomes who you're and instead of the entire human being and the other – to take it a step further, some people are uncomfortable with that identity, or uncomfortable thinking about those things. Think about the discrimination that you might face and rather than confront it, or address it, they would rather just not deal with you, or limit their interact. \n\nCASEY: Right, yeah.\n\nMANNAH: So this is not a question for Casey, this is just something to the group. How can we navigate that and wanting to being willing to share of ourselves, but recognizing that there is some social backlash that can come from that?\n\nCASEY: I think my number one thing I want allies to understand is they can support each other in being allies and it can take work to be comfortable talking to each other, to support each other. You don't have to just depend on the queer people to learn queer about things. If one of you learns and one ally learns, they can teach another ally the concept, or the idea, or share how to navigate it. \n\nI did a Twitter poll for this, actually. Not a huge sample size, but still. A lot of people only have 1 to 3 people they can talk to about things like this. That's very few and they might not cover all the different situations. \n\nSo that's my number one thing to help people navigate it is get so support, find support, be support for other people and you'll get support in return for that, too. That's your homework. Everyone, write this down. Find 10 people you can talk to about inclusivity related topics, 10 people.\n\nMANDY: And Google exists for a reason. So always, when things come up, I like to Google and I've gotten push back about that several times. “Well, I don't want to put that stuff into my search engine because then all of a sudden, I start getting gay targeted ads,” or something.\n\nCASEY: That's true. That's a real concern. [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: And I’m, “It’s not –” Well, hello, incognito mode.\n\nCASEY: Right. \n\nMANDY: Thank you, everyone. That's a thing. Use it. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and you don't have to feel icky using incognito mode. You can use it because you don't want to ads tracking you. \n\nMANDY: Exactly.\n\nCASEY: Some people use it for everything. They never use the regular browser mode because they don't want the tracking. It's work to learn things about other people and so, that's why I like to focus on the support part. If you get support from people, maybe you can both be looking up stuff and sharing articles with each other, and that's really multiplying the effects here. \n\nMANDY: Absolutely.\n\nMANNAH: So we started homework for allies. I think now it might be a good time to talk about what makes good ally. We talked a little bit about how it can feel voyeuristic. Mandy, you talked about how people asking questions can sometimes feel a little picky and we talked about some better ways to asking questions. But are there any other ways that either both, all of us would like to see people be more effective ally?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I want to call back to an earlier point. I want to see more people switch from being reactive to being proactive. To being the first voice. Me included, honestly. Whenever you can get away with it and whatever helps you be proactive, do those things, which might be the support thing I keep talking about. Getting support to be more proactive, becoming accountable to people. \n\nIf you're already an ally, I'm assuming you're being reactively supportive some of the times. A lot of the people I talk to, who consider themselves allies, would agree, but taking that next step. And there's a different spectrum for each issue, like pronouns is one. Pronouns being shared in meetings. How proactive, or reactive are you for that? I don't even know. There are thousands of things [chuckles] that you can do to become more proactive.\n\nMANDY: I would like to say for allies, teaching our children love and not hate. I see a lot of nastiness coming from children and that comes from parents. It's really sad to see sometimes the amount of people who don't – they just spew hate and they're like, “I'm not referring to this person as a pronoun.” Like, “They/them, no. They're a this, or they're –” \n\nIt saddens me to no end when you are around children to model nasty behavior and I think if you are not the person doing that yourself and you're around it, and you see somebody say something and say, “That's not okay, don't. Do you understand how you sound? Do you understand what you're saying? Do you understand that you're having an effect on everyone around you by giving your nasty opinions and that kind of thing?”\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I've got a one word, one liner thing that I like to pull out and I'm proud every time I say it. “Rude,” and I can walk away. It can happen in the grocery store. Someone can say something. It doesn't matter the nuance, what's going on and how I might explain it to them in fuller language. I can at least pull that one word out, rude, and walk away and they are called out for it. I'm proud whenever I can call someone out.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: I don't always do it, though. The stakes can seem high and it takes practice. \n\nSo this is homework, too. If you see someone and saying something hurtful to another person, it's your responsibility if you dare claim this to defend the other person and call the person rude, or however you would say the same thing. Say something. \n\nMANDY: Yeah, say something. \n\nMANNAH: I think that that can be really hard for allies.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANNAH: And if I had one piece of advice for allies, it would be that sometimes allyship is uncomfortable and that is something that you have to navigate. You can't pick and choose when you're going to… Well, that's not true. There's some discretion, but recognize that being a part-time ally, or a tourist in that space has an effect on people and not confronting your own insecurities, or your own feelings limits your effectiveness in allyship.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It can be a deep question to ask yourself what made me hesitate that one time and what can I do to not hesitate helping next time? You can journal about it. You can talk to friends about it. You can think about it. Doing something more than thinking is definitely more helpful, though. Thinking alone is not the most powerful tool you have to change your own behavior. \n\nYeah, it is uncomfortable. One thing that helps me speak up is instead of focusing on my discomfort, which is natural and I do it, for sure, I try to focus on the discomfort of the other person, or the person directly affected by this and I really want to help that person feel seen, protected, heard, defended. If you think about how they're feeling even more, that's very motivating for me and honestly, it helps in some ways that I am a queer man, that I have been discriminated against and people have been hateful toward me that I can relate when other people get similar experiences. \n\nIf you haven't had experiences like that, it might be hard to rally up the empathy for it. But I'm sure you have something like that in your background, or if not, you know people who've been affected and that can be fuel for you, too. People you care about telling you stories like this and it is uncomfortable. [chuckles] Getting comfortable with that discomfort is critical here.\n\nMANNAH: One of the things that is very uncomfortable is, I think that as we go through life, we all grow is being reflective on the times when maybe we’re not inclusive, or maybe were insensitive. At least being able to those situations, I feel like is a great first step.\n\nCASEY: Mm hm.\n\nMANNAH: Saying, “Hey, I said this about this group of people,” or “I use this word.” Maybe you didn't fully know what it meant and recognized the impact at the time, but being able to go back and be reflective about your behavior, I feel like is a very important skill to help become a more well-rounded individual.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Agreed. And it's a practice. You have to do it. The more you do it, the easier it gets to process these and learn from them. It's a habit also, so any of the books that talk about learning habits, you can apply to this kind of problem, too. Like a weekly calendar event, or talking to a friend once a month and this is a topic that comes up. I don’t know, there are a ton of ways you can try to make this habit, grow and stick for yourself, and it varies by person what's effective. But if you don't put it into your schedule, if you don't make room and space for it, it's really easy to skip doing it, too.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. It's amazing to look back. Even myself, I'm not the same person. I was 10, 15 years ago. I'm sure. Even as being a bisexual person that back in high school, I called something gay at one point just referring to, “Oh, that's gay.” \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: I’m sure I – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: I’m sure I did it, too.\n\nMANDY: I'm sure I've said that. Knowing that I'm not that person anymore, recognizing that, and looking back at how much I've grown really helps me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't always woke on this subject. We do a lot of growing over our lives. I'm in my 30s now and I've done so much growing and to look back on the person who I used to be versus the person I am now, I get very proud of how far I've come. Even though it can suck to look back at maybe a specific instance that you always remember and you're like, “Oh my God, that's so cringy. I can't believe I did that.” Having those moments to be like, “Well, you know what, that might have happened in 2003, but this is 2022 and look how far you've come.”\n\nCASEY: Love it! Yeah, growth.\n\nMANDY: Like that just makes me feel so good.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. We need the growth mindset.\n\nMANDY: And having discussions like this is what has gotten me to this place. Entering tech. I entered tech 12 years ago. I know this because my daughter's 12 and I always like, I'm like, “Okay so when my daughter was born, I got into tech. That's when I started actually becoming a decent person.” [laughs] So I measure a lot of my timeline by my daughter's age and it's just amazing to go back and see how much you've grown. Honestly, you should – another piece of homework, if you can just sit back and think about who you were before and who you are now and reflect on that a bit.\n\nMANNAH: We talked about normalizing pronouns, but I think it's also important to normalize sharing that story that you just told. I know I had a similar story where wherever I am on the wokeness scale, I was definitely much less so a couple years ago. I just did not have the same – I did not have enough experiences. I did not think about things in the same way. I did not challenge myself to be empathetic as much as I do now. It is a process and we're all somewhere on that journey. \n\nWho you are, like you said, 10 years ago is not necessarily who you are now. If it is, I don't know. I hope I'm not the same person in 10 years. I hope I'm always growing. So to make sure to share with others that it is a process and you don't wake up one day being woke. It is something that takes work and a skill that is developed.\n\nMANDY: Oh, you definitely have to do the work. \n\nEvery year, I do a program. It's an actually a wonderful program. It's called Stratejoy. I can put the link in the show notes. But every year there's this woman who you sit down, you take stock of the last year and she asks a lot of deep questions. You journal them, you write them down, and then you think about what do I want to see? What can I improve? What do I want to do? How can I do so? And then we have quarterly calls throughout the year and really sit down, write it down, talk about it, and reflect on it because it is work. \n\nA lot of people make fun of people who read self-help books and I love fiction books just as much as the next person, I want to get away and read before bed at the end of the night, too. But it's really important for me to read books that make me feel uncomfortable, or make me learn, or make me think. \n\nI read a lot of books on race. So You Want to Talk About Race was one I read and it had a profound effect on me to read that book and take stock of myself and my own actions. It can be hard sometimes and it can cause anxiety. But I think in order to grow as a person, that's where you need to be vulnerable and you need to say, “No, I'm not perfect. I've done this thing wrong in the past and I don't know this, so I'm going to do what I can to educate myself.”\n\nCASEY: Another thing I hear a lot is some people say, “You should not celebrate any progress you make. You should always just feel bad and work harder forever.” Do you ever hear that kind of sentiment? Not in those words. \n\nMANDY: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: But if you ever say, “I learned a thing and I'm proud of it, here's what I learned,” there's someone on the internet who's going to tell you, “You are terrible and wrong and should do even better. Forget any progress you've made. You're not perfect yet,” and that is so frustrating to me. \n\nSo here's something I'd like to see from more woke allies is less language policing, more celebrating of people who make progress. A lot of it's invisible, like we talked about on the spectrum. I do like when people get called out for making mistakes, like there's an opportunity for learning and growth, but you don't have to shame people in public, make them feel really bad about it, and embarrassed in front of the whole company. \n\nYou could maybe do it privately and send a message to the companies talking about the policy in general like, “Don't use this word, don't do this thing.” You can do it very tactfully and you can be very effective. You don't have to just be PC police to the extreme. But if you are PC police to the extreme, I'm glad you’re doing something. That's good. But you can be more effective. Please think about how you can be really effective, that's my request for all my woke friends. It can go overboard. It can definitely go overboard, being a language police.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, and it can make people who are trying to quit. \n\nCASEY: Right. That's a huge risk. I want to give all this a caveat, though, because if – here's an example from a friend's company. \n\nThere was a presentation and there ended up being a slide with Blackface on it, which if you don't know is a terrible, awful thing that makes Black people feel really bad and it makes the person showing it seem like they are malicious, or oblivious and it shouldn't happen. And then we were wondering like, “What should someone have done in that situation?” Call it out, for sure and move on publicly is a good call there to protect any Black people in the room feel like they're being protected and heard, but not necessarily shaming the person and giving them a 5-minute lecture during that. You can be effective at getting the person not to do it again in private later calling it out to defend the people in the room.\n\nProtecting is goal number one for me, but what can you do to change the company culture effectively is a piece that I see a lot of people skipping. If you are just 5 minutes yelling at a person that might make them shut down, you're not being your most effective. So it's a hard walk to balance protecting people, calling people out, and changing the culture. But it's possible and it's work. \n\nI guess, it's really two things you're balancing, protecting the person, making them feel part of the group included and cared for versus changing the culture of the group and of the individual. We want both outcomes, ideally. But if I had to pick one, I'm going to pick protecting the person first and then the larger change can happen afterwards.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. And if you do mess up, which I've done. I've accidentally misgendered somebody and I felt terrible. All night, I kept apologizing to this person and finally, this person took me aside and said, “You're making it worse by keeping apologizing. Let it go.” \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: So also, not rehashing and banging your head against the wall multiple, multiple times. Apologize and move on.\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. If your apology is sincere, then you shouldn't need to repeat it multiple times. Make sure that the person you're apologizing to hears it and make whatever amend need be made. But I do think if you over apologizing, it's more for you so you feel better than it is more for the person that you potentially offended. \n\nCASEY: Right and I don't expect you to know that without having thought about it like you are right now. Take this moment and think about it deeper. This is intriguing to you. It is natural to want to apologize forever, but it is also harmful and you can do better than that. \n\nI offer a lot of workshops in this vein. Like there's one called Bystander to Upstander. There's another LGBTQIA inclusion where I go through a whole bunch of charts and graphs. There's one called preventing and recovering from microaggressions where you can practice making a mistake and recovering from it in a group. The practice is the key here, like really making a mistake and recovering from it, getting that the muscles, the reactions, the things you say to people, it does take work to get that to be a practice. Even if you already agree you want to, it's hard to put it into practice a lot of the time. \n\nI give workshops, including these, for community groups a couple times a month and if you want to get updates on that, that's at happyandeffective.com/updates. Also, I do these for companies so if you think your company would benefit from having these kinds of discussions, feel free to reach out to Happy and Effective, too. That's my company.\n\nMANNAH: Well, with that, I think it'd be a great time to move to reflections. What do y'all think? \n\nI think this whole episode has been one big reflection to be quite honest, but does anybody want to share anything in particular that has stood out to them throughout the hour we've just spent together?\n\nMANNAH: I'm happy to kick it off. \n\nI think that we've made some really good suggestions around how people can create more through their own actions. Create more inclusive environments. I do want to say that these are not things that are kind of stone. There are a lot of ways. Everybody's an individual, every situation is different, and I don't want to be prescriptive in saying you have to do certain things. \n\nI do want to say that when I'm speaking, this is my experience and these are things that I think can help. So please don't take what I say to be gospel. They are suggestions and if you disagree with them, then I'm happy to have that conversation. But recognize that the people speaking on this panel don't necessarily have the answers, but they are people who are willing to start this conversation.\n\nCASEY: The thing I want people to take away is—and you can repeat after me, everyone—I will make mistakes. Good, good. I heard it. I will find more support. Awesome. You're great. Okay. You're on the right path for this now. \n\nMandy, over to you.\n\nMANDY: This is not something that you do once and you're done. This kind of reflection and this kind of work is always going to be a work in progress until the day you're no longer here. It's not something you can read a book and be like, “Okay, I did that. I'm good now. I know things.” It's constantly changing and evolving and you need to do the work. You need to have empathy for others and realize that everybody is constantly changing and just because somebody isn’t one ting one day, they might be something the other day. \n\nI tell my daughter all the time because she’s very unsure about who is she and I’m like, “You don’t have to know right now. Just because you think you’re this, or you’re this right now, in 2 years, you might feel differently and you might be this.” So people are always evolving, always changing, and that doesn’t just go for how you present either your gender identity, or sexual identity but it also just goes for who you are. I always try to grow as a person and the work is never done.\n\nCASEY: No one has all the answers, no one knows everything, and anyone who says they do is lying because it’s going to change. It will change.\n\nMANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mannah and Casey for having this conversation today. I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it’s a hard thing to talk about, and I’m so grateful that you both showed up to have it. \n\nIf we want to continue these conversations, I invite anybody who’s listening to reach out to us. If you’d like to come on the show to talk about it, reach out to us. We have a Slack channel that we can have private conversations in. You can find that at Patreon.com/greaterthancode and donate as little as a dollar to get in. We do that so we keep the trolls out and if you cannot afford a dollar, please DM any one of us and we will get you in there for free. \n\nSo with that, thank you again for listening and we will see you all next week.Sponsored By:Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.","content_html":"01:56 - Episode Intro: Who is Casey Watts?
\n\n\n\n02:25 - “Gay” vs “Queer”
\n\n06:11 - Pronoun Usage & Normalization
\n\n16:36 - Asking Questions & Sharing
\n\n28:16 - Effective Allyship
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMannah: The people on this show are all willing to start and have conversations.
\n\nCasey: I will make mistakes. I will find more support.
\n\nMandy: Reflection is always a work in progress. It’s never done. Keep doing the work. People are always evolving and changing.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nCASEY: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 268. I'm Casey, and I'm here with co-host, Mannah.
\n\nMANNAH: How's it going? I'm Mannah and I'm here with Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Hey, everybody. It’s Mandy and today, I'm excited because we are doing a panelist only episode. So our host and panelist, beloved Casey Watts, is going to take us through Casey did a LGBTQ panel for Women Who Code Philly a couple weeks ago and it went really great. He offered to do a show to talk about the subject in more depth on the show. So we're here to do that today.
\n\nSo without further ado, why don't you give us a little intro, Casey?
\n\nCASEY: Sure. I'm going to start by talking about who I am a little bit and why I'm comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. My name's Casey, I'm a gay man, or a queer man. We can get into the difference between gay and queer [chuckles] in the episode. I live in D.C. and I really like my community groups that I'm in to be super inclusive, inclusive of people of all kinds of backgrounds and all the letters in LGBTQIA especially.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. So right there, you just gave us an in. Can we get into the difference between gay and queer?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I love it.
\n\nPeople lately use the term “queer” as an umbrella term that represents all the letters in LGBTQIA especially younger people are comfortable with that term, but it is reclaimed. Older people, it used to be a slur and so, like my cousin, for example, who's older than me hesitates to use the word queer on me because she knows that it used to be used to hurt people.
\n\nBut queer people like this as an umbrella term now because it is just saying we're not the norm in gender identity, or sexual, romantic orientation, that kind of stuff. We're not the norm. We're something else. Don't assume that we're the norm and then it's not describing all the little nuances of it. It's just like the umbrella term. So I'm definitely queer and I'm gay.
\n\nAnother distinction that I really like to make and that's cultural versus specifically what the term means. So I'm gay and that I'm attracted to other men, but I don't hang out at gay bars and watch RuPaul's Drag Race like the mainstream gay man does in media and in life. I know a lot of people who love that I'm not comfortable there. I don't like it. I think drag queens are fun I guess, but they're also really catty and mean and I don't like that, and I don't want that to rub off on me personally. Instead, I hang out in groups like the queer marching band which has a ton of lesbian women, bisexual, biromantic people, asexual people, intersex people, and trans people and has all the letters in LGBTQIA and I love that inclusive community. That's the kind of group I like to be in.
\n\nSome of the gay men there talk about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it's like a minority of that large group. I love being in the super inclusive cultures. So I'm culturally queer, but I'm sexually romantically gay. So depending on what we're talking about, the one is more important than the other.
\n\nI have a story for this. Before the pandemic, I got a haircut at a gay barber shop. It's gay because D.C. has a lot of gay people and there's a gym above the barber shop that's pretty explicitly gay. They cater to gay people. They have rainbows everywhere.
\n\nI got my hair cut and this woman just kept making RuPaul’s Drag Race references to me that I didn't get, I don't get it. I don't know what she's saying, but I know the shape of it and I told her I don't like that and I'm not interested in it. Please stop. She didn't because she was assuming I'm culturally gay, like most of her clientele and it was really annoying and she wasn't seeing me, or listening to what I was saying and I was not seen. But she's right I was gay, but I'm not gay culturally in that way.
\n\nDoes that make sense? That's kind of a complex idea to throw out at the beginning of the episode here. A lot of people take some time to get your head around the cultural versus sexual terms.
\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. That is interesting especially because with so many identities, I guess that’s true for every identity where there's a cultural element and then there's some other thing. For instance, I’m a Black man and no matter where I hang out, or what I’m interested in, I’ll always be a Black man, but there is associated with both masculinity and specifically, Black masculinity.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and I like the – lately, I've been seeing lowercase B black to mean a description of your skin color and uppercase B Black to mean a description of the culture and I like that distinction a lot. It's visual.
\n\nDeaf people have been using that for years. My aunt’s deaf so my family has a deaf culture. I'm a little bit deaf culture myself just by proxy, but I'm not deaf. I'm capital D Deaf culturally in amount. Her daughter, who she raised, my deaf aunt, is culturally Deaf way, way more than the average person, but not fully because she's not deaf herself.
\n\nSo there's all spectrum here of cultural to experiencing the phenomenon and I was happy to see, on Twitter at least, a lot of people are reclaiming capital B black. And for me, it's capital Q Queer and lowercase G gay. That's how I distinguish into my head—culturally queer and I'm sexually gay.
\n\nMANNAH: So one of the things, I've been thinking about this since our intro and for those of you listening, our intro is scripted and as simple as it was like, “Hey, my name is Mannah,” and passing it off to Mandy. Generally, when I introduce myself – I just started a new job. I introduced myself with my pronouns, he/him, because I think it's more inclusive and I want to model that behavior and make sure that people around me are comfortable if they want to share their pronouns. I do think that this is championed by the queer community and as a member of that community, I'd just love to hear your take on people being more explicit with that aspect of their identity.
\n\nCASEY: I love the segment. Pronouns is a huge, huge topic in this space lately especially. I like to start from here, especially with older audiences that we used to have mister and miss in our signatures and in the way we address letters and emails, and that's gone away. So including pronouns is a lot like just saying mister, or miss, but we've dropped the formality. I'm glad to be gone with the formality, but we still need to know which pronouns to use and it's nice to have that upfront. I like and appreciate it. I try to include pronouns when I remember it and when I'm in spaces where that's a norm. I like to follow that for sure every time there.
\n\nBut I'm not always the first person to introduce it. Like if I was giving a talk and there were 30 older white men in the audience who've never heard of this idea, I might not start with he/him because I want to meet them where they're at and bring them to the point where they get it. So I'm not always a frontrunner of this idea, but I love to support it, I love to push it forward, and help people understand it and get on board.
\n\nIt's like there's different stages of allyship, I guess you could say and I really like helping people get from a further backstage to a middle stage because I don't think enough people are in that space and there are plenty of people getting people who are in the middle stage to the more proactive stage. Like, “We should use pronouns!” You hear that all the time in spaces I'm in.
\n\nIt's possible I can get pushback for that kind of thing, like even meeting people where they're at, and that frustrates because I want to be effective. I don't want to just signal that I'm very progressive and doing the right things. I want to actually be effective. I give workshops on this kind of thing, too. That's where we're coming from for the today's talk.
\n\nMANDY: I think on the last show, it might have been Kate Marshall who said that normalizing pronouns is really important to do, but not just when there's an obvious person in the room who you're not sure. Maybe we even started off on the wrong foot on the show by not saying, “Hi, I'm Mandy, my pronouns are she and her.” Just adding that in to normalize it would be a really good step, I think.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, love it. Here's where I like to come with my role. Say, “Plus one, I love that idea. Let's do it now.” I like to activate the idea once it's in the room, but it takes someone brave to bring it up in the first place and it's a different amount of social energy, maybe in a different head space you have to be in to be that first person. But being the second is also very important and I like to help people understand that, too. If you're the second person, that's still being helpful. Maybe you can become the first person in some groups, but I want to celebrate that you're the second person even. That's great.
\n\nYeah, I think that's a good change we could do.
\n\nMANNAH: You mentioned allyship and I think that that is why am so proactive in introducing myself with pronouns because I do present as a traditional man. Well, maybe not traditional, but I present as a man and I have the ability to deal with some of that pushback.
\n\nWe talk about superpowers on the show. I feel like one of my superpowers is I am willing to engage in those conversations, even if they are difficult.
\n\nCASEY: Mm hm.
\n\nMANNAH: So I can use my powers for good by starting that conversation perhaps, or starting to build that norm. Whether, or not I am doing it for anyone in particular, it is important for me to do it wherever we are. So I think that just wherever we can make spaces more inclusive with the way we can conduct ourselves and our language, it's important.
\n\nCASEY: I have a framework to share that's kind of related to that.
\n\nSo there's a spectrum of allyship—that's my title for it anyway—that goes from an active detractor all the way over to an active supporter of an idea. In this case, the active supporter would be getting pronouns to happen in a space where they're not happening. And then in the middle, maybe you're neutral, not doing anything. In the middle on either side, there's a passive – like you're not doing anything, but you kind of support the idea. You're kind of against the idea, but you're not taking any action. And then on the active part, there's even a split between and being proactive and reactive.
\n\nSo for pronouns, I guess the way I'm self-describing here is I'm a reactive pronoun person. For better, or worse, that's where I'm at on that spectrum and that's where I like to help move things along. So I can talk to people who are more maybe passively against the idea because I'm not so far on the right.
\n\nI like to use the spectrum for another purpose, which is moving people from one space to the next is valuable and often invisible. If you can get someone to be loudly against pronouns to just be quiet, that's a step forward. You've persuaded them a little bit to go in that direction, or if they’re there to neutral, or neutral to passively supportive, but quiet about it. A lot of this kind of progress with people who aren't active supporters is invisible and that can be really frustrating for people; it feels like you're not making any progress.
\n\nSo for people who are allies and want to be allies, there's a step forward you can do for yourself, which is getting yourself from being reactive to being proactive. But you're not just helping the people in the room, but helping people who could be in the room, or might be in the future. Reactive to proactive.
\n\nMANDY: I've been doing that a lot with just actually referring to everybody as they/them no matter if I already know how they present, or not. That, to me, is just the most inclusive way to refer to people in general.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, that's generally a safe practice, but there are people who don't want to be called they/them.
\n\nMANDY: Hmm.
\n\nCASEY: For example, I have some friends who… Let's imagine a trans man who wants to be considered he/him, they are very invested in this and they want the – If you keep calling them, they/them, even if they correct you, “He/him is my pronouns,” then they're going to be upset about that, pf course. But it is a safe, starting point because the ambiguous they is just generally, it’s good grammar, the APA endorses it even. You're allowed to use they when it's ambiguous by grammar rules. But if you know someone's pronouns and it isn't they/them, it's generally better to use those because they prefer it.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. That's what I meant. If somebody says to me, “I would prefer you call me she/her, he/him.: But when I'm first, like if I'm even talking to say my dad and I'm talking about work, I would be like, “I have a friend, they did this.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. That's ambiguous day and that's perfectly appropriate there.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. But as far as like addressing somebody on a regular basis who wants to be referred to as one, or the other, I have no problem doing that. I've just been training myself to use ambiguous terms because I see and I think it's wonderful. My daughter's 12 and almost all of her friends are non-binary. So when I meet them, or I'm talking about her friends for me, it's just more, I don't want to say easy. I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing it, like taking the easy way out, but I'll just be like, do the they/them stuff to have the conversation and then once I find out more, we can transfer over to the he/him, she/her as I'm corrected, or being asked to do one, or the other.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right. It's definitely safer to assume you don't know than to assume someone's gender based on how they looked, for sure and the ambiguous they is perfect for that. Even for people who use they/them as pronouns, there's a switch in my head at least—you probably feel it, too—from ambiguous to specific. Like now I know they/them is their pronouns.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've had no problem. When my daughter has brought new people over, who I know are non-binary, I will say to them even if I already know, because she's told me, I'll be like, “What pronouns do you prefer?” And every single time these are 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, they're like, “Thank you for asking.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Because a lot of times, I feel it's not very accepted yet. So when I hear, or when they hear me say, “How would you like me to refer to you?” They smile so big.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, you’re treating them like the individual person they are.
\n\nMANDY: Exactly, and they're like, “Thank you,” and now I'm known as the cool mom. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Ah. Great. [laughs]
\n\nYeah. If I could snap my fingers and change a behavior of mine, that would be one. I would consider everyone's pronouns unknown until they tell me and it also varies by context. I don't even want to trust secondhand. Like if Mandy, you said he for Mannah before I met him, I wouldn't assume that's his pronouns. If maybe you are assuming, or maybe you heard it from someone and they were assuming, or maybe based on context, it's different. I want to hear it from the person, ideally.
\n\nMANDY: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: I also don't necessarily want to go around asking for pronouns actively all the time. I'd rather us offer them upfront, or have them in our usernames, or something so it's less verbiage in the air about it. I like it to be normalized. We don't have to think about it. That's a dream state.
\n\nBut for now, I'd rather ask people directly than assume anything. But it's a hard habit because I've been trained from school and everything, since a young age, to assume someone’s gender and not to use they at first. That's what we've been trained and I love this trend of untraining that. Ambiguous they is accepted and we should start with that.
\n\nMANDY: I love seeing people proactively put pronouns in their Zoom profiles, or their Zoom names and at conferences, I love the conferences having badges, or stickers.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: I love that.
\n\nCASEY: It's helpful.
\n\nMANNAH: I want to change directions slightly and go back to something you said about the spectrum and how we move people – I don't remember the exact words you used, the two polar opposites.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANNAH: But how to move people towards a more inclusive mindset, let's say and wherever you are on that spectrum, you might not know how to move forward and the way to kind of deal with that, you might have questions. I just want to hear from you how you would like to be approached with questions around how do you feel about pronouns, or whatever it might be relating to your culture, or your, I guess, I'm going to say sexual identity.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANNAH: People are unsure how can they approach you with questions in a way that's respectful and a way that will allow them to learn more about you?
\n\nCASEY: Good question. I feel like you're reading my mind a bit here.
\n\nI want to start with another framework that you might have heard of. It's the circles of grief Ring Theory. Like if someone just lost their parent, then you need to pour support into that person who's closest to them and if you're outside like a more distant family member, or a friend, pour support in and then the grief gets stumped out. That's the framework, generally. So there's a lot of rings. People who are closer to it are affected more directly and people who are outside are affected more indirectly.
\n\nThat applies to asking people personal things, too. So I'm directly affected by being queer and I've been discriminated against and people have said bad things to me before. To ask me about it and to bring up those feelings could harm me in some way so you can't just assume everybody's comfortable talking about their experience. Like, “Tell me about how you feel about your dead mother.” It wouldn't be sensitive either because they're experiencing the pain directly, but sometimes people do want to talk about that and they're comfortable, they processed it, and they want to help spread the word.
\n\nSo I'm one of those people; you can ask me anything. Even if you don't know me, you can DM me on Twitter. Anyone listening, ask me a question about queer things. I'll point you to a resource, or answer it myself. I'm offering because I'm comfortable at this point. But a lot of people aren't and, in that case, you could ask if someone's comfortable, that's not a bad idea, or you could ask people who are in further circles out.
\n\nLike you don't need to ask a queer person about queer experiences if you can read about it in an article online, or watch a documentary, or talk to friends who have other queer friends and they know some things about it. It's not as good as secondhand experience hearing from someone with firsthand experience, but you're causing less harm by making the ideas come up again.
\n\nSo you have a range of ways you can find out more about what it's like to be queer and I encourage you to think about all the different ways you can learn about a thing. You don't have to depend on the person who has [chuckles] this negative experience to do it.
\n\nAnother way you can learn more is by doing workshops, like the ones that I facilitate. So I was thrilled to have a good audience at Women Who Code Philly, actively asking question and learning things, and that's a space where you're supposed to ask questions and learn.
\n\nI've heard of some people have peers they can talk to like peer support; people you can go to, to ask questions like that. Like my cousin asks me questions sometimes about her kids and that's like peers. Some companies actually have support groups like a weekly, or monthly meeting for people in the company to ask these questions that they have [laughs] and they don't know where to ask them and they can all learn from it.
\n\nI've seen in some Slacks, there's a Diversity 101 channel in one of the Slacks I'm in people can ask questions like when would you, or would you not use this word? That's a space dedicated to asking questions like that and if someone like me wants to go in and contribute, I can answer questions there, but I don't have to. I know I'm welcome to, and I know I'm not pressured to, and that's a great middle ground and that's a lot of options. You’ve got to figure out what works for you, who you have around, who you can offer the support to, and who you can ask for the support from. Both directions.
\n\nMANDY: It's great to have someone like you offering to do that and take on because it is of emotional labor and sometimes when people are curious, I know for me as being bisexual, some people are just like trying to – they're asking out of curiosity, but it's more like, “Give me the dirty details,” or something like that.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Sometimes it's like, “We just want to know because I don't – so I want to know what it's like for you,” and I'm like, “I'm not going to share just because –” right now, I am in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Normally, if I was in a single state, a lot of people just try to ask questions that sometimes can be, I find it more inappropriate and they want to know because they're interested in the salacious details, or something like that.
\n\nCASEY: Right.
\n\nMANDY: That rubs me the wrong way and I can usually tell when somebody is asking, because they're genuine, or not.
\n\nCASEY: There's a big difference between asking to get to know you as a person in the context you're in with the background you have versus asking for salacious gossip. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: And the one is much more kind than the other. It sounds like you've done a good job setting boundaries in these situations saying, “That's not appropriate. I'm not answering that. Sorry about it,” or something like that.
\n\nMANNAH: Not sorry.
\n\nCASEY: Not sorry.
\n\nMANDY: Well, in the same token, it's something that bothers me, too because I feel like a lot of times, I just don't even tell people that I'm bisexual.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Because it's easier to not answer the questions because once you open that can of worms, then everybody comes at you and wants to know this and wants to know details. “Have you ever done this?” Or, “Have you ever done that?” It rubs me the wrong way again.
\n\nCASEY: Right.
\n\nMANDY: So sometimes I feel almost resentful. I feel resentful that I can't be my full self because it causes people to just ask and the whole conversation, or the whole time I spend with them is focused on this one thing and it's like for me, it's just not a big deal.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right, right. Like on my Twitter profile—I like to use this as an example—I list out like 10, 15 things about myself on my Twitter profile and there is one little rainbow flag emoji in there at the end and I'd rather you talk about any of the other things probably. I'm willing to share that I'm queer and rainbow I affiliate with, but so much more to me, [chuckles] I'd rather you learn about me before that.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: But it's the newest, novelist thing to those people who don't otherwise get exposed to it. They fixate on it sometimes and that, they might not realize, can be harmful. It can hurt people like you. It does hurt people. [chuckles]
\n\nMANDY: It absolutely does. It makes me uncomfortable. So it's not an aspect that I talk about much, especially living in rural/suburban Pennsylvania. It's something that I just kind of, aside from my internet friends and tech community, that a lot of people still don't know about me.
\n\nCASEY: Right. I can imagine not wanting to share. I used to not share my sexuality either in a lot of contexts and still when I go somewhere like the south, if I go to a place that has more bigotry around, I'm not holding my partner's hand there. I might get attacked even, that happens still in certain environments, they don't get it.
\n\nOkay, I want to acknowledge that people asking these questions might have good intentions and they're making a mistake and I want to explain what I think the mistake is.
\n\nMANDY: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: People want to be treated as individuals, but you can go too far in that extreme and treat someone like an individual and ignore their background. Like it doesn't matter that you've been queer. It doesn't matter that you're Black. It doesn't matter, I'm just going to treat you like an individual. Ignoring all this background is its own kind of overgeneralization in a way is ignoring that background and context. And then there's another way you can do an exaggeration, which is only focusing on that background in context and ignoring the person's individual traits and their individual experiences.
\n\nThe best thing to do is to treat them like an individual who has this context and background putting them both together. So maybe these people are trying to understand you better by understanding this context. Maybe—I'm being very generous— [chuckles] some of these people are probably not this, but some people honestly want to know more about your context to understand you and that's thoughtful. They're just going about it in a way that's not the most helpful, or kind to you and I appreciate those people. But then there are other people who want to use the background and context to overgeneralize and just treat you as a member of this group, a token member, and that is a problem, too.
\n\nSo it's like two ingredients and if you put them together, that's the best and a lot of people focus on one, or the other too much. The individual experience versus the group background context experience.
\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. That was really well put. I do think that as I said earlier, I'm someone who is very willing to have these. However, the downside of that is that becomes who you're and instead of the entire human being and the other – to take it a step further, some people are uncomfortable with that identity, or uncomfortable thinking about those things. Think about the discrimination that you might face and rather than confront it, or address it, they would rather just not deal with you, or limit their interact.
\n\nCASEY: Right, yeah.
\n\nMANNAH: So this is not a question for Casey, this is just something to the group. How can we navigate that and wanting to being willing to share of ourselves, but recognizing that there is some social backlash that can come from that?
\n\nCASEY: I think my number one thing I want allies to understand is they can support each other in being allies and it can take work to be comfortable talking to each other, to support each other. You don't have to just depend on the queer people to learn queer about things. If one of you learns and one ally learns, they can teach another ally the concept, or the idea, or share how to navigate it.
\n\nI did a Twitter poll for this, actually. Not a huge sample size, but still. A lot of people only have 1 to 3 people they can talk to about things like this. That's very few and they might not cover all the different situations.
\n\nSo that's my number one thing to help people navigate it is get so support, find support, be support for other people and you'll get support in return for that, too. That's your homework. Everyone, write this down. Find 10 people you can talk to about inclusivity related topics, 10 people.
\n\nMANDY: And Google exists for a reason. So always, when things come up, I like to Google and I've gotten push back about that several times. “Well, I don't want to put that stuff into my search engine because then all of a sudden, I start getting gay targeted ads,” or something.
\n\nCASEY: That's true. That's a real concern. [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: And I’m, “It’s not –” Well, hello, incognito mode.
\n\nCASEY: Right.
\n\nMANDY: Thank you, everyone. That's a thing. Use it. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and you don't have to feel icky using incognito mode. You can use it because you don't want to ads tracking you.
\n\nMANDY: Exactly.
\n\nCASEY: Some people use it for everything. They never use the regular browser mode because they don't want the tracking. It's work to learn things about other people and so, that's why I like to focus on the support part. If you get support from people, maybe you can both be looking up stuff and sharing articles with each other, and that's really multiplying the effects here.
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely.
\n\nMANNAH: So we started homework for allies. I think now it might be a good time to talk about what makes good ally. We talked a little bit about how it can feel voyeuristic. Mandy, you talked about how people asking questions can sometimes feel a little picky and we talked about some better ways to asking questions. But are there any other ways that either both, all of us would like to see people be more effective ally?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I want to call back to an earlier point. I want to see more people switch from being reactive to being proactive. To being the first voice. Me included, honestly. Whenever you can get away with it and whatever helps you be proactive, do those things, which might be the support thing I keep talking about. Getting support to be more proactive, becoming accountable to people.
\n\nIf you're already an ally, I'm assuming you're being reactively supportive some of the times. A lot of the people I talk to, who consider themselves allies, would agree, but taking that next step. And there's a different spectrum for each issue, like pronouns is one. Pronouns being shared in meetings. How proactive, or reactive are you for that? I don't even know. There are thousands of things [chuckles] that you can do to become more proactive.
\n\nMANDY: I would like to say for allies, teaching our children love and not hate. I see a lot of nastiness coming from children and that comes from parents. It's really sad to see sometimes the amount of people who don't – they just spew hate and they're like, “I'm not referring to this person as a pronoun.” Like, “They/them, no. They're a this, or they're –”
\n\nIt saddens me to no end when you are around children to model nasty behavior and I think if you are not the person doing that yourself and you're around it, and you see somebody say something and say, “That's not okay, don't. Do you understand how you sound? Do you understand what you're saying? Do you understand that you're having an effect on everyone around you by giving your nasty opinions and that kind of thing?”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I've got a one word, one liner thing that I like to pull out and I'm proud every time I say it. “Rude,” and I can walk away. It can happen in the grocery store. Someone can say something. It doesn't matter the nuance, what's going on and how I might explain it to them in fuller language. I can at least pull that one word out, rude, and walk away and they are called out for it. I'm proud whenever I can call someone out.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I don't always do it, though. The stakes can seem high and it takes practice.
\n\nSo this is homework, too. If you see someone and saying something hurtful to another person, it's your responsibility if you dare claim this to defend the other person and call the person rude, or however you would say the same thing. Say something.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, say something.
\n\nMANNAH: I think that that can be really hard for allies.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANNAH: And if I had one piece of advice for allies, it would be that sometimes allyship is uncomfortable and that is something that you have to navigate. You can't pick and choose when you're going to… Well, that's not true. There's some discretion, but recognize that being a part-time ally, or a tourist in that space has an effect on people and not confronting your own insecurities, or your own feelings limits your effectiveness in allyship.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It can be a deep question to ask yourself what made me hesitate that one time and what can I do to not hesitate helping next time? You can journal about it. You can talk to friends about it. You can think about it. Doing something more than thinking is definitely more helpful, though. Thinking alone is not the most powerful tool you have to change your own behavior.
\n\nYeah, it is uncomfortable. One thing that helps me speak up is instead of focusing on my discomfort, which is natural and I do it, for sure, I try to focus on the discomfort of the other person, or the person directly affected by this and I really want to help that person feel seen, protected, heard, defended. If you think about how they're feeling even more, that's very motivating for me and honestly, it helps in some ways that I am a queer man, that I have been discriminated against and people have been hateful toward me that I can relate when other people get similar experiences.
\n\nIf you haven't had experiences like that, it might be hard to rally up the empathy for it. But I'm sure you have something like that in your background, or if not, you know people who've been affected and that can be fuel for you, too. People you care about telling you stories like this and it is uncomfortable. [chuckles] Getting comfortable with that discomfort is critical here.
\n\nMANNAH: One of the things that is very uncomfortable is, I think that as we go through life, we all grow is being reflective on the times when maybe we’re not inclusive, or maybe were insensitive. At least being able to those situations, I feel like is a great first step.
\n\nCASEY: Mm hm.
\n\nMANNAH: Saying, “Hey, I said this about this group of people,” or “I use this word.” Maybe you didn't fully know what it meant and recognized the impact at the time, but being able to go back and be reflective about your behavior, I feel like is a very important skill to help become a more well-rounded individual.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Agreed. And it's a practice. You have to do it. The more you do it, the easier it gets to process these and learn from them. It's a habit also, so any of the books that talk about learning habits, you can apply to this kind of problem, too. Like a weekly calendar event, or talking to a friend once a month and this is a topic that comes up. I don’t know, there are a ton of ways you can try to make this habit, grow and stick for yourself, and it varies by person what's effective. But if you don't put it into your schedule, if you don't make room and space for it, it's really easy to skip doing it, too.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. It's amazing to look back. Even myself, I'm not the same person. I was 10, 15 years ago. I'm sure. Even as being a bisexual person that back in high school, I called something gay at one point just referring to, “Oh, that's gay.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: I’m sure I – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: I’m sure I did it, too.
\n\nMANDY: I'm sure I've said that. Knowing that I'm not that person anymore, recognizing that, and looking back at how much I've grown really helps me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't always woke on this subject. We do a lot of growing over our lives. I'm in my 30s now and I've done so much growing and to look back on the person who I used to be versus the person I am now, I get very proud of how far I've come. Even though it can suck to look back at maybe a specific instance that you always remember and you're like, “Oh my God, that's so cringy. I can't believe I did that.” Having those moments to be like, “Well, you know what, that might have happened in 2003, but this is 2022 and look how far you've come.”
\n\nCASEY: Love it! Yeah, growth.
\n\nMANDY: Like that just makes me feel so good.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. We need the growth mindset.
\n\nMANDY: And having discussions like this is what has gotten me to this place. Entering tech. I entered tech 12 years ago. I know this because my daughter's 12 and I always like, I'm like, “Okay so when my daughter was born, I got into tech. That's when I started actually becoming a decent person.” [laughs] So I measure a lot of my timeline by my daughter's age and it's just amazing to go back and see how much you've grown. Honestly, you should – another piece of homework, if you can just sit back and think about who you were before and who you are now and reflect on that a bit.
\n\nMANNAH: We talked about normalizing pronouns, but I think it's also important to normalize sharing that story that you just told. I know I had a similar story where wherever I am on the wokeness scale, I was definitely much less so a couple years ago. I just did not have the same – I did not have enough experiences. I did not think about things in the same way. I did not challenge myself to be empathetic as much as I do now. It is a process and we're all somewhere on that journey.
\n\nWho you are, like you said, 10 years ago is not necessarily who you are now. If it is, I don't know. I hope I'm not the same person in 10 years. I hope I'm always growing. So to make sure to share with others that it is a process and you don't wake up one day being woke. It is something that takes work and a skill that is developed.
\n\nMANDY: Oh, you definitely have to do the work.
\n\nEvery year, I do a program. It's an actually a wonderful program. It's called Stratejoy. I can put the link in the show notes. But every year there's this woman who you sit down, you take stock of the last year and she asks a lot of deep questions. You journal them, you write them down, and then you think about what do I want to see? What can I improve? What do I want to do? How can I do so? And then we have quarterly calls throughout the year and really sit down, write it down, talk about it, and reflect on it because it is work.
\n\nA lot of people make fun of people who read self-help books and I love fiction books just as much as the next person, I want to get away and read before bed at the end of the night, too. But it's really important for me to read books that make me feel uncomfortable, or make me learn, or make me think.
\n\nI read a lot of books on race. So You Want to Talk About Race was one I read and it had a profound effect on me to read that book and take stock of myself and my own actions. It can be hard sometimes and it can cause anxiety. But I think in order to grow as a person, that's where you need to be vulnerable and you need to say, “No, I'm not perfect. I've done this thing wrong in the past and I don't know this, so I'm going to do what I can to educate myself.”
\n\nCASEY: Another thing I hear a lot is some people say, “You should not celebrate any progress you make. You should always just feel bad and work harder forever.” Do you ever hear that kind of sentiment? Not in those words.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: But if you ever say, “I learned a thing and I'm proud of it, here's what I learned,” there's someone on the internet who's going to tell you, “You are terrible and wrong and should do even better. Forget any progress you've made. You're not perfect yet,” and that is so frustrating to me.
\n\nSo here's something I'd like to see from more woke allies is less language policing, more celebrating of people who make progress. A lot of it's invisible, like we talked about on the spectrum. I do like when people get called out for making mistakes, like there's an opportunity for learning and growth, but you don't have to shame people in public, make them feel really bad about it, and embarrassed in front of the whole company.
\n\nYou could maybe do it privately and send a message to the companies talking about the policy in general like, “Don't use this word, don't do this thing.” You can do it very tactfully and you can be very effective. You don't have to just be PC police to the extreme. But if you are PC police to the extreme, I'm glad you’re doing something. That's good. But you can be more effective. Please think about how you can be really effective, that's my request for all my woke friends. It can go overboard. It can definitely go overboard, being a language police.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, and it can make people who are trying to quit.
\n\nCASEY: Right. That's a huge risk. I want to give all this a caveat, though, because if – here's an example from a friend's company.
\n\nThere was a presentation and there ended up being a slide with Blackface on it, which if you don't know is a terrible, awful thing that makes Black people feel really bad and it makes the person showing it seem like they are malicious, or oblivious and it shouldn't happen. And then we were wondering like, “What should someone have done in that situation?” Call it out, for sure and move on publicly is a good call there to protect any Black people in the room feel like they're being protected and heard, but not necessarily shaming the person and giving them a 5-minute lecture during that. You can be effective at getting the person not to do it again in private later calling it out to defend the people in the room.
\n\nProtecting is goal number one for me, but what can you do to change the company culture effectively is a piece that I see a lot of people skipping. If you are just 5 minutes yelling at a person that might make them shut down, you're not being your most effective. So it's a hard walk to balance protecting people, calling people out, and changing the culture. But it's possible and it's work.
\n\nI guess, it's really two things you're balancing, protecting the person, making them feel part of the group included and cared for versus changing the culture of the group and of the individual. We want both outcomes, ideally. But if I had to pick one, I'm going to pick protecting the person first and then the larger change can happen afterwards.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. And if you do mess up, which I've done. I've accidentally misgendered somebody and I felt terrible. All night, I kept apologizing to this person and finally, this person took me aside and said, “You're making it worse by keeping apologizing. Let it go.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So also, not rehashing and banging your head against the wall multiple, multiple times. Apologize and move on.
\n\nMANNAH: Yeah. If your apology is sincere, then you shouldn't need to repeat it multiple times. Make sure that the person you're apologizing to hears it and make whatever amend need be made. But I do think if you over apologizing, it's more for you so you feel better than it is more for the person that you potentially offended.
\n\nCASEY: Right and I don't expect you to know that without having thought about it like you are right now. Take this moment and think about it deeper. This is intriguing to you. It is natural to want to apologize forever, but it is also harmful and you can do better than that.
\n\nI offer a lot of workshops in this vein. Like there's one called Bystander to Upstander. There's another LGBTQIA inclusion where I go through a whole bunch of charts and graphs. There's one called preventing and recovering from microaggressions where you can practice making a mistake and recovering from it in a group. The practice is the key here, like really making a mistake and recovering from it, getting that the muscles, the reactions, the things you say to people, it does take work to get that to be a practice. Even if you already agree you want to, it's hard to put it into practice a lot of the time.
\n\nI give workshops, including these, for community groups a couple times a month and if you want to get updates on that, that's at happyandeffective.com/updates. Also, I do these for companies so if you think your company would benefit from having these kinds of discussions, feel free to reach out to Happy and Effective, too. That's my company.
\n\nMANNAH: Well, with that, I think it'd be a great time to move to reflections. What do y'all think?
\n\nI think this whole episode has been one big reflection to be quite honest, but does anybody want to share anything in particular that has stood out to them throughout the hour we've just spent together?
\n\nMANNAH: I'm happy to kick it off.
\n\nI think that we've made some really good suggestions around how people can create more through their own actions. Create more inclusive environments. I do want to say that these are not things that are kind of stone. There are a lot of ways. Everybody's an individual, every situation is different, and I don't want to be prescriptive in saying you have to do certain things.
\n\nI do want to say that when I'm speaking, this is my experience and these are things that I think can help. So please don't take what I say to be gospel. They are suggestions and if you disagree with them, then I'm happy to have that conversation. But recognize that the people speaking on this panel don't necessarily have the answers, but they are people who are willing to start this conversation.
\n\nCASEY: The thing I want people to take away is—and you can repeat after me, everyone—I will make mistakes. Good, good. I heard it. I will find more support. Awesome. You're great. Okay. You're on the right path for this now.
\n\nMandy, over to you.
\n\nMANDY: This is not something that you do once and you're done. This kind of reflection and this kind of work is always going to be a work in progress until the day you're no longer here. It's not something you can read a book and be like, “Okay, I did that. I'm good now. I know things.” It's constantly changing and evolving and you need to do the work. You need to have empathy for others and realize that everybody is constantly changing and just because somebody isn’t one ting one day, they might be something the other day.
\n\nI tell my daughter all the time because she’s very unsure about who is she and I’m like, “You don’t have to know right now. Just because you think you’re this, or you’re this right now, in 2 years, you might feel differently and you might be this.” So people are always evolving, always changing, and that doesn’t just go for how you present either your gender identity, or sexual identity but it also just goes for who you are. I always try to grow as a person and the work is never done.
\n\nCASEY: No one has all the answers, no one knows everything, and anyone who says they do is lying because it’s going to change. It will change.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mannah and Casey for having this conversation today. I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it’s a hard thing to talk about, and I’m so grateful that you both showed up to have it.
\n\nIf we want to continue these conversations, I invite anybody who’s listening to reach out to us. If you’d like to come on the show to talk about it, reach out to us. We have a Slack channel that we can have private conversations in. You can find that at Patreon.com/greaterthancode and donate as little as a dollar to get in. We do that so we keep the trolls out and if you cannot afford a dollar, please DM any one of us and we will get you in there for free.
\n\nSo with that, thank you again for listening and we will see you all next week.
Sponsored By:
00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds
\n\n\n\n10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices
\n\n28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread - Impact Consulting
\n\n\n\n38:43 - Management & Mentorship
\n\n\n\n52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings
\n\n55:08 - Ideal Clients
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMae: The phrase “indie”.
\n\nCasey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself.
\n\nChelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person’s needs.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nCHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae.
\n\nMAE: And also with us is Casey.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey.
\n\nAnd today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting.
\n\nTo get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level?
\n\nChelsea, would you mind going first?
\n\nCHELSEA: Sure.
\n\nSo I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization.
\n\nMy job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers.
\n\nSo that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs’ umbrella.
\n\nAfter I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while.
\n\nSo in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job.
\n\nAfter I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks’ notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client.
\n\nI still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout.
\n\nAnd then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story.
\n\nIs anyone feeling a penchant for going next?
\n\nMAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me.
\n\nSpecifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things.
\n\nAnyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning.
\n\nSo I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them.
\n\nI think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work.
\n\nCASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them.
\n\nAll right, I'll share about me now.
\n\nSo I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both.
\n\nSo after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever, I got to go. I can't deal with caring so much anymore, and I'm not willing to care less either.”
\n\nSo most recently, I took a sabbatical and I finished my book, Debugging Your Brain, which takes together psychology ideas, like cognitive behavioral therapy and programming ideas and that, I'm so proud of. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out.
\n\nThen I went back to my job and I gave them another month where I was like, “All right, look, these are things need to change for me to be happy to work here.” Nothing changed, then I left. Maybe it's changing very slowly, but too slowly for me to be happy there, or most of these past companies. [laughs]
\n\nAfter I left, this last sabbatical, I spent three to six months working on a board game version of my book. That's a lot of fun. And then I decided I needed more income, I needed to pay the bills, and I can totally be a tech consultant if I just deal with learning marketing and sales. That's been my… probably six months now, I've been working on the marketing in sales part, thinking a lot about it. I have a lot of support from a lot of friends.
\n\nNow I consult on ways to make teams happier and more effective and that's my company name, Happy and Effective. I found it really easy to sell workshops, like diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops to HR departments. They're pretty hungry for those kinds of workshops and it's hard to find good, effective facilitators. It's a little bit harder to get companies to pay for coaching for their employees, even though a new EM would love coaching and how to be a good leader.
\n\nCompanies don't always have the budget for that set aside and I wish they would. I'm working with a lot of companies. I have a couple, but not as many as I'd like. And then the hardest, my favorite kind of client is when I get to embed with the team and really work on seeing what's going on me on the ground with them, and help understand what's going on to tell the executives what's happening and what needs to change and really make a big change. I've done that once, or twice and I'd love to do that more, but it's the hardest. So I'm thinking about easy, medium, hard difficulty of selling things to clients. I would actually make plenty of money is doing workshops, honestly, but I want the impact of embedding. That's my bigger goal is the impact.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I basically have used my software as a Trojan horse for [laughs] offering the consulting and change management services to help them get there because that is something that people already expect to spend some money on. That, though has been a little problematic because a few years in, they start to think that the line item in the budget is only for software and then it looks very expensive to them. Whereas, if they were looking at it as a consultant gig, it's incredibly inexpensive to them.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It's maybe so inexpensive that it must not be a quality product that they're buying.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: Put it that way implicitly.
\n\nMAE: Definitely, there's also that.
\n\nCASEY: When setting prices, this is a good general rule of thumb. It could be too low it looks like it'll be junk, like a dollar store purchase, or it can be too high and they just can't afford it, and then there's the middle sweet spot where it seems very valuable. They barely can afford it, but they know it'll be worth it, and that's a really good range to be in.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. Honestly, for the work that I do, it's more of a passion project. I would do it totally for free, but that doesn't work for this reason you're talking about.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Like, it needs to hurt a little bit because it's definitely going to be lots and lots of my time and it's going to be some of their time and it needs to be an investment that not hurt bad [laughs] but just be noticeable as opposed to here's a Kenny’s Candy, or something.
\n\nCASEY: I found that works on another scale, on another level. I do career coaching for friends, and friends of friends, and I'm willing to career coach my friends anyway. I've always been. For 10 years, I've reviewed hundreds, thousands of resumes. I've done so many interviews. I'm down to be a career coach, but no one was taking me up on it until I started charging and now friends are coming to me to pay me money to coach them. I think on their side, it feels more equitable. They're more willing to do it now that I'm willing to take money in exchange for it. I felt really bad charging friends until I had the sliding skill. So people who make less, I charge less for, for this personal service. It's kind of weird having a personal service like that, but it works out really well. I'm so happy for so many friends that have gotten jobs they're happy with now from the support. So even charging friends, like charging them nothing means they're not going to sign up for it.
\n\nMAE: Yes, and often, there is a bias of like, “Oh, well, that's my friend.” [laughs] so they must not be a BFD.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. But we are all BFDs.
\n\nMAE: Exactly!
\n\nHow about you Chelsea? How did you start to get to the do the pricing thing?
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah, I think it's interesting to hear y'all's approaches to the marketing and the pricing because mine has been pretty different from that.
\n\nBut before I get off on that, one thing I do want to mention around getting started with offering personal services at price is that if it seems too large a step to offer a personal service to one person for an amount of money, one thing that I have witnessed folks have success with in starting out in this vein is to set up a Patreon and then have office hours for patrons wherein they spend 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that and anyone who is a patron is welcome to join. What often ends up happening for folks in that situation is that people who are friends of theirs support their Patreon and then the friends can show up.
\n\nSo effectively, folks are paying a monthly fee for access to this office hours, which they might attend, or they might not attend. But there are two nice things about it.
\n\nThe first thing about it is that you're not – from a psychological perspective, it doesn’t feel like charging your friends for your time with them. It feels more indirect than that in a way that can be helpful for folks who are very new to charging for things and uncomfortable with the idea.
\n\nThe second thing is that the friends are often much more willing to pay than somebody who's new to charging is willing to charge. So the friends are putting this money into this Patreon, usually not because they're trying to get access to your office hours, but because they want to support you and one of the nice things about Patreon is that it is a monthly amount.
\n\nSo having a monthly email from Patreon that's like, “Hey, you we're sending you—” it doesn't even have to be a lot. “We're sending you 40 bucks this month.” It is a helpful conditioning exercise for folks who are not used to charging because they are getting this regular monthly income and the amount is not as important as receiving the regular income, which is helpful psychological preparation for charging for things on your own, I think.
\n\nThat's not the way that I did it, but I have seen people be effective that way. So there's that.
\n\nFor me, marketing was something that I was very worried about having to do when I started my business. In fact, it was one of those things where my conviction, when I started my consulting business, was I do not want to have to sell my services. I will coast on what clients I can find and when it is no longer easy, I will just get a full-time job because selling traditionally conceptualized is not something that I enjoyed.
\n\nI had a head start on the marketing element of things, that is sort of the brand awareness element of things, my reputation and the reason for that is that first of all, I had consulted at Labs for several years, which meant that every client team that I had ever worked with there, the director remembered me, the product owner remember me. So a lot of people who had been clients of Labs – I didn't actually get anybody to be a client of mine who was a client of Labs, but the individuals I had worked with on those projects who had then changed jobs to go to different companies, reached out to me on some occasions. So that was one place that I got clients from.
\n\nThe other place that I gotten clients from has been my blog. Before I started my business, I had already been writing a tech blog for like 4, or 5 years and my goal with the tech blog has never actually been to get clientele, or make money. My goals for the blog when I started it were to write down what I was learning so that I would remember it and then after that, it was to figure out how to communicate my ideas so that I would have an easier time communicating them in the workplace. After that, it became an external validation source so that I would no longer depend on my individual manager's opinion of me to decide how good I was at programming.
\n\nOnly very recently has it changed to something like, okay, now I'm good enough at communicating and good enough at tech that I actually have something to teach anybody else. So honestly, for many years, I would see the viewership on my blog and I would be like, “Who are all these people? Why are they in my house?” Like, this is weird, but I would get some credibility from that.
\n\nCASEY: They don't expect any tea from me.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. I really hope. I don't have enough to go around, [laughs] but it did help and that's where a lot of folks have kind of come from. Such that when I posted on my blog a post about how I'm going to be going indie. I've quit my job. I didn't really expect that to go anywhere, but a few people did reach out from that and I've been lucky insofar is that that has helped me sustain a client load in a way that I didn't really expect to.
\n\nThere's also, I would be remiss not to mention that what I do is I sling code for money for the majority of my consulting business, at least historically and especially in the beginning was exclusively that, and there's enough of a demand to have somebody come in and write code that that helped. It also helped that as I was taking on clients, I started to niche down specifically what I wanted to work on to a specific type of client and to a specific type problem. So I quickly got to the point where I had enough of a client load that I was going to have to make a choice about which clients to accept, or I was going to have to work over time.
\n\nNow, the conventional wisdom in this circumstance is to raise your rates. Vast majority of business development resources will tell you that that's what you're supposed to do in this situation. But part of my goal in creating my consulting business had been to get out of burnout and part of the reason for the burnout was that I did not feel that the work that I was doing was contributing to a cause that made me feel good about what I was doing. It wasn't morally reprehensible, but I just didn't feel like I was contributing to a better future in the way that my self-identity sort of mandated that I did. It was making me irritable and all these kinds of things.
\n\nMAE: I had the same thing, yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. So it's interesting to hear that that's a common experience, but if I were to raise my rates, the companies that were still going to be able to afford me were going to be companies whose products were not morally reprehensible, but not things that coincided with what I was trying to get out of my consulting business.
\n\nSo what I did instead was I said, “I'm specifically looking to work with organizations that are contributing to basic scientific research, improving access for underserved communities, and combating the effects of climate change,” and kept my rates effectively the same, but niche down the clientele to that.
\n\nThat ended up being kind of how I did it. I find that rates vary from client to client in part, because of what you were talking about, Casey, wherein you have to hit the right price in order to even get clients board in certain circumstances.
\n\nCASEY: Right.
\n\nCHELSEA: I don't know a good way to guess it. My technique for this, which I don't know if this is kosher to say, but my technique for this has been whoever reached out to me, interested in bringing me on as a consultant for that organization, I ask that person to do some research and figure out what rate I'm supposed to pitch. That has helped a lot because a lot of times my expectations have been wildly off in those circumstances.
\n\nOne time I had somebody say to me, this was for a custom workshop they wanted. I was like, “What should I charge?” And they were like, “I don't know, a few thousand.” I was like, “Is that $1,200? Is that $9,000? I don't know how much money that is,” and so they went back and then they came back and they were able to tell me more specifically a band. There was absolutely no way I would've hit that number accurately without that information.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and different clients have different numbers. You setting your price standard flat across all customers is not a good strategy either. That's why prices aren't on websites so often.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. I find that it does depend a lot. There's similarly, like I said, a lot of my clients are clients who are contributing to basic scientific research are very often grant funded and grants funding is a very particular kind of funding. It can be intermittent. There has to be a skillset on the team for getting the grant funding. A lot of times, to be frank, it doesn't support the kinds of rates that somebody could charge hourly in a for-profit institution.
\n\nSo for me, it was worth it to make the choice that this is who I want to work with. I know that my rate is effectively capped at this, if I'm going to do that and that was fine by me. Although, I'm lying to say it was completely fine by me. I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, while I was still in that last full-time job, and realize that I had become a person who gauged her self-worth by the salary that she commanded more than I was comfortable with. More than I wanted to. I had to figure out how to weaken that dependency before I was really able to go off and do my own thing. That was my experience with it.
\n\nI'm curious whether y'all, well, in particular, Casey, did you find the same thing?
\n\nCASEY: The self-worth by salary?
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I felt that over time, yeah. Like I went from private sector big tech to government and I got a pay cut and I was like, “Ugh.” It kind of hurt a little and it wasn't even as much as I was promised. Once I got through the hiring process, it was lower than that and now I'm making way less. When I do my favorite impact thing, the board game, like if I made a board game about mental health for middle schoolers, which is something I really want to do, that makes less than anything else I could with my time. I'll be lucky to make money on that at all. So it's actually inverse. My salary is inversely proportional to how much impact I can have if I'm working anyway.
\n\nSo my dream is to have enough corporate clients that I can do half-time, or game impact, whatever other impact things I'm thinking about doing. I think of my impact a lot. Impact is my biggest goal, but the thing is salary hurts. If I don't have the salary and I want to live where I'm living and the lifestyle I have, I don't want to cut back on that and I don't need to, hopefully.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right.
\n\nCASEY: I'm hoping eventually, I'll have a steady stream of clients, I don't need to do the marketing and sales outreach as much and all those hours I kind of recoup. I can invest those in the impact things. I've heard people can do that. I think I'll get there.
\n\nCHELSEA: No, I think you absolutely will.
\n\nMae, I'm curious as to your experience, because I know that you have a lot of experience with a similar calculation of determining which things are going to provide more income, which things are probably going to provide less income, and then balancing across a bunch of factors like money, but also impact, time spent, emotional drain, and all that stuff.
\n\nMAE: Well, Chelsea.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI am a real merry go round in this arena. So before I became a programmer, I had a state job, I was well paid, and I was pretty set. Then I was a programmer and I took huge pay cut because I quit. I became a programmer when I was 37 years old. So I already had a whole career and to start at the beginning and be parallel with 20-year-old so it's not just like my salary, but also my level and my level of impact on my – and level of the amount of people who wanted to ask me for my advice [laughs] was significantly different.
\n\nSo like the ego's joking stopped and so when you mentioned the thing about identity. Doing any kind of consulting in your own deal is a major identity reorganization and having the money, the title, the clout, and the engagement. Like a couple years, I have spent largely alone and that is very different than working at a place where I have colleagues, or when I live somewhere and have roommates. But I have found signing up for lots and lots of different social justice and passion project things, and supporting nonprofits that I believe in.
\n\nSo from my perspective, I'm really offering a capacity building grant out of my own pocket, my own time, and my own heart and that has been deeply rewarding and maybe not feel much about my identity around salary. Except it does make me question myself as an adult. Like these aren't the best financial decisions to be making, [chuckles] but I get enough out of having made them that it's worth it to me.
\n\nOne of the things probably you were thinking of, Chelsea, we worked together a little bit on this mutual aid project that I took on when the pandemic started and I didn't get paid any dollars for that and I was working 18 hours a day on it, [chuckles] or something.
\n\nSo I like to really jump in a wholeheartedly and then once I really, really do need some dollars, then I figure something else out. That is kind of how I've ebbed and flowed with it. But mostly, I've done it by reducing my personal overhead so that I'm not wigged about the money and lowering whatever my quality-of-life spending goals [chuckles] are. But that also has had to happen because I have not wanted to and I couldn't get myself to get excited about marketing of myself and my whole deal. Like I legit still don't have a website and I've been in operation now since 2014 so that's a while.
\n\nI meet people and I can demonstrate what it is and I get clients and for me, having only a few clients, there's dozens of people that work for each one. So it's more of an organization client than a bunch of individuals and I can't actually handle a ton. I was in a YCombinator thing that wanted me to really be reporting on income, growth rates, and all of these number of new acquisition things, and it just wasn't for me. Those are not my goals. I want to make sure that this nonprofit can help more people this year and that they can get more grant money because they know how many people they helped and that those people are more efficient at their job every day. So those are harder to measure. It's not quite an answer to your question, [laughs] but I took it and ran a little.
\n\nCHELSEA: No, I appreciate that. There is a software engineer and a teacher that I follow on Twitter. His name is GeePawHill. Are y'all familiar with GeePawHill?
\n\nMAE: No.
\n\nCHELSEA: And he did a thread a couple of days ago that this conversation reminds me of and I found it. Is that all right if I read like a piece of it and paraphrase part of it?
\n\nMAE: Yes, please.
\n\nCHELSEA: Okay.
\n\nSo this is what he says. He says, “The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things…that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do.
\n\nThe young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me.
\n\nThe problem they're going to face when they get to The Show isn't technical, or intellectual at all. No language, or framework, or OS, or library, or algorithm is going to daunt them, not for long.
\n\nNo, the problem they're going to face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it.
\n\nIt is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it; many are doing it today.
\n\nBut it is very hard.
\n\nVery hard.
\n\nFar harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or, dart, or SQL, or even Haskell.
\n\nHow do you tell people you've watched “become” as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, 5 years or more, they must…navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development?
\n\nThe best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work.
\n\nIt is a lousy answer.
\n\nI feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.”
\n\nCASEY: I just saw this thread and I really liked it, too. I'm glad you found it.
\n\nMAE: Oh, yeah. I find it honestly pretty inspiring, like people generally who get involved in the kinds of consulting gigs that we three are talking about, which is a little different than just any random consulting, or any random freelancing.
\n\nCASEY: Like impact consulting, I might call that.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. It's awesome if the money comes, but it's almost irrelevant [chuckles] provided that basic needs are meant. So that's kind of been my angle. We'll see how – talk to me in 20 more years when I'm [chuckles] trying to retire and made a lot of choices that I was happy with at the time.
\n\nCASEY: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's an executive director of an orchestra in the nonprofit space and he was telling me that so many nonprofits shoot themselves in the foot by not doing enough fundraising, by not raising money, and that comes from not wanting to make money in a way because they're a nonprofit, money is not a motive, and everybody's very clear about that.
\n\nThat's noble and all, but it ends up hurting them because they don't have the money to do the impactful things they would as a nonprofit. Money is a necessary evil here and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. Including me a lot of the time. Honestly, I have to tell myself not to. What would I tell a friend? “No, charge more money.” Okay, I guess I'll tell myself to do that now. I have this conversation with myself a lot.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I've been very aware that when I become anti-money, the well dries up. The money well. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: And when I am respectful of and appreciative of money in the world, more comes my way. There is an internal dousing, I think that happens that one needs to be very careful about for sure.
\n\nCASEY: One of the techniques I use with myself and with clients is a matrix where I write out for this approach, this thing that I'm thinking about how much money will it make, how much impact will it have on this goal, and all the different heuristics I would use to make the decision, or columns and all the options arose. I put numbers in it and I might weight my columns because money is less important than impact, but it's still important. It's there. I do all this math.
\n\nIn the end, the summary column with the averages roughly matches what's in my head, which is the things that are similar in my head are similar on paper, but I can see why and that's very clarifying for me. I really like being able to see it in this matrix form and being able to see that you have to focus on the money some amount. If you just did the high impact one, it wouldn't be on the top of the list. It's like, it's hard to think about so many variables at once, but seeing it helps me.
\n\nCHELSEA: It is. GeePaw speaks to that some later in the thread. He says, “You’ve got to feed your family. You’ve got to. That's not negotiable. But you don't got to forget the well. To be any good at all, you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours, or after hours. Matters whether you get to it.
\n\nThe thing you’ve got to watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process.
\n\nYou’ve got to watch whether, or how you're getting to the well.
\n\nIf you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.”
\n\nI think I'm curious as to y'all's thoughts on this, but like I mentioned earlier, I have a full-time job and I also do this consulting on the side. I also teach. I teach at the Master's program in computer science at University of Chicago. I do some mentoring with an organization called Emergent Works, which trains formerly incarcerated technologists.
\n\nThe work situation that I have pieced together for myself, I think manages to get me the income I need and also, the impact that I'm looking for and the ability to work with people and those kinds of things. I think my perspective at this point is that it's probably difficult, if it's realistic at all, to expect any one position to be able to meet all of those needs simultaneously. Maybe they exist, but I suspect that they're relatively few and far between and I think that we probably do ourselves a disservice by propagating this idea that what you need to do is just make yourself so supremely interview-able that everybody wants to hire you and then you get to pick the one position where you get to do that because there's only one in the entirety of tech, it's that rare.
\n\nSure, maybe that's an individualist way to look at it. But when we step back and look more closely, or when we step back and look more broadly at that, it's like, all right, so we have to become hypercompetitive in order to be able to get the position where we can make enough while helping people. Like, the means there seem kind of cutthroat for the ends, right? [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: This reminds me of relationships, too and I think there's a lot of great parallels here. Like you shouldn't expect your partner to meet all of your needs, all of them.
\n\nMAE: I was thinking the same thing!
\n\nCASEY: Uh huh. Social, emotional, spiritual, physical, all your needs cannot possibly by one person and that is so much pressure to put on that person,
\n\nCHELSEA: Right.
\n\nCASEY: It's like not healthy.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right.
\n\nCASEY: You can choose some to prioritize over others for your partner, but you're not going to get a 100% of it and you shouldn't.
\n\nCHELSEA: Well, and I find that being a conversation fairly regularly in monogamous versus polyamorous circles as well. Like, how much is it appropriate to expect of a partner? But I think it is a valid conversation to have in those circles. But I think that even in the context of a monogamous relationship, a person has other relationships—familial relationships, friend relationships—outside of that single romantic relationship.
\n\nCASEY: Co-workers, community people, yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right. But even within that monogamous context, it's most realistic and I would argue, the most healthy to not expect any one person to provide for all of your needs and rather to rely on a community. That's what we're supposed to be able to do.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Interdependence, not independence.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right.
\n\nCASEY: It's more resilient in the face of catastrophe, or change in general, mild, more mild change and you want to be that kind of resilient person for yourself, too. Just like you would do a computer system, or an organization. They should be resilient, too.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: Your relationship with your job is another one.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right. And I think that part of the reason the burnout is so quick – like the amount of time, the median amount of time that somebody spends at a company in tech is 2.2 years.
\n\nMAE: I know, it's so weird.
\n\nCHELSEA: Very few companies in tech have a large number of lifers, for example, or something like that. There are a number of reasons for that. We don't necessarily have to get into all of them, although, we can if you want. But I think one of them is definitely that we expect to get so much out of a full-time position. Tech is prone. due to circumstances of its origin, to an amount of idealism. We are saving the world. We, as technologists, are saving the world and also, we, as technologists, can expect this salary and we, as technologists, are a family and we play ping pong, and all of these things –
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat contribute to an unrealistic expectation of a work environment, which if that is the only place that we are getting fulfillment as programmers, then people become unsatisfied very quickly because how could an organization that's simultaneously trying to accomplish a goal, meet all of these expect for everybody? I think it's rare at best.
\n\nCASEY: I want to bring up another example of this kind of thing. Imagine you're an engineer and you have an engineering manager. What's their main job? Is it to get the organization's priorities to be done by the team, like top-down kind of thing? We do need that to happen. Or is it to mentor each individual and coach them and help them grow as an engineer? We need that somewhere, too, yeah. Or is it to make the team – like the team to come together as a team and be very effective together and to represent their needs to the org? That, too, but we don't need one person to do all three of those necessarily. If the person's not technical, you can get someone else in the company to do technical mentorship, like an architect, or just a more senior person on, or off the team somewhere else. But we put a lot of pressure on the engineering managers to do that and this applies to so many roles. That's just one I know that I can define pretty well.
\n\nThere's an article that explains that pretty well. We'll put in the show notes.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nSo what I am currently doing is I have a not 40 hours a week job as an engineering manager and especially when I took the gig, I was still doing all of these pandemic charity things and I'm like, “These are more important to me right now and I only have so many hours in the day. So do you need me to code at this place? I can, but do you need me to because all those hours are hours I can go code for all these other things that I'm doing,” and [laughs] it worked. I have been able to do all three of the things that you're talking about, Casey, but certainly able to defer in different places and it's made me – this whole thing of not working full-time makes you optimize in very different ways.
\n\nSo I sprinkle my Slack check-ins all day, but I didn't have to work all day to be present all day. There's a lot that has been awesome. It's not for everyone, but I also have leaned heavily on technical mentorship happening from tech leads as well.
\n\nCASEY: Sounds good.
\n\nMAE: But I'm still involved. But this thing about management, especially in tech being whichever programmer seems like the most dominant programmer is probably going to be a good needs to be promoted into management. Just P.S. management is its own discipline, has its own trajectory and when I talk to hiring managers and they only care about my management experience in tech, which is 6 years, right? 8, but I have 25 years of experience in managing. So there's a preciousness of what it is that we are asking for the employees and what the employees are asking of the employer, like you were talking about Chelsea, that is very interesting. It's very privileged, and does lead a lot of people to burnout and disappointment because their ideas got so lofty.
\n\nI just want to tie this back a little bit too, something you read in that quote about – I forget the last quote, but it was something about having enough to be able to change the world and it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown, pleasure activism, emergent strategy, and all of her work, and largely, generations of Black women have been saying, “Yo, you’ve got to take care [chuckles] of yourself to be able to affect change.” Those people have been the most effective and powerful change makers. So definitely, if you're curious about this topic, I urge you to go listen to some brilliant Black women about it.
\n\nCASEY: We'll link that in the show notes, too.
\n\nI think a lot about engineering managers and one way that doesn't come up a lot is you can get training for engineering managers to be stronger managers and for some reason, that is not usually an option people reach for. It could happen through HR, or it could happen if you have a training budget and you're a new EM, you could use your training budget to hire coaching from someone. I'm an example. But there's a ton of people out there that offer this kind of thing. If you don't learn the leadership skills when you switch roles, if you don't take time to learn those skills that are totally learnable, you're not going to have them and it's hard to apply them. There's a lot of pressure to magically know them now that you’ve switched hats.
\n\nMAE: And how I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have a therapist, [laughs] I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have multiple job coaches at any time. Like why are we not sourcing more ideas and problem-solving strategies, and thinking we need to be the repository of how to handle X, Y, Z situation?
\n\nCASEY: For some reason, a lot of people I've talked to think their manager is supposed to do that for them. Their manager is supposed to be their everything; their boss. They think the boss that if they're bad, you quit your job. If they're good, you'll stay. That boss ends up being their career coach for people, unless they're a bad career coach and then you're just stuck. Because we expect it so strongly and that is an assumption I want everyone listening to question. Do you need your manager at work to be that person for you? If they are, that's great. You're very fortunate. If not, how can you find someone? Someone in the community, a friend, family member, a professional coach, there's other options, other mentors in the company. You don't have to depend on that manager who doesn't have time for you to give you that kind of support.
\n\nCHELSEA: So to that end, my thinking around management and mentorship changed about the time I hit – hmm. It was a while ago now, I don't know, maybe 6 years as a programmer, or something like that. Because before that, I was very bought into this idea that your manager is your mentor and all these types of things.
\n\nThere was something that I realized. There were two things that I realized. The first one was that, for me, most of my managers were not well set up to be mentors to me and this is why. Well, the truth is I level up quickly and for many people who are managers in a tech organization, they were technologists for 3 to 5 years before they became managers. They were often early enough in their career that they didn't necessarily know what management entailed, or whether they should say no based on what they were interested in. Many managers in tech figure out what the job is and then try to find as many surreptitious ways as possible to get back into the code.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: Additionally, many of those managers feel somewhat insecure about their weakening connection to the code base of the company that they manage.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: And so it can be an emotionally fraught experience for them to be mentor to someone whose knowledge of the code base that they are no longer in makes them feel insecure. So I learned that the most effective mentors for me – well, I learned something about the most effective mentors for me and I learned something of the most effective managers for me.
\n\nI learned that the most effective managers for me either got way out ahead of me experience wise before they became managers, I mean 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, because those are not people who got promoted to management because they didn't know to say no. Those are people who got promoted to management after they got tired of writing code and they no longer staked their self-image on whether they're better coders than the people that they manage. That's very, very important.
\n\nThe other type of person who was a good manager for me was somebody who had never been a software engineer and there are two reasons for that. First of all, they trended higher on raw management experience. Second of all, they were not comparing their technical skillset to my technical skillset in a competitive capacity and that made them better managers for me, honestly. It made things much, much easier.
\n\nAnd then in terms of mentors, I found that I had a lot more luck going outside of the organization I was working for mentors and that's again, for two reasons. The first one is that a lot of people, as they gain experience, go indie. Just a lot of people, like all kinds. Some of my sort of most trusted mentors. Avdi Grimm is somebody I've learned a lot from, indie effectively at this point. GeePawHill, like I mentioned, indie effectively at this point. Kenneth Mayer, indie effectively at this point. And these are all people who had decades of experience and the particular style of programming that I was doing very early in my career for many years. So that's the first reason.
\n\nAnd then the second reason is that at your job, it is in your interest to succeed at everything you try—at most jobs. And jobs will tell you it's okay to fail. Jobs will tell you it's okay to like whatever, not be good at things and to be learning. But because if I'm drawing a paycheck from an organization, I do not feel comfortable not being good at the thing that I am drawing the paycheck for.
\n\nMAE: Same.
\n\nCHELSEA: And honestly, even if they say that that's the case, when the push comes to shove and there's a deadline, they don't actually want you to be bad at things. Come on! That doesn't make any sense. But I've been able to find ambitious projects that I can contribute to not for pay and in those situations, I'm much more comfortable failing because I can be like, “You know what, if they don't like my work, they can have all their money back.”
\n\nAnd I work on a couple projects like that right now where I get to work with very experienced programmers on projects that are interesting and challenging, and a lot of times, I just absolutely eat dirt. My first PR doesn't work and I don't know what's wrong and the whole description is like somebody please help and I don't feel comfortable doing that on – if I had to do it at work, I would do it, but I'm not comfortable doing it.
\n\nI firmly believe that for people to accelerate their learning to their full capacity for accelerating their learning, they must place themselves in situations where they not only might fail, but it's pretty likely. Because that's what's stretching your capacity to the degree that you need to get better and that's just not a comfortable situation for somewhere that you depend on to make a living.
\n\nAnd that ended up being, I ended up approaching my management and my mentorship as effectively mutually exclusive things and it ended up working out really well for me. At this particular point in time, I happened to have a manager who happened to get way out ahead of me technically, and is willing to review PRs and so, that's very nice. But it's a nice-to-have. It's not something that I expect of a manager and it's ended up making me much more happy and manage relationships.
\n\nMAE: I agree with all of that. So well said, Chelsea.
\n\nCHELSEA: I try, I try. [laughs]
\n\nCasey, are there things that you look for specifically in a manager?
\n\nCASEY: Hmm. I guess for that question, I want to take the perspective inward, into myself. What do I need support on and who can I get that from? And this is true as also an independent worker as a consultant freelancer, too. I need support for when things are hard and I can be validated from people who have similar experiences, that kind of like emotional support. I need technical support and skills, like the sales I don't have yet and I have support for that, thank goodness. Individuals, I need ideally communities and individuals, both.
\n\nThey're both really important to me and some of these could be in a manager, but lately, I'm my own manager and I can be none of those things, really. I'm myself. I can't do this external support for myself. Even when I'm typing into a spreadsheet and the computer's trying to be a mirror, it's not as good as talking to another person.
\n\nAnother perspective that I need support on is how do I know what I'm doing is important and so, I do use spreadsheets as a mirror for that a lot of the time for myself. Like this impact is having this kind of magnitude of impact on this many people and then that calculates to this thing, maybe. Does that match my gut? That's literally what I want to know, too. The numbers aren't telling me, but talking to other people about impact on their projects really kind of solidifies that for me. And it's not always the client directly. It could be someone else who sees the impact I'm having on a client.
\n\nKind of like the manager, I don't want to expect clients to tell me the impact I'm having. In fact, for business reasons, I should know what the impact is myself, to tell them, to upsell them and continue it going anyway. So it really helps me to have peers to talk through about impact. Like that, too types of support.
\n\nWhat other kinds of support do you need as consultants that I didn't just cover?
\n\nMAE: I still need – and I have [laughs] hired Casey to help me. I still need a way to explain what it is that I am offering and what the value of that really is in a way that is clear and succinct. Every time I've gone to make a website, or a list of what it is that I offer, I end up in the hundreds of bullet points [laughs] and I just don't – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, yeah.
\n\nMAE: Have a way to capture it yet. So often when people go indie, they do have a unique idea, a unique offering so finding a way to summarize what that is can be really challenging.
\n\nI loved hearing you two when you were talking about knowing what kinds of work you want to do and who your ideal customer is. Those are things I have a clearer sense of, but how to make that connection is still a little bit of a gap for me.
\n\nBut you reminded me in that and I just want to mention here this book, The Pumpkin Plan, like a very bro business book situation, [chuckles] but what is in there is so good. I don't want to give it away and also, open up another topic [laughs] that I'll talk too long about. So I won't go into it right now, but definitely recommend it. One of the things is how to call your client list and figure out what is the most optimal situation that's going to lead toward the most impact for everybody.
\n\nCASEY: One of the things I think back to a lot is user research and how can we apply that this business discovery process. I basically used the same techniques that were in my human computer interaction class I took 10, or 15 years ago. Like asking open ended questions, trying to get them to say what their problems are, remembering how they said it in their own words and saying it back to them—that's a big, big step.
\n\nBut then there's a whole lot of techniques I didn't learn from human computer interaction, that are sales techniques, and my favorite resource for that so far is called SPIN selling where SPIN is an acronym and it sounds like a wonky technique that wouldn't work because it's just like a random technique to pull out. I don't know, but it's not.
\n\nThis book is based on studies and it shows what you need to do to make big ticket sales go through, which is very different than selling those plastic things with the poppy bubbles in the mall stand in the middle of the hallway. Those low-key things they can manipulate people into buying and people aren't going to return it probably. But big-ticket things need a different approach than traditional sales and marketing knowledge and I really like the ideas in SPIN selling. I don't want to go into them today. We'll talk about it later. But those are two of the perspectives I bring to this kind of problem, user research and the SPIN selling techniques.
\n\nI want to share what my ideal client would be. I think that's interesting, too. So I really want to help companies be happier and more effective. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective, and that has the impact on the users of the company, or whoever their clients are. It definitely impacts that, which makes it a thing I can sell, thankfully. So an organization usually knows when they're not the most happy, or the most effective. They know it, but my ideal client isn't just one that knows that, but they also have leadership buy-in; they have some leader who really cares and can advocate for making it better and they just don't know how. They don't have enough resources to make it happen in their org. Maybe they have, or don't have experience with it, but they need support. That's where I come in and then my impact really is on the employees. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective. That's the direct impact I want, and then it has the really strong, indirect impact on the business outcomes.
\n\nSo in that vein, I'm willing to help even large tech companies because if I can help their employees be happier, that is a positive impact. Even if I don't care about large tech companies’ [chuckles] business outcomes, I'm okay with that because my focus is specifically on the employees. That's different than a lot of people I talk to; they really just want to support like nonprofit type, stronger impact of the mission and that totally makes sense to me, too.
\n\nMAE: Also, it is possible to have a large and ever growing equitably run company. It is possible. I do want to contribute toward that existing in the world and as much as there's focus on what the ultimate looking out impact is, I care about the experience of employees and individuals on the way to get there. I'm not a utilitarian thinker.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, but we can even frame it in a utilitarian way if we need to. If we're like a stakeholder presentation, if someone leaves the company and it takes six months to replace them and their work is in the meantime off board to other people, what's the financial impact of all that. I saw a paper about it. Maybe I can dig it up and I'll link to it. It's like to replace a person in tech it costs a $100K. So if they can hire a consultant for less than a $100K to save one person from leaving, it pays for itself. If that number is right, or whatever. Maybe it was ten employees for that number. The paper will say much better than I will.
\n\nCHELSEA: I think that in mentioning that Casey, you bring up something that businesses I think sometimes don't think about, which is some of the hidden costs that can easily be difficult to predict, or difficult to measure those kinds of things. One of the hidden costs is the turnover costs is the churn cost because there's how much it takes to hire another person and then there's the amount of ramp time before that person gets to where the person who left was.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right, right.
\n\nCHELSEA: And that's also a thing. There's all the time that developers are spending on forensic software analysis in order to find out all of the context that got dropped when a person left.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. The one person who knew that part of the code base, the last one is gone, uh oh.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right.
\n\nCASEY: It's a huge trust. And then engineering team is often really interested in conveying that risk. But if they're not empowered enough and don't have enough bandwidth time and energy to make the case, the executive team, or whoever will never hear it and they won't be able to safeguard against it.
\n\nMAE: Or using the right language to communicate it.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right. And that’s its own skill. That's trainable, too thankfully. But we don't usually train engineers in that, traditionally. Engineers don't receive that training unless they go out of their way for it. PMs and designers, too, honestly. Like the stakeholder communication, everybody can work on.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That's true.
\n\nMAE: Communication. Everyone can, or not. Yes. [laughs]
\n\nI learned the phrase indie today. I have never heard it and I really like it! It makes me feel cool inside and so love and – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I have no record label, or I am my own record label, perhaps.
\n\nMAE: Yo!
\n\nCASEY: I've got one. I like the idea of having a Patreon, not to make money, but to have to help inspire yourself and I know a lot of friends have had Patreons with low income from it and they were actually upset about it. So I want to go back to those friends and say, “Look, this prove some people find value in what you're doing.” Like the social impact. I might make my own even. Thank you.
\n\nMAE: I know I might do it too. It's good. That's good.
\n\nCHELSEA: Absolutely. Highly recommended.
\n\nOne thing that I want to take away is the exercise, Casey, that you were talking about of tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes in terms of a person's needs. Because I think that an exercise like that would be extremely helpful for, for example, some of my students who are getting their very first tech jobs. Students receive a very one-dimensional message about the way that tech employment goes. It tends to put set of five companies that show remain unnamed front and center, which whatever, but I would like them to be aware of the other options. And there is a very particular way of gauging the value of a tech position that I believe includes fewer dimensions than people should probably consider for the health of their career long-term and not only the health of their career, but also their health in their career.
\n\nCASEY: One more parting thought I want to share for anyone is you need support for your career growth, for your happiness. If you're going to be a consultant, you need support for that. Find support in individuals and communities, you deserve that support and you can be that support for the people who are supporting you! It can be mutual. They need that, too.
","summary":"Greater Than Code Panelists, Chelsea Troy, Mae Beale, and Casey Watts talk marketing, setting prices, and explaining their value and offerings for their personal consulting businesses while also sustaining connection to the well of “geek joy,” as GeePaw Hill mentioned in a recent Twitter thread. They talk about how it’s difficult to take on multiple roles when in management and agree that to lower burnout rates, there should be separate roles for separate people within companies.","date_published":"2022-01-19T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/4f8d60ec-fec7-40de-a4de-72091c56ac0c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52923341,"duration_in_seconds":3726}]},{"id":"7ad6af45-fb51-4b8b-89f5-e541cafd5c0d","title":"266: Words Carry Power – Approaching Inclusive Language with Kate Marshall","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/words-carry-power-approaching-inclusive-language","content_text":"01:48 - Kate’s Superpower: Empathy\n\n\nAbsorbing Energy\nSetting Healthy Energetic Boundaries\nAuthenticity\nIntent vs Impact\n\n\n10:46 - Words and Narratives Carry Power; Approaching Inclusive Language\n\n\nTaking Action After Causing Harm\nGet Specific, But Don’t Overthink\nPractice Makes Progress\nNormalize Sharing Pronouns\n\n\nNo-CodeConf\nNo-CodeSchool\n\nGender Expresion Does Not Always Equal Gender Identity\n\n\n21:27 - Approaching Inclusive Language in the Written Word\n\n\nWebflow Accessibility Checklist\nAsking For Advice\nDo Your Own Research/Work\n\n\n29:18 - Creating Safe Places, Communities, and Environments\n\n\nAbsorbing and Asking\nAuthenticity (Cont’d)\nAdaptation to Spaces\nShifting Energy\n\n\n42:34 - Building Kula While Working in Tech\n\n\nCommunity Care, Mutual Aid-Centered Model\nUsing Privilege to Pave the Way For More People\nAlignment\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity.\n\nArty: Words carry power.\n\nKate: Having an open heart is how you can put any of this into action.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript: \n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Arty Starr. \n\nARTY: Thanks, John. And I'm here with our guest today, Kate Marshall. \n\nKate is a copywriter and inclusivity activist living in Denver. Since entering tech 4 years ago, she's toured the marketing org from paid efforts to podcast host, eventually falling in love with the world of copy. With this work, she hopes to make the web a more welcoming place using the power of words. Outside of Webflow, you'll find Kate opening Kula, a donation-based yoga studio, and bopping around the Mile High City with her partner, Leah.\n\nWelcome to the show, Kate.\n\nKATE: Hi, thank you so much!\n\nARTY: So we always start our shows with our famous first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nKATE: My superpower, I've been thinking about this. My superpower is empathy. It can also be one of my biggest downfalls [laughs], which I actually think happens more often than not with any superpower. I once heard from a child, actually, they always seem to know best that too much of the good, good is bad, bad. \n\n[laughter]\n\nSo it turns out sometimes too much empathy can be too overwhelming for my system, but it has really driven everything that I've done in my career and my personal life.\n\nAs for how I acquired it, I don't know that you can really acquire empathy. I think it's just something you have, or you don't. I've always been extremely intuitive and if you're going through something, it's likely that I can feel it. So I think I'm just [laughs] I hate to steal Maybelline's line, but I think I was born with it. \n\nJOHN: You talked about having a downside there and I've heard – and I'm curious, because most people talk about empathy as a positive thing and wanting more people to develop more empathy, but I'd to love hear you talk a little bit more about what you see the downsides are.\n\nKATE: Yeah. As someone who struggles with her own mental health issues, it can be really overwhelming for me to really take on whatever it is you're going through. Especially if it's a loved one, you tend to care more about what they're feeling, or what they're going through and an empath truly does absorb the energy of what's happening around them. \n\nSo although, it does influence a lot of the work that I do, both in my full-time career and opening my yoga studio and everything in between, it's also hard sometimes to set those boundaries, to set healthy, really energetic boundaries. It's hard enough to voice your boundaries to people, but setting energetic boundaries is a whole other ballgame. So it can tend to feel overwhelming at times and bring you down if the energy around you is lower than what you want it to be. \n\nARTY: So what kind of things do you do to try and set healthy, energetic boundaries?\n\nKATE: Ah. I do a lot of what some people would call, including myself, woo-woo practices. [chuckles] Obviously, I practice yoga. I teach yoga. I'm super passionate about holistic, or energetic healing so I go to Reiki regularly. I'm in therapy, talk therapy. All of those things combined help me build this essentially an energetic shield that I can psych myself up to use any time I'm leaving the apartment. If it feels a high energy day, or if I'm meeting up with a friend who I know is going through something, I really have to set those boundaries is. \n\nSame thing kind of at work, too. So much of the time that we spend in our lives is spent at work, or interacting with coworkers or colleagues and same thing. Everyone's going through their own journey and battles, and you have to carry that energetic shield around you wherever you go.\n\nJOHN: One way I've often thought about having those sort of boundaries is the more I know who I am, the more what the limits of me are and the barrier between me and the universe is. So the work that I do, which includes therapy and other things, to understand myself better and to feel like I know what's me and what's not me, helps me have those boundaries. Because then I know if there's something going on with someone else and I can relate to it, but not get swept up by it.\n\nKATE: Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I was actually just having a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago that has really stuck with me. I was kind of feeling like I was messing up, essentially. Like I was not fully able to honor, or notice all of the triggers of the people around me. I think especially at the end of the year and as a queer person who is surrounded by queer community, it can be really tough around the holidays. \n\nSo that energy can just be generally more charged and I was finding it difficult to reconcile with my idea of perfection in that I really want to honor every person around me who has triggers, who has boundaries that maybe haven't been communicated, and it almost feels like you're almost always crossing some sort of line, especially when you're putting those perfectionism expectations on yourself.\n\nMy friend was like, “I don't think it's as much about being perfect at it as much as it is feeling like you're being authentically yourself and really authentically interacting with those people.” I don't know if I can really voice what the connection is between being able to honor triggers and boundaries of the people around you and feeling like your authentic self, but there's something about it that feels really connected to me. As long as you're trying your best and feeling like you're coming from a place of love, or connection, or compassion, or empathy whatever feels most to you, that's really all we can do, right?\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I feel like that authenticity is such a tricky concept because the thoughts that you're having about wanting to be perfect and take care of everyone and make sure you're not triggering anybody and not stepping on any of your own things, that's also part of you that is authentically you. You may not want it to be that way, but it still is. [laughs].\n\nARTY: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: So I still don't have a really clear sense in my mind what authenticity really is. I think probably it settles down to being a little bit more in the moment, rather than up in the thinking, the judging, the worrying, and being able to be present rather than – [overtalk]\n\nARTY: Totally. \n\nJOHN: Those other things, but it is tricky. \n\nKATE: Yeah. It can be tricky. Humans, man. \n\n[laughter] \n\nIt really is like being a human and part of the human experience is going to be triggering other people. It’s going to be causing harm. It’s going to be causing trauma to other humans. That's just part of it. \n\nI think the more you can get comfy with that idea and then also just really feeling like you're doing everything you can to stay connected to your core, which usually is in humans is a place of love. You're rooted in love for the people around you. How could you criticize yourself too much when you know that you're coming from that place?\n\nARTY: I feel like things change, too as you get feedback. In the context of any intimate relationship where you've got emotionally connected relationship with another person where you are more unguarded and you're having conversations about things that are more personal, that have at least the potential to hurt and cause harm. Like sometimes we do things not meaning to and we end up hurting someone else accidentally, but once that happens—and hopefully, you have an open dialogue where you have a conversation about these things and learn about these things and adapt—then I think the thing to do is honor each person as an individual of we're all peoples and then figure out well, what can we do to adapt how we operate in this relationship and look out for both people's best interests and strive for a win-win.\n\nIf we don't try and do that, like if we do things that we know we're harming someone else and we're just like, “Well, you should just put up with that,” [laughs], or whatever. I think that's where it becomes problematic is at the same time, we all have our own limitations and sometimes, the best thing to do is this relationship doesn't work. The way that we interact causes mutual harm and we can't this a win-win relationship and the best thing to do sometimes is to separate, even though it hurts because it's not working.\n\nKATE: Yeah. I feel like sometimes it's a classic case of intent versus impact, too. Like what's your intention going into a conversation and then how does that end up actually impacting that person and how can you honor that and learn from that? \n\nThat's actually one thing that I love so much about being a writer is that words do carry so much power—written word, spoken word, whatever it is. They hold so much power and they can cause harm whether we want them to, or not. Part of being an empath is caring a lot about people's lived experiences and I really see it as more than putting – being a writer and doing this every day, I see it so much more than just putting words on a page and hoping signs up for the beta, or watches the thing registers, or the conference. It's words can foster connection, words can build worlds for people; they can make people feel like they belong and I believe that I'm on this planet to foster that connection with each other and with ourselves.\n\nSo it all connects for me. It all comes back around whether we're talking about being in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our parents, or our caregivers, or the work that I do every day it all comes back to that connection and really wanting to make people feel more connected to themselves, to each other, and like they have a place with words.\n\nARTY: Yeah. It's very powerful. Words and narratives, I would say too, just thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we tell one another that become foundational in our culture. It's all built upon were words. Words shape the ideas in our head. They shape our thoughts. They shape how we reflect on things, how we feel about things, and then when people give us their words, we absorb those and then those become part of our own reflections. \n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nARTY: We affect one another a lot. I think that's one of the things I'm just seeing and talking to you is just thinking about how much we affect one another through our everyday interactions.\n\nKATE: Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to – there's something you said earlier that resonated in that it's really about the action you take after you cause the harm, or after you say the thing that hurts the other person and it's less about – and that's what made me say intent versus impact because you see the impact, you acknowledge it, and you make a decision to lessen that next time, or to be aware, more aware next time. \n\nThis is really at the core of all the work I do for inclusive language as well. It's just the core principle of the words we use carry a lot of power. \n\nAnd I was actually just chatting with someone in the No-Code space. We connected through Webflow a couple weeks ago and he said, “I think people are so scared to get it wrong when it comes to inclusive language,” and I experience this all the time. People freeze in their tracks because they don't know how address someone and then they're so scared to get it wrong and they're like, “Oh, so sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” and they're so apologetic. And then that makes it worse and it's just a whole thing. \n\nIn this conversation, we were talking specifically about misgendering people. My partner is non-binary. They're misgendered every single day when we go to restaurants, when we are just out and about. So this is something that is a part of my life every day. I told him that fear is so real and I carry that fear, too because I don't want to hurt people because I want to like get it right. It comes back to that perfectionism, that expectation that I put on myself, especially as a queer person to get it right all the time.\n\nBut so much of the good stuff lies in how you approach it and then how you fix it when you mess it up. Like, it's not so much about the thing, it's about the way that you approach it. If you approach inclusive language with an open mind, an open heart, and a real willingness, like true willingness to learn, that's what's important going into it and then you're already doing the work. You're already an ally. You're already however you want to put it. \n\nAnd then when you use an ableist word, or you use a racist word, or you misgender someone, your actions for following that speak volumes. I think we can really get caught up in the action itself and it's more about how you go into it and then how you try to fix it.\n\nARTY: So I'm thinking for listeners that might identify with being in a situation of being in the headlights and not knowing how to respond, or what to do. Other than what you were just talking about with coming at it with an open heart, are there any specific recommendations you might have for how to approach inclusive language? \n\nKATE: Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple really, really good ones. So often, the way to speak more inclusively, or to write more inclusively is just to get more specific about what you're trying to say. So instead of saying, “Oh, that's so crazy,” which is ableist, you can say, “Oh, that's so unheard of.” That's a good example. Or instead of unnecessarily gendering something you're saying like, “Oh, I'm out of wine, call the waitress over.” It's server instead of waiter, or waitress. \n\nYou kind of start to essentially practice replacing these words and these concepts that are so ingrained into who we are, into society at large, and really starting to disrupt those systems within us with challenging the way that we've described things in the past. So just essentially getting more specific when we're speaking. \n\nWhen it comes to misgendering people specifically, it's really important to not be overly apologetic when you misgender someone. I can give an example. If a server, for example, comes up to me and my partner and says, “Can I get you ladies anything else?” And I say, “Oh, actually my partner uses they/them pronouns. They are not a lady,” and they say, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh shit!” And then that makes my partner feel bad [chuckles] for putting them in that position and then it's kind of this like ping pong back and forth of just bad feelings. \n\nThe ideal scenario, the server would say, “Oh, excuse me, can I get you all anything else?” Or, “Can I get you folks anything else?” Or just, if you're speaking about someone who uses they/them pronouns and you say, “Yeah, and I heard she, I mean, they did this thing.” You just quickly correct it and move on. Don't make it into a production. It's okay. We get it. Moving on. Just try not to overthink it, basically. [laughs] Get more specific, but don't overthink it. Isn't that like, what a dichotomy. \n\n[laughter]\n\nJOHN: That ties back to what you were saying about perfectionism also, right? Like you said, you freeze up if you try and be perfect about it all the time, because you can't always know what someone's pronouns are and so, you have to make a guess at some point and maybe you're going to guess wrong. But it's how you deal with it by not making everybody uncomfortable with the situation. [laughs]\n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: And like you said, ping pong of bad feelings just amplifies, the whole thing blows out of proportion. You can just be like, “Oh, my apologies.” Her, they, whatever it is and then very quickly move on and then it's forgotten the next minute. Everything moves on from that, but you're not weeping and gnashing and – \n\n[laughter]\n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: Well, it means you don't have to keep feeling bad about it for the next 3 days either, like everyone can move on from that point.\n\nKATE: Right. Yeah, and just doing your best to not do it again.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nKATE: Once you learn, it's important to really let that try to stick. If you're having trouble, I have a friend who really has trouble with they/them pronouns and they practice with their dog. They talk to their dog about this person and they use they/them pronouns in that. Practice really does make perfect in this – not perfect, okay. Practice really does make progress in this kind of scenario and also, normalize sharing pronouns. \n\nJOHN: Yeah. \n\nKATE: It's more than just putting it in your Zoom name. It's more than just putting it in your Instagram bio. A good example of really starting this conversation was during Webflow's No-Code Conf, our yearly conference. It was mostly online and we had a live portion of it and every single time we introduced someone new, or introduced ourselves, we said, “My name is Kate Marshall, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm so happy to be here with you today.” Or just asking if you don't know, or if you're in a space with someone new, you say, “What are your pronouns?” It's really is that easy. \n\nWebflow made some year-round pride mech that we launched over the summer and we have a cute beanie that says “Ask me my pronouns.” It's like, it's cool to ask. It's fine to ask and that's so much better than unintentionally misgendering someone. It's going to take some time to get there, but normalize it.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I think there's one key to that that has always stuck out of my mind, which is don't ask pronouns just for the people you think might have different pronouns than you would expect. \n\nKATE: Yes.\n\nJOHN: Make it part of all the conversations so it's not just singling somebody out of a group and saying, “I want to know your pronouns because they're probably different.” That's not good.\n\nKATE: Right, because gender expression does not always equal gender identity.\n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nKATE: You can't know someone's gender identity from the way that they express their gender and that's also another huge misconception that I think it's time we talk more about.\n\nJOHN: So we've been talking a lot about conversations and person-to-person interactions and inclusive language there. But a lot of what you do is it on the writing level and I imagine there's some differences there. So I'm curious as to what you see as far as the things that you do to work on that in the written form.\n\nKATE: Yeah. So this is actually a really great resource that I was planning on sharing with whoever's listening, or whoever's following along this podcast. There is a really wonderful inclusive language guidelines that we have published externally at Webflow and I own it, I update it regularly as different things come in and inclusive language is constantly evolving. It will never be at a final resting point and that's also part of why I love it so much because you truly are always growing. I'm always learning something new about inclusive language, or to make someone feel more included with the words that I'm writing.\n\nThis table has, or this resource has ableist language, racist language, and sexist language tables with words to avoid, why to avoid them, and some alternatives and just some general principles. I reference it constantly. Like I said, it's always evolving. I actually don't know how many words are on there, but it's a good amount and it's a lot of things have been surfaced to me that I had no idea were racist. For instance, the word gypped. Like if you say, “Oh, they gypped me” is actually racist. It's rooted in the belief that gypsy people are thieves. [chuckles] So it's things like that we really kind of go deep in there and I reference this constantly. \n\nAlso, ALS language is a really big consideration, especially in the tech space. So instead of – and this can be avoided most of the time, not all of the time. We do work with a really wonderful accessibility consultant who I run things by constantly. Shout out to Michele. Oh, she was actually on the podcast at one point. Michele Williams, shout out. Lovely human.\n\nSo a good example is instead of “watch now,” or “listen now,” it's “explore this thing,” “browse this thing,” “learn more”. Just try not to get so specific about the way that someone might be consuming the information that I'm putting down on the page. Stuff like that. It truly does come down to just getting more specific as just a general principle.\n\nJOHN: So it sounds to me some of the first steps you take are obviously being aware that you have to mold your language to be more accessible and inclusive, then it's informing yourself of what the common pitfalls are. As you said, you have consultants, you've got guides, you've got places where you can gather this information and then once you have that, then you build that into your mental process for writing what you're writing.\n\nKATE: Yeah, and truly just asking questions and this goes for everyone. No one would ever – if I reached out to our head of DEI, Mariah, and said, “Mariah, is this thing offensive?” Or, “How should I phrase this thing to feel more inclusive to more people?” She would never come back at me and say, “Why are you asking me this? You should already know this,” and that is the attitude across the board. I would never fault someone for coming to me and asking me how to phrase something, or how to write something to make it feel better for more people. So it's really a humbling experience [laughs] to be in this position. \n\nAgain, words carry so much power and I just never take for granted, the power essentially that I have, even if it is just for a tech company. A lot of people are consuming that and I want to make them feel included.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. The written face of a company is going to tell readers a lot about the culture of the company, the culture of the community around the product.\n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: Whether they're going to be welcome there, like what their experience is going to be like if they invest their time to learn about it. So it's really important to have that language there and woven into everything that's written, not just off the corner on the DEI page.\n\nKATE: Yeah. That's what I was just about to say is especially if you're a company that claims to prioritize DEI, you better be paying close attention to the words that you're using in your product, on your homepage, whatever it is, your customer support. I've worked with the customer support team at Webflow to make sure that the phrasing feels good for people. \n\nIt truly does trickle into every single asset of a business and it's ongoing work that does not just end at, like you said, putting it on a DEI page. Like, “We care about this,” and then not actually caring about it. That sucks. [laughs]\n\nJOHN: Oh, the other thing before we move too far on from last topic, you’re talking about asking for advice. I think one of the keys there, a, being humble and just saying, “I would like to know,” and you're very unlikely to get criticized for simply asking how something can be better. But I feel like one of the keys to doing that well is also not arguing with the person you've asked after they give you an answer.\n\nKATE: Right. Yes. Especially if that person is a part of the community that your words are affecting, or that your question is affecting. It's such a tricky balance because it's really not the queer community's job to educate people who are not queer about inclusive language. But when that person is willing to share their knowledge with the you, or willing to share their experience with you, you’ve got to listen. Your opinions about their lived experience don't come into that conversation, or shouldn't come into that conversation. \n\nIt's not questioning the information that you're given, but then it's also taking that and doing your own research and asking more people and having conversations with your friends and family trying to widen this breadth of information and knowledge as a community. Like I said, kind of dismantling the things that we're taught growing up by capitalism, by society, everything that kind of unnecessarily separates and then doing better next time. \n\nI've actually had conversations with people who are very curious, who come to me with questions and then the next time I interact with them, they're just back to factory settings. That's so disappointing and just makes me feel like my energy could have been better spent having that conversation with someone who is more receptive. So I think it really is just about being open to hearing someone's experience, not questioning it, and then really taking that in and doing the work on your own.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and part of that doing the work is also for the things that you can Google for the things where you can look at it from the guide, do that first before asking for someone's time.\n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: So that they're not answering the same 101 questions every time that are just written in 15 different blog posts.\n\nKATE: Yes. Especially if you're asking a marginalized person to do the work for you. \n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nKATE: Intersectionality matters and putting more work on the shoulders of people who are already weighed down by so much ain't it. [laughs]\n\nARTY: Well, I was wanting to go back to your original superpower that you talked about with empathy. We talked a lot about some of these factors that make empathy of a difficult thing of over empathizing and what kind of factors make that hard. But as a superpower, what kind of superpowers does that give you?\n\nKATE: Ah, just being able to really connect to a lot of different people. I mentioned earlier that I believe it's my purpose, it's my life's work on this planet at this time to connect people to themselves and to each other. The more asking I can do and the more absorbing I can do of other people's experiences, the better I am at being able to connect with them and being able to make them feel like they belong in whatever space I'm in. I can't connect with someone if I don't try and get it. Try and get what they're going through, or what their experiences are. \n\nThat's why I do so much time just talking to people, and that's why I love yoga and why I want to start this studio and open this space. Because we live in a world where we don't have a lot of spaces, especially marginalized communities don't have a lot of spaces that feel like they're being understood, or they're truly being heard, or seen. Me being an empath, I'm able to access that in people more and therefore, bringing them closer to safer spaces, or safer people, safer communities where they really feel like they can exist and be their full, whole, and complete selves. It's really special.\n\nARTY: We also touched this concept of authenticity and it seems like that also comes up in this context of creating these safe spaces and safe communities where people can be their whole selves. So when you think about authenticity, we talked about this being a difficult and fuzzy word, but at the same time, it does have some meaning as to what that means, and these challenges with regards to boundaries and things. But I'm curious, what does authenticity mean to you? How does that come into play with this idea of safety and creating these safe spaces for others as well?\n\nKATE: Yeah. I feel like there's so much in there. I think one of the biggest things to accept about the word authenticity, or the concept of authenticity is that it's always changing and it means something different to everyone. We are all authentic to ourselves in different ways and at different times in our lives and I think it's so important to honor the real evolution of feeling authentic. \n\nThere are times and days where I'm like who even am. It's like what even, but there's always this sort of core, root part of me that I don't lose, which is what we've been talking about. This ability to connect, this feeling of empathy, of compassion, of wanting to really be a part of the human experience. That, to me, kind of always stays and I feel like that's the authentic, like the real, real, authentic parts of me. \n\nThere are layers to it that are always changing and as people, we are also always evolving and always changing. So those different parts of authenticity could be what you wear that make you feel like your most authentic self. It can be how you interact with your friends, or how you interact with the person, getting your popcorn at the movies, or whatever it is. Those can all feel like parts of your authentic self. \n\nThat means something different to everyone. But I think that's such a beautiful part about it and about just being human is just how often these things are changing for us and how important it is to honor someone's authenticity, whatever that means for them at that time. Even if it's completely different from what you knew about them, or how you knew them before. It's this constant curiosity of yourself and of others, really getting deeply curious about what feels like you.\n\nARTY: I was wondering about safety because you were talking about the importance of creating these safe communities and safe environments where people could be their whole, complete selves, which sounds a lot like the authenticity thing, but you trying to create space for that for others.\n\nKATE: Yeah. Well, the reality of safety is that there's no one space that will ever be a “safe space for everyone,” and that's why I like to say safer spaces, or a safer space for people because you can never – I feel like it's all coming full circle where you can never meet every single person exactly where they need to be met in any given moment. You can just do your best to create spaces that feel safer to them and you do that with authentic connection, with getting curious about who they are and what they love, and just making sure that your heart's really in it. [chuckles] Same with inclusive language. \n\nIt's all about the way you approach it to make someone feel safer. But I do think it's an I distinction to remember. You're never going to be safe for everyone. A space you create is never going to be safe for everyone. The best you can do is just make it safer for more people.\n\nARTY: When I think about just the opposite of that, of times that I've gone into a group where I haven't felt safe being myself and then when you talk of about being your complete whole self, it's like bringing a whole another level of yourself to a space that may not really fit that space and that seems like it's okay, too. Like we don't necessarily have to bring our full self to all these different spaces, but whatever space we're a part of, we kind of sync up and adapt to it. \n\nSo if I'm in one space and I feel the kind of vibe, energy, context of what's going on, how people are interacting, the energy they put forth when they speak with whatever sorts of words that they use. I'm going to feel that and adapt to that context of what feels safe and then as more people start adapting to that, it creates a norm that other people that then come and see what's going on in this group come to an understanding about what the energy in the room is like. \n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nARTY: And all it takes is one person to bring a different energy into that to shift the whole dynamic of things.\n\nKATE: Yeah. The reality is you'll never be able to change every space and I think that's such a good point. It makes me feel like saying you have to be protective of your energy. If you go into a space and it just doesn't feel right, or there's someone who is in the room that doesn't feel safe to you, or that doesn't feel like they're on the same page as you, it's okay to not feel like you need to change the world in that space. Like you don't always have to go into a space and say, “I'm going to change it.” That is how change is made when you feel safe enough. That's why it's so important to foster that energy from the jump. \n\nThat's just a foundational thing at a company in a yoga studio, in a home, at a restaurant. It can be changed, but it really should be part of the foundation of making a safer space, or a more inclusive space. Because otherwise, you're asking the people who don't feel safe, who are usually marginalized people, or intersectionally marginalized in some way. You're asking them essentially to put in the work to change what you should have done as the foundation of your space. \n\nSo it's a such a delicate balance of being protective of your energy and really being able to feel out the places where you feel okay saying something, or making a change, or just saying, “No, this isn't worth it for me. I'm going to go find a space that actually feels a little bit better, or that I feel more community in.”\n\nARTY: And it seems like the other people that are in the group, how those people respond to you. If you shift your energy, a lot of times the people that are in the group will shift their energy in kind. Other times, in a different space, you might try to shift energy and then there's a lot of resistance to that where people are going a different way and so, you get pushed out of the group energy wise. These sorts of dynamics, you can feel this stuff going on of just, I just got outcast out of this group. \n\nThose are the kinds of things, though that you need to protect your own energy of even if I'm not included in this group, I can still have a good relationship with me and I can still like me and I can think I'm still pretty awesome and I can find other groups of folks that like me.\n\nIt definitely, at least for me, I tend to be someone who's like, I don't know, I get out grouped a lot. [laughs] But at the same time, I've gotten used to that and then I find other places where I've got friends that love me and care about me and stuff. So those are recharge places where I can go and get back to a place where I feel solid and okay with myself, and then I'm much more resilient then going into these other spaces and stuff where I might not be accepted, where I might have to be kind of shielded and guarded and just put up a front, and operate in a way that makes everyone else feel more comfortable.\n\nKATE: Yeah, and isn't it so powerful to feel cared for? \n\nARTY: I love that.\n\nKATE: Like just to feel cared for by the people around you is everything. It's everything. That's it. Just to feel like you are wanted, or you belong. To feel cared for. It can exist everywhere is the thing. In your Slack group, or whatever, you can make people feel cared for. I have never regretted reaching out to a coworker, or a friend, or whoever an acquaintance and saying, “Hey, I love this thing about you,” or “Congratulations on this rad thing you just launched,” or whatever. It's the care that's so powerful.\n\nARTY: I feel like this is one of those things where we can learn things from our own pain and these social interactions and stuff. One of the things that I've experienced is you're in a group and you say something and nobody responds. [laughs] \n\nKATE: Yeah.\n\nARTY: And after doing that for a while, you feel like you're just shouting into the void and nobody hears you and it's just this feeling of like invisibility. In feeling that way myself, one of the things I go out of my way to do is if somebody says something, I at least try and respond, acknowledge them, let them know that they're heard, they're cared about, and that there's somebody there on the other side [chuckles] and they're not shouting into the wind because I hate that feeling. It's an awful feeling to feel invisible like that.\n\nKATE: Awful, yeah.\n\nARTY: But we can learn from those experiences and then we can use those as opportunities to understand how we can give in ways that are subtle, that are often little things that are kind of ignored, but they're little things that actually make a really big difference.\n\nKATE: Yeah, the little things. It really is the little things, isn't it? [laughs] Like and it’s just, you can learn from your experiences, but you can also say, “I'm not doing this right now.” You can also check out. If you are giving and giving. and find that you're in the void essentially, more often than not, you can decide that that's no longer are worth your time, your energy, your care, and you can redirect that care to somewhere else that's going to reciprocate, or that's going to give you back that same care and that's so important, too.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and it sounds like starting a yoga studio is not a trivial undertaking and obviously, you're highly motivated to create this kind of an environment in the world. So is there anything more you'd like to say about that because that ties in very closely with what we're talking about?\n\nKATE: Yeah. It’s so weird to work full-time and be so passionate about my tech job and then turn around and be like, “I'm opening a yoga studio.” It's such a weird, but again, it's all connected at the root, at the core of what I'm trying to do in this world. \n\nThe thing about Kula is that it's really built on this foundational mutual aid model. So being donation-based, it's really pay what you can, if you can. And what you pay, if you're able to give an extra $10 for the class that you take, that's going to pay for someone else's experience, who is unable to financially contribute to take that class. That's the basis of community care, of mutual aid and it's really this heart-based business model that is really tricky. I’m trying to get a loan right now and [chuckles] it's really hard to prove business financials when you have a donation-based model and you say, “Well, I'm going to guess what people might donate per class on average.”\n\nSo it's been a real journey, [laughs] especially with today's famous supply chain issues that you hear about constantly in every single industry. I have an empty space right now. It needs to be completely built out. Construction costs are about triple what they should be. \n\nAgain, coming from this real mutual aid community care centered model, it's really hard, but I have to keep coming back. I was just telling my partner about this the other day, I have to keep coming back to this core idea, or this real feeling that I don't need to have a beautifully designed space to create what I'm trying to create. \n\nWhen I started this, I envisioned just a literal empty room [chuckles] with some people in it and a bathroom and that's it. So of course, once I saw the designs, I was like, “Oh, I love this can lighting that's shining down in front of the bathroom door.” It's like so whatever, stereotypical. Not stereotypical, but surface level stuff. \n\nI really have had to time and time again, return to this longing almost for a space that feels safer for me, for my community, for Black people, for disabled people, for trans people, for Asian people; we don't have a lot of spaces that feel that way and that's just the reality. \n\nSo it's a real delicate balance of how do I like – this is a business and I need money, [laughs] but then I really want this to be rooted in mutual aid and community care. It comes back to that car and that inclusivity, creating authentic connections. It's tricky out there for a queer woman entrepreneur with no collateral. [laughs] It's a tricky world out there, but I think we'll flip it someday. \n\nI really think pioneering this idea, or this business model at least where I'm at in Denver, I think it's going to start the conversation in more communities and with more people who want to do similar things and my hope is that that will foster those conversations and make it more accessible to more people.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I think every time someone manages to muster up the energy, the capital, and the community effort to put something like this together, it makes it just slightly easier for someone else a, they can learn the lessons and b, they're more examples of this thing operating in the world. So it becomes more possible in people's minds and you can build some of that momentum there. \n\nKATE: Yeah. And of course, it's really important to note and to remember that I come from a place of immense privilege. I have a great job in tech. I'm white. I am upper middle class. Technically, I'm “straight passing,” which is a whole other concept, but it is a thing and this is the way that I'm choosing to use my privilege to hopefully pave the way for more people. I do not take for granted the opportunity that I'm given and like I said, intersectionality matters and all of that, but I still have a lot of privilege going into this that I hope turns into something good for more people. \n\nARTY: It also takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur because you really have to just keep on going. No matter any obstacle that's in your way, you’ve just got to keep on going and have that drive, desire, and dream to go and build something and make it happen and your superpowers probably going to help you out with that, too. It sounds like we've got multiple superpowers because I think you got to have superpowers to be an entrepreneur in itself. \n\nKATE: Yeah. I don't know, man. It's such a weird feeling to have because it just feels like it's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's it. It doesn't feel like I'm like – yes, it's a calling and all of that, but it just feels like the path and that, it feels more, more natural than anything I guess, is what I'm trying to say. \n\nThe more people follow that feeling, the more authentic of a world, the more connected of a world we're going to have. I see a lot of people doing this work, similar things, and it makes me so happy to see. \n\nThe words of one of my therapists, one of my past therapists told me, “Always stick with me,” and it was right around the time I was kind of – so I'd started planning before COVID hit and then COVID hit and I had to pause for about a year, a little bit less than a year. It was right around the time I was filing my LLC and really starting to move forward. It was actually December 17th of last year that I filed my LLC paperwork. So it's been a little over a year now. \n\nHe told me, “How much longer are you willing to wait to give the community this thing that you want to give them? How much are you willing to make them wait for this space?” And I was like, “Yesterday. Yesterday.” Like, “I want to give people this space immediately,” and that has truly carried me through. This supply chain stuff is no joke. [laughs] and it has really carried me through some of the more doubtful moments in this journey. Yeah, and I feel like, man, what powerful words. Like, I just want to keep saying them because they are such powerful words to me. How much longer are you willing to make them wait? And it's like, I don't want to. [chuckles] So I guess I'm going to go do it.\n\n[laughter] \n\nThrow caution to the wind. [laughs]\n\nJOHN: Well, I think that ties back into what you were talking about is as you were thinking about designing the space and what kind of buildout you're going to need, and that can be a guide star for what actually needs to be there. What's the actual MVP for this space? Does it need a perfect coat of paint, or is what's there good enough? Does it need all the things arranged just so in the perfect lighting, or does it just need to exist and have people in the room and you can really focus in on what's going to get you there? And then of course, you iterate like everything else, you improve over time, but.\n\nKATE: Right. \n\nJOHN: I love that concept of just cut out everything that's in the way of this happening right now as much as possible. \n\nKATE: Yeah, and what a concept, I think that can be applied to so many things. Who am I trying to serve with this thing and what do I need to do to get there? It doesn't have to be this shiny, beautiful well-designed creation. It just needs to serve people. The people that you want to serve in the best way possible, and for me, that's getting this space open and actually having it in action.\n\nARTY: I think once you find something that feels in alignment with you, you seem to have lots of clarity around just your sense of purpose, of what you want to move toward of a deep connection with yourself. One thing I found with that is no matter how much you get rejected by various groups in the world, if you can be congruent and authentic with yourself and follow that arrow, that once you start doing that, you find other people that are in resonance with you. They're out there, but you don't find them until you align with yourself.\n\nKATE: Yeah. Community. Community is so powerful and I love that you just said alignment because that really is truly what it is. It's finding the thing that makes you feel like you're doing something good and that feels authentic to your core, to those core principles of you that never really change. The things that are rooted in love, the things that are rooted in compassion, or whatever it is you care about. Community, that alignment is absolutely key.\n\nIt's also, when I say I was born with my superpower of being an empath, this desire to create this space feels, it feels like I was also born with this desire, or born with this alignment. So I feel like so many times it's just going back to the basics of who you are.\n\nARTY: Like you're actualizing who you are.\n\nKATE: Yeah. Like full alignment, enlightenment, that all kind of falls into place when you're really making the effort to be connected to your core. \n\nARTY: It seems like a good place to do reflections. So at the end of the show, we usually go around and do final reflections and takeaways, final thoughts that you have and you get to go last, Kate.\n\nJOHN: There are a whole lot of different things that I've been thinking about here, but I think one of the ones that's sticking with me is the dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity, and how I feel like they really are pulling against one another and that, which isn't to say things can't be perfect and authentic at the same time. But I think perfectionism is usually a negative feeling. Like you should do something, you're putting a lot of pressure, there's a lot of anxiety around perfectionism and that is pretty much an opposition to being authentically yourself. It's hard to be in touch with yourself when you're wrapped up in all those anxieties and so, thinking about the two of them together, I hadn't made that connection before, but I think that's something that's interesting that I'll be thinking about for a while.\n\nARTY: I think the thing that's going to stick with me, Kate is you said, “Our words carry so much power,” and I think about our conversation today out just vibes in the room and how that shifts with the energy that we bring to the room, all of these subtle undercurrent conversations that we're having, and then how a sort of energy vibe becomes established. And how powerful even these really little tiny things we do are. \n\nWe had this conversation around inclusive language and you gave so many great details and specifics around what that means and how we can make little, small alterations to some of these things that are just baked into us because of our culture and the words that we hear, phrasing and things that we hear, that we're just unaware of the impact of things. Just by paying attention and those little subtle details of things and coming at things with an open heart, regardless of how we might stumble, or mess things up, how much of a difference that can make because our words, though carry so much power.\n\nKATE: Yeah. And the thing you just said about having an open heart is truly how you can put any of this into action, how you can remain open to learning about authenticity, or what it feels like to not fall into a trap of perfectionism, or how to speak, or write, or interact more inclusively with other human beings. \n\nI feel like being open, being openminded, being open-hearted, whatever it is, is just really a superpower on its own. Remaining open and vulnerable in today's world is hard work. It does not come naturally to so many people, especially when you're dealing with your own traumas and your own individual interactions and maybe being forced into spaces where you don't feel safe. To remain open is such a tool for making other people feel cared for. So if that's the goal, I would say just being open is truly your superpower.\n\nJOHN: I think that's the quote I'm going to take with me: being open is the key to making people feel cared for.\n\nKATE: Yes. I love that.\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Kate. It's been a pleasure to have you here.\n\nKATE: Thank you so much. This has been just the energy boost I needed.Special Guest: Kate Marshall.Sponsored By:Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.","content_html":"01:48 - Kate’s Superpower: Empathy
\n\n10:46 - Words and Narratives Carry Power; Approaching Inclusive Language
\n\n21:27 - Approaching Inclusive Language in the Written Word
\n\n29:18 - Creating Safe Places, Communities, and Environments
\n\n42:34 - Building Kula While Working in Tech
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity.
\n\nArty: Words carry power.
\n\nKate: Having an open heart is how you can put any of this into action.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Arty Starr.
\n\nARTY: Thanks, John. And I'm here with our guest today, Kate Marshall.
\n\nKate is a copywriter and inclusivity activist living in Denver. Since entering tech 4 years ago, she's toured the marketing org from paid efforts to podcast host, eventually falling in love with the world of copy. With this work, she hopes to make the web a more welcoming place using the power of words. Outside of Webflow, you'll find Kate opening Kula, a donation-based yoga studio, and bopping around the Mile High City with her partner, Leah.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Kate.
\n\nKATE: Hi, thank you so much!
\n\nARTY: So we always start our shows with our famous first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nKATE: My superpower, I've been thinking about this. My superpower is empathy. It can also be one of my biggest downfalls [laughs], which I actually think happens more often than not with any superpower. I once heard from a child, actually, they always seem to know best that too much of the good, good is bad, bad.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo it turns out sometimes too much empathy can be too overwhelming for my system, but it has really driven everything that I've done in my career and my personal life.
\n\nAs for how I acquired it, I don't know that you can really acquire empathy. I think it's just something you have, or you don't. I've always been extremely intuitive and if you're going through something, it's likely that I can feel it. So I think I'm just [laughs] I hate to steal Maybelline's line, but I think I was born with it.
\n\nJOHN: You talked about having a downside there and I've heard – and I'm curious, because most people talk about empathy as a positive thing and wanting more people to develop more empathy, but I'd to love hear you talk a little bit more about what you see the downsides are.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. As someone who struggles with her own mental health issues, it can be really overwhelming for me to really take on whatever it is you're going through. Especially if it's a loved one, you tend to care more about what they're feeling, or what they're going through and an empath truly does absorb the energy of what's happening around them.
\n\nSo although, it does influence a lot of the work that I do, both in my full-time career and opening my yoga studio and everything in between, it's also hard sometimes to set those boundaries, to set healthy, really energetic boundaries. It's hard enough to voice your boundaries to people, but setting energetic boundaries is a whole other ballgame. So it can tend to feel overwhelming at times and bring you down if the energy around you is lower than what you want it to be.
\n\nARTY: So what kind of things do you do to try and set healthy, energetic boundaries?
\n\nKATE: Ah. I do a lot of what some people would call, including myself, woo-woo practices. [chuckles] Obviously, I practice yoga. I teach yoga. I'm super passionate about holistic, or energetic healing so I go to Reiki regularly. I'm in therapy, talk therapy. All of those things combined help me build this essentially an energetic shield that I can psych myself up to use any time I'm leaving the apartment. If it feels a high energy day, or if I'm meeting up with a friend who I know is going through something, I really have to set those boundaries is.
\n\nSame thing kind of at work, too. So much of the time that we spend in our lives is spent at work, or interacting with coworkers or colleagues and same thing. Everyone's going through their own journey and battles, and you have to carry that energetic shield around you wherever you go.
\n\nJOHN: One way I've often thought about having those sort of boundaries is the more I know who I am, the more what the limits of me are and the barrier between me and the universe is. So the work that I do, which includes therapy and other things, to understand myself better and to feel like I know what's me and what's not me, helps me have those boundaries. Because then I know if there's something going on with someone else and I can relate to it, but not get swept up by it.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I was actually just having a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago that has really stuck with me. I was kind of feeling like I was messing up, essentially. Like I was not fully able to honor, or notice all of the triggers of the people around me. I think especially at the end of the year and as a queer person who is surrounded by queer community, it can be really tough around the holidays.
\n\nSo that energy can just be generally more charged and I was finding it difficult to reconcile with my idea of perfection in that I really want to honor every person around me who has triggers, who has boundaries that maybe haven't been communicated, and it almost feels like you're almost always crossing some sort of line, especially when you're putting those perfectionism expectations on yourself.
\n\nMy friend was like, “I don't think it's as much about being perfect at it as much as it is feeling like you're being authentically yourself and really authentically interacting with those people.” I don't know if I can really voice what the connection is between being able to honor triggers and boundaries of the people around you and feeling like your authentic self, but there's something about it that feels really connected to me. As long as you're trying your best and feeling like you're coming from a place of love, or connection, or compassion, or empathy whatever feels most to you, that's really all we can do, right?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I feel like that authenticity is such a tricky concept because the thoughts that you're having about wanting to be perfect and take care of everyone and make sure you're not triggering anybody and not stepping on any of your own things, that's also part of you that is authentically you. You may not want it to be that way, but it still is. [laughs].
\n\nARTY: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: So I still don't have a really clear sense in my mind what authenticity really is. I think probably it settles down to being a little bit more in the moment, rather than up in the thinking, the judging, the worrying, and being able to be present rather than – [overtalk]
\n\nARTY: Totally.
\n\nJOHN: Those other things, but it is tricky.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. It can be tricky. Humans, man.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt really is like being a human and part of the human experience is going to be triggering other people. It’s going to be causing harm. It’s going to be causing trauma to other humans. That's just part of it.
\n\nI think the more you can get comfy with that idea and then also just really feeling like you're doing everything you can to stay connected to your core, which usually is in humans is a place of love. You're rooted in love for the people around you. How could you criticize yourself too much when you know that you're coming from that place?
\n\nARTY: I feel like things change, too as you get feedback. In the context of any intimate relationship where you've got emotionally connected relationship with another person where you are more unguarded and you're having conversations about things that are more personal, that have at least the potential to hurt and cause harm. Like sometimes we do things not meaning to and we end up hurting someone else accidentally, but once that happens—and hopefully, you have an open dialogue where you have a conversation about these things and learn about these things and adapt—then I think the thing to do is honor each person as an individual of we're all peoples and then figure out well, what can we do to adapt how we operate in this relationship and look out for both people's best interests and strive for a win-win.
\n\nIf we don't try and do that, like if we do things that we know we're harming someone else and we're just like, “Well, you should just put up with that,” [laughs], or whatever. I think that's where it becomes problematic is at the same time, we all have our own limitations and sometimes, the best thing to do is this relationship doesn't work. The way that we interact causes mutual harm and we can't this a win-win relationship and the best thing to do sometimes is to separate, even though it hurts because it's not working.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. I feel like sometimes it's a classic case of intent versus impact, too. Like what's your intention going into a conversation and then how does that end up actually impacting that person and how can you honor that and learn from that?
\n\nThat's actually one thing that I love so much about being a writer is that words do carry so much power—written word, spoken word, whatever it is. They hold so much power and they can cause harm whether we want them to, or not. Part of being an empath is caring a lot about people's lived experiences and I really see it as more than putting – being a writer and doing this every day, I see it so much more than just putting words on a page and hoping signs up for the beta, or watches the thing registers, or the conference. It's words can foster connection, words can build worlds for people; they can make people feel like they belong and I believe that I'm on this planet to foster that connection with each other and with ourselves.
\n\nSo it all connects for me. It all comes back around whether we're talking about being in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our parents, or our caregivers, or the work that I do every day it all comes back to that connection and really wanting to make people feel more connected to themselves, to each other, and like they have a place with words.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. It's very powerful. Words and narratives, I would say too, just thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we tell one another that become foundational in our culture. It's all built upon were words. Words shape the ideas in our head. They shape our thoughts. They shape how we reflect on things, how we feel about things, and then when people give us their words, we absorb those and then those become part of our own reflections.
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: We affect one another a lot. I think that's one of the things I'm just seeing and talking to you is just thinking about how much we affect one another through our everyday interactions.
\n\nKATE: Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to – there's something you said earlier that resonated in that it's really about the action you take after you cause the harm, or after you say the thing that hurts the other person and it's less about – and that's what made me say intent versus impact because you see the impact, you acknowledge it, and you make a decision to lessen that next time, or to be aware, more aware next time.
\n\nThis is really at the core of all the work I do for inclusive language as well. It's just the core principle of the words we use carry a lot of power.
\n\nAnd I was actually just chatting with someone in the No-Code space. We connected through Webflow a couple weeks ago and he said, “I think people are so scared to get it wrong when it comes to inclusive language,” and I experience this all the time. People freeze in their tracks because they don't know how address someone and then they're so scared to get it wrong and they're like, “Oh, so sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” and they're so apologetic. And then that makes it worse and it's just a whole thing.
\n\nIn this conversation, we were talking specifically about misgendering people. My partner is non-binary. They're misgendered every single day when we go to restaurants, when we are just out and about. So this is something that is a part of my life every day. I told him that fear is so real and I carry that fear, too because I don't want to hurt people because I want to like get it right. It comes back to that perfectionism, that expectation that I put on myself, especially as a queer person to get it right all the time.
\n\nBut so much of the good stuff lies in how you approach it and then how you fix it when you mess it up. Like, it's not so much about the thing, it's about the way that you approach it. If you approach inclusive language with an open mind, an open heart, and a real willingness, like true willingness to learn, that's what's important going into it and then you're already doing the work. You're already an ally. You're already however you want to put it.
\n\nAnd then when you use an ableist word, or you use a racist word, or you misgender someone, your actions for following that speak volumes. I think we can really get caught up in the action itself and it's more about how you go into it and then how you try to fix it.
\n\nARTY: So I'm thinking for listeners that might identify with being in a situation of being in the headlights and not knowing how to respond, or what to do. Other than what you were just talking about with coming at it with an open heart, are there any specific recommendations you might have for how to approach inclusive language?
\n\nKATE: Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple really, really good ones. So often, the way to speak more inclusively, or to write more inclusively is just to get more specific about what you're trying to say. So instead of saying, “Oh, that's so crazy,” which is ableist, you can say, “Oh, that's so unheard of.” That's a good example. Or instead of unnecessarily gendering something you're saying like, “Oh, I'm out of wine, call the waitress over.” It's server instead of waiter, or waitress.
\n\nYou kind of start to essentially practice replacing these words and these concepts that are so ingrained into who we are, into society at large, and really starting to disrupt those systems within us with challenging the way that we've described things in the past. So just essentially getting more specific when we're speaking.
\n\nWhen it comes to misgendering people specifically, it's really important to not be overly apologetic when you misgender someone. I can give an example. If a server, for example, comes up to me and my partner and says, “Can I get you ladies anything else?” And I say, “Oh, actually my partner uses they/them pronouns. They are not a lady,” and they say, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh shit!” And then that makes my partner feel bad [chuckles] for putting them in that position and then it's kind of this like ping pong back and forth of just bad feelings.
\n\nThe ideal scenario, the server would say, “Oh, excuse me, can I get you all anything else?” Or, “Can I get you folks anything else?” Or just, if you're speaking about someone who uses they/them pronouns and you say, “Yeah, and I heard she, I mean, they did this thing.” You just quickly correct it and move on. Don't make it into a production. It's okay. We get it. Moving on. Just try not to overthink it, basically. [laughs] Get more specific, but don't overthink it. Isn't that like, what a dichotomy.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: That ties back to what you were saying about perfectionism also, right? Like you said, you freeze up if you try and be perfect about it all the time, because you can't always know what someone's pronouns are and so, you have to make a guess at some point and maybe you're going to guess wrong. But it's how you deal with it by not making everybody uncomfortable with the situation. [laughs]
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: And like you said, ping pong of bad feelings just amplifies, the whole thing blows out of proportion. You can just be like, “Oh, my apologies.” Her, they, whatever it is and then very quickly move on and then it's forgotten the next minute. Everything moves on from that, but you're not weeping and gnashing and –
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Well, it means you don't have to keep feeling bad about it for the next 3 days either, like everyone can move on from that point.
\n\nKATE: Right. Yeah, and just doing your best to not do it again.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKATE: Once you learn, it's important to really let that try to stick. If you're having trouble, I have a friend who really has trouble with they/them pronouns and they practice with their dog. They talk to their dog about this person and they use they/them pronouns in that. Practice really does make perfect in this – not perfect, okay. Practice really does make progress in this kind of scenario and also, normalize sharing pronouns.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKATE: It's more than just putting it in your Zoom name. It's more than just putting it in your Instagram bio. A good example of really starting this conversation was during Webflow's No-Code Conf, our yearly conference. It was mostly online and we had a live portion of it and every single time we introduced someone new, or introduced ourselves, we said, “My name is Kate Marshall, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm so happy to be here with you today.” Or just asking if you don't know, or if you're in a space with someone new, you say, “What are your pronouns?” It's really is that easy.
\n\nWebflow made some year-round pride mech that we launched over the summer and we have a cute beanie that says “Ask me my pronouns.” It's like, it's cool to ask. It's fine to ask and that's so much better than unintentionally misgendering someone. It's going to take some time to get there, but normalize it.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I think there's one key to that that has always stuck out of my mind, which is don't ask pronouns just for the people you think might have different pronouns than you would expect.
\n\nKATE: Yes.
\n\nJOHN: Make it part of all the conversations so it's not just singling somebody out of a group and saying, “I want to know your pronouns because they're probably different.” That's not good.
\n\nKATE: Right, because gender expression does not always equal gender identity.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKATE: You can't know someone's gender identity from the way that they express their gender and that's also another huge misconception that I think it's time we talk more about.
\n\nJOHN: So we've been talking a lot about conversations and person-to-person interactions and inclusive language there. But a lot of what you do is it on the writing level and I imagine there's some differences there. So I'm curious as to what you see as far as the things that you do to work on that in the written form.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. So this is actually a really great resource that I was planning on sharing with whoever's listening, or whoever's following along this podcast. There is a really wonderful inclusive language guidelines that we have published externally at Webflow and I own it, I update it regularly as different things come in and inclusive language is constantly evolving. It will never be at a final resting point and that's also part of why I love it so much because you truly are always growing. I'm always learning something new about inclusive language, or to make someone feel more included with the words that I'm writing.
\n\nThis table has, or this resource has ableist language, racist language, and sexist language tables with words to avoid, why to avoid them, and some alternatives and just some general principles. I reference it constantly. Like I said, it's always evolving. I actually don't know how many words are on there, but it's a good amount and it's a lot of things have been surfaced to me that I had no idea were racist. For instance, the word gypped. Like if you say, “Oh, they gypped me” is actually racist. It's rooted in the belief that gypsy people are thieves. [chuckles] So it's things like that we really kind of go deep in there and I reference this constantly.
\n\nAlso, ALS language is a really big consideration, especially in the tech space. So instead of – and this can be avoided most of the time, not all of the time. We do work with a really wonderful accessibility consultant who I run things by constantly. Shout out to Michele. Oh, she was actually on the podcast at one point. Michele Williams, shout out. Lovely human.
\n\nSo a good example is instead of “watch now,” or “listen now,” it's “explore this thing,” “browse this thing,” “learn more”. Just try not to get so specific about the way that someone might be consuming the information that I'm putting down on the page. Stuff like that. It truly does come down to just getting more specific as just a general principle.
\n\nJOHN: So it sounds to me some of the first steps you take are obviously being aware that you have to mold your language to be more accessible and inclusive, then it's informing yourself of what the common pitfalls are. As you said, you have consultants, you've got guides, you've got places where you can gather this information and then once you have that, then you build that into your mental process for writing what you're writing.
\n\nKATE: Yeah, and truly just asking questions and this goes for everyone. No one would ever – if I reached out to our head of DEI, Mariah, and said, “Mariah, is this thing offensive?” Or, “How should I phrase this thing to feel more inclusive to more people?” She would never come back at me and say, “Why are you asking me this? You should already know this,” and that is the attitude across the board. I would never fault someone for coming to me and asking me how to phrase something, or how to write something to make it feel better for more people. So it's really a humbling experience [laughs] to be in this position.
\n\nAgain, words carry so much power and I just never take for granted, the power essentially that I have, even if it is just for a tech company. A lot of people are consuming that and I want to make them feel included.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. The written face of a company is going to tell readers a lot about the culture of the company, the culture of the community around the product.
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Whether they're going to be welcome there, like what their experience is going to be like if they invest their time to learn about it. So it's really important to have that language there and woven into everything that's written, not just off the corner on the DEI page.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. That's what I was just about to say is especially if you're a company that claims to prioritize DEI, you better be paying close attention to the words that you're using in your product, on your homepage, whatever it is, your customer support. I've worked with the customer support team at Webflow to make sure that the phrasing feels good for people.
\n\nIt truly does trickle into every single asset of a business and it's ongoing work that does not just end at, like you said, putting it on a DEI page. Like, “We care about this,” and then not actually caring about it. That sucks. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: Oh, the other thing before we move too far on from last topic, you’re talking about asking for advice. I think one of the keys there, a, being humble and just saying, “I would like to know,” and you're very unlikely to get criticized for simply asking how something can be better. But I feel like one of the keys to doing that well is also not arguing with the person you've asked after they give you an answer.
\n\nKATE: Right. Yes. Especially if that person is a part of the community that your words are affecting, or that your question is affecting. It's such a tricky balance because it's really not the queer community's job to educate people who are not queer about inclusive language. But when that person is willing to share their knowledge with the you, or willing to share their experience with you, you’ve got to listen. Your opinions about their lived experience don't come into that conversation, or shouldn't come into that conversation.
\n\nIt's not questioning the information that you're given, but then it's also taking that and doing your own research and asking more people and having conversations with your friends and family trying to widen this breadth of information and knowledge as a community. Like I said, kind of dismantling the things that we're taught growing up by capitalism, by society, everything that kind of unnecessarily separates and then doing better next time.
\n\nI've actually had conversations with people who are very curious, who come to me with questions and then the next time I interact with them, they're just back to factory settings. That's so disappointing and just makes me feel like my energy could have been better spent having that conversation with someone who is more receptive. So I think it really is just about being open to hearing someone's experience, not questioning it, and then really taking that in and doing the work on your own.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and part of that doing the work is also for the things that you can Google for the things where you can look at it from the guide, do that first before asking for someone's time.
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: So that they're not answering the same 101 questions every time that are just written in 15 different blog posts.
\n\nKATE: Yes. Especially if you're asking a marginalized person to do the work for you.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKATE: Intersectionality matters and putting more work on the shoulders of people who are already weighed down by so much ain't it. [laughs]
\n\nARTY: Well, I was wanting to go back to your original superpower that you talked about with empathy. We talked a lot about some of these factors that make empathy of a difficult thing of over empathizing and what kind of factors make that hard. But as a superpower, what kind of superpowers does that give you?
\n\nKATE: Ah, just being able to really connect to a lot of different people. I mentioned earlier that I believe it's my purpose, it's my life's work on this planet at this time to connect people to themselves and to each other. The more asking I can do and the more absorbing I can do of other people's experiences, the better I am at being able to connect with them and being able to make them feel like they belong in whatever space I'm in. I can't connect with someone if I don't try and get it. Try and get what they're going through, or what their experiences are.
\n\nThat's why I do so much time just talking to people, and that's why I love yoga and why I want to start this studio and open this space. Because we live in a world where we don't have a lot of spaces, especially marginalized communities don't have a lot of spaces that feel like they're being understood, or they're truly being heard, or seen. Me being an empath, I'm able to access that in people more and therefore, bringing them closer to safer spaces, or safer people, safer communities where they really feel like they can exist and be their full, whole, and complete selves. It's really special.
\n\nARTY: We also touched this concept of authenticity and it seems like that also comes up in this context of creating these safe spaces and safe communities where people can be their whole selves. So when you think about authenticity, we talked about this being a difficult and fuzzy word, but at the same time, it does have some meaning as to what that means, and these challenges with regards to boundaries and things. But I'm curious, what does authenticity mean to you? How does that come into play with this idea of safety and creating these safe spaces for others as well?
\n\nKATE: Yeah. I feel like there's so much in there. I think one of the biggest things to accept about the word authenticity, or the concept of authenticity is that it's always changing and it means something different to everyone. We are all authentic to ourselves in different ways and at different times in our lives and I think it's so important to honor the real evolution of feeling authentic.
\n\nThere are times and days where I'm like who even am. It's like what even, but there's always this sort of core, root part of me that I don't lose, which is what we've been talking about. This ability to connect, this feeling of empathy, of compassion, of wanting to really be a part of the human experience. That, to me, kind of always stays and I feel like that's the authentic, like the real, real, authentic parts of me.
\n\nThere are layers to it that are always changing and as people, we are also always evolving and always changing. So those different parts of authenticity could be what you wear that make you feel like your most authentic self. It can be how you interact with your friends, or how you interact with the person, getting your popcorn at the movies, or whatever it is. Those can all feel like parts of your authentic self.
\n\nThat means something different to everyone. But I think that's such a beautiful part about it and about just being human is just how often these things are changing for us and how important it is to honor someone's authenticity, whatever that means for them at that time. Even if it's completely different from what you knew about them, or how you knew them before. It's this constant curiosity of yourself and of others, really getting deeply curious about what feels like you.
\n\nARTY: I was wondering about safety because you were talking about the importance of creating these safe communities and safe environments where people could be their whole, complete selves, which sounds a lot like the authenticity thing, but you trying to create space for that for others.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. Well, the reality of safety is that there's no one space that will ever be a “safe space for everyone,” and that's why I like to say safer spaces, or a safer space for people because you can never – I feel like it's all coming full circle where you can never meet every single person exactly where they need to be met in any given moment. You can just do your best to create spaces that feel safer to them and you do that with authentic connection, with getting curious about who they are and what they love, and just making sure that your heart's really in it. [chuckles] Same with inclusive language.
\n\nIt's all about the way you approach it to make someone feel safer. But I do think it's an I distinction to remember. You're never going to be safe for everyone. A space you create is never going to be safe for everyone. The best you can do is just make it safer for more people.
\n\nARTY: When I think about just the opposite of that, of times that I've gone into a group where I haven't felt safe being myself and then when you talk of about being your complete whole self, it's like bringing a whole another level of yourself to a space that may not really fit that space and that seems like it's okay, too. Like we don't necessarily have to bring our full self to all these different spaces, but whatever space we're a part of, we kind of sync up and adapt to it.
\n\nSo if I'm in one space and I feel the kind of vibe, energy, context of what's going on, how people are interacting, the energy they put forth when they speak with whatever sorts of words that they use. I'm going to feel that and adapt to that context of what feels safe and then as more people start adapting to that, it creates a norm that other people that then come and see what's going on in this group come to an understanding about what the energy in the room is like.
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: And all it takes is one person to bring a different energy into that to shift the whole dynamic of things.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. The reality is you'll never be able to change every space and I think that's such a good point. It makes me feel like saying you have to be protective of your energy. If you go into a space and it just doesn't feel right, or there's someone who is in the room that doesn't feel safe to you, or that doesn't feel like they're on the same page as you, it's okay to not feel like you need to change the world in that space. Like you don't always have to go into a space and say, “I'm going to change it.” That is how change is made when you feel safe enough. That's why it's so important to foster that energy from the jump.
\n\nThat's just a foundational thing at a company in a yoga studio, in a home, at a restaurant. It can be changed, but it really should be part of the foundation of making a safer space, or a more inclusive space. Because otherwise, you're asking the people who don't feel safe, who are usually marginalized people, or intersectionally marginalized in some way. You're asking them essentially to put in the work to change what you should have done as the foundation of your space.
\n\nSo it's a such a delicate balance of being protective of your energy and really being able to feel out the places where you feel okay saying something, or making a change, or just saying, “No, this isn't worth it for me. I'm going to go find a space that actually feels a little bit better, or that I feel more community in.”
\n\nARTY: And it seems like the other people that are in the group, how those people respond to you. If you shift your energy, a lot of times the people that are in the group will shift their energy in kind. Other times, in a different space, you might try to shift energy and then there's a lot of resistance to that where people are going a different way and so, you get pushed out of the group energy wise. These sorts of dynamics, you can feel this stuff going on of just, I just got outcast out of this group.
\n\nThose are the kinds of things, though that you need to protect your own energy of even if I'm not included in this group, I can still have a good relationship with me and I can still like me and I can think I'm still pretty awesome and I can find other groups of folks that like me.
\n\nIt definitely, at least for me, I tend to be someone who's like, I don't know, I get out grouped a lot. [laughs] But at the same time, I've gotten used to that and then I find other places where I've got friends that love me and care about me and stuff. So those are recharge places where I can go and get back to a place where I feel solid and okay with myself, and then I'm much more resilient then going into these other spaces and stuff where I might not be accepted, where I might have to be kind of shielded and guarded and just put up a front, and operate in a way that makes everyone else feel more comfortable.
\n\nKATE: Yeah, and isn't it so powerful to feel cared for?
\n\nARTY: I love that.
\n\nKATE: Like just to feel cared for by the people around you is everything. It's everything. That's it. Just to feel like you are wanted, or you belong. To feel cared for. It can exist everywhere is the thing. In your Slack group, or whatever, you can make people feel cared for. I have never regretted reaching out to a coworker, or a friend, or whoever an acquaintance and saying, “Hey, I love this thing about you,” or “Congratulations on this rad thing you just launched,” or whatever. It's the care that's so powerful.
\n\nARTY: I feel like this is one of those things where we can learn things from our own pain and these social interactions and stuff. One of the things that I've experienced is you're in a group and you say something and nobody responds. [laughs]
\n\nKATE: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: And after doing that for a while, you feel like you're just shouting into the void and nobody hears you and it's just this feeling of like invisibility. In feeling that way myself, one of the things I go out of my way to do is if somebody says something, I at least try and respond, acknowledge them, let them know that they're heard, they're cared about, and that there's somebody there on the other side [chuckles] and they're not shouting into the wind because I hate that feeling. It's an awful feeling to feel invisible like that.
\n\nKATE: Awful, yeah.
\n\nARTY: But we can learn from those experiences and then we can use those as opportunities to understand how we can give in ways that are subtle, that are often little things that are kind of ignored, but they're little things that actually make a really big difference.
\n\nKATE: Yeah, the little things. It really is the little things, isn't it? [laughs] Like and it’s just, you can learn from your experiences, but you can also say, “I'm not doing this right now.” You can also check out. If you are giving and giving. and find that you're in the void essentially, more often than not, you can decide that that's no longer are worth your time, your energy, your care, and you can redirect that care to somewhere else that's going to reciprocate, or that's going to give you back that same care and that's so important, too.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and it sounds like starting a yoga studio is not a trivial undertaking and obviously, you're highly motivated to create this kind of an environment in the world. So is there anything more you'd like to say about that because that ties in very closely with what we're talking about?
\n\nKATE: Yeah. It’s so weird to work full-time and be so passionate about my tech job and then turn around and be like, “I'm opening a yoga studio.” It's such a weird, but again, it's all connected at the root, at the core of what I'm trying to do in this world.
\n\nThe thing about Kula is that it's really built on this foundational mutual aid model. So being donation-based, it's really pay what you can, if you can. And what you pay, if you're able to give an extra $10 for the class that you take, that's going to pay for someone else's experience, who is unable to financially contribute to take that class. That's the basis of community care, of mutual aid and it's really this heart-based business model that is really tricky. I’m trying to get a loan right now and [chuckles] it's really hard to prove business financials when you have a donation-based model and you say, “Well, I'm going to guess what people might donate per class on average.”
\n\nSo it's been a real journey, [laughs] especially with today's famous supply chain issues that you hear about constantly in every single industry. I have an empty space right now. It needs to be completely built out. Construction costs are about triple what they should be.
\n\nAgain, coming from this real mutual aid community care centered model, it's really hard, but I have to keep coming back. I was just telling my partner about this the other day, I have to keep coming back to this core idea, or this real feeling that I don't need to have a beautifully designed space to create what I'm trying to create.
\n\nWhen I started this, I envisioned just a literal empty room [chuckles] with some people in it and a bathroom and that's it. So of course, once I saw the designs, I was like, “Oh, I love this can lighting that's shining down in front of the bathroom door.” It's like so whatever, stereotypical. Not stereotypical, but surface level stuff.
\n\nI really have had to time and time again, return to this longing almost for a space that feels safer for me, for my community, for Black people, for disabled people, for trans people, for Asian people; we don't have a lot of spaces that feel that way and that's just the reality.
\n\nSo it's a real delicate balance of how do I like – this is a business and I need money, [laughs] but then I really want this to be rooted in mutual aid and community care. It comes back to that car and that inclusivity, creating authentic connections. It's tricky out there for a queer woman entrepreneur with no collateral. [laughs] It's a tricky world out there, but I think we'll flip it someday.
\n\nI really think pioneering this idea, or this business model at least where I'm at in Denver, I think it's going to start the conversation in more communities and with more people who want to do similar things and my hope is that that will foster those conversations and make it more accessible to more people.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I think every time someone manages to muster up the energy, the capital, and the community effort to put something like this together, it makes it just slightly easier for someone else a, they can learn the lessons and b, they're more examples of this thing operating in the world. So it becomes more possible in people's minds and you can build some of that momentum there.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. And of course, it's really important to note and to remember that I come from a place of immense privilege. I have a great job in tech. I'm white. I am upper middle class. Technically, I'm “straight passing,” which is a whole other concept, but it is a thing and this is the way that I'm choosing to use my privilege to hopefully pave the way for more people. I do not take for granted the opportunity that I'm given and like I said, intersectionality matters and all of that, but I still have a lot of privilege going into this that I hope turns into something good for more people.
\n\nARTY: It also takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur because you really have to just keep on going. No matter any obstacle that's in your way, you’ve just got to keep on going and have that drive, desire, and dream to go and build something and make it happen and your superpowers probably going to help you out with that, too. It sounds like we've got multiple superpowers because I think you got to have superpowers to be an entrepreneur in itself.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. I don't know, man. It's such a weird feeling to have because it just feels like it's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's it. It doesn't feel like I'm like – yes, it's a calling and all of that, but it just feels like the path and that, it feels more, more natural than anything I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
\n\nThe more people follow that feeling, the more authentic of a world, the more connected of a world we're going to have. I see a lot of people doing this work, similar things, and it makes me so happy to see.
\n\nThe words of one of my therapists, one of my past therapists told me, “Always stick with me,” and it was right around the time I was kind of – so I'd started planning before COVID hit and then COVID hit and I had to pause for about a year, a little bit less than a year. It was right around the time I was filing my LLC and really starting to move forward. It was actually December 17th of last year that I filed my LLC paperwork. So it's been a little over a year now.
\n\nHe told me, “How much longer are you willing to wait to give the community this thing that you want to give them? How much are you willing to make them wait for this space?” And I was like, “Yesterday. Yesterday.” Like, “I want to give people this space immediately,” and that has truly carried me through. This supply chain stuff is no joke. [laughs] and it has really carried me through some of the more doubtful moments in this journey. Yeah, and I feel like, man, what powerful words. Like, I just want to keep saying them because they are such powerful words to me. How much longer are you willing to make them wait? And it's like, I don't want to. [chuckles] So I guess I'm going to go do it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThrow caution to the wind. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: Well, I think that ties back into what you were talking about is as you were thinking about designing the space and what kind of buildout you're going to need, and that can be a guide star for what actually needs to be there. What's the actual MVP for this space? Does it need a perfect coat of paint, or is what's there good enough? Does it need all the things arranged just so in the perfect lighting, or does it just need to exist and have people in the room and you can really focus in on what's going to get you there? And then of course, you iterate like everything else, you improve over time, but.
\n\nKATE: Right.
\n\nJOHN: I love that concept of just cut out everything that's in the way of this happening right now as much as possible.
\n\nKATE: Yeah, and what a concept, I think that can be applied to so many things. Who am I trying to serve with this thing and what do I need to do to get there? It doesn't have to be this shiny, beautiful well-designed creation. It just needs to serve people. The people that you want to serve in the best way possible, and for me, that's getting this space open and actually having it in action.
\n\nARTY: I think once you find something that feels in alignment with you, you seem to have lots of clarity around just your sense of purpose, of what you want to move toward of a deep connection with yourself. One thing I found with that is no matter how much you get rejected by various groups in the world, if you can be congruent and authentic with yourself and follow that arrow, that once you start doing that, you find other people that are in resonance with you. They're out there, but you don't find them until you align with yourself.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. Community. Community is so powerful and I love that you just said alignment because that really is truly what it is. It's finding the thing that makes you feel like you're doing something good and that feels authentic to your core, to those core principles of you that never really change. The things that are rooted in love, the things that are rooted in compassion, or whatever it is you care about. Community, that alignment is absolutely key.
\n\nIt's also, when I say I was born with my superpower of being an empath, this desire to create this space feels, it feels like I was also born with this desire, or born with this alignment. So I feel like so many times it's just going back to the basics of who you are.
\n\nARTY: Like you're actualizing who you are.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. Like full alignment, enlightenment, that all kind of falls into place when you're really making the effort to be connected to your core.
\n\nARTY: It seems like a good place to do reflections. So at the end of the show, we usually go around and do final reflections and takeaways, final thoughts that you have and you get to go last, Kate.
\n\nJOHN: There are a whole lot of different things that I've been thinking about here, but I think one of the ones that's sticking with me is the dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity, and how I feel like they really are pulling against one another and that, which isn't to say things can't be perfect and authentic at the same time. But I think perfectionism is usually a negative feeling. Like you should do something, you're putting a lot of pressure, there's a lot of anxiety around perfectionism and that is pretty much an opposition to being authentically yourself. It's hard to be in touch with yourself when you're wrapped up in all those anxieties and so, thinking about the two of them together, I hadn't made that connection before, but I think that's something that's interesting that I'll be thinking about for a while.
\n\nARTY: I think the thing that's going to stick with me, Kate is you said, “Our words carry so much power,” and I think about our conversation today out just vibes in the room and how that shifts with the energy that we bring to the room, all of these subtle undercurrent conversations that we're having, and then how a sort of energy vibe becomes established. And how powerful even these really little tiny things we do are.
\n\nWe had this conversation around inclusive language and you gave so many great details and specifics around what that means and how we can make little, small alterations to some of these things that are just baked into us because of our culture and the words that we hear, phrasing and things that we hear, that we're just unaware of the impact of things. Just by paying attention and those little subtle details of things and coming at things with an open heart, regardless of how we might stumble, or mess things up, how much of a difference that can make because our words, though carry so much power.
\n\nKATE: Yeah. And the thing you just said about having an open heart is truly how you can put any of this into action, how you can remain open to learning about authenticity, or what it feels like to not fall into a trap of perfectionism, or how to speak, or write, or interact more inclusively with other human beings.
\n\nI feel like being open, being openminded, being open-hearted, whatever it is, is just really a superpower on its own. Remaining open and vulnerable in today's world is hard work. It does not come naturally to so many people, especially when you're dealing with your own traumas and your own individual interactions and maybe being forced into spaces where you don't feel safe. To remain open is such a tool for making other people feel cared for. So if that's the goal, I would say just being open is truly your superpower.
\n\nJOHN: I think that's the quote I'm going to take with me: being open is the key to making people feel cared for.
\n\nKATE: Yes. I love that.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Kate. It's been a pleasure to have you here.
\n\nKATE: Thank you so much. This has been just the energy boost I needed.
Special Guest: Kate Marshall.
Sponsored By:
00:54 - Emily’s Superpower: Being a Good Teacher
\n\n06:24 - Online College Courses vs In-Person Learning / Emily’s Community College Path
\n\n\n\n11:58 - Computer Science Curriculums
\n\n19:28 - Being A Good Mentor / Mentor, Student Relationships
\n\n38:24 - Dungeons & Dragons
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDave: College is what you make of it, not where you went.
\n\nArty: Teaching people better who don’t have a lot of experience yet.
\n\nMandy: “Empowered women, empower women.” Empowered men also empower women.
\n\nEmily: Your mentor should have different skills from you and you should seek them out for that reason.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 265 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest panelist, Dave Bock.
\n\nDAVE: Hi, I'm David Bock and I am here with our usual co-host, Arty Starr.
\n\nARTY: Thank you, Dave. And I'm here today with our guest, Emily Haggard.
\n\nEmily is graduating from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science this past December so, congratulations. She has a wide variety of experience in technology from web development to kernel programming, and even network engineering and cybersecurity. She is an active member of her community, having founded a cybersecurity club for middle schoolers. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing novels.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Emily.
\n\nEMILY: Thank you.
\n\nARTY: So our first question we always ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nEMILY: So I spent some time thinking about this and I would say that my superpower is that I'm a good teacher and what that means is that the people who come to me with questions wanting to learn something number one, my goal is to help them understand and number two, I think it's very important to make sure that whatever gap we have in our experience doesn't matter and that they don't feel that. So that they could be my 6-year-old brother and I'm trying to teach him algebra, or something and he doesn't feel like he is the 6-year-old trying to learn algebra.
\n\nDAVE: I'll echo that sentiment about being a good teacher actually on two fronts, Emily. First of all, I am teaching your brother now in high school and just the other day, he credited you towards giving him a lot of background knowledge about the course and the curriculum before we ever started the class. So he seconds that you're a good teacher.
\n\nAnd then listeners might remember, I was on a few weeks ago talking about my nonprofit and Emily was there at the beginning of me starting to volunteer in high schools. In fact, the way I met Emily, it was the fall of 2014.
\n\nThe first time I was volunteering at Loudoun Valley High School and one morning prior to class, there was going to be a meeting of a cybersecurity club. There were a bunch to the students milling about and there was this sophomore girl sitting in front of a computer, looking at a PowerPoint presentation of networking IP addresses, how the /24 of an IP address resolves and just all that kind of detail. Like very low-level detail about networking stuff and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I wouldn't have expected a sophomore girl to be so interested in the low-level type of details of IP. And then the club started and she got up and started giving that presentation. That was not a slide deck she was reading; it was a slide deck she was creating.
\n\nEMILY: Thank you. I actually remember that. [laughs]
\n\nARTY: So how did you acquire that superpower?
\n\nEMILY: I think it was out of necessity. So going back to the story that David mentioned in high school, there was a cybersecurity competition called CyberPatriot that I competed in with friends and one year, all of a sudden, they just introduced network engineering to the competition. We had to configure and troubleshoot a simulated network and no one knew how to do that.
\n\nSo I took it upon myself to just figure it out so that my team could be competitive and win, but then part of the way that I learn actually is being able to teach something like that's how I grasp. I know that I've understood something and I'm ready to move on to the next topic is like, if I could teach this thing.
\n\nSo actually, I started out building all of that as a way to kind of condense my notes and condense my knowledge so that it’d stick in my head for the competition and I just realized it's already here, I should share this. So that's how I started there. Teaching network engineering to high schoolers that don't have any background knowledge is really hard. It forced me to put it in terms that would make sense and take away the really technical aspects of it and I think that built the teaching skill.
\n\nDAVE: That relates to the club you started at the middle school for a CyberPatriot. How did that start?
\n\nEMILY: That was initially a desire to have a capstone project and get out of high school a few weeks early. But I was sitting there with my friend and thinking about, “Okay, well, we need to do something that actually helps people. What should we do?” Like some people are going out and they're painting murals in schools, or gardening. It was like, well, we don't really like being outside and we're not really artistic. [chuckles] But what we do have is a lot of technical knowledge from all this work with CyberPatriot and we know that CyberPatriot has a middle school competition.
\n\nSo we actually approached the middle school. We had a sit down with, I think the dean at our local middle school. We talked about what CyberPatriot was and what we wanted to do with the students, which was have them bust over to the high school so we could teach them as an afterschool program. I guess we convinced him and so, a couple months later they're busing students over for us to teach.
\n\nDAVE: Wow. And did they ever participate in competitions as middle schoolers?
\n\nEMILY: Yes, they did.
\n\nDAVE: Very cool.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: Can you go into what those competitions are like? I don't think most of the audience even knows that exists.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah, sure.
\n\nSo CyberPatriot, it's a cybersecurity competition for predominantly high schoolers that's run by the Air Force and you have a couple rounds throughout the year, I think it’s like five, or so, and at each round you have 6 hours and you're given some virtual machines, which you have to secure and remove viruses from and things, and you get points for doing all of that.
\n\nThey added on network simulation, which was with some Cisco proprietary software, which would simulate your routers, your firewalls, and everything. So you'd have to configure and troubleshoot that as well and you would get points for the same thing.
\n\nIt builds a lot of comradery with all of us having to sit there for 6 hours after school and like, we're getting tired. It's a Friday night, everyone's a little bit loopy and all we've eaten is pizza for 6 hours. [laughs]
\n\nDAVE: Well, that's a good jumpstart to your career, I think. [laughs]
\n\nEMILY: Yes, for sure.
\n\nMANDY: So while in college, I'm guessing that – well, I'm assuming that you've been pretty impacted by COVID and doing in-person learning versus online learning. How's that been for you?
\n\nEMILY: I've actually found it pushes me to challenge the status quo. Online college classes, for the most part, the lectures aren't that helpful. They're not that great. So I had to pick up a lot of skills, like learning to teach myself, reading books, and figuring out ways to discern if I needed to research something further, if I really understood it yet, or not. That's a really hard question to ask actually is if you don't have the knowledge, how do you know that you don't have that knowledge? That's something I kind of had – it's a skill that you have to work on.
\n\nSo that is something I developed over the time when we were online and I've actually also done – I worked time for a year after high school and I took mostly online classes at the community college. Those skills started there, too and then I just built on them when I came to Virginia Tech and we had COVID happen.
\n\nDAVE: Actually, I'd like to ask about that community college time. I know you had an interesting path into Virginia Tech, one that I'm really interested in for my own kids as well. Can you talk about that?
\n\nEMILY: Yeah. So I, out of high school, always thought I'm going to – I'm a first-generation student. My parents did not go to college. They went to the military and grandparents before them. So I had always had it in my head that I am going to go and get that 4-year degree. That's what I want for myself.
\n\nAt the end of high school, I applied to Virginia Tech. I had a dream school. I wanted to go to Georgia Tech. They rejected me. Oh, well, that dream shot. I need to find something new. So I applied to Virginia Tech thinking it was going to be a safe bet. It's an in-state school, I was a very good student; they would never reject me and so, I applied for the engineering program and I was rejected. They did admit me for the neuroscience program, but it wasn't going to be what I wanted and I was realizing that I did not like either chemistry, or biology, so that would never work.
\n\nAnd then at the same time, because of my work with CyberPatriot, I was able to get an internship in network engineering at a college not too far from where I lived. After I graduated high school, they offered me a job as a network engineer, which I took because my team was fantastic, I really liked my manager, and I was comfortable there. I took this job and I said, “Okay, I'm going to keep working on the college thing because it's what I always wanted for myself.” So I just signed up for community college and that was pretty tough working a full-time and doing community college until 11 o'clock at night and getting up the next day and doing it all over again.
\n\nAnd from there, I decided that Virginia Tech was going to be the best option for me, just from a very logical perspective. I kind of thought Virginia Tech was a bit cult-y. I was never really gung-ho about going, but it made the most sense being an in-state school that's very well-known. I worked through community college and I applied to Virginia Tech again after 1 year at community college and they rejected me again. so I was like, “Oh no, now what do I do I?” And I realized I needed to make use of the guaranteed transfer program.
\n\nOne of the really cool things in Virginia at least is that a lot of the state schools have agreements with the community college, where if you get an associates with a specific GPA, you can transfer into that program and the university and your transfer's guaranteed, they can't reject you. So I was like, “Aha, they can't get rid of me this time.” Yeah, I did it and it's kind of a messy process.
\n\nI actually went into that in a blog post on David has a nonprofit called Loudoun Codes. I wrote a blog post for his website and detailed that entire – being a transfer student is hard because there's a lot of credits that may not get transferred over because Virginia Tech is a little bit – all 4-year colleges are a little bit elitist in their attitude towards community college and they didn't take some of the credits that I had, which put me behind quite far, even though I had that knowledge, they said I didn't. So that added on some extra time and some extra summer semesters while I was at Tech.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. I did something similar with doing community college and then what you're talking about with the whole elitist attitude with the transfer and having a whole bunch of your credits not transferring and I'm definitely familiar with that whole experience.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah.
\n\nEMILY: And even now that I think about it, I remember community college, too. It's built for one specific type of student, which is great. I think they're really good at helping people who just weren't present, or weren't able to do the work and make the progress in high school. They're really good at helping those types of students. But as someone who did a whole bunch of AP classes, had a crazy GPA, they just didn't really know how to handle me. They said, “Okay, you've tested out of pretty much all of our math classes, but you are still lacking some credits.” So I had to take multi-variable calculus in community college in order to get credit to replace the fact that I tested out of pre-cal and which was kind of silly, but in the long run, it was great because I hear multi-variable calculus at Tech is pretty hard.
\n\nBut definitely, there's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense about college. Education is important. It's great. I've learned a lot of things, but there's still all these old ways of thinking and people are just not ready for change in college a lot of the time. The people who make decisions that is.
\n\nDAVE: Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about the computer science curriculum that you've had and the angle I'm asking from when I worked at LivingSocial, I worked with one of the first group of people that had graduated from our bootcamp program and had transferred from other careers, spent 12 weeks learning software engineering skills, and then were integrated with a group of software engineers at LivingSocial.
\n\nWe would occasionally get into conversations about, well, if I learned to be a software engineer in 12 weeks, what do you learn in 4 years of college? So we started to do these internal brown bags that were kind of the Discovery Channel version of computer science. A lot of that material I've since recycled into the presentations I do at high school.
\n\nBut for your typical person who might have sidelined into this career from a different perspective, what's been your curriculum like?
\n\nEMILY: I really like the parts of the curriculum that had technical depth because coming into it at my level, that's what I was lacking in certain areas. I had built the foundation really strong, but the details of it, I didn't have.
\n\nThe classes that Virginia Tech, like the notorious systems class and a cybersecurity class I have taken this semester, that have gone in detail with technology and pushed what I understood, those were my most valuable classes. There was a lot of it that I would've been happy without [laughs] because I'm not sure it will apply so much to my life going forward. I'm a very practical person. Engineer mindset; I don't want to worry about things that can actually be applied to the real world so much.
\n\nSo for me this semester, actually, it's been really challenging because I've taken a data structures and algorithms class where we're talking about NP complete versus NP hard, and what it would mean if we could solve an NP complete problem in polynomial time. It's really hard to care. It's really hard to see how that [laughs] helps. It's interesting from a pure math perspective, but coming into it as someone who was already in the adult world and very grounded, it feels like bloat.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. That stuff is interesting if you're are designing databases, but most of us are just using databases and that – [overtalk]
\n\nEMILY: Right.
\n\nDAVE: Stuff is all kind of baked in.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: For the average person on a technical career path, we're far more interested in the business problems than the math problems.
\n\nARTY: I'm curious, too. There's also lots of stuff that seems like it's missing in college curriculum from just really fundamental things that you need to know as a software engineer. So did you have things like source control and continuous integration? I think back to my own college experience and I didn't learn about source control until I got out of college. [laughs] And why is that? Why is that? It seems so backwards because there's these fundamental things that we need to learn and within 4 years, can we not somehow get that in the curriculum?
\n\nI'm wondering what your experience has been like.
\n\nEMILY: So Virginia Tech, I think the CS department head is actually really good at being reflective because he requires every senior to take a seminar class as they exit. It's a one credit class; it's mostly just feedback for the school and I think it's really cool because he asks all of us to make a presentation, just record ourselves talking over some slides about our experience and the things we would change.
\n\nThat really impressed me that this guy who gets to make so many decisions is listening to the people who are just kind of peons of the system and what I said was that there are certain classes that they give background knowledge. Like there's one in particular where it's essentially the closest crossover we have with the electrical engineering department and it's really painful, as someone who works with software, to try and put myself in a hardware mindset working with AND gates, OR gates, and all that, and trying to deal with these simulated chips. It's awful and then it never comes back. We never talk about again in the curriculum and it's a prerequisite for the systems class, which has nothing at all to do with that, really.
\n\nThis segues into another thing. I've had an internship while I've been at Virginia Tech that's a web consultant role, or a development consultant role with a company called Acceleration. They run just a small office in Blacksburg and they have a really cool business model. They take students at Virginia Tech and at Radford, a neighboring school, and they have us work with clients on real software development projects. They pair us with mentors who have 5, 10 years of experiences, software consultants, and we get to learn all those things that school doesn't teach us.
\n\nSo that's actually how I learned Git, Scrum, and all that stuff that isn't taught in college even now and I went back to the CS department head and I said, “Replace that class with the class that teaches us Git, Scrum, Kanban, and even just a brief overview of Docker, AWS, and the concepts so that people have a foundation when they try to go to work and they're trying to read all this documentation, or they're asked to build a container image and they have no idea what it's talking about, or what it's for.”
\n\nYeah, going back to the original question, no, I didn't learn version control in college, but the weird thing is that I was expected to know it in my classes without ever being taught it because, especially in the upper level like 3,004 level, or 1,000 level classes, they have you work on group projects where Git is essential and some of them, especially the capstone project, are long-term projects and you really need to use Scrum, or use some sort of methodology rather than just the how you would treat a two-week project.
\n\nActually, it's interesting because David was my sponsor on my capstone project in college and he really helped my team with the whole project planning, sprint planning, and just understanding how Scrum and all that works and what it's for.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. I just shared a link that is a series of videos from MIT called The Missing Semester of Your Computer Science Education that talks about Git, version control and command line, using the back shell, stuff about using a database, how to use a debugger; just all that kind of stuff is stuff that you're expected to know, but never formally taught.
\n\nARTY: What about unit testing?
\n\nEMILY: Okay. So that's an interesting exception to the rule, but I don't think they really carried it through, through my entire experience at Tech. So in the earlier classes, we were actually forced to write unit tests that was part of our assignments and they would look to see that we had – I think we had to have a 100% testing coverage, or very close to it.
\n\nSo that was good, but then it kind of dropped away as we went to the upper-level classes and you just had to be a good programmer and you had to know to test small chunks of your code because we'd have these massive projects and there would be a testing framework to see if the entire thing worked, but there was no unit testing, really. Whereas, at work in my internship, unit tests are paramount, like [laughs], we put a huge emphasis on that.
\n\nARTY: So earlier Emily, you had had mentioned teaching people that had no experience at all and the challenge of trying to be able to help and support people and learning to understand regardless of what their gap was in existing experience. So what are some of the ideas, principles, things that you've learned on how to do that effectively?
\n\nEMILY: That's a really tough question because I've worked on building intuition rather than a set of rules. But I think a few of the major things probably are thinking about it long enough beforehand, because there's always a lot of background context that they need. Usually, you don't present a solution before you’ve presented the problem and so, it's important to spend time thinking about that and especially how you're going to order concepts.
\n\nI've noticed, too with some of the best teachers I've had in college is they were very careful with the order in which they introduced topics to build the necessary context and that's something that's really important with complete beginners.
\n\nThe thing is sometimes you have to build that context very quickly, which the best trick I have for that is just to create an analogy that has nothing to do with technology at all, create it out of a shared experience that you have, or something that they've probably experienced. Like a lot of times analogies for IP addressing use the mailing service, houses on a street and things like that, things that are common to our experience. I guess, maybe that's the foundation of it is you're trying to figure out what you have in common with this person that can take them from where they are to where you are currently and that requires a lot of social skills, intuition, and practice, so.
\n\nDAVE: That’s a really good observation because one of the things I find teaching high school, and this has been a skill I've had to learn, is being able to put my mindset in the point of view of the student that I need to go to where they are and use a good metaphor analogy to bring them up a step. That's a real challenge to be able to strip away all the knowledge I have and be like, “Oh, this must be the understanding of the problem they have” and try to figure out how to walk them forward.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: That's a valuable skill.
\n\nEMILY: I think that's really rewarding, though because when I see in their eyes that they've understood it, or I watch them solve the problem, then I know that I did it well and that's really rewarding. It's like, okay, cool. I got them to where I wanted them to be.
\n\nARTY: Reminds me. I was helping out mentoring college students for a while and I hadn’t really been involved with college for a really long time. I was working with folks that knew very, very little and it was just astounding to me one, just realizing how much I actually knew. That's easy to take for granted.
\n\nBut also, just that if you can dial back and be patient, it's really rewarding I found to just be able to help people, to see that little light go on where they start connecting the dots and they're able to make something appear on the screen for the first time. That experience of “I made that! I made that happen.” I feel like that's one of the most exciting things about software and in programming is that experience of being able to create and make something come to life in that way.
\n\nJust mentoring as an experience is something, I think is valuable in a lot of ways beyond just the immediate being able to help someone things, like it's a cool experience being a mentor as well.
\n\nEMILY: And I think it's really important, too as a mentor to have good mentors yourself. I was really lucky to have David just show up in my high school one day [laughs] and I've been really lucky consistently with the mentors in my life. In my internship that I mentioned, I worked with fantastic engineers who are really good teachers.
\n\nIt's difficult to figure out how to good teacher without having first had good teachers yourself and regardless of the level of experience I have, I think I will always want to have that mentor relationship so that I can keep learning. One of the things, too is a lot of my mentors are quite different from mine. Like I am a very quiet introvert person. I would not say I'm very charismatic. I would say David is the opposite of all those things. So wanting to build those skills myself, it's good to have a role model who has them.
\n\nDAVE: Well, thank you for that compliment.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: That's really interesting that you said to find mentor that's the opposite of yourself. I literally just heard the same thing said by a different person last week that was like, “Yeah, you should totally find someone who you want to be, or emulate,” and I thought that was really good advice.
\n\nEMILY: I agree with that completely.
\n\nThere's a lot of conversation around diversity in computer science and that's definitely a problem. Women do not have the representation they should, like I've always gone through classes and been 1 of 3 women in the class. [chuckles]
\n\nBut I think one of the ways in which we can approach this, besides just increasing the enrollment number, is focusing on commonalities—kind of what I mentioned before— from the perspective of mentors who are different than their students. Maybe a male mentor trying to mentor a female student. Focusing on your commonalities rather than naturally gravitating towards people who are like you; trying to find commonalities with people who are different from you. I think that's important.
\n\nFrom the student perspective, it's less about finding commonalities more about, like you said, finding the things you want to emulate. Looking at other groups of people and figuring out what they're good at and what things you would like to take from them. [laughs] So.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, that's been an interesting challenge I've noticed in the school system is that in the elementary school years, boys and girls are equally competent and interested in this material. By the time they get to high school, we have that 70/30 split of males versus females. In the middle school, the numbers are all over place, but in the formal classes, it seems to be at 70/30 split by 7th grade and I can't really find any single root cause that causes that.
\n\nUnfortunately, I think I saw some stuff this week with Computer Science Education Week where students as young as first grade are working with small robots in small groups and there always seems to be the extrovert boy that is like, “It's a robot. I'm going to be the one that plays with it,” and he gatekeeps access to girls who are like, “It's my turn.” It's really discouraging to see that behavior ingrained at such a young age.
\n\nAny attempt I try to address it at the high school level – well, not any attempt, but I feel like a lot of times I can come off as the creepy old guy trying to encourage high school age girls to be more interested in computer science. It's a hard place for me to be.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah. I don't think you're the creepy old guy.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI think this is a larger topic in society right now is it's ingrained in women to be meek and to not be as confident, and that's really hard to overcome. That sounds terrible. I don't think people consciously do that all the time. I don't think men are consciously trying to speak over women all the time, but it it's definitely happened to me all over the place—it's happened at work, it's happened in interviews.
\n\nI think getting over that is definitely really tough, but some of the things that have helped me are to see and celebrate women's accomplishments. Like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it makes me so happy. I know one time in high school, David took a few other female students and I to a celebration of women's accomplishments and the whole thing, there were male allies there, but the topic of the night was women bragging loudly about the things that they've accomplished. Because that's not something that's encouraged for us to do, but it's something that it builds our confidence and also changes how other people see us.
\n\nBecause the thing is, it's easy to brag and it's saddening that people will just implicitly believe that the more you say you did. So the more frequently you brag about how smart you are, the more inclined people are to believe it because we're pretty suggestible as humans. When women don't do that, that subtly over time changes the perspective of us. We have to, very intently – I can't think of a word I'm trying to say, but be very intentional about bragging about ourselves regardless of how uncomfortable it is, regardless of whether we think we deserve it, or not.
\n\nMANDY: I also think it's really important for women to also amplify other women, like empowered women empower women. So when we step up and say, “Look at this thing Emily did, isn't that cool?”
\n\nEMILY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: That's something that we should be doing to highlight and amplify others' accomplishments.
\n\nEMILY: For sure. I've been to the Grace Hopper conference virtually because it was during COVID times, but that was a huge component of it was there would be these networking circles where women just talk about the amazing things that they've done and you just meet all these strangers who have done really cool things. It goes in both directions, like you said, you get to raise them up and also be encouraged yourself and have something to look forward to.
\n\nARTY: It sounds like just being exposed to that culture was a powerful experience for you.
\n\nEMILY: For sure.
\n\nARTY: I was thinking about our conversation earlier about role models and finding someone to look up to that you're like, “You're a really cool person. I admire you.” Having strong women as role models makes it much easier for us to operate a certain way when we interact with other people, and stay solid within ourself and confident within ourself and not cave in. When all the examples around us of women are backing off, caving in, and just being submissive in the way that they interact with the world, those are the sort of patterns we pick up and learn.
\n\nLikewise, the mixed gender conversations and things that happen. We pick up on those play of dynamics, the things that we see, and if we have strong role models, then it helps us shift those other conversations. So if we have exp more experience with these things, like the Grace Hopper conference and being able to go into these other that have a culture built around strong women and supporting being a strong woman, then you can take some of those things back with you in these other environments and then also be a role model for others. Because people see you being strong and standing up for yourself, being confident and they might have the same reaction to you of like, “Wow, I really admire her. She's really cool.” And then they start to emulate those things too.
\n\nSo these cultural dynamics, they spread and it's this subconscious spreading thing that happens. But maybe if we can get more experiences in these positive environments, we can iteratively take some of those things back with us and influence our other environments that, that maybe aren't so healthy.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah. I agree. And I think also, it's important to be honest and open about where you started because it's easy, if you're a really confident woman walking into the room, for people to think you've always been that way. I think it's important to tell the stories about when you weren't, because that's how other people are going to connect with you and see a path forward for themselves. Definitely.
\n\nI'll start by telling a story. I think it's just a million small experiences. I was a strong student in high school. I was very good at math. We had study halls where we'd sit in the auditorium and we'd all be doing homework, and students would often go to the guy in my math class who knew less than I did and ask for help. I would just sit there and listen to him poorly help the other students and mostly just brag about himself, and just be quiet and think about how angry it made me, but not really be able to speak up, or say anything.
\n\nI'm very different now. Because of the exposure that I've had, I am much more quick to shut that down and to give a different perspective when someone's acting that way.
\n\nMANDY: But how cool would it have been if that guy would've been like, “Don't ask me, ask Emily”?
\n\nDAVE: That's a really important point because I hear women talk about this problem all the time and I don't think the solution is a 100% in the women's hands. I think that it's men in the room.
\n\nMy own personal experience, most of my career has been spent in government contracting space and, in that space, the percentage of women to men is much higher. It's still not great, but I think there's a better attempt at inclusion during recruiting. I think that there's a lot of just forces in that environment that are more amenable to that as a career path for women.
\n\nAnd then when I started consultancy with my two business partners, Kim and Karen, that was an unheard-of thing that I had two women business partners and at the time we started it, I didn't think it was that big of a deal at all. But then we were suddenly in the commercial space and people thought it was some scam I was running to be a minority owned company and my partner was my wife, or I'd go into a meeting and somebody thought I brought a secretary and I was like, “No, she's an engineer and she's good, if not better than me.”
\n\nIt opened my eyes to the assumptions that people make about what the consulting rates even should be for men versus women and it's in that environment I learned that I had to speak up. I had to represent to be a solution to that problem. I think you can get in an argument with other guys where they aren't even convinced there's a problem to solve. They'll start talking about, “Oh, well, women just aren't as interested in this career path.” It's like, I've known plenty that are and end up leaving.
\n\nEMILY: I think definitely having support from both sides has been really important because it is typically men in places of authority and to have them be encouraging and not necessarily forcing you into the spotlight, but definitely trying to raise you up and encourage you to speak out means a lot.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. I found most of the teams I've been on, I was the only woman on the team, or one of two maybe and early on, when nobody knows you, people make a lot of assumptions about things. The typical thing I've seen happen is when you've got a woman programmer is often, the bit is flipped pretty early on of that oh, she doesn't know what she's doing and stuff, we don't need to listen to what she says kind of thing and then it becomes those initial conversations and how things are framed, tend to affect a lot of how the relationships on the team are moving forward.
\n\nOne of the things that I learn as just an adaptive thing is I was really smart. So what I do, the first thing on the team I'd find out what the hardest problem was, that none of the guys could solve and figure it out, and then I would go after that one. My first thing on the team, I would go and tackle the hardest thing. I found that once you kick the ass of the biggest baddy on the yard, respect.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I ended up not having problems moving forward and that the guys would be more submissive toward me, even as opposed to the other way around. But it's like you come into a culture that is dominated by certain ways of thinking in this masculine hierarchy, alpha male thing going on and if that's the dominant culture, you have to learn to play that game and stake yourself in that game. Generally speaking, in this engineering world, intelligence is fairly respected. So I've at least found that that's been a way for me to operate and be able to reset that playing field anyway.
\n\nMID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
\n\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.
\n\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?
\n\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.
\n\nListen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.
\n\nARTY: Well, speaking of games, Arty, one of the things that Emily mentions in her bio is playing Dungeons and Dragons and this is an area where as well as I know Emily from her high school years, this is not something I know much about Emily at all. So I'd like to talk about that. Play, or DM, Emily?
\n\nEMILY: Both. But I really enjoy DMing because it's all about creating problems to solve, in my opinion, like you throw out a bunch of story threads. The way I approach things is I try actually, unlike a lot of DMs, I do not do a lot of world building for places my players haven't been. I pretty much, there are bright light at the center of the world and anything the light doesn't touch doesn't exist. I haven't written it and I don't really look at it that often.
\n\nSo I'm constantly throwing out story threads to try and see what they latch onto and I'll dive into their character backstory to see what they are more predisposed to be interested in. It's like writing a weekly web comic. You don't have necessarily a set beginning and end and you don't really know where you're going to end up in between, but you end up with all these cool threads and you can tie them together in new and interesting ways. Just seeing the connections between those and being able to change what you want something to be on the fly is really cool and just very stimulating mentally for me. So it's like a puzzle exercise the whole time and it is also an interesting social exercise because you're trying to balance the needs of each person.
\n\nI feel like D&D allows you to know people on a really deep level, because a lot of times, our characters are just – that we’re playing. I guess, I didn't really explain what D&D is; I just made an assumption that people would know. It's a tabletop role playing game where you make a character. You're usually heroic and you're going about on this adventure trying to help people solve problems and these characters tend to be just naturally an extension of ourselves. So you get to see all the things that subconsciously the person doesn't real about themselves, but that show up in their character. I think that's really cool.
\n\nDAVE: So do you have a weekly game, or how often do you play?
\n\nEMILY: I try to run a weekly game. College often gets in the way. [laughs]
\n\nDAVE: How many players?
\n\nEMILY: It ranges from 3 to 4, sometimes 5. It's really cool because it's also, most of them are people that I met during the pandemic. So we've played predominantly online and this is the way we've gotten to know each other. We've become really close in the year, or so since we started playing together through the game that I DM and through the game that one other person in the group DMs and it's cool. It's definitely a way to kind of transcend the boundaries of Zoom and of video calls in general.
\n\nDAVE: Hmm.
\n\nARTY: How did you end up getting into that?
\n\nEMILY: It was just a friend group in high school. Someone said, “Hey, I would like to run a Dungeon and Dragons game. Do you want to play?” And I said, “Oh, what's that?” I've always loved books and reading so it was kind of a natural progression to go from reading a story to making a story collaboratively with other people. So that just immediately, I had a connection with it and I loved the game and that's been a huge part of my hobbies and my outside of tech life ever since.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. I played D&D as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, but my mom took all my stuff away from me when that Tom Hanks movie came out that started the whole Satan panic thing. So I didn't play for a long time until my own kids were interested after getting hooked on Magic. Seeing my own kids interested in D&D, the story building, the writing, the math that they had to do, like I don't know why any parent wouldn't encourage their kids to play this game. It's just phenomenal. The collaborative, creative, sharing, math; it's got everything.
\n\nEMILY: Yeah. I'm an introverted person so it takes a lot to make me feel motivated to be in a group with other people consistently, but D&D does that and it does it in a way that's not, I guess, prohibitive to people who are naturally shy. Because you're pretending to be someone else and you're not necessarily having to totally be yourself and you're able to explore the world through a lens that you find comfortable.
\n\nDAVE: That’s really cool.
\n\nEMILY: I guess, also, it kind of goes back to our conversation about teaching. Being a DM, a lot of my players are people who have not played before, or very, very new. Like, maybe they've read a lot about it, maybe they've watched them [43:18] shows, but they maybe haven't necessarily played.
\n\nD&D does require a lot of math and there's a lot of optimization, like you can get very into the weeds with your character sheet trying to make the most efficient battle machine, whatever and that's not really always approachable. Especially when I started introducing my younger siblings to D&D, I used versions, D&D like games that were similar, but not quite D&D. Like less math, a very similar amplified character sheets so you're looking at fewer numbers, or fewer calculations involved just to kind of get the essence, because there's a few core concepts in D&D.
\n\nYou have six statistics about your character that they change a little bit between different types of role-playing games, but they're pretty universal, I think for the most part. It's constitution, strength, dexterity, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma. Once you kind of nail those concepts down and once a person understands what those skills are supposed to mean, that really opens the gates to understanding a lot more about the core mechanics of D&D outside of the spell casting stuff and all the other math that's involved.
\n\nI think just simplifying the game down to that makes them fall in love with the narrative and collaborative aspect of the game, and then be more motivated to figure out the math, if they weren't already predisposed to that.
\n\nDAVE: So if somebody were interested in picking up a game trying to figure it out, where would they start?
\n\nEMILY: It really to depends on the age group. If you're going to play with high school students, I would definitely say if none of you have played before, then pick up a player's handbook, maybe a dungeon master's guide if you're going to DM, you've never DM before because it gives a lot of tips for just dealing with the problems that arise in a collaborative storytelling game. And then probably just a prewritten module so you don't have to worry about building your own story, because these modules are stories that are written by professional game developers and you can take pieces of them and iterate it on yourself so you don't have to start with nothing.
\n\nBut if you are going for a much younger audience, I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, but it's essentially an animal adventure game. It's very much D&D without using the word D&D because I think it's a different company, it's copyrighted, and whatnot. But you have these little cute dog characters and they're trying to defeat an evil animal overlord who wants to ruin the town festival. It's very family friendly, like there's no death like there is in regular D&D and it's just a chance to engage with the character creation aspect of it.
\n\nMANDY: That's really cool.
\n\nSo we're about heading towards our time, but I really appreciate you coming on the show, Emily and I wanted to just ask you, if you could give any advice to young girls looking to get into tech, or software engineering, what advice would you give them?
\n\nEMILY: I think don't be afraid to walk off the path. A lot of my life has been kind of bucking the prewritten path that a lot of people are told is the best one because it didn't work for me, or whatever reason, and I think it's important just to not be afraid of that and to be courageous in making your own path.
\n\nMANDY: That's great advice.
\n\nSo should we head into reflections, everyone? Who wants to start us off?
\n\nDAVE: I'll start with one.
\n\nI mentioned that when asked Emily about her path into college, that I was interested in a similar path for my own kids. I had a really strange college path that I started out a music major, ended up a computer science major, and had a non-traditional path. I've always believed that college is what you make of it, not where you went. Where you went might help you get your first job, but from then on, it's networking, it's personality, it's how well you did the job.
\n\nTalking to Emily about her path, just reinforces that to me and helps me plot a path for what I might have my own children do. I have triplet boys that are in 9th grade. So we're starting to think about that path and not only would a path through Virginia Community College save us a fortune, [laughs] it would also be a guaranteed admission into Virginia Tech, or one of the Virginia schools so it's definitely something worth to consider. So I appreciate that knowledge, Emily.
\n\nARTY: I've been thinking a lot about how we can better teach people that don't have a lot of experience yet. We've got so much stuff going on in this field of software engineering and it's really easy to not realize how far that this plateau of knowledge that we live in and work with every day to do our jobs, and how important it is to bring up new folks that are trying to learn.
\n\nOne of the things you said, Emily was about teaching is being able to find those shared things where we've got a common understanding about something—you used metaphor of male delivery to talk about IP addresses, for example. But to be thinking in those ways of how do we find something shared and be able to get more involved with mentoring, reaching back, and helping support people to learn because software is super cool. It really is! We can build amazing, amazing things. It'd be awesome if more of us were able to get involved and have that experience and having good mentors, having good role models, all of those things make a big difference.
\n\nMANDY: I just love the conversation that we had about men and women in technology and for me, I love to reiterate the fact that empowered women empower women and I even want to take that a step further by saying especially right now in our field, empowered men also empower women.
\n\nSo I think that that's something that really needs to be said and heard and not perceived as like Dave said oh, he felt like the creepy guy encouraging girls, or women to get involved in tech. I think it's cool. Dave has personally, he's mentored me. He's gotten me more interested. I used to do assistant work and now I'm learning programming and it's because I've been encouraged to do so by a lot of different men in the industry that I've been lucky to know.
\n\nDAVE: Well, thank you, Mandy. You certainly have a who's who of mentors.
\n\nMANDY: I am very, very lucky to know the people I know.
\n\nDAVE: I’m quite honored to even be named on that list of people you know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEMILY: I think the thought I keep coming back to is one that I've mentioned, but didn't really crystallize in my head until this morning when I was preparing for this recording is, I listened to David's interview and I thought about like, “Oh wow, he did really well on the podcast, all these things that I wish I did.” It really crystallized the idea that your mentor should be different from you and should have skills you don't, and you should seek them out for that reason.
\n\nMentors tend to be the people that I run into and I haven't really thought about it that way before, but that gives me a different perspective to go out and intentionally seek out those people. That definitely gives some food for thought for me. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: I love intentionally seeking out people who are different from myself in general, just to learn and get perspectives that I might have never even thought of before. But with that, I guess we will wrap up.
\n\nEmily, it's been so nice having you on the show. Congratulations and best of luck on your exams. I know being – [overtalk]
\n\nDAVE: I can’t believe you took the time to do this with your exams coming up.
\n\nMANDY: I know!
\n\nEMILY: I'm procrastinating as hard as I can.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: But it's been so nice to have you on the show. Dave, thank you for coming and being a guest panelist and Arty, it's always wonderful to host with you. So I just wish everybody a happy new year and we'll see you next week!
Special Guests: Dave Bock and Emily Haggard.
Sponsored By:
00:54 - Pariss’ Superpower: Being Vocal and Transparent
\n\n08:01 - #BlackTechTwitter & Black Tech Pipeline
\n\n15:56 - Being Okay with Losing Opportunities
\n\n28:57 - UX Design vs Software Engineering (What would you do if you weren’t in tech?)
\n\n35:11 - Pariss’ Passion for Acting & Being On Set
\n\n43:38 - Growing & Evolving Community
\n\nReflections:
\n\nChanté: Being intentional about community.
\n\nJohn: The impact an individual person can have on culture.
\n\nJamey: Be bothered. Ways that marginalized communities share some things and not other things.
\n\nTim: Having these discussions because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience; Making sure the Black experience is changed for the better moving forward.
\n\nPariss: Being an ally vs being a coconspirator.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 264. I'm John Sawers. My pronouns are he/him. And I'm here with Chanté Thurmond.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. My pronouns are she/her and ella. And I'm here today with Jamey Hampton.
\n\nJAMEY: Thanks, Chanté. My pronouns are they/them. And I'd like to also introduce Tim Banks.
\n\nTIM: Hey, everybody. My pronouns are he/him. And I would like to introduce today's guest, Pariss Athena.
\n\nPARISS: Hey, everyone. I'm Pariss Athena. My pronouns are she/her.
\n\nI'm founder and CEO of Black Tech Pipeline and creator of the hashtag movement and community, #BlackTechTwitter.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to the show!
\n\nWe're going to start off with the question that we ask every guest that we have. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nPARISS: This is such a downer, because I really don't know. I don't have one. I don't have a superpower, I don't think.
\n\nJAMEY: Just because you don't know does not mean that you don't have one.
\n\nCHANTÉ: One of them that I think is obvious to me, when I found you on Twitter, was your ability to see the problem, see the opportunity, and obviously, to find the talent. So those are three clear distinct talents you got there.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. Okay, I didn't consider them as superpowers, but we can definitely go with that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Sure!
\n\nTIM: I will tell you; it was interesting to me because Pariss and I don't interact very often on Twitter, but I've been a follower and a fan for a while. The one thing that I've noticed about you is that you are always unapologetically yourself and I think that is a huge thing that cannot be underestimated. Because your ability to do these things, and your ability to inspire and empower others is because you first inspire and empower yourself. That's something that myself as a Black man, especially as a Black woman, we don't see that a lot and we don't see that a lot in a way that uplift others as well.
\n\nSo I've always been super, super impressed with your ability to do that and to do it unapologetically, and to stand there against all the people that level hate at all of us just to be there, complete yourself and let it go off. So always been inspired by that and I don't think you should underestimate that as a superpower.
\n\nPARISS: Thank you! See, I didn't consider these things superpowers, but I guess, now I do. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: There you go.
\n\nPARISS: Thank you. You're making me realize things about myself. [chuckles]
\n\nTIM: Oh, yeah. That's one thing; we'll tell you about yourself. Whether it's good, or bad, we'll still tell you.
\n\nPARISS: I love it. I love to hear the feedback.
\n\nCHANTÉ: The other thing you might want to do now is we can ask #BlackTechTwitter what they think your superpowers are. I'm sure that they'll give you lots of insights of interacting with you over the last few years.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. I think the whole saying kind of what I want to say no matter what will probably be a big one.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.
\n\nPARISS: For me, I like doing that. I guess, I don't mind losing opportunities because I wanted to be honest, like it just is what it is, but I feel like I've always been that way. Maybe because I've been bullied for so many years and I'm just one day I just had it. I was like, “You know what? I'm fed up.” I'm done trying to appease people and I didn't care if I didn't have any friends, or whatever. I was like, “I was tired being a pushover,” and from there, I've just always been very vocal and transparent.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Ah, there it is. It's like the superhero wound that turns into your superpower.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. Some people will say that. Some other people will be like, “Oh, that’s my villain origin story.” But I don’t know, I’m at a breaking point [chuckles] and I was like, “All right, I'm done. This is just whatever.”
\n\nTIM: See, I always thought that was interesting because the “villains,” or “heroes;” any character in a story is most sympathetic when you understand where you're coming from. It's interesting that we talk about the villain origin story. It's because my favorite villains would be heroes in a different setting. You take like Magneto and I take Magneto because for me, the X-Men comic books, for those of you don't follow, has always been about civil rights.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah.
\n\nTIM: Always from the get go. Always about civil rights, always about the marginalized, and always about the people who are different. Sometimes they're different in ways that you can't tell and sometimes there's different in very, very obvious ways.
\n\nI think that I always spoke to marginalized folks because some of those mutants had powers that you wouldn't know by looking at them. So some people are marginalized in ways where they're neurodivergent, where they have disabilities that you can't see, and some of them are very, very obvious about what they are.
\n\nBut the big thing that made the villains sympathetic is you understood why they did what they did. You may not have agreed with the methodology, but you could understand and were sympathetic to those costs. It’s like I said, Magneto from the X-Men was a great one.
\n\nThe heroes oftentimes had to endure the same kinds of problems that the villains did, but they went about it by a different approach and I think that's what makes a real big difference in our society today. It's not that whether folks are marginalized, or not, it's not whether folks have been bullied, or anything like that. It's how they choose to use that experience to go forward from that.
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: So people who haven’t had those kinds of experiences say, “Yeah, it's a choice.” People can simplify it, or oversimplify it and say, “Oh, well they just had a choice to do good, or bad,” and it's like, no, it's never that easy. It's never that easy. In the right circumstances, all of us would probably do something that we would consider and the privilege that we do enjoy now—bad, or wrong, or whatever. But it was a thing that was necessary at the time.
\n\nSo I think we, as folks, especially as Black people, or other marginalized folks in this industry, need to be able to look back and to reach down and pull folks up and say, “Hey, there's a different way to go about it.” Because sometimes they just don't know that they have options and that's why it's important for us to inspire and empower folks to be that.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah, and I feel like there's always that argument of yes, there is this problem, but the way you're going about solving it is not okay. But that's one perspective and then there's another perspective. At the end of the day, you're like, “Who's really right, who's really wrong,” and it's like that type of war. It's hard.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. We don't live in an actual right/wrong, like very black and white thing.
\n\nPARISS: Mm hm.
\n\nTIM: Not to delve too far into it, one of the things I always liked about some of the Sergio and Morricone movies, the spaghetti westerns, was that they were never really heroes. Everybody was just shades of gray and it's like, did they do the right thing this time? Yeah. They may have been despicable people, but they did the right thing and I see that.
\n\nWe see that when we look through our history, regardless who it is, every “hero” has got some darkness to them and so, they didn't do everything right. That's all of us and none of us has ever done everything. It's just a matter what is our aggregate. So we always try and do the best we can.
\n\nBut like I said—not to steal the spotlight. I apologize for going off on this. But one of the things I've always looked at you, Pariss for is because you never claim to be always right. You never have said, “Everything I do is right,” or you follow me like that. It's always like, “Hey, look, I'm just doing the best I can.” When we are very open and transparent about that and vulnerable about that, that's what's inspiring.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. It's funny he brought up superheroes. I guess, he says he's not a hero, or a villain, which is why I love him so much, but Deadpool. I absolutely love Deadpool because he doesn't claim one, or the other. He's like, “I'm a guy making my own decisions and that's that.” I love that because you're not asking people to side with you, you're just this one person and you're going about life the way you want to do it, or go about things. I feel like that's just sort of what I do. I'm just doing what I do and like it or not, I don't know. I don't want to claim to be a role model, or like you said, that I'm always right. I'm not. I'm a human and that's that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Pariss, I'd love to take that as our cue to ask you. Let's talk about what you do, how you started #BlackTechTwitter and the Black Tech Pipeline. Tell us about what inspired you, what you were going through at that moment, and give us high level overview of where you've come from and where you are now.
\n\nPARISS: I'll start off with #BlackTechTwitter. So I got onto Twitter in September, or August of 2018 because I had just been laid off for my first job as a software engineer and I wanted to just talk about my journey, finding a new role. When I got on there, that's when I noticed that there was a really small community of Black technologists and up until that point, first of all, I was new to tech so it's not like I really knew the industry, but also, I never worked with anyone who looked like me since I entered the industry. So when I saw that there was a community, I was excited about it.
\n\nSo one day I just posted a tweet asking what does Black Twitter in tech look like. I wasn't trying to start anything. I didn't even have followers. I just posted a tweet. That was it and then that tweet just ended up taking off and it gained so much traction. I didn't expect that. Black technologists from all over the world posted themselves into that tweet and it just created that really long thread with their pictures and captions of what they do in the industry and overnight, it really formed this movement community in #BlackTech Twitter. Again, that was not my intention. It just kind of happened.
\n\nBlack Tech Pipeline then also fell into my lap pretty much just because that tweet and the traction that it gained; all of these employers were DMing me on Twitter. It was weird to have all these really big-name companies just in my Twitter DMS. I'm like, “Oh, wow.” Like, [chuckles] “[inaudible]. That’s so cool.” And they’re like, “Hey, we saw that. There's no pipeline problem. You brought exposure to this community. We want to hire people. Can you send us candidates?” Now I wasn't a recruiter at all. I didn't have recruiting experience. I didn't know what to do, but I was just like, “You're just connecting people. It's not that hard.”
\n\nSo what I did was I created a Discord community. I moved a lot of the members from Twitter into there and that's what I used to ask people like, “Hey, are you looking for work? I'm working with this employer.” I wasn't actually working with anyone in terms of having a contract. I was helping people for free. [laughs] So I was like, “Hey, let me connect you to this guy at Amazon, this guy at Google, this guy at Etsy,” that's just what it was.
\n\nI was connecting people just like that and people were getting jobs and so, it was working. But I formed this entity, Black Tech Pipeline, after a lot of the candidates that I “recruited”—I'm doing air quotes for people who can't see—recruited into these companies. I started Black Pipeline because they came back to me and let me know that they left the companies that I recruited them into. When I asked why, it was like the typical just, “They weren't actually inclusive. It was very performative. It was a negative environment. They didn't really have any goals for me. It's like I was a diversity hire.”
\n\nI felt horrible because I didn't vet these companies. I just was like, “Yeah, sure. I'll bring you candidates,” and that was it. So I felt horrible about that, especially being a Black woman enduring so much negativity within the industry. I was like, “If I'm going to do this type of work, then I want to do it right.”
\n\nSo I formed Black Tech Pipeline and I created this recruitment model, which was inspired by my bootcamp model. Anytime someone got hired from Black Tech Pipeline, I would stay on the job with them for 90 days and that meant I would biweekly virtual check-ins with those hires just to ask, “Hey, how's it going? What's your experience been like? Do you have the tools and resources that you need?” Those hires would give me feedback on their experience and I’d take that feedback and I'll relay it to the employer. So it was this feedback loop for 90 days to ensure that everyone's being set up for success, they have what they need, and they're happy and healthy in their environment. And then I eventually launched a job board.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. I remember actually when you started off this conversation, because I was a headhunter at the time and looking for tech talent. So I stayed, I followed, watched, and I was so excited.
\n\nOne of the things that, as you were telling back that story, but I remember now that you're retelling it. Initially, I was like, “I love what Pariss is doing. It's very organic, it's real, it's needed. It's an opportunity that had been long overlooked.” I was so grateful that you were just building this movement, but I was also a little sad that you weren't necessarily getting paid. I know it was a labor of love, but I felt like all of a sudden, people started coming to you.
\n\nI remember just all this activity and I was like, “Dang, that's a lot to take on,” and as a person in this industry, too. I feel like I'm oftentimes like, “Let me go help you.” I take on this role of being a Black woman caretaker of my community. I feel like I have this obligation to look out for people, which I think is pretty common in our Black community specifically. But it just feels like this problem that was so pervasive to technology and quite frankly, in a lot of other industries, became now this responsibility of you.
\n\nPeople were like, “Hey, can you –?” They're sliding into your DMS and they're like, Hey, can you connect us with talent?” And then the fact that they didn't say, “And let us compensate you equitably for the labor that you are doing on our behave that we don't even have the capacity to do, or to maintain, sustain.” So just want to say I hope that now, as you're getting into this work and understanding the game of it, the business and the economic model that you are charging what you're worth on behalf of doing this labor.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. So that wasn't even – when I thought about that later on, I did it for free for 2 years. I wasn't thinking about it then, but now that I think about like, wow, I really build these companies up with Black technologists and no one offered to pay me at all. No one mentioned money at all and I'm like, “That's performative within itself.” I had to really think about that and it made me upset.
\n\nI've actually even had a few of those companies come back to me after I launched Black Tech Pipeline and they expected work for free again. I was like, it just gives me insight into who's just here for the check the box and who's not. I've had tons of different experiences. I've even had companies – like I said, I do that recruitment model where I stay on the job with people for 90 days. I've even had companies offered to pay me more money to not stay on the job with the hires and just place them and I was like, “That's not, no. That's mandatory. I have to stay on the job.”
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Red flag.
\n\nPARISS: Right, and I ended up not working with them anyway, but it's just like, so much is revealed in this work and it's frustrating. It’s emotional all the time.
\n\nTIM: I think that underlies the whole problem of around diversity and inclusion in tech is that companies are willing to do it as long as they're not out anything. But as soon as they have to make an investment that's going to determine whether, or not they see the value in it. So if someone else is going to do the work, if someone else is going to do the labor of getting the talent to them, they don't have to pay nothing for it. Great. Well, that's just easy, but when you tell them, they actually have to invest in that, that's when they balk.
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: Because it's not actually worth it for them. And the companies that will pay, or offer to pay, the companies that will pay Black speakers, the companies that will pay Black talent equivalent to the other ones, the companies that will pay to go and look for talent out of marginalized folks, those are the ones, they may not always do it right. But they're doing it better than the ones that just – if we happen upon some inclusive, great.
\n\nPARISS: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: One thing you said earlier when we were talking about your superpower of saying what you mean all the time was that you're not afraid to lose opportunities because of the things you say and stuff. I thought that that was really interesting because folks from marginalized backgrounds have to think about what they're doing and if it's going to lose them opportunities in a way that other people don't have to think about.
\n\nSo I guess, I was kind of wondering what your feelings are about that. I know I've talked about this with people in my network and the way I feel about if a company doesn't want to work with me, or an opportunity wants to overlook me because of this, this, or that about myself, then maybe I didn't want to work with them. I'm wondering what your philosophy is on that and how you came to that conclusion about it.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. So for me, I do not judge.
\n\nI've had a few candidates who, they got hired at Google, but they were scared to announce it because of all of these issues with Google internally when it comes to their Black and brown hires. I was like, “No, you got hired at Google. That's a big deal. Say it. I know Google has issues. Trust me, even the smallest businesses have these issues and I don't think it's something we can actually escape, but you accomplished something, you got thing that you wanted, you should be proud of that so, say it.” That doesn't mean that you're here claiming like, “Oh, Google is the gods of technology.” No, but you got hired at your dream job and that's great. Announce that.
\n\nFor me, there are certain things I wouldn't do, but that's just me. Personally, like I said, I'm not scared to lose opportunities and I think that's because I'm so angry, I'm fed up, and I'm tired of needing to think of something before I say it, when people in privilege, they can just say whatever they want with no repercussions.
\n\nI understand that other people aren't like that and that's totally fine. If you don't want to say something because you're scared you might lose opportunity, then don't say it. I would hate for someone to be like, “You know what, let me try this,” and then they can't sleep that night because they didn't really want to do it. They felt pressured to. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. If you want to, then do it. But I'm not going to judge you based off of that. You do what you want.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think a number of times on the show, we've talked about companies that have less than stellar reputations for the way they treat their people, places like Shopify and Google. Pretty much like you said, any company's going to have some issues like that. Some people have the privilege and the place where they can quit that job on principle based on that sort of thing. But we also don't want to criticize the people that have to stay there, that they need that job. They don't feel like they can just pick up the next one immediately.
\n\nSo you can criticize the company and all the things, but we want to separate that from criticizing individual workers who are working that job. Like you said, you’re going to be proud of getting a job at Google. That's a hard thing to do. That's something you should be proud of regardless of what other crap they're doing in their other departments, or at various levels.
\n\nPARISS: Exactly. Yeah. I feel like the only people I criticize are the employers themselves because they’re the ones making the policies, they’re the ones making these roles and these changes. If they're only benefiting you, or the people in power and people in privilege, then I have no problem just roasting you, it's fine. You'll be fine. You still make your money.
\n\nJAMEY: The way I kind of see it sometimes when someone that I care about takes a job with a company, Google is a good example, where I have this simultaneously, “I'm really happy for you that you accomplished this big thing and it's not that I'm judging people, but also, I'm a little worried for you.” Like, “I hope that that works out for you.” [laughs]
\n\nPARISS: Well, yeah, same. I feel that way, too all the time, but I don't tell them that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I don't want to raid on your parade, but in the back my mind, I'm definitely like, “God, I really hope they do have a really good experience and if not, at least you got Google on your resume, you can go somewhere else.” But I try not to rain on anyone's parade. I think my negative thoughts, but outward, I’m like, “I’m so proud of you. Congrats.”
\n\nJAMEY: [laughs] Absolutely.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. As you all were talking, it reminds me, too. I think for the last few days, or week, I've seen some pieces around the great resignation and just people having privilege to quit their job and what that means about your social location and your circumstances. Many times, the people who have the privilege to quit are folks who have other things in the pipeline, or other means to cover their expenses and just the cost of living, or they have opportunities galore.
\n\nI'm just curious if you've had any conversations with folks about that in the past several weeks, or months, given all the things we've seen with COVID and just how the economy's being playing out.
\n\nPARISS: No, people are not – well, this is only true for me and the conversations I've had. No, people are not leaving their jobs without having another one lined up just because it's not like you need the money, right? You still have to pay your bills whether you have a job, or not.
\n\nSo no, they're staying and it sucks that you have to stay in a toxic situation. Like it sucks. That's just what you have to do and yet, that's kind of just what I'm seeing and I let them know like, “Obviously, I'll help you out.” Like, “I have a job board. I'm connected to all these employers. I'll help you as much as I can.
\n\nI also don't even encourage them. I'm like, “Unless you want to quit, then go ahead and do that, and I'll help you as much as I can. Otherwise, yes, I understand at the end of the day, things still need to be paid. You have to put food on the table and regardless of what your situation is, just kind of hold out for as long as you can.” It sucks. It's like being between a rock and a hard place.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah, and it’s hard, especially, I feel like what I've seen is folks who have taken the plunge and broken into tech. They're like, “Well, I work so hard to get here. You think I'm just going to quit?” Like, there's a lot of hype with my tech team right now to quit and the stuff that happened at Netflix, it was a lot of hype and it's like, that's great that people can quit and walk out and do whatever.
\n\nAnd then there are people who just absolutely cannot. They want to fight and they want to be in solidarity with their coworkers on things, but they might not have the privilege, or ability to really do that in such a way. It's not just performative. It's like, this is their livelihood, too. Doesn't mean that they're not in solidarity.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. No, I haven't talked to anyone who's felt comfortable enough to literally just up and quit because they're angry, or something.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right.
\n\nPARISS: Like for them, they just got to go with it. It is what it is.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.
\n\nTIM: I think, too, there's a certain amount of almost protest, or hate working where it's like, I know some folks, who were civil servants, work for federal state governments that they detest it. Especially our parents’ generations, baby boomers, they worked for the federal government. Even though the federal government was doing them dirty, they were still going to get their money. They were going to get paid. They were going to use the government that they couldn't stand to set them up. They were going to take them for all their work.
\n\nI think there's a lot of that sentiment, too among Black tech workers. Like, look, this company may be treating me wrong, but I'm going to soak them. I'm going to get every penny and dye my can out of these people and when I'm driving around in my Jaguar and going on vacation, they can eat it. When I buy that house, when I have something to leave my kids, that is what I'm doing this for. They can detest the company and you see them every day. They get home, they're like, “What’s up, man. Look, I'm just trying to get this paycheck, dog.”
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: And that’s legit. That is a very legitimate reason. I've worked for companies whose ethics I didn't necessarily agree with. But you know what, when I came home and I was driving a nice car, I had a big house, and my kids get fed, I'm like, “Look, man, that's all I'm here for.” That’s especially for marginalized folks, especially for folks that don't have generational wealth, never mind the actual privilege of being able to quit myself. But when you are set up with generation of wealth and you know you have something to leave the next generation, it's a whole different story than this is my opportunity for generational wealth. This money that I am making, it's a lot and I can hate the fucking company, but you know what, when I have something to leave my progeny, that's what I'm here for.
\n\nPARISS: Oh, yes. I cannot stand when people are like, “If you're not here for passion, you're not going to last. You have to do it because you're passionate.” It's like maybe for you. I think this is really for marginalized communities, but we don't have the luxury of doing something for passion.
\n\nI'm passionate about acting. I wish my mom could take care of my bills while I'm out chasing my dreams. But that can't happen for me. I have to work a 9:00 to 5:00, work on my little skits afterwards. That's the reality of my life for me. I can't just quit this company because unfortunately, even if they're just a terrible company, I can't just up and quit because I bills to pay. I have a child to feed. I have family to take care of. I don't have that privilege.
\n\nSo I think especially just Black people, we're so used to just living like this, it’s like this is just our reality every day. We have to deal with the way the world is and then still grow and thrive. Just going into a company and dealing with that is nothing new for us.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. Real talk and I really appreciate you all talking about this because I actually faced the same situation not too long ago where I had two jobs and people were like, “Oh wow. It must be nice.” I'm like, “Must be nice? You think I'm working two jobs because it's a luxury, yo? Like, “It's actually because I'm making up for lost ground and for time.” This is equitable, this is reparations. In order to actually have a savings account, I have to have two jobs to be able to help my family during COVID. Are you tripping?
\n\nI got to the point where I actually did need to make a decision because it was so unhealthy. I was getting so sick at work and I lost my dad. Suddenly, he got really sick and then that kind of forced me. The life circumstances forced me. But I was ready and committed to work two jobs just because my parents both have always worked more than one job. They always have multiple incomes. That's all I know. That's all I know.
\n\nIt's interesting seeing some of this play out in technology. What I noticed was, as I got into more technologically advanced, or well-funded companies and stuff, talking to people, they're like, “You can just quit,” and I'm like, “What are you talking about?” [laughs] That is not my reality.
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. It's funny that people talk about the hustle culture, whatever, having this and having that, having this thing on the side. Look, Black people have been doing this from the jump, from the get go. We've been having two, three jobs. We had a side hustle. We've been doing this; we're doing that on the side. We have been doing that forever because that's what we had to do that and then second of all, if we wanted to have anything more than the basics, that's what we needed to do.
\n\nBoth my parents work two jobs. I had two jobs since the time I was 16, since the time I was 35. I had two jobs and that was my present to me was when I made enough that I could only have one job and I was like, “Man, I can see my kids and stuff like that.” It's crazy, right?
\n\nBut that thing is the thing that people say, “Oh, well, now you can do things like that.” “That has how our existence has been for a long time. For a long, long time and that's not new to us. So for us, it is a privilege. For us, it's a privilege to just have one job, never mind to be able to quit that job.
\n\nPeople say, “I'm going to go on and fund unemployment. I'm going to take a few months off to figure out what I want to do.” That doesn't register with me. That is not something I could ever do comfortably. That's not never going to see me do. Unless you're going to pay me to be gone. When people say, “Oh, I'm going to quit and I'm going to go take a vacation to Europe and then I'm going to come back in six months.” I'm like, “Bro, that is not a world in which I live.”
\n\nPARISS: Sounds amazing, though.
\n\nTIM: I know it does. I love that for you.
\n\nPARISS: I wish I could do that. [laughs]
\n\nMID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
\n\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.
\n\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?
\n\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.
\n\nListen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.
\n\nTIM: So I guess, Pariss, I want to know when it gets to a point where you get in demand, what people want to hire not just your company, when they want to, “I want to hire Pariss Athena to work for my company.” What role are you going to work? What role do you want to be in?
\n\nPARISS: Now? That's hard because I do Black Tech Pipeline full-time and I'm always like, “If this doesn't work out.” Sometimes I feel like I should be in a DEI role, but then I don't want to, because I know what DEI officers go through working at one company and it's just a shitshow. It's really hard. And sometimes, maybe I'll just leave this industry altogether, I don't know, because I don't want to be a software engineer anymore. I think I'd start over and be a UX designer, probably. Literally just start over as a junior in UX design.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Tell us more about that because that was actually a question I had. If you weren't doing this, what would you be doing? So tell me more about why UX design instead of software engineering.
\n\nPARISS: So I'm a person who loves research a lot, especially with UX because I just think it's cool. You're really thinking about such intricate things to make sure someone's having a good experience and you're thinking of all these different communities, especially the very vulnerable communities. I love that.
\n\nYou're using that to build a product that people are going to use, whether it's a digital, or a physical product. I think that's amazing. I think it also makes you more empathetic and aware of things and I love that. I just think there's a lot of opportunity to grow as a human. I just really love UX design and so, I would get into that.
\n\nJOHN: And what is it about software that you're moving away from?
\n\nPARISS: Software engineering is not fun to me when I'm doing it for work, but it's fun if I have a personal project.
\n\nWhen I learned to code, I started coding my own – like I thought I was building this app that was going to make me a billionaire. So I loved coming home from work and building it every day. It was a React native application. Turns out, now that I think about it, it probably would have made me no money at all. The social media platforms would've killed me early. So whatever, but back then, I thought it was this golden egg idea and it just had me excited.
\n\nBut doing it for work 9:00 to 5:00, I just didn't enjoy it and that could have been because of the companies I was at, or the mentorship that I lacked. I don't know. It could have been a bunch of different reasons, but I've never really had a good experience coding for work.
\n\nAnd then honestly, if I could snap my fingers altogether and be literally anything I wanted, I would definitely work on set of movie films. I wouldn't have to be an actor, or anything. I would really enjoy pulling curtains if I had to. I just like people on set and watching everything come to life, it's like this feeling I can't describe. It makes me very, very happy. I would probably do that, too.
\n\nTIM: I think that's interesting. That part, so many people I know have similar things like that.
\n\nPARISS: Oh really?
\n\nTIM: Whether it’s they want to do lighting, whether it's they want to do the board. For me, I want to be a Foley artist. For those of you don't know, a Foley artist is when you have a scene where somebody's walking through gravel. Well, they don't actually have a microphone at the feet of the person walking through gravel, they have somebody out there who's taking a block and smashing it in gravel in the place where they walk so, they make those sounds. That's what Foley artist does.
\n\nPARISS: Oh.
\n\nTIM: But so many people in tech that I know that have super diverse sets of interests, always come back to that portion of working behind the scenes.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah.
\n\nTIM: To make something that's very visible. People enjoy it. Whether it's music, or whether it's movies, that kind of same emotional things. I love that answer. I think is really cool.
\n\nPARISS: That's so interesting. I didn't even know that.
\n\nI feel like what's funny. A lot of software engineers that I've met, they didn't start off wanting to be a software engineer. They did start off with going to art school and stuff. I'm like, “What happened?”
\n\nJAMEY: I went to art school.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nTIM: I'm a musician by trade. I started off, when I joined the Marine Corps, I joined the Marine Corps to be a musician and play a bunch of music.
\n\nPARISS: Oh wow.
\n\nJAMEY: That's really interesting.
\n\nPARISS: Right?
\n\nTIM: Yeah.
\n\nPARISS: What happened?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a story you don't hear every day.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPARISS: Like, did we all grow up and realized that we have bills? Like, why did we stop?
\n\nTIM: Oh. So I stopped because the Marine Corps that I was too smart to be a musician and made me an avionics tech instead.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPARISS: Oh my God.
\n\nTIM: They changed my MOS in bootcamp.
\n\nPARISS: Wow.
\n\nJAMEY: I stopped because I realized that if I wanted to do big film movie kind of stuff, I would have to move to either New York, or LA and I didn't want to do that. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: I did actually a lot of dance in college, but I also did software and then obviously, software pays a lot more than dance so I kept doing it. But I think unlike everyone here, I actually enjoy the software for the software and then so that's what's kept me in it for so long. Although, now I'm doing management. I'm not actually writing much software these days.
\n\nBut I feel like software is great because like you said, you can do it, make a ton of money, and then go do something else that you enjoy more, or that you really want to do. So it's nice in that respect, but it's also interesting that there's so many people in it that are doing it 9:00 to 5:00 and then they go do the thing they really enjoy afterwards.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah, no, it pays well and it pays to support your actual dream. So it works out.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right. And I do think that a lot of the people in tech that I – as a recruiter, one of the things I always enjoy is well, how did you get into this field. I think that the trend is that most people don't actually to get into software engineering, but they have all this array of skill, talent, interests that actually make them much better at their jobs, or make it feel like I can come here, do this work, pick it up, put it down, and then I have the emotional and the bandwidth to go do the things that I really love. Whereas, if I was doing that other thing I love, that might get burnt out.
\n\nSo I always find that that's an interesting – specifically, it seems like in tech that I admire about people that they have that ability to do that.
\n\nJAMEY: Pariss, you've mentioned a couple of times about acting and being on set. I can tell how much you love it because the tone of voice that you have when you talk about it. Now we're talking, getting into people's real passions and how tech supports that and stuff. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what got you into acting and what you love about it.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. So I'm going to say it started with home videos. My mom has so many home videos of just doing what I do and I was always part of the drama class ever since middle school. I was always in the plays. I was always main character. I was doing that. And then high school came and I really got into YouTube. So I was doing videos and I don’t know, I always really loved it.
\n\nOnce high school came, that's actually when I started getting bullied a lot and then I was like, “Oh, I'm going to show them. Once I graduate, I'm going to get into my top university and become an actress.”
\n\nI did get into my top university in New York. I moved there to become an actress and then that's where – no, I didn't, I lied. I went there for film and screen studies. I lied, but I wanted to be an actress, too. But when I went to New York, that's when I realized everybody wants to be famous. Everyone wants to do this work.
\n\nI was like, “Okay, let me go to LA.” Go to LA, it's even worse. First of all, I saw 80 people who looked just like me. I was like, “Okay, it's going to be really hard to make it in this industry.” It killed my dream a little bit, but I have still always really loved it, but I don't think it's one of those things I want to pursue whole time to get in front of the camera and that's when I started loving just simply being on set.
\n\nI was like, “Oh my God.” I love just watching because I just think it's so cool. I really enjoyed being a background actor on set because you get to see the actors walk by and how they build these things. It's just like this vibe.
\n\nAnother thing I loved was watching – I would go on YouTube and I would buy the extra DVDs for movies. They don't do that anymore. I don't think. But DVDs for movies, they would come with watch the bloopers and how we put all this together. I'd watch that more than the actual movie. I'd watch it for hours and hours. I'd go on YouTube and watch behind the scenes of all my favorite movies. Everything was just so amazing behind scenes.
\n\nIt's just so fun seeing humans in this amazing job and that's what I fell in love with it, really. I also realized I don't think I want to do acting. I just like be there.
\n\nJAMEY: I relate to that a lot about watching the behind-the-scenes stuff. I totally get it.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I always like that feeling that sense of knowing what's going – for example, if you work at a theme park and you know what all the trails are behind the scenes and how they set up the things, even then when you're attending, or whatever, you still know all the stuff that's going on as part of supporting the façade of the experience. I really always have enjoyed having that experience.
\n\nI can even remember that back in high school, because my parents were faculty at the school, so I got to go into the places that most of the students never got to go and talk to people in a different way. So I always had that sense of being on the inside a little bit.
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nJOHN: And that knowledge of more about how things operate and that's always very satisfying to me.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: It's really interesting because I've had people ask me before like, “Oh, you know a lot about –” I was going to do film editing was what I was studying in school and they're like, “Oh, you know a lot about cinematography and editing and how that stuff gets done. Doesn't that ruin watching movies for you because that's what you're thinking about when you're watching them?” I guess, I get why people ask that, but I'm like, “Not at all.” Like, it's great. [laughs]
\n\nPARISS: Yeah, I do that, too. I'm like, “Oh.” I'll point things out and I'm sure it's really annoying to people, but I'm like, “But I never did that!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI even do that now. As someone who used to be a software engineer, I'd be like, “Oh, I know what they use. Oh, they use these –.” I just know all these things and I know it's annoying to people.
\n\nJAMEY: I got a GraphQL error in the wild on Facebook the other day and I was like, “Look at this GraphQL error,” and all my friends were like, “I don't care about that at all.” [laughs]
\n\nPARISS: That’s [inaudible].
\n\nTIM: I think it's interesting though, because as we're talking about these things, about understanding how the sauce is made and understanding what goes into the things increases our enjoyment on it.
\n\nTo bring this back a little bit, it's like when I see marginalized people, especially Black folks, succeed in tech—I'm happy for my friends and they do well—but I am over the moon for my Black friends, for Black women, for Black transwomen for anything like that when they succeed. Because I know what all it took. I understand the things they had to go through to get there and it's not the same as everybody else.
\n\nSo me having understand, because I have that common experience to understand that what it took to get there, I am like, “Yes.” So if you do get that high paid job at Google like, “Yeah man, fuck Google, but yes, get that bag.”
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: Because I know what it took to get to that point and a lot of people don't appreciate that. Especially if they don't have the common experience because they don't understand it's not just about knowing the code. It's not just about getting the interview. It's so much more to even get to that point to get that. If you go to the Google, if you go to even Facebook, whatever they call themselves now, and you get that bag, I'm happy. You get that bag because I understood what it took to get there.
\n\nPARISS: Right. Yeah, and you understand how it's going to change your lives dramatically and that's the most exciting. Anytime I see someone just got their first – someone from #BlackTechTwitter, anytime I see that they just got their first job, or whatever it is, I'm like, “I am so excited that you're about to start this life-changing journey,” because I was on it, too. I know.
\n\nIt’s like ah, it's so exciting and you know they're going to have these super amazing experiences that they probably wouldn't have and been able to have had they got a job like a 9:00 to 5:00, I don't know, as an administration person, or something. It’s the financial aspect of it is life-changing. It's exciting.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. It's like, I remember the first time I ever flew first class.
\n\nPARISS: I still have to do that!
\n\nTIM: First person in my family, in my whole family, to ever fly first class.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah.
\n\nTIM: And I remember texting my parents and my parents cried because their kid got to fly first class and people don't understand what all goes into that. They're like, “Oh, you're in first class.” Somebody on Twitter, they came at me sideways for mentioning I was in first class. I'm like, “You know what, I am going to talk about being in first class.”
\n\nPARISS: Right.
\n\nTIM: “Because ain't a lot of people like me in first class, you go hear about it and I don't care it bothers you. You're just going to have to be bothered.”
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. people are like, “Get over it.” People don't realize that, it is. It's a big deal. Again, these are experiences that we might not have ever been able to have. But luckily, we got into this industry and we became successful in it. Like I said, it's life-changing and we might be the first ones in our family to experience these sort of things and I would hope we're not the last, but that's a big possibility, unfortunately. So it is a big one and I think you should talk about it. Who cares?
\n\nJAMEY: Can I tell you how much I love, “You're just going to have to be bothered”? I'm like, [laughs] “I'm keeping that one.”
\n\nTIM: Oh no, it's funny because I've had to read somebody in-person and it's like, you're just going to have to be bothered and it goes like –
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIf I could turn that into a t-shirt, or whatever, it’s be bothered.
\n\nJAMEY: I would wear that t-shirt.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPARISS: Have it into a – [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: I want that t-shirt.
\n\nPARISS: Go for a gift, whatever.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. Because I mean, that's the way we do people come at us sideways for all kinds of stuff like that whether it's been our hair, whether it's been the way we dress, whether it's because the codeswitch to back to how we really talk instead of having to codeswitch to that white professional talk, whatever it is. We say y'all, we eat spice, whatever it is, people come at sideways and I'm not apologizing anymore.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Good for you. Don't.
\n\nTIM: And again, that's something I've always appreciated about you, Pariss is that you don't apologize to that. You’re just like, “You don't like it. I'm not even sorry. You're just going to have to be bothered by it.”
\n\nPARISS: Yeah. I just tell people to unfollow me, or block me. It's fine.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah, Pariss. One of the questions I have for you is just in this journey, what has been the most surprising thing you've learned?
\n\nPARISS: It's not really something I learned because there's a lot of things I already knew. Especially just working with employers, really teaching white people about diversity, equity, inclusion. Certain responses I've gotten, it's not surprising to me, or anything. Maybe things within my own community, but that doesn't really surprise me either. I think it's maybe the experiences I've had, but coming from my own community. Anything happening within my own community is more shocking, or I just feel more when it's from my own people, but I'm also like this happens in every community. It doesn't matter. But of course, this is my community so it affects me more.
\n\nCHANTÉ: And then the other question that maybe this will help to prompt that, too. But for me, it's been a lot to experience and to hold and sometimes I feel like I don't want to do it anymore, but I look for things that sustain me, or things that inspire me. So I'm curious, what are those things for you right now in this season?
\n\nPARISS: So I follow, I think it's called @BotBlackTech. It's a Twitter account and they retweet all these hashtags, including the #BlackTechTwitter one. So I get to see every – and anytime someone hashtags #BlackTwitter, I see what that announcement is and I get happy seeing that people are just asking questions to #BlackTechTwitter. “Hey, how should I build this?” “Hey, I did that.” I love seeing that. I just love seeing that the community has grown.
\n\nI love knowing that people don't know how #BlackTechTwitter started, because that shows the progress. It means that community has grown a ton and that’s the whole point. You want it to continue standing and later on people find out the origin story of it. That’s not the priory.
\n\nThe priority is there are just more people here now and that's what's most exciting and I think that's just what really keeps me doing this work because I never wanted to do – what I'm doing now, I never wanted to do it. I actually promised myself I wouldn't do this work. Yet I'm here. But seeing all the good that's come from it, I'm like, “Wow, this is really, really dope.” I feel really blessed and lucky and it just makes me very happy.
\n\nCHANTÉ: That's dope. And do you ever give thought about if you ever want to step away, or you need to step away, how this would proliferate, how it would continue to grow, and evolve with, or without you? Have you given any consideration to that?
\n\nPARISS: Oh yeah. I don't know if I would want to do this forever, but I know I'd want it to stay around forever even if I'm not the one running it. I'd love to hand it off to someone else. That's something we're thinking about now, because I think the issue with Black Tech Pipeline is that the business – if I were to die, or something, that would be it for Black Tech Pipeline and that's not a good business model. It needs to be able to run with, or without me. So that's something we're currently figuring out right now, how to make that happen.
\n\nAs for the community on Twitter and the just social media period, it's fine. There's no face to #BlackTechTwitter. It's just a community and it's good. It's set for life.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I'm glad you have given that a consideration. I thought about the same thing and I'm always here if you ever want to chat about it, or just have a jam session about it. I'd love to be in community with you and help you explore what that would be.
\n\nPARISS: That'd be awesome. Thank you.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Of course.
\n\nJAMEY: There's something really beautiful about doing something that you care so much about that you feel like you want to worry about what will happen to it, even if you weren't there for it.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah, no, this is necessary. Again, #BlackTechTwitter and Black Tech Pipeline have created an immense impact. It has to continue, especially for the Black community. It has to continue, no matter what. Whoever's turning that wheel, it shouldn't matter like that. Like I said, there shouldn't be a face, or just one person, or one designated area. It just needs to be decentralized. In any community.
\n\nThere's so many different communities and companies that have grown out of the #BlackTechTwitter movement and I hope they're thinking of the same thing. It has to run forever. This is extremely important, especially digitally, perfect. Must continue forever.
\n\nTIM: So I guess with that in mind, what are you going to say to the next generation? Let's say, somebody calls on you to give the commencement speech at Howard and there's always that quota. What do you tell the up-and-coming folks, the folks who are going to take up your work?
\n\nPARISS: That this cannot ever be personal.
\n\nI think the number one most important thing to me is not being afraid to say no and not being afraid to, again, lose opportunity. I think that is so important because so many people can be swayed by money and we cannot—I cannot stress this enough—this cannot happen in the Black community period.
\n\nWe cannot be swayed by money. I don't want to take money and then need to be silenced, or follow someone else's rules that don't benefit my community, or impact it negatively. We can't be swayed by that. We have to do what's best for our community and that's number one and money, or just that benefit even if, I don't know if it's monetary, or not, you can't be swayed by that. And that takes hiring really good humans, really genuine, good, strong humans, which is really, really hard. But I think for me, that's the most important thing.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I really appreciate that. I'm having a reflective thing, but I actually want to save it.
\n\nSo I want to prompt us to move to reflections, if it's okay and I'm willing to go first, because what you just said really elicited something in the end.
\n\nWhat I heard you say, Pariss is that we need one, as a Black community, a Black and brown community, solidarity, and also, shared values and vision. We have to be on the same page about what we care about and also, what we want people to understand about our experience and why we're so valued and why we are that token of the month, or year, or era. I think that means that we need to be intentional about community and just building a container and having culture around what we are now and who we want to be in the future.
\n\nI've been giving myself a lot of time and space to really think about time as a spiral, connecting with my ancestors, connecting with the present, and connecting with the future and just remembering that I can heal all of those parts if I'm present. I'm in community with people who understand that, that we have an opportunity together.
\n\nSo again, extending the olive branch and just saying I'm hoping that we can be intentional about building community and anybody who might catch this episode today, let's build community intentionally.
\n\nJOHN: So what's something to me is the rather remarkable impact that an individual person can have on the culture, really. Like you started this organically out of just what you were seeing and the way you were talking and then now you've built this into a company that you're running and now you're working on how to make sure this company is perpetuates itself even without your work. So you're creating an institution here that's generating all this opportunity for your community.
\n\nI think that's an amazing amount of power that you've harnessed there just with your own caring, that you've put this time in to build something and that you're going to eventually build something that can run for however long it needs to run. That's absolutely amazing, absolutely remarkable that one person can start that and bring more people in. It's not just you doing the work, but you're guiding that work. Collecting, focusing it in, and making it into something that’s going to have this fantastic impact. So it’s amazing to see one person can do that.
\n\nPARISS: Thank you. I’m telling my community none of this would have happened if each individual in this community didn’t really bring exposure to it, care about it, and bring awareness to it the way that they did. So it's a collective effort, and a collective care and love for the community and its members.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: I keep coming back to this, my brain keeps coming back to this, “You're just going to have to be bothered,” because I love that so much.
\n\nBut it's got me thinking, this whole conversation has gotten me thinking about it's really meaningful to be able to listen to you all talk about your experiences in the Black community in tech. It's striking to me how some aspects of it resonate with me as someone in the trans community. Like what Tim was saying about people will come at me and I feel that.
\n\nBut then there's other aspects of it that are not the same and I hadn't thought about in the way of generationally. My parents aren't trans and they didn't have this experience and it's not this pathway of time where that kind of marginalization is happening.
\n\nSo I think it's interesting and important to think about the ways that different marginalized communities share some things and not other things. Because I think that's what we really have to understand and internalize if we're going to have different intersectionalities of marginalized folks like coming together to build community together and I think that that's really important.
\n\nTIM: So I think it's important for us to have these conversations because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience and the Black experience in America has always been difficult. The doors have not always been open to us. We have not had warm welcomes. We've had our time, our freedom, our money, and our land stolen from us from the jump.
\n\nWe are getting now to a point where we can establish ourselves a little bit and we've got forces and powers in this country who are trying to cover their tracks on what they've done to us so that they can do it again. It's important for us to have these discussions so that people understand same with the Black experiences and it's important for folks like Pariss to do that work so that we can become established. So that we're not only just citizens, but we have influence with our money, our power, and our position so that the we, as the fruits of the Black experience, can make sure that the Black experience has changed for the better in this country going forward.
\n\nThat is going to take us, as Black people, helping each other and relying on, unfortunately – I don’t want to say not unfortunately relying on, but relying on folks who are not marginalized to recognize that we do need your assistance and your allyship and your being an accomplice to changing the Black experience for the better in this country. Because if we don't the people who want to change the Black experience back to what it used to be will win and I'm not here for that.
\n\nJAMEY: I love accomplice instead of ally, I have to say it. That's so good. That's such a good way to describe the mindset that you want people to be in in a more descriptive way.
\n\nPARISS: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. Thank you for that, Tim.
\n\nPARISS: I like that. There's what is it, co-conspirator. There's being an ally and a co-conspirator. My mom does DEI work full-time. She's done it her whole life. So from what I've learned from her, she's for an ally, they're saying like, “Yes, Black lives matter.” They're doing very subtle work. For a co-conspirator, they're getting in front of the Black person when a cop has a gun to their face. They're like, “Do not pull that trigger.” Like, “This is wrong.” You’re really in it actively. So I always prefer a co-conspirator, or accomplice.
\n\nTIM: An ally will film it; an accomplice will jump in front.
\n\nPARISS: Mm hm. Yes.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes. Yeah, for sure. And it's important, we need all of them. Everyone does play a part, but if we're going to dismantle systemic and institutionalized racism and oppression, then that is what it takes is to have multiple people willing to play multiple roles and you don't have to stay in one. You can change as your privilege, power, and your resource changes, or maybe it increases over time because you do gain strength and understanding by being in community with people, or maybe you have more money and opportunities. So you're like, “Yeah, I can fund this.”
\n\nBut Pariss, I'd love to hear your reflection. Bring us on home.
\n\nPARISS: This conversation right here about accomplice, co-conspirator, and ally just because I think that conversation was really talked about when George Floyd was murdered, especially on Twitter. There were just so many different expectations coming from the Black tech community, then you have tech Twitter, which is kind of the more white tech community, and just wishing that more things were being done, or people not understanding their role, or not understanding what to say and things like that.
\n\nI like what you said about people being able to play their part and then maybe learning more and then growing into other roles. I think that's really important. For me, I always want people to jump right in. Because that's what I have to do, period. It doesn't really matter. That's what I'm forced to do because I am Black.
\n\nSo for me, I'm always like, “Oh, I respect the people who are just like, ‘Fuck you. This is what it is and whatever.’” For me, I'm more so like, I didn't like when people were coming into my DMs like, “Hey, I don't know if I should say this. Should I say this?” I'm like, “I don't have time to educate you. Just do what you want to do. Just say it.” But sometimes, I have to – not that I have to educate them, or take time to respond to them. But for me, I have to understand that people need to learn how to play which roles because maybe they're good at some versus others and you're right.
\n\nThey can grow into other roles and it's not something I've really thought about just because like I said, I'm one of those people who wants to jump right in. So I'm just reflecting on that. It's something I'll continue talking about and thinking about and becoming more understanding of.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Thank you. That's a perfect endcap to our conversation. I'll look for some, unless you have a favorite resource, but I'll share some so that folks can have more learning to learn about the difference between what it means to be an ally, an accomplice, and a co-conspirator because I think this is just beautiful and definitely needed.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Pariss, thanks again for joining us today. We can continue the conversation so we welcome you back if you want to come and have part 2. But really appreciate all that you have said and of course, all that you're building and doing for the Black and actually, the BIPOC tech community, but specifically the Black folks. Thank you so much.
Special Guest: Pariss Athena.
Sponsored By:
02:01 - Kat’s Superpower: Terrible Puns!
\n\n08:07 - Security Awareness Education & Accessibility
\n\n20:58 - Making the Safe Thing Easy
\n\n22:43 - Awareness; Security Motivation; Behavior and Culture (ABC)
\n\n\n\n33:34 - Dietary Accessibility; Harm Reduction and Threat Monitoring
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Internal teams relating to other internal teams as a marketing issue.
\n\nCasey: Phishing emails cause harm.
\n\nKat: AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
\n\nUnconscious Bias Training That Works
\n\nThe Responsible Communication Style Guide
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Episode 263 of Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're both here with our guest today, Kat Sweet.
\n\nHi, Kat.
\n\nKAT: Hi, John! Hi, Casey!
\n\nCASEY: Well, Kat Sweet is a security professional who specializes in security education and engagement. She currently works at HubSpot building out their employee security awareness program, and is also active in their disability ERG, Employee Resource Group. Since 2017, she has served on the staff of the security conference BSides Las Vegas, co-leading their lockpick village. Her other superpower is terrible puns, or, if they're printed on paper—she gave me this one—tearable puns.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAT: Like written paper.
\n\nCASEY: Anyway. Welcome, Kat. So glad to have you.
\n\nKAT: Thanks! I'm happy to be here.
\n\nCASEY: Let's kick it off with our question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nKAT: [chuckles] Well, as I was saying to both of y’all before this show started, I was thinking I'm going to do a really serious skillful superpower that makes me sound smart because that's what a lot of other people did in theirs. I don't know, something like I'm a connector, or I am good at crosspollination. Then I realized no, [chuckles] like it, or not, terrible puns are my actual superpower.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMight as well just embrace it.
\n\nI think as far as where I acquired it, probably a mix of forces. Having a dad who was the king of dad puns certainly helped and actually, my dad's whole extended family is really into terrible puns as well. We have biweekly Zoom calls and they just turn into everyone telling bad jokes sometimes.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I think it also probably helps that, I don't know, having ADHD, my brain hops around a lot and so, sometimes makes connections in weird places. Sometimes that happens with language and there were probably also some amount of influences just growing up, I don't know, listening to Weird Al, gets puns in his parodies. Oh, and Carlos from The Magic School Bus.
\n\nCASEY: Mm hmm. Role models. I agree. Me too.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAT: Indeed. So now I'm a pundit.
\n\nCASEY: I got a pun counter going in my head. It just went ding!
\n\nKAT: Ding!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: I never got – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: They've only gotten worse during the pandemic.
\n\nCASEY: Oh! Ding!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMaybe we'll keep it up. We'll see.
\n\nI never thought of the overlap of puns and ADHD. I wonder if there's any study showing if it does correlate. It sounds right. It sounds right to me.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, that sounds like a thing. I have absolutely no idea, but I don't know, something to do with divergent thinking.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I’m on board with that.
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I hang out in the channels on Slack that are like #puns, or #dadjokes. Are you in any of those? What's the first one that comes to mind for you, your pun community online?
\n\nKAT: Oh yeah. So actually at work, I joined my current role in August and during the first week, aside from my regular team channels, I had three orders of business. I found the queer ERG Slack channel, I found the disability ERG Slack channel, and I found the dad jokes channel.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat was a couple of jobs ago when I worked at Duo Security. I've been told that some of them who are still there are still talking about my puns because we would get [laughs] pretty bad pun threads going in the Slack channels there.
\n\nCASEY: What a good reputation.
\n\nKAT: Good, bad, whatever. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: I don't know. Decent as a form of humor that's safe for work goes, too because it's generally hard to, I guess, punch down with them other than the fact that everyone's getting punched with a really bad pun, but they're generally an equalizing force. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I love that concept. Can you explain to our listeners, punching down?
\n\nKAT: So this is now the Great British Bake Off and we're talking about bread. No, just kidding.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo, I think in humor a lot of times, sometimes people talk about punching up versus punching down in terms of who is actually in on the joke. When you're trying to be funny, are you poking fun at people who are more marginalized than you, or are you poking at the people with a ton of privilege? And I know it's not always an even concept because obviously, intersectionality is a thing and it's not just a – privilege isn't a linear thing. But generally, what comes to mind a lot is, I don't know, white comedians making fun of how Black people talk, or men comedians making rape jokes at women's expense, or something like that. Like who's actually being punched? [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: Obviously, ideally, you don't want to punch anyone, but that whole concept of where's the humor directed and is it contributing to marginalization?
\n\nCASEY: Right, right. And I guess puns aren't really punching at all.
\n\nKAT: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Ding!
\n\nKAT: Ding! There goes the pun counter.
\n\nYeah, the only thing I have to mindful of, too is not over relying on them in my – my current role is in a very global company so even though all employees speak English to some extent, English isn't everyone's first language and there are going to be some things that fly over people's heads. So I don't want to use that exclusively as a way to connect with people.
\n\nCASEY: Right, right.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It is so specific to culture even, right. Because I would imagine even UK English would have a whole gray area where the puns may not land and vice versa.
\n\nKAT: Oh, totally. Just humor in general is so different in every single culture. Yeah, it's really interesting.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that reminds me. Actually, just today, I started becoming weirdly aware as I was typing something to one of my Indian colleagues and I'm not sure what triggered it, but I started being aware of all the idioms that I was using and what I was typing. I was like, “Well, this is what I would normally say to an American,” and I'm just like, “Wait, is this all going to come through?”
\n\nI think that way might lead to madness, though if you start trying to analyze every idiom you use as you're speaking. But it was something that just suddenly popped into my mind that I'm going to try and keep being a little bit more aware of because there's so many ways to miss with communication when you rely on obscure idioms, or certain ways of saying things that aren't nearly as clear as they could be. [chuckles]
\n\nKAT: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that's definitely a thing in all the corporate speak about doubling down, circling back, parking lots, and just all the clicking, all of those things.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut yeah, that's actually something that was on my run recently, too with revamping one of the general security awareness courses that everyone gets is that in the way we talk about how to look for a phishing – spot a phishing email. First of all, one of the things that at least they didn't do was say, “Oh, look for poor grammar, or misspelled words,” because that's automatically really exclusive to people whose first language isn’t English, or people who have dyslexia.
\n\nBut I was also thinking we talk about things like subtle language cues in suspicious emails around a sense of urgency, like a request being made trying to prey on your emotion and I'm like, “How accessible is that, I guess, for people whose first language is English to try and spot a phishing email based on those kind of things?” Like how much – [chuckles] how much is too much to ask of…? Like opinions about phishing emails, or the phishing training anyway being too much to ask of people to some degree, but I don't know. There's so much subtlety in it that just is really easy for people to lose.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that even American English speakers – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: With a lot of experience still have trouble. Like actually, [chuckles] I just got apparently caught by one of them, the test phishing emails, but they notified me by sending me an email and saying, “You were phished, click here to go to the training.” And I'm like, “I'm not going to click on that!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI just got phished!
\n\nKAT: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: But I think my larger point is again, you're talking about so many subtleties of language and interpretations to try and tease these things out. I'm sure there are a lot of people with a range of non-typical neurologies where that sort of thing isn't going to be obvious, even if they are native English speakers.
\n\nKAT: Exactly. Myself included having ADHD. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. It's been interesting trying to think through building out security awareness stuff in my current role and in past roles, and having ADHD and just thinking about how ADHD unfriendly a lot of the [laughs] traditional approaches are to all this.
\n\nEven like you were just saying, “You got phished, take this training.” It seems like the wrong sequence of events because if you're trying to teach someone a concept, you need to not really delay the amount of time in between presenting somebody with a piece of information and giving them a chance to commit it to memory.
\n\nADHD-ers have less working memory than neurotypical people to begin with, but that concept goes for everyone. So when you're giving someone training that they might not actually use in practice for several more months until they potentially get phished again, then it becomes just information overload. So that's something that I think about.
\n\nAnother way that I see this playing out in phishing training in particular, but other security awareness stuff is motivation and reward because we have a less amount of intrinsic motivation. Something like, I don't know, motivation and reward system just works differently with people who have trouble hanging onto dopamine. ADHD-ers and other people's various executive dysfunction stuff.
\n\nSo when you're sitting through security training that's not engaging, that's not particular lead novel, or challenging, or of personal interest, or is going to have a very delayed sense of reward rather than something that immediately gratifying, there's going to be a limitation to how much people will actually learn, be engaged, and can actually be detrimental. So I definitely think about stuff like that.
\n\nCASEY: That reminds me of a paper I read recently about—I said this on a previous episode, too. I guess, maybe I should find the paper, dig it up, and share.
\n\nKAT: Cool.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Oh, but it said, “Implicit bias awareness training doesn't work at all ever” was an original paper. No, that's not what it said of course, but that's how people read it and then a follow-up said, “No, boring! PowerPoint slide presentations that aren't interactive aren’t interactive.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\n“But the interactive ones are.” Surprise!
\n\nKAT: Right. That's the thing. That's the thing.
\n\nYeah, and I think there's also just, I don't know. I remember when I was first getting into security, people were in offices more and security awareness posters were a big thing. Who is going to remember that? Who's going to need to know that they need to email security at when they're in the bathroom? [laughs] Stuff like that that's not particularly engaging nor particularly useful in the moment. But that DEI paper is an interesting one, too. I'll have to read that.
\n\nCASEY: Do you have experience making some of these trainings more interactive and getting the quicker reward that's not delayed and what does that look like for something like phishing, or another example?
\n\nKAT: It's a mixed bag and it's something that I'm still kind of – there's something that I'm figuring out just as we're scaling up because in past roles, mostly been in smaller companies. But one thing that I think people, who are building security awareness and security education content for employees, miss is the fact that there's a certain amount of baseline level of interaction and context that you can't really automate a way, especially for new hires.
\n\nI know having just gone through process that onboarding weeks are always kind of information overload. But people are going to at least remember more, or be more engaged if they're getting some kind of actual human contact with somebody who they're going to be working with; they’ve got the face, they've got some context for who their security team is, what they do, and they won't just be clicking through a training that's got canned information that is no context to where they're working and really no narrative and nowhere for them to ask questions. Because I always get really interesting questions every time I give some kind of live security education stuff; people are curious.
\n\nI think it's important that security education and engagement is really an enhancer to a security program. It can't be carrying all the weight of relationships between the security team and the rest of the company. You're going to get dividends by having ongoing positive relationships with your colleagues that aren't just contact the security team once a year during training.
\n\nCASEY: And even John's email, like the sample test email, which I think is better than not doing it for sure. But that's like a ha ha got you. That's not really [chuckles] relationship building. Barely. You’ve got to already have the relationship for it to – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: No, it's not and that's – yeah. And that's why I think phishing campaigns are so tricky. I think they're required by some compliance frameworks and by cyber insurance frameworks. So some places just have to have them. You can't just say we're not going to run internal phishing campaigns, unfortunately, regardless of whether that's actually the right thing for businesses.
\n\nBut I think the angle should always be familiarizing people with how to report email like that to the security team and reinforcing psychological safety. Not making people feel judged, not making people feel bad, and also not making them sit through training if they get caught because that's not psychological safety either and it really doesn't pay attention to results.
\n\nIt’s very interesting, I remember I listened to your episode with Eli Holderness and at some point, one of the hosts mentioned something about human factors and safety science on the evolving nature of how people management happens in the workplace. How there was this old model of humans being a problem to be managed, supervised, and well, just controlled and how the new view of organizational psychology and people management is more humans are your source of success so you need to enable their growth and build them up.
\n\nI think a lot of security education approaches are kind of still stuck in that old model, almost. I've seen progress, but I think a lot of them have a lot of work to do in still being, even if they're not necessarily as antagonistic, or punitive, they still feel sometimes paternalistic. Humans are like, “If I hear the phrase, ‘Humans are the weakest link one more time,’ I'm going to table flip.” First of all, humans are all the links, but also – [overtalk]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: It's saying like, we need to save humans, which are somehow the security team is not humans. We need to save humans from themselves because they're too incompetent to know what to do. So we need, yeah – which is a terrible attitude.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: And I think it misses the point that first of all, not everyone is going to become a security expert, or hypervigilant all the time and that's okay. But what we can do is focus on the good relationships, focus on making the training we have and need to do somewhat interactive and personal and contextual, and let go of the things you can't control. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I think Taylorism is the name for that management style. I think it came around in the 40s and – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: Really?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, ruined a lot of lives. [laughs] Yeah, and I think your point about actually accepting the individual humanity of the people you're trying to influence and work with rather than as some sort of big amorphous group of fuckups, [laughs] for lack of a better word. Giving them some credit, giving them, like you said, something that's not punitive, somewhere where they don't get punished for their security lapses, or forgetting a thing, or clicking the link is going to be a lot more rewarding than, like you said, just making someone sit through training.
\n\nLike for me, the training I want from whatever it was I clicked on is show me the email I clicked on, I will figure out how it tricked me and then I will learn. I don't need a whole – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: Yes.
\n\nJOHN: 3 hours of video courses, or whatever. I will see the video, [chuckles] I will see the email, and that is a much more organic thing than here's the training for you.
\n\nKAT: Exactly. Yeah, you have to again, give some people a way to actually commit it to memory. Get it out of RAM and into SSD.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAT: But yeah, I love that and fortunately, I think some other places are starting to do interesting, innovative approaches. My former colleague, Kim Burton, who was the Security Education Lead at Duo when I was there and just moved to Texas, gave a webinar recently on doing the annuals security training as a choose your own adventure so that it could be replicated among a wide group of people, but that people could take various security education stuff that was specific to their own role and to their own threat model. I really liked that.
\n\nI like being able to give people some amount of personalization and get them actually thinking about what they're specifically interacting with.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, yeah. That's great and it also makes me think about there are undoubtedly things I'm pretty well informed in security and other things that I'm completely ignorant about. I'd rather not sit through a training that covers both of those things. Like if there's a way for me to choose my own adventure through it so that I go to the parts where I'm actually learning useful things. Again, a, it saves everybody time and b, it means I'm not fast forwarding through the video, hoping it'll just end, and then possibly missing things that are actually useful to me.
\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking of a concrete example, I always remember and think of and that's links and emails. I always hover and look at the URL except when I'm on my phone and you can't do that. Oh, I don't know. It has never come up in a training I've seen.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, you can click and hold, but it's harder and I think that speaks to the fact that security teams should lead into putting protections around email security more so than relying entirely on their user base to hover every single link, or click and hold on their phone, or just do nothing when it comes to reporting suspicious emails.
\n\nThere's a lot of decision fatigue that, I think security teams still put on people whose job is not security and I hope that that continues to shift over time.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I mean, you're bringing up the talking about management and safety theory that probably came from Rein Henrichs, who is one of our other hosts.
\n\nBut one of the things he also has talked about on, I think probably multiple shows is about setting the environment for the people that makes the safe thing easy.
\n\nKAT: Right.
\n\nJOHN: So that all the defaults roll downhill into safety and security rather than well, here's a level playing field you have to navigate yourself through and there's some potholes and da, da, da, and you have to be aware of them and constantly on alert and all those things. Whereas, if you tilt the field a little bit, you make sure everything runs in the right direction, then the right thing becomes the easy thing and then you win.
\n\nKAT: Exactly, exactly. I think it's important to put that not only in the technical defaults – [overtalk]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, yeah.
\n\nKAT: But also process defaults to some degree.
\n\nOne of my colleagues just showed me a talk that was, I think from perhaps at AppSec Cali. I'll have to dig it up. But there was somebody talking about making I guess, threat modeling and anti-abuse mindsets more of a default in product development teams and how they added one single line to their sprint planning—how could this feature potentially be misused by a user—and that alone just got people thinking just that little process change.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That's beautiful. But such a small thing, but constantly repeated at a low level. It's not yelling at anyone to…
\n\nKAT: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. And even if the developers and product designers themselves weren't security experts, or anti-abuse experts, it would just get them thinking, “Oh hey, we should reach out to the trust and safety team.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I'm thinking about so many steps and so many of these steps could be hard. The next one here is the security team responsive and that has a lot to do with are they well-staffed and is this a priority for them? Oh my goodness.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. [laughs] So many things.
\n\nCASEY: It's layers. But I'm sure you've heard of this, Kat. The Swiss cheese model of error prevention?
\n\nKAT: Yeah. Defense in depth.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nI like to bring it up on the podcast, too because a lot of engineers and a lot of non-security people don't know about it.
\n\nKAT: Hmm.
\n\nCASEY: Do you want to explain it? I don't mind. I can.
\n\nKAT: Oh, yeah. Basically that there are going to be holes in every step of the process, or the tech and so, that's why it's important to have this layered approach. Because over time, even if something gets through the first set of holes, it may not get through a second set where the holes are in different spots. So you end up with a giant stack of Swiss cheese, which is delicious, and you come out with something that's hopefully pretty same.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and it's the layers that are – the mind-blowing thing here is that there can be more than one layer. We don't just need one layer of Swiss cheese on this sandwich, which is everybody pay attention and don't ever get phished, or it's your fault. You can have so many layers than that. It can be like a grilled cheese, really, really thick, grilled cheese.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAT: Yes. A grilled cheese where the bread is also cheese.
\n\nCASEY: Yes! [laughs]
\n\nMID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
\n\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.
\n\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?
\n\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.
\n\nListen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.
\n\nCASEY: Earlier, you mentioned awareness, Kat as something interesting. You want to talk about awareness more as a term and how it relates to this?
\n\nKAT: Oh, yeah. So I – and technically, my job title has security awareness in it, but the more I've worked in the security space doing employee security education stuff as part of all my job. I know language isn't perfect, but I'm kind of the mindset that awareness isn't a good capture of what a role like mine actually should be doing because awareness without behavior change, or action is just noise. It's just we're all very aware of things, but if we don't have an environment that's friendly to us putting that awareness into some kind of action, or engagement, or response, we are just aware and scared. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, awareness alone just makes us feel bad. We need more than that.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. So I think security awareness is sometimes just a product of a term that got standardized over several years as it's in all of the compliance control frameworks, security awareness is a part of it. I don't know it's the best practice thing. I hope over time it will continue to evolve.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: As with any other kind of domains.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think that maybe security motivation might be a better term for it.
\n\nKAT: I've seen a bunch of different ones used. So I end up speaking in terms of, I don't know, security education and engagement is what I'm working on. Security culture is my vision. I've seen things like security awareness, behavior, and culture, ABC, things like that. But all this to say security awareness not being in a vacuum.
\n\nCASEY: I like those. This reminds me of a framework I've been thinking about a lot and I use in some of my DEI workshops. AIDA is an acronym. A-I-D-A. The first one's Awareness, the last one is Action, and in the middle is Interest and Desire.
\n\nKAT: Nice.
\n\nCASEY: So the questions I use to frame is like, are they aware of, for example, if they're misgendering someone? That's the context I'm using this in a lot. Are they aware of this person's pronouns in the first place? Are they interested in caring about this person and do they want to do anything about it and did they do it? Did they use their proper pronouns? Did they correct their actions? It's like 4 stages – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: I like that.
\n\nCASEY: AIDA. It's used in marketing a lot for like a sales funnel, but I apply it to all sorts of how do you get someone from aware to action?
\n\nKAT: I like that a lot.
\n\nIt's been interesting working at a place that makes a product that's more in the sales and marketing space. Definitely learned a lot because a couple of previous roles I've had been with security vendors. I think one of the interesting ideas that was a new concept to me when I started was this idea of inbound marketing, where instead of just cold contacting people and telling them, “Be interested in us, be interested in us, buy our stuff,” you generate this reputation as being of good service by putting out useful free nuggets of content, like blog posts, webinars, and things. Then you get people who are interested based on them knowing that you've got this, that you offer a good perspective, and then they all their friend. They are satisfied customers, and they go promote it to people.
\n\nI think about this as it applies to security teams and the services they provide, because even though corporate security teams are internal, they've still got internal customers. They've still got services that they provide for people. So by making sure that the security team is visible, accessible, and that the good services that they provide are known and you've got satisfied customers, they become promoters to the rest of their teams. Think about like security can definitely learn a lot from [chuckles] these sales and marketing models.
\n\nCASEY: I can totally imagine the security team being the fun team, the one you want to go work with and do workshops with because they make it so engaging and you want to. You can afford to spend your time on this thing.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAT: Oh yes.
\n\nCASEY: You might do it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I think marketing's a great model for that. Marketing sort of has a bad reputation, I think amongst a lot of people because it's done badly and evilly by a lot of people. But it's certainly possible and I think inbound market is one of those ways that you're engaging, you're spreading awareness, you're letting people select themselves into your service, and bring their interest to you. If you can develop that kind of rapport with the employees at your company as a security team, everybody wins.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, absolutely, and it can absolutely be done.
\n\nWhen I was working at Duo a couple jobs ago, I was on their security operations team and we were responsible, among other things, for both, the employee security education and being the point of intake; being the people that our colleagues would reach out to with security concerns to security and it definitely could see those relationships pay off by being visible and being of good service.
\n\nCASEY: So now I'm getting my product manager hat on, like team management.
\n\nKAT: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I will want to choose the right metrics for a security team that incentivizes letting this marketing kind of approach happen and being the fun team people want to reach out to have the bigger impact and probably the highest metric is like nobody gets a security breach. But that can't be the only one because maybe you'll have a lucky year and maybe you'll have an unlucky that's not the best one. What other metrics are you thinking of?
\n\nKAT: That's the thing, there's a lot more that goes into not getting pwned than how aware of security people are. There's just way too many factors to that. But – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I guess, I'm especially interested in the human ones, like how come – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: Oh, yeah. And I mean like – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: The department allowed to do the things that would be effective, like incentivized and measured in a sense.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, and I think a lot of security education metrics often have a bit of a longer tail, but I think about not – I don't really care so much about the click rates for internal phishing campaigns, because again, anyone can fall for a phish if it's crafted correctly enough. If it's subtle enough, or if just somebody's distracted, or having a bad day, which we never have. It's not like there's a pandemic, or anything.
\n\nBut for things that are sort of numbers wise, I think about how much are people engaging with security teams not just in terms of reporting suspicious emails, but how often are they reporting ones that aren't a phishing simulation? How much are they working with security teams when they're building new features and what's the impact of that baseline level before there's, I don't know, formal process for security reviews, code reviews, threat modeling stuff in place? What does that story look like over time for the product and for product security?
\n\nSo I think there's quite a bit of narrative data involved in security education metrics.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I mean you could look at inbound interests, like how often are you consulted out of the blue by another team, or even of the materials you've produced, what's the engagement rates on that? I think that's a lower quality one, but I think inbound interest would be fantastic.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking to some degree about well, what kinds of vulnerabilities are you shipping in your code? Because I think there's never 100% secure code. But I think if you catch some of the low-hanging fruits earlier on, then sometimes you get an interesting picture of like, okay, security is being infused into the SDLC at all of these various Swiss cheese checkpoints.
\n\nSo think about that to some degree and that's often more of a process thing than a purely an education thing, but getting an education is an enhancer to all of these other parts of the security programs.
\n\nJOHN: So in the topics for the show that you had suggested to us, one of the things that stood out to me was something you called dietary accessibility. So can you tell me a little bit more about what that means?
\n\nKAT: So earlier in this year, in the middle of all of this pandemic ridiculousness, I got diagnosed with celiac disease. Fortunately, I guess, if there was a time to be diagnosed with that, it’s I'm working remotely and nobody's going out to eat really. Oh, I should back up. I think a lot of people know what it is, but just in case, it's an autoimmune disorder where my body attacks itself when I eat gluten. I've described it in the past as my body thinks that gluten is a nation state adversary named fancy beer.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDing, one more for the pun counter. I don't know how many we're up to now. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I have a random story about a diet I had to do for a while for my health.
\n\nI have irritable bowel syndrome in my family and that means we have to follow over really strict diet called the low FODMAP diet. If your tummy hurts a lot, it's something you might look into because it's underdiagnosed. That meant I couldn't have wheat, but not because I had celiac disease; I was not allergic to the protein in wheat flour. I was intolerant to the starch and wheat flour. So it would bother me a lot.
\n\nPeople said, “Do you have celiac, or?” And I was like, “No, but I cannot have wheat because the doctor told me so, but no, it's not an allergy.” I don’t know, my logical brain did not like that question.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat was an invalid question. No, it's not a preference. I prefer to eat bread, but I cannot, or it hurts my body according to my doctor.
\n\nKAT: [chuckles] So you can't have the starch and I can't have the protein. So together, we can just – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Separate it!
\n\nKAT: Split all of the wheat molecules in the world and eat that. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: That's fair. I literally made gluten-free bread with gluten. [laughs] I got all the gluten-free starches and then the gluten from the wheat and I didn't have the starch in the wheat and it did not upset my stomach.
\n\nKAT: Oh man.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I've got a dairy sensitivity, but it's not lactose. It's casein so it's the protein in the dairy.
\n\nCASEY: Protein, uh huh.
\n\nKAT: Oh, interesting.
\n\nCASEY: I apologize on behalf of all the Casey.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCasey in.
\n\nKAT: Who let Casey in?
\n\nCASEY: Ding!
\n\nKAT: Ding!
\n\nNo, but it’s made me think a lot about as I was – first of all, it's just I didn't fully appreciate until I was going through it firsthand, the amount of cognitive overload that just goes into living with it every day. [laughs]
\n\nSpeaking of constant state of hypervigilance, it took a while for that to make it through – I don't know, me to operationalize to my new life that's going to be my reality for the [laughs] rest of my life now because it was just like, “Oh, can I eat this? Can I eat that?” All of that.
\n\nSomething that at least helped ease me out of this initial overwhelm and grieving period was tying some of the stuff that I was dealing with back to how would I do this in my – how would I approach this if this were a security education and security awareness kind of thing?
\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah.
\n\nKAT: Because it's a new concept and it's a thing that is unfamiliar and not everyone is an expert in it. so I’m like, “How would I treat myself as the person who's not an expert in it yet?” I, again, tried to get myself back to some of those same concepts of okay, let's not get stuck in thud mode, let's think about what are some of the actual facts versus what’s scaremongering. I don't need to know how much my risk of colon cancer is increased, because that's not how helpful for me to actually be able to go about my day. I need to know what are the gluten-free brands of chips? That's critical infrastructure.
\n\nCASEY: I love this parallel. This is so cool.
\n\nKAT: And so I thought about to – I've mentioned earlier, decision fatigue as a security issue. I thought about how can I reduce the decision fatigue and not get stuck just reading all the labels on foods and stuff? What are the shortcuts I can take? Some of those were like okay, let me learn to recognize the labels of what the labels mean of a certified gluten-free logo and also just eat a lot of things that would never have touch gluten to begin with, like plain and raw meat, plain potatoes, plain vegetables, things like that. So just anything to take the cognitive load down a little bit, because it was never going to be zero.
\n\nIt's interesting. Sometimes, I don't know, I have tons of different interests and I've always interested in people's perspective outside of security. A lot of that stuff influences the way I think about security, but sometimes the way I think about security also ends up influencing other stuff in my life, so.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I think that's brilliant. Use – [overtalk]
\n\nKAT: And interesting to connect with those.
\n\nCASEY: The patterns and you're comfortable with, and apply them.
\n\nKAT: Exactly.
\n\nCASEY: A lot of really cool ideas come from technology.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, and go for harm reduction, not nothing because we don't live in a gluten-free world. It’s like I can try to make myself as safe as possible, but at some point, my gut may suffer a data breach and [laughs] when I do, should be blameless and just work on getting myself recovered and trying – [overtalk]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I mean, thinking about it as a threat model. There's this gluten out there and some of it's obvious, some of it's not obvious. What am I putting in place so that I get that 95th percentile, or whatever it is that you can think of it that way? I like that.
\n\nKAT: Exactly. It's an interesting tie to threat modeling how the same people – even if people have the same thing that they can't eat, they may still have a different threat model. They may, like how we both had to avoid wheat, but for different reasons and with different side effects, if we eat it and things like that.
\n\nCASEY: I love these parallels. I imagine you went into some of these in that talk at DisInfoSec. Is that right?
\n\nKAT: Yeah. A little bit.
\n\nSo DisInfoSec, it's a virtual conference in its second year of existence, specifically highlighting disabled speakers in the InfoSec community run by Kim Crawley, who's a blogger for Hack the Box. There was a really interesting lineup of talks this year. Some people, I think about half of them touched on neurodiversity and various aspects of security through lenses of being autistic and ADHD, which is really cool.
\n\nFor mine, I focused on those of us who have disability-related dietary restrictions and how that affects our life in the tech workplace, where compared to a lot of other places I've worked, there's a lot of free food on the company dime hanging around and there's a lot of use of food as a way to build connection and build community.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, and a lot of stuff, a lot of people can't eat. I'm with you, uh huh.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. I just took stock of all of the times that I would take people up for lunch interviews, go out to dinner with colleagues when they're in town, all of these things. Like snacks in the office. Just there not being a bathroom on the same floor as me for multiple jobs where I worked. [laughs] Things like that.
\n\nSo I really wanted to – the thing that I wanted to highlight in that talk in general was systemic level accommodations to be made for people with be they celiac IBS, food allergies, diabetes rather than relying on people individually requesting accommodations.
\n\nThis universal design model where you've got to make sure that your workplace is by default set up to accommodate people with a wide range of disabilities including dietary needs and a lot of times it doesn't come down to even feeding them. It comes down to making sure their health insurance is good, making sure people can work remotely, making sure that – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Higher levels of Swiss cheese on that. They are various levels.
\n\nKAT: Yeah, the levels of Swiss cheese. A lot of stuff cascades from lunch interviews, making sure that if you do them at all, that you're really flexible about them.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I can definitely relate to the being able to work from home, which I've done for the last decade, or more, has been huge for being able to have a solid control of my diet. Because it's really easy to have all the right things around for lunch rather than oh, I've only got half an hour, I can run out to the sub shop and I'll just deal with the consequences. Because that's what's nearby versus, or trying to bring food into the office and keep it in the fridge, or the free – that's a whole mess.
\n\nSo just like you said, good health insurance, working from home, these are things that allow for all sorts of different disabilities to be taken care of so well that you don't – that's the base, that's table stakes to formatting kind of inclusion.
\n\nKAT: Exactly, exactly.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: Exactly. Yeah, and I think what sometimes gets missed is that even there are other things that I need to – the ability to just sometimes lay down, the ability to be close to a bathroom, and things that are not food related, but definitely are my reality. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: And companies went out, too. By accommodating you, they get all of your expertise and skills and puns. In exchange for flexibility, they get puns.
\n\nKAT: [laughs] And I still make puns about gluten, wheat, rye, and barley even though I can I eat them anymore. That will never go away.
\n\nCASEY: They just keep rising.
\n\nKAT: Wheat for it. Wait for it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Ding!
\n\nKAT: That's just my wry sense of humor.
\n\nCASEY: All right. We're getting near end of time for today. This point, let's talk about reflections and plugs.
\n\nJOHN: I can go first.
\n\nI think the thing that's definitely sticking with me is thinking about the internal teams relating to other internal teams at a company as a marketing issue. Security is obviously one where you need to have that relationship with pretty much every team. But I'm thinking all sorts of all the way around development, DevOps, tech QA. Everyone can think this way and probably gain something from it as a what are we presenting to the rest of the company, what is our interface, and how do we bring more things to it such that people like working with our interface a lot so that we have great relationships with the rest of the team? I think I’m going to keep thinking about that for a while.
\n\nCASEY: I'll share a reflection.
\n\nI liked noticing that those phish emails can cause harm to people—they can feel bad and then make them less receptive. I've always been a fan of them overall. But thinking about that impact, I might have even been the one to say that, but it was still surprising to me when that came out of my mouth. Say, oh yeah, it hurts people in a way, too. We don't have to have that painful experience to teach people. It can be done in a safer environment.
\n\nI wonder what else we can do for training of things like that to make it more positive and less negative. I'm going to be thinking on that.
\n\nKAT: Yeah. And I wrote down AIDA. Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Did I get that right?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nKAT: I'm definitely going to look into that. I think that's a great model for education of all kinds.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. If you want to go even deeper, there's like 6 and 7 tier models on the Wikipedia page links to a bunch of them. That's just the most common.
\n\nKAT: Awesome.
\n\nCASEY: For plugs, I just want to plug some homework for you all.
\n\nEveryone listening, there's this Unconscious Bias Training That Works article that I've mentioned twice now. I hope you get to read that. And I guess, the AIDA – It'll be in the show notes for sure. And then the Wikipedia page for AIDA marketing just so you have a spot to look it up, if you forget about it. Try to apply that to situations, that's your homework.
\n\nKAT: I think something I plugged on Twitter quite a bit over the years and a lot when we were talking about the language that we use earlier, I'm a huge fan of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, which was put out by the Recompiler, which is a feminist activist hacker publication. So they've got guides on words to avoid, words to use instead for when talking about race, gender, class, health, disability status. It's written for a tech audience and I really like that as a resource for using inclusive language.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It's great stuff.
\n\nCASEY: I love it. All right, thanks so much for are coming on our show today, Kat.
Special Guest: Kat Sweet.
","summary":"Kat Sweet talks about security education, awareness, behavior, and culture. She’s got terrible puns, so this is a super fun show! \r\n\r\nWe talk about unconscious bias training that works, attempting to make safe things easy, and even dietary accessibility.","date_published":"2021-12-15T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0d46a1ee-5f8e-4f7d-ae75-32e8aafe6217.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":40138008,"duration_in_seconds":2811}]},{"id":"f63c66b6-f101-436d-ab8d-c0d44e857eb3","title":"262: Faith, Science, Truth, and Vulnerability with Evan Light ","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/faith-science-truth-and-vulnerability","content_text":"00:59 - Evans’s Superpower: Talking about topics that aren’t interesting to whomever he’s talking to at the time\n\n\nADHD\n\n\nDiagnosing as an Adult\nAdult ADHD Self-Report Scale\nQbCheck: ADHD Self-Check Test\nWhy seek a medical diagnosis?\nAlmost everything that you know about “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is probably wrong \n\nVulnerability\n\n\n12:45 - Debugging Oneself, Neuroscience, Meditation\n\n\nDebugging Your Brain by Casey Watts\nCBT - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy\nMBCBT - Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy\nSearch Inside Yourself Program \nNeuroplasticity\n\n\n21:57 - The Limitations of Science\n\n24:54 - The Spiritual Side, Mindfulness, and Meditation\n\n\nBuddhism\nAikido\n\n\nKi Society\n\nSiddhartha by Hermann Hesse\nZencasts\nAudioDharma\nSecular Buddhism\n\n\n32:03 - Psychological Safety\n\n\nGroupthink & Human Dynamics and Teams\nWelcomed Disagreement \nVulnerability & Accountability\nUnconscious Bias\nResmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies\n\n\n49:28 - Faith and Science\n\n\nExploring Areas of Disagreement\nTruth\nDisagreement and Conflict\n\n\nRadical Candor\nNonviolent Communication\nAcetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence\n\n\n\n01:04:08 - Words!\n\n\nThink, Know, and Believe; Hope, Want, and Intend: Are these words unique?\n\n\nGreater Than Code Twitter Poll Results! \n\nReplacement Words For “Normal”, “Guys”\n\n\nReflections:\n\nDamien: The value of being vulnerable.\n\nEvan: Disagreement leading to deeper discussion. Cultivating more empathy.\n\nCasey: We can’t usually know what is true, but we can know when something’s false.\n\nMae: Think about the ways you are biased and have healing to do. Talking about ways we are not awesome to each other will help us actually be awesome to each other.\n\nSearch Inside Yourself Leadership Institute \n\nGreater Than Code Episode 248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman\n\nHappy and Effective \n\nSiddhartha by Hermann Hesse\n\nNonviolent Communication\n\nConversations For Action\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 262 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I'm joined by Mae Beale.\n\nMAE: And I'm here with Casey Watts. \n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here with our guest this week, Evan Light.\n\nEVAN: Hi, I'm Evan Light. \n\nCASEY: Welcome, Evan. \n\nEvan has been in the tech field for over 25 years, and has the grey hairs to show for it. Evan was searching for the term “psychological safety” long before it became mainstream — just wishes he had it sooner! Evan prizes growing teams and people by creating empowering environments where people feel free to share their ideas and disagree constructively. He lives in the crunchiest part of the DC area, Tacoma Park, Maryland. \n\nSo glad to have you here, Evan.\n\nEVAN: Thank you. Glad to be here.\n\nCASEY: All right, we're going to ask our question we always ask, what is your superpower, Evan and how did you acquire it?\n\nEVAN: Well, the first thing that came to mind is talking ad nauseam about topics that aren't all that interesting to whoever I'm talking to at the time. And the way I acquired it was being born probably a little bit different with ADHD and I say probably because I still need to prove it concretely that I have ADHD, but I'm working on it.\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that sounds like a very useful superpower for a podcast guest. \n\n[laughter]\n\nEVAN: Well, if you want that guest to take up the whole show, then sure. [laughs]\n\nMAE: Yes, please. We want – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that's why you're here. \n\nEVAN: Well, I do like conversation, that's the funny part. I like give and takes. Just sometimes I lose track of how long I've been talking. \n\nMAE: I do that, too, Evan.\n\nCASEY: Fair.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. I wonder how many of you have ADHD, too. [laughs]\n\nMAE: I do – there is a statistically significant portion of programmers, for sure.\n\nEVAN: I don't know that there've been scientific studies of it, but the currently reported number of, I think 4 and a half percent of the population is well-acknowledged to be significantly under reported. At least among adults. And that's because one people say ADHD goes away with age it, in fact, doesn't. We just look – and I kind of hate that word 4-letter word. \n\nPeople with ADHD often tend to find ways to compensate for it, those of us who don't get diagnoses later in life, if we don't have it already. And two, how many people do you know who seek out mental health evaluations and counseling? So I'm sure it's massively under reported.\n\nDAMIEN: Which brings up my question. How does one diagnose an adult with ADHD?\n\nEVAN: Yeah, that's a fun one. \n\nSo I know of – well, I guess three ways now. One, you are talking to a doctor who themselves has ADHD and has some idea, or a person who has ADHD, not necessarily a doctor, who has a pretty good idea of what to look for usually because they have it. You tell them about some problems you're having and they say, “Huh. Well, I know this problem can sometimes be caused by comorbidity, which is medical term that's often thrown about, this other problem, ADHD.” \n\nThat's how I found out about it and frankly, I was trying to figure out how to—after having dealt with so many other problems in my life—lose the excess weight, talking to a weight loss medical specialist in D.C., and also has ADHD. He said, “Huh, this all sounds like ADHD. Fill out this really simple test,” that I'll be glad to share with you all. It's just a PDF and you can share it with listeners and you can pretty quickly see for yourself how likely you are based on how you respond. That's one way.\n\nAnother way is sit down and talk with a psychologist, or a psychiatrist who has some special background in ADHD, who they can just sort of evaluate you. \n\nAnd the third way is coupled sometimes with the second one, which is what I did this early this morning. There is a test called QbCheck letter—Q letter, b, check. It's an online test that uses your camera and eye tracking, so I guess that uses computer vision as part of it—which I thought found intriguing—to test your attention, apparently how much your eyes are moving, and how quickly and correctly you respond to prompts on the screen.\n\nI think QbCheck, you're not supposed to take directly from the – maybe you can, but in my case, I'm going through a psychologist who's going to evaluate that test with me and then talk to me about it. However, I'm really, really curious for the results. I kind of wish I was talking to y'all in a week, because I'll get them tomorrow morning. \n\nI've been a meditator most of my life, I can focus my attention when I well, deliberately concentrate. So I deliberately concentrated taking that test. I wonder if I skewed the test results that way. \n\n[laughter] \n\nI'm really eager to find out.\n\n[laughter] \n\nBecause I very naturally sort of slipped into a meditative state with focus on the space on the screen, hit the Space bar when you see a pattern, repeat it, and then just stay there. Okay. It's really hard for me to do this with a lot of distractive noises. All right, I'm just going to be aware of distracting noises, but I'm going to stay with the thing on the screen. That's meditation. Instead of focusing on my breath, I focused on the object on the screen. So I'm dying the know. [laughs] I'll find out tomorrow.\n\nDAMIEN: So then I have a follow-up question. Why seek a medical diagnosis for ADHD as an adult?\n\nEVAN: Ohm yeah. So first off, it's how do I debug myself and if I want to speak nerdy about it, but I guess, that's how I approach a lot of things, trying to fix a problem in myself that I've been trying to fix for well, now 48 years, the time 47 years, this was last October with my weight. Okay, now 47 technically. This would've been 40 years and well, nothing else worked then if I have a new potential cause, that gives me another lever I didn't have before. So when the doctor says, “Oh, ADHD might be a contributing factor.” Huh, I need to know more about that. So that's part of it. \n\nSome of it is I wouldn't say post hoc rationalization, more like post hoc understanding and even self-compassion. I've never really felt like I belonged among most people.\nOkay, I present straight white male, like everyone else in tech. I was raised Jewish and that means I'm 2% of the population. So around this time of year, I would always feel like the weirdo people are singing songs in school. I'm being forced to sing their songs. Don't like it. I would squirm them every time the Holocaust came up because I lost relatives in it and I've always just had a hard time, frankly, connecting with – or I had a hard time a lot as a kid connecting with other kids. \n\nI was a pariah a lot of my life and there might be an explanation that really, if fairly concrete one of, well, here's why you didn't belong this because your brain is different, and then I'm really interested in exploring that because that gives me a whole different way to evaluate my life.\n\nWhy did I make some of the decisions that I made? Because I don't like some of them. Why did I have some of the problems that I had? How could I do it differently that it's not just understand the past better and have more compassion, it's how can I live a better life? And that's where I can say, “Oh,” a camera, which you all can't see, I'm holding up my Adderall at this point. Thanks to this gem and is this the other one? No, wrong bottle. Thanks to Adderall and Vyvanse, I'm a much happier, less anxious person on a regular basis. Anxiety and depression used to eat me alive for a lot of my life and I don't have that problem nearly as much, that I get maybe one bad day a month now and it used to be a lot more often than that.\n\nI wrote a blog post about it because it mattered such so much to me, I wanted people to know. I've always been very pro discussing mental health, normalizing mental health, because I had struggles earlier in my life, too where—this is a whole other tangent—I was a caregiver for 10 years and that really put me through an emotional ringer and a lot of mental healthcare. So I wanted other people to feel comfortable talking about it, partly because I wanted to feel comfortable talking about it. \n\nSo I want to normalize it also because I know I work with a lot of people who have undiagnosed conditions, where if they just explored them and if they work with me, they've got pretty good insurance. They could. Then, oh my God, why wouldn't you? Okay and I say that there's grief associated with the knowledge. \n\nWhen you find out you've lived a large chunk of your life in a way with these suffering you didn't have to have, it hurts to realize that. Because on one hand, yay, my life can be better, but oh fuck, everything that came before that if I'd known this, it didn't have to be that bad. That maybe I wouldn't have had those experiences, or maybe they just wouldn't have hurt so much because I had to not take my meds for 24 hours to take that test this morning. I was really unhappy last night. [laughs] \n\nI wasn't depressed. It was just, I was really irritable, lots of things were making me stabby, and I don't take a big dose of Adderall. It's not like I'm a junkie. I take 7 and a half milligrams, which for most people with ADHD, that's a tiny dose. But I've played with my dosage and that's right about my sweet spot that that's just enough stimulant where I don't feel stimulated, where I don't feel uncomfortable, but I also don't feel irritable and before the meds, irritable, anxious frequently. That was just my normal life; I didn't know that, that I didn't know it could be different, can be different. So that's why you want to know.\n\nMAE: What an amazing answer, Evan. \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: Long one, which again, that's superpower. [laughs] \n\nMAE: Love it. We’re with you. \n\nI would add to your superpowers, the ability and willingness to be vulnerable. Having known you awhile, someone who is willing to just say the things, answer the real answer, and the answer below that answer. There's nothing I like more than talking to people about where they're really, really, really at. I'm just so grateful about how you always do that and there was a couple things in your sharing about not feeling like you belong. It really struck me because you are someone who is always creating opportunities for belonging.\n\nEVAN: That's a reason for that.\n\nMAE: Yeah, exactly. It's like a super, very classic tears of a clown that most of the people, myself included, who work to make spaces for people, it's usually because they have experienced that other thing. So I am sorry that you have had such challenge to be so different, but I can say speaking personally and on behalf of many, how grateful I am and we are for what you have done with that. \n\nEVAN: Thanks. That was something prior to a lot of therapy and medication, I would've cringed at hearing because I wasn't at all comfortable receiving gratitude. I say receiving it, I mean internalizing it. I would hear it and I would wince. I'm not worthy. [laughs] That was what would come to mind. No, thank you. \n\nBut there really was a selfish – there's always a selfish component to it and that’s, I create spaces for belonging because I want to belong there. That if I don't feel like I belong in other places, then maybe I can create a place I belong and other people can belong to who feel like they don't either. So again, I can help myself, but I can help other people at the same time. \n\nMAE: Totally.\n\nYou said a second thing that stuck out to me about debugging oneself and it reminds me of our co-host’s book called Debugging your Brain. \n\n[laughter]\n\nAnd I'm curious, Casey, if you have anything that you might want to say about that topic.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Evan and I talked a lot about this ideas that are in the book before I published it, before I had to talk about it and I would bounce ideas off of him. He knows very well all the stuff in my book. [laughs]\n\nEVAN: I've read some parts of it multiple times over a few different drafts. I was always bothering Casey with what was less CBT, more self-awareness, more emphasis on self-discovery and meditation. I've softened somewhat in that respect that I used to take a more, or a less generous perspective to meditation versus CBT. That I told Casey before you need to have at least a certain level of self-awareness to be able to be able to CBT and that what I see is a lot of people lack that fundamental self-awareness they need in order to CBT effectively. I don't think that that's true anymore. I think it's just like meditation that you peel layers of the onion, potentially and having more than one tool to do that can be effective, but having too many could be exhausting. \n\nSo I see a therapist, he doesn't use CBT. He uses – oh geez. Short-term. I always get it wrong. I'll have to look it up, or I'll remember it later in the podcast. It's a 5-letter acronym that's a little convoluted and it's not as common. CBT is about – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Speaking of acronyms, Evan. Would you be willing to say for listeners what CBT is just in case that –?\n\nEVAN: Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy. Sorry. Cognitive behavioral therapy is where you identify thought, or thoughts that cause the stories and feelings that we're reacting to. The therapy that I have is sort of the inverse it's you start with the feelings, and you go and look at how those show up in the thoughts, stories, and physical manifestations in the body.\n\nI've seen some intro to philosophy courses; where does thought begin, or where does feeling begin, and which comes first. I don't know that neuroscience has successfully answered this question, but philosophy sure hasn't. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I can tell you with some confidence that neuroscience science is not capable of answering that question. I don't know if it ever will be.\n\nMAE: Ooh!\n\nEVAN: That’s interesting. I don't know that – you're saying science won't ever be able to prove a thing?\n\nDAMIEN: Do say more, do say more.\n\nEVAN: Yeah, that's an absolute, I don't believe in too many of those.\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] Well, we're talking about internal conscious thought, internal experiences. Like I don't think that that's a scientific concept. The best you can get is self-reporting on it, I suppose.\n\nEVAN: The best we can now. That can change.\n\nDAMIEN: Sure. And you can measure neurons and interneurons potentials, and serotonin and dopamine levels. But translating that to thought is not a scientific concept.\n\nEVAN: Not yet. I say not yet, but we keep developing technologies at smaller and smaller scales and if we can develop technologies – we have nanotechnology already. We have complicated enough systems that we can inject into the body that can measure this information and send telemetry on it and you would probably end up with massive amounts of telemetry. But if you could correlate that with honest self-reported thought, maybe you end up with a Rosetta Stone of sorts, or really, really heavily data loaded Rosetta Stone.\n\nDAMIEN: I mean, and that's as close as you're going to get in biological telemetry coupled with self-reporting.\n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: Which is what we have now.\n\nEVAN: But except not at that level of fidelity that if you get a high enough fidelity, maybe you can approximate what people are actually thinking with a reasonable degree of accuracy.\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh.\n\nDAMIEN: We can do that.\n\nCASEY: Let's talk about this fidelity. This is my background, neuroscience.\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: Right. I know. And a little bit of mine now.\n\nCASEY: So my favorite types of studies, when I was studying this at Yale were the single neuron studies, because then you really know the electrical, what's going on over time for single cell. And I always wish there were more studies that did 1 million cell study—I don't know how many neurons are in the brain—but every single neuron in the brain I want to measure at the same time without the needles affecting anything about how it works, which – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Right. \n\nCASEY: Another problem.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: And then that's just the electrical part, but you can't – from that measure, the epigenetic modifications to each gene over time in each neuron and oh my God, it's so complicated to truly represent everything that's going on at the lowest level that I would want to do. So that's why there's some studies on single neurons in organisms with only one neuron, or very few neurons. They just have 6, some model organisms do. But then a human brain, oh. Our best – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Let’s say, but at 6 neurons – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: [inaudible] proxy for neuronal activation. That's an MRI. And I would love to get a full [chuckles] download of everything going on in the brain in every way whatsoever. But that is so sci-fi, I can't imagine what it would look like today.\n\nDAMIEN: I think the focus on the neurological system is completely misplaced. Like I can tell what people are thinking by their respiration rate. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: By the pupil dilation stuff, I can see it. You can see people's heart rate by the change in color and their face. \n\nEVAN: But there are so many indicators. And so, you see now we're getting into another topic that's interesting to me, too. Because I've been learning to teach the Search Inside Yourself program, which came out of Google from over 10 years ago, which is a combination of neuroscience backed by about 20 different neuroscience studies and neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness to develop leadership skills and to increase performance. \n\nThere are a lot of things you're saying, Damien that neuroscience has been able to prove already, that we can prove that – neuroscience has demonstrated for example, that habits, or that behaviors that we repeat, the brain optimizes for those habits. That's neuroplasticity that the brain alters its structure based on the activities we perform. In Search Inside Yourself, we cite a study where experienced meditators versus unexperienced meditators, and experienced meditator's brain is substantially different that they – \n\nSo for example, that we can see in FMRIs, for example, that they experience less anticipatory stress before pain than someone who is not an experienced meditator, that they spend less time in distress after that pain. After the pain is applied to mentioned anticipatory so they know it's coming. It's not anxiety, it's they know it's going to happen, then they experience it and then the time after, they recover faster. \n\nSo this is proven under FMRI. There are a lot of things like that, where we have that at kind of the macro level, we got really into the weeds, because I do that with the ADHD, I think. But talking about what if we could model, if we could record every neuron, every electrical transaction, every electrical exchange in the brain, but then there's also the biochemical exchanges, too, the neurotransmitters. Casey's point. \n\nHonestly, I didn't think of the actual genetic modifications that occur, but that's I guess, also a manifestation of the neuroplasticity itself perhaps. \n\nMy point is—because I got a little into the sci-fi land again—we have these studies that show that the brain can be intentionally altered, that we do this all the time when we practice any skill, we’re altering our brain.\n\nMID-ROLL 1: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up with all this and also to know if you’re protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team looks at the latest news, stories, and topics you might have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast. Mixing in-depth discussion, expert guests from around the world, a pinch of humor, and all with an easy to consume style - be sure you check them out today.\n\nMAE: I wanted to get back to the thing that Damien opened up about, the limitations of science. My undergrad is biochem and what I realized is most inquiry, most scientific inquiry, is fundamentally a result of a discomfort with the unknown. \n\nEVAN: Hmm. \n\nMAE: And I went to massage school for a little while and I lived at Kripalu the yoga retreat center. So I've been around some of these same circles, Evan and what I find is a lot of times, those folks will use a lot of scientific words and rationale [laughter] to basically justify the fact that they are supporting people, deepening their spirituality. To use science as a validity tool about anything to do with one's spirit, [laughs] I have a lot of feelings about that. It grates on my ears when I start to hear people trying to quantify and justify. I want some mystery, I'm okay with it and I think there's a piece in there. \n\nI agree, though, with all of your opening statements, Evan, about knowing more about one's self and what you can do with that. But I don't dream of every neuron being measured because I think it will actually shroud our ability to understand the things we need and want to as humankind. I don't know.\n\nEVAN: So – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: I see a pattern, that bothers me a lot, that's very related. Some people take the science to the extreme and they say, “I will only believe the things that have been proven.”\n\nMAE: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: “I will not believe things that have not been proven. Even if they haven't been disproven either, the unknown things, I just won't believe in them at all.” Like meditation wasn't respected by a lot of science thinkers until now there's more studies saying it – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Totally.\n\nCASEY: Does things. But we knew it worked for a very, very long time. \n\n[laughter]\n\nEVAN: See. And because of the ADHD, I literally have to take notes because I don't want to lose topics.\n\nCASEY: Oh, me too.\n\nEVAN: I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. Ah.\n\nMAE: It's quite why – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: I wonder – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: I'm an interrupter in life, Evan too is because I'll forget about it if I don't say it right then.\n\nEVAN: Me too. Hey, that's ADHD possibly. \n\nMAE: Oh yeah. I'm in the group.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I relate to that. \n\nEVAN: Okay.\n\nCASEY: I relate to almost every ADHD meme I see and I wonder if I have it sometimes, but I don't have a diagnosis and I don't feel like it would help me that much because I'm not looking for the med part and I am already doing the coping mechanisms part, like the non-medication therapies for ADHD. I just read everything I can about every mental illness in case there are any nuggets that help improve my life.\n\nEVAN: Mae, what I'd say first is I don't think I brought the spiritual side into anything I said.\n\nMAE: You didn't.\n\nEVAN: Yet, yet. \n\n[laughter] \n\nCASEY: Yet.\n\nEVAN: Yet. I say yet. I mean, sure, I'll just come out and say, “Okay, by the way, I'm a Buddhist.” I didn't start there, though, or I suppose in a weird kind of way maybe I did. I just didn't mean to. No, I started with meditation at age 17 because I was an angry teenager and I kind of accidentally fell into it.\n\nDAMIEN: How does an angry teenager get started with meditation? That’s a key for me.\n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. Well, it wasn't intentional. It was my mother didn't want to pay for Kung Fu lessons, which is what I wanted because I wanted to beat the crap out of things to take my anger out on them. Come on, that seems obvious, right? Physically, I don't know, punishing inanimate objects. But there was this really nice aikido dōjō nearby and “Why don't you try that? That's cheaper.” “Oh, okay. Fine.” \n\nI didn't know anything about aikido at the time. It also turned out that I found myself in one of the most internal, if not the most internally focused aikido schools of aikido that exists in the world. It's called Shinshin Toitsu Aikido. I’ll provide a link to it. Also known globally as the Ki Society, not K-E-Y, but K-I. \n\nEvery Sunday, there was this lovely woman named Mary K who started with a meditation, an hour-long meditation set, and I found that I had so much more peace that. I just fell in love with it and I didn't continue to practice rigorously after going –when I started in college, I tried to. They have a dōjō in Charlottesville where they did. \n\nBut it stayed with me and then when my first wife was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease—huge tangent there—I remembered before I went to University of Virginia, they gave me this reading list and they said, “Here are all these books we want you to read.” I didn't know that I wasn't going to be tested on any of the stuff, but I felt obligated to read it. One of those was Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which is a story – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: So good.\n\nEVAN: Absolutely excellent book. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: Yeah, okay. So I remembered Siddhartha. Buddhism. Yeah, there is this whole religion that says life hurts. Hmm, maybe I should explore that. That's not really what it says, but that suffering is unavoidable and the whole religion, such as it is, religion is about how do we engage with that, or at least the philosophy of it. And I found a website and a podcast that is currently defunct called Zencasts, which is ironic considered we are using an app called Zencastr, and that comes from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. I've been listening to them ever since 2006 to the Dharma Talks, which is a talk given by a person who is usually an ordained priest of Buddhism. \n\nNow they have a podcast called Audio Dharma that's still running. That's recordings of their meditations and their Dharma Talks and I followed that for years and years and years telling myself I don't do this religion thing and I gave up in religion decades before, but mindfulness. Okay, that’s secular version. So that mindfulness, I'll do that. It turns out, I guess when you get into that enough, you're going to be exposed and you listen to enough talks, you're eventually going to be exposed to some ideas that aren't just mindfulness, that are Buddhist related and quickly realize okay, fine. Maybe I can self-describe I did of, I can maybe there is an identity of secular Buddhism. It turns out that's most Western Buddhism. Most people don't buy into the reincarnation thing, karma, and all of that but the philosophy. \n\nMAE: I'm a huge Pema Chödrön fan.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. I've read some of hers. ADHD makes it really hard for me to take in any book that's non-fiction in its entirety, but I've read some Pema Chödrön and I've read some of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Some people object to the “his holiness” part. Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gil Fronsdal, who is the lead teacher at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and a few others. I just got a huge soft spot for Gil because his was the first Dharma Talk I ever listened to and now I just find his voice so soothing. Let’s say I'm a Gill fanboy.\n\nMAE: Love it. \n\nEVAN: But the mystical versus scientific part that I feel you. The analogy that comes to mind; I got really pissed at George Lucas when he started explaining the Force away with Midi-Chlorians. \n\n[laughter]\n\nIt's like, “God damn it, George, take that back.”\n\nDAMIEN: [inaudible].\n\nEVAN: The Force is supposed to be magic. Don't take magic from the world. That just makes me upset. On one hand, I feel what you're saying, Mae. On the other hand, I subscribe to the notion that I'm a biological machine and with adequate science, I'm probably fully deterministic. At the same time, I wouldn't want people to be able to read my mind and with businesses out there like Meta AKA Facebook. No, fuck that. \n\nMAE: Yo!\n\nDAMIEN: I want to say these are not contradicting philosophies. You can believe in a clockwork universe that absolutely is deterministic. While at the same time, knowing that there are things that science cannot prove that are true. Like that's a scientific fact. There are things that are true, that science cannot prove and then there are things that are literally not scientific. My favorite color is blue. That's a fact. That's not a scientific fact. There is no science that's going to prove that. The closer you’re going to get – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: I wonder if that's really true that no science currently they could prove that. Still, I question whether it's universally true no science could ever prove that.\n\nDAMIEN: The best you can get is correlation between a physical response and a particular wavelength of light. \n\nEVAN: Again, currently. I still – I think there's a chain of causality there that you might be able to connect with enough really, really deep telemetry, which we do not have nor seem likely to have any time at all in our lifetime.\n\nMAE: I'm still on the I don't care how many stats there are, there's still more. And to your thing, Damien – [overtalk][\n\nEVAN: I hope so. \n\nMAE: The definition that I learned in school, in college of scientific fact is not yet then proven false. Like that's the best that we can do. \n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nMAE: And this is pretty limited.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, absolutely.\n\nMAE: Also, when you look at the history of scientific thought, which I have taught before, it's fascinating what we used to think were facts. \n\n[laughter].\n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nMAE: And when we just like – we are constantly talking about it like it's just this aggregation of facts over time and really, it's just constantly rehabbing everything that we got attached to. So all of the things that we even are referring to as facts are things we now know, or whatever, or things we will find out later. Yeah, and most everything we think right now is the probability of it being told is very high.\n\nEVAN: Well, that's why science calls them theories, right. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: Because fair theory means this has been demonstrated to be true, given the information we have available, but theories can also be proven false. \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. And I love that word, non-falsifiability, like scientific facts are falsifiable.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nMAE: Yeah. \n\nDAMIEN: And scientific theories are falsifiable and if you work really hard to falsify them and you fail, then it probably true.\n\n[laughter] \n\nEVAN: I mean, if –\n\nDAMIEN: That's what we call true.\n\nEVAN: This is where we can get down to what's the definition of facts, scientific facts. You could call measurements, facts, but even a measurement is going to be some degree of approximation because you are always rounding at some point. [laughs] Right?\n\nDAMIEN: I agree.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. I'm starting have so much fun right now. \n\n[laughter]\n\nOkay, but there's also generally not like truth, capital T, is usually very – includes a lot of contradictions and if it is one way and everybody answers that same thing, that's probably fallible. [laughs] Like when you start to get the contradictions and see a richer picture, that's when I feel closer to whatever truth that is. \n\nSo when people tell me that there's such and such kind of person and they think this kind of way, or a scientific fact, it's the only one truth. This is when I definitely don't believe whatever it is. So that's also why I like to include the – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Yeah, group think.\n\nMAE: Mystery magical option in there too, because unless you're including that, you're not getting the success of approximation to the truth in my book.\n\nEVAN: See, this is where I start – Casey was going there, too. This is when I start thinking about human dynamics and teams that as a leader, or as a manager—because there is a difference between management and leadership, frankly—I tend to be my most uncomfortable when no one disagrees with me. \n\n[laughter] \n\nThat if I'm – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nEVAN: Or I should say if I'm putting an idea out there that is fairly obvious, that we're all breathing in oxygen, that I'm not too concerned about if people disagree with me. When I'm putting an idea out there that's fairly novel and there's some risk associated with it and no one says anything to disagree, I get nervous. “Wait a minute. No one has a problem with this at all. Do you feel safe enough to respond? What's going on here?” [chuckles]\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. What's more likely: everybody agrees, or people don't feel unsafe disagreeing?\n\nMAE: Yo!\n\nEVAN: Right? Whoa. No, nom and you just used one of the most painful things you could use with me: double negative.\n\n[laughter]\n\nOw. No, don't do that. It's like using unless in a Ruby statement, it hurts my brain.\n\n[laughter]\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, Damien. It's so true. It is hard to foster environments where disagreement is welcomed, acceptable, encouraged, sustained. [laughs] \n\nEVAN: I know what I do, and I know to try to do that. I also know it's not universally successful was I was given a little dose of much needed humility in that regard recently with a team member of mine. \n\nI think, Mae, Casey, you've seen this with me before that I tend to be one of the earlier people to deliberately be vulnerable, to admit some shortcoming, or some mistake. That I try to establish, “Hey I'm okay admitting I'm wrong, or I've been wrong and if it's okay for me, if you see me as an authority figure, this is me trying to tell you I want you to feel okay doing it, too.” That I'm up here saying, “Hey, I have to –” Well, that time I chose not to swear for whatever reason. I think I'm in a little bit more of the work context, I'm talking about teams and no one's throwing stones at me yet. So maybe it's safe for you to do it, too. \n\nThat works for some people. I – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: That's so important. It's so important to come from people at the top, near the top. \n\nMAE: Exactly.\n\nDAMIEN: Like when your boss is like, “Oh, I was wrong about this.” When the CTO was like, “Oh yeah, last week, I knocked off production. Ooh, my bad.” [laughs]\n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nEVAN: But when you say that, I tried to think about the counterpoint because I've seen this not succeed. Sometimes I've been confused by it. There's well, what happened after you made that mistake? Was there an accountability conversation? What did that look like? Were you taking a risk, or did you just make a “dumb mistake?” Was it really bad judgment? That there's a difference between being vulnerable and creating psychological safety and having accountability, and that can be a kind of fuzzy boundary. \n\nBut what I found is holding accountability, you got to do that in private, because that disrupts psychological safety and you have to think about, when you're holding accountability well, who's going to hear about the repercussions and what will that do to psychological safety? I won't go into details, but I can think of a situation where I saw someone perhaps have a severe lapse in judgment, get fired over it and then having a chilling response on an organization as a result, causing a severe reduction in psychological safety. \n\nI'll say, I had no part of this. [chuckles] Just want to be clear. I do not reach for the fire button when it comes to people making mistakes. It's okay, how do we learn from this and get better is my preference That when someone makes a mistake, I think of it usually as okay, you made the mistake. How did the system allow for this in the first place?\n\nDAMIEN: Bingo. \n\nCASEY: Yes, first place.\n\nEVAN: And how can we prevent this in the future such that the system puts you in a position where you are able to make that mistake? Can we put in guardrails and checks and does the danger, the magic red button, does it need to have a safety cover on it, for example? That how many different protections can we put in place and are there enough of them?\n\nMAE: And I try to do that. I'm an engineer manager, also Evan, and similarly, try to demonstrate vulnerability and publicly share mistakes. There are ways in which that impacts some people positively. There are ways in which that me as a white person admitting mistake is a different deal and me as a woman admitting a mistake is a different deal. And like – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Totally.\n\nMAE: there's just so much in there about, I appreciated that you were going into the what happens after, because we can get people to say things. But then if the system does not actually hold what it is that people are saying, and if the system does not hold accountable to the people who are most marginalized in the system, that's who gets to define whether, or not accountability is real, whether, or not if there is psychological safety, et cetera. It's not for the people with the most power to assess.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. This really resonates with me, particularly because of a conversation I had with one of my directors at work lately. But I found it really profound when this one director of mine was very open about their experience as someone more diverse than me, let's just say, because I at least appear to be about as non-diverse as you get at least on the outside. \n\nTheir very real concerns because of the diversity, how that might impact their career, how people perceive them, and how they're perceived impacts their career growth. I was really grateful and humbled that they shared that with me and so, I took all that in and everything that they were telling me about the concerns, thought about it some, and that I received that sharing has impacted my management on my team, that I don't talk to others on the team about this person's diversity, but I am trying to get them to reflect further as a way of trying to you check for bias with other people.\n\nMAE: Yeah. That's been my main mission. [laughs] I feel like most of my life is like, can we just say and see when we are biased because we are of a culture that is incredibly biased and unjust, and there is no way to be separate from it.\n\nOne of my very favorite quotes from Diane di Prima, this beat poet, is, “For every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy.” \n\nEVAN: God, I feel that.\n\nMAE: As much as we can be change agents and social justice advocates, ultimately, we are still of the thing.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. And yes.\n\nMAE: And I try to go on record all the time. I am definitely racist, sexist, [chuckles] homophobic, atheist, and ageist; I am all of the things. I catch myself all of the time. And – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: And then there are the times you don't catch yourself, too, probably – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Fair.\n\nEVAN: Which is unconscious bias, because that's why I try to make other people aware by approaching it indirectly is unconscious bias can creep in so many different ways and okay, so all I can do is kind of explore this person's surface area and see, well, what is it you are really, what story are you telling yourself here? What data are you operating on? Is this congruent when you look at all of it together, or do you see gaps for yourself? \n\nI haven't had anyone's light bulb go off just yet, but I'm still working on some people and maybe it's possible that there are legitimate concerns, too. That can be accompanied by unconscious bias and that can get really hard to deal with.\n\nCASEY: I read a paper recently about unconscious bias training being not effective at all ever. And then I read another paper saying – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: What! \n\nCASEY: It's not effective when it's done very poorly, like in our [inaudible] – [overtalk]\n[laughter] \n\nAnd it is effective when you have people talk about it with each other, actually apply it, and think about it.\n\nEVAN: It's not effective?\n\nCASEY: And that’s not so – no, no one was surprised. \n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: Put it on my feed on Twitter and everyone was like, “Duh. But now we have science.”\n\nEVAN: When it's done poorly, does it work. Hello? [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: But the addition to that is most of the time it's done poorly.\n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: That's true, too. Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And I'll give you my personal opinion. I didn't come up with this myself. If you're comfortable doing it, it's not being done well. [laughs]\n\nEVAN: That's the truth.\n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nCASEY: Well said. \n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. This is where I'll go back to meditation and mindfulness training, that with mindfulness, you become more aware. I've become more aware of the passing thoughts that I have; they're automatic thoughts. Buddhism has this idea of monkey mind that the mind is a machine that shatters like a monkey. It's a machine for creating thought and we have metacognition if we're aware of our thoughts, if we're paying attention to our thoughts. \n\nI have noticed more of that chatter and oh, whoa, whoa. I didn't – I thought that? What? Okay, let's slow down here for a moment and explore that because that made me really uncomfortable that that went through my head in that moment about that person whether it's racist, sexist, whatever. I'm human, these thoughts come up and now I'm never getting a job again. [laughs] \n\nMAE: Well, I went first so. \n\nEVAN: I know you did so, you were vulnerable. Thank you. [laughs]\n\nMAE: Do you all know about Resmaa Menakem?\n\nEVAN: No. \n\nCASEY: No.\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. Okay, so check it out. This guy says he wrote this book called My Grandmother's Hands and he's saying that trauma is passed down physiologically.\n\nEVAN: I've heard this.\n\nMAE: And part of the reason why we have not been able to deal with bias and all of this is because we are trying to do it through the mind – [overtalk] \n\nEVAN: Really?\n\nMAE: And that is not the place to go. It's actually physiological healing that we all are responsible to do as part of contributing toward creating a different world is like it's within us. \n\nSo his premises that the white-on-white trauma in the Middle Ages got passed down and that is part of how white people have been [chuckles] passing along a lot more trauma, I'll say that. \n\nAnyway, the book is fascinating and the first time I've heard a non-brain thought focused way to approach social change.\n\nDAMIEN: I feel this very, very strongly, like there's such a focus and this is why I bristled at our neuroscience experts here [laughs] and their lovely focus on neurology. Like there's so much focus on neurons, the neurological system, and the cognitive mind and the cognitive mind is such a tiny, tiny part of what we are.\n\nEVAN: Yeah, true. \n\nMAE: Yes. \n\nEVAN: We're a whole system. So no, I was going to say something, not double negative, not all that dissimilar.\n\n[laughter] \n\nYou said closer to the mic to be ironic. That they're interconnected. Casey was talking to it, too that thought creates physiological changes, creates chromosomal changes so, genetic changes.\n\nMAE: And vice versa.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and you can tell this vice versa. That the most obvious way to do this is next time you're angry, breathe slowly. It's literally impossible to be angry and breathing peacefully.\n\nMAE: Hmm. Oh my gosh. This is such a good challenge. \n\nEVAN: Yeah, pretty much.\n\nMAE: I know this is what Casey is going to quote at the end.\n\nEVAN: I mean, when you say breathe peacefully, let's be clear. You can slow your breathing down, but not be breathing peacefully when you're slowing your breathing down. But now it's how do we define peacefully? \n\nDAMIEN: Sure.\n\nCASEY: Cognition!\n\nEVAN: That makes you really pedantic here. But as a meditator? Yeah. Mae, you meditate, too, though? Don't you? I thought.\n\nMAE: I’m a dabbler in all of the things.\n\nEVAN: So what is breathing peacefully that deep breaths will tend to encourage the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and over that encouragement, the parasympathetic nervous system, the so-called rest and digest. So it's hard to sustain deep breathing for a long time and not calm down, but I'm sure it's possible. I've had some experiences where I've been so emotionally activated—you could use the word triggered. Take your pick, some people don't like it. But at that point, if there's a trauma involvement, then it can be really hard to use the physiological to tamp down the emotional. \n\nDAMIEN: Well, what I will say is just on a more fundamental level. Your thoughts, your emotions, they're physical, and they're embodied.\n\nEVAN: Yeah, totally.\n\nDAMIEN: They are literally in your body and so, they change your body and your body changes them, and they're not a separate thing. \n\nEVAN: So you thought we were disagreeing? That's neuroscience, too. Sorry. Eh, you failed. \n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: I failed at disagreeing.\n\nMAE: Ah!\n\nDAMIEN: I will never make it on cable television now. \n\nEVAN: No, I think this is what you call violent agreement.\n\nCASEY: Yes!\n\n[laughter]\n\nYeah, for a lot of these things we're talking about, I quickly go to like, “Yes, there's even a science that supports it.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nEven if we don't have the science to support it yet because there's so much we don't know about everything.\n\nEVAN: I feel like we've kind of got to meet the press table here because we've got the two on two of the people who want to say, “No, it's not science,” and the people on the other side were saying, “Hey, this thing you're not saying is science, there's science for this!” \n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: I was saying it about the audience.\n\nMAE: I’m just saying I don’t want to have to use science in order to be able to have faith. That's what I'm saying. \n\nEVAN: Ah. \n\nCASEY: Mm hmm.\n\nEVAN: Well, I would argue that even for those of us who don't really want to have faith, that there's always something we're taking on faith. \n\nMAE: Totally.\n\nEVAN: Because there's a lot of it, because even those of us who think we know science so well, there are plenty of things we're ignorant of that we have, that we operate with very large assumptions on. We essentially take on faith because we don't understand them.\n\nDAMIEN: The scientific method is taken on faith.\n\nMAE: Mm!\n\nEVAN: Oh, oh god.\n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nEVAN: Someone get Gödel, Escher, Bach; I think we’re hitting recursion.\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, I’m having so much fun! \n\nEVAN: Another book I’ve read some of. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: I always think about the audience we're talking to. So I'm well-equipped to talk to people who really want to hear some science because I can bring up some like, “Well we don't know this part over here,” and I'm very happy to be the person to talk to those people. I am much less well-equipped to talk to someone more spiritual, who doesn't want to think about science things at all. I'm not well-equipped to talk – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: No, I've loved doing that.\n\nCASEY: Some people are fluent in both, but I specialize in the science part.\n\nEVAN: I’m fluent in it but I – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Conversational, perhaps.\n\nEVAN: I like areas of disagreement and this really makes some people very uncomfortable. In student government in college, I prized the people who thought very differently for me because I often learned from them and had insights that wouldn't have otherwise. I've made my in-law super uncomfortable because they're deeply religious. I am so not. And when I asked them challenging questions, I think they thought I was trying to start a fight and said, “No, I was trying to start a discussion to explore and learn,” but they got upset. [laughs] \n\nMAE: Yes, I have this, too, Evan.\n\nDAMIEN: A lot of people don't want to explore and learn because they're afraid of what they'll find, and I think – I know that's true for me in certain areas.\n\nEVAN: I don't know that that's accurate, but I also don’t think – I'll be frank, I don't think it's all that generous either. \n\nDAMIEN: No, it's not generous. Of course.\n\nEVAN: Yeah, and I've been tested on this a lot, because my wife is really quite religious and I'm not. So we're a really interesting pair that way, that I think it's instead that they're projecting negative intent on me because they're more accustomed to people challenging their belief from an aggressive and a hostile place. \n\nDAMIEN: That's also fair.\n\nEVAN: Where frankly, I probably had some of that unintentionally, but my true intent was—and this goes back to something you were saying earlier, Mae that I wanted to say and I forgot because of ADHD probably—that my vulnerability, my discussions with people, it's because I'm a little obsessed with truth. And one doesn't find truth through constant agreement. One finds truth by taking your truth, comparing it to other people's truths that are different, testing them, and the exploring, which I think that's where we get the assignment – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: And then combining them enzymatically. Let’s just use a science word to prove this approach.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. You look for the yes ands, but then you also look for the oh, these don't connect here, here, here, and here and the person with more faith might just say, “We have to just agree to disagree here,” and I might just have to, “Okay, fine. You're saying you don't want to talk about that part is what I hear then.”\n\n[chuckles] \n\nOne of my best friends when I lived in Eastern shore of Maryland, devoutly religious evangelical and… also in the computers. When we met, we would often go out to lunch and just have these really strong disagreements that I always found fascinating. We would just talk and talk and talk and inevitably, it would get into religion and God, and he would get down to “Because God has a plan for every one of us,” and I'd say, “Yeah, I don't believe it.” [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that's unfalsifiable.\n\nEVAN: Right, so we’re back to those I can't prove it's false thing; you can’t prove it – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, now we're just having fun. And then – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Yeah, I can't prove the non-existence of God, ooh, I'm done. That's the Godwin's law of talking about religion. That’s what's Godwin's love every conversation on the internet inevitably becomes about Hitler. Boom.\n\nMAE: Wow. \n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: But it's an important point. Like when you even as a person who – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: I just mentioned Hitler, sorry. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Even as a person who has taken on faith, this shared objective, external reality exists, [chuckles] there are still things that are unfalsifiable and so you have to – well, what I like to do is I get to choose. I get to choose what I believe. [laughs] \n\nEVAN: We all do.\n\nDAMIEN: I choose the beliefs that serve me the best.\n\nEVAN: Or we all think we do. We might – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I believe that, too. \n\nMAE: Ah! \n\nEVAN: We might add a free will, but you might believe we do and I'm not so sure. I suspect we don't.\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that's also non-falsifiable. [chuckles]\n\nEVAN: I know.\n\nDAMIEN: And so, it's another opportunity for me to choose a belief that there – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Right. Currently, I'm falsifiable and as I said earlier, closing another loop, I'm not sure I want to live in the world where we can prove it because it'll get misused.\n\nMAE: Mm yeah. There's no deal there, too. \n\nA loop piece, too, that I wanted to say is, Evan on the thing about being interpreted as being consternatious, or content – like trying to create conflict. Disagreement to me is not conflict. [chuckles] Like you can disagree and not be in conflict, but I am from upstate New York and the way that I talk –\n\nEVAN: [laughs] Wait, Upstate, not Manhattan. \n\nMAE: Correct.\n\nEVAN: So there's different. [laughs] \n\nMAE: Correct. I can sound like I am having a problem with someone because I'm challenging a thing they said and those are just very different to me; challenging a thing that someone said versus having a problem with a person and what they think. My coined phrase I made up is “conflict is care.” So if they're really in conflict, it's because there's emotion involved. Somebody has to care for there to be actual conflict. \n\nDAMIEN: Otherwise, you walk away.\n\nMAE: Yeah. \n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nMAE: So like, whatever. That was weird.\n\nEVAN: So few things. First, conflicting disagreement to me, they can mean the same thing. Conflict doesn't have to imply hostility, or violence. Two different books come to mind based on what you just said. \n\nOne, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I love that book because one example, you know it's a management book because it has a four-quadrant diagram in it and – [laughs] Mae’s laughing. That's not on the audio.\n\nBut I love that book and there's the top left quadrant, I can't remember what it's called. I always forget these, which is the you're just not contributing because you don't care enough. So there's the whole right side of the diagram is you care enough to intervene. I think the bottom right is can't forget, but basically, you're saying the truth but you're just a jerk about it. It's the I'm sharing and I'm just being blunt and I'm not addressing your feelings on the matter at all, I'm just sharing. And the top right, the radical candor is I care and I'm sharing to try to help so it speaks to compassion in the sense of, I see a problem. I'm offering because I care and I'm trying to, I'm taking action because I have empathy. \n\nBy the way, I'm almost literally borrowing from a Search Inside Yourself program when I say that, when I describe compassion that way.\n\nThe other book that came to mind… Oh, yeah was Nonviolent Communication. I think that's – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Another excellent book. \n\nEVAN: Daniel Rosenberg. Yeah, that has been a hugely impactful book on me. Some people have a lot of difficulty with the notion that speech can be violent. But it comes down to what does the word violence mean because if you think of violence in the form of violation, if you are saying things that are unwelcome to another person, that is a violation. \n\nDAMIEN: Well, also the author breaks that down, clears that up in the very beginning. What they mean by violence is causes harm.\n\nEVAN: And then quantifying harm.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. \n\nEVAN: There's not just physical harm. Although, then we get to the neuroscience and physiological part, emotional harm is physical harm because – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nEVAN: These things we call feelings—I'm going to Search Inside Yourself again here, these things we call feelings, they are felt sensations in the body. They are manifestations of emotions that are in the brain.\n\nDAMIEN: I just want to say that again. Feelings are felt sensations.\n\nEVAN: Bingo. So when I feel bad, it's I literally feel bad. \n\nI was telling my therapist yesterday when I was having a bad day, I said, “I reached right for the pain relief that day,” and he said, “Oh yeah, I totally do that, too.” Because the felt sensations in the body are hurt and hey, guess what? Pain relief medication can treat the physical hurt and if you treat the physical hurt, that can help with the emotional and mental hurt, too a little because you don't have that exacerbating the emotional hurt. You don't have that exacerbate – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: This is not just true. It's studied.\n\n[laughter]\n\nEVAN: Casey, blow people's minds and go to the study in the show notes. \n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: I bet you can find it. I hope it's public. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nEVAN: This is something that drove me nuts in the Search Inside Yourself program. That I'm that guy that when I'm looking at the neuroscience, it's okay, I see this study. I'm reading through this study. Cool. I want to know something about some of the other studies that are referred to you in here because I have more questions. Wait, this shit’s behind a pay wall? Fuck this. \n\nCASEY: Ah, yeah.\n\nEVAN: There are so many studies behind the pay wall unless you're associated with the university. You can't get them. Oh my God. I hate them. \n\nDAMIEN: Pro tip, scientific authors love sharing their work and they own the copyright to it. [chuckles] Email them, they'll send it to you. \n\nEVAN: Oh, you can't see my huge O face. [laughs] I am totally doing it. \n\nMAE: But – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: Thank you.\n\nMAE: As someone who worked in higher ed for many years, that is consistently being defunded. Scientific inquiry happening in higher ed is like the places where the money goes and what research is allowed to happen is a pretty murky water. And so, paying the distribution place to help there be some peer reviewed studies out there that are not only and solely funded by big industry [chuckles] no names that I'll give them my 3 bucks.\n\nEVAN: I wish it was just 3 bucks, though. \n\nMAE: I know, yes.\n\nEVAN: I'm looking at wait, you want to purchase this journal so you can – some of them you can rent, I think they said, but – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Also – [overtalk]\n\nEVAN: [inaudible] journal is like 250 bucks for a single journal.\n\nMAE: Oh no.\n\nDAMIEN: And do the journals pay the – do they pay the authors? Do they pay the peer reviewers?\n\nMAE: Yeah. You get – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, okay \n\nMAE: Well, it depends on the journal, on the industry, but there is a whole extra thing about peer review being a part of kind of community service. It's like open source. You have to have done it to be able to be let in the club and keep up your reps, or whatever. So there's definitely a lot of peer review stuff that happens. That's not as cool for, especially earlier career researchers, but there's definitely some funding that really goes back.\n\nEVAN: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Getting research funded in academia is always hard, so sure. I mean, if it's a few bucks here and there, it's one thing, but 250 bucks for a journal.\n\nMAE: That’s fascinating, that’s great.\n\nEVAN: Damien, I'm going to try your idea. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: The research I did was funded by the military because it was PTSD related.\n\nEVAN: Oh. \n\nCASEY: Even though for my interest, it was basic science; how do epigenetics affect memory. But that is the application is PTSD and the military has a big budget for that.\n\nEVAN: Sounds like, you know what?\n\nCASEY: I always felt a little weird about it because that's – I don't know. I didn't want to get money from the military, but I did want –\n\nMAE: A lot of [inaudible] has – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: The research was important – [overtalk] \n\nMAE: Always come from the military.\n\nCASEY: A lot has. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\n\nEVAN: Hey, this internet we're talking on? [laughs] This internet thing that we're using right now?\n\nMAE: Yeah, sure.\n\nEVAN: That little thing came from this thing called defense something research project agency, I think DARPA, ARPANET originally, and that was the internet way back when. \n\nMID-ROLL 2: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.\n\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.\n\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?\n\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.\n\nListen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support. \n\nCASEY: We've been talking about knowledge and what is truth, and I want to bring up an idea that I'm surprised surprises so many people. I use these words completely differently—believe, think, no, wonder, want, need. Every word like that is unique to me. So if I say, I believe that's true. That doesn't mean I think it's true, or I know it's true, or I want it to be true. It means I believe; it's a belief I have based on something. Do you want to know what that something is? I can tell you what that comes from. Or I know this is true. I reserve that for personal experience, or there's a study.\n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: In the study, I might not even use no for, because they can be contradicted as we're talking about all the whole episode. \n\nEVAN: Can we survey listeners? Because I'm actually curious how many people make this distinction. I do, too. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nEVAN: So I'm actually curious now is this normal, or are you and I weird in similar ways that way? Because again, how did I end up finding out I have ADHD and why did it matter to me? It's how am I different?\n\nMAE: And we can a tarot deck out it. \n\nEVAN: Oh and by the way, I mentioned comorbidities of ADHD. ADHD and autism spectrum disorders, they tend to coexist. There are a lot of people on autism spectrum disorders have ADHD, also comorbid anxiety, depression, sometimes eating disorders, ding, ding, ding and rejection sensitivity disorder. The list goes on and on and on. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. Yeah. \n\nEVAN: So some of these patterns, I've occasionally wondered hey, am I somewhere on the autism spectrum? I don't know. But I sometimes get into my clarifications and get really pedantic about them.\n\nCASEY: I can be pedantic. Sometimes. I try to go light on it. \n\nMAE: I like to be pedantic, too! [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: I promise you, normal people do not make distinctions between those words, but normal people are generally very sloppy with their language. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. We can't afford to; forever programming changes the way we think.\n\nMAE: I would like to normalize this word we're using right now pretty liberally, normal. Speaking of being special about our words.\n\nEVAN: Neurotypical and neuroatypical – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Common.\n\nEVAN: Might be a little bit better. \n\nCASEY: Common, I like better most of the time. \n\nDAMIEN: Common is the word what I should have used. \n EVAN: Yeah. I don't like normal so much. Common, okay. I tend to – there's a whole ADHD Twitter. I could probably link to a few lists. There's just the ADHD hashtag gets thrown lot around a lot and you see people talk about NT an awful lot. They’re neurotypicals. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, that's more specific. It is much more specific than normal. What kind of normal? \n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: Normal, the word I want to drop, but it still slips into my speech. Just like guys. \n\nMAE: Yeah, same. \n\nCASEY: I have it found a perfect replacement for how guys feels to use. \n\nEVAN: Y'all.\n\nCASEY: I wish I could. \n\nEVAN: Y'all. I love y'all.\n\nCASEY: Sometimes y'all’s good. But if I walk into a room and say, “What are –?” Okay, that's not a good example. \n\nEVAN: How are you folks? \n\nCASEY: What are you guys doing? Well, y'all is great there.\n\nEVAN: I use folks.\n\nCASEY: It sounds like – [overtalk] \n\nEVAN: I use filters – [overtalk]\n CASEY: Where guys – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: I use folks. I use people. I use peeps. I use y’all. \n\nEVAN: Yes.\n\nMAE: I use all kinds of things.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. I use all these, too. \n\nEVAN: I might have gotten one, or two of those to use – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: When somebody says guys, as someone who has hung out in mostly places where it is all guys, I don't like it. I just don't. \n\nCASEY: No.\n\nMAE: Does not make me feel good.\n\nEVAN: How do you know they self-Identify as male? Right? I mean, seriously, so. But no, I was going to say, Mae, or I tried to say earlier, I might have [inaudible] amount of – I’ve used that occasionally. I'm pretty sure maybe at least one of these came from you, from interacting with you at one point, just can't say which. Y’all, that was from a stint at Rackspace and going to Texas enough times, but I stuck with it.\n\nCASEY: Y’all is great. Y'all should be more formal, popular, mainstream accepted English. It should not be just slang casual. I use it in formal writing as much as I can get away with. \n\nEVAN: So happy in a work meeting yesterday to hear someone new to me use y'all in a work meeting setting. It tickled me. [laughs] \n\nCASEY: It's like Spanish. Spain’s Spanish has vosotros that's y'all and that is more formal in Spanish. \n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: Once we get y'all in English, we can extend it to the even more useful all y’all.\n\nMAE: Yes! Now we're talking.\n\nDAMIEN: You, y’all, all y'all.\n\nEVAN: No, wait, there's some other ones I learned, too. There's yinzer. There's some other – [overtalk]\n\nDAMIEN: Philadelphia yinz. That's a third person plural, second person plural.\n\nEVAN: It gets kind of weird me, but every neologism starts weird before it gets normalized. I air quoted. [laughs] I remember the first time I heard fleek and I just couldn't accept it. [laughs]\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. \n\nDAMIEN: That's a tough one.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Fleek is for eyebrows. Eyebrows on fleek, that's what it's used for mostly.\n\nI think it's my gray hair showing just, yeah, I still twitch a little there. I just lost a whole generation of people who might have been paying attention. [laughs]\n\nMAE: What, by telling the truth and demonstrating vulnerability and saying things that…?\n\nEVAN: Yes. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: So first let's do reflections on the episode and then we'll do the plugs. Who wants to go first?\n\nDAMIEN: I can go first. Yeah, because my reflection is something I think one things we talked least about, but was demonstrated most: the value of being vulnerable, of just revealing things and I think that's like – I think because Evan, you were so vulnerable opening up this conversation, it allowed us to have a really open and just really valuable conversation with that. So that's an object lesson that I witnessed today and was a part of.\n\nEVAN: Thank you. And Mae was saying it a lot earlier and I really appreciate that you were vulnerable in sharing that feedback as we went. By the way, that's also me sort of trying to imply to people who are listening, feedback doesn't have to be bad. \n\n[laughter]\n\nFeedback can be encouraging, too.\n\nMAE: Evan's doing his plug right now. \n\nEVAN: Well, sort of. People hear the word feedback; they think it always has to be critical. I winced. \n\nMy reflection is I was tickled that we got to explore so many things and while there were points of disagree that the disagreement ultimately led to deeper discussion. I just had such a fun time with this. So very much echoing the sentiment Mae shared earlier in the conversation. My reflection is this was just fun kind of bouncing around all these different topics and exploring things scientific, spiritual, existential in all manner.\n\nCASEY: I'll go next. I like how many times Damien got the word unfalsifiable into the conversation.\n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: And non-falsifiable a couple times. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: One of those will be incorrect, right? \n\n[laughter]\n\nEVAN: We used not unfalsifiable the first time and I winced.\n\nCASEY: Not unfalsifiable, yeah. \n\nSo I haven't thought on it in a long time. I'm sure I have before, but we can't usually know what is truth. Truth is maybe unattainable in a lot of ways. But we can know when something's false and there's something really satisfying about that. So I'm going to try to hold onto that thought and see how it feels.\n\nMAE: I love that, Casey. \n\nI'm trying to remember the thing that Damien said that I thought was going to be the thing that you were are going to say, Casey, because you're so good at always getting in on the CTA options, but.\n\nEVAN: CTA?\n\nMAE: Oh, thank you, Evan. I'm usually so good about acronyms and saying what they are. Call to action.\n\nEVAN: Oh, I see.\n\nMAE: Well, I'm going to – [laughs] my reflection is that I need to spend some time rethinking all of the stuff that we talked about. Maybe even relistening to be able to relay—I'm trying to come up with another word that starts with R-E. What my reflection is, but it's something Damien said and it was really good and I can't wait to rediscover it.\n\nEVAN: Was it about unconscious bias and that we need to be talking about our biases because if it's not uncomfortable, then it's not productive?\n\nMAE: That’s the one. \n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nMAE: That… maybe it wasn't. I think it is.\n\nDAMIEN: Right.\n\nMAE: I think I have to get back to us. [laughs]\n\nEVAN: I think it was it's not an effective conversation about bias if it's not uncomfortable. \n\nCASEY: Mm, that's it. I love that.\n\nDAMIEN: Evan remembers it because it has a double negative in it.\n\nEVAN: That's possible. It hurt me.\n\n[laughter]\n\nI’ve got to admit, it did hurt saying it. That's the truth. I felt it. \n\n[laughter]\n\nBut it's also true, I'm just – I admit in my head, I am trying to knot the knots [laughs] and it hurts. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Well, don't get tied knots doing it, Evan.\n\nEVAN: Bang, bang and Ruby hurt my brain except they convert things to Boolean. That's a nice little trick in the Ruby language.\n\nMAE: I have a plug and kind of call-to-action. \n\nCASEY: Plug, plug!\n\nMAE: I really just like please everybody, think about all the ways in which you are biased and have healing to do and in your body. Brains, well, they're complicated and maybe we'll have some more studies to tell some more things about them. But our bodies, if you would consider bringing that also into your workplaces, in your families, in your communities about starting to truly talk about ways in which we are not awesome to each other, it will actually help us get more awesome to each other.\n\nEVAN: Amen. Yeah, we don't get better until we talk about where it hurts. Until we face it. \n\nI think I plugged it a few times already, but I'll say it more explicitly: Search Inside Yourself. I don't make money off of this. This is something where I took this class. I took it as a class in D.C. about 6 years ago. I took it with Casey. In fact, we took it the same time and…\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: It has been so impactful in my life in so many different ways that I literally took the time and effort to learn how to teach it. This is something I've been primarily doing in my spare time and it's taken a little bit of time away from work for the actual sit down with other people in trainings with the super experienced trainers. But most of that time has been evenings and weekends pouring over material and cramming all these things into my brain and trying to not only learn it all, but then learn the mental model of it all to be able to share it with other people. \n\nSearch Inside Yourself is a way to build the muscles to do exactly what Mae is urging you to do. That empathy is a skill, you can learn it. That you might not have learned early that enough – I'm extending that plugs to ADHD again, [laughs] but I'll finish. \n\nThat most of us didn't grow up with the minimum recommended dose of Mr. Rogers in our life. I say that as someone who didn't. I know someone, Casey and I have a good friend who did, and I'm really grateful. I guess, I'll mention that friend, Andrew Dunkman, that he grew up with a lot of Mr. Rogers and got me thinking and reflecting a lot more on the man and the more I learned, the more I wish I had paid attention when I was little. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nEVAN: Because a lot of those lessons are really important in the modern world where we need to work with other people and live better with other people, and the consequences of not doing that is a world with a lot of hostility and divisiveness that oh, by the way, we live in right now. So if we all cultivated some more empathy, I think we would all be a lot better off. I think. Sorry, no, I don't think. I believe, but I also have data to support it. Interesting. See, I did use, I think colloquially there. \n\nCASEY: Nuance! Yeah, Andrew has been on the show before. If you miss the episode with Andrew Dunkman, you might want to go check it out. It's pretty good. \n\nAll right. I want to share my plug. I'm so shy about sharing. I have my own business, Happy & Effective, and it is so related to every episode, honestly and finally enough people have encouraged me to talk about it on the show and now is a great moment. Just like Evan is studying to teach Search Inside Yourself, I do workshops kind of like that through my company on emotional intelligence and well-being. Things like debugging your brain. I do a lot of DEI training—diversity, equity and inclusion—strategic thinking, leadership skills. And my approach is so hands-on, it's all breakout rooms and talking to each other and applying it. I give homework. I give reading assignments. \n\nAnyway, if you want to bring that to your company, reach out to me. I'd love to chat with you. We can help make it happen. The website for that is happyandeffective.com.\n\nDAMIEN: Do you make people uncomfortable in that process, Casey? Excellent. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, but they love it because they're in a supportive environment. That might be my superpower, making people comfortable trying do that things. \n\nEVAN: That’s the one. We do that in Search Inside Yourself.\n\nCASEY: It's true in the dance classes I teach, too. I get people who hate dancing, think they hate dancing to become comfortable with it, happy with it.\n\nEVAN: You make people uncomfortable in Search Inside Yourself, too. Yeah.\n\nCASEY: True.\n\nEVAN: Well, you’ve got to stretch yourself. Damien, you haven't gone.\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] I wish I had something to plug. I'll plug some of the books we mentioned. Siddhartha, absolutely amazing.\n\nEVAN: Yes.\n\nDAMIEN: Short narrative. \n\nEVAN: Short read.\n\nDAMIEN: Fun read.\n\nEVAN: Oh, yeah.\n\nCASEY: There's a free link of this on Gutenberg. I put a link in the show notes. It's free. You can just get it on your phone, do it.\n\nDAMIEN: Nonviolent Communication, another amazing book. That's not as much fun to read, but in part incredibly impactful.\n\nEVAN: Oh, there are also courses on Nonviolent Communication that you can take offered around the world really fairly cheaply Some of them tend to be community given. My wife and I went to once some time ago, so.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I've heard good things about those. \n\nEVAN: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And then finally the last one, Conversations For Action. Ooh, I hope I got that right. Fernando Flores. We didn't talk about this.\n\nMAE: Ooh.\n\nDAMIEN: But it talked very much about speech being an act. You're not just talking; you're doing something when you talk. \n\nEVAN: Right. \n\nDAMIEN: Also amazing book.\n\nEVAN: Yeah. There are a lot of books in this list, that makes me happy. I have more things to read now, though. Get it?\n\n[laughter] \n\nLonger reading list.\n\nDAMIEN: Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today.\n\nEVAN: Thank you for having me. \n\nMAE: Yeah, super fun.\n\nEVAN: I was really glad. This was lot of fun.Special Guest: Evan Light.Sponsored By:Compiler (Red Hat): This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange. \r\n\r\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.\r\n \r\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, What is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And, do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?\r\n\r\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role if any, that managers should have in codebases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.\r\n\r\n Listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up with all this and also to know if you’re protected. Don't worry Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team looks at the latest news, stories and topics you might have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable podcast – mixing in-depth discussion, expert guests from around the world, a pinch of humor, and all with an easy to consume style - be sure you check them out today!","content_html":"00:59 - Evans’s Superpower: Talking about topics that aren’t interesting to whomever he’s talking to at the time
\n\n12:45 - Debugging Oneself, Neuroscience, Meditation
\n\n21:57 - The Limitations of Science
\n\n24:54 - The Spiritual Side, Mindfulness, and Meditation
\n\n32:03 - Psychological Safety
\n\n49:28 - Faith and Science
\n\n01:04:08 - Words!
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: The value of being vulnerable.
\n\nEvan: Disagreement leading to deeper discussion. Cultivating more empathy.
\n\nCasey: We can’t usually know what is true, but we can know when something’s false.
\n\nMae: Think about the ways you are biased and have healing to do. Talking about ways we are not awesome to each other will help us actually be awesome to each other.
\n\nSearch Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 262 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I'm joined by Mae Beale.
\n\nMAE: And I'm here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here with our guest this week, Evan Light.
\n\nEVAN: Hi, I'm Evan Light.
\n\nCASEY: Welcome, Evan.
\n\nEvan has been in the tech field for over 25 years, and has the grey hairs to show for it. Evan was searching for the term “psychological safety” long before it became mainstream — just wishes he had it sooner! Evan prizes growing teams and people by creating empowering environments where people feel free to share their ideas and disagree constructively. He lives in the crunchiest part of the DC area, Tacoma Park, Maryland.
\n\nSo glad to have you here, Evan.
\n\nEVAN: Thank you. Glad to be here.
\n\nCASEY: All right, we're going to ask our question we always ask, what is your superpower, Evan and how did you acquire it?
\n\nEVAN: Well, the first thing that came to mind is talking ad nauseam about topics that aren't all that interesting to whoever I'm talking to at the time. And the way I acquired it was being born probably a little bit different with ADHD and I say probably because I still need to prove it concretely that I have ADHD, but I'm working on it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that sounds like a very useful superpower for a podcast guest.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVAN: Well, if you want that guest to take up the whole show, then sure. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Yes, please. We want – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that's why you're here.
\n\nEVAN: Well, I do like conversation, that's the funny part. I like give and takes. Just sometimes I lose track of how long I've been talking.
\n\nMAE: I do that, too, Evan.
\n\nCASEY: Fair.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. I wonder how many of you have ADHD, too. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: I do – there is a statistically significant portion of programmers, for sure.
\n\nEVAN: I don't know that there've been scientific studies of it, but the currently reported number of, I think 4 and a half percent of the population is well-acknowledged to be significantly under reported. At least among adults. And that's because one people say ADHD goes away with age it, in fact, doesn't. We just look – and I kind of hate that word 4-letter word.
\n\nPeople with ADHD often tend to find ways to compensate for it, those of us who don't get diagnoses later in life, if we don't have it already. And two, how many people do you know who seek out mental health evaluations and counseling? So I'm sure it's massively under reported.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which brings up my question. How does one diagnose an adult with ADHD?
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, that's a fun one.
\n\nSo I know of – well, I guess three ways now. One, you are talking to a doctor who themselves has ADHD and has some idea, or a person who has ADHD, not necessarily a doctor, who has a pretty good idea of what to look for usually because they have it. You tell them about some problems you're having and they say, “Huh. Well, I know this problem can sometimes be caused by comorbidity, which is medical term that's often thrown about, this other problem, ADHD.”
\n\nThat's how I found out about it and frankly, I was trying to figure out how to—after having dealt with so many other problems in my life—lose the excess weight, talking to a weight loss medical specialist in D.C., and also has ADHD. He said, “Huh, this all sounds like ADHD. Fill out this really simple test,” that I'll be glad to share with you all. It's just a PDF and you can share it with listeners and you can pretty quickly see for yourself how likely you are based on how you respond. That's one way.
\n\nAnother way is sit down and talk with a psychologist, or a psychiatrist who has some special background in ADHD, who they can just sort of evaluate you.
\n\nAnd the third way is coupled sometimes with the second one, which is what I did this early this morning. There is a test called QbCheck letter—Q letter, b, check. It's an online test that uses your camera and eye tracking, so I guess that uses computer vision as part of it—which I thought found intriguing—to test your attention, apparently how much your eyes are moving, and how quickly and correctly you respond to prompts on the screen.
\n\nI think QbCheck, you're not supposed to take directly from the – maybe you can, but in my case, I'm going through a psychologist who's going to evaluate that test with me and then talk to me about it. However, I'm really, really curious for the results. I kind of wish I was talking to y'all in a week, because I'll get them tomorrow morning.
\n\nI've been a meditator most of my life, I can focus my attention when I well, deliberately concentrate. So I deliberately concentrated taking that test. I wonder if I skewed the test results that way.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'm really eager to find out.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBecause I very naturally sort of slipped into a meditative state with focus on the space on the screen, hit the Space bar when you see a pattern, repeat it, and then just stay there. Okay. It's really hard for me to do this with a lot of distractive noises. All right, I'm just going to be aware of distracting noises, but I'm going to stay with the thing on the screen. That's meditation. Instead of focusing on my breath, I focused on the object on the screen. So I'm dying the know. [laughs] I'll find out tomorrow.
\n\nDAMIEN: So then I have a follow-up question. Why seek a medical diagnosis for ADHD as an adult?
\n\nEVAN: Ohm yeah. So first off, it's how do I debug myself and if I want to speak nerdy about it, but I guess, that's how I approach a lot of things, trying to fix a problem in myself that I've been trying to fix for well, now 48 years, the time 47 years, this was last October with my weight. Okay, now 47 technically. This would've been 40 years and well, nothing else worked then if I have a new potential cause, that gives me another lever I didn't have before. So when the doctor says, “Oh, ADHD might be a contributing factor.” Huh, I need to know more about that. So that's part of it.
\n\nSome of it is I wouldn't say post hoc rationalization, more like post hoc understanding and even self-compassion. I've never really felt like I belonged among most people.
\nOkay, I present straight white male, like everyone else in tech. I was raised Jewish and that means I'm 2% of the population. So around this time of year, I would always feel like the weirdo people are singing songs in school. I'm being forced to sing their songs. Don't like it. I would squirm them every time the Holocaust came up because I lost relatives in it and I've always just had a hard time, frankly, connecting with – or I had a hard time a lot as a kid connecting with other kids.
I was a pariah a lot of my life and there might be an explanation that really, if fairly concrete one of, well, here's why you didn't belong this because your brain is different, and then I'm really interested in exploring that because that gives me a whole different way to evaluate my life.
\n\nWhy did I make some of the decisions that I made? Because I don't like some of them. Why did I have some of the problems that I had? How could I do it differently that it's not just understand the past better and have more compassion, it's how can I live a better life? And that's where I can say, “Oh,” a camera, which you all can't see, I'm holding up my Adderall at this point. Thanks to this gem and is this the other one? No, wrong bottle. Thanks to Adderall and Vyvanse, I'm a much happier, less anxious person on a regular basis. Anxiety and depression used to eat me alive for a lot of my life and I don't have that problem nearly as much, that I get maybe one bad day a month now and it used to be a lot more often than that.
\n\nI wrote a blog post about it because it mattered such so much to me, I wanted people to know. I've always been very pro discussing mental health, normalizing mental health, because I had struggles earlier in my life, too where—this is a whole other tangent—I was a caregiver for 10 years and that really put me through an emotional ringer and a lot of mental healthcare. So I wanted other people to feel comfortable talking about it, partly because I wanted to feel comfortable talking about it.
\n\nSo I want to normalize it also because I know I work with a lot of people who have undiagnosed conditions, where if they just explored them and if they work with me, they've got pretty good insurance. They could. Then, oh my God, why wouldn't you? Okay and I say that there's grief associated with the knowledge.
\n\nWhen you find out you've lived a large chunk of your life in a way with these suffering you didn't have to have, it hurts to realize that. Because on one hand, yay, my life can be better, but oh fuck, everything that came before that if I'd known this, it didn't have to be that bad. That maybe I wouldn't have had those experiences, or maybe they just wouldn't have hurt so much because I had to not take my meds for 24 hours to take that test this morning. I was really unhappy last night. [laughs]
\n\nI wasn't depressed. It was just, I was really irritable, lots of things were making me stabby, and I don't take a big dose of Adderall. It's not like I'm a junkie. I take 7 and a half milligrams, which for most people with ADHD, that's a tiny dose. But I've played with my dosage and that's right about my sweet spot that that's just enough stimulant where I don't feel stimulated, where I don't feel uncomfortable, but I also don't feel irritable and before the meds, irritable, anxious frequently. That was just my normal life; I didn't know that, that I didn't know it could be different, can be different. So that's why you want to know.
\n\nMAE: What an amazing answer, Evan.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Long one, which again, that's superpower. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Love it. We’re with you.
\n\nI would add to your superpowers, the ability and willingness to be vulnerable. Having known you awhile, someone who is willing to just say the things, answer the real answer, and the answer below that answer. There's nothing I like more than talking to people about where they're really, really, really at. I'm just so grateful about how you always do that and there was a couple things in your sharing about not feeling like you belong. It really struck me because you are someone who is always creating opportunities for belonging.
\n\nEVAN: That's a reason for that.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, exactly. It's like a super, very classic tears of a clown that most of the people, myself included, who work to make spaces for people, it's usually because they have experienced that other thing. So I am sorry that you have had such challenge to be so different, but I can say speaking personally and on behalf of many, how grateful I am and we are for what you have done with that.
\n\nEVAN: Thanks. That was something prior to a lot of therapy and medication, I would've cringed at hearing because I wasn't at all comfortable receiving gratitude. I say receiving it, I mean internalizing it. I would hear it and I would wince. I'm not worthy. [laughs] That was what would come to mind. No, thank you.
\n\nBut there really was a selfish – there's always a selfish component to it and that’s, I create spaces for belonging because I want to belong there. That if I don't feel like I belong in other places, then maybe I can create a place I belong and other people can belong to who feel like they don't either. So again, I can help myself, but I can help other people at the same time.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nYou said a second thing that stuck out to me about debugging oneself and it reminds me of our co-host’s book called Debugging your Brain.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd I'm curious, Casey, if you have anything that you might want to say about that topic.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Evan and I talked a lot about this ideas that are in the book before I published it, before I had to talk about it and I would bounce ideas off of him. He knows very well all the stuff in my book. [laughs]
\n\nEVAN: I've read some parts of it multiple times over a few different drafts. I was always bothering Casey with what was less CBT, more self-awareness, more emphasis on self-discovery and meditation. I've softened somewhat in that respect that I used to take a more, or a less generous perspective to meditation versus CBT. That I told Casey before you need to have at least a certain level of self-awareness to be able to be able to CBT and that what I see is a lot of people lack that fundamental self-awareness they need in order to CBT effectively. I don't think that that's true anymore. I think it's just like meditation that you peel layers of the onion, potentially and having more than one tool to do that can be effective, but having too many could be exhausting.
\n\nSo I see a therapist, he doesn't use CBT. He uses – oh geez. Short-term. I always get it wrong. I'll have to look it up, or I'll remember it later in the podcast. It's a 5-letter acronym that's a little convoluted and it's not as common. CBT is about – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Speaking of acronyms, Evan. Would you be willing to say for listeners what CBT is just in case that –?
\n\nEVAN: Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy. Sorry. Cognitive behavioral therapy is where you identify thought, or thoughts that cause the stories and feelings that we're reacting to. The therapy that I have is sort of the inverse it's you start with the feelings, and you go and look at how those show up in the thoughts, stories, and physical manifestations in the body.
\n\nI've seen some intro to philosophy courses; where does thought begin, or where does feeling begin, and which comes first. I don't know that neuroscience has successfully answered this question, but philosophy sure hasn't. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I can tell you with some confidence that neuroscience science is not capable of answering that question. I don't know if it ever will be.
\n\nMAE: Ooh!
\n\nEVAN: That’s interesting. I don't know that – you're saying science won't ever be able to prove a thing?
\n\nDAMIEN: Do say more, do say more.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, that's an absolute, I don't believe in too many of those.
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] Well, we're talking about internal conscious thought, internal experiences. Like I don't think that that's a scientific concept. The best you can get is self-reporting on it, I suppose.
\n\nEVAN: The best we can now. That can change.
\n\nDAMIEN: Sure. And you can measure neurons and interneurons potentials, and serotonin and dopamine levels. But translating that to thought is not a scientific concept.
\n\nEVAN: Not yet. I say not yet, but we keep developing technologies at smaller and smaller scales and if we can develop technologies – we have nanotechnology already. We have complicated enough systems that we can inject into the body that can measure this information and send telemetry on it and you would probably end up with massive amounts of telemetry. But if you could correlate that with honest self-reported thought, maybe you end up with a Rosetta Stone of sorts, or really, really heavily data loaded Rosetta Stone.
\n\nDAMIEN: I mean, and that's as close as you're going to get in biological telemetry coupled with self-reporting.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which is what we have now.
\n\nEVAN: But except not at that level of fidelity that if you get a high enough fidelity, maybe you can approximate what people are actually thinking with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh.
\n\nDAMIEN: We can do that.
\n\nCASEY: Let's talk about this fidelity. This is my background, neuroscience.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Right. I know. And a little bit of mine now.
\n\nCASEY: So my favorite types of studies, when I was studying this at Yale were the single neuron studies, because then you really know the electrical, what's going on over time for single cell. And I always wish there were more studies that did 1 million cell study—I don't know how many neurons are in the brain—but every single neuron in the brain I want to measure at the same time without the needles affecting anything about how it works, which – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Right.
\n\nCASEY: Another problem.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: And then that's just the electrical part, but you can't – from that measure, the epigenetic modifications to each gene over time in each neuron and oh my God, it's so complicated to truly represent everything that's going on at the lowest level that I would want to do. So that's why there's some studies on single neurons in organisms with only one neuron, or very few neurons. They just have 6, some model organisms do. But then a human brain, oh. Our best – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Let’s say, but at 6 neurons – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: [inaudible] proxy for neuronal activation. That's an MRI. And I would love to get a full [chuckles] download of everything going on in the brain in every way whatsoever. But that is so sci-fi, I can't imagine what it would look like today.
\n\nDAMIEN: I think the focus on the neurological system is completely misplaced. Like I can tell what people are thinking by their respiration rate.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: By the pupil dilation stuff, I can see it. You can see people's heart rate by the change in color and their face.
\n\nEVAN: But there are so many indicators. And so, you see now we're getting into another topic that's interesting to me, too. Because I've been learning to teach the Search Inside Yourself program, which came out of Google from over 10 years ago, which is a combination of neuroscience backed by about 20 different neuroscience studies and neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness to develop leadership skills and to increase performance.
\n\nThere are a lot of things you're saying, Damien that neuroscience has been able to prove already, that we can prove that – neuroscience has demonstrated for example, that habits, or that behaviors that we repeat, the brain optimizes for those habits. That's neuroplasticity that the brain alters its structure based on the activities we perform. In Search Inside Yourself, we cite a study where experienced meditators versus unexperienced meditators, and experienced meditator's brain is substantially different that they –
\n\nSo for example, that we can see in FMRIs, for example, that they experience less anticipatory stress before pain than someone who is not an experienced meditator, that they spend less time in distress after that pain. After the pain is applied to mentioned anticipatory so they know it's coming. It's not anxiety, it's they know it's going to happen, then they experience it and then the time after, they recover faster.
\n\nSo this is proven under FMRI. There are a lot of things like that, where we have that at kind of the macro level, we got really into the weeds, because I do that with the ADHD, I think. But talking about what if we could model, if we could record every neuron, every electrical transaction, every electrical exchange in the brain, but then there's also the biochemical exchanges, too, the neurotransmitters. Casey's point.
\n\nHonestly, I didn't think of the actual genetic modifications that occur, but that's I guess, also a manifestation of the neuroplasticity itself perhaps.
\n\nMy point is—because I got a little into the sci-fi land again—we have these studies that show that the brain can be intentionally altered, that we do this all the time when we practice any skill, we’re altering our brain.
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\n\nMAE: I wanted to get back to the thing that Damien opened up about, the limitations of science. My undergrad is biochem and what I realized is most inquiry, most scientific inquiry, is fundamentally a result of a discomfort with the unknown.
\n\nEVAN: Hmm.
\n\nMAE: And I went to massage school for a little while and I lived at Kripalu the yoga retreat center. So I've been around some of these same circles, Evan and what I find is a lot of times, those folks will use a lot of scientific words and rationale [laughter] to basically justify the fact that they are supporting people, deepening their spirituality. To use science as a validity tool about anything to do with one's spirit, [laughs] I have a lot of feelings about that. It grates on my ears when I start to hear people trying to quantify and justify. I want some mystery, I'm okay with it and I think there's a piece in there.
\n\nI agree, though, with all of your opening statements, Evan, about knowing more about one's self and what you can do with that. But I don't dream of every neuron being measured because I think it will actually shroud our ability to understand the things we need and want to as humankind. I don't know.
\n\nEVAN: So – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: I see a pattern, that bothers me a lot, that's very related. Some people take the science to the extreme and they say, “I will only believe the things that have been proven.”
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: “I will not believe things that have not been proven. Even if they haven't been disproven either, the unknown things, I just won't believe in them at all.” Like meditation wasn't respected by a lot of science thinkers until now there's more studies saying it – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nCASEY: Does things. But we knew it worked for a very, very long time.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVAN: See. And because of the ADHD, I literally have to take notes because I don't want to lose topics.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, me too.
\n\nEVAN: I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. Ah.
\n\nMAE: It's quite why – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: I wonder – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: I'm an interrupter in life, Evan too is because I'll forget about it if I don't say it right then.
\n\nEVAN: Me too. Hey, that's ADHD possibly.
\n\nMAE: Oh yeah. I'm in the group.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I relate to that.
\n\nEVAN: Okay.
\n\nCASEY: I relate to almost every ADHD meme I see and I wonder if I have it sometimes, but I don't have a diagnosis and I don't feel like it would help me that much because I'm not looking for the med part and I am already doing the coping mechanisms part, like the non-medication therapies for ADHD. I just read everything I can about every mental illness in case there are any nuggets that help improve my life.
\n\nEVAN: Mae, what I'd say first is I don't think I brought the spiritual side into anything I said.
\n\nMAE: You didn't.
\n\nEVAN: Yet, yet.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Yet.
\n\nEVAN: Yet. I say yet. I mean, sure, I'll just come out and say, “Okay, by the way, I'm a Buddhist.” I didn't start there, though, or I suppose in a weird kind of way maybe I did. I just didn't mean to. No, I started with meditation at age 17 because I was an angry teenager and I kind of accidentally fell into it.
\n\nDAMIEN: How does an angry teenager get started with meditation? That’s a key for me.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. Well, it wasn't intentional. It was my mother didn't want to pay for Kung Fu lessons, which is what I wanted because I wanted to beat the crap out of things to take my anger out on them. Come on, that seems obvious, right? Physically, I don't know, punishing inanimate objects. But there was this really nice aikido dōjō nearby and “Why don't you try that? That's cheaper.” “Oh, okay. Fine.”
\n\nI didn't know anything about aikido at the time. It also turned out that I found myself in one of the most internal, if not the most internally focused aikido schools of aikido that exists in the world. It's called Shinshin Toitsu Aikido. I’ll provide a link to it. Also known globally as the Ki Society, not K-E-Y, but K-I.
\n\nEvery Sunday, there was this lovely woman named Mary K who started with a meditation, an hour-long meditation set, and I found that I had so much more peace that. I just fell in love with it and I didn't continue to practice rigorously after going –when I started in college, I tried to. They have a dōjō in Charlottesville where they did.
\n\nBut it stayed with me and then when my first wife was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease—huge tangent there—I remembered before I went to University of Virginia, they gave me this reading list and they said, “Here are all these books we want you to read.” I didn't know that I wasn't going to be tested on any of the stuff, but I felt obligated to read it. One of those was Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which is a story – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: So good.
\n\nEVAN: Absolutely excellent book.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, okay. So I remembered Siddhartha. Buddhism. Yeah, there is this whole religion that says life hurts. Hmm, maybe I should explore that. That's not really what it says, but that suffering is unavoidable and the whole religion, such as it is, religion is about how do we engage with that, or at least the philosophy of it. And I found a website and a podcast that is currently defunct called Zencasts, which is ironic considered we are using an app called Zencastr, and that comes from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. I've been listening to them ever since 2006 to the Dharma Talks, which is a talk given by a person who is usually an ordained priest of Buddhism.
\n\nNow they have a podcast called Audio Dharma that's still running. That's recordings of their meditations and their Dharma Talks and I followed that for years and years and years telling myself I don't do this religion thing and I gave up in religion decades before, but mindfulness. Okay, that’s secular version. So that mindfulness, I'll do that. It turns out, I guess when you get into that enough, you're going to be exposed and you listen to enough talks, you're eventually going to be exposed to some ideas that aren't just mindfulness, that are Buddhist related and quickly realize okay, fine. Maybe I can self-describe I did of, I can maybe there is an identity of secular Buddhism. It turns out that's most Western Buddhism. Most people don't buy into the reincarnation thing, karma, and all of that but the philosophy.
\n\nMAE: I'm a huge Pema Chödrön fan.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. I've read some of hers. ADHD makes it really hard for me to take in any book that's non-fiction in its entirety, but I've read some Pema Chödrön and I've read some of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Some people object to the “his holiness” part. Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gil Fronsdal, who is the lead teacher at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and a few others. I just got a huge soft spot for Gil because his was the first Dharma Talk I ever listened to and now I just find his voice so soothing. Let’s say I'm a Gill fanboy.
\n\nMAE: Love it.
\n\nEVAN: But the mystical versus scientific part that I feel you. The analogy that comes to mind; I got really pissed at George Lucas when he started explaining the Force away with Midi-Chlorians.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's like, “God damn it, George, take that back.”
\n\nDAMIEN: [inaudible].
\n\nEVAN: The Force is supposed to be magic. Don't take magic from the world. That just makes me upset. On one hand, I feel what you're saying, Mae. On the other hand, I subscribe to the notion that I'm a biological machine and with adequate science, I'm probably fully deterministic. At the same time, I wouldn't want people to be able to read my mind and with businesses out there like Meta AKA Facebook. No, fuck that.
\n\nMAE: Yo!
\n\nDAMIEN: I want to say these are not contradicting philosophies. You can believe in a clockwork universe that absolutely is deterministic. While at the same time, knowing that there are things that science cannot prove that are true. Like that's a scientific fact. There are things that are true, that science cannot prove and then there are things that are literally not scientific. My favorite color is blue. That's a fact. That's not a scientific fact. There is no science that's going to prove that. The closer you’re going to get – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: I wonder if that's really true that no science currently they could prove that. Still, I question whether it's universally true no science could ever prove that.
\n\nDAMIEN: The best you can get is correlation between a physical response and a particular wavelength of light.
\n\nEVAN: Again, currently. I still – I think there's a chain of causality there that you might be able to connect with enough really, really deep telemetry, which we do not have nor seem likely to have any time at all in our lifetime.
\n\nMAE: I'm still on the I don't care how many stats there are, there's still more. And to your thing, Damien – [overtalk][
\n\nEVAN: I hope so.
\n\nMAE: The definition that I learned in school, in college of scientific fact is not yet then proven false. Like that's the best that we can do.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: And this is pretty limited.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, absolutely.
\n\nMAE: Also, when you look at the history of scientific thought, which I have taught before, it's fascinating what we used to think were facts.
\n\n[laughter].
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: And when we just like – we are constantly talking about it like it's just this aggregation of facts over time and really, it's just constantly rehabbing everything that we got attached to. So all of the things that we even are referring to as facts are things we now know, or whatever, or things we will find out later. Yeah, and most everything we think right now is the probability of it being told is very high.
\n\nEVAN: Well, that's why science calls them theories, right.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Because fair theory means this has been demonstrated to be true, given the information we have available, but theories can also be proven false.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. And I love that word, non-falsifiability, like scientific facts are falsifiable.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And scientific theories are falsifiable and if you work really hard to falsify them and you fail, then it probably true.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVAN: I mean, if –
\n\nDAMIEN: That's what we call true.
\n\nEVAN: This is where we can get down to what's the definition of facts, scientific facts. You could call measurements, facts, but even a measurement is going to be some degree of approximation because you are always rounding at some point. [laughs] Right?
\n\nDAMIEN: I agree.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. I'm starting have so much fun right now.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOkay, but there's also generally not like truth, capital T, is usually very – includes a lot of contradictions and if it is one way and everybody answers that same thing, that's probably fallible. [laughs] Like when you start to get the contradictions and see a richer picture, that's when I feel closer to whatever truth that is.
\n\nSo when people tell me that there's such and such kind of person and they think this kind of way, or a scientific fact, it's the only one truth. This is when I definitely don't believe whatever it is. So that's also why I like to include the – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, group think.
\n\nMAE: Mystery magical option in there too, because unless you're including that, you're not getting the success of approximation to the truth in my book.
\n\nEVAN: See, this is where I start – Casey was going there, too. This is when I start thinking about human dynamics and teams that as a leader, or as a manager—because there is a difference between management and leadership, frankly—I tend to be my most uncomfortable when no one disagrees with me.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThat if I'm – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nEVAN: Or I should say if I'm putting an idea out there that is fairly obvious, that we're all breathing in oxygen, that I'm not too concerned about if people disagree with me. When I'm putting an idea out there that's fairly novel and there's some risk associated with it and no one says anything to disagree, I get nervous. “Wait a minute. No one has a problem with this at all. Do you feel safe enough to respond? What's going on here?” [chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. What's more likely: everybody agrees, or people don't feel unsafe disagreeing?
\n\nMAE: Yo!
\n\nEVAN: Right? Whoa. No, nom and you just used one of the most painful things you could use with me: double negative.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOw. No, don't do that. It's like using unless in a Ruby statement, it hurts my brain.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, Damien. It's so true. It is hard to foster environments where disagreement is welcomed, acceptable, encouraged, sustained. [laughs]
\n\nEVAN: I know what I do, and I know to try to do that. I also know it's not universally successful was I was given a little dose of much needed humility in that regard recently with a team member of mine.
\n\nI think, Mae, Casey, you've seen this with me before that I tend to be one of the earlier people to deliberately be vulnerable, to admit some shortcoming, or some mistake. That I try to establish, “Hey I'm okay admitting I'm wrong, or I've been wrong and if it's okay for me, if you see me as an authority figure, this is me trying to tell you I want you to feel okay doing it, too.” That I'm up here saying, “Hey, I have to –” Well, that time I chose not to swear for whatever reason. I think I'm in a little bit more of the work context, I'm talking about teams and no one's throwing stones at me yet. So maybe it's safe for you to do it, too.
\n\nThat works for some people. I – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: That's so important. It's so important to come from people at the top, near the top.
\n\nMAE: Exactly.
\n\nDAMIEN: Like when your boss is like, “Oh, I was wrong about this.” When the CTO was like, “Oh yeah, last week, I knocked off production. Ooh, my bad.” [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nEVAN: But when you say that, I tried to think about the counterpoint because I've seen this not succeed. Sometimes I've been confused by it. There's well, what happened after you made that mistake? Was there an accountability conversation? What did that look like? Were you taking a risk, or did you just make a “dumb mistake?” Was it really bad judgment? That there's a difference between being vulnerable and creating psychological safety and having accountability, and that can be a kind of fuzzy boundary.
\n\nBut what I found is holding accountability, you got to do that in private, because that disrupts psychological safety and you have to think about, when you're holding accountability well, who's going to hear about the repercussions and what will that do to psychological safety? I won't go into details, but I can think of a situation where I saw someone perhaps have a severe lapse in judgment, get fired over it and then having a chilling response on an organization as a result, causing a severe reduction in psychological safety.
\n\nI'll say, I had no part of this. [chuckles] Just want to be clear. I do not reach for the fire button when it comes to people making mistakes. It's okay, how do we learn from this and get better is my preference That when someone makes a mistake, I think of it usually as okay, you made the mistake. How did the system allow for this in the first place?
\n\nDAMIEN: Bingo.
\n\nCASEY: Yes, first place.
\n\nEVAN: And how can we prevent this in the future such that the system puts you in a position where you are able to make that mistake? Can we put in guardrails and checks and does the danger, the magic red button, does it need to have a safety cover on it, for example? That how many different protections can we put in place and are there enough of them?
\n\nMAE: And I try to do that. I'm an engineer manager, also Evan, and similarly, try to demonstrate vulnerability and publicly share mistakes. There are ways in which that impacts some people positively. There are ways in which that me as a white person admitting mistake is a different deal and me as a woman admitting a mistake is a different deal. And like – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Totally.
\n\nMAE: there's just so much in there about, I appreciated that you were going into the what happens after, because we can get people to say things. But then if the system does not actually hold what it is that people are saying, and if the system does not hold accountable to the people who are most marginalized in the system, that's who gets to define whether, or not accountability is real, whether, or not if there is psychological safety, et cetera. It's not for the people with the most power to assess.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. This really resonates with me, particularly because of a conversation I had with one of my directors at work lately. But I found it really profound when this one director of mine was very open about their experience as someone more diverse than me, let's just say, because I at least appear to be about as non-diverse as you get at least on the outside.
\n\nTheir very real concerns because of the diversity, how that might impact their career, how people perceive them, and how they're perceived impacts their career growth. I was really grateful and humbled that they shared that with me and so, I took all that in and everything that they were telling me about the concerns, thought about it some, and that I received that sharing has impacted my management on my team, that I don't talk to others on the team about this person's diversity, but I am trying to get them to reflect further as a way of trying to you check for bias with other people.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. That's been my main mission. [laughs] I feel like most of my life is like, can we just say and see when we are biased because we are of a culture that is incredibly biased and unjust, and there is no way to be separate from it.
\n\nOne of my very favorite quotes from Diane di Prima, this beat poet, is, “For every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy.”
\n\nEVAN: God, I feel that.
\n\nMAE: As much as we can be change agents and social justice advocates, ultimately, we are still of the thing.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. And yes.
\n\nMAE: And I try to go on record all the time. I am definitely racist, sexist, [chuckles] homophobic, atheist, and ageist; I am all of the things. I catch myself all of the time. And – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: And then there are the times you don't catch yourself, too, probably – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Fair.
\n\nEVAN: Which is unconscious bias, because that's why I try to make other people aware by approaching it indirectly is unconscious bias can creep in so many different ways and okay, so all I can do is kind of explore this person's surface area and see, well, what is it you are really, what story are you telling yourself here? What data are you operating on? Is this congruent when you look at all of it together, or do you see gaps for yourself?
\n\nI haven't had anyone's light bulb go off just yet, but I'm still working on some people and maybe it's possible that there are legitimate concerns, too. That can be accompanied by unconscious bias and that can get really hard to deal with.
\n\nCASEY: I read a paper recently about unconscious bias training being not effective at all ever. And then I read another paper saying – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: What!
\n\nCASEY: It's not effective when it's done very poorly, like in our [inaudible] – [overtalk]
\n[laughter]
And it is effective when you have people talk about it with each other, actually apply it, and think about it.
\n\nEVAN: It's not effective?
\n\nCASEY: And that’s not so – no, no one was surprised.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Put it on my feed on Twitter and everyone was like, “Duh. But now we have science.”
\n\nEVAN: When it's done poorly, does it work. Hello? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: But the addition to that is most of the time it's done poorly.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That's true, too. Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And I'll give you my personal opinion. I didn't come up with this myself. If you're comfortable doing it, it's not being done well. [laughs]
\n\nEVAN: That's the truth.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nCASEY: Well said.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. This is where I'll go back to meditation and mindfulness training, that with mindfulness, you become more aware. I've become more aware of the passing thoughts that I have; they're automatic thoughts. Buddhism has this idea of monkey mind that the mind is a machine that shatters like a monkey. It's a machine for creating thought and we have metacognition if we're aware of our thoughts, if we're paying attention to our thoughts.
\n\nI have noticed more of that chatter and oh, whoa, whoa. I didn't – I thought that? What? Okay, let's slow down here for a moment and explore that because that made me really uncomfortable that that went through my head in that moment about that person whether it's racist, sexist, whatever. I'm human, these thoughts come up and now I'm never getting a job again. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Well, I went first so.
\n\nEVAN: I know you did so, you were vulnerable. Thank you. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Do you all know about Resmaa Menakem?
\n\nEVAN: No.
\n\nCASEY: No.
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. Okay, so check it out. This guy says he wrote this book called My Grandmother's Hands and he's saying that trauma is passed down physiologically.
\n\nEVAN: I've heard this.
\n\nMAE: And part of the reason why we have not been able to deal with bias and all of this is because we are trying to do it through the mind – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Really?
\n\nMAE: And that is not the place to go. It's actually physiological healing that we all are responsible to do as part of contributing toward creating a different world is like it's within us.
\n\nSo his premises that the white-on-white trauma in the Middle Ages got passed down and that is part of how white people have been [chuckles] passing along a lot more trauma, I'll say that.
\n\nAnyway, the book is fascinating and the first time I've heard a non-brain thought focused way to approach social change.
\n\nDAMIEN: I feel this very, very strongly, like there's such a focus and this is why I bristled at our neuroscience experts here [laughs] and their lovely focus on neurology. Like there's so much focus on neurons, the neurological system, and the cognitive mind and the cognitive mind is such a tiny, tiny part of what we are.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, true.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nEVAN: We're a whole system. So no, I was going to say something, not double negative, not all that dissimilar.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYou said closer to the mic to be ironic. That they're interconnected. Casey was talking to it, too that thought creates physiological changes, creates chromosomal changes so, genetic changes.
\n\nMAE: And vice versa.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and you can tell this vice versa. That the most obvious way to do this is next time you're angry, breathe slowly. It's literally impossible to be angry and breathing peacefully.
\n\nMAE: Hmm. Oh my gosh. This is such a good challenge.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, pretty much.
\n\nMAE: I know this is what Casey is going to quote at the end.
\n\nEVAN: I mean, when you say breathe peacefully, let's be clear. You can slow your breathing down, but not be breathing peacefully when you're slowing your breathing down. But now it's how do we define peacefully?
\n\nDAMIEN: Sure.
\n\nCASEY: Cognition!
\n\nEVAN: That makes you really pedantic here. But as a meditator? Yeah. Mae, you meditate, too, though? Don't you? I thought.
\n\nMAE: I’m a dabbler in all of the things.
\n\nEVAN: So what is breathing peacefully that deep breaths will tend to encourage the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and over that encouragement, the parasympathetic nervous system, the so-called rest and digest. So it's hard to sustain deep breathing for a long time and not calm down, but I'm sure it's possible. I've had some experiences where I've been so emotionally activated—you could use the word triggered. Take your pick, some people don't like it. But at that point, if there's a trauma involvement, then it can be really hard to use the physiological to tamp down the emotional.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, what I will say is just on a more fundamental level. Your thoughts, your emotions, they're physical, and they're embodied.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, totally.
\n\nDAMIEN: They are literally in your body and so, they change your body and your body changes them, and they're not a separate thing.
\n\nEVAN: So you thought we were disagreeing? That's neuroscience, too. Sorry. Eh, you failed.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: I failed at disagreeing.
\n\nMAE: Ah!
\n\nDAMIEN: I will never make it on cable television now.
\n\nEVAN: No, I think this is what you call violent agreement.
\n\nCASEY: Yes!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, for a lot of these things we're talking about, I quickly go to like, “Yes, there's even a science that supports it.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEven if we don't have the science to support it yet because there's so much we don't know about everything.
\n\nEVAN: I feel like we've kind of got to meet the press table here because we've got the two on two of the people who want to say, “No, it's not science,” and the people on the other side were saying, “Hey, this thing you're not saying is science, there's science for this!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: I was saying it about the audience.
\n\nMAE: I’m just saying I don’t want to have to use science in order to be able to have faith. That's what I'm saying.
\n\nEVAN: Ah.
\n\nCASEY: Mm hmm.
\n\nEVAN: Well, I would argue that even for those of us who don't really want to have faith, that there's always something we're taking on faith.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nEVAN: Because there's a lot of it, because even those of us who think we know science so well, there are plenty of things we're ignorant of that we have, that we operate with very large assumptions on. We essentially take on faith because we don't understand them.
\n\nDAMIEN: The scientific method is taken on faith.
\n\nMAE: Mm!
\n\nEVAN: Oh, oh god.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nEVAN: Someone get Gödel, Escher, Bach; I think we’re hitting recursion.
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, I’m having so much fun!
\n\nEVAN: Another book I’ve read some of. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I always think about the audience we're talking to. So I'm well-equipped to talk to people who really want to hear some science because I can bring up some like, “Well we don't know this part over here,” and I'm very happy to be the person to talk to those people. I am much less well-equipped to talk to someone more spiritual, who doesn't want to think about science things at all. I'm not well-equipped to talk – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: No, I've loved doing that.
\n\nCASEY: Some people are fluent in both, but I specialize in the science part.
\n\nEVAN: I’m fluent in it but I – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Conversational, perhaps.
\n\nEVAN: I like areas of disagreement and this really makes some people very uncomfortable. In student government in college, I prized the people who thought very differently for me because I often learned from them and had insights that wouldn't have otherwise. I've made my in-law super uncomfortable because they're deeply religious. I am so not. And when I asked them challenging questions, I think they thought I was trying to start a fight and said, “No, I was trying to start a discussion to explore and learn,” but they got upset. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Yes, I have this, too, Evan.
\n\nDAMIEN: A lot of people don't want to explore and learn because they're afraid of what they'll find, and I think – I know that's true for me in certain areas.
\n\nEVAN: I don't know that that's accurate, but I also don’t think – I'll be frank, I don't think it's all that generous either.
\n\nDAMIEN: No, it's not generous. Of course.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, and I've been tested on this a lot, because my wife is really quite religious and I'm not. So we're a really interesting pair that way, that I think it's instead that they're projecting negative intent on me because they're more accustomed to people challenging their belief from an aggressive and a hostile place.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's also fair.
\n\nEVAN: Where frankly, I probably had some of that unintentionally, but my true intent was—and this goes back to something you were saying earlier, Mae that I wanted to say and I forgot because of ADHD probably—that my vulnerability, my discussions with people, it's because I'm a little obsessed with truth. And one doesn't find truth through constant agreement. One finds truth by taking your truth, comparing it to other people's truths that are different, testing them, and the exploring, which I think that's where we get the assignment – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: And then combining them enzymatically. Let’s just use a science word to prove this approach.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. You look for the yes ands, but then you also look for the oh, these don't connect here, here, here, and here and the person with more faith might just say, “We have to just agree to disagree here,” and I might just have to, “Okay, fine. You're saying you don't want to talk about that part is what I hear then.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nOne of my best friends when I lived in Eastern shore of Maryland, devoutly religious evangelical and… also in the computers. When we met, we would often go out to lunch and just have these really strong disagreements that I always found fascinating. We would just talk and talk and talk and inevitably, it would get into religion and God, and he would get down to “Because God has a plan for every one of us,” and I'd say, “Yeah, I don't believe it.” [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that's unfalsifiable.
\n\nEVAN: Right, so we’re back to those I can't prove it's false thing; you can’t prove it – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh, now we're just having fun. And then – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Yeah, I can't prove the non-existence of God, ooh, I'm done. That's the Godwin's law of talking about religion. That’s what's Godwin's love every conversation on the internet inevitably becomes about Hitler. Boom.
\n\nMAE: Wow.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: But it's an important point. Like when you even as a person who – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: I just mentioned Hitler, sorry. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Even as a person who has taken on faith, this shared objective, external reality exists, [chuckles] there are still things that are unfalsifiable and so you have to – well, what I like to do is I get to choose. I get to choose what I believe. [laughs]
\n\nEVAN: We all do.
\n\nDAMIEN: I choose the beliefs that serve me the best.
\n\nEVAN: Or we all think we do. We might – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I believe that, too.
\n\nMAE: Ah!
\n\nEVAN: We might add a free will, but you might believe we do and I'm not so sure. I suspect we don't.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that's also non-falsifiable. [chuckles]
\n\nEVAN: I know.
\n\nDAMIEN: And so, it's another opportunity for me to choose a belief that there – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Right. Currently, I'm falsifiable and as I said earlier, closing another loop, I'm not sure I want to live in the world where we can prove it because it'll get misused.
\n\nMAE: Mm yeah. There's no deal there, too.
\n\nA loop piece, too, that I wanted to say is, Evan on the thing about being interpreted as being consternatious, or content – like trying to create conflict. Disagreement to me is not conflict. [chuckles] Like you can disagree and not be in conflict, but I am from upstate New York and the way that I talk –
\n\nEVAN: [laughs] Wait, Upstate, not Manhattan.
\n\nMAE: Correct.
\n\nEVAN: So there's different. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Correct. I can sound like I am having a problem with someone because I'm challenging a thing they said and those are just very different to me; challenging a thing that someone said versus having a problem with a person and what they think. My coined phrase I made up is “conflict is care.” So if they're really in conflict, it's because there's emotion involved. Somebody has to care for there to be actual conflict.
\n\nDAMIEN: Otherwise, you walk away.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: So like, whatever. That was weird.
\n\nEVAN: So few things. First, conflicting disagreement to me, they can mean the same thing. Conflict doesn't have to imply hostility, or violence. Two different books come to mind based on what you just said.
\n\nOne, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I love that book because one example, you know it's a management book because it has a four-quadrant diagram in it and – [laughs] Mae’s laughing. That's not on the audio.
\n\nBut I love that book and there's the top left quadrant, I can't remember what it's called. I always forget these, which is the you're just not contributing because you don't care enough. So there's the whole right side of the diagram is you care enough to intervene. I think the bottom right is can't forget, but basically, you're saying the truth but you're just a jerk about it. It's the I'm sharing and I'm just being blunt and I'm not addressing your feelings on the matter at all, I'm just sharing. And the top right, the radical candor is I care and I'm sharing to try to help so it speaks to compassion in the sense of, I see a problem. I'm offering because I care and I'm trying to, I'm taking action because I have empathy.
\n\nBy the way, I'm almost literally borrowing from a Search Inside Yourself program when I say that, when I describe compassion that way.
\n\nThe other book that came to mind… Oh, yeah was Nonviolent Communication. I think that's – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Another excellent book.
\n\nEVAN: Daniel Rosenberg. Yeah, that has been a hugely impactful book on me. Some people have a lot of difficulty with the notion that speech can be violent. But it comes down to what does the word violence mean because if you think of violence in the form of violation, if you are saying things that are unwelcome to another person, that is a violation.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, also the author breaks that down, clears that up in the very beginning. What they mean by violence is causes harm.
\n\nEVAN: And then quantifying harm.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: There's not just physical harm. Although, then we get to the neuroscience and physiological part, emotional harm is physical harm because – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nEVAN: These things we call feelings—I'm going to Search Inside Yourself again here, these things we call feelings, they are felt sensations in the body. They are manifestations of emotions that are in the brain.
\n\nDAMIEN: I just want to say that again. Feelings are felt sensations.
\n\nEVAN: Bingo. So when I feel bad, it's I literally feel bad.
\n\nI was telling my therapist yesterday when I was having a bad day, I said, “I reached right for the pain relief that day,” and he said, “Oh yeah, I totally do that, too.” Because the felt sensations in the body are hurt and hey, guess what? Pain relief medication can treat the physical hurt and if you treat the physical hurt, that can help with the emotional and mental hurt, too a little because you don't have that exacerbating the emotional hurt. You don't have that exacerbate – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: This is not just true. It's studied.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVAN: Casey, blow people's minds and go to the study in the show notes.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: I bet you can find it. I hope it's public.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: This is something that drove me nuts in the Search Inside Yourself program. That I'm that guy that when I'm looking at the neuroscience, it's okay, I see this study. I'm reading through this study. Cool. I want to know something about some of the other studies that are referred to you in here because I have more questions. Wait, this shit’s behind a pay wall? Fuck this.
\n\nCASEY: Ah, yeah.
\n\nEVAN: There are so many studies behind the pay wall unless you're associated with the university. You can't get them. Oh my God. I hate them.
\n\nDAMIEN: Pro tip, scientific authors love sharing their work and they own the copyright to it. [chuckles] Email them, they'll send it to you.
\n\nEVAN: Oh, you can't see my huge O face. [laughs] I am totally doing it.
\n\nMAE: But – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: Thank you.
\n\nMAE: As someone who worked in higher ed for many years, that is consistently being defunded. Scientific inquiry happening in higher ed is like the places where the money goes and what research is allowed to happen is a pretty murky water. And so, paying the distribution place to help there be some peer reviewed studies out there that are not only and solely funded by big industry [chuckles] no names that I'll give them my 3 bucks.
\n\nEVAN: I wish it was just 3 bucks, though.
\n\nMAE: I know, yes.
\n\nEVAN: I'm looking at wait, you want to purchase this journal so you can – some of them you can rent, I think they said, but – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Also – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: [inaudible] journal is like 250 bucks for a single journal.
\n\nMAE: Oh no.
\n\nDAMIEN: And do the journals pay the – do they pay the authors? Do they pay the peer reviewers?
\n\nMAE: Yeah. You get – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, okay
\n\nMAE: Well, it depends on the journal, on the industry, but there is a whole extra thing about peer review being a part of kind of community service. It's like open source. You have to have done it to be able to be let in the club and keep up your reps, or whatever. So there's definitely a lot of peer review stuff that happens. That's not as cool for, especially earlier career researchers, but there's definitely some funding that really goes back.
\n\nEVAN: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Getting research funded in academia is always hard, so sure. I mean, if it's a few bucks here and there, it's one thing, but 250 bucks for a journal.
\n\nMAE: That’s fascinating, that’s great.
\n\nEVAN: Damien, I'm going to try your idea. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: The research I did was funded by the military because it was PTSD related.
\n\nEVAN: Oh.
\n\nCASEY: Even though for my interest, it was basic science; how do epigenetics affect memory. But that is the application is PTSD and the military has a big budget for that.
\n\nEVAN: Sounds like, you know what?
\n\nCASEY: I always felt a little weird about it because that's – I don't know. I didn't want to get money from the military, but I did want –
\n\nMAE: A lot of [inaudible] has – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: The research was important – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Always come from the military.
\n\nCASEY: A lot has. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Hey, this internet we're talking on? [laughs] This internet thing that we're using right now?
\n\nMAE: Yeah, sure.
\n\nEVAN: That little thing came from this thing called defense something research project agency, I think DARPA, ARPANET originally, and that was the internet way back when.
\n\nMID-ROLL 2: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
\n\nCompiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.
\n\nCompiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?
\n\nI checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.
\n\nListen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.
\n\nCASEY: We've been talking about knowledge and what is truth, and I want to bring up an idea that I'm surprised surprises so many people. I use these words completely differently—believe, think, no, wonder, want, need. Every word like that is unique to me. So if I say, I believe that's true. That doesn't mean I think it's true, or I know it's true, or I want it to be true. It means I believe; it's a belief I have based on something. Do you want to know what that something is? I can tell you what that comes from. Or I know this is true. I reserve that for personal experience, or there's a study.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: In the study, I might not even use no for, because they can be contradicted as we're talking about all the whole episode.
\n\nEVAN: Can we survey listeners? Because I'm actually curious how many people make this distinction. I do, too.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: So I'm actually curious now is this normal, or are you and I weird in similar ways that way? Because again, how did I end up finding out I have ADHD and why did it matter to me? It's how am I different?
\n\nMAE: And we can a tarot deck out it.
\n\nEVAN: Oh and by the way, I mentioned comorbidities of ADHD. ADHD and autism spectrum disorders, they tend to coexist. There are a lot of people on autism spectrum disorders have ADHD, also comorbid anxiety, depression, sometimes eating disorders, ding, ding, ding and rejection sensitivity disorder. The list goes on and on and on.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: So some of these patterns, I've occasionally wondered hey, am I somewhere on the autism spectrum? I don't know. But I sometimes get into my clarifications and get really pedantic about them.
\n\nCASEY: I can be pedantic. Sometimes. I try to go light on it.
\n\nMAE: I like to be pedantic, too! [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: I promise you, normal people do not make distinctions between those words, but normal people are generally very sloppy with their language.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. We can't afford to; forever programming changes the way we think.
\n\nMAE: I would like to normalize this word we're using right now pretty liberally, normal. Speaking of being special about our words.
\n\nEVAN: Neurotypical and neuroatypical – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Common.
\n\nEVAN: Might be a little bit better.
\n\nCASEY: Common, I like better most of the time.
\n\nDAMIEN: Common is the word what I should have used.
\n
EVAN: Yeah. I don't like normal so much. Common, okay. I tend to – there's a whole ADHD Twitter. I could probably link to a few lists. There's just the ADHD hashtag gets thrown lot around a lot and you see people talk about NT an awful lot. They’re neurotypicals.
CASEY: Yeah, that's more specific. It is much more specific than normal. What kind of normal?
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Normal, the word I want to drop, but it still slips into my speech. Just like guys.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, same.
\n\nCASEY: I have it found a perfect replacement for how guys feels to use.
\n\nEVAN: Y'all.
\n\nCASEY: I wish I could.
\n\nEVAN: Y'all. I love y'all.
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes y'all’s good. But if I walk into a room and say, “What are –?” Okay, that's not a good example.
\n\nEVAN: How are you folks?
\n\nCASEY: What are you guys doing? Well, y'all is great there.
\n\nEVAN: I use folks.
\n\nCASEY: It sounds like – [overtalk]
\n\nEVAN: I use filters – [overtalk]
\n
CASEY: Where guys – [overtalk]
MAE: I use folks. I use people. I use peeps. I use y’all.
\n\nEVAN: Yes.
\n\nMAE: I use all kinds of things.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I use all these, too.
\n\nEVAN: I might have gotten one, or two of those to use – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: When somebody says guys, as someone who has hung out in mostly places where it is all guys, I don't like it. I just don't.
\n\nCASEY: No.
\n\nMAE: Does not make me feel good.
\n\nEVAN: How do you know they self-Identify as male? Right? I mean, seriously, so. But no, I was going to say, Mae, or I tried to say earlier, I might have [inaudible] amount of – I’ve used that occasionally. I'm pretty sure maybe at least one of these came from you, from interacting with you at one point, just can't say which. Y’all, that was from a stint at Rackspace and going to Texas enough times, but I stuck with it.
\n\nCASEY: Y’all is great. Y'all should be more formal, popular, mainstream accepted English. It should not be just slang casual. I use it in formal writing as much as I can get away with.
\n\nEVAN: So happy in a work meeting yesterday to hear someone new to me use y'all in a work meeting setting. It tickled me. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: It's like Spanish. Spain’s Spanish has vosotros that's y'all and that is more formal in Spanish.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Once we get y'all in English, we can extend it to the even more useful all y’all.
\n\nMAE: Yes! Now we're talking.
\n\nDAMIEN: You, y’all, all y'all.
\n\nEVAN: No, wait, there's some other ones I learned, too. There's yinzer. There's some other – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Philadelphia yinz. That's a third person plural, second person plural.
\n\nEVAN: It gets kind of weird me, but every neologism starts weird before it gets normalized. I air quoted. [laughs] I remember the first time I heard fleek and I just couldn't accept it. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's a tough one.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Fleek is for eyebrows. Eyebrows on fleek, that's what it's used for mostly.
\n\nI think it's my gray hair showing just, yeah, I still twitch a little there. I just lost a whole generation of people who might have been paying attention. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: What, by telling the truth and demonstrating vulnerability and saying things that…?
\n\nEVAN: Yes. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: So first let's do reflections on the episode and then we'll do the plugs. Who wants to go first?
\n\nDAMIEN: I can go first. Yeah, because my reflection is something I think one things we talked least about, but was demonstrated most: the value of being vulnerable, of just revealing things and I think that's like – I think because Evan, you were so vulnerable opening up this conversation, it allowed us to have a really open and just really valuable conversation with that. So that's an object lesson that I witnessed today and was a part of.
\n\nEVAN: Thank you. And Mae was saying it a lot earlier and I really appreciate that you were vulnerable in sharing that feedback as we went. By the way, that's also me sort of trying to imply to people who are listening, feedback doesn't have to be bad.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nFeedback can be encouraging, too.
\n\nMAE: Evan's doing his plug right now.
\n\nEVAN: Well, sort of. People hear the word feedback; they think it always has to be critical. I winced.
\n\nMy reflection is I was tickled that we got to explore so many things and while there were points of disagree that the disagreement ultimately led to deeper discussion. I just had such a fun time with this. So very much echoing the sentiment Mae shared earlier in the conversation. My reflection is this was just fun kind of bouncing around all these different topics and exploring things scientific, spiritual, existential in all manner.
\n\nCASEY: I'll go next. I like how many times Damien got the word unfalsifiable into the conversation.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: And non-falsifiable a couple times.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: One of those will be incorrect, right?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVAN: We used not unfalsifiable the first time and I winced.
\n\nCASEY: Not unfalsifiable, yeah.
\n\nSo I haven't thought on it in a long time. I'm sure I have before, but we can't usually know what is truth. Truth is maybe unattainable in a lot of ways. But we can know when something's false and there's something really satisfying about that. So I'm going to try to hold onto that thought and see how it feels.
\n\nMAE: I love that, Casey.
\n\nI'm trying to remember the thing that Damien said that I thought was going to be the thing that you were are going to say, Casey, because you're so good at always getting in on the CTA options, but.
\n\nEVAN: CTA?
\n\nMAE: Oh, thank you, Evan. I'm usually so good about acronyms and saying what they are. Call to action.
\n\nEVAN: Oh, I see.
\n\nMAE: Well, I'm going to – [laughs] my reflection is that I need to spend some time rethinking all of the stuff that we talked about. Maybe even relistening to be able to relay—I'm trying to come up with another word that starts with R-E. What my reflection is, but it's something Damien said and it was really good and I can't wait to rediscover it.
\n\nEVAN: Was it about unconscious bias and that we need to be talking about our biases because if it's not uncomfortable, then it's not productive?
\n\nMAE: That’s the one.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: That… maybe it wasn't. I think it is.
\n\nDAMIEN: Right.
\n\nMAE: I think I have to get back to us. [laughs]
\n\nEVAN: I think it was it's not an effective conversation about bias if it's not uncomfortable.
\n\nCASEY: Mm, that's it. I love that.
\n\nDAMIEN: Evan remembers it because it has a double negative in it.
\n\nEVAN: That's possible. It hurt me.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI’ve got to admit, it did hurt saying it. That's the truth. I felt it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut it's also true, I'm just – I admit in my head, I am trying to knot the knots [laughs] and it hurts. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, don't get tied knots doing it, Evan.
\n\nEVAN: Bang, bang and Ruby hurt my brain except they convert things to Boolean. That's a nice little trick in the Ruby language.
\n\nMAE: I have a plug and kind of call-to-action.
\n\nCASEY: Plug, plug!
\n\nMAE: I really just like please everybody, think about all the ways in which you are biased and have healing to do and in your body. Brains, well, they're complicated and maybe we'll have some more studies to tell some more things about them. But our bodies, if you would consider bringing that also into your workplaces, in your families, in your communities about starting to truly talk about ways in which we are not awesome to each other, it will actually help us get more awesome to each other.
\n\nEVAN: Amen. Yeah, we don't get better until we talk about where it hurts. Until we face it.
\n\nI think I plugged it a few times already, but I'll say it more explicitly: Search Inside Yourself. I don't make money off of this. This is something where I took this class. I took it as a class in D.C. about 6 years ago. I took it with Casey. In fact, we took it the same time and…
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: It has been so impactful in my life in so many different ways that I literally took the time and effort to learn how to teach it. This is something I've been primarily doing in my spare time and it's taken a little bit of time away from work for the actual sit down with other people in trainings with the super experienced trainers. But most of that time has been evenings and weekends pouring over material and cramming all these things into my brain and trying to not only learn it all, but then learn the mental model of it all to be able to share it with other people.
\n\nSearch Inside Yourself is a way to build the muscles to do exactly what Mae is urging you to do. That empathy is a skill, you can learn it. That you might not have learned early that enough – I'm extending that plugs to ADHD again, [laughs] but I'll finish.
\n\nThat most of us didn't grow up with the minimum recommended dose of Mr. Rogers in our life. I say that as someone who didn't. I know someone, Casey and I have a good friend who did, and I'm really grateful. I guess, I'll mention that friend, Andrew Dunkman, that he grew up with a lot of Mr. Rogers and got me thinking and reflecting a lot more on the man and the more I learned, the more I wish I had paid attention when I was little.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nEVAN: Because a lot of those lessons are really important in the modern world where we need to work with other people and live better with other people, and the consequences of not doing that is a world with a lot of hostility and divisiveness that oh, by the way, we live in right now. So if we all cultivated some more empathy, I think we would all be a lot better off. I think. Sorry, no, I don't think. I believe, but I also have data to support it. Interesting. See, I did use, I think colloquially there.
\n\nCASEY: Nuance! Yeah, Andrew has been on the show before. If you miss the episode with Andrew Dunkman, you might want to go check it out. It's pretty good.
\n\nAll right. I want to share my plug. I'm so shy about sharing. I have my own business, Happy & Effective, and it is so related to every episode, honestly and finally enough people have encouraged me to talk about it on the show and now is a great moment. Just like Evan is studying to teach Search Inside Yourself, I do workshops kind of like that through my company on emotional intelligence and well-being. Things like debugging your brain. I do a lot of DEI training—diversity, equity and inclusion—strategic thinking, leadership skills. And my approach is so hands-on, it's all breakout rooms and talking to each other and applying it. I give homework. I give reading assignments.
\n\nAnyway, if you want to bring that to your company, reach out to me. I'd love to chat with you. We can help make it happen. The website for that is happyandeffective.com.
\n\nDAMIEN: Do you make people uncomfortable in that process, Casey? Excellent.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, but they love it because they're in a supportive environment. That might be my superpower, making people comfortable trying do that things.
\n\nEVAN: That’s the one. We do that in Search Inside Yourself.
\n\nCASEY: It's true in the dance classes I teach, too. I get people who hate dancing, think they hate dancing to become comfortable with it, happy with it.
\n\nEVAN: You make people uncomfortable in Search Inside Yourself, too. Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: True.
\n\nEVAN: Well, you’ve got to stretch yourself. Damien, you haven't gone.
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] I wish I had something to plug. I'll plug some of the books we mentioned. Siddhartha, absolutely amazing.
\n\nEVAN: Yes.
\n\nDAMIEN: Short narrative.
\n\nEVAN: Short read.
\n\nDAMIEN: Fun read.
\n\nEVAN: Oh, yeah.
\n\nCASEY: There's a free link of this on Gutenberg. I put a link in the show notes. It's free. You can just get it on your phone, do it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Nonviolent Communication, another amazing book. That's not as much fun to read, but in part incredibly impactful.
\n\nEVAN: Oh, there are also courses on Nonviolent Communication that you can take offered around the world really fairly cheaply Some of them tend to be community given. My wife and I went to once some time ago, so.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I've heard good things about those.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And then finally the last one, Conversations For Action. Ooh, I hope I got that right. Fernando Flores. We didn't talk about this.
\n\nMAE: Ooh.
\n\nDAMIEN: But it talked very much about speech being an act. You're not just talking; you're doing something when you talk.
\n\nEVAN: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Also amazing book.
\n\nEVAN: Yeah. There are a lot of books in this list, that makes me happy. I have more things to read now, though. Get it?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLonger reading list.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today.
\n\nEVAN: Thank you for having me.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, super fun.
\n\nEVAN: I was really glad. This was lot of fun.
Special Guest: Evan Light.
Sponsored By:
Catch Dave on Episode 006 of Greater Than Code! Getting Technology Into the Hands of Children with David Bock
\n\n02:10 - Dave’s Superpower: Ability to Reevaluate and Drop Ideas – Onto The Next!
\n\n\n\n07:10 - The Acceptance of Ruby; Using Ruby as a Teaching Language
\n\n18:01 - Mobile Development
\n\n24:10 - Teaching Remotely
\n\n34:25 - Computer Science Education Week + Teaching/Volunteering
\n\n\n\n\n“Computers aren’t smart. They’re just dumb really, really fast.”
\n
56:39 - Handling Time Management and Energy
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey: Motivating students to learn algorithmic efficiency. Feeling the problem.
\n\nMae: Becoming more involved in the community.
\n\nChelsea: What are people in the tech world ready for?
\n\nDave: How much talking about computer science education is invigorating and revitalizing. Seeing problems through beginners’ eyes.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nCHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 261. I’m Chelsea Troy and I’m here with my co-host, Mae.
\n\nMAE: And I’m here also with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here today with Dave Bock.
\n\nWelcome, Dave.
\n\nDAVE: Hi, glad to be here again.
\n\nCASEY: David Bock is the Vice President of Strategic Development at Core4ce, Inc. where he is responsible for taking new strategic ideas within the company through development and into production.
\n\nDave speaks frequently on software engineering and management topics at software engineering conferences.
\n\nDave’s true passion is his work as the Executive Director of Loudoun Codes, a nonprofit for teaching K-12 students in Loudoun County, Virginia topics related to computer science. He has been volunteering in classrooms since 2013, working with parents and teachers on an official curriculum, extracurricular, and other supplemental activities.
\n\nWelcome, Dave. We’re so glad to have you.
\n\nDAVE: I'm thrilled to be here. I love to talk about my passions.
\n\nCASEY: Speaking of your passions, we always start the episode with a certain question. I think you're ready for it.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, I’m never ready for this question. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: What's your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nDAVE: You know it's funny, listening to this podcast over the years, I have answered that question in the car a dozen times and every time it's a different answer. Sometimes, I don't think there's a good answer for it. It's like trying to settle on what I wanted to talk about this time. Because it's like I don't have any superpowers; they're just mundane powers applied well.
\n\nBut I think my superpower, if I had to pick one, I would say it is my ability to quickly reevaluate and drop ideas that I no longer find value in like, I don't get overly attached to an idea. I guess, that's the best way to put it.
\n\nThe first time I realized thinking about that was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard said to somebody that if you truly believe your convictions, you won't be afraid to reevaluate them, and that's just something that I've always kind of applied.
\n\nIt came up again. My wife watches the TV show, House, which is now long since off the air, but the premise of that show was this doctor who was an expert in rare pathological diseases and he was a kind of a grumpy antihero doctor.
\n\nEvery episode, there'd be some weird, rare disease and he'd be the first one to identify it and then some other symptom would present itself and he'd abandon that idea and move on to the next one. At one point somebody said to him, “You always think you're right,” and he said, “No, I always think I'm eventually right.” Because if you see it, he's always willing to drop an idea and move on to the next one even when other people were still wedded to the old idea and I think I apply that daily.
\n\nBut even in my career, back in the 2006, 2007 timeframe, I was set. I could have kept as a Java developer for the rest of my career and instead, I abandoned it and started doing Ruby on Rails development. And I've since abandoned it again. Did the Clojure for a while, abandoned that again and got into management. I just didn't want to identify myself with any one track record too long.
\n\nMAE: Love it. Was that how you ended up having that approach is from TNG, or that is like a –? [overtalk]
\n\nDAVE: No, I just realized that I had that and that resonated with me. That line resonated with me, that stayed with me all these years. I can't say I noticed it the first time that I saw the episode. It was in a repeat one day that it just really struck me.
\n\nCASEY: When did you first realize you have this skill? Was it before that?
\n\nDAVE: I think when it was made conscious to me was around the time I was career switching. I had a resume in the Java space that sounded unbelievable. I was a president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. I was on the Java 6 Spec Committee. I was one of the 100 people that Sun had called a Java champion. And I really had – I was speaking at a Java themed software engineering conference.
\n\nI saw Ruby on Rails and I was like, “That is so cool.” It's such a breath of fresh air. It's like every decision that a team normally argues over for the first several weeks is just made, you can just start moving out. I quit my job, started a consultancy doing Rails development and kept with that for 8 years and it was a blast. Meanwhile, I had friends in the Java community who were like, “Why are you doing that? That's a toy language.”
\n\nCASEY: Oh, wow.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHELSEA: What did you say to them?
\n\nMAE: Yeah!
\n\nCASEY: How did you retort? Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, I didn't have a good one. It was just, it was a good career move
\n\nMAE: Maybe you've been doing it so long, you don't have a way to explain it anymore, but how do you not get too emotionally attached to any single idea?
\n\nDAVE: Oh, man. I think it might be just a healthy amount of imposter syndrome.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhere I question myself a little bit and I know that it also presents itself in a way that, especially as I've gotten older, I noticed that when I'm working with people and a good idea will present itself, they'll immediately attach to that idea and start doubling down on it and about the time other people are starting to write a blog entry on it, I'm wanting to lean in and do research and figure out prior art. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Have you experienced any downsides of this? Has this bit you before?
\n\nDAVE: Ah.
\n\nCASEY: I'm all for this concept that you're talking about, but.
\n\nDAVE: That's a good question. Have I ever been too quick to abandon an idea that would have paid out? Probably. I also fall into that cliché of people that wonder if they have never diagnosed ADHD because I have a million half started projects and it's like a milestone when I actually get to finish one. I wonder if that's related. I don't know.
\n\nMAE: It's a pretty huge swath of programmers.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: True.
\n\nMAE: You mentioned the thing about the Java folks calling Ruby a toy language and I'm curious about where you think it stands today and why and how you find Ruby really effective, especially for educational purposes.
\n\nDAVE: I guess, I'm saddened to see so much news lately where people are talking about the death of Ruby, or the death of Rails. Because I really think that the acceptance of Ruby in a first-class way was my eye-opening to the world being a polyglot environment. That even when I was a Java developer, I was a JavaScript developer, a CSS developer, an HTML developer, and Ruby was just another dot on that map for me.
\n\nIf I look at my career path, I started professionally programming in Pascal, did C, C++, Objective Pascal, switched to Java. So moving to Ruby was just another step on that long road for me, but it's the one that I keep going back to. I've also done Clojure. I'm managing a project now that's in Python and JavaScript and React. Ruby is at a sweet spot for me. When I want to solve a problem, it's the tool I bring out every time despite a half dozen languages I could probably do that with.
\n\nI did mention that it was a sweet spot for me in terms of teaching and I need to say that the curriculum that we formally teach in high school is based on Java and that's because the AP exam is in Java. So the march is towards programming in passing the AP exam. But I think the curriculum is a little bit schizophrenia in trying to decide whether it's teaching computer science, or whether it's a vocational skill for teaching programming. For me, teaching Ruby makes computer science much more approachable, mainly because I get to get syntax out of the way.
\n\nThe first few weeks in a Java programming course, my students struggle with where the semi-colons go? Wait, why do I need to begin in brackets here? What is this public static void main thing about? Which is, that's especially frustrating because we never fully explained that even in 2 years of programming courses.
\n\nAnd Ruby just strips all that kind of complexity away. But then at the same time, it makes some aspects of teaching computer science much more approachable. The fact that I have all these cool things I can do with collections, like I can say each, I can select, I can reject, I can over a collection ask for every combination of five elements of that without it being a page and a half of recursive code [laughter] to get every possible combination.
\n\nI teach concepts around algorithmic performance by talking about permutations and combinations that would be inaccessible that quickly in other languages, including Python. Python is a close second, I think and Python definitely has mindshare for teaching in that space. But Ruby is just in a slightly sweeter spot than that for me.
\n\nIt's funny because you get five programmers in a room and start talking about high school computer science education, you'll get six answers as to what language we should be teaching. I can say that 8 years in a classroom has challenged every assumption I've ever made about that and there are situations where I've taught students 6502 in Z80 assembly language programming on retro computers. So I've been through the gamut of trying to teach students various things.
\n\nThere's an example where we even do a little bit of prologue to solve a [inaudible] puzzle. When my students, who have been programming in Java for a while, see Ruby, they accuse me of cheating.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo, you can actually program like this professionally.
\n\nMAE: Love it.
\n\nCASEY: I used to teach, too and a lot of this resonates with me. I taught undergrad programming and I chose Ruby, too for a lot of the same reasons [chuckles] because it's approachable and syntax gets out of the way.
\n\nI just shared in the sidebar here, a diagram that it's a dependency graph and you need to know what a variable is before you can sort an array, you need to know res exists before you can sort them, and you need to know about objects before you can learn Rails because it's based on objects. It's like, what do you need to know before you can know the next thing? It's a huge, huge spider web of stuff.
\n\nBut in other languages, if I had taught Java, for example, there's a whole another mess, web tangled ball of yarn at the top, which is the syntax getting in the way. Ruby gets a lot of this whole what you need to learn first, second, third. It's a lot cleaner in Ruby.
\n\nDAVE: Right. And I don't know that there's a perfect teaching language and I think that's irrelevant that there isn't. I think how many of us professionally program in the first language we ever learned? I think the real expertise as a software engineer comes when you know several different languages and can bring them to bear on different problems.
\n\nSo really – and I think that the computer science, the teaching community is starting to get this right, that they're starting to concentrate on computational thinking, not the syntax of computer programming. If you look at the kind of the hierarchy of skills, there's things that we can teach elementary school kids about computational thinking, give them puzzles on how do you explain to your friend how to solve a maze, things like that.
\n\nThen there's the notion of computer programming. How do we get the curly braces in the right place? How do we take our ideas and translate them to the computer? And then above that, there's computer science concepts and then using computer science concepts, but in a much different way, is software engineering.
\n\nI'll have students that ask me, “Well, what's the difference between the two?” And computer science, I tell them it’s ultimately about like the performance of algorithms and you can get into almost philosophy of what is computable within the universe if you take computer science to the ultimate theoretical limit. And software engineering is about how do we use as various pieces to solve business problems? How do we work together as a team? And those are very different problems and it's one of the reasons why you can go to school for 20 years to get an advanced theoretical computer science degree, but it's possible to come out of a 12-week bootcamp and have skills that those people would never have.
\n\nCASEY: Well said.
\n\nMAE: Chelsea also is a teacher. And I'm curious, Chelsea, if you have any thoughts in this realm?
\n\nCHELSEA: I do. So I teach a couple classes at the University of Chicago. One of them is Python programming. I teach Python and then intermediate Python and I teach a mobile software development class.
\n\nIt's funny that you mentioned that there's not one perfect programming language for teaching, because I found that to be true as well. I teach the Python programming class, for example, the point isn't specifically to learn the syntax of Python. The point is to learn principles of programming and the language is chosen basically because it's a relatively low overhead language for a lot of the reasons that Casey mentioned before. But there are limitations that come with that, too.
\n\nSo Python, I think one of the strengths of Python for example, is that the core Python team makes explicit what I think a lot of other programming language core teams leave implicit in such a way that it is apparent for new learners to understand which is that any tool, any programming language, anything that we write, or read, or use in computer science was written with a perspective in mind because it was written by a person, or a group of people. The Python core team makes that perspective explicit in a number of ways and that perspective leans towards object-oriented programming, which works for a lot of our use cases.
\n\nBut if we are attempting to teach principles of programming, it also makes sense for us to include functional programming, functional paradigms, and functional programming thinking and I end up needing to use a couple of workarounds to get to that in Python. We end up writing decorators.
\n\nA decorator is a sort of meta function in Python that you can pass other functions into and it can rack those functions in the same way that you would decorate a class in something like Ruby. It's not the kind of thing that you would write as an end user application developer. Most folks using Python don't write decorators. I'd hazard the guess in fact, that most people who write Python don't know what a decorator is really.
\n\nSo students start a little bit confused about the decorator syntax and even Python core maintainers have asked me, “Why do you teach decorators in an introduction to programming like Python course?” The reason isn't that students are going to need to use decorators professionally, it's that decorators are one of the only access points in Python for teaching functional concepts.
\n\nWe run into a – we handle the problem a little bit differently, or I handle it a little bit differently in mobile software development. So that course, similar to the Python programming course, is a platform specific way to sneak in general programming concepts. And I happen to think that mobile is a really great avenue for teaching a lot of things in computer science. Because before you're on a really small device, a lot of the algorithmic optimizations and data optimizations, that we talk to students about being so primarily important, are just not functionally relevant on a machine of the power that these students have.
\n\nAt this point, a laptop is so powerful that telling them that they need to optimize this loop in order to make something run faster, they're not going to be able to notice a difference on their machine. But when we're talking about something like a mobile device, where there is a very real, very tangible limit on the amount of data that your application can take up, those things start to feel tangible to students in a way that makes them relevant and memorable. We end up using a couple of different programming languages in that course—we use Swift, we use tiny bit of Objective-C, and we use Kotlin.
\n\nCASEY: I love that idea that you can motivate programming a really efficient algorithm by putting it onto a mobile device. [chuckles] Sometimes in a class, I would bring that up as the example like, “Well, sometimes you'll need to make it very efficient, like a mobile,” but we never taught – in my experience, I had never taught mobile app development, but that's so motivated. It matters there.
\n\nCHELSEA: It helps. I find that mobile is a great avenue for teaching a lot of different things in computer science. So we end up not talking a lot about sourcing ethics for mobile devices, for example, is a very tangible way for students to understand some of the engineering ethics concerns that we have.
\n\nAnd mobile allows us to talk about accessibility in ways that are tangible for students, because the truth is that the vast majority of the design innovations that made mobile devices so important when they came out, came from accessibility companies, accessibility ideas, and accessibility products.
\n\nSo if folks have heard me talk about mobile development before, then they've heard me say this, but the touch capacitive screen that made the iPhone so important that made it break the market for phones that existed when we were using T9 and keypads. That innovation and its precursors came from this company called FingerWorks that Apple acquired and the goal of that company was to enable human computer interaction for people who had lost their fine motor skills.
\n\nThere are a lot of things in development that are like that, where the fact that everyone at this point who's got a mobile phone, considers it so indispensable to their life is a testament to the way that building something in an accessible fashion makes it more useful to everyone, not just the community that “needs the accessibility.”
\n\nMAE: Yes. Thank you for plugging accessibility as accessible for all.
\n\nDAVE: You mentioned being able to teach them performance and you're right, that is a challenging problem on modern machines. I just shared in the chat two different links to puzzles that I use in the classroom.
\n\nOne is this Star 26 puzzle, which is the numbers 1 through 12 on little pegs and you have to arrange them in rows of four numbers, kind of like the Star of David and have it so each row adds up to 26 and there are several hundred solutions to that problem. I walk through my students solving that puzzle and the way we can write a program to find every solution to that is just try every – I was talking before about combinations and permutations. We can literally try every possible permutation of the numbers 1 through 12, and we just have a function to see if that's a solution. In a Ruby program—Ruby is not the fastest language—and it can chug through that in about 2 minutes on my laptop.
\n\nThe second puzzle I shared is called Aristotle's Number puzzle and that has the numbers 1 through 19 that have to be ranged in a hexagonal, almost like a honeycomb pattern so that every row and column has to add up to 39. If you look at the size of the permutation of the number 1 through 19 – and I'll show that puzzle to the students and they'll be like, “Oh yeah, we can write a program to solve that,” now that they've written the first one. They write the program and not considering the size of the set of the number of permutations of 1 through 19 and they sit there and they wait for it to start to spit out answers and wait and wait.
\n\nA few minutes go by and nothing happens and then I ask them, “Well, how much bigger is that space?” So we talk about finding all the spaces and we realize that if we could solve permutations of 1 through 12 and about 2 minutes, the permutations of 1 through 19 will take over a 1,000 years. So we're like, “How can we get that down?” And we have to have a completely different approach to solve that problem.
\n\nCASEY: That is motivated. To make them feel the pain of waiting, even though – [overtalk]
\n\nDAVE: Right, right.
\n\nCASEY: It's probably, it's time bound, right?
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCASEY: To give them a…
\n\nCHELSEA: How long did the final programs end up taking?
\n\nDAVE: So you use a little bit of linear algebra and believe it or not, I can use this to – they can intuit the concepts of linear algebra from this puzzle. I'd have to talk you through it, but I can find the solution to that first puzzle in under 30 seconds and then using the same approach on the first Star 26 puzzle, we can bring that solution to find all the possible answers in under 6 seconds.
\n\nCHELSEA: Wow.
\n\nDAVE: So we go from blindly testing every possible permutation to a depth first search where we quickly eliminate entire branches of the problem, because we know that they don't solve a simpler version of the constraint. And I have a bunch of different puzzles that kind of fit that pattern of the first one, the obvious brute force solution solves it in a couple of minutes, the next one would take a 1,000 years. So we have to figure out a smarter way to solve it.
\n\nCHELSEA: I think that's really cool that you give them the opportunity to see, to feel the waiting process.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCHELSEA: I think that those sorts of experiences end up allowing lessons like these to stick in a way that just explaining that this thing is going to take a long time sometimes doesn’t.
\n\nDAVE: Right. I should also – I'm talking a lot about my time in the classroom here. I need to give credit to the teacher that I work with. I'm not going to say his name because I didn't get permission to mention him beforehand. But I work with a math teacher at the high school where I work, where 8 years ago, he opened his classroom to me and we lecture together. Most of the time, I would just wander around and help students with lab time. But there are several topics that he just lets me stand in front of the class and give my ideas and give them extracurricular projects. It's just fantastic that he opened his classroom to me like that.
\n\nI volunteer in his classroom two mornings a week and that has led to things that I do at local elementary schools, local middle schools. And then last year during the pandemic, when a lot of teachers were looking for other ways to engage their students, I started to engage a lot more remotely and that finally got me some visibility at the county level where there's a Director of Computer Science Education and a few education facilitators that I'm working with now as well.
\n\nCHELSEA: Very cool. How did teaching remotely compare for you to teaching in-person?
\n\nDAVE: Oh my God, it was so hard. In addition to this—I got into this whole thing because I have 3 boys that are triplets and they're finally at the high school where I'm teaching. But when they were in kindergarten, I started to volunteer through a program called Watch D.O.G.S Dads at their local elementary school. So that's how I got into this whole thing.
\n\nSo I taught in the classroom for years before COVID and I saw it, first of all, with my own kids in that there were classes that they did fine at, especially with me being able to tutor them in some math stuff, that worked well. But it was also the first year that all three of them were taking Spanish and that was just a really hard remote thing to try to take a foreign language remotely because you sit there and you watch the teacher and she's like, “Okay, I want everybody in the class to say Hola, but I want you to all be muted because I can't hear you all at the same time. Okay, say Hola. Okay, now Daniel, you unmute and say Hola. Daniel, Daniel, the button. Yeah, honey, the button to unmute. There you go.” It took an entire class to get every student to say Hola and it was not going to go well that year.
\n\nIn the computer science class, most of the time it was okay because it was lab time once they’ve got a concept of just sitting and thinking in front of a computer. In some ways, it was even easier because they can share their screen with me and stuff like that. But there's one topic that I love to teach. It's like I love to teach recursion to the high schoolers because the high school age, you teach them recursion and when they get it, it's like I taught them one of the secrets of the universe.
\n\nNormally, in the classroom, I see their faces light up and their eyes were like I've made the connection. They've understood it. At least they understand it in the minute. I'm sure you've all been there where you understand something and then tomorrow, it's a dim memory and you have to grasp for it again. But they understood it in the moment and remotely, I could not make that decision, or make that connection. I walked out of my office and went in to see my wife in her office across the house and I was just like dejected. I was like, “That was the worst teaching experience I ever had,” because I covered the material, but I had no connection with anybody. I could've just been doing it to a blank screen.
\n\nMy county did not force students to have their cameras on, which is probably a good thing. But at the same time, very few students had their cameras on. So there were very few faces to make that connection to as you're talking. So oftentimes, I was just speaking to a blank screen and a microphone; I could have been singing in the shower for all I knew. There was no connection.
\n\nCHELSEA: Wow.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It's unnerving. I've been teaching online this year, too and when everyone's camera's off, it is unnerving.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I feel like I'm literally talking to myself. But often, I'll ask people to turn the video camera on and when I ask people to even give me visual feedback, even one person can completely transform my experience.
\n\nDAVE: Oh, right.
\n\nCASEY: Well, just one person. But I don't know that I do that with kids. I feel like you're stuck where you are.
\n\nDAVE: Right. Especially there's – not that any of that's happened in my county, but there are situations where students have been disciplined for posters they have up in their bedroom and stuff like that because it was now a school event. So I understand why as a high school student, I wouldn't want the school intruding into my personal space like that.
\n\nOne good thing to come out of the remoteness of the pandemic. In Loudoun, we went to virtual very suddenly towards the end of the year before last. So the last few months of school was all remote and we weren't expecting to do that. It was one day, “Okay, we're going out on break,” and then all of a sudden, “No, you're not going back.” So students picked their classes for the next school year remotely and our percentage of women in the class went up and there's no real, like I haven't heard anybody doing studies on that.
\n\nAt the Computer Science Teachers Association, there was anecdotal evidence that that was true across counties everywhere and the general thinking is that students pick their classes without that peer pressure of people being like, “Ooh, you're going to take that?” So the percentage of women taking computer science classes in high school went up.
\n\nAnd that's always been a mystery to me because we do events at the elementary school level and boys and girls are equally good and equally interested up until 5th grade, which is the end of elementary school. Then I see students again in the middle school when I do events in 7th grade and we already have that 70/30 split. It's like, where are all those girls that a couple of years ago really loved this stuff. They're just all kinds of weird peer pressure and there's no one cause that I can contribute to it. But then by the high school, where on bad years, were down to 20% women in a class. This year, we're up to 33, which is better than normal, but we can still do a lot.
\n\nCHELSEA: I wonder whether some of it would have also had to do with somebody’s experience in the class. So if you're taking a class remotely, you're not in this class surrounded by potentially people you don't know, people that you're not spending a lot of time with, people that you're not friends with. That's the kind of thing that I think would really influence the way that a middle schooler would select classes.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: I remember being at that age and wanting to be in the classes that my friends were in.
\n\nDAVE: Right. Yeah. In fact, I have students that I've talked to, there's a little bit of perception there that that's the geeky subject, I don't want to take that, or girls are more academically interested earlier than boys are. So they want to start language classes a year earlier because that's a requirement and statistics bear that out. This is an optional extracurricular class and so, they're all kinds of reasons. There's no one root because that I can point to and say, “That's the thing we need to fix.”
\n\nMAE: Well, with the academic orientation, it's funny that you brought that up because when you described that about the online trend, I was like, “Well, I mean, people are.” It's pretty clear that having these skills will position you better and that is something that girls tend to be pretty attuned to. If we're talking in terms of a gender binary and if we're talking in terms of [laughs] total platitudes about gender stuff.
\n\nCASEY: I had some peers in undergrad who were really gatekeeping me as a developer. I had done some community college classes in high school. I was a total nerd. My parents supported me in doing it. It was great. I knew programming, but in freshman year, people said, “Are you a programmer? Here, I know how to tell if you are a programmer. What's recursion?” And I don't know, somehow, I was like, I got it already. I knew recursion years ago.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCASEY: I was like, “I don't know how to answer this question.” So I clearly wasn't a programmer until I could prove I knew of recursion to this undergrad boy that was trying to gatekeep me out of it. Any amount of pressure like that, even if it's more subtle, to the women I imagine is even stronger.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, and the gatekeeping thing is weird. The first year I was teaching, I saw a boy in one of the classes say to a girl that oh, I think it's cute that a girl is learning how to code and she beamed like it was a compliment. And I realized this is going to be tougher to figure out than I originally thought, because this mixes up in the high school dynamic of who has a crush on who and who wants a compliment from whom. At the time it happened, I sat there and just didn't know how to respond to it and since then, whenever I've seen something like that happen again, I actually have a little bit prepared where I'm like, “Well, actually the first computer programmers were women.” And I have a whole little keynote presentation ready to go that has – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nDAVE: Pictures of women in front of ENIACs switching the wires around and Grace Hopper is there in her admiral’s uniform and a whole little thing to talk about how this was originally seen as programming was kind of that secretarial pool, the original world of computers. But when computers were people and the computers were just a step above the secretarial typist pool and that as people figured out oh, actually this is kind of interesting, kind of like guys dominated. And how they kind of attribute that in the 80s as video games became popular and first-person shooters ruled the world, that computers became the toy that was in the boy's bedroom, not the girl's bedroom and that's where a lot of our gender bias today can come from. So I try to make them aware of that.
\n\nIt's funny, I originally took the opportunity to volunteer in high school as a completely selfish reason to see what high school peer pressure was going to be like for my own kids these days. Because I grew up when breakfast club was a reality. My high school was clique upon clique and it's almost encouraging that that doesn't seem to exist as much today. There's, I think a lot more acceptance than I see in the high school.
\n\nCHELSEA: That’s interesting to hear. I wouldn't have… My experience of high school was very similar to your experience of high school and not only was it my experience, but it's also what I have seen reflected in—I'm not particularly partial to movies, or television that focus on high schoolers, but any movies, or television that I have seen that is focused on the high school age, or even the middle school age, that has essentially been the expectation for what it is like for students to be in school.
\n\nDAVE: Now I have to admit the students that I'm largely exposed to are a special group in that our first-year computer science, the intro class is a completely voluntary thing. It's not a requirement. And then the AP class is a volunteer thing again, an extracurricular, or not an extracurricular, but an elective.
\n\nCASEY: Elective.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. So they're opting in twice. If they get involved in anything I'm doing extracurricularly with the competitions, or the events that I hold at my local library, they're opting in a third time. So those students are a rare group and they seem to be much more accepting of each other. I can't say that that's true in your typical English class for instance, but I do have geeks, jocks, nerds, everybody all in one room and they get along.
\n\nMAE: While we're on the topic of computer science education. Upcoming is the Computer Science Education Week, Dave and I understand you have a bit to tell us about.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, this is how I actually got involved in this whole thing. I mentioned that I was volunteering at my son's elementary school and the first year I was just as overly enthusiastic parent who was kind of disappointed that they had a computer lab, but they only seem to teach 20th century office worker skills. I volunteered to try to teach something and “Well, we can install stuff on the computers. We don't have any curriculum.”
\n\nWell, the next year was the first annual Computer Science Education Week and there was this curriculum called the Hour of Code. The goal was to get every student in the country to have one hour of computer programming experience. I mentioned that to the technology resource teacher and she helped me get the principal involved in it and we ran the Computer Science Education Week with all the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at the elementary school.
\n\nAnd then that got me involved at volunteering at the high school level and since then, we have been having our high school students every year go back to elementary schools and help teach the Computer Science Education Week. So we have high schoolers going back to the elementary schools that they went to helping their old teachers teach computer science. And – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Oh, I love that!
\n\nDAVE: It's amazing how much they accomplish in an hour. If you go take a look at code.org, or cseducationweek.org, or even hourofcode.org, there are lessons that take about an hour and need nothing more than a browser. My favorite is the one from the first year that just uses the game characters from Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies and you have to write a computer program that tells a zombie how to get through the maze to a flower.
\n\nSo it starts out, you have to tell the zombie to move forward, and then move forward and turn right, and then move forward and if the path in front of you is blocked, turn left. Oh, but if the path to your left is blocked, turn right. And there's this whole – steps you through the algorithm to solve a maze and at the end of the class, you tell the students that just doesn't solve that maze, that can solve any maze and it blows their mind.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThe schools are always looking for volunteers to help teach that stuff. So consider this a call to action for the audience, reach out to a local elementary school, a local middle school, even a high school, find the math teacher, or whatever teacher that's teaching some coding aspects, find out if they're doing an Hour of Code event, and volunteer to help. Because it is almost a stereotype that elementary school teachers walk into the classroom and are like, “Oh, don't ask me to program. I don't know anything about programming. I can't even figure out how to use the printer.”
\n\nThat's not a great mindset to be teaching our elementary school kids because they eat this material up. They think it's fun. Let's get them encouraged with it. So I've been using other students to do that for years and it's to great success. I now have students that are arriving at the high school looking forward to this event because they remember it from when they were elementary school students.
\n\nCHELSEA: That's cool.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I love that. I've done an Hour of Code before. We did a Scratch thing, but it was Star Wars themed.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, I remember that one.
\n\nMAE: I wore my hair in buns. It was really fun.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. The great thing is over the years, they've built out more and more curriculum. The problem with the first year is that advanced, like 5th and 6th graders, especially by the time they'd done it a couple of years, they were bored with it. Like, “We've done this before.” Oh, I have a great story about that I'll get to in a second. But then the 1st and 2nd graders would come and number one, sometimes they had trouble reading it. Number two, it's only at the end of the 2nd-grade year that they have the concept of they're looking top down on this screen, but they can't see it from the zombie’s eyes where the zombie has to move forward and then turn left and then move forward.
\n\nSo the Star Wars curriculum has BB-8 that can move up, down, left, or right. So they take away the having to see it through the zombie’s eyes.
\n\nMAE: Right, yeah.
\n\nDAVE: And then at the kindergarten, 1st grade level, they have it with just up, down, left, and right arrows so you drag the arrows out. So now they don't even have to read. But then at the 5th-grade level, they have one based on Frozen where you're ice skating and you can do angles like 45 degrees, 30 degrees, 90 degrees. So there's a lot more motion available in that and almost spirograph like effects. So there's something for everybody there. It's just fantastic. It's stuff that's geared towards educational level, stuff that's geared towards gender, just all kinds of material there. You could almost get a computer science education for free off of code.org.
\n\nSo I mentioned that I have two great stories about teaching 5th graders. The first year we did the Hour of Code when they complete the lesson, they can hit Show Code and it shows them the JavaScript code that would do what they just did in terms of move forward, turn left, all that stuff.
\n\nWell, I showed them the code I'd written for a game that played Connect 4. So we played Connect 4, I let the computer beat the whole class, and then I showed them the code. I was like, “Look, there's a lot more of it, but it's the same stuff you were just writing,” and we broke it down into one little and I showed them how six lines of code work and I said, “All the computer's doing is it looks –” there's only seven possible moves in Connect 4. So it looks at all possible seven moves and imagines what if it happened? Well, after that move, there's seven possible moves. So there's only 49 possible moves at that level. After that, there is only so many other moves and we keep – and I said, “So the computers just look seven moves ahead, sees who wins and loses, and decides I'm going to go that way down this whole tree.” And this 5th-grade girl said, “Oh, so computers aren't smart. They're just dumb really, really fast.”
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. I love that.
\n\nDAVE: And that quote, I use that quote all the time.
\n\nAnd then I had another student who came in a few years later and she was like, “I'm getting tired of this. I don't want to drag the buttons. I want to type the code like the big kids do.” So with one of the high school students in another one of the Hour of Code lessons, she was typing out JavaScript and we got a when she had to do move forward, move forward, move forward, she was like, “There should be an easier way to do this.” So she just tried writing “move forward” and in the empty parentheses she put the number 3 and it worked. She was like, “Awesome.” So. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nDAVE: And it's just great to see students like that that you're encouraging them to push the boundaries without fear.
\n\nCHELSEA: Well, and kudos to the developer who wrote the API that had move forward where you could put 3 in it.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHELSEA: I wish I had experience doing any – honestly, AWS integration anything.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIf it were intuitive, I would cry with joy.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo at the level that I – I teach Masters students and at that point, I don't have as many fun things for them to program, but I make them program things like they write a testing framework, they modify a testing framework that I've written, and then they do a similar thing for a data analysis framework similar to pandas if you use Python, or something like that.
\n\nBut the goal is very much what you were describing earlier with showing folks that Connect 4 code insofar as that I want them to understand that the libraries that they're using on a day-to-day basis aren't magic. There's not something happening in there that the fundamental concept would be unfamiliar to them if they were to hear about it. It's effectively maybe more complex and maybe more fiddly versions of things that they are writing and at some level, there's sort of this Pareto principle thing going on, where you can get 80% of the functionality of a lot of APIs with 20% of the code. Provided you're willing to make some assumptions, like people know how to use it and they're not going to put it in the wrong thing, and that kind of thing.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCHELSEA: When you're introducing, like trying to make helpful error messages, that's way more code in most of these things than the happy path implementation is. So it's cool to see them implement those things and start to realize that a lot of the code that they use on a day-to-day basis, at least from the happy path perspective is not different from what they write themselves.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCHELSEA: So you mentioned that you teach 1st and 2nd graders, 5th graders, 7th graders. Did I get that right?
\n\nDAVE: I've had done some stuff at the middle school and let me tell you, the middle school, my favorite thing to do there is to walk in as a guest lecturer with several teachers that I know. Because when you walk in for the class—and I tend to bring in wooden puzzles, or little encryption toys and stuff like that and I bring them in in this little suitcase that looks like the suitcase that guy in the Harry Potter movies that the animal pops out of? You walk into a classroom with something that looks like that and you have everybody's attention like the students are silent, waiting for you to open that thing and see what's in it. And teachers are always like, “I can't believe how attentive they were for you.”
\n\nBut I can say that several years ago, pre-COVID, I ran a afterschool robotics club for middle school and where once a week we would spend an hour and a half building out this robot with the VEX Robotics team stuff. That was a little hard having to work with the same group of kids regularly on an afterschool extracurricular thing because there were several students who were there because they knew they loved robotics and you see them a few years later at the high school doing stuff with the robotics club. There were kids that were there because their mom can't pick them up until 4:30 and “You're going to do something after school that looks educational, you're going to do that and they didn't want to be there.”
\n\nThe other coach and I are not formal teachers in the county. We're there as volunteer coaches. So these students. I don't know if they instinctually know that, or what, but there are disruptive students. That like 7th grade age where they're like, eh just so I've gotten to this point where like, if it's any long committal thing like that I have fun with them until 5th grade and then I'm like, “I'll see y'all in high school. You'll go have – I have some stuff to work out.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I do like to volunteer as a guest teacher in the classroom maybe four times a year with teachers that I know. That way you have a good rapport with the students. They remember you from elementary school. They're going to be happy to see you when they get the high school. Anyway, that's what my experience at the middle school levels become.
\n\nCASEY: Very cool. If someone listening wants to guest lecture at a school, what could that look like for them? If they call the front desk at the elementary school, who are they going to talk to, and then who, and how do they meet them?
\n\nDAVE: I have the best results reaching out to the teacher that I know is teaching the curriculum. And if you go to your school's website, there is probably going to be a list of all the faculty at the school and the subjects teach. Computer science topics are generally under the math curriculum. If you can't find exactly who's teaching it, talk to the department head, and they'll put you in touch with who's teaching it. Because that teacher is going to be the one that can say, “I have exactly the thing I can use you for.” The further I go up that chain, the harder it is as an entry point. But if you start grassroots, you can move up that chain.
\n\nSo the whole reason I'm at the high school is that the first year I did this at the elementary level, we got some local press for it and the elementary school principal was like, “This is fantastic.” And then that high school principal was like, “I want to know more about that.” So that's how that happened, but I always have the best success just reaching out to a teacher and saying, “Hey, I have some stuff prepared. I'd love to volunteer as a guest in your classroom.”
\n\nIt's even branched out from math teachers. I have a curriculum on computers in World War II that I did at the middle school level, when they were learning about World War II. My sons, who are now in 9th grade, I've talked to one of their world history teachers about talking about the development of math from a historical perspective. Like, I don't know if you've read the book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
\n\nMAE: No.
\n\nDAVE: But that, oh, fantastic book. It's called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and it's about the history of where the number zero comes from.
\n\nMAE: I have heard some of this, but I wasn't familiar with the book. Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, because zero's kind of a contentious topic.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: Because counting is a natural thing when I'm counting my sheep in my farm. I have 5 sheep. I have 6 sheep. Oh, I'm giving you 2 sheep. You can almost even end up with negative numbers making sense because I gave you 3 sheep kind of thing. So you can – it's kind of weird that I have negative 3 sheep, but you owe me 3 sheep. Somebody can understand, but I have 0 sheep. Well, I also have 0 pigs. Why does that matter? So it was like a huge philosophical debate: is 0 a number we need to consider in math?
\n\nWhen 0 was introduced to cultures that used something like a Roman numeral based counting system, it didn't make sense. You think about counting in Roman numerals, you have the number 5. What do you do to make 6? You put a 1 in front of it, or a 1 after it. You put a 1 before it to make 4. Well, so if I have the number 5 and I put a 0 in front of it. 0 means nothing. But now you're telling me it's ten times as much. It's 50. What? But I put as 0 in front of it! So it didn't make a lot of sense to people where that was their mindset and it was a big cultural shift. And that book goes into that.
\n\nMAE: I must have talked to someone about this book because it was sheep examples and it was something also about that before numbers, people would take rocks and when the sheep went out, they would put a rock for each one and when the sheep came back in, they would then move that pile of rocks. So even – anyway, sheep counting [laughs] is a lot of base math apparently.
\n\nDAVE: [laughs] Right, right. So, and I have two great examples that I'm dying to use with this world history teacher who's currently on subjects of Mesopotamia and stuff. There is an artifact that is in this collection and it's labeled as Plimpton 322. This is a clay tablet that has numbers in, I can't remember the counting system, but it's based on a stick pressed into the tablet and the orientation of the stick represents what the number is.
\n\nAfter decoding this tablet, they realized that contains a bunch of Pythagorean triples, which if you remember the Pythagorean theorem, 3, 4, and 5 are a Pythagorean triple. So it's basically any three integers that can be the sides of a triangle. This tablet contains a bunch of Pythagorean triplets 1,500 years before Pythagoras was around and this is in Mesopotamia. That's like, where did that knowledge come from? That's just amazing that such a thing exists. So I have a bunch of references like that I'm using with this curriculum I'm working up to present to a world history class.
\n\nMAE: Love it.
\n\nCHELSEA: That seems like a great opportunity to drive home the idea that a lot of the things that we attribute to a singular person having invented, or discovered it, it probably wasn't necessarily that way. Even in the cases where we attribute one person, it was often a collaborative effort and even in the cases where we're attributing that one collaborative effort, a lot of ideas sort of materialize in several different places around the same time period.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nMAE: I know, it's so cool.
\n\nDAVE: You think Newton and Leibniz both came up with calculus at the same time, apparently pretty independently, but it's because the world was ready for such a thing to exist. We had all the foundational knowledge in place.
\n\nCASEY: I was just in Cancun last week for a wedding, which was really nice, and then we went on a trip. The Mayans apparently had zero and they represented it with an empty shell.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Ah.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, this is a theme for me lately. Zero.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVE: Let me tell you something. It sounds like it would be a dry, boring book, but Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is definitely worth the read.
\n\nCHELSEA: I mean, and now we're back to the point in programming where people don't want to have Nolan programs, so.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHELSEA: There might be something to this we really need zero idea?
\n\nDAVE: Well, then there's the whole debate around imaginary numbers. That's a whole interesting branch of mathematics as well.
\n\nCASEY: This reminds me of a line I almost said earlier where, when you're learning programming, you go from caring about programming for the computer’s sake, like algorithmic efficiency, and then on the next level of complexity is programming for people who are way more complex. The developers developing after you, maybe you, and the people you're developing for. They're differently complex, but practically, in all the jobs I've worked in, the algorithmic complexity is not the most complex one that takes the most time, it’s the hardest for problems space for it.
\n\nDAVE: That's one of the things that I tell students about when they're learning Java and they ask me about other programming languages like, “Well, why do other programming languages exist?” And I say, “Well, it's not so much for the computer because the computer will run any old thing we tell it to.” The different languages exist because it's how humans use to express thoughts and – [overtalk]
\n\nCHELSEA: That's right.
\n\nDAVE: Often where it's documentation for other humans.
\n\nCHELSEA: People want to express their perspective and if their perspective differs from a programming language that they see out there, they write their own.
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nMAE: [laughs] I explain programming to non-programmers often as, or in describing coming into the industry, I thought it was going to be way more math like and really, I found it to be creative writing. A lot of people think that other people's code is bad because it's not how their brain works, or how they would've arranged it. And so, it is this thing about, is your brain most like the other brains, or are you able to predict what the other brains will want you to have said. [laughs].
\n\nDAVE: Right.
\n\nCHELSEA: Right. And we end up spending a lot of time reformatting code over things like that.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCHELSEA: So I give this workshop it's about technical debt and what technical debt action is and what that term means because folks, everyone sort of knows what technical debt feels like, but then the way that we end up conceptualizing it is a little bit different to that.
\n\nOne of the things that happens a lot of times, if you give people a free week to refactor and reduce tech debt in the code base, what you get is a fair number of code renovations where what happened was somebody didn't like the way somebody else wrote it so they wrote it their way. Right now, it does the same thing and right now, the maintenance load is the same as it was before. Best case scenario, it's the same as it was before. Worst case scenario, you erased a bunch of context the team had about the way it worked.
\n\nThe fundamental difference is a preferential one, rather in a functional one, rather than a documentation one, or a context one and it is shockingly easy to fall victim to that. It is extremely easy to feel like you are reducing the maintenance load in the code base when you're not because your personal perspective aligns by better with the way you're trying to write it than the way the code is aligned at that time.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. I have students that in the first few weeks of programming get really frustrated learning to program, learning their syntax is wrong, their semicolons in the wrong place and they blame themselves. I'm like, “Don't. This isn't you; the computer is the stupid one in this relationship. You have to be smart for both of you.” And it's kind of like writing poetry for an obsessive-compulsive English teacher who is expecting where every semicolon has to be in the right place.
\n\nMAE: [laughs] Oh. And to go back a moment, though, I do want to put in a plug because Chelsea recently can that workshop at RubyConf and when that comes out and is available, definitely check it out.
\n\nDAVE: Excellent.
\n\nCHELSEA: Oh yeah, I did. If you have a RubyConf ticket, by the way that recording is available as of today.
\n\nMAE: Ooh.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yeah. It'll be on YouTube at some point too. But I had a teacher who expressed a very similar thing that you did, Dave insofar is that if we were having trouble getting something, he was very, very quick and he said that he did this in his programming job as well. He would blame the UI typically and I find myself doing that a lot. In particular, when it comes to ops type stuff. [chuckles] if I'm messing with ops, I'm like, “It's not my fault that I don't understand why this dropdown only has one item in it,” and stuff like that.
\n\nIt's funny that you – and I'll bring this back as well that you mentioned earlier elementary school teachers talking about how like, “Well, I can't be expected to know anything about code. I can barely operate the printer.” When you said that, I thought to myself, “I mean, I'm a professional software engineer and there are days that I can't operate that printer.”
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. That's a hardware problem. I'm a software – [ianudble 56:27]
\n\nCHELSEA: I know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLike, I'm a mechanic, that don't mean I'm a good driver and it certainly doesn't mean that I can read the mind of a designer who I never met, who released something 20 years ago that now sits in a break room somewhere. I think it’s very different skillsets.
\n\nCASEY: And that designer probably didn't think it was great either; they had constraints.
\n\nMAE: Right. Totally.
\n\nCASEY: But there are people who will defend the design. Maybe they don't see the fuller picture here.
\n\nMAE: They didn't take Dave Bock's lesson of how to not get too attached to an idea.
\n\nCASEY: Ah! Love it.
\n\nCHELSEA: Actually, I did need to ask you that about that, Dave because you mentioned you teach a number of different age groups, you do a number of different guest lectures. You go and you volunteer at the local library. I imagine that for a lot of our listeners would love to be able to give back to their communities in addition to their full-time job. But like you, they got kids, they got things going on and there's logistical challenges associated with that.
\n\nI'm interested in hearing a little bit about how you manage maybe your time, but in my experience, limiting ingredient is really more energy than it is time. So I'm curious to as to how you approach that.
\n\nDAVE: Wow. It's not like I have more time in my day than anybody else. I just – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Especially with triplets.
\n\nDAVE: Right. It's just how I manage it. If anything, because of the triplets, I'm used to having to have a higher energy level. But first of all, for years, I didn't watch television at all. Not a single thing on TV at all. Like I missed probably a decade of cultural awareness and movies and everything. First of all, because I had kids, but also because I was volunteering in the classroom and that kind of stuff.
\n\nBut I have to say that the curriculum that I'm building with my students, that effort back every year. Every year, I'm like, “Oh, you know what, that's a neat little puzzle. I tend to do stuff with a lot of little wooden puzzles and I'll be like, “Oh, that's a neat puzzle. I'm going to add that to the curriculum,” and “Oh, that's just like that puzzle.”
\n\nSo I mentioned earlier, the 26 puzzle and the Aristotle’s Number puzzle, those are two puzzles I saw at completely different times, but similar gimmick, different scales. By the same token, if you've ever seen the Cracker Barrel triangle peg jumping thing.
\n\nMAE: Oh yeah.
\n\nDAVE: The peg solitaire. Well, that also exists in what they call English solitaire, which is marbles on a board and there's about 33 marbles doing the same thing, like a cross arrangement. Again, similar jumping mechanic, completely different size space problem. So I keep finding puzzles like that in pairs. I found a bunch of board games that are like this and each one illustrates some concept along computational thinking and every year, I have a fresh crop of new students so every time I add a puzzle to it, it just keeps glomming onto the complete set of curriculum I've developed. So it's not like I've spent tons of time developing this curriculum. I've spent a little bit of time over 8 years building it out and it's evergreen because there are always more students to learn.
\n\nSo how do I manage my time? I could not tell you that I have any secret sauce. I can tell you that prior to COVID, since about 2007, I have been working remotely on and off and not having a commute really gave me time, back in my day, to do stuff. The job I have now, they treasure the time that I spend in the classroom.
\n\nIn fact, my last several jobs have really supported me in this in the fact that I work from home, I'm 5 minutes from my high school, I can schedule a class on my calendar and it's just like a meeting. I can disappear for an hour and come back and it's just like I had a meeting in the middle of my day with anybody. So it really gives me that flexibility to volunteer at the school. In fact, for a year and a half, I had an hour and a half commute on a good day and for that year and a half, I was not in the school nearly as much because I couldn't get to it.
\n\nSo I think being able to work remotely is a big draw of my time. Not spending time parked in front of the TV, which admittedly has changed. I found a few guilty pleasures in television shows lately.
\n\nCHELSEA: Ooh, what are you watching?
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nDAVE: Oh my God. I am late to Ted Lasso.
\n\nMAE: I haven't seen yet!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHELSEA: What!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: Why have you not seen?!
\n\nDAVE: Oh, oh God. I’ve got to tell you. I'm not going to spoil anything because I want everybody to watch this show.
\n\nA friend of mine was raving about this show in terms of its postmodernism and he's off on a tangent describing that he predicted a show of this kind of non-ironic sentimentality and virtue ethics years ago because of the way the society was going.
\n\nWhen I first heard about this show, I was like, “Let me get this straight, a show about an overly positive, self-righteous character that is a soccer coach? Okay, I'm not a sports guy so I don't care about soccer and everything I've seen and heard about this guy, it sounds like it's Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. Why am I going to watch a show where Ned Flanders is the main character of that show?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I was dead set against a show forever and then somebody said to me—I was at a gathering of a bunch of friends recently and he said to me— “You're absolutely right. You need to watch it anyway.” So then I don't know, a month, or so ago, my wife and I were watching something. We were dead tired after a long day, sitting down for dinner. She wanted to watch something on TV and we were like, “Well, we could start the Foundation series. or we could watch the Dune movie,” and we're like, “No, both are too heavy to get into now.”
\n\nAnd Apple TV showed us a big flag thing for Ted Lasso and I was like, “Sure, I'll watch it right now. I don't feel like watching anything and I won't get committed to it.” 15 minutes into it, I'm watching it and I'm thinking, “Yeah, this isn't for me. Yeah, this is not the show I want to watch.” And then there was a line. I'm going to say the line—it doesn't give anything away. But this Ned Flander's type, after making somebody angry with his at first what comes across is toxic positivity turns to somebody else and says, “Wow. If he thinks he hates us now wait till we win him over?” And that line kind of touched me, like he's not just some random one-dimensional Saturday Night Live character failing up; he's doing this with intent and this is a decision to be this way.
\n\nMAE: Mm.
\n\nDAVE: And all of a sudden, the character had all this depth and with that one line I was hooked. And then in another episode, he was talking about his role as coach and a reporter was interviewing him—another one liner that doesn't give anything away. A reporter was interviewing him about the loss of a soccer game and he says, “I don't care if my team win wins, or loses,” and the reporter thought that was incredulous. He's like, “You don't care if they win, or lose?” And he's like, “It's not my job to care if they win, or lose. It's their job as the players to win, or lose. It's my job to make them the best players, the best people that they can beat today,” and I was like, “Wow.”
\n\nThe show revolves around this character who is just an upstanding human being at every point, unironically, and how he influences the lives around him and influences them just through his existence to be better people and how all this chaos around him and they all become aligned. It's just such an awesome show. I really recommend it.
\n\nWhen we watch a TV show, my wife and I have a commitment that we don't binge watch it. I hate binge watching a show because later on I'm like, “Oh, I don't remember that thing.” So we're watching one episode night, or two and it gives me the space to think about that episode and it's just such a rich, rich thing to think about it. It's really something that makes you think about your philosophy of life.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, maybe I have to watch this now, don’t I?
\n\nMAE: I know! That’s how I feel. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: It also sounds like – [overtalk]
\n\nDAVE: Sometime when you're brain dead and don't feel like watching anything, give the first episode a shot.
\n\nCHELSEA: Yes.
\n\nDAVE: Let me know what happens.
\n\nCASEY: It also sounds like the first contemporary male role model I might like.
\n\nCHELSEA: Oh, totally.
\n\nCASEY: My favorites for me are Dick Van Dyke, Bill Nye the science guy, Weird Al, and a lot of people from Star Trek, but there's none in the last 10 years. No one I can name who in media has been a good, positive male role model other than Ted Lasso, apparently.
\n\nDAVE: I really think you'll like this character. I can't imagine who wouldn't. You would have to be the most cynical puppy kicker to hate the show.
\n\nMAE: I definitely want to watch it. As someone that can be taken as a Pollyanna person about other people's lives [chuckles] and not my own, I have chosen a lot of things about being positive and honest, and it can get lost and be seen as naïve. So I really like what you've described.
\n\nI get extra positive by looking at the negative, like I can hold contradictions and human foibles and failures really, really well. So that doesn't make me now not want to deal with that person. So yeah, I'll be curious to see what Ted Lasso has to say about all kinds of things.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah, definitely recommend that show. This'll date me when I talk about how I haven't watched TV for a decade. The last characters that I felt this kind of passion about and they were the antiheroes was the – God, I can't remember the character's name now. But it was on the TV show, The Shield, which was basically a bunch of cops as antiheroes about how they had come to terms with, they could not just be forces of good in the world at sometimes they had to be the force of least evil and the mechanism that they had to do that and they were at times, real antiheroes.
\n\nThen the early days, I only watched the first two seasons of Dexter, the serial murderer with code. So real antihero kind of TV shows. I just have not watched a lot of TV and then to land on Ted Lasso is such a breath of fresh air. I can see why, especially during the height of the pandemic, that show resonated with a lot of people.
\n\nMAE: Oh my gosh. I have so many things to say to [chuckles] what you just said about the being least evil and a lot. Also Chelsea, you brought this up about how many things happen through – [overtalk]
\n\nDAVE: Vic Mackey. That's the name of the cop, Vic Mackey.
\n\nMAE: Oh, cool, cool, cool.
\n\nDAVE: Sorry.
\n\nMAE: No, no.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nHow many people contribute to whatever it is and a lot of the vexing problems, like the pharmaceutical industry, it gets really complicated when you start to see there is no one lever and a lot of people do feel, in those positions, that they are being the least evil.
\n\nSo many more topics, but we might be closer to the end of our session. I don't know if anybody else has any other zingers they want to put in before we do our reflections?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I think we're out of zingers for now.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWe could come up with more.
\n\nAll right, let's do reflections.
\n\nI happened to have one already, I can go first. Usually, I take a second to think of one. From earlier in the episode, I noticed a couple examples we had about how do you motivate students to learn about algorithmic efficiency and we had two examples.
\n\nOne is Chelsea has mobile apps need the faster algorithms and that makes sense. [laughs] If I knew mobile app development enough to teach it, I think I would start there, too. And then Dave had the great algorithm, like a simple wooden puzzle and then a complex wooden puzzle, and then moment in the middle where you pause, they're trying to run the simple naïve algorithm. That's so motivating. Help them feel the problem in the mobile app sense, help them see how slowly it would load before you make it refactored.
\n\nIn my background in education, computer science, it was definitely algorithms first and I was always like, “Why, though?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo one answered that at any point, really. [laughs] I was never that motivated to learn algorithms and I still didn't study them, but I might in these situations.
\n\nMAE: I have participated in Hour of Code and I did call my local school, but it kind of fell through and so, I really appreciate just getting reminded about coming more involved in my community. So thanks for bringing that, Dave.
\n\nCHELSEA: For my reflection, I tend to have a strong recency bias right after I'm thinking about things and so, the thing that I'm remembering the most right now is our discussion of the television shows.
\n\nBut what I think I'll take away from that is the comment from your friend, Dave, around having predicted that something like this would have its time, which reminds me of our discussion earlier in the conversation about the world being ready for something being a larger factor in when something gets developed than a fictitious individual progenitor of that thing, the way that calculus was.
\n\nI find myself wondering right now, what in our field, in programming, in tech in general, what is the industry, is the world, are the people that we serve, what are they ready for that I expect will see not because some genius comes along, but because that's what our field needs and I don't know what it is, but I'll be thinking about that.
\n\nDAVE: Ooh. Wow, that's real food for thought there.
\n\nMAE: Mm hm.
\n\nCHELSEA: I try, I try.
\n\nDAVE: That's kind of like – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: I knew Chelsea’s was going to be really good, which is why I went first. [laughs]
\n\nCHELSEA: Oh gosh.
\n\nDAVE: That's kind of the William Gibson quote of “The future is here—it's just not widely distributed yet.” I used that in another curriculum we'll talk about someday.
\n\nCASEY: I hope the answer to that is inclusion because that's a big thing – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nCASEY: And it's not being applied nearly enough.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nCASEY: I hope that's what we get next. That's the next upgrade I'm looking for in teamwork OS, whatever.
\n\nDAVE: So I can tell you that I've been at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference the last 2 years that it's been virtual and inclusion is a big topic there, even dominating discussion about pedagogy and teaching algorithms. People are talking more about how do we increase representation in the classroom.
\n\nSo my takeaway—and I actually did not realize it until the last second when Chelsea mentioned what I said was my superpower at the beginning was me sitting here talking about Ted Lasso is exactly an example of that. Because I was committed that I was not going to be interested in a show with Ned Flanders as a character and now here I am saying, “Everybody needs to watch this.” So that's a little example of I'm not wedded to that evaluation and I revisited it and moved on.
\n\nBut before she said that, the thing I was considering about my takeaway is how much even after a long, tiring day at work when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh, okay, now I have to do this interview. It's going to be an hour and a half and then I can take a break.” Whenever I talk about this stuff, it is invigorating and revitalizing. I am just so passionate about this stuff that it gives me so much energy. It recharges me. So I'm going to try to take that point in some useful direction.
\n\nCASEY: I want to comment on that last thing you said. I was thinking earlier, what gives you energy so you can volunteer more, Dave Bock? And then your answer was kind of volunteering gives you energy.
\n\nMAE: Mm hm.
\n\nCASEY: You didn't quite say that, but that's what I picked up from it. So anyone who wants to get the enough energy to volunteer may be powering through and just getting started and trying it once could be enough to get you started and if it energizes you in the end anyway. It might not. You could try it, though.
\n\nDAVE: Yeah. I never expected it to be this kind of fuel. I’ll have one last parting thought on that in that when I hold events at the library, it's often without any real agenda, except, “The end of the semester's coming up, come to the library and I'll help you with our end of the semester projects, or even if you just want to explore something else, I'll be there, to” – I'll have students that come with random ideas and we just sit there and just my presence can give them the encouragement to do something they'll be like, “I don't know, let's do that together.”
\n\nI can get so involved in an interesting problem that I can forget I'm working with a high school student and not some relatively new graduate peer of mine at work and I just begin to see a problem with beginner’s eyes. That is very invigorating. Maybe I’m a vampire stealing energy from our youth, I don’t know. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: They’ll got plenty; they’ll share.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, yeah.
Special Guest: Dave Bock.
Sponsored By:
01:01 - Ian’s Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning
\n\n06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy”
\n\n\n\n12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken)
\n\n16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry?
\n\n24:25 - Interview Processes Don’t Align with Skills Needed
\n\n35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Peoples’ tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning.
\n\nArty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship.
\n\nIan: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?”
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas.
\n\nIan has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He’s currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Ian.
\n\nIAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nIAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way.
\n\nBut it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you’re signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic.
\n\nARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you?
\n\nIAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share.
\n\nI grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked.
\n\nThankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean?
\n\nIn the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it.
\n\nAnd then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home.
\n\nIt was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nWhatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that.
\n\nJust the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business.
\n\nAnd so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time.
\n\nMANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming?
\n\nIAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching.
\n\nI started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?”
\n\nSo I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years.
\n\nAnd then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide.
\n\nWhen I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that.
\n\nA friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.”
\n\nThe curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.”
\n\nI love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well.
\n\nI think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively.
\n\nSo the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun.
\n\nARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many.
\n\nIAN: Definitely. Yeah.
\n\nARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews?
\n\nIAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken.
\n\nThere are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs.
\n\nAs a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be.
\n\nSo the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips.
\n\nI've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible.
\n\nI used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website.
\n\nAnd then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer.
\n\nBecause there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change.
\n\nI'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together.
\n\nMANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here.
\n\nIAN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street?
\n\nIAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company?
\n\nThat's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years’ experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years’ experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years’ experience.
\n\nSo the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years’ experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job.
\n\nI know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there.
\n\nMANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job?
\n\nIAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine.
\n\nYou can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.”
\n\nIt really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have.
\n\nSo I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs.
\n\nThe other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills.
\n\nAs a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply.
\n\nThe challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I’m bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of.
\n\nSo I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years’ experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team.
\n\nNow you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills.
\n\nI went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff.
\n\nARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job.
\n\nYou mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment?
\n\nIAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems.
\n\nWhere the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry.
\n\nBack in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.”
\n\nWell, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does.
\n\nOne criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it?
\n\nBut then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.”
\n\nWe shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing.
\n\nARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
\n\nI have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will.
\n\nIAN: Sure.
\n\nARTY: Being able to think that way, it’s fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles]
\n\nIAN: I agree.
\n\nARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis.
\n\nIAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that.
\n\nBut I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: Do they want to learn?
\n\nIAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here.
\n\nIAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works.
\n\nAnd then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people.
\n\nBut some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you’re signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it.
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\n\nARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things?
\n\nIAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too.
\n\nBut I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview.
\n\nBut I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it.
\n\nSo I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I’ve got to tell my friends about this.”
\n\nThat's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that.
\n\nSo I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that.
\n\nAnd I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.”
\n\nI think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that.
\n\nI think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time.
\n\nUnfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.”
\n\nCompanies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there.
\n\nARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack.
\n\nI think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it’s generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that.
\n\nIAN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging.
\n\nIAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.”
\n\nI think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments.
\n\nBut I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?”
\n\nI think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn’t even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that?
\n\nSo I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.”
\n\nBut again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations.
\n\nAnd then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there.
\n\nIf people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry.
\n\nIAN: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.”
\n\nIAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.”
\n\nWhen I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case.
\n\nBut there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you’re like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.”
\n\nBut then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates.
\n\nIf anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve.
\n\nI was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.”
\n\nIt's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody.
\n\nIAN: I agree.
\n\nARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this.
\n\nAnother thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we’re like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills.
\n\nMaybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.”
\n\nI feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality.
\n\nIAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time.
\n\nBut at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you’ve got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send.
\n\nAgain, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them.
\n\nI think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things.
\n\nThat's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team.
\n\nIt's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.”
\n\nBut I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment.
\n\nFor me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be.
\n\nAlso, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight.
\n\nARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen.
\n\nI know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship.
\n\nAlthough, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us.
\n\nIAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better, wanting to help build up other people around them to make something better about tech. There are a lot of things broken in tech. I'm a white guy in tech; I've been a part of the problem. I will admit that very forthrightly.
\n\nBut my main takeaway here is how easy it is to just sit down and have conversation with people, who I've never met before, and still come up with great ideas and collaborate and just be open to ideas, open to perspectives. I'm walking away from this conversation going now, I wonder what it would take to go build that open source collective on shaking this thing up. Who do I know at different companies that would be open and willing to help back this and put their name on it? Who do I know at different companies and who do I know in different upper management types of positions that would be willing to take a chance and say, “You know what, we're going to try this a little bit different for a quarter and see what kind of impact it has on our team and kind of impact it has on our hiring,” and then report back? Do that agile feedback of try a thing, get some feedback, make a change.
\n\nI love that we can just sit down and have conversation about it. It doesn't have to be polarized. It doesn't have to be politicized. It can just be, “Yeah, this is not working. What idea do you have?” I love that you're both willing to entertain ideas and present ideas and I appreciate the concept now. I actually want to go do something about it.
\n\nSo if anybody listening to this wants to do that, you can reach out to me. I'm on techinterview.guide. My email's on there. My LinkedIn's on there. You're welcome to contact me at any point and I would love to keep this conversation going.
\n\nArty, I'd love to pick your brain a little bit more. And Mandy, if you've got ideas about this, too, let's start pooling this stuff together. Let's start being that change.
\n\nARTY: That sounds great.
\n\nMANDY: Thank you.
\n\nARTY: Thank you, Ian so much for joining us on and I agree, we should totally keep this conversation going. This is how magic happens, right?
\n\nIAN: Sure.
\n\nARTY: You have connections and relationships that form just in the context of having a conversation like this and maybe we can kickstart something awesome.
\n\nMANDY: Heck yeah! Well, thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Ian Douglas.
Sponsored By:
01:42 - Rin’s Superpower: Writing, Public Speaking, and Being Neurodivergent + Awesome!
\n\n02:18 - GitHub Actions
\n\n07:47 - Improving Developer Experience
\n\n11:33 - Neurodivergence + Autistic Burnout
\n\n17:04 - Mentoring and Reviewing for Kubernetes
\n\n\n\n20:49 - Open Source Contribution
\n\n29:04 - Mentoring (Cont’d)
\n\n\n\n32:46 - Evaluating Open Source Projects: Tips For Newbies
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Technical Mentorship vs Social Mentorship.
\n\nMando: Providing a welcoming sense of community for people with non-traditional backgrounds.
\n\nRin: Being intentional about helping others, but also helping others means helping yourself.
\n\nJohn 2: The distinction between technical and autistic burnout.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla.
\n\nMANDO: Hi, John. Thanks. And I am here with our friend, Rin Oliver.
\n\nRIN: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with you all.
\n\nMANDO: We're happy to have you, man.
\n\nRin is a Technical Community Builder at Camunda. They enjoy discussing all things open source with a particular focus on improving hiring pipelines in the technology industry for those that are neurodivergent and improving the developer experience for new and returning open source contributors.
\n\nSo Rin, we like to start off each of our episodes mostly the same way, which is to ask our new friend, what is your superpower and how did you arrive to it?
\n\nRIN: I’m solid at writing, pretty solid writing, and I've been writing since I was a kid. I'm somehow really good at public speaking and I never used to be good at that. That was just through repetition. Other than that, being neurodivergent and being awesome is another superpower.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDO: Absolutely.
\n\nRIN: Yeah, I would say writing and public speaking and generally just being awesome. In terms of programming languages, I'm still kind of learning a bunch of different things. I'm enjoying DevSecOps and I really enjoy GitHub Actions so CICD.
\n\nMANDO: Cool.
\nI think this might be the first time I've ever heard someone they enjoy GitHub Actions.
RIN: Oh, I think they're great.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, I mean, so I love them as well and I shouldn't say that. I should take that back because I very much enjoyed GitHub Actions for the first, I don't know, two, or three weeks that I was using them. [laughs] And then I started hitting the problems of trying to share bits and pieces of my jobs across other jobs and that became a non-stop frustration.
\n\nRIN: Do you mean by concurrent actions where you use a different piece of action and another action kind of thing?
\n\nMANDO: I don't know about concurrent necessarily, but more just like, I want to be able to run this reusable step across multiple different actions.
\n\nRIN: They fixed that. We had that problem, too. They fixed that very recently back in August and you can now use the uses and with keywords and action repeatedly. You don't have to have it just – you can have the uses word define more than once.
\n\nMANDO: Really?
\n\nRIN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Huh. Man. All right. Well, this podcast – [overtalk]
\n\nRIN: Made your day.
\n\nMANDO: Just covered the price of admission [inaudible] guy. Thank you.
\n\nRIN: I know, right. You're welcome.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. The solution that I had before was to pull that stuff out into some bash script, or…
\n\nRIN: That's what we did, too. We've got it in bash script right now, but we might go back in and refactor it so we can have that uses keyword come back in. Just do it that way. Yeah, but now you can do that.
\n\nMANDO: That’s great.
\n\nRIN: Yeah, they just fixed that in a patch back in August, early September.
\n\nMANDO: Oh man. That's fantastic.
\n\nRIN: Yeah. The words you're looking for is concurrent actions. That's what they call those.
\n\nMANDO: That's what they call it? Okay. Well, fantastic. That's great to hear.
\n\nRIN: I know, right?
\n\nMANDO: So what kinds of things are you doing with GitHub Actions? Like, is it just CICD, or are you doing other things with it as well?
\n\nRIN: It is mostly just CICD, but another thing that I've been working on along with our infra team was bringing in security into that CICD function in that we brought in Aqua Security Trivy to scan the automatic releases that we were doing using GitHub Actions for critical vulnerabilities before they could automatically release. So we brought Trivy in with a bash script and it says, “Hey, if you have a critical CVE, you cannot do that release. Go back, do not pass Go, do not collect your $100.”
\n\nMANDO: No, that's awesome. That's fantastic.
\n\nRIN: Yeah. I just gave a presentation about it a couple weeks ago at DevX Day, which was a KubeCon, cloud data con co-located events. So that was pretty cool. I will link you all the slides if you'd like.
\n\nMANDO: So was it doing actual scanning of the thing of the output artifact, or was it –? Can you go a little bit deeper into I guess, what you all were doing specifically around security scanning as part of your pipeline?
\n\nRIN: Specifically? So what we had Trivy doing was scanning that output artifact and flagging it for CVs and if it didn't return them, it would upload them to Trivy in SARIF format so that people could review them, the retainers could review those and be like, “Hey, here's that?” And they wouldn't be able to automatically release until they'd resolved that.
\n\nMANDO: Got you. What were these output artifacts like? Were they like Java JARs, or –?
\n\nRIN: They are. They are mainly Java JARs. Yes, that's correct. It was used for publishing artifacts that may have been central.
\n\nMANDO: Got you. Nice.
\n\nRIN: I will actually link it to you. It's in our community hub and that is my project that I've been working on for the entire time I've been at Camunda and I've been there for almost a year.
\n\nCamunda Community Hub is our open source GitHub organization where all of our community powered extensions live. That is their home and if that is where people can find all of the things that extend Camunda and make it better, that are powered by our wonderful community and it's a wonderful place. There's a 124 repositories in there as of today and one of them is our community-action-maven-release, which is this tool that we are using to allow some of our maintainers that opt to use it to release automatically to Maven Central. So I will drop a link and it's a wonderful tool.
\n\nIt was a collaboration with myself and our infra team and a bunch of our other team members and the community itself. It was a whole bunch of people that came together to make this happen and make it better collaboration between Camunda, the community, and all of our wonderful people involved in this open source project to make it happen. The infra and developer experience team collaborated on that security piece and then we've also had a few people come to improve the tooling as of a whole in the DevRel team and the community as well in the last couple weeks too, which is great.
\n\nJOHN: Nice.
\n\nMANDO: I'm reading the README right now. [laughs]
\n\nRIN: Good. I'm glad. I'm glad I love a good README. That's wonderful. Good.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. But it makes for not great podcasting [laughs].
\n\nRIN: That is true. That is true.
\n\nIn summary, essentially, this GitHub Action supports the community extension release process for those individuals in our Camunda Community Hub that have extensions that are written in Java. So that workflow defines composite run steps to duplicate actions across repositories that allow for releasing to Maven Central and we do have a process workflow that shows that workflow as it stands in terms of both, the security scanning, how you use it, the prerequisites, and troubleshooting so that if you're interested in that and you want to undertake that option to release those artifacts to Maven Central automatically using this tool, you can do so.
\n\nJOHN: Nice. So I noticed in your bio, you talked a lot about improving the developer experience of new and returning contributors and open source and sounds like that's where you've been spending a lot of time with this community work that you've been doing. So tell me more about what it is that you feel needs to be worked on and what work have you been doing in that area?
\n\nRIN: The short version is that right now, I work in the Developer Experience team at Camunda, which is about again, obviously improving the developer experience, which is, for those people that are working with Camunda, ensuring they get the best experience possible. How can we make that experience better for those developers that are working with and extending out Camunda in that open source community? That's where I come in. And then Contributor Experience, how do we make the experience for our contributors, for our extension maintainers better? How can we improve that process as a continually improving function moving forward?
\n\nOn the longer-term side, I actually am a member of Kubernetes and I got involved in Kubernetes in 2018 and I joined the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group. So that's where I do a lot of my behind this scenes work is in the Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG and I've gotten a few people interested in Kubernetes who have gone on to actually speak at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and have gone on to do wonderful things and just generally, amazing people and have been a pod mentor at Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in the past—a few of them now—and just said, “You don't need a technical background,” and I hate to say technical. But you don't have to have a computer science background. You don't have to have a certain background to contribute to open source. Don't self-select out. You have an option to contribute to this community no matter what your background. You can write documentation. You can update READMEs. You can any number of things, you can be supportive of the open source community with and the Kubernetes community definitely needs your help.
\n\nJOHN: Very cool. So what sorts of things – you were talking about working behind the scenes. So tell me more about what those things are that you're doing to make that developer experience friendly, or smoother, or whatever their goals are there.
\n\nRIN: So for me, basically what I do, or I try to do anyway, is I do a lot of work improving, for example, contributor experience docs, building out that contributor ladder, making sure that there's unified READMEs and processes in general is what I'm hoping to build out at Camunda, unifying that contributing.md document, making sure that contributor journey is clearly laid out and everyone has the same experience regardless of where they come into that contributor journey and that there's a clearly defined pathway towards becoming a maintainer, et cetera. So that they know that this is what a commit message should look like, this is what's to be expected of code reviewers, this is what's to be expected of maintainers, et cetera. That experience is unified and cohesive across that platform.
\n\nMaking sure that in terms of the broader spectrum, such as Kubernetes, just making sure that we're holding space for people and just making sure that we understand that not everybody learns in the same way, not everybody absorbs information in the same way. Starting those conversations about burnout and enabling people to come together and talk about those conversations; what does that look like, what does autistic burnout look like, how do we recognize that, et cetera.
\n\nMANDO: From a first time, or an early contributor for projects like the different Kubernetes and Cloud Native projects, Rin would you suggest that the CONTRIBUTING.md be kind of the first place that you start, if you are thinking about contributing code? Should you start there and do some research – [overtalk]
\n\nRIN: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDO: Before you start diving in?
\n\nRIN: Yeah, I would say hands down, go there first. Go to kubernetes.dev and then just go check out that welcome section and then check out, it says right there, “The first step is check out the contributor guide.” That's absolutely the first place you should go is always check out that contributor guide. That's your first point of call.
\n\nMANDO: Okay. For those of our friends listening right now who are neurodivergent, what are some things that you think they should be especially on the lookout for, or things that they should keep in mind before and during their journey down open source?
\n\nRIN: I would say if you haven't already, definitely check out the recording that Julia Simon did at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 a few weeks ago on burnout. Julia’s presentation was amazing and it was packed during that KubeCon and that was a reason for that is that we're talking about burnout. Julia started a burnout channel and the CNCF Slack. I would say, join that.
\n\nI've given some presentations on autistic burnout. I will link that. I would say autistic burnout, be aware of what that looks like because it's very different from how neurotypical people experience burnout. Be aware of autistic burnout, be aware of those signs and recognize them, and be sure that you're talking about it with your team, your community, your friends, and be sure that what that looks like for yourself.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That was going to be one of the questions I have on my list here is how does that differ from burnout in more neurotypical area?
\n\nOh, actually before we get too deeply into that, I did actually want to talk have, if you could quickly talk about neurodivergence and what that means to you just in case there are listeners out there that are maybe not entirely clear on what that means.
\n\nRIN: Absolutely. So neurodivergence, basically that's an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of things. It relates to autism, ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s—there's a whole boatload of other things and it's very individual just because one person relates to neurodivergence another way. And also, it can relate to aspects of mental health as well. It can also be acquired; it doesn't have to be something you were born with. For example, CPTSD, or complex posttraumatic stress disorder is another form of neurodivergence and you don't have that necessarily at birth. That's something you acquire and that is a neurotype.
\n\nI'd say that there are plenty of – every neurotype and every combination of neurotypes is very unique to the individual. Nobody has the same neurotype. So I would always caution you that just because one person that is neurodiverted, you know just that one person. Definitely, you know just one person.
\n\nI myself am autistic, I have ADHD, I have dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and CPTSD so I have a whole boatload of things. I also have some ignored disabilities in that I have a bunch of metal in my left leg, but you wouldn't know it by looking at me. [chuckles] So it's just one of those wonderful things.
\n\nI navigate the world as someone who is also fat and trans. So those are also things. Visually impaired. So that's another one and the list goes on, but they're just some of the many facets that make up me and none of them fully define who I am. They're just aspects of who I am as we all are. We all facets of things that make up a whole and I would say that none of us are static. I would always be aware of that, that we are always ever evolving as individuals.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, I love that. Yeah, because it's absolutely true. The person we are today is not who we were yesterday.
\n\nRIN: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDO: Probably won't be the person that we are tomorrow, right?
\n\nRIN: No, I like to tell people that if you met me before I was like 32, we've had some updates to the system and all the bad codes have been patched down.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBe aware that there are further releases coming in the pipeline.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Yeah. Got to keep an eye out.
\n\nRIN: Exactly. Continuous improvement, continuous deployment of self.
\n\nJOHN: I have a conference talk where I talk about if you've got unhandled traumas, or emotional stuff that's stuck in there, that's emotional debt just like you have technical debt and you need therapeutic techniques in whatever stripe to do the work there and that's an update. Like you're clearing out all that old stuff; it leaves more room for all your current processes to run, they get more CPU, more RAM, or space to expand and really be the you that you want to be rather than you that's stuck in forever ago.
\n\nRIN: That is so true. I feel like also therapy is something that is very individual as well and I think that individual journey is just another, that's so unique to every individual and everyone has their own unique journey with therapy and the therapeutic process. I think that's something that's really challenging for neurodivergent people as well is to find a therapist that will listen to you and that's been a rough one, finding a good therapist
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. With CPTSD as well, there are so many forms of therapy, or therapists who aren't informed enough to actually be able to treat you well and it's a challenge to find someone to work with. Once you've gotten to the point where you've decided you want to work with someone, actually getting someone that's going to do some good for you is hard.
\n\nRIN: Absolutely. I found a therapist that finally specializes in EMDR and I'm just, just starting to say, I might want to explore that, maybe, eventually. Let's talk about that. She's been really respectful, but it took me months to find her and I'm like, “Okay, okay. This is good.” EMDR is pretty cool. But again, that's super unique and just because it might work for me. Check back with me in a few months.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDO: You never know given how our brains are in fact, individual snowflakes and – [overtalk]
\n\nRIN: Exactly.
\n\nMANDO: You don't know what medication is going to do to you necessarily. You don't know what different kinds, like you were saying, Rin of therapeutic approaches. Just because it did a certain thing for one person doesn't mean it's going to do it for you.
\n\nRIN: Exactly. You could take one medication and it could be fine for you, but it makes somebody else break out in hives.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. So Rin, what areas of the Kubernetes project are you closely connected to right now, if any?
\n\nRIN: Closely connected to right now, I would say I'm actually working on becoming a reviewer so I'm in a mentoring project wherein I'm getting some mentorship and being involved with other mentors and learning how to become a reviewer for Kubernetes. The good part is you can take that at your own pace and I fully tend to do that because I do have a day job and contributing to open source is not my bread and butter. So I would do that on my free time, very slowly, and learning hopefully, how to review and become a reviewer in Kubernetes.
\n\nAnother place that I'm contributing actively, or plan to is in our annual contributors’ summit, sort of contributor celebration event. We had a bakeoff last year, or the year before—my years are kind of blurry together—that I actually won, which was awesome. [laughs]
\n\nYeah, won that, which was rad. That was super fun. But it was tough. I was up against a really stiff competition and it was a challenge for sure, but that was a really fun event.
\n\nThis year my friend, that came in second. It was a dead tie; we actually had a vote off. Anyway, we're both going to be judging this year, if we have another bakeoff. So that's something that I'm hoping to be involved in and I will be. If we do end up having another bake off, I will be a judge on that and that is something that I'm hoping comes to fruition. Fingers crossed because that's cooking show judge has been my dream since I was a kid.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPlease let this happen, please.
\n\nMANDO: Awesome.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, can't go wrong with that.
\n\nRIN: I love it. It was during peak pandemic so we couldn't do it in person, but I wish we could have because it would've been so fun. It would've been just – and it was really, it was so fun. Even virtual, it was. We were all on Zoom and just cooking and it was chaotic, but it was fun and just getting to hang out with a bunch of my favorite people. Like I had somebody come up to me two weeks ago and they're like, “My kid thinks that you are their hero because the cake that you made at the bakeoff had candy that came out of it. It was a piñata cake and my kid loves you.” I'm like, “This is the best day of my life.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDO: Oh.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: That's what you want to be known for.
\n\nRIN: I know, right. If I'm known for anything, please let be the piñata cake, I'm begging you.
\n\nMANDO: Well, best of luck that you'll be able to put another one together.
\n\nRIN: I know, right? Yeah, that's where I'm working is that area of being mentored to learn how to become a reviewer. I poke my hat in SIG counter backs, but I actually have taken a little bit of time off from open source because I am trying to focus all my new job, my new role here at Camunda. I want to learn to become a reviewer and be more active in that reviewer process. Also, I’m a mentor for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as often as I can be. So I try to do that.
\n\nSo yeah, that's where I'm most active and of course, I spoke at the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon that just happened and I throw my hat in the ring for speaking every now and again at KubeCon. So in terms of being active in Kubernetes right now, I'm on that mentor short path and I'm taking it slow, but I've got to balance my time and I dip my head in every now and again and I try to do my best to be welcoming and positive when people do see me and they go, “Hey, it’s Rin.”
\n\nMANDO: Heck yeah. What did you speak on at the last?
\n\nRIN: At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, I did the DevX Day co-located event for building secure open source communities from the ground up.
\n\nMANDO: Nice.
\n\nRIN: And then I did at CloudNativeCon itself was how did I get started in open source using your Kubernetes contributions, or building off your Kubernetes contributions to further your career sort of thing. I'm blanking on any of my own talk, but that's fine.
\n\nMANDO: Oh.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, absolutely.
\n\nRIN: Yeah, that's fine. Everything's fine.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] That's something that I've seen, or at least I've felt like I've seen a shift in the way people understand open source contribution. And it might just be me getting older, but it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you feel different, but it seems to me like people are walking into doing open source contributions now with maybe their eyes wide open a little bit more than they used to. What I mean by that is they're coming into these kind of contribution spaces looking not only to see how they can make – how they can improve the community and contribute to the community, I should say.
\n\nBut they're also approaching it with a solid eye on like, how can they use this to further their career? How can they use this to get a better job? How can they use this to move into maybe a different direction that they were originally kind of started off in, or use it as a way to get their foot in the door? Maybe more of, I don't know, mutually beneficial path as opposed to the older school “altruistic path” of like, you're going to contribute open source software for the betterment of the community and then Apple takes your code and makes a bunch of money off of it and you're just kind of sitting around wishing you had more money.
\n\nRIN: That is true and that's something that I've had to conversations with a few people about now, about paying maintainers and saying we need to support our maintainers and make this experience better. I don't know what's going to come out of that conversation, but it's an ongoing one. Not my project, but I'm talking to people that are organizing a project around that so fingers cross that comes to fruition, because I'm always of the mind that we need to thank maintainers and pay maintainers. There's a GitHub sponsor button. It does great things, use it.
\n\nBut in terms of people coming into open source with their eyes wide open, I think so. I think that's true. But I also think that yes, people used to contribute for altruistic reasons. You did that because you love the project, or because you want the maintainers to have an easier time, or because you genuinely see something wrong and you know how to fix the IT, or whatever. But I think that there's also a case for the fact that open source software contribution is a way for people that don't necessarily have access to a computer science career background sort of education, or they can't clear those gatekept hurdles to get involved and say, “No, I am enough and here's how.”
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely and it was a refrain early on in my experience with open source was that this was a way, a path, a potential path and you would hear stories of folks who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds contributing to open source and then getting hired by some company based on their open source contributions.
\n\nRIN: That's what happened to me.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Do you feel like that's something that's well understood kind of in the – and this is so hard to say because I was thinking in the community of people who want to break into technology, but don't come from a traditional background. But okay, what cohort of people is that? [chuckles]
\n\nRIN: It's starting to be. It's starting to be because people like myself and a lot of people in the Kubernetes community and a lot of people in the broader open source community are saying if you come from a nontraditional background, make sure that you have your open source contributions on your LinkedIn, on your resume. Call it out, make sure that when you are applying for jobs, they know about it. Tell people and never stop telling people. Document those wins and say, “I have contributed to the following projects. These are my skills. This is what I'm doing. Here's my GitHub. Here's everything that I've done and the ways that I'm active in the community that might not necessarily be code. Here's the meetups I'm running. Here's the special interest group meetings I attend. Here's the projects that I'm helping on. Here's the mentoring I'm doing, or the mentoring I'm receiving,” et cetera.
\n\nMANDO: When we're talking about this area of technology specifically, like DevOps, DevSecOps that have that part of the community, in my mind that is a little bit of a, I don't know, harder task to experiment and play with this stuff on your own as opposed to sitting down and writing a Rails project, or a Spring project. Like there's more involved, in my mind, to doing DevOps-y kind of stuff, like building a lab and things like that.
\n\nRin, what's your experience in helping people who aren't – maybe who are interested in doing that kind of work, but don't really know where to start. Like, do you point them toward like, I don't even know anymore. I know that there was MiniKube used to be a way that you could get a small Kubernetes cluster running on your laptop. What are the options for folks now?
\n\nRIN: Yeah, MiniKube is still a thing as far as I know. But for me, in terms of DevSecOps, where I actually turn people to is I'm actually a board member for The Diana Initiative, which is a non-profit for gender diverse individuals in technology that's focused on information security, DevSecOps, et cetera. They have an annual conference and they have a wonderfully active Slack full of a couple thousand people at least. And that's where I tell people to hang out and submit CFPs and generally meet that community and get them involved.
\n\nAnd I say, the CFP is going to be open in January, please submit. If you are a gender diverse person and interested in InfoSec, DevSecOps, et cetera, cybersecurity, all of those wonderful things, submit to The Diana Initiative. We'd love to read your CFP. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: No, that's fantastic to have a spot that helps people land. That says, “This is for you. This is where you can come get that feedback on joining community, starting your speaking career, starting your open source contributions.”
\n\nRIN: Absolutely. And for that security side, it's full of just such helpful people, like the people that I met in The Diana Initiative InfoSec community are some of the most helpful people that I've ever met in this industry and they are people that you would never think would take 2 minutes to talk to you that have given me time out of their days to help me and to say, “Hey, here's some options.” I've met wonderful friends and wonderful community members. It's just a great place to be and they're always really helpful and really inspiring.
\n\nI'm glad to be a part of that community, be on that board, and to push that initiative forward into getting more gender diverse people, more non-binary people, more trans people be involved in that community and saying there's a place in for you in cybersecurity, there's a place for you in DevSecOps.
\n\nIn terms that projects to work on. Honestly, for me, I'd say look at things like Aqua Security’s Trivy. How can you implement security scanning into tools that you're already using? You don't have to reinvent the wheel; look at how you can use DevOps and DevSecOps tools into things that you're already using.
\n\nMANDO: I love that. That's fantastic. Absolutely one of the things that is a constant struggle, especially when you're talking about building containerized workloads. How do you make sure that the containers that your engineers are building are running on the latest version of the operating system that they're pulling in, or make sure that they're doing the dependency scanning to make sure that they're not releasing something that has a recently discovered CVE?
\n\nAll that work that you were talking about in the beginning, Rin beginning of the episode, the stuff that you had done spreading that gospel, [chuckles] if you will, to your engineering team, or I guess, your engineering friends, or whatever. That does sound like a pretty interesting and I don't know, I guess, relatively low friction way to start. You don't have to shove that in the middle of a process. You can kind of do that out of band and roll it out slowly rather than having to say, “We're going to stop the world and do this incredibly intrusive security audit and no one can release software until this third-party auditor has come through and gone through things.” Right?
\n\nRIN: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in terms of auditing, that's another thing where people that have non-traditional backgrounds can get involved because you can be involved in an audit and not necessarily have to write code. You can look at docs. You can review things that you have access to. It depends on who your CSO is. It depends on your cybersecurity team. You can help them write the documentation. You can help them write their findings. You can help them check their grammar and their reports, et cetera. You can still help. Even if you necessarily aren't writing that hard cybersecurity code, you can still help.
\n\nJOHN: You mentioned mentoring at KubeCon and I'm curious is that mentoring first time speakers coming in, or is that mentoring attendees of the conference?
\n\nRIN: That is actually mentoring attendees of the conference and I will drop a link to that. KubeCon pod mentoring. “Pod mentoring gathers a group of mentors to help people get their Kubernetes-related questions answered quickly and efficiently.” So where I usually sit is in that community track, that's where I come in is I mentor in the community track because that's where I have a lot of expertise is the community side.
\n\nBut there's people in – there's a technical track. There's a whole bunch of other things and people ask really – they ask some really solid questions and it's pretty great. It's available during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events. You have to register for it individually for the event to be eligible for mentoring, but it's really cool. They're not run by Contributor Experience, actually run by the CNCF and Linux Foundation. They're not run by SIG Contributor Experience, but they do advise and the SIG Contributor Experience members do help out such as myself. So that is a CNCF/Linux Foundation initiative and it's great. I love doing it. Something that I will always do if I have time at every KubeCon I go to.
\n\nJOHN: That's so interesting because what you described there is completely different from what I was imagining, but in a way that's really interesting to me because I'm part of the scholarship organizing group at Ruby Central. So we do RubyConf and RailsConf.
\n\nRIN: Oh, cool.
\n\nJOHN: And so we have a scholarship where we get people who are either brand new and underrepresented to tech – [overtalk]
\n\nRIN: I know that.
\n\nJOHN: For scholarships to the conference. But then we also pair them up with a guide so that they have a conference buddy, someone who's more experienced, who possibly knows a bunch of people, can help introduce them, and also help just get plan through what they're going to do and get the most out of the conference. That was sort of what I was thinking.
\n\nAs far as mentoring goes, we don't have anything like that in the Ruby conference world that I'm familiar with, where we have that technical question and answer like, “Hey, I'm stuck on this problem,” or “I don't really understand how this thing works.” That's a really interesting way of also like bringing developers in and helping support at them that I hadn't heard about and so, now I'm sort of spitting in my mind about what we could do there.
\n\nRIN: The good news is it's open source and you can use it as a framework.
\n\nJOHN: [laughs] Awesome.
\n\nRIN: If you want any help, I'm happy to help. That's something that I love doing and like I said, I'm getting interested in Ruby and poking around with Ruby and GitHub Actions, who knows maybe I could be a mentee this time.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nRIN: Switch it on me. I could actually get some help. [laughs]
\n\nBut starting a mentorship program such as this one in any community, I think is really valuable because you have time for people to ask those questions and say, “I'm stuck,” and be in that supportive environment where they're not going to get downloaded on Stack Overflow, or some other terrible place and they're not going to get judged relentlessly. They can come to that safe space and get answers from the people that are actually doing the work on a daily basis and that might have more experience in a particular area and can help them get unstuck, or at least push them further towards a resolution.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That's super fantastic. I do some individual mentoring with people outside of the conference and I can definitely, in that experience, I can see how so often it would be so valuable to them if there was that technical resource where it's like senior developer on demand where you can go ask the questions like, “I don't quite work how this thing is doing for me,” or “Here's my code, why doesn't it do what I think it does?” I think that would make for a wonderfully welcoming community.
\n\nRIN: I agree. And I think making those community is welcoming. It's just a concept of, like we said, in the beginning of the show, continuous action, continuous improvement. Nothing is static; it always evolves over time.
\n\nJOHN: Cool. I think the other question I had was around again, working with so many people who are new to the industry and I think lot of them here, especially in the bootcamps. “You should have some open source on your resume. It's going to help out do the thing,” like we were saying earlier. And I hear the next thing out of their mouth is, but I have no idea where to start. I don't know what projects are out there and accepting which ones have been groomed with issues that are suitable for new developers. You don't have to be Mr. Expert, or Mrs. Expert to go in and jump on those issues and actually solve them and start getting that contribution count up.
\n\nSo do you have any advice for people to sort of like, “Oh, I'm a bit lost in this whole world. Where is a good place to start looking, or how do I evaluate a project once I am interested to find out if it's going to toxic, or welcoming?”
\n\nRIN: I would say, first things first, always make sure that a project you're contributing to has a Code of Conduct and read it. Sign their Contributor License Agreement. If they have one, sign that CLA. Make sure that you adhere to that Code of Conduct, do your best to be a good human, just be a good person and if they have a CRC lined up – and CRC stands for Code of Conduct. If they have that Code of Conduct lined up, you know what you're in for, what to be is expected of you, what is expected of the people that you're going to be working with.
\n\nSo read that and then from there, I would say, check out the issues. Are they labeled? Do they have that good first issue label? Are they using it well? And if they're not, see if you can go at it to some issues that you think are good first issues. That's a good place to start, too.
\n\nMANDO: You mentioned CLAs there. Real quick, could you give our listeners a quick definition of what a CLA is?
\n\nRIN: I can. CLA actually stands for Contributor License Agreement and it's an agreement that a lot of open source projects would ask that you sign and some people like them, some people don't, we don't have time to get into that. [chuckles] But CLAs in general are a tributed relations agreement that says by signing this, you are contributing to this project open source and it's a whole bunch of legal jargon. Essentially, read it. But that's basically what it is. It's an agreement between yourself and the project that you're contributing to that says you can do these things, but not necessarily some other things.
\n\nMANDO: Are there any things in the Code of Conducts, or the Contribute License Agreement that you think people should keep an eye out for? The things you have seen in the past that you'd equate to being like a red flag.
\n\nRIN: I would say not having a code of conduct. [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: Fair enough, yeah.
\n\nRIN: Is kind of a red flag. I'm sure that there's some projects even that might not have a code of conduct in our community up. I'd like to hope they all do. But on the other hand, it's not necessarily something that you can force people to do. It's something where you can say, “We recommend that you have this, we would prefer that you have this,” but we can't force anyone to have it. We would like to hope that people do. A lot of projects do have those, what they call default community health files, where they've automatically any repo that is created – actually in the community hub, if you create a repo from our template repo, you well automatically get a Code of Conduct IMD generated. So that is good. We have that in place that says you have to buy this Code of Conduct if you would like to be a participant in this organization. So we do have to adhere to our Code of Conduct to be a part of the community hub. So that is very important. [laughs]
\n\nBut I would say not having one, or just not going to rattle off the many lists of things that would red flag because that's individual from me, what red flags for me are, I would say use your best judgment. If someplace feels unwelcoming, or seems like it's overly judgmental, or is just a negative place full of people that are saying things that aren't positive and not aren't welcoming, I would maybe not.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. That's a really good point.
\n\nJOHN: And you would see those discussions and say, GitHub issues, like as things are going back and forth?
\n\nRIN: Exactly. Yeah. You watch the issues. There’s Stack Overflow, or Reddit, or wherever that discussion is taking place, or Twitter. You'll know if that conversation is ingenuine in any way.
\n\nMANDO: That's a really good thing to mention that when you're deciding to contribute your time and effort to a community, take a little bit of time. Just because you like using a piece of software doesn't necessarily mean that the community might be as open and welcoming as you would hope. It's not necessarily indicative of a community that you would want to spend time interacting inside. So it's worth going to Reddit and it's worth going and checking out their GitHub issues, or whatever they're using to track it. Look to see if they have a Slack, or a Discord. Just spend a little bit of time trying to get your thumb on the pulse of the community. That's a really good thing.
\n\nRIN: Absolutely. I would say try to get your feel for community before you start contributing. Get the lay of the land, explore some special interest groups, explore the Slack, see how things are run, figure out how things are done, how people respond to issues, what that contributor experience is like, see how people talk to each other, see how they treat each other and say, “Is this a place that I want to invest my time?”
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Better to do that upfront than to have spent months working on code and then trying to perfect your submissions, and then discovering that it's going to be a real fight to get through your thing. Even though it's not that big a deal, or if you just getting being dismissive, or in intent, or whatever the dysfunctions of the community are. Knowing that beforehand, this is probably really valuable.
\n\nRIN: Exactly.
\n\nJOHN: It's funny that reminded me of – completely tangential. A friend of mine was trying to figure out what kind of dog breed to get and so, he spent a whole bunch of time going into different dog owner, like breed owner communities to see what the people that owned those kind of dogs were like, and use that as another data point to say like, “Oh God, I would never hang out with those people. I'm not going to get one of those dogs.” [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: It's not bad. Isn't that bad at all.
\n\nRIN: That's smart. Honestly, I wish I would've done that. That's really smart.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: So we've come to the time on our show when we do what we call our reflections, which is basically just each of us is going to reflect on this wonderful conversation we just had and talk about what it is that's going to stick with us, or we're going to be thinking about for the next couple of days, or new ideas things that we found.
\n\nAnd for me, I think looking into this different concept of technical mentorship versus social mentorship and especially in the conference context, but it could go into a lot of different areas, too and ways to expand that level of support within a community so that you not only have social support and mentorship on that level, but also, on the technical side, just to make that even more welcoming. I love that idea and I'm going to keep thinking about what we can do in the communities I'm in.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
\n\nThe thing that struck me, I had thought about it some. It’s something that keeps kind of rolling around in my head here and there, but the idea of all of the different ways that we have, as a community, to allow folks from non-traditional backgrounds, maybe non-computer science backgrounds and how it's a bit of – it's a responsibility on us and Rin, you touched on this and this is what really made it stick in my head. It's a responsibility on us who are in the community to make sure that the wins that folks get, who come from non-traditional backgrounds, make sure that we keep track of those and make sure that we celebrate them so that we provide that welcoming sense of community, John, like you're saying. That we provide a way to say, “These are some paths that people have taken.” You can see kind of the fruits of their labor and where they started from and where they've gotten to and they didn't have to go through the traditional path.
\n\nIt's on us to make sure that those things are brought out into the light and other people get to see them so that they can if not be inspired, at least have something that they can stumble across on the internet when they're feeling maybe a little down, or discouraged, or I'm never going to get in. I'm never going to get that job. They can come across these wins, maybe it'll give them a lift in the sales at the right time.
\n\nRIN: Absolutely. I'm going to be thinking about [chuckles] just continuous improvement and being intentional about where you spend your time, being intentional about helping others, taking time out of your day, but also understanding that you also sometimes helping others looks like helping yourself. It's that whole adage: put your mask on first like they do on the airplane. That whole concept is important to understand that you need to be aware and check yourself of burnout and make sure intentionally how you're spending your time and remember that you and everyone around you can hopefully always improve as people and try to uplift people and make this community better. Leave it better than we found it.
\n\nMANDO: Beautiful.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, for sure.
\n\nMANDO: 100%. Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: And actually that's my post-reflection reflection is also that you brought up the distinction between typical burnout and autistic burnout. That's definitely something I'm going to be reading up on because I had no idea there was a distinction there and it sounds like a very important one.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, yeah. Me neither. But it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense that there would be distinct differences there and as folks in the community, this stuff's on us.
\n\nRIN: Totally. It's on all of us to just do better, and learn and be better, and research and find what we can to just make this a better place to be at the end of the day and I guess, our takeaway is what are you going to do to make this a better place?
\n\nJOHN: All right, that wraps us up for today. Thank you, everyone for listening to the show.
Special Guest: Rin Oliver.
Sponsored By:
01:53 - Michael’s Superpower: Networking and Community Building
\n\n10:36 - Defining Mental Health
\n\n20:09 - Involving Gaming in Engaging in Talk Therapy
\n\n31:13 - “Age-Appropriate Horror”
\n\n\n\n38:45 - Social Media, Media, and Mental Health: Curate & Engage Responsibly
\n\n50:41 - The Geek Therapy Community
\n\n\n\n55:16 - Connect with Mike!
\n\n\n\n59:14 - Intergenerational & Epigenetic Trauma
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Coyote & Crow Role Playing Game + Using Role Playing and Game Playing to treat mental health.
\n\nI’m Begging You To Play Another RPG (Facebook Group)
\n\nMae: The pragmatic approach to seeing where people are and meeting them there.
\n\nCasey: Helping middle schoolers talk to friends in a structured way.
\n\nMike: The hardest part about doing something is helping people know you’re doing it.
\n\n\n\nBristol Children’s Hospital: Oath of Accessibility: “Anyone can be a hero. Everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 258. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae.
\n\nMAE: Hi, there! Also with us is Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Mike, The Nerd Therapist.
\n\nMike is a mental health counselor from Perth, Western Australia, and he does geeky therapy. He runs programs in which they use video games and tabletop games in therapy like Civ, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Dungeons and Dragons.
\n\nMike also writes the Pop Culture Competence project, which is a resource for parents, teachers, and therapists and seeks to boost professionals’ awareness and understanding of the themes and applications of Nerd Culture.
\n\nWelcome, Mike.
\n\nMIKE: Hey, thanks for having me.
\n\nCASEY: All right. It's time for that question we prepared you for. We want to know, Mike to kick off the episode, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMIKE: My superpower, I'd say I've been told by people whose opinions I trust is networking. In my last job, I was actually known to a few people before I even got there. And then in my previous job, when I worked in school counseling, I knew most of the applicants for new roles and I knew before the manager of our agency knew that they'd been picked up for jobs.
\n\nYeah, I love community and I found this out after recovering from social anxiety, that I just love community and building networks and meeting people. And that's evolved very naturally into creating professional spaces and working in professional spaces and just getting to know and to meet people.
\n\nCASEY: That's awesome. How did you acquire this skill, networking and community building?
\n\nMIKE: When I see a need, I'm driven to fill it, which that may actually have been a better answer to begin with, but hey, we're committed to this answer.
\n\nSo during my degree, we had an opportunity to do some training in a program called Mental Health First Aid. It's a really good piece of training, it's meant for like bystander civilian level people, but it's a professional grade training. It's really good. My university said, “You have to organize this. So just organize this on your own time, but we thought this might be cool to share with you.” So I contact the trainer and she goes, “Listen, it's 2 grand to book the weekend, but if you can get group of 20 people together, it's a 100 per person.” So I'm like, “Yeah, okay.” So I got 20 people together and we did that and then I sat there at the end of the second day of training. I'm like, “We could do this again.”
\n\nAbout three months later, we did some more mental health training. We did some severe critical mental health training. A couple months later, we did it again with a special victims’ ward of our local hospital and then we did probably about four training courses that year. We actually were all in our second, or third year of our degrees, but we were as qualified as graduates to actually deliver programs. It's kind of, I discovered that it is able to get out there and get people together to accomplish something.
\n\nMAE: I love that Mike, I find also sometimes I want to stay in community, but I'm so oriented to goals and outcomes [chuckles] that I try to do it around projects. So I'm a much more reliable buddy on keeping in touch if we're working on something together. I'm curious, it sounds similar to what you said, but maybe different. I don't know if it resonates with you.
\n\nMIKE: No, I hear you. If I'm in proximity to someone, or we're working on something, I find a way easier to keep in touch. Especially when we're with workmates, or studying, or something, I do find it better if there's kind of not a reason to give someone a message, but I find it easy to stay engaged if we're working towards something. That community of professionals that I'd actually built up, the long-term goal was to become a volunteering agency. But unfortunately, just being university students, what we had planned was a little bit it out of our scope and no one would insure us.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nR: The bureaucracy bites.
\n\nMIKE: It does. It was also my call because the original plan was to put mental health workers. So we've got a part of our city is just devoted to nightclub and the overall plan was to put mental health crisis workers in the nightclub district so that some drunk girl gets kicked out of a club, one of our team can make sure she gets into a taxi safely, or just someone's having a moment as a former nightclub bartender—nights don't always go well.
\n\nSo just having some Mental Health First Aid trained people in the city that can deescalate and bring people down to a safe place, that was the goal. But unfortunately, that also involved putting a whole bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds in the nightclub district on weekends and it was a logistical nightmare to do that ethically and safely.
\n\nCASEY: I think I've heard of bartender training, or professionals. Oh, the specific story I heard of was training barbers, I think it was in New York City, to have this Mental Health First Aid triage, or connecting people to services that would be helpful for them. So this idea is really powerful, I think.
\n\nMIKE: It is really good because it's really helpful because there's two types of people that people tell everything, that's barbers, or hairdressers and bartenders and that was kind of the goal. We actually have a similar program here in Australia where we're teaching hairdressers and barbers, we're actually providing them domestic violence training so that they can recognize signs and know who to talk to next.
\n\nBecause if there are people in society who are being told everything because it's very intimate physician, it would be a missed opportunity to do some good, but also to provide these people some training so they can handle it because as a bartender, I heard a lot of stuff that would be challenging to hear if I wasn't already an experienced mental health professional while I was doing it. So these programs, I love that they're recognizing this is a thing that happens and I'm also really hoping that they're teaching these people how to actually support themselves when they're hearing the rough stuff.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I wonder what percentage of bartenders and barbers get any kind of training? 1% would be better than I would've thought a year ago.
\n\nMIKE: Honestly, I wouldn't know. I haven't been something I've been engaged with. My city, Perth, we've got a big focus on mental health at the moment. There's a few charities working in the industry, trying to support people from an employee perspective, but also from an industry perspective because bartending doesn't lead to the healthiest lifestyles.
\n\nJOHN: I was thinking, it reminds me of there's an organization called MAPS that does research into psychedelics and they provide counselors for example, at Burning Man, or at other places where people are going to be doing a lot of these things, trained in dealing with people having problems while they're on psychedelics and so, they were able to talk people down and keep them centered and get them into a good place. I think it's so powerful to acknowledge that people are going to be doing these things.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: People are going to be doing drugs, they're going to be going out in the evening, they're going to have a night out. But they're not always going to go well and having a support system right there is, I think so important versus waiting till it spirals so much more than it would otherwise. And then police are involved and every goes downhill from there.
\n\nMIKE: Oh, a 100%. It's all about the harm reduction. I actually didn't know they did that. That's a really great initiative.
\n\nMAE: Love it. I was going to bring up Burning Man. Mutual Aid and so many different community conveners are in touch with how much mental health is connected to all the other things. My dad owns a biker bar and I'm 5 feet tall and it has been interesting to bartend there in rural upstate New York, figure out how to navigate the after-midnight hours. [laughs]
\n\nMIKE: That would be interesting. I was once contacted about providing mental health and emotional support at a BDS&M night and that would've been a really interesting – unfortunately, I was busy because when you are bartending, you're already working weekends. But I liked that the organizers were looking for some support for these events and they ended up doing the Mental Health First Aid training as well.
\n\nJOHN: Nice.
\n\nMIKE: Which was really cool.
\n\nCASEY: That's awesome. Yeah. I'm thinking about all this in the sales funnel framework so like, how do you get people into the top of the funnel in the first place.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's often the missing step.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: You’ve got to get people exposed to the idea that they could, take the training, and then they have to be interested and they have to decide to do it and go to the barrier of scheduling and paying. And then same for applying it; it’s like a process. I love that we're talking about the top of the funnel because a lot of the conversations in the bottom of the funnel, like go to a therapist. I mean, as a series of funnels but.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Very top of the stop post one.
\n\nMIKE: And that's the big part of the conversation is a lot of people don't know these services exist. Like Mental Health First Aid, if you go to any given Mental Health First Aid training course, it will doubtless be mostly filled with people who work in mental health, or be people who work near mental health, like teachers when it's designed to be a bystander level course, it's designed for people. So if you were [chuckles] literally anyone who doesn't work in mental health, that's who the course is for and getting people out there, who can actually provide support, is so important for that ground level stuff so we can head off a crisis.
\n\nMAE: I wonder if it might be useful to talk about some definitions for a moment and people who don't identify as having any mental health challenges, or know anybody in their life, it can sound really big. So just to say, maybe from your perspective, how would you define mental health and my opener leading question caveat is that I don't understand how we all don't just have [laughs] orientations toward external support and there's a lot of stigma stuff. Just hoping to break down some of that for any listeners who have us experience with this whole framework could have some access points.
\n\nMIKE: The problem I experience with mental health is that people only ever use the phrase mental health to refer to times when something's not working correctly, or when something's wrong like a crisis. It very rarely comes up in terms of positive mental health and in terms of things going well; it's always disordered. That's a problem because it would just be nice to not have the phrase mental health be synonymous with not doing well. Mental…
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMental anguish.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Well said. That sounds like it would be the literal term for it: health of the mental [inaudible] – [overtalk]
\n\nMIKE: It does.
\n\nCASEY: But it is not.
\n\nMIKE: And semantically, it is. But when we're talking about mental health trauma, it's always talking about disorders, or experiences like trauma and it becomes really challenging because we see a lot of these big conversations and it's harder than it has to be because a lot of people self-invalidate. They'll go, “Oh, I'm just experiencing this. It's not as bad as what this person's going through, or this news article I've seen.”
\n\nI guess, the one thing I tell a lot of people is that your experiences are valid and what your feelings are. Just because you don't have it as bad as the next person doesn't mean you still don't have it bad. We have this idea called dialectics, which basically distills down to two seemingly contradictory concepts can peacefully coexist and that in this context with you, other people have it bad and I can also have it bad even though doesn't seem to be as bad as them.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I really love moving away from comparative definitions [chuckles] into self-assessment stuff. Is that where you were going to go, John?
\n\nJOHN: Well, I was noting that I frequent the CPTSD subreddit for complex PTSD and the number of people in there who have had truly horrific experiences that are having that same argument with themselves. “Oh, what?”
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: “I wasn't actually murdered as a child so, other people had it –” and it's really heartbreaking to see someone having had such experience still invalidating them and still thinking they're not worthy of treatment and support.
\n\nMIKE: I attended a training when I worked in schools and some of the participants there were from a very prestigious private school in my state. They were teachers, they were year leaders, they were, I think the principal was there as well. It was close to a third of the class from this one high school and the thing they all said their students faced was everyone just assumes they don't have problems because they're rich, or everyone assumes their problems can't be solved with money. Now we can solve a lot of problems with money, don't get me wrong. But it really just brought to mind this comparison that these privileged kids must be experiencing. It would be hard for them to go because people are very invalidating of that because they have means and access. This is just a really interesting thing that I'd never really considered.
\n\nMAE: Are you familiar with the study about the amount of money at which point more money does not lead to more happiness? Like, there's basic needs and some comfort, and then after that, the more money really does not have a direct correlation to happiness, but below that, for sure.
\n\nMIKE: I did. I only read that a couple weeks ago. It was really cool. It was titled like “Money does buy happiness, but it suffers from diminishing returns,” and I really enjoyed reading that because it's true. A lot of problems, a lot of issues that a lot of people face is systemic and it's financial. There's a whole lot of stresses out there that wouldn't be stresses if we could just afford the way to solve it. But unfortunately, people don't always get that, or understand that. We get these trite little sayings like, “Money doesn't buy happiness.” It's like, yeah, but it puts food on the table and it buys medicine and it pays for therapy.
\n\nJOHN: It buys a lot of happiness up to a point. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: It's a more nuanced phrase, less catchy maybe.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: But I'd rather have that one.
\n\nMIKE: Mm.
\n\nMAE: My life and experience of life and other did change when I could afford my bills and I didn't have to check my bank account every day to figure it out. And the amount of hours that I would have to spend in order to make sure that my bills were taken care of like, to be poor is significantly more expensive.
\n\nMIKE: Mm hm. Oh, it is.
\n\nMAE: Which compounds mental health challenges as well.
\n\nMIKE: It's like that line from… Well, it’s not a line, it's like a whole page, but it's from a Discworld, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and it goes into the Boots theory of poverty. A rich man can spend $50 on boots that will last him all year, but a poor man will have to spend $10 a month on boots that will only last him the month, but he can't afford that $50. All he can afford is the $10 so it's more expensive to be in poverty because you have to buy poor quality items.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I'd always wish that some high-powered economist could actually crunch the numbers on what the curve is like, at what level of income does it stop being more expensive to be poor and then I assume that there's the opposite curve where the more money doesn't do any. But I know there's a curve there and it would be super curious to know what that looks like.
\n\nMIKE: That would be really interesting to read. I'm not a big money person. I don't like those conversations. I really struggle with business and finance sort of stuff. But I would read that article in a heartbeat to figure out where is the line.
\n\nCASEY: I want to hear the original one adjusted for inflation, too. The original study saying money doesn't buy happiness is probably old at this point. I think the dollar has doubled in, or halved in value since 1990 to today. Did you all know that? I look it up once in a while. I try to see the sodas I bought as a kid, how much are they inflated to today and it is $2, it used to be $1 for a soda. So, for all these studies, double it at this point, if you're not sure.
\n\nMAE: A comment on the money thoughts. There's this book, that's now a couple years old, circulating called Decolonizing Wealth. It's mostly focused on fundraising and the development, discipline and philanthropy and how all of that happens behind the scenes. But it's written by a man who is indigenous and has some really interesting takes on money and how and when and why it flows. I think he might appreciate that one, too, Mike.
\n\nMIKE: That would be an interesting read.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I think I want to track that down.
\n\nCASEY: Let’s link it. By the way, we also have noted that we will link Mental Health First Aid, which I encourage all the listeners to take. I haven't taken myself, but everyone who's taken it raves about it afterwards. It's so helpful. It's practical.
\n\nMIKE: It is such a good piece of training. I can't speak for other ones, but the provider I had came from a youth not-for-profit who are based in Melbourne on the other side of Australia. They come over to Perth, my city, to deliver it and I picked up more practical information in a 2-day course than I probably did at six months at uni. And that's speaking more about the quality of the course than the quality of my education. My uni was great, but the course was so – it was a big 2 days because you were covering some huge topics.
\n\nI always experience what I call a course hangover because it's 2 days of thinking about some really heavy stuff. So I always leave with migraines, but it is such a powerful skillset and I wish it was more available to the general public.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Actually, my company's making a big push to get people that training, which I'm super excited about.
\n\nMAE: Awesome!
\n\nCASEY: Brilliant.
\n\nMIKE: There's lots of different variants, too. So there's Mental Health First Aid is the standard, there's Children's Mental Health First Aid and all the different variants focus more on the issues that affect that group. So there's Children's Mental Health First Aid. I haven't done that one. There's Teen Mental Health First Aid that focuses a lot on anxiety and eating disorders. There's a Youth Mental Health First Aid, which is like everyone from 5 to 25, and that focuses a lot on substances, eating, and anxiety again. There's Older People's Mental Health First Aid. Again, I haven't done it, but it sounds really good. And there's even one, and I really want to do this, it's an Indigenous Australians Mental Health First Aid. It teaches how to be culturally appropriate in terms of mental health delivery.
\n\nMAE: Love all of this.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That's amazing
\n\nMAE: In listening to your bio, Mike, I couldn't help but think of, and I wonder if you could share a little bit about if you're familiar with her work and if it has some overlap, but Jane McGonigal's TED Talk about mental health and gaming. It's a little older now.
\n\nMIKE: I feel like I've watched that TED Talk. Is that the How Gaming Can Make a Better World one?
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: I have watched it.
\n\nMAE: She's got a couple, actually and she was one of the early proponents of involving gaming in engaging people in perhaps non-standard talk therapy ways and the gamification of positive healthy habits.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: Which sounds right up your alley. So regardless if you're familiar with her, [chuckles] maybe if you want to tell us a little bit more about some of your applications and approaches.
\n\nMIKE: Sure thing. I do remember watching that TED Talk when I was at uni and I thought it was amazing.
\n\nOh, for the last little bit over a year, I've run Nerd Therapy. So I started off as a counselor working in schools like elementary schools and probably September last year. So we've got our own like – therapists have a million Facebook groups for location, for specialty, for their needs, just really, if you can think of a niche reason to have a group, there is one.
\n\nI'm in a few of them and those recurring questions about, “Hey, what's Fortnite, what's Minecraft, what's Pokémon,” and a lot of the answers they were being given were actually pretty disingenuous. Someone literally called Pokémon a children's dogfighting game, which isn’t wrong, but it was also completely inaccurate.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nPokémon consenting at the very least, it's a very healthy industry. And I've realized these people who are working with kids were getting very tarnished views of the media these kids are engaging in and it's going to be hard to engage in a positive way if you actually have told and you believe that children are engaging in recreational murder.
\n\nSo I started writing up whole essays in Facebook comments. I was that person and it was getting tiring finding them again and reposting them because I didn't have the foresight to save them to a Word document for reuse later. So I made a website and I called it The Nerd Therapist and it was, “Hey, this is Fortnight. This is a simplified overview of what it is, here is why people like it.”
\n\nI really enjoyed writing that segment because it made me think that Fortnight's one of the most inclusive games ever made in terms of access because it'll run on almost any device and everyone can play together. So you've got like that one kid in the friend group who doesn't have the newest console, or has an Xbox and all his friends that have PlayStations, that kid doesn't get left out. I love that because that would happen with a lot of games.
\n\nI write why they're into it, what makes it fun, and finish it off with a segment like, “Okay, here's how you use it in therapy.” You can use it to build communication skills. You can use it to build teamwork abilities. You can just use it to think about mental health and defenses in your own strategies. There's a lot of symbolism and don't talk so much smack about the Battle Royale when everyone's favorite book for a few years was about a Royale book by the name of The Hunger Games.
\n\nI create this project and for a few months I ran it in secret because I'm like, “You know what? I don't feel confident sharing that I'm doing this with people because I'm going to get called unprofessional.” It's going to get nasty because I'm out there telling this industry, these people with a very uncharitable view towards video games that they can actually think about video games and anime superheroes in a productive way.
\n\nI started that this September 4th last year and I'm yet to receive a single negative comment on the internet.
\n\nMAE: What?!
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEven that's after two Reddit AMAs and that's…
\n\nMAE: Wow.
\n\nMIKE: A hell of an achievement for anyone who gets the internet to any degree. So after about two, or three months, I went public with them like, “Okay, this is me. This is what I do.” I took the shot; I shot my shot. And then I got asked by someone who contacted me for the project for some advice, they go, “Have you ever do you run D&D as therapy?” And I sat there for a second and I'm thinking, why the hell don't I run D&S as therapy?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: Because I'd read the studies, I'd read the awesome articles about people doing it, and I'm like, “Why the hell haven't I done this yet?” So I probably spent like a month reading through research and figuring out how to do—it was my obsession—and then I introduced it to the program and I started running D&D as therapy. And then I completely rebranded because I had a counseling practice at the time, but the Facebook page was very neutral earth tones, very touchy feely, it was kind of nice counselor, but very generic counselor and I just went, “No, this isn't me. I'm cosplaying as a therapist here. This isn't really who I am.” Had a lot of mountain imagery and I'm like, “You know what? No.”
\n\nSo I rebrand, I become The Nerd Therapist and I changed my project's name to Pop Culture Competence because I'm advocating for movies, media in general, to be more recognized as an element of cultural understanding because at the moment, it's not. There isn't someone you can go to. There's a consultant for every cultural group. Every cultural religious group, there'll be someone in this community who runs a project, or organization so you can learn more about them and how to engage them in therapy.
\n\nBut until this project started, I was not aware of and I still haven't found just a free, simple resource you can go to when you need to know about nerds. When you work in primary schools, they may not be nerdy, but every kid's playing Fortnite. So if your view of that is not charitable, it doesn't help your relationship with them and the kids can tell. Every little facial expression that an adult pulls that when they're hearing about games and they don't want to hear about games, the kids pick up on it and it hurts a little.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: I actually got sent by a colleague, or friend, they’re working in the United States, actually have a list of phrases that will shut down any conversation with a gamer and it was really cool to read because it's basically a list of nerdy microaggressions. It was really fascinating to read and I'll share some with you.
\n\nMAE: Yes, please. Yes.
\n\nMIKE: If you want to shut down a conversation with a gamer, “You play what now? Oh, I heard that game was violent.”
\n\nJOHN: Oh yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, that's bad.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah. All that phrase is all you need to tell your kid that you don't actually care about what they're into is that you're just believing whatever's been on the news out it, or whatever other people have told you, and you're not willing to listen to them about why you are really just frigging thrilled that you figured out how to make something in Minecraft. It's digital Lego. You can't malign Minecraft. You can malign Notch who made Minecraft, but he's out of the picture now.
\n\nBut I get a lot of calls from people whose kids have been invalidated and belittled by a therapist for playing games, or whose parenting skills have been brought into question by therapists for allowing them to play games. I've said this since I was about 8 years old, but I'm not going to take criticism on gaming from people who watch an equal amount of TV.
\n\nCASEY: Oh! Love it. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: I love thinking of you at 8 years old having that to say as well. [laughs]
\n\nMIKE: I was a mouthy 8-year-old
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut it's that invalidation and it stops conversations from happening. So I started this project so I can at least boost understanding.
\n\nAnd probably the best article I wrote was the one that really pushed what I was willing to say was I did an article on Grand Theft Auto and that was a calculated risk because I'm like, “Okay, here's probably the most famous game for being kind of what people accuse it of being.” And I enjoyed GTA, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. So I wrote about it. I'm like, “Look, this is Grant Theft Auto. First, I have to start off by saying, ‘Look, I don't advocate for any of the in-game actions [chuckles] because of all the legal stuff. But if you want to start with it, this is what you can do.’”
\n\nI gave a brief rundown of the history and then I started talking about the plot of Grant Theft Auto V because GTA V has a plot. I also talked about the social commentary in it and the political commentary in it about how, especially in GTA V, crime isn't portrayed as particularly glamorous, or without risk. It's a game where a lot of people die simply for being involved with you.
\n\nI used it to talk about the socioeconomic determinants of crime and what leads people to do crimes and how it's way more than presented because GTA V actually gave us some storylines. You had Franklin who is just raised in the hood, raised in the cycle of gang violence, and trying to break out of it. And you had Michael who peaked in high school and never really managed and his only real thing that he could figure out was crime.
\n\nAnd then even again, finish off that article with here's how to use GTA's imagery to boost communication and teamwork, because you need to have a good cohesive team who communicates in order to pull off a heist.
\n\nThat one was a tricky one to write because GTA is infamous and that article actually got some good reception. I got even got some messages from some people with really impressive job titles and they're like, “I've never thought about GTA in this way before,” and I'm like, “Yeah.”
\n\nCASEY: That's awesome. You were really taking the perspective of other people and including yourself, I guess, in this case. But what do people enjoy in this and how can it make sense to someone who doesn't get it? You're validating.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah, and that's what I try to do. That's what I try to say even for stuff I'm not a big fan of. Like, I'm not a huge fan of Five Nights at Freddy's, just not my kind of game, but I still did an article on it and I gave it it's validation. Oh, this is what it's about and also, while we're here, can we talk about how there's no kids horror.
\n\nKids are seeking out horror content and they're having to go out of their age range because they don't make horror for kids and yeah, horror for kids would be incredibly tricky to pull off and it would be a huge niche, but it's also better than being greeted by a group of 3rd graders who've just watched Stephen King's It because I wouldn't even sit down and watch that movie. I don't like seeing kids get hurt. I don’t know how we'd get it done. But I just feel like kids like to be scared, like to be startled, they like suspense, they seek out horror. So we get a lot of kids into stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's, or Slender Man despite it being not appropriate at all and I just wish there was more age-appropriate horror for younger viewers.
\n\nMAE: Ooh. I love what you just said. Age-appropriate horror, [chuckles] that I do think is an untapped market right there, [laughs] market need. I personally like have always moved away from horror. Even as a kid, there was some movie, I don't remember what it was, but it ended up not being a scary movie in the end. I think it was the one where there were the little roller animals that – [overtalk]
\n\nJOHN: Oh, Critters?
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nJOHN: Critters, yeah.
\n\nMAE: Yes, John, thank you. We went to the movies as a family and we were going to see Critters and I was like, “Mm I can't do it. It's too scary.” I left and instead, I went into the Jackie Gleason movie where he's dying. [laughs] Like this super heavy drama, that's where I went as a kid. But you're helping me because I do have and the older I get, the stronger it becomes; some judginess and aversion toward violence, hatred, and horror. I don't totally support my niece's 5-hour day TikTok habit, so.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThere are ways in which I don't want to be like, “Boy, that rock and roll is really messing with the kids today.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I also, I don’t know, there's pieces in there that I don't love like the portrayals of women from the Grant Theft Auto posters I've seen, or there's stuff that I don’t know is awesome even when there's other things that are skills-based that we all could use more of.
\n\nMIKE: No, I hear that and that's another thing I address in the topic of my Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto posts. I'm like, “Look, these aren't for kids. These are not for kids. They are explicitly not for kids,” but kind of that acceptance of kids are playing them and we've got to look at what we can do in that scope if we're not stopping access entirely. That can be really challenging because yeah, GTA, it aims to be problematic.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd I still enjoy parts of it for what it is in that not a lot of games will just let you drive around a city without being incredibly boring and that's what – like, I've talked with a lot of parents whose younger kids play GTA, but it's not for the violence. It's not for killing. It's just for being let loose on a city with a car because there's not a lot of games where you can just kind of drive around a city and if there are, there's usually some sort of caveat, like you’ve got, in Crazy Taxi, your missions are only going to last for 90 seconds, or something.
\n\nThis is kind of that free-roaming freedom and that's one of the things I do bring up is like, look, these aren't age-appropriate. Here's what they're getting out of it. Maybe let's think about some alternatives and unfortunately, there's not always alternatives. I always come back to stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's and the horror genre, and they're seeking out these age-inappropriate things because there isn't much age appropriate for them. One of my favorite movies when I was 8 was Starship Troopers and I still love Starship Troopers, but there's nothing kind of really in that big gung-ho military satire sci-fi for my age group at the time.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and I can't say that I'm any sort of expert in this, but one way to approach say, your 12-year-old niece comes to you saying how much they love Grant Theft Auto and they've been playing it 5 hours a week and whatever may like your reaction is like, “Well, okay, I can see there's fun stuff, but there's also this stuff that makes me cringy and I'm really uncomfortable with.” I'm thinking that that can actually be a point of communication.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Like you can relate to them about what they're doing and what they're enjoying about it and then you can say, “Well, what did you think about that other thing? Like, was that something you thought was cool, or were you a little uncomfortable, or?” You can use that to discuss, like you were saying, Mike, about the social determinants of crime in the world that it exists and you could start conversations on that because they're portrayed in the game world.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah. They are great prompts. It's like, “Hey, you've seen this thing happen in the game. Is that something you'd like to talk about?” And if you've got adults that a kid can trust to have that conversation, you can actually start conversations rather than end them. So if you hear a kid say, “Oh, I'm really into” – we'll keep going with Grand Theft Auto. “I'm really into Grand Theft Auto.” It's like, cool and instead of dumping on GTL saying, “Oh, that's not appropriate. Let's do something else.” Then you can actually start a conversation, go, “Yeah, how did you feel about that scene where Michael's daughter is trying to get onto a reality show and she's being exploited by Lazlow?”
\n\nYou can talk about some of these really big topics if that's where you want to go and that's kind of at the end of every article, I talk about themes and it's, “Here's where you could go if you want to have a conversation, here's some of the topics you could go into.” I do a lot of values-based work and that's where we can look at where we can go from here. It's like, how do you have a conversation with people about using Among Us for instance, or what conversations can you start?
\n\nCASEY: My therapist friends, Among Us was their go-to last year.
\n\nMIKE: Hmm.
\n\nCASEY: It was also the zeitgeist. The most popular thing. But to do during therapy with kids was Among Us, totally.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah. I didn't use Among Us in the work, but I still have it on my phone and we just again, covered it in articles like, “Here's the conversations you can have with it. Here's how you talk about. Here's a way to look at intrusive thoughts as being this little imposter trying to tell you, you are what you're not.”
\n\nOne game I'm currently playing – and again, looking at gaming and decision-making, one game I’m currently playing is Civilization VI and we're looking at values in terms of like hey, what kind of civ are you going to be? Are you going to look more at military? Are you going to look more economics, trade, politics? Where's your decision-making going and then you can look at decision-making by the turn. It's like hey, this city's been at war with you for a little while, you've been on war with it for a couple of turns now, what are you thinking of doing and you can look at why, what logic, and what values are driving your decisions.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, totally. And just for the record, I’m not an advocate of all that much censorship, but just well, what I usually say is, “Listen, Niecy, you are in charge of your brain and the stuff that you put in there, it affects how you think about yourself and others and so, it's up to you. There are things that you're going to be curious about and going to want to know about, but just as long as you're having a more meta view,” [chuckles] which I don't say it that way, but I think it's food. It's mental food, all the things that we engage ourselves in, these topics among them, and we can be healthy consumers of information to go back to that word, health, or we can eat lots of candy, which I definitely do sometimes.
\n\nMIKE: And that's a 100% accurate especially in terms of, I'm actually looking at that similar thought process in social media right now because I see a lot of parts about how social media is damaging. But what I'm also suggesting to people so if you're having a bad experience on for media, you can curate your newsfeed and if you're seeing posts that are just designed to make you angry and there's content out there designed to elicit an emotional response from you, change what you're seeing.
\n\nDuring my degree, I subscribed to a whole bunch of science pages and it was really cool cause it was science posts and then it reached this point where they'd stopped being about science posts as much as they started being about abuses and human rights violations of children in American schools.
\n\nIt reached this point where I was logging onto social media and just becoming incredibly frustrated and then typing out half an essay in a comment section and like, “Wait a second. What am I achieving here? I am just railing against someone in the USA who will never read this post.” There’s some school principal who's made a horrible decision and while it is important to stand up for what's right, you've also got to take the choice of when it is impacting your mental health and looking at when things are and aren't serving you.
\n\nIt's the same in media and I really do think that's why the last few years has been such a push to wholesome memes is because our media consumption, especially during I guess, the last few years of the 2000s was very focused on being edgy. And then we see that in the series like Rick and Morty, or BoJack Horseman, they’re incredibly depressing and cynical and that's fine. If that's what you want to engage in, that's fine. But also be wary. I've watched BoJack Horseman at a time when I shouldn't and it sucked. It was just so depressing. It was too depressing and we've got to –
\n\nIt's a 100% right that the fruit and nutrition analogy is perfect because there are cognitive houses out there and if all you're taking in is this specific media on these specific topics, it does affect your world view. That's again, where we've got to have conversations that are empathic and validating. It's not as if you should stop because this is wrong. It's like, well, friend, person, human being, please think about how you're engaging and engage responsibly and maybe if you're not vibing with it right now, just go play some Minecraft, or listen to something chill because we do need that balance of our media content.
\n\nMAE: You reminded me of BoJack Horseman. There's this one episode of where he's giving a eulogy for his mother. There's parts about it that are depressing, but the realism of challenges many, many people have with their relationships, with their parents, and orientations to their passing. I thought it was incredibly therapeutic [chuckles] and people who are very close to me, who have those challenges, I've recommended [chuckles] it so many times as one of the very best pieces of, I don't know, any collection movie, any medium, this best captured for me the complexity of some of those challenges.
\n\nSo I don't know, but I get excited by naming complexity and challenge. [chuckles] Whereas, other people are really discouraged by that. Once there's more of a map, or a light in the room, or something, it all feels more navigable to me. So there's that
\n\nMIKE: When I'm sitting there watching a movie and the point of it clicks and I'm like, “Wow, this movie is about something.” When I watched Zootopia, it was during my degree and I'm sitting there watching Zootopia with my family and I'm like, “Wow, this movies about a lot of stuff.”
\n\nI had the same thing with Pixar. They could just do this. Inside Out, I left that – I think I watched Inside Out a month before I started my degree, before I started studying—I'd quit my last job and I was going to start working in mental health—and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” This just perfect. This is how depression works. This is a big conversation about grief is happening here as well. The complexity of the emotional experience in terms when everything turns from just these five emotions, these five core emotions, and sadness and happiness becomes bittersweet, and anger and joy joining together to form assertion and fun. It's really awesome to kind of have these aha moments as an adult and being like, “Oh, that's what this movie's about.”
\n\nI kind of realized when I was like 7, or 8 that the X-Men was about oppression and that's again, one of my favorite conversations to have with people who maybe are new to comics, or new to the X-Men. I can't wait for the MCU X-Men to start so I can have this conversation with even more people, because that's been such a cool thing to think about and I do love having those big conversations with people.
\n\nIt's also why I can't watch Onward ever again. I don't know if you watched Onward last year. I feel like this movie doesn't get as much conversation as it deserves. It's absolutely brilliant, but it's also about a really specific experience of grief that just kicks my ass and I can't watch that movie without crying.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, that was the D&D trolls one. I did see that. Which one was that?
\n\nMIKE: Yeah, it was an urban fantasy. They were elves. They were blue and had pointy ears. I think they were elves. And they were on a quest to resurrect their dad. Pixar released it in June 2020 so still talking like height of the pandemic and they released it online. I think it was one of the first big online releases and yeah, I just watched that and it broke me in a way that a movie hadn't for a long time.
\n\nCASEY: But Mike, you're inspiring an idea in me and maybe you were already working on this—it sounds like it. A lot of people end up wanting to use the same approaches to deal with challenging experiences, for instance, talking about it and journaling and I see fewer people reach to reading things, or consuming media that's related to what they're doing. I think partly because it's hard to find an appropriate one that you would relate to. I hear you listing out a whole bunch of things that might relate to a circumstance someone is in. Have you thought about that problem space and how would you navigate trying to help get people to the right media that helps them?
\n\nMIKE: Well, I kind of vibe on what people are already interested in and I don't always give recommendations, but I will have chats about to see what people where people are and what they need and if there's kind of an experience they're seeking. It hasn't been a big one for me because a lot of the clients I see are already into a lot of what the stuff I've been to and I end up getting more recommendations from them than I have to give.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I use them to, again, it's for conversations. It's like, “Have you watched this? Have you thought about this?” And the conversation kind of go, “Yeah, I've seen it and this is what I thought,” or “I haven't seen it and here's why.” And sometimes, I'll have a conversations like, “Have you watched this movie?” and people go, “No, I really don't want to because I know what it's about and I don't want to kind of go there yet.”
\n\nCASEY: Sure. Yeah, yeah.
\n\nMAE: Kind of riffing off of your thing, Casey and tying in some of Mike's work with equipping schools better with mental health tools that having a little, I don't know, glossary of here's a challenge and here's five different options like here's a poem and here's a movie and here's a video, or song. That'd be amazing.
\n\nI agree with you on Inside Out, my lap was so wet thinking just the tears were streaming out of my eyes thinking of all the young people who will now have language to be able to articulate [chuckles] what it is that they're feeling.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah, yeah. There’s actually really cool programs that use Inside Out in therapy. Because I left that movie theater thinking about how I'm going to use this in therapy later. I hadn't even started my degree. I had no theoretical backdrop. I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to use this.” And then a year later, I'm at a school – taking my son to school and I see the classroom is covered in Inside Out stuff and I'm sitting there like, “Oh my God, this is better than I ever imagined.”
\n\nI love having these conversations and I love playing clips and stuff. When I worked in the schools, if we had a school competition—and people would win and people didn't win—there'd always be someone who's really upset because they didn't win this thing. Whether it was a classroom recollection, or sports stuff, we'd always have conversations. I would go in and one of most fun things I'd ever do is I'd fire up YouTube and I'd play that clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard says, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That's just the way life is sometimes.”
\n\nI'd probably written that on every other board, every other whiteboard in a classroom, because it's such a powerful quote and it's such an awesome way of just looking at sometimes things don't turn out. We've got to deal with that and we've got to do the next thing and then the next thing would be playing the clip from The Dark Night as what do we do when we fall, Master Bruce? We stand up and playing that. It was Batman so it was a bit more approachable to the kids, but knowing these little bits from movies and stuff to really just tie in and begin a conversation.
\n\nMAE: You reminded me of the montage at the end of Captain Marvel, where despite all of the “powers” she acquired through the accident, her true strength came from her just consistently standing back up no matter and it's just this – she gets knocked over, she gets insulted, she loses something like it's just a lifetime of getting back up. I was pretty moved by that one, too. I had a wet lap [laughs] after that one also.
\n\nMIKE: And I love it when movies can lead to these inspiring conversations that this still worthy scene from Endgame when Thor goes back to Asgard. He's still able to call Mjolnir and he's still worthy and there's a whole conversation. I've written a whole article based on that scene alone and I've seen people with tattoos of Mjolnir with still worthy engraved into it.
\n\nIt's just this really powerful and moving scene that again, it starts a conversation and I can see a lot of people out there who can resonate with that scene. Especially when we look at worthiness as also our own inner worthiness and how we feel about ourselves. But also, in the context of Thor’s own story is that it wasn't worthy in just in general, it was worthy in the eyes of Odin. So at this point in the story, Odin had been dead for a long time, but Thor, in that moment, got – after everything he'd been through, he was not only still worthy of the hammer, but he was also worthy in his father's eyes, which was a big part of his own journey through the movies.
\n\nMAE: Yo! So after hanging out with you for a little while, Mike, there are like 47 people that I want to connect with you.
\n\nMIKE: [laughs] Go for it.
\n\nMAE: And I'm curious about what sort of engagement is welcomed, where are your widest open doors, where are you headed next, and how we support the amazing perspectives and work and experience that you have?
\n\nMIKE: I mean, the hardest part is, is that I'm in Australia and I can't work with Americans. The US and Canada is explicitly outside of my remit. In the USA, you've got to be registered state by state so even if I was in the USA, I could only work in the states I'm registered in and that is a whole process for each state.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: I've been told it's expensive. And then it's tricky when I do stuff like the Reddit AMAs, because I get messages like, “Hey, I'm in Florida and I want to see you.” I'm like, “Well, I can't.”
\n\nBut thankfully, I've used my superpower of networking to join a group called The Geek Therapy Community where it's a whole bunch of geeky therapists, sharing, resources, sharing ideas, and training. I've just got a thread in there saying, “Hey, look, I get approached by Americans every now and again, please tell me what state you're in and if you're open,” and always try my best to link people in when they message me. Currently looking for someone in Louisiana, but that one's being tricky. Yeah, it’s a really good group. It's really supportive. It's really friendly, and it's just really open to having a conversation about hey, look, I'm not really into this, but a lot of my clients are really vibing on this content, what can you share with me right now?
\n\nSo the big one at the moment the conversations have been around, well, Minecraft will never be out of the conversation [chuckles] but also Goblin Slayer the anime and My Hero Academia are consistent topics, which is really cool. I have to sit down and watch Goblin Slayer because I haven't yet. But at the moment, I'm running well, I've got a Facebook page where I share nerdy memes and stuff. So one of my favorite ones is thinking about Spoon theory as spell slots from D&D.
\n\nJOHN: Mm.
\n\nMAE: What. [laughs]
\n\nMIKE: Yeah. I don't know. It's not a meme, but it's just, I don't know what it is. It's a screencap from Tumblr and this person's therapist reconceptualized string theory into spell slot theory, but also talked about hyper focus as a free action and a cantrip. So it’s a bit more complex.
\n\nMAE: What! Okay, okay, okay I’m totally nerding out right now and I want to make sure that if you would be willing to say what spoon theory is and what a cantrip is, some of these things, yeah.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nMIKE: Sure.
\n\nMAE: I love that we’re saying these words that I know!
\n\nJOHN: Hey! [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yay!
\n\nMIKE: And that's the point, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. We're trying to provide a common language. So for those uninitiated, spoon theory is a term used by people experiencing mental health and/or disability to describe their energy levels. You can look at any activity as you have a set amount of spoons—and this changes per day. Sometimes you've only got a 2-, or 3-spoon day and different tasks have a spoon cost. So doing the dishes could cost you 5 spoons. If you are only having a 10-spoon day, doing the dishes is going to take it out of you.
\n\nI actually saw a great TED Talk recently. It was about, I'm still explaining spoon theory, but also everyone knows what a burns, or no burns day is and it's a very similar concept. And then someone has adapted the sprint theory to the Dungeons and Dragons spell slots. So for the people who play D&D, spell casters in Dungeons and Dragons get a set amount of spells they can cast per day. So this really translates really well into, I've got a certain amount of things I can do in a day before I'm burned out and I need to take a rest.
\n\nAnd then you've got cantrips, which are minor spells, but you can use them at no cost. Sometimes there's things you can do if you're experiencing mental health, or you've got a disability that you can do that don't cost a spoon, it could be a hyper focus, or it could be a piece of self-care that just really does it for you, it's really nice, and it doesn't actually take an emotional toll to actually carry out this task.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that's fantastic.
\n\nMAE: Are there any other topics that you were hoping that we would touch on?
\n\nMIKE: So at the moment, what I'm providing is D&D therapy. I've got one group a week. I'm looking to expand that to two, or three groups a week. I'm looking at also branching out to different RPGs like, I'm really excited for the Avatar RPG. This should be coming out early next year. I've already got a quick start copy and that's looking like a whole lot of fun. I'm hoping to start a Star Wars RPG, or a Warhammer 40K RPG group because I was dead/not haunted, but heckled at a convention. Someone says, “I bet you can't turn 40K into a therapy RPG. It's too depressing,” and I did it and now I don't have a group to run it for.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut Warhammer 40K universe is a universe where your emotions become psychic energy, which can become demons and I really can't think of a better setting in which you go out and literally slay your demons.
\n\nMAE: Whoa, yes. I did not know about this – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Wow, what a good framing.
\n\nMAE: And love that framing.
\n\nMIKE: That's the hope is to create a story. I've created a storyline where players are going to go out literally to slay their demons because we see in Warhammer 40K, there's actually demons that have arisen from specific experiences. There's a demon that was brought into existence when the first sentient life form killed another one. It's called the Echo of the First Murder and it's super depresso and it’s super gaff. But I love it because it gives you this idea that there is a demon out there that could be made up of what you've been through and you can go out there and banish it and seal it. You can go on this own adventure literally facing your demons.
\n\nCASEY: That sounds so powerful. I can't wait to hear how it goes when you get to do this on people.
\n\nMIKE: It'll be a fun one. See, that's kind of what I'm doing in the RPG world right now. I'm doing more gaming therapy so we're playing Civ, doing a lot of Minecraft because Minecraft is so easy to access. Minecraft, Roblox and Civ at the moment just to give for people who fidget. For neurodiverse people who like myself, you may have noticed on camera, I don't sit still. I do better as well if I've got something to do and so do some of the people I see. So we play Minecraft and we do things. We share an activity. It's the same kind of mindset that leads to just going out for a walk with someone and having a big talk. It's like, let's build a castle and go find some diamonds.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. There's such a difference between two people facing each other. Even if you're in some therapeutic relationship, it's friendly, there is still that hint of confrontation. Like you were saying, you're both looking into screen. You're both going for a walk. Suddenly, you're both looking forward and it takes that level of pressure down. That's so useful.
\n\nMIKE: It really does. It's just a nice way of doing things, especially for kids and younger teens who, if they're being sat down and confronted with someone in the past, it's probably because they've been in trouble. So this way, it's just look, we can sit down, we can vibe, we can build something, and we can even use the game to power the conversation.
\n\nMinecraft is a great one because there's so many resources for it, but we can talk about filling needs here. What do we need? We can build little stations for mental health check-ins, which I've got on my page. Or we can even just ad lib, not ad libs, I do a lot of improv sort of stuff. We got attacked by zombies in one game because I never the play on peaceful and we got attacked by zombies. So we had to, very hastily, build some walls and we built a house that could withstand attack and punctuated that with a conversation, where do you go when you don't feel safe, or what can you do if you need to feel safe, and we talked about self-care, self-supporting, and self-soothing from that.
\n\nMIKE: Are you familiar with the book, My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem’s work?
\n\nMIKE: No, I am not.
\n\nMAE: When you were talking about the Warhammer 40K and going out and slaying the demons that have arisen from certain experiences, Resmaa’s basically premise is that a lot of our current social justice challenges and racial challenges have to do with the fact that we have transferred experiences of trauma through physical by having children, like we physically inherit it. And the reason we haven't been able to solve a lot of these problems is that we are focusing on our thoughts about them. There's a whole transformation, a physical healing that if we can engage at that level, then we've got a shot at some of this intergenerational trauma stuff.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah. Intergeneration and epigenetic trauma is such a huge topic and it's something we are learning more about. It blew me away to first learn about it at uni, but it's also one of those topics that is, we were only really starting to see the effects and we're really only starting to get an understanding. In my knowledge. I could be wrong because it's not my area of specialty, but from what I am seeing, we've still got a whole lot to learn on this topic. It's going to be incredibly profound to just to start learning about the effects these things can have in the long-term.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Well, I want to define epigenetics for the audience. I studied this in undergrad. Epigenetics is like the genetics, like T, A, G, C codon pairs, but it's the part like how they wrap around spools in the body and then the spools might be tight, or loose. So different spools of DNA in your body are tighter, or looser, and that gets passed down generation to generation. And we can't measure it as well. It's harder to measure so we know a lot less about it than we do T, A, G, C DNA base pairs. Anyway, it's heritable. That's the main takeaway for here, but science nerd nugget.
\n\nMIKE:I think one of the big ones is that our experiences are things. As you said, they're heritable, we can pass stuff down and our genetics can change with us. I thought that was really, that was a huge read, especially when we talk about cycles and patterns of disadvantage.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. There's not only the social machinery that's reinforcing the disadvantage, but then you've also got it coming directly into the biology as well.
\n\nMIKE: Mm. Thank you for the book. I'll have a look at that.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I think you I'd really love it and if you do check it out, I totally want to talk to you about it. In fact, I'm finding it hard to not bring up a whole bunch more topics.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut we have been on a while and it might be time to transition to reflections. Even though I don't really want to right now!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, me too. I've got notes of things I could bring up. We're not going to get to.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMIKE: I am always happy to come back.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, cool. Very good.
\n\nJOHN: Cool, man. I mean, I think that like you, Mae and Casey, I think we're all having lots of ideas swirling around in our heads and one of the ones that's popped up just as, as you were talking about specifically the work you were doing with RPGs, D&D, 40K, and all those. It just reminded me there's a Kickstart, it's just about out, an RPG called Coyote & Crow, which is set in alternate history of indigenous people in the United States. In an alternate history where colonization didn't happen.
\n\nMIKE: Hmm.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. And they've built a whole structure around this and they're using all Native artists and writers and publicists, and then the whole thing. They're doing amazing stuff there.
\n\nBut I think having context like that, again, allows you to – especially if you were working with someone who was indigenous, or with another disadvantage. Being able to use the structure of the game to talk about their experience of being indigenous and how that is one of the intersections that is affecting that person and there are just so many layers that you can go through with all this. It strikes me that there's such massive potential through all of it and it's actually interesting because for the longest – I've been in and out of therapy various times over the years, and I know that some therapists like to do roleplaying where you take on various people, or talk to certain people.
\n\nThat idea had always somewhat terrified me perhaps, because the thing I need to work on is there. But now that I've been doing D&D for a couple of years, I have more experience with roleplaying in a less emotionally fraught context. So that gives me that little bit extra comfort with the idea of doing such a thing in a therapeutic context. And even more particular, if there was therapeutic context that was even spinning in all of the world of D&D, that seems like that would make me even more comfortable. So it's just really fascinating how bringing in all these extra concepts can cut through baggage and things for people to get to doing the work that is most can be good for them without just – and shortcutting so much of the fight you have to get there.
\n\nMIKE: It makes it easier to talk about something. Eevery conversation when I was youngest started with, “Oh, my friend. My friend is going through this.” It makes it easy to talk about something; it doesn't have to be about you. It does also lead to nuance. When you're an RPG therapist, you have to ask questions like, “Hey, is this just your character's tragic backstory [laughs], or are you going through something we need to talk about?” Asking that question has been an interesting one, because I do prefer that my players make as much of they can of themselves into their characters. But I also don't require it because they may not be ready yet, even to just admit something about their character could be huge for them.
\n\nBut it is huge and I'm loving this. I'm a proponent and an advocate for social justice and I love seeing projects like this. I've been following it on, I can't remember what page I've been seeing that post on. I think it's called I'm Begging Play You to Play Another RPG is where that's being posted. I'm really into it and I've been really tempted to get some sort of qualification in teaching so I can lean more into an education perspective with these because there's an awesome opportunities for social and emotional education.
\n\nIn my own campaigns, I use a Homebrew World called Advantasia and it's actually based on the – well, it's based on where I live in the world. It's not quite Australia. It's a typical, not European fantasy world, but continentally, it's similar to Australia. It's in the Southern hemisphere and stuff. But the weather cycles, the calendar years in Advantasia is the same one uses the indigenous people of the land where I'm living.
\n\nThey don't have the four-season model. They actually have a season model that actually fits where I live. They've got a six-season model. So there's two months for every season and it just fits way better than the autumn summer, winter, spring seasons we have here. We've got Birak, which is December and January. It's just hot and it's dry. And then Bunuru is February and March and it's still hot, but it's also like a humid kind of heat. And then in April and May, we've got Djeran, which it's starting to get cooler. And then June and July is Makuru where it's cold and wet and there's stormy. And then August and September is Djilba and it's getting warmer, but it's still quite hot. It's still quite wet and windy. And then October and November, where we are now is Kambarang and it's longer, it's more dry periods, and we're kind of starting into the summer.
\n\nIt's just a way more nuanced look at the world and I include this in my settings, so that not only can players learn about mental health, but they're also learning about part of their world, where they live, and how we can actually ways we can look at the world in a better way.
\n\nMAE: I love that; ways we can look at the world in a better way. Look at the world and ourselves [laughs] in a better way.
\n\nI think the thing that struck me the most out of this conversation, if I have to pick one thing, or one theme, it'd be, I really appreciate the way in which the pragmatic approach that you're taking of this is where people are, let's just hang out there. [chuckles]
\n\nMIKE: Yeah.
\n\nMAE: And regardless of what all the other philosophy, politics, opinions, blah, blah. It's like, well, how about we just hang with the people? So I really appreciate being reminded to continuously work on starting from there and connecting from there.
\n\nMIKE: Well, we have a saying --- well, as a saying it's a bit of a maximum therapy. It's called meet people where they are and that's often about not invalidating people because of the way they're seeing the world, or not belittling people because someone else might have it worse than them. It's just about understanding this person and how they see the world and just being with them where they are.
\n\nTo me, what I'm doing is just taking that to its rational next step is especially during the past, let’s just say the past 18 months, has really highlighted a need for online services. A lot of therapists play Flash games like there’s browser-based UNO, or Battleship, or something and I'm just going, “Well, we could do that. We could also play Minecraft.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThis is meeting people where they're.
\n\nMAE: How about you, Casey? Do you have something that struck you, or that you're going home with?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I keep thinking about, I didn't want to talk about myself so much on this call, but I've been working on a board game for doing mental health skills for middle schoolers. But I was very happy to talk about the D&D themes today instead of that. But I keep thinking about how my approach is to help the middle schoolers talk to their friends in a structured way where the structure helps them talk about things they wouldn't normally be able to, or think to, or they wouldn't be prompted to.
\n\nI've play tested it a lot. It's really successful. People love playing it, but they don't always know they'd love to play it because it's not something they're going for already. I wish I could talk to my friends over a board game. So I don't know about the marketing side of this thing. It might be more helpful as a tool for therapists to bring out with a group of middle schoolers who want to talk to each other.
\n\nBut anyway, my takeaway is also meet them where they are. That sounds so powerful when you just get on Among Us, or Minecraft with them where they're at, the barrier is solo and then they still get that engagement like they're fidgeting, or whatever that they need to do to get comfortable. That’s really powerful.
\n\nMIKE: I would love to see this board game. I think schools need more tools and that's kind of, I was working in schools and in my private practice when I developed my RPG therapy program. But it's also the kind of stuff that would be really helpful for schools and I would love to see that is anything which we can use to empower connection with people is incredibly – well, it's incredibly vital, but it's also very beautiful.
\n\nCASEY: All right, Mike, how about you? Do you have any takeaways, any insight you got today on the call with us that you're going to take with you?
\n\nMAE: It can be something you said, too. Doesn't have to be – [overtalk]
\n\nMIKE: [laughs] I've done a lot of talking today. Again, I think my reflection is actually from what you've just mentioned is that you could have something really special and this does sound something that's also really special, this board game you've designed. But the hardest part about doing something is helping people know you're doing it.
\n\nThere's a bit of a negative connotation to networking and especially here in Australia, we're not too big on talking about ourselves in a positive way. We have cultural values against that, but I feel like there's a really important need for people, who are doing good work, to be able to talk about it in a positive way. Because I guarantee you, there's a whole lot of really awesome stuff being done out there, but people aren't talking about it because they fear being accused of being like self-aggrandizing, or looking for attention when at the end of the day, if we can build awareness that there's other ways to do things, or there's new ways of doing things, we can hopefully inspire and empower.
\n\nCASEY: I love that it comes back to networking, which is your superpower as we said at the very beginning.
\n\nMIKE: I was really tempted to not list that [chuckles] as my superpower, but I am continually told that it is. It's one of those tricky ones. We have a thing here in Australia called tall puppy syndrome. It's a person who is conspicuously successful and whose success frequently attracts envious hostility and it's just, what is it? The nail that stands out gets the hammer. It's just kind of this cultural value of just not being self-aggrandizing. There's also finding that happy medium where you are happy to talk about yourself and what you're doing in a way that gets it out there.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: Because I reckon that's a whole lot of really cool stuff out there that isn't being talked about because people are a little bit shy, or just might not want to be seen as talking themselves up too much.
\n\nCASEY: And then getting over that hump of being shy, then you have to get over the other hub of finding the right people to talk to and that's the marketing and sales aspect, that's my head's been. I started my own business this year and I don't know much about marketing and sales.
\n\nMIKE: Congrats!
\n\nCASEY: Thank you. Well, I do now, but 12 months ago, I did so much less than I do now. [chuckles]
\n\nMIKE: I understand that. I went full-time in my practice 6 weeks ago. Until recently, I was working…
\n\nMAE: Congratulations!
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: Thank you. Until recently. I was just working in schools and then I went to a youth not-for-profit, and then 6 weeks ago, I just had this opportunity where I was getting emails daily. Like, look, I see two people a week, that's all I've got room for. Two people in a D&D group a week and then I looked at all the people who sent me an email like, oh, okay, I could go full time if all these people say yes. So I gave notice and it's been a hell of an experience.
\n\nCASEY: That's awesome. Congrats. I love this trend.
\n\nMIKE: Thank you.
\n\nCASEY: People are starting more small businesses. Another therapist friend of mine, she just started her own small practice. It's booming. I like this trend for our economy, too.
\n\nMIKE: Hmm.
\n\nCASEY: It's a trend. I hope it sticks.
\n\nMIKE: Yeah, and it's really cool because it lets people do their thing.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMIKE: It lets people live their passion and their authenticity, and it creates this environment where we have a lot more diversity and people can be who they are. If we can make these small, innovative businesses work, we're going to see a lot more diversity in our services we can deliver because we're not tied to an organization that says, “You will conform,” or an organization that says, “No, you won't have a social media presence. No, you won't talk to the press about things.”
\n\nCASEY: You just got a great image in my head. We want to be rainbow pinwheel, not gray cogs.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI want more of those.
\n\nMIKE: That's very true.
\n\nMAE: I'm ready for that plan. Casey.
\n\nCASEY: It's spinning.
\n\nMIKE: One thing I see a lot of is, there's a D&D resource coming out of the Bristol Children's Hospital and they created the Oath of Accessibility. It is a Paladin subclass as the whole point is to create accessibility tools for D&D and it's awesome. They do some really good stuff, but they have this tagline and I think it's really special. It is, “Anyone can be a hero and everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”
\n\nJOHN: Aww.
\n\nCASEY: I love it.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: What a great quote. That's true.
\n\nJOHN: That’s a great place to end it.
Special Guest: Michael Keady.
Sponsored By:
01:03 - Not Giving Into Peer Pressure
\n\n02:31 - Reaching Outside of the Accessibility World (Demystifying Accessibility)
\n\n12:37 - The Real Work of Accessibility: Organizational Change
\n\n17:52 - Avoiding Dysfunctional Ways of Working
\n\n26:46 - Moral Obligations and Social Norms: Top Down
\n\n31:20 - Personas: Translating Ideas and Principles Into Action
\n\n\n\n37:04 - Putting Accessibility Into Action
\n\n51:06 - “Disability Dongles” – Liz Jackson
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMichele: Finding room for everyone to provide their perspective.
\n\nJohn: The real solutions are infrastructural.
\n\nRein: Accessibility has to be built-in throughout the process of building and designing software.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nREIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 257 of Greater Than Code. I'm your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I'm here with my friend, John Sawers.
\n\nJOHN: Thank you, Rein, and I'm here with our guest, Michele A. Williams.
\n\nShe's the owner of M.A.W. Consulting (Making Accessibility Work). Her 16 years of experience include influencing top tech companies as a Senior User Experience Researcher and Accessibility Consultant, and obtaining a PhD in Human-Centered Computing focused on accessibility. A W3C-WAI Invited Expert, international speaker, published academic author, and patented inventor, she is passionate about educating and advising on technology that does not exclude disabled users.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Michele.
\n\nMICHELE: Thank you so much, John and Rein. Thanks for having me.
\n\nJOHN: You are very welcome and we'll start the show as we always do by asking our standard question, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMICHELE: I don't think I have the most creative answer to this. [laughs] I kind of hate those, “Oh, tell us something fun about yourself.” But the thing I thought about that came to mind was my ability to not give into peer pressure. [chuckles] And some ways that manifests for instance, I have a technology background and yet I'm almost the least technical person like I was probably one of the last people to get a smartphone. I love my flip phone and you couldn't take it from me.
\n\nSo this idea that everyone's doing this social media, all of that, I just joined Twitter last year. So I do things dagnabbit; when I need it, not necessarily just because there's groundswell. So I would say that's pretty good superpower.
\n\nJOHN: All right. So you gave some examples there in your personal life with technology and social media. I assume that that's also a fairly powerful capability in a business context as well.
\n\nMICHELE: I think so. Particularly when you're advocating for say, disabled people who aren't necessarily always advocated for, it definitely helps to have a more strong will and the ability to take a stance that turns others rather than consistently feeling like you're being turned around about what others want you to do. So I agree with that, thanks.
\n\nJOHN: [chuckles] Excellent. And so it looks like you've been involved in the accessibility world on a number of different angles and capabilities and so, what have you found to be the most impactful of those?
\n\nMICHELE: I tend to want to reach people who are outside of the accessibility world. Unfortunately, I think sometimes accessibility people can tend to talk to other accessibility people a little bit too much. I tend to like to recognize that it is something that everyone in the world should know a little something about. It is an expertise, but there are some ways that everyone can do it. I just recently wrote an article for A11Y Project called Everyday Accessibility. That's when you're making a Word document, for instance, using the Ribbon, using headings, and buttons, or bulleted lists.
\n\nSo I tend to want to bring everyone on board, and demystify accessibility and make it more attainable and easier to grasp and that feels so much like this expert field that takes years to break it down to those tangible pieces that still make a big difference.
\n\nREIN: One of the things that I hear a lot when abled people are advocating for accessibility is, “Sure, this helps disabled people, but you should care about it because it helps abled people, too.” How do you feel about that?
\n\nMICHELE: So that's a conversation that's been coming up a lot, too and I have a particular colleague that sent me their response, for instance and it's a stance that I don't particularly align with because the problem with that stance is you end up keeping the status quo. So there are real consequences to being in a society that does not value disability and you, as someone who doesn't have a disability, do not feel those effects. So until we are a more equitable society, we do have to call out the characteristics that make someone have negative effects.
\n\nSo the reality is yes, there are things like situational impairments, which is when the situation you're in mirrors the impact of a disability such as walking and texting—you're not seeing out of your periphery—or there's temporary disabilities, like you've broken your arm, and then there's just the natural process of aging. All of that is true and you can also figure designing for your future self for that last part. But again, I think that we have to be very mindful that right now we need to overemphasize and think about disability until it is our normal way of thinking.
\n\nREIN: It also seems like it's conceding the ground that doing what's right for disabled people is enough of a justification.
\n\nMICHELE: Explain that a little bit more, what you mean by that.
\n\nREIN: So when you say it helps disabled people, but it also helps abled people, it seems to me like you're saying it's not enough for me to just say that this helps disabled people. I have to give you another reason.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely, absolutely, and that ties back into ableism and the invisibility of disability and the devaluing of disability. Like you said, it's like a disabled person is not enough. It has to also include absolutely right with that way of thinking and that's another reason not to go that route of segmenting it in that way.
\n\nJOHN: I think this ties into something that you had mentioned earlier that I find really interesting, this idea that able people are doing something for disabled people.
\n\nMICHELE: Yes, and that's the big thing. When you say like, “What's been on your mind lately?” That's the one that comes to mind and it comes to mind for a couple of different reasons. None of them new, none of them – I did not discover any of this; people have been saying this for decades upon decades.
\n\nBut for me, my personal experience, I will give a talk, an accessibility talk, I might explain something about say, screen readers, or some other technology, or a particular disability and then the response is, “Well, it should work this way,” or “We should do this.” There's a lot of solutioning around what I've just presented without any context of ever having met say, a disabled person, or particularly a person in the disability community that has been talked about and that comes, I think from this idea, a couple of things.
\n\nOne, again, this idea of a power structure where, “Well, I'm doing this for you, disabled person.” Not understanding the empowerment that the disabled person has, or this misunderstanding and again, invisibility of disability in spaces like tech innovation and not understanding, okay, that touch screen you're using, that text-to-speech you love, those captions that you use at the bar; all of these things [chuckles] came from disability. We erased the innovation that came from someone designing for themselves and designing for their ability and it's assisted technology and therefore, it's an add-on when it's for disabled folks, but it's innovation when it's for people who don't have disabilities.
\n\nI think we need to have a lot more discussion about this, particularly in spaces like user experience, where we're supposed to be all inclusive and all about the user. There's some ways that we really are reinforcing this mindset and this power structure, for sure.
\n\nJOHN: So I want to check my understanding of what you're saying, just to make sure. Are you saying that when you present a problem, accessibility problem, the abled people, the other UX designers, the other people who want to be helpful jump in with, “Oh, we can do this, we can do that, or that” rather than saying, “Well, let's go talk to some disabled people and find out what they need and let that guide how we solve this problem rather than us just being like, ‘Oh, it would be great if dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.’”
\n\nMICHELE: So to two stages to that. For the first one yes, that's the first thing that happens. In the assistive technology, broad accessibility world, this manifests in some very familiar ways. The first is the blind navigation. Every year, some engineer thinks they've solved blind navigation, pedestrian navigation. Meaning they’ve created a belt with vibrations on the left and right with an Arduino, or something and they go, “You don't need a cane anymore because it's going to vibrate left when you need to turn left and right when you need to turn right, and you can walk like a sighted person,” or some variation of that—robot guide dogs, smart cane, something like that, or the sign language gloves, or the stair climbing wheelchair. There's these sort of assistive technologies that always come out with very little context around whether it's actually happening, whether it's actually needed.
\n\nBut then there's something John, about what you said, too about let's see what people need and we'll build it. We have to be careful even with that, too because that assumes that I can't build for myself and that's not true either. [chuckles] Disabled folks are the most innovative people because the world is not accessible.
\n\nThere is a such thing as a specialty. Like I have an accessibility specialty, I have a design specialty, but I think we often think that’s someone without a disability. No, a disabled person can also have these specialties, or they can be someone who has the idea of what they need and you're partnering with them with your specialty in say, design to create those solutions. So again, I think we have to be very careful about our wording and our viewpoints of what's actually happening.
\n\nREIN: There's a framework that I've been using for this that actually comes from aviation safety and there's a European aviation safety magazine where Cormac Russell published an op-ed called Four Modes of Change: To, For, With, By. The idea is that change to is the mode where change has done to us without us. So this is a sort of authoritarian top-down thing. We’ve got no say in the matter. It's not even necessarily for our benefit. Then change for is a benevolent top-down approach. “I'm trying to help you, but I'm the one who decides what to change.” Change with is a participatory co-creating the change. And then change by is change done by us for us where if I'm, for example, a manager, my role would be find out what support you need so you can make the changes you want to make.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely. Perfect. Thank you. I knew there was some reference. This appears in disability justice spaces, in any kind of space where you're talking about inclusion, we know that sometimes inclusion can be code for do things the way that the current power structure does it. Do things the way that the current people in charge of comfortable and assimilate rather than no, we're actually going to allow you to be your authentic self and come into these spaces.
\n\nPart of the reason this has also been on my mind is because I fit into some of these other spaces as a woman and as a Black person. I think that sometimes my cohorts think well, because we have experienced some of that in our lives, we are immune to them giving that out to others.
\n\nSo as a Black person, a woman, even someone with intersectionality, I can't possibly do that to do was done to me to someone else. But we don't realize how much ableism is steeped into our society, such that it is very easy to do that with disability and not even realize it and not even realize you have the mentality that someone is inferior to you, incapable, and particularly when the disability has to do with neurological, or anything that we really don't understand. But even still, even that kind of categorization can go away because the idea is that any sort of disability triggers usually some sort of ableist response and these things can happen even if you've experienced it yourself.
\n\nJOHN: So like so many of the other things we discussed on this podcast, it sounds like the real work of accessibility is organizational change. It's getting the power structures to change to allow these things to come into being rather than forcing them in there, or trying to – like you were saying, not forcing the change on the disabled people to fit in.
\n\nMICHELE: I've been thinking about the roots of this, for sure. And thank you for that. Unfortunately, capitalism drives a lot of this and again, if we're talking specifically more to tech worlds and say, including accessibility into your tech, part of that is just because the buy-in sometimes comes from the internal stakeholders, not the end customer. Again, if you're not mindful, not careful, and don't have leadership that are careful.
\n\nSo the dirty little secret is for instance internally yes, you may be making education software for students, but you're really marketing to the teachers who are going to buy it, and you're then even more so really marketing to whoever the management structure is internally who's going to approve it to even be on the market. So you get further and further away from actually helping a student because you have all these other checks that it needs to impress, or you need to make the case for similar to what we were saying earlier, you have to make the case for disability. For instance, you have to say, “Well, blind people to do this.” You get this pushback of, “Well, blind people don't do that so we don't have to worry about it and you keep moving on.”
\n\nSo there is a shift that is hard, but I do think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about taking a stance. I think that people do need to individually start to take the stance that that may be how we do things now, or how it may even need to be done. But we do want to be careful buying into that completely because it's going to perpetuate the same. We know that that power dynamic internally of who the stakeholders are, again, also sometimes doesn't reflect the diversity of who we are designing for.
\n\nWe're going to keep getting the same result if we're not super mindful and super careful to take the stance that we are going to care about the diversity of the end users, the people that ultimately will have their hands on what we're making and celebrate that oftentimes those best solutions, again, come from the community who are doing the work.
\n\nSo celebrating the innovation that comes from being tied back to those end users rather than thinking the solution has to come from within. So changing that mindset around this difficult, but it takes taking a stand and recognizing it, too.
\n\nJOHN: So it's trying to change my thinking around to the by style change around accessibility and my context is on the team of web developers who develop apps that are eventually used by some disabled people. So I'm trying to think about obviously, we need buy-in from the power structures as a company and to spend time on the work, but deciding what work gets done needs to be – that's where the inclusion comes in and I'm curious about what the steps are there that helped me get to that point where those people are included
\n\nMICHELE: So here’s a few ways that that comes about. One of it could just be, okay, this is the feature we're doing and we're going to make sure that this feature that we're doing—however that came about—is assessable. That can come from anything from how you're going to code, like making the decision to use standardized elements that come with accessibility built-in, or whatever knowledge building you can do internally to just bake it into how you are creating that feature.
\n\nThen there is what is the feature and making sure that that, if nothing else, is as inclusive as possible, or at least not exclusionary. You're not making a feature that will exclude people. Again, that comes from an understanding of who is the audience and making sure everyone understands that. No one, I don't think has fully solved for how to make accessibility the thing that everyone knows does – it's difficult. It takes time. It takes training. It takes science from top down as well as then knowledge from the bottom up. It's a journey.
\n\nBut I think that there are places where decisions are made, that you know you're going one way, or the other, whether it's, I'm using a div, or a button, [chuckles] whether it's we're going to wait to put captions, or we're going to go ahead and build in time to do that, whether it's, again, we're going to put in this very visual feature, or we're going to take a little bit more time to understand how to have an alternative to that feature. So there's lots of places where you can be very intentional, that you are going to take the steps to learn about accessibility from your point of view and then incorporate it.
\n\nREIN: So let's say that your VP of engineering mandates that every project has to meet a certain accessibility score, or something like that, but you don't train the developers. So you were saying top down and bottom up have to come together. I have seen things like that lead to some pretty dysfunctional ways of working.
\n\nMICHELE: I can see that [laughs] and I think part of that comes from a misunderstanding that accessibility is not just something you say we're going to do. Like, it's not like we didn't do it because we just simply forgot, or we didn't do it just for reasons that can then you can flip a switch and turn it on. People aren't doing it because they weren't taught it, they aren't fully aware of the diversity of it, they aren't aware of what's required, and then leadership isn't aware. Therefore, that steps have to be taken.
\n\nSo there's a lot of rally around let's be inclusive, let's be assessable, but then there's less so when you learn oh, that means we have to maybe take half of the time to train and disrupt our workflow, or we have to do our workflow differently, or we have to go back to the code we’ve already written and been using for years and fix it. Those are some real decisions and those are some real consequences sometimes to that, too when you're a business that is expected to constantly move forward, but they are decisions that have to be made in order to actually put it in place, not just say you are for it.
\n\nREIN: Todd Conklin has a book, The 5 Principles of Human Performance, and there are two that I think are especially relevant here. One is that context drives behavior. So if you want to know why someone is behaving the way they do, the thing to look at is the context that they're operating in, and the other is that how leaders respond to matters.
\n\nWhen I think about this, I think if you have a design systems team, is that design system built to be accessible from first principles? Is the easy thing to do grab a component that's already designed to be accessible, or is the easy thing to do is throw a div on the page?
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah, and there are, I think that the number one takeaway is none of it is easy because all of it is late. So there are initiatives like teachaccess.org; we really need to be embedding it in how we even learn the things that we learned, because then it does feel like we're almost disrupting industry to do this. When in reality, we just learned it wrong. [chuckles] We learn to cheat and to make it look and feel the way I want it to look rather than learning that there was a reason there's this thing called a button versus this thing called a div.
\n\nNow, recognizing, too, though that standards come after innovation. So you can't standardize something that hasn't really even been explored, or even invented yet. So we understand that as you want technology to advance, it's more difficult to then say, “Okay, there's a standard for this and that will guarantee us accessibility.” So for instance, using native HTML elements isn't all, or when we look at mobile, native mobile elements is more difficult to do. This is still a new space, a growing space and so, sometimes we don't often know what that looks like.
\n\nBut that then requires again, that awareness piece of what disability looks like and this is where they're trying to catch augmented reality and virtual reality with XR Access and accessibility initiatives. Because if you're at least aware of the diversity of disability, you can catch it early enough so that when the standards come out again, we're making it less hard.
\n\nSomeone on a panel I was on last week, talked about like tech debt and this idea of well, it can be overwhelming. Well, if you have less things you need to maintain, it's less overwhelming and that comes from using standards and being aware of standards. You lessen your tech debt; that becomes part of the overall responsibility of standards bodies, for instance. So there are some again, tangible steps that I think just need more awareness and talking about over and over again until we get it right, that can be put in place, should be put in place. Hopefully, it will be put in place to make this less daunting over time.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and then on the how leaders respond thing. If someone builds something that's not accessible to you, do you punish them to just drive that behavior underground, or do you say, “Why weren't they able to do it? Do they not have the right expertise? Were they under too much time pressure?” How can I make the context better so that people are more likely to do the behaviors that we're trying to lead them towards?
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. Thinking a lot about that, too. So I tend to have two ways. I guess, it's sort of the carrot stick kind of thing, or maybe some other dynamic like that, but we know some people are going to get the altruistic side. Again, awareness. They just weren't thinking about disability. It's not something that's in their life. It's not something that was exposed to them. Once someone is exposed and understands a little bit of the work that needs to be done, they're bought in and they go for it.
\n\nThere are other folks that just are ablest. They just will not care. If it has not affected them personally in their lives, they are going to look – maybe like you said, maybe their motivations are something like money, even though they don't realize they're excluding more consumers. Whatever those things are, they're just not going to buy in. That's when unfortunately things like the threat of lawsuits, or bad publicity has to be the way that you get those folks to turn around, or again, you just do it. [chuckles]
\n\nSo that's when maybe the folks on the ground can just do it regardless and the one thing, I think about is this video that went around with this little baby and there was a parent and a teacher aide. I presume the baby was supposed to be doing their sound it out cards, flashcards, but didn't feel like doing it. The little baby sitting on the floor back turned, the mom and the teachers, they did it. They did the sound out cards. The baby's looking back still playing, but keeps looking back and eventually, the baby goes, “Wait a minute, that's my game,” and next thing you know, they're playing the game.
\n\nSo there is something also, too to like you said, maybe it's just a peer pressure thing. No one else seems to be doing accessibility so why do we have to be the ones to do it? But if the cool kids start doing it, if the company start exposing that they are doing it, if there's enough groundswell, people will just get on board with the thing that everyone is doing, too.
\n\nSo I think maybe there are three ways now—maybe I've added a third in my mind. There are ways – as a user experience person, I say user experience the person that you're dealing with. Like you said, get in their head, what are they thinking? What do you think they would want? But ultimately, understand that it isn't always going to be because it's the right thing and the faster you learn that, the more you might be able to actually get some results, too.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I like what you said there, Rein about set up the system so that the right thing is easy and I think obviously, there's a lot of work to get to that point where you have the whole system built around that. But once you can get there, that's great because then, like you were saying, Michele, there's so much less effort involved in getting the thing to happen because that's just how everyone does it and you're just pulling the components are, or copy pasting from the other parts of the code that are already accessible so that it that stuff is already built into the process. And then it doesn't have to be quite so much of an uphill. Like even just uphill thinking process where you have to think differently than you used to in order to get the thing done in an accessible manner.
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. Again, unfortunately it's not embedded within us to do this, but maybe the next generation will, maybe the next couple of generations If we keep talking about it and we take the effort to start to shift ourselves, maybe it will be the thing that people can't even remember when they didn't do it. I do feel like we're in a cool moment right now where that might be possible. I'm hearing it more and more. I didn't learn it in school when I was doing computer science and software engineering, but I know some students now that are coming out that are. So I'm kind of hopeful, but the conversations really need to be said aloud and often in order for it to happen, for sure.
\n\nREIN: You mentioned the larger structural problem here, which is that designing accessible software is a moral obligation and we work in an economic system that's not optimized around moral obligations. Let's put it that way.
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. [laughs] That will dollar. [laughs] I think again, there's that school, are we changing that, or we're going to work within it. I think you can do both. Some people should – we should really be tackling both, any kind of inclusion efforts, same thing. Do you do it from within, or outside? Do you work within the structure, or do you dismantle it? I think there's benefits to both. I think there's benefit to basically editing what isn't working about what we're currently doing. There's always an improvement and I tend to look at it that way.
\n\nIt's not so much as it’s down with this and up with that. I think we just need to recognize, as human beings who can evolve and do things different, learn, grow, and get wiser, let's just do that. Let's do what we're doing better and when we recognize that we have a negative effect, let's solution something that is going to work better and just recognize that and do better. It's okay to edit.
\n\nSo I don't think we have to toss our hands up and say, “Oh, we'll never get there because of how this is.” That was invented, too. All of these things are constructs. At some point, the way we do things wasn’t the way we did things; we did things completely differently. Empires can fall and rise and be redone. So we don't have to stay stagnant, but we can, again, start to make these changes.
\n\nREIN: I think that even within a capitalist system, there's still a place for social norms. There's still a place for deciding which behaviors we're going to accept and which behaviors we're not going to accept and what we're going to do about those. I just wouldn't expect that to be the CEO's job. I would expect that to be the entire community of the company.
\n\nMICHELE: The entire community with the CEOs. So the two companies that are the pillars, for instance, of accessibility, Microsoft and Apple, you hear their CEOs say, “We do things accessibly.” So it's not necessarily on them to forego stakeholders and stock prices and all of that. Certainly, you can't do too much if you don't have a company, so they have to do what they have to do, but there is still an okay from that and that's part of that top-down. Again, we need training. Is there money in the budget for training? That has to come from management.
\n\nSo there is still a recognition and it's just always beneficial when everyone is on the same page that this is how we operate; the message then doesn't ever get disconnected. It just shifts to the role of a person and they put it into practice in their own particular way.
\n\nREIN: Martha Acosta, who is one of the few original women in safety science, she says that there are four things that leaders can control, or have leverage over—there’s roles, there's processes and practices, there's values, or norms, and there's incentives. So I think this ties in with what you're saying about what the CEO's job could be.
\n\nMICHELE: Versus stock prices? Yeah. [laughs] Versus yeah. Which unfortunately is, again, I think it's even upon the CEO to take a stance on what they are going to do with their company and their time. Because certainly, the pressures are coming to them sometimes not necessarily emanating from them.
\n\nSo I think there is opportunity, this is why there's opportunity for everyone to evaluate what are we doing. Like you said, we can decide what is important, how are we going to go about this? And if enough people start to be even more mindful than they were yesterday, shifts are going to inevitably happen. And people who disregard others, discriminate all of these other negative effects that we've seen will inevitably have less effects because the norm will be these other ways that we're trying to include and get better as a society.
\n\nREIN: So one of the things I like to think about when we have guests, or ask guests to think about, is to think about this challenge from the perspective of a few different people. A few different personas. So I'm a manager, I'm a line level manager and the people that report to me are engineers. What can I do? Or I am a mid-level engineer, what can I do? How do we translate these ideas and principles into action?
\n\nMICHELE: So what is to understand that there are, for instance, guidelines like there are web accessibility, web content, accessibility guidelines, or author and tool guidelines, because we do need to define what it means. At some point, there needs to be metrics and there needs to be measures that need to be placed to understand, did we do this? One way to do that is to translate those into those various roles. Some of that work has happened and some of it needs to happen.
\n\nSo there's understanding the tangible actions that can and should happen. But I think also, it's simply a matter of deciding that accessibility and inclusion and particularly in my world, disability is just going to be a part of everything. Every check that you make for whatever your role is. You were talking about different frameworks for different levels. Certainly, that's true. I think that we tend to separate out disability from those kinds of conversations as if it's different. It's not different.
\n\nMaking decisions for how you're going to manage your employees should be inclusive of disabled employees. The tools that you want them to use, the ways you want them to work, how “productive” you want them to be, how you're going to measure that. All of that should be mindful of the variety of people that you are supporting. Same with I am a developer so that means that I am writing code on behalf of a group of other people and that means I need to know who these people are.
\n\nIt's funny you say personas because—I know that's not probably what you meant, but in my role, obviously that triggers the user experience personas, which I'm not a fan of. That's all another podcast. [chuckles] But when we're talking about that so in user experience we’re saying, “Oh, we're designing for these people, these target audience per se.” It'll be John who's the manager and he does this on his way to work and then there's Mary. Maybe she's a stay-at-home mom, but uses it this way. Dah, dah, dah, all these other characteristics. And then we'll go so now we need disability personas. No. [chuckles] John can also be quadriplegic. Mary can also have multiple sclerosis.
\n\nSo again, it goes back to the idea that we have separated out and made invisible disability. Oh, taboo. Even the word oh, it’s taboo. Can't talk about disability.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. Like imagine having a separate persona for a woman, or a Black person.
\n\nMICHELE: Thank you. We don't do it. We don't do the whites only school and we'll get to the Black people later. We know that intrinsically, but we do it in everything. So same thing particularly when we're talking about inclusion of disability in all of these phases of say, an organization, we go, “And disability.” No, no, no. If we really want to think about it, disability is the equalizer. Anyone can become disabled at any moment at any time, it does not discriminate. It is the one thing that any human being can become at any time and yet we still separate it out as if it's this taboo, or a terrible thing.
\n\nNow, again, there are negative outcomes of disability. Not saying that, but we have this tendency to segment it in ways that just absolutely don't make sense and aren't necessary and are detrimental and make it more work, so.
\n\nREIN: There's a book called Software Security by McGraw. It's kind of old now, but the premise is still very relevant, which is that to make software secure, you have to build security in at the beginning, and you have to keep constructing and repairing it throughout the software development life cycle. So it starts with design, but it includes, you talked about different touchpoints in the life cycle, where you want to sort of check in on whether you still are as secure as you think you are. So that includes design. It includes code review. It includes testing. I wonder if this sort of an approach works for accessibility, too; we just sort of bake it into the fabric of how you design soft.
\n\nMICHELE: It should be how it works. The moniker is shift left. That's absolutely what has to happen to do it well. You have to be thinking about it all the time. Everything that you do. So that's how my mind works now. It took a long time to do that. But now when I'm sending an email and I put a picture in, “Okay, let me put the alternative text.” I'm making a spreadsheet, “Okay, let me do the heading.” Like, I'm always constantly checking myself as I'm doing anything. “Okay, if I'm doing a podcast like this, is there a transcript, or are there captions?”
\n\nI'm just constantly doing these checks. That takes time to build up, but it is the way you have to do it to make sure nothing slips through the cracks so that all the hard work that say, the design team, or the dev team did, and then QA comes in and doesn't know how to test it. We're all interdependent so it has to be everyone all the time, all throughout the process in order to get it from end to end to work; the weak link in the chain will break that. So very much how it has to go.
\n\nREIN: It also seems like this there are small, actionable things that you could do to move in this direction. So for example, when you do code review, ask some accessibility questions. Maybe build yourself an accessibility checklist. Now I don't like checklists, but that's a whole other podcast, but it's better than not thinking about it.
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. As you're learning something, sometimes the checklist is helpful because you don't yet have it in your own mind and you don't want to forget. Now you don't want to – I'm sure what you're saying is you don't want to tie yourself to the checklist, too.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMICHELE: But as you're building up knowledge, yes, there are so many just tangible did I do this things that you might as well just keep a sticky at your desk, or however you want to do it and just start doing those things. Again, we don't have to keep talking about it. It doesn't have to be this revelation of inclusive buy-in in order to put captions on your videos. [chuckles] These things, you know.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. This also seems like an opportunity for tech leads to do leadership to say, “Hey, so I looked at this and the contrast ratio is a little bit low. Do you think we could punch this up in a code review?”
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. The only thing, though is back to the beginning—being careful about these directives, making sure you understand the directives that you're doing because again, a lot of times, particularly when people are new to accessibility, they overdo it. So they hear a screen reader and they think it needs to read like a novel so they want to add in a summary of the page in the beginning, a summary of this section, and they want to overly describe the alternative text, the image down to the pixels.
\n\nThere's some give and take there, too. There's some learning you want to do, but you can iterate. You can learn one piece, get comfortable with it. Okay, now that this next piece. Knowledge building it's just what it is, is what it is. So there's absolutely knowledge building that you can do to get more comfortable and we need everyone to do this. There's certain parts that should be specialty, but unfortunately, the specialists are doing what everyone else should be doing the basics and so, we've got to shift that so that the specialists can do the specialty stuff, the harder stuff that may not quite get – [overtalk]
\n\nREIN: That's exactly the same problem is having a security person on your team.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely. So it sounds like you all have a focus on implementation. Like you're implementing and you want to know how best to make – I'm turning it on [inaudible]. [laughs] So you want to know how best to make it work for you, or is that what I'm hearing?
\n\nREIN: I guess, I lean towards practice. I want to understand the theory, but then if I can't put that theory into practice, the theory is not very useful to me. If that makes sense.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely makes sense. My company name is Making Accessibility Work and a lot of what I say is put accessibility into action, because I am very much tied to this idea that you can be absolutely on board with accessibility and not have any clue how to do it. [chuckles] And then the inverse can be true, too. You can absolutely do not care, but because you care about semantic HTML, you're doing more accessibility than the person who cares.
\n\nThere are these places that people can be in their understanding that neither one is actually, or you think one is helping, but the other actually is. I think people think you have to care. You have to want to Sometimes, you know what, you don't. Sometimes I just need you to fix the color contrast, [laughs] or yes, it's great that you care, but in doing so, you're actually, co-opting a message. You care a little too much and you are actually not letting disabled people speak for themselves because you've now discovered accessibility and now, you're all about it.
\n\nSo I think we’ve got to meet in the middle, folks. Let's care, let's do, let's demystify, but also understand there are some harder problems to solve, but understand where those are. Putting headings on the page is not the hard problem we need to solve. Just put the headings, making math and science more accessible, particularly when we've made it so visualization heavy. Yeah, let's go over there. Let's tinker with that, folks and that's where we need to be putting all this massive brain power.
\n\nWe've had Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for 20 years. HTML5, which addressed a lot of semantics for accessibility, has been out a decade. Y'all, hurry up and learn that and let's get that going so we can get over to this harder stuff. Get this brain power over to these more complex issues and newer innovations.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think if you're one of those people that cares, like you were saying, a little too much, or perhaps just a lot, you can end up with option lock because you want to solve all the problems and then you're just like, “But what do we do? What are we doing here?” Like, I'll just put the headings in, put the alt texts in, we'll start there. You’ve got to get moving. And that's partly where I'm coming from with some of the questions I'm asking is that process of just getting that boulder rolling a little bit so that it takes a little bit less effort to keep going in the future.
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah, and there's no perfect way to do it. I think everyone's looking for okay, well, how do we do it? You're going to spend a year on how and again, miss the year of what and doing it. It is messy because you're hiring people, you've got people working who don't know how to do it; it's going to be disruptive. We didn't come in with this knowledge. I know you didn't hire people to then train them up and send them to school but unfortunately, you’ve got to do that. People need to know what to do differently, what they're doing wrong.
\n\nSo some of it is going to be experimental, iterative, and messy, but in the end, start giving access. We talk about language even. Do we say disability? Do we say people with? Or do we say disabled people? And do we say differently abled? Even these – okay you know what, the reality is you do all of that and still don't get access. What would be better is if you have a person with a disability at the table to tell you themselves, but you're worried about language and yet can't even hire someone with a disability.
\n\nSo again, it's getting out of these little zones that we sometimes get in and recognizing the real work that needs to be done and can get done today.
\n\nREIN: I think there's a real temptation to fixate on the hard, or interesting problems in the tech world that might be wanting to build this distributed database with five nines of durability. But your API server has a bug where 1% of the requests are an error. So if you don't fix that, your five nines over here are useless.
\n\nMICHELE: The flashy thing, yes. [laughs] The shiny thing, we want to gravitate. Oftentimes, there's no glory in what was considered the grunt work, the foundational work. But I think that's where leadership could come in.
\n\nI heard someone say years ago, “Appreciate the bunts” in baseball that oh, chicks dig the home run. We love the home run, but sometimes, that bunt wins the game. But that's where a leadership can come in and appreciate laying found a scalable foundation of code that does not add to tech debt, or the diminishing of the bugs that you've kept rolling year after year after year, you close 50 of them. That's where, again, a change in mentality of what we value.
\n\nSometimes again, accessibility is not put at the front because sometimes it's just code changes that aren't visible to users. So users are going to think you spent a year and didn't do anything to your code, or some of them will. But again, I think that's a messaging and that's an appreciation of really trying to do, and that's even appreciating software engineering versus just COVID.
\n\nI have a software engineering degree and that's when I realized, “Oh, we're not just supposed to sit down and start hacking away and make sure it runs for the teacher to check it and we're done.” There's an engineering to this, but you have to value that.
\n\nBut also, I think there needs to be clearer consequences like speaking of engineering. If it’s a building, we know the building can collapse. I don't think sometimes we appreciate what can happen if we don't do that foundational work and I think that's a shift overall and then technology and appreciation of that work.
\n\nREIN: And I appreciate what you did there, which was to subtly redirect me back to the context and to how leaders respond. Because if building that five nines database gets you promoted and fixing that bug doesn't, what are people going to do?
\n\nMICHELE: Yeah. So what's valued and that's set. Someone sets that. That's made up. You can value whatever you want to value. You can praise whatever you want to praise.
\n\nComplete tangent, but that takes me to my high school where they were intentional that the students who performed well were going to be recognized by the principal because oftentimes, it was the misbehaving students that went to the principal's office. So the principal knows all the misbehaving students, but doesn't know any of the students that are doing the actual work that the school is asking of them to do. Not trying to get too much into school systems but again, it's an intention that you will honor the work, the unseen work. We do these in other spaces; the behind-the-scenes work, the unsung heroes. That's an intentional step that you can take as well to celebrate that, too.
\n\nREIN: We have an older episode on glue work and how valuable glue work is, but how rarely it's acknowledged, or appreciated, especially by leadership and also, how it has a gender characteristic, for example. It seems to me like it might be easy to put accessibility in the category of glue work rather than in the category of like you were saying, foundational things that make us have a reliable product and a product that works for everyone.
\n\nMICHELE: And I don't know if how we've presented technology to consumers plays into that as well. Again, the new flashy wow.
\n\nThe other day, I just looked down at my keyboard on my computer and I just thought about we just take such advantage of the fact that I'm just sitting here typing on the keyboard. Someone had to decide what the material would be that doesn't scratch my fingertips. Someone had to decide how to make the letters so that they don't rub off, or how they light up in the back.
\n\nThere's so much detail that goes into almost everything that we use and we just get so dismissive of some of it. “What's next? Eh, that's okay.” So I think, again, it's a human condition. It’s the human condition to appreciate what people are doing for one another in front and behind the scenes and absolutely.
\n\nBut I think that also ties into, again, ableism, too. We see in assistive technology, or an adjustment because of disability as okay, that thing we can do later. But then when it becomes Alexa, when it becomes the vacuuming robot, when it becomes the new latest and greatest thing, then it's front and center and everyone wants to work on it. But it's the same technology. [chuckles] It's the same reasons that you should do it. It just happens to benefit everyone. It came out of disability, but you didn't want to think about it until you’ve found a benefit for all the “others.” Again, I think that's a human condition we have to correct.
\n\nREIN: There's a thing that happens once a month on Twitter, which is someone will post an image of pre-sliced vegetables and they'll say, “What kind of a lazy loser needs pre-sliced vegetables?” And then someone will respond, “Disabled people need pre-sliced vegetables.” And then the response to that will either be blocking them, or saying, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I had no idea.” I think that there's maybe that dynamic going on here as well.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely what I was thinking about, too, like Nike's shoes recently that you don't have to tie. Well, who doesn't want to sit down and tie their shoes? People who can't sit down and tie their shoes, but that was also a marketing issue. They refused to market it for disability. Like where were the disabled people? Where were the people with chronic illness, or chronic pain, or body size that just does not lend itself to bending over and tying your shoes? Why did it have to be marketed in that other way that then took away the messaging that this is a useful piece of equipment?
\n\nREIN: Yeah. Like why is this fit model not able to tie their shoes?
\n\nMICHELE: Exactly. Rather than take the angle that – again, they're all made up. Someone just happened to decide laces. We could have very easily decided this other way at the beginning. We could have very easily decided Velcro was the way. We just, I don't know, somewhere along the way, came up with laces.
\n\nI think people in general have to go through their own journey of recognizing that what they were told was fact, truth, and stance just with someone's made up thing. Even these companies that we've just hold as pillars started in garages. They may have started in garages a 100 years ago, rather than just 50, or 20 years ago. But these things are just built. So we can build them differently. We can say them differently. It's okay. So taking away that stigma that things have to go a certain way and the way that they've been going, or at least perceived to have been going. We have got to start dismantling that.
\n\nJOHN: Harking back here, a point earlier about the new shiny is always held up as always better. I read an article recently about prosthetic arms and how everyone's always really interested in building new robotic prosthetic arms. They're the new shiny, they're the cool thing to work on, and people feel good about working on them because they feel like they're helping people who need them. But that in a lot of cases, they're not better than the one that was designed 30 years ago that doesn't do a lot, but has at least a functional hook.
\n\nThey were following one woman through the article who had gotten one of these new ones, but it actually wasn't any better and she ended up switching back to the old one because she could get it to do the things that got her through the day and – [overtalk]
\n\nREIN: Made with titanium.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: And you can clearly see that probably the people that are designing these probably weren't working with people bringing that feedback into the process enough and it was designed for rather than designed by.
\n\nMICHELE: Absolutely. So Liz Jackson coined the phrase “Disability Dongle.” That's another one that comes up. The prosthetic, the exoskeleton, absolutely. The thing that non-disabled people look at and awe and look at what technology is doing, disabled people are over in the corner going, “That ain't going to help us.” [laughs] If you had asked, we would have told you we don't need that.
\n\nI think we've also reached a point where we're at the harder stuff and no one's willing to tackle, I don't think always the harder stuff. So for instance, going back to blind navigation, one of the things that makes navigating difficult as a blind person—and I learned this because I talked and worked with like 80 blind people. [laughs]
\n\nSo one of the conclusions that came to with that infrastructure disables blind navigation, you don't need a smart – a lot of people espouse a smart cane. Well, they had this white cane, but it needs an infrared and it needs buzzers and it needs – okay, you're going to give people carpal tunnel. The battery on that is going to die. It's not going to be reliable. And in the meantime, the thing you could have done is educate people on putting stuff at head level.
\n\nSo the way that we design our street signs, for instance, we do everything very car minded. We do a lot of things for cars and we forget people also have to walk and so you put obstacles, or you can educate people about trimming your trees, for instance so people aren't running into them, or how they park their cars so that they're not in the way.
\n\nSome of it is also just not a technology solution. It may be more an environmental and human education solution, but you can't tell people, who have signed up to work in technology, that they must find a technology solution. So they end up solutioning amongst themselves in ways that actually aren't helpful, but they make themselves, like you said, feel better and they promote within themselves. It's difficult to get people to undo that.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, it strikes me like you were talking about the wheelchairs that can go ramps, the exoskeletons, and there are certainly use cases for those sorts of things. But I think the distinction there is those are a solution to make the disabled people more abled rather than making the world more accessible. Like what they need is lower countertop so that in the wheelchair, they can still cook. That's what they need. Not the ability to walk upstairs, or have like you said, this awe-inspiring exoskeleton that just draws more attention to them and probably doesn't even solve most of the problems.
\n\nMICHELE: I'm just going to say amen. [laughs] That is it. That is the thing we need people to get. So you'll hear about the models of disability, too. Sometimes you'll hear about – you should hear about the models of disability and when people extract that and summarize that, they usually pull out two, which is the medical model, which is generally what we've been under, which is the effects of disability and how that affects the person. Therefore, these things need to happen to overcome and this sort of again, hospital, kind of what the body's doing, or what the mind is doing mindset, which is opposite of one that people often quote, which is the social model. The social model says, “No, no society, the world, my environment is disabling me. If you would just give me something more adaptive, more inclusive, I’d be good.”
\n\nSo a lot of examples of that, I recently read a Kia Brown's book with a book club and you'll have to insert [chuckles] the link. The Pretty One is what it's called. Kia has cerebral palsy and one of the things that was a feat for her was putting her hair in a ponytail and it made you think about scrunchies and the makeup of that. What if we just made the mechanism to have maybe a little bit more to it to grab your hair and put it in the ponytail rather than relying on the fact that you have two hands that you can do that with?
\n\nSo those are the differences in the mindsets of our views of disability that we need people to shift and even go sometimes again, deeper into what it is you're really doing when it comes to inclusion. Are you really being inclusive, or are you saying, “Hey person, come on to what I believe is the way of life”?
\n\nJOHN: So reflections, then.
\n\nMICHELE: My reflection, or takeaway would be that my hope is that we can find room for everyone. Everyone who wants to create great tech, everyone who has an idea, everyone who has a contribution. I hope that that doesn't continue to need to filter through say, a non-disabled person, or a certain status of job title. My hope is that we're starting to recognize that there's room for everyone to provide their perspective and it can be valued and it can be included in the ways that we operate at equal opportunity. So that's hopefully, my reflection and my takeaway.
\n\nJOHN: All right, I can go next.
\n\nI think really actually the point that that's really sitting with me is what I had just said, which dawned on me as I was saying it, as we were talking in the last minute there about how the real solutions are, like you said, infrastructural. They're changing the form of society to make the disabled person able to do what they need to do rather than bringing them up to the level of whatever was currently built, or whatever that – and even there's a weird value judgment in saying, bringing them up to the level. I'm uncomfortable saying it that way.
\n\nSo just changing the thinking, like you said, the social model is, I think a powerful change and thought process around this, and I'm going to keep turning that one around in my head.
\n\nREIN: I think for me, I'm coming back to the idea that just like security, accessibility has to be built in throughout the process of designing and building software. You can't have a part of your software delivery life cycle where that’s the only place where you think about accessibility. You can't just think about it during design, for example, and you can't just have a team of accessibility experts that you go to sometimes when you need help with accessibility. It's really everyone's job and it's everyone's job all the time.
\n\nMICHELE: I love it. I'm going to change the world. [laughs]
Special Guest: Dr. Michele A. Williams.
","summary":"Dr. Michele A. Williams’ mission is to reach outside of the accessibility world and demystify it for able-bodied people. In this episode, she talks about the real work of accessibility needing to come from top down organizational changes, and rethinking our moral obligations and social norms as a culture.","date_published":"2021-11-03T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9da3d2c7-772f-47ae-8d27-660534bf9d62.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47358811,"duration_in_seconds":3588}]},{"id":"76549a3a-157f-40db-8709-e6404228af3b","title":"256: Unbreaking the Web with Chris Ferdinandi","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/unbreaking-the-web","content_text":"Greater Than Code Episode #170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi \n\n02:50 - Project Gemini and Text Protocols \n\n\nAlways Bet on JavaScript\n\n\n07:05 - Overusing Analytics & Tracking Scripts\n\n\nBe An Advocate For Your Users / Ethical Obligations\n\n\n12:18 - Innovations: Making Accessibility The Default\n\n14:48 - Ad-Tech and Tooling\n\n\nPartytown\nFathom \nPreact\nAlpine.js\npetite-vue\nSvelte\nSvelteKit\n\n\nHave Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes \nAstro\n\n\n\n32:08 - HTMX\n\n46:30 - Frontend Development is Hard\n\n\nSPA’s and Transitional Apps\nFederated Multipage Apps\nMicro Frontends\nPhoenix LiveView\nJoint Activity\n\n\nJoint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering\n\n\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Vanilla JavaScript + Privacy.\n\nJacob: The web piqued at LiveJournal. Also, encouraging devs to think about what tool would be best for different jobs.\nChris: Maintaining privacy on the web.\n\nSign up for Chris’s newsletter at gomakethings.com!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.\n\nREIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 256 of Greater Than Code, a nice round number. I’m your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I’m here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.\n\nJACOB: Thank you so much! I'm joined with this week's guest, Chris Ferdinandi.\n\nChris helps people learn vanilla JavaScript. He believes that there is a simpler, more resilient way to make things for the web. His Developer Tips newsletter is read by thousands of developers each day. Learn more at gomakethings.com. \n\nWelcome to the show. Welcome back to the show, I should say. We had you on just before COVID, we were saying before the show started, so it's been quite a while.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me back. It's been kind of a wild 18 months. \n\nLast time I was on the show, I think we spent a lot of time talking about how modern development best practices might be ruining the web and this time, I was hoping we might have a little bit of chat about how that's still kind of the case, but there's also a whole ton of new things that have happened in the last 18 months that maybe swinging the pendulum back in the other direction, creating a web that's faster, little bit more resilient, and works better for everybody.\n\nREIN: That sounds great. But first, has your superpower changed? Do you still have the same superpower?\n\nCHRIS: I don't remember exactly what I said last time, but assuming it's derailing conversations, then the answer is absolutely yes. [laughs] That has always been and always will be my superpower. I am great at tangents. \n\nREIN: Well, this podcast is just a series of tangents stitched together, so.\n\nCHRIS: Excellent. Always makes for a fun conversation.\n\nJACOB: Yeah. Very true.\n\nREIN: Have you heard about this new internet protocol, Gemini?\n\nCHRIS: No, I have not. \n\nREIN: So it's like somewhere between Gopher and HTTP and so, it's a plain text protocol with no mark, no markup, no XML, no HTML and you can have links, but they have to be on a separate line. So you basically are sharing these plain text documents and there's no JavaScript, there's no CSS and people are seeing it as a revitalization of what the web used to be about. No click tracking. No injected advertisements.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. This is weird. So there's a few years ago where I've been like, “Yes, that's what the web needs.” I feel like I'm a little bit more pragmatic now as I have less hair and more white in the beard. Like that seems really cool in some ways and a huge step back in others. I have very mixed feelings about that as a gut reaction; knowing nothing else about it other than what you just told me.\n\nREIN: What do you think is the happy medium between where we are now and 1990’s text protocols?\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So in some ways, I feel like the web maybe peaked with LiveJournal, or maybe Myspace. Myspace made it really easy to hack on the web and that was really cool. But the text-only web, I don't necessarily think I'd like to go back to. \n\nI think I'm actually not even really opposed to commercialization on the web in large part because I'm only able to do what I can do professionally because of that. But I would love something that really curtails all the spyware for profit stuff over tracking. I have none of that on any of my websites. I removed all of my analytics, all of my – I don't even track opens on my newsletter and so, I really like the interactive and immersive nature of the web. I don't mind the commerce side of the web. I really hate the whole Big Brother-esque “we’re always watching you” nature of the web. I think that's really awkward and creepy.\n\nAlso, I feel like sometimes we try to run before we can walk on the web and so, we end up throwing a boatload of JavaScript at the frontend to make up for limitations in the platform and we have a tendency to create experiences that are really slow, brittle, and super prone to breaking. I think about how the web has gotten, or the internet as a whole has gotten four to five times faster in the last decade, but the average webpage still loads at about the same speed as it did a decade ago. \n\n[chuckles] The original Space Jam website loaded in about the same amount of time that the new Space Jam website loaded, even though the internet [chuckles] has gotten so much faster in that time and a large part of that has to do with the way we build and the tooling that we use.\n\nJACOB: Just consuming that extra capacity that we get through faster connections, et cetera. More people.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, for every extra megabit of internet speed that we get, we throw a bunch more JavaScript on the frontend and we have a tendency—it's really weird for me to, as someone who teaches JavaScript for a living, tell people to use less JavaScript. But the web keeps moving to a more JavaScript driven future and JavaScript is the most fragile and bad for performance part of the frontend stack. I feel like in the last maybe 5 years, or so, we saw the pendulum swing really far in the JavaScript end of things. \n\nI still think the phrase, “Always bet on JavaScript” is a good one. I don't think JavaScript is going anywhere. I don't, in abstract, hate it. The interactivity that it brings is good. I think the challenge is around how we lean on it heavily for things that it's not necessarily the best tool for the job for. I'm starting to see a new slate of tools that take advantage of some of the things that's great at in a way that doesn't punish the users for those decisions so that's pretty cool. \n\nWe can dig into that if you both want to. There's a lot of new stuff in the works that I think has the ability to maybe fix some of the challenges that we've been facing up to this point. \n\nREIN: What would you say are some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of implementations, design that people could take that would just make their app a little bit better, play a little bit more nicely, be a little less extractive in terms of tracking everything the user does?\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So one of the weirdest things that I've just encountered on the web, there's a certain subset—a lot of times it's e-commerce vendors, sometimes it's SAAS—but they're loading eight different tracking and analytics scripts on a single page through all sorts of different vendors. So they'll load Google Analytics, Salesforce, and three, or four other vendors that I'll do some version of the same thing—racking what you click on and where you go next. The impression I've gotten from talking to folks is that this is a byproduct of having a bunch of different internal departments that all want access to data and no one wanting to be like, “This is the tool we're using,” [chuckles] and so, they all just chuck it in there. \n\nSo that's probably a really big offender there and there's a couple things that you can do about that. First is I feel like a lot of developers and a lot of designers have this; I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to – I'm trying to think of the right phrase here, but it's almost like your job is to an advocate for the user. So just because your manager, or executive is saying, “We need this” doesn't necessarily mean your job is to just be like, “Okay, let me throw that in there.” I liken it to if you were building a house and a customer told you they wanted you to install a hair dryer in the bathtub. You could do that for them because they ask, but it's a really bad idea and maybe it's your professional responsibility to tell them that.\n\nREIN: Yeah. That is the thing that distinguishes a profession is that you have ethical obligations to uphold,\n\nCHRIS: And this is where I think you get into the pro and con of the web being an industry that you can get into without professional certifications and trainings. It's like anybody can do it, but there's also not necessarily that same level of there's no certification board that's like, “You're going to lose your certification if you do these things that are harmful.” \n\nFor most of us, for a lot of what we do, the side effect of having eight tracking scripts on a website is not life-threatening, but depending on the type of site that you offer and the services that you provide, it can be. Like I think a lot of people get taken a little aback by that, but I've heard multiple stories in the last few years about utility companies—electricity, gas, whatever—where utilities get knocked out in a really bad storm. So people are relying on their smartphones on 3G and they live in areas where connectivity is not particularly great and their Wi-Fi's down because their power is out and trying to connect to the electric company website to be able to file a claim like, “My electricity's out,” or even just find the contact number to call them, the site just keeps crashing, reloading, and they can't open it. \n\nNot having access to your utility company because somebody was irresponsible with how they built the website really sucks. And depending on what the weather is like, like I live in a very cold climate up in the US in the Northeast and if the temperatures drop below freezing and there's a down tree blocking your ability to get in and out of the area and you don't have electricity, or heat, that can be a really serious thing. \n\nI think a lot of times we just think about like, “I'm just building websites.” But it can be so much more than that depending on the industry you work in and the type of work that you do.\n\nSo the whole there's no equivalent of you're going to get disbarred if you do these bad things, there just isn't that for a profession, which can be a good thing, but is also – [crosstalk]\n\nREIN: There's no equivalent of the city code that's 2,000 pages long, but also means that you can't build a bathroom that electrocutes people and you can't put asbestos in the walls. The counterargument is that regulations are onerous and they stifle innovation, but – [crosstalk]\n\nCHRIS: And they can.\n\nREIN: Do you want innovation in less safe ways to build houses? Like, is that what we're looking for?\n\nCHRIS: Right. Yeah. I had a similar argument once with someone about accessibility on the web and how it shouldn't be legally required for sites to build themselves accessibly because it stifles innovation for one person shops who are just trying to throw something up quickly. I don't know, at some point it just boils down to a moral argument and it's really hard to have an objective conversation about should you care about other people and doing the right thing? Like, I don't really know how to have that kind of conversation in a logical kind of way.\n\nJACOB: And I'm thinking about where the innovation can happen is the big platforms—your WordPresses, your Wixes, Squarespaces. What innovations can they think of that can make accessibility the default? Like help people fall into the pit of success? What are the new innovations that they haven't come up with yet that just make accessibility just happen magically for someone who is –?\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I also sometimes feel like it's a little bit of a – well, so there's two aspects here. I feel like the you can have innovation, or regulation, but not both thing is a bit of a false dichotomy. I think one of the things we've seen in—my liberalness is going to show a little bit here—but one of the things we've seen in unregulated capitalism is that it doesn't necessarily drive innovation. It just drives more ways to squeeze profit out of people. I think you see that on the web with the current state of internet surveillance and ad tech. Do you, as a consumer, feel like you’ve got a lot of innovation out of all the new ways that large companies have figured out how to track what you do on the web so they can sell more toothpaste to you? Because I certainly don't. \n\nSo that's one aspect of it and the other is, I feel like sometimes we're overly obsessed with innovation for innovation's sake and there's something to be for the boring, predictable web. Websites that try to be different just for the sake of being different often just end up being confusing and unusable and I don't necessarily want that in my web experience. I find that particularly frustrating. I'm a really big advocate of “the boring web.” I like when I show up on a website and I know exactly how to use it, I know how to move around, and I don't have to follow a whole bunch of popup tutorials just to figure out how to achieve the task I'm there to achieve. \n\nREIN: And if you look at the context that's driving, some of this behavior from startups, from UX engineers at startups, it's often that their business model depends on being able to sell customer data. There are a lot of mobile apps that if they lost the ability to sell their customer's data would cease to exist and so I guess, the question is, is it justified? Should they exist if that's the only way they can exist?\n\nCHRIS: I struggle with this a fair bit because I use and have benefited from free sell customer data services in the past. I'm of the mind that I personally would pay for –like, let's just use Twitter as an example. If I had the ability to pay to use Twitter and they would stop recommending all these completely irrelevant ads to me in my timeline all the time, I would probably pay a not insignificant amount of money for that. But I know there's a lot of people who either wouldn't, or couldn't afford to and the value of Twitter to me would go down substantially if a bunch of people dropped off the service. \n\nSo that's a really good question that I don't have a great answer for. I feel like there's a balance somewhere between where we are today and this ideal, you're never tracked ever state. I don't know what it is, but I know there is one. \n\nOne just related things, since we're talking about ad tech, is a lot of these third-party scripts are some of the biggest offenders when it comes to slowing down performance on the web. They add a lot latency into sites. I just saw this interesting project this morning from a guy by the name of Adam Bradley called Partytown. I don't know if either of you have heard of this yet, but it's essentially a lightweight interface that allows you to load and run your third-party scripts from a web worker instead of on the main thread. \n\nOne of the biggest challenges with a lot of these scripts in JavaScript is that JavaScript is single threaded and so, all of these things block other stuff from happening because they're on the one main, I shouldn't say single threads. Single thread within the browser, but service workers and other web workers run on the separate thread in the background but don't have access to the DOM.\n\nSo Adam Bradley created this really interesting, that I haven't had time to properly play around with yet, library that allows you to bridge that gap. So you can run these scripts off that main thread, but still give them those hooks into the DOM where they're needed with ideally the potential of reducing the overall load on the main thread and the latency and performance issues that come from that. \n\nThe other thing that I think a lot of – I guess, another angle you could pull out here is the fact that tracking and analytics don't have to be as privacy invasive as they are. I think you see this in things like Paul Jarvis's analytics platform, Fathom, which is so privacy minded that it doesn't require a GDPR notification on your website to use. So it's not doing this really invasive follow you all over the internet kind of tracking. \n\nNaturally doing that dramatically reduces that data's value for advertisers. But if you're looking to use that data for you as a business, it still gets you the information you need without sacrificing your user's privacy. So it'll tell you things like what pages people are looking at and how frequently certain things on your site convert without you needing to know that after leaving your site, John Smith went to Colgate and bought a tube of toothpaste and then went to Amazon and bought a new kayak and all that kind of stuff. \n\nThere's a balance somewhere. I'm not a 100% sure where it is, but I'm seeing a lot of interesting ways of coming at this problem.\n\nJACOB: Yeah. I'm going to be very speculative here because I can't claim to know about all this stuff, but I would guess that a lot of users that are just plugging Google Analytics just drop it into their site. They have no personal interest in all that advanced stuff. Like, they're not going to use it. They do want to know about convergence and that simple stuff anyway and really, they're just [chuckles] funneling more data to Google [chuckles] in the first place. \n\nCHRIS: Yeah. Honestly, a big part of the reason why I pulled Analytics from all of my stuff is it just wasn't giving me that much value. I was tracking all this data that I wasn't actually using. Well, not even track, I was basically giving Google all this data about my users for free that I wasn't really taking meaningful action on anyways. I'd imagine for a lot of, like you've said, folks who are using these scripts, they're not really doing much with them and probably don't need nearly as much information as they're sucking up.\n\nSo ad tech is a big, a big part of the challenge with the modern web. But actually, I think one of the other kind of related problems is the fact that we're using JavaScript for all the things. The entire frontend is being powered and generated with JavaScript and that just creates not just performance issues, but extreme fragility in the things that we build just because as a scripting language, JavaScript is so unforgiving when it runs into errors, or when things go wrong. It's never fun when you click a navigation element, or click a button, or try to load a page and nothing happens and that just happens so often because of JavaScript. \n\nSo for the last 3 years, I've been on this tirade about how JavaScript is ruining the frontend. We're starting to see a bunch of new tools now that take some of the best parts of all of the JavaScript we've been shipping to the frontend and get rid of all the stuff that makes it so terrible, or at least minimize it as much as possible. That's been really interesting to see. To the bigger trends I've seen here are around micro libraries and precompilers. \n\nIf you're both interested, I'd love to dig into that a little bit. If you have another way, you'd like to take this conversation, that's totally fine, too. \n\nJACOB: It sounds good to me. \n\nREIN: Sounds interesting.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So just to set the scene here. I have lost track of the number of times in the last few years that I've heard people say, “You need to use a JavaScript framework in your app because it's better for performance.” “The real DOM is slow; React uses a virtual DOM so it's faster.” Or “If you write vanilla JavaScript, you're just building your own framework.” I hear stuff like this all the time and it drives me nuts because it's not true. \n\nBut the thing I think people don't always realize is that can potentially be true depending on how your UI is structured. So if you ever view source on Twitter, their Like button is nested within 13 other divs and is itself a div and so, doing the div thing whenever you update the UI with an absurdly nested structure like that is going to be costly. But I think you could also argue that that's just bad HTML and you could probably structure that differently and better.\n\nReact itself is 30 kilobytes of JavaScript minified and gzipped that unpacks in the browser into, I think it's like a megabyte, or two of JavaScript when it's all done. It's huge and all that abstraction is really, really costly. \n\nSo on one end of the spectrum, I've seen the rise of micro libraries, which take some of the best concepts of libraries like React and Vue—state-based UI, DOM diffing where when you make an update, you only change the stuff that needs changing—and then they provide it in a much smaller package that gets you closer to the metal is maybe the best phrase here. They remove as many abstractions as possible and in doing so, they mean you have to load less JavaScript, which is an instant win on initial page load time, and then by removing abstractions, the actual interactions are faster themselves as well. \n\nSo for example, a state change in Preact, which is a 3-kilobyte alternative to React that uses the same API is four times faster than that same state change in React. Even though you're using the same patterns, you're just loading a much smaller footprint. You’ve shed some features, but not all and you end up with that same kind of user experience, or developer experience if you like the React developer experience, but with a much smaller footprint and a much friendlier experience for the people who ultimately use the thing you build. \n\nSimilarly, for a while, Alpine.js was gaining some traction. It was another small library built based on the way view works. Evan You, who built Vue was so inspired by it that he just recently released Petite-vue, which is a small subset of Vue built for progressive enhancement. It's a fraction of the size. \n\nSo I find those really, really intriguing because they take some of the best parts and then they get rid of all the cruft. \n\nOn the other end of the spectrum though, are folks who have started to realize that you can get some of those same developer benefits without passing on any of that cost to the user and to be honest, I'm finding that aspect of things a lot more intriguing. This takes the form of proper frameworks, or compilers where rather than authoring your JavaScript, shipping it to the browser, and then having the browser generate the HTML from it at runtime in the browser, or in the client, you still author your content in JavaScript, but then a compiler builds that into HTML, converts your library-based code into plain old vanilla JavaScript without the abstractions and that's what's get ships to the browser. \n\nSo Rich Harris, a couple years ago, built Svelte and it was, as far as I know, the first of these tools. I'm sure there have probably been others before it, but Rich’s is the one that got most popular. It's just really, really interesting because you write with a similar pattern that you might in React, but then it spits out just HTML files in old-school like DOM manipulation, interactions. It's doing all of the heavy lifting before the code gets shipped to the browser and the user gets a really nice, lightweight experience. He is in the process of building out this new tool called SvelteKit that gives you really, really awesome stuff like routing and built-in progressive enhancement. \n\nActually, he just recently gave a talk and a demo on this at Jamstack Conf last week at time of recording. I'll make sure I get you both a link to that if you want to drop it in the show notes for this one. \n\nBut in it, he gave this demo about how you can author this page with an interactive form and if JavaScript is supported and loads in the browser, it does Ajax form handling. And if for some reason that JavaScript fails, it does an old-school HTTP form submit and then manually reloads the page and gives you the same exact experience. But you, as an author, don't have to write two different applications, like your client-side code and then your server fallback. SvelteKit just takes care of all that for you.\n\nI think this is one of the biggest reasons why people like JavaScript libraries is they have a single codebase to manage and these compilers are allowing you to get those same benefits without punishing the user for that developer experience.\n\nThere's another tool that came out. I forget if it's called Atomic, or Astro. Astro, yeah. Similar kind of thing, slightly different angle. This one allows you to take all of your favorite client-side library components, mash them together, and then it spits out prerendered HTML and remove as much of the JavaScript as possible. So like you could use a dropdown menu component from React, a card component from Vue, and some Svelte files that you started working on and this will mash them all up together for you and spit out a ton of really small code. \n\nJason Lengstorf—whose name I almost certainly butchered and Jason, I'm very sorry—over at Netlify recently tried this on a next JS project of his and the resulting build actually had 90%, less client-side JavaScript in it and decreased the page load time by 30%, even though it used almost all of the same project code. It just produced a much smaller, faster kind of frontend thing with the same am developer experience. \n\nSo these are the kinds of things that I get really excited about because I'm seeing us taking everything that we've learned from the last 5, or 10 years and finally starting to swing in the other direction with tooling that doesn't harm the users and we'll hopefully, start to unbreak the web a little bit.\n\nREIN: So the analogy I use to try to understand this is basically frameworks like React install a runtime into your browser. Just like Ruby installs a runtime, you're not just compiling down to C calls. You're compiling to C calls, but those C calls are a framework of runtime that is quite large and quite future rich. Maybe the most direct example is in Rust, if you compile with no standard and you don't have a runtime, you're somewhat limited in what you can do, but you're getting as close to the metal as possible.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. That's a good analogy. I like that. That's a good way to describe it.\n\nJACOB: Safely.\n\nCHRIS: You really are. Yeah, I like that.\n\nJACOB: I think the analogy goes further and correct me if I'm wrong, but Rust gives you all of that memory safety you wouldn't get with C. Svelte is doing the same thing with, can we call it DOM safety? [chuckles] That it's going to help you not make the common errors that you would often get with state manipulation.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, for sure and really, it has the potential to just save you from this situation that happens where the JavaScript breaks and then the whole app falls apart. The less you can rely on that, the better. It's not that you can't still ship that nice, enhanced experience to your users if they can tolerate it, but you end up with something that's a lot more resilient, which is not just better for them, but it's better for you.\n\nI've just lost track of how many things I haven't purchased because I couldn't get the site to work in these JavaScript heavy apps, or even there's been one, or two occasions where my wife has run into an issue on a web app she's been trying to use. I've opened up dev tools, found the error, gone into the JavaScript code, fixed to the error live, and then she's been able to continue and like, should I file that with their dev team and send them a bill for fixing it? It's just, JavaScript is so unforgiving in the browser and having tools that provide more fallbacks and safety nets around that is definitely a good thing.\n\nREIN: Maybe the other thing is that the runtime starts take on a whole bunch of responsibilities like you just start to pack it full of features. So in Rust, the runtime does everything from a stack overflow of protection to processing command line arguments.\n\nCHRIS: I don't know Rust that well so I don't have a really good comment on that, but, [laughs] or I can't necessarily make an analogy between that and JavaScript, but that sounds like a good thing. \n\nI guess, the related thing here is we also have a bad habit, as developers—just not necessarily you guys personally, but just as a community—we have a bad habit of doing our work on really high-end machines and testing our work on really high-end machines and good internet connections, and then assuming that the majority of our user base is like that. \n\nI think React works perfectly fine on modern smartphone, or modern computer and a really good internet connection. But so many of the people who use the things we build don't have either of those things, or have one but not the other and the house of cards really starts to fall apart in those situations. Things become really slow, really buggy really fast and this is again where we get into the whole there's no professional standards board that says your site has to load this fast on this type of internet connection. There's no threshold mandating, or fault tolerance testing, or anything like that like you might have with the electrical in your house, or anything like that and maybe there should be, I don't know.\n\nMID-ROLL: And now we want to take a quick time out to recognize one of our sponsors, Kaspersky Labs.\n\nRarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up or know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humor, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, go check it out!\n\nJACOB: I was reading something interesting. So I haven't tried it, but I guess, it's called HTMX, which are you familiar with it?\n\nCHRIS: You are the second person to mention that to me. I have not played around with it myself, but I heard just a little bit about it. So I'd love to hear your take on it.\n\nJACOB: We might know about the same, but what it looks like is it's coming from the other side, which is saying you as a developer should really, you're just going to author markup and from your perspective, you don't know if the browser's native capability is going to handle it, or if there's going to be JavaScript that's going to look at a certain attribute and handle it for you. You just want to handle markup and I just think that's a really interesting take because it gets developers back into the mindset of markup first.\n\nCHRIS: You brought up another good point that I totally forgot to mention. So one of the things that I think we're starting to see is—and we saw this with jQuery, too—I call it paving of the cow path and I, by no means coined that term. I'm sure you're both heard it before, but. \n\nSo when jQuery came about, there was no good way to get elements by classes, looping through things was really hard. Like everything about JavaScript kind of sucked and jQuery really showed the developer community what a good API around working with the DOM could look like. It took a long time, but eventually, the browsers standards’ bodies incorporated a lot of that into what we get out of the platform. So the reason query selector and query selector all exist today, and the array for each method, and all of these awesome ways for interacting with the DOM, the class list API, the only reason any of that stuff exists is because John Resig and the jQuery team showed us a better way and paved those cow paths.\n\nAs much as the massive popularity of state-based UI libraries bugs me because I think they're overused, just like jQuery was probably overused in its day, they have really in many ways, paved the cow path for what a better browser native system could be. \n\nOne of the trends I'd like to see more of is, to what you were just talking about, Jacob, HTML doing more of the work and JavaScript doing less of it. I think a really good model for this is in the details and summary elements, which allow you to create a browser native, show and hide disclosure component without any JavaScript at all. It's just entirely HTML. You can click it, it shows the thing, you click it again, it hides the thing. It's accessible out of the box. If the browser doesn't support it, it's progressively enhanced; you get the full text. Beautiful. \n\nI want that for everything. I want that for tabs. I want that for carousels. I want that for image galleries and just any sort of interactive component. Like I want that and the really nice thing about details and summary where I feel they really nailed it is its styleable. So if you want it to look different, if you want the expand and collapse icon to be styled differently, you can do that. If you want to animate it in, you can do that. Like you can add CSS to make it look the way you want. And if you want to enhance it with some JavaScript, it also is a custom JavaScript event that you can hook into and build on top of, but you don't need to. \n\nOne of, I think the biggest boons of JavaScript libraries is the ability to add interactive components, complex interactive components with ease. I feel like for a lot of developer teams, that's a real draw for them. They don't have to figure out how to redesign an accordion, because there's a component for that and that has the real benefit of adding more accessibility to the web, too. But it would be really cool if the platform just did that for you and we didn't have to reinvent the wheel, but this is where I feel like a lot of a lot of these libraries are paving the cow paths and hopefully, at some point, the platform will catch up and we'll have some of this stuff just baked right in. \n\nI think the HTML enhanced thing you just referenced is another example of what that could look like. I think from what I've gathered from it, it's still a runs in the browser type tool, but it allows you to just focus on running HTML. I could be wrong. It could be a compiler, but I just really want that stuff out of the box in the browser, without me having to think about it. I'm also a lazy developer, though so that's [laughs] part of it.\n\nJACOB: [chuckles] Me too.\n\nREIN: I feel like the $2 trillion elephant in the room here is that the browser everyone's using is made by Google.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, and that used to not be the case, right? We've lost a lot of rendering engines in the last 3, or 4 years. You can do your part by not using Chrome. I'm not saying you should use Firefox. I'm on Edge. A lot of people like Brave. I have very mixed feelings about that one for a variety of reasons. But yeah, no, that is true. Chrome is like what, 70, or 80% of the market at this point? So that, just from a tracking and data absorption perspective, is not great. \n\nOne interesting argument I've heard in the past is that it's not necessarily bad if there's only one rendering engine on the web and browsers are competing on different features. Like, imagine a world where you didn't have to worry about which APIs are supported by which browser; we're pretty close at this point. [chuckles] But I'm thinking back to when Firefox had more popularity and Edge was still running on its own operating system and they were always just a little bit out of sync. \n\nIt would be awesome if the entire web ran on a single rendering engine and features were layered on top of that. Like, I think there is potentially an argument for that being a good thing. I think the real problem is that that rendering engine is controlled by Google and so, even if you're using a chromium-based browser that's not Chrome, it's still very much subject to the whims of what Google wants from the web. And you see that in a lot of the way things get prioritized, and what makes it into the platform and what doesn't. They have a nasty habit of if they can't get the rest of the folks in the standards board on board, they just plow ahead with it anyways and then users start using it and then everybody either follow suit, or riots happen. So that is an elephant in the room and I don't really have a good way to reconcile. That kind of sucks.\n\nREIN: Have you heard about the new idle tracking API fiasco with Google Chrome? \n\nCHRIS: No, I haven't, but I'd love to learn more.\n\nREIN: This was in the news a couple weeks ago, so this is pretty fresh, but Google is basically introducing a new API to Chrome that detects when the users are idle and – [crosstalk]\n\nCHRIS: That's gross. \n\nREIN: Every other browser manufacturer is like, “This is an invasion of privacy and you should stop doing it.” Meanwhile, Google is also like, “Web tracking is out of control and has resulted in an erosion of trust,” and they say that out one side of their mouth. Now to the other side, they introduce this tracking API that for example, malicious sites could use to determine when it's okay to use your CPU to mine Bitcoin.\n\nCHRIS: I'm thinking about how they recently insisted that alert had to be deprecated because it's bad for user security and now I'm hearing about this and it just really doesn't – like, I have a tough time consigning that what we say, what we do kind of aspect. Yeah, that's gross and that really sucks. I wish Firefox had maintained more of its market dominance, that would've been nice. Or if the W3C managed the rendering engine so that browser vendors weren't controlling that. This is all really, it's a little bit disheartening. \n\nI don't have a really great solution for this kind of stuff. I'm by no means smart enough for that. But for some reason, it seems really, really hard to get a new browser engine in the market as evidenced by the fact that even big corporations who have tried it, eventually just give up and fold and switch over to chromium. I'm not enough of a computer science expert to really understand why that is, but I can imagine it's very hard, especially as the platform gets more complicated. \n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean and there's also a vendor lock-in. So on iOS, every browser is secretly WebKit under the hood. \n\n[laughter]\n\nBecause they literally aren't allowed to ship their own browser implementations.\n\nCHRIS: Right, yeah. That one's always really fun. That one catches people by surprise; you're running Chrome, but you're actually running Safari under the hood.\n\nJACOB: I think for a while, Mozilla wouldn't make an iOS app because they didn't want people to think that they were getting everything you associate with Mozilla's values when you download it. I think they have one now and it's because they are able to do certain privacy features, even if they can't do all of them but yeah, that's an interesting debate. \n\nCHRIS: Yeah.\n\nREIN: S you could imagine a version of HTML that remove moves a whole bunch of features that makes it harder to track people, that makes it harder to implement extractive, hidden stuff. The problem is there's no way to enforce that a certain site is using that subset. That would have to be done at the browser level and Google has no incentive to ever make that possible\n\nCHRIS: [laughs] Oh man, I'm thinking now about the web we lost. \n\nREIN: Yeah. That was actually one of the motivations for Jim and I to not try to mess with HTML is oh look, we can specify this restrictive subset of HTML that meets our needs, but there's no way to guarantee that any particular site you access is actually well-behaving. So they came up with an entirely new protocol so that they could enforce very strict rules about what a site can do. \n\nJACOB: Would that mean end users have to type in Gemini:// explicitly?\n\nREIN: Yeah. So there is a – is that called the protocol call part of the URL?\n\nJACOB: I think so.\n\nREIN: So there is a Gemini:// protocol. Is it scheme? Anyway, there is that and it has its own protocol definition. One of the goals of the protocol is to be civil enough that you could implement it in about a hundred lines and keep it all in your head.\n\nCHRIS: [chuckles] That's pretty wild. I'm on the Project Gemini website right now and this is very old-school. Ooh, and it uses the details and summary element.\n\nREIN: That's basically an HTML proxy for an actual Gemini page. \n\nCHRIS: Huh. \n\nREIN: But there was no CSA. There's no JavaScript. There are no headers. Aside from the one header that you use to make the request, there are no headers so you can't insert anything in headers. There's no user agent.\n\nCHRIS: See if this loads. No, this doesn't load. I wonder if there's any browsers that have actually incorporated this, or that allow you to – [crosstalk]\n\nREIN: No, but there are like a hundred different clients that have been implemented in every language imaginable.\n\nM: Ooh. I am noticing that it uses like a markdown-esque syntax. I'm looking at the advanced line types here where you use hashes for headings and asterisks for bulleted lists.\n\nREIN: Yeah, but it doesn't allow inline links for example.\n\nCHRIS: So you can always see what the actual URL that you're going to follow is? That's cool. Yeah, I – [crosstalk]\n\nREIN: So there is this movement tool people are interested in moving away from the huge mess that is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some people, I think are interested in this for privacy reasons. Some people, I think are interested in this for the same, I think motivation that brought you towards vanilla JavaScript, which is can't we just build sites that work better by not doing all this extra stuff?\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, and they're separate, but they're also very tightly linked, I think where a lot of the privacy stuff is what causes a lot of the issues that bother me about the way that the web works today. \n\nThis is an interesting project. Candidly, I'm not entirely sure this will ever really catch on in a mainstream fashion. I think the genie is just way too far into the bottle, but it is interesting to think about a way the web could be different. \n\nREIN: Yeah. It's interesting because this is definitely fringe, but fringes are where the interesting stuff happens. \n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I could see parts of this informing what happens on the platform itself. The flipside here is I also do like some of the interactivity. I hate parallax and animation effects and all that, but I like being able to watch a video in a browser. I think that's pretty cool.\n\nREIN: There are advantages to single-page applications to have – that user experience has some, I think real advantages over traditional hypermedia making a bunch of requests to new pages stateless. Basically, we’ve you figured out how to reimplement a stateful thick client right on top of HTTP.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah like, being able to keep media playing as you navigate around those near instant page loads, that’s pretty sweet. Man, you're making me really sad about [laughs] just where the web is today. I hadn't really sat on just how pervasive ad tech and web surveillance are until this conversation.\n\nREIN: Yeah, and it's also, React is almost a declaration that the REST manifesto was wrong.\n\nCHRIS: [laughs] It's a bold claim.\n\nREIN: I mean, React is – the original REST documentation basically would make React style SPAs impossible.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. Just one of the things in that talk Rich Harris from Svelte gave at Jamstack Conf talked about how there's this battle on the internet between the single-page apps are awesome people and the no, multi-page apps are better. They're way less complicated, better for accessibility, et cetera and admittedly, I tend to fall into that camp more often than not. He likened it to almost a bit of a false dichotomy where they both have really good points and they both serve important functions. Sometimes one is the right tool for the job over the other. So I absolutely have historically maybe come down a little bit too hard on the SPAs are always terrible, never use [chuckles] camp when they do sometimes have good uses.\n\nBut so, his whole talk was about this new term that he was trying to get going called transitional apps, #transitionalapps, that [chuckles] took the best of both worlds and allowed you to seamlessly move from one to the other, when appropriate, without having to just choose out of the box like, I'm going to build this, or I'm going to build that. I thought that was a really interesting approach that I hope we see mature a little bit more over the next year, or two because I think it has a lot of teeth and could do a lot of good for the web.\n\nREIN: Yeah. Once again, it's the boundary zone between these two things where the interesting stuff happens, right? So HTMX, I think of it as federated multi-page apps so you might make multiple requests, but this one's just for this part of the page and this one's just for this part of page.\n\nJACOB: It’s called micro frontends is a term I've heard.\n\nREIN: Ooh. So the main difference is the micro frontends are an SPA thing and so, you have different subsites rendering different parts of the page, but they each render their own SPA type thing. But what you have with HTMX, or GitHub, this for a long time was GitHub’s style is I want to click this button and when I click this button, it's going to make a request for a new HTML fragment, and then it's going to put this HTML fragment on the page.\n\nJACOB: Tight coupling has its value sometimes.\n\nREIN: And then you also have things like Phoenix LiveView, the Elixir framework, where it looks a lot like a single-page app, but is actually making tons of server push updates.\n\nCHRIS: This might be a little bit of – I know they call it HTML Over the Wire, that Hotwire thing that Basecamp came out with a year, or two ago and it's also interesting, Basecamp politics aside, where you build your old-school monolithic multi-page app, and then you layer a light JavaScript client on top of it that simulates a single-page app, or progressively enhances in some ways into one. I was really, really intrigued by the idea, but the more I played around with it, the more it pulled in some of the best aspects of both, but also some of the worst aspects of both and ended up being in my opinion, this weird Franklin project that did neither one particularly well. It just didn't work for me. I'm sure for certain types of types of projects, it can be really useful. \n\nBut I think the takeaway for the show is that frontend engineering is hard and there's a lot of trade-offs you have to make no matter what. I love to sit in my ivory tower and postulate about this stuff. We’re building really simple and really narrow apps that get by just fine as a multi-page vanilla JavaScript thing because they're not doing that much.\n\nREIN: So speaking of frontend development is hard. There is a particular way in which frontend development is becoming incredibly complex and it is this movement away from client server models, away from Shannon communication style, I make a request. You give me a response. I make a request. You give me a response. This sort of a serial communication to a form of communication that's called joint activity, which is where just everything's happening all at once. I'm not making a request and waiting for a whole new page back. This part of the page is updating. This part of the page is updating. I'm typing over here, just a whole bunch of stuff happening at the same time and this is a paradigmatically different form of communication than request and response.\n\nCHRIS: Do you have an example of that? I'm having a really tough time picturing what that looks like in my head.\n\nREIN: So there's a book called Joint Cognitive Systems introduces this stuff if folks are interested, but think about incident response. During an incident, you're not synchronously causing things to happen and then getting the response. You have this person looking at this dashboard and you have this person on this machine doing this. It's all just happening all at once and you're not blocking waving on every next piece of information. The information arises in the environment whenever it does and you have to react to it in real time. There's no guarantee that only one thing will be happening at a time; any number of things can happen at the same time. \n\nJACOB: Yeah.\n\nREIN: It's basically non-blocking – [crosstalk]\n\nJACOB: Several people are typing.\n\nREIN: Yeah, several people are typing is actually a really good example. It's you no longer have an expectation that you're in this synchronous serial mode of communication with a single other entity. The entire environment is changing it in whatever ways it needs to and you have to respond to all of it. So React apps are starting to become more like this where the dashboards that you build today that you use to respond to incidents are like this. You've got 16 little widgets and they're all updating at the same time. Well, which one am I supposed to look at? Is that the one that shows me where the problem is, or is it this one? \n\nCHRIS: Ah, this also kind of makes me wonder, not wonder, just think out loud. It sometimes feels like the things we build—and I'm admitting right up front, this is dumb. But it sometimes feels like the things we build are potentially more complicated than they need to be and I don't mean from the engineering under the hood, but there's a tendency to kitchen sink all the things like, if one is good, five is better and that's not always the case. \n\nI think about, for example, Facebook, which has eight different things built into it and would each of those things be better if it was his own standalone application that had a very narrow focus potentially? That's just a really high-level throwaway comment that I think someone could very easily pick apart and point out all these examples of why it's stupid and wrong. But it also feels like if we didn't try and do this with everything we built, it would potentially alleviate a lot of the problems and challenges we have with all these moving parts and complexity. Admittedly, just a random thought that popped into my head so, not very well-developed in the slightest.\n\nREIN: So it seems like we've organically moved into reflections, which is right on time.\n\nCHRIS: Yes, indeed.\n\nREIN: I think my reflection is, I don't think it's a coincidence, Chris, that you're, like you said, interested in both vanilla JavaScript and in privacy. We talked about it a little bit, but there are some deep connections between these two things, I think. \n\nCHRIS: Yeah, absolutely.\n\nREIN: And I think that the solution to one might be found in the other one and potentially vice versa. I think if we design – moving in the direction of vanilla JavaScript, I also think naturally moves us in the direction of increased privacy and maybe – [crosstalk]\n\nCHRIS: Yes, potentially.\n\nREIN: So the thing that I struggle with is how to motivate people to move in this direction because a lot of people have a lot of different conflicting goals. They may be in contexts that make it difficult for them to move in that direction. They work at a startup where selling user data is part of the business model and you're not going to get a product person on the same page with you on removing this tracker. It's not going to happen. Where are the actual levers that allow us to make progress in these directions?\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. For me, because I've been thinking about this a lot, I think this is one of the reasons why I'm particularly excited about this new bit of tooling that I'm seeing come out. Because I am not personally big on lots of tooling for the things that I built, but I noticed that a large chunk of the community is and I think tools that make it easier to build things, but also keep the cost to the user down, whether it's privacy, or just the amount of shipped code are a very good thing. So when I look at compilers like Astro and Svelte, or I look at that tool we were talking about earlier, Partytown, that keeps those third-party tracking scripts off the main thread, that's great. \n\nI think the other lever here is browsers themselves and the platform itself and what gets baked in. I think we already talked a little bit about how I think as long as Google is the dominant player in the browser market, there's only so much we can really do there because it is very much against their corporate interest to do that. But having platform native ways to do the things we want to do in a way that's easy and painless, like that path of least friction is in my opinion, probably one of the more powerful paths forward.\n\nJACOB: I have two reflections. The first is, I think the web did peak at LiveJournal [laughs] for lots of reasons.\n\n[laughter]\n\nYeah. The second is I'm thinking a lot about the software education industry and the whole space of just new developers generally and there is a lot of pressure in that spot that [inaudible]. It's all about single-page apps and showing that you can use “modern tooling,” which means React and probably lots of other complicated things that change every six months. I can't help but think about how that's actively shaping the web and it's making me wonder what would be different if we were encouraging developers to think about what would be best for what job and how React isn't the right tool for many jobs. So, yeah.\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I strongly agree. Strongly agree. There's definitely this kind of perception that if you're not using React, you're not serious about what you're building and I think the education market plays a big role in that. \n\nOn my end, I think one of the big things that came out of this talk, that I was not actually expecting to go in that direction so it was really interesting, was just around the whole privacy angle and how difficult it really is to maintain that privacy on the web. Even with tools like VPNs and adblockers and stuff, like the platform itself keeps making it harder and harder and I just really wish that weren't the case.\n\nREIN: I really enjoyed this episode. \n\nCHRIS: Yeah, no, I guess the only other thing I would add is if people enjoy having these conversations, or just want to tell me how wrong I was about something, I have a Daily Newsletter over at gomakethings.com that may, or may not be of interest to you. \n\nREIN: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us again.\n\nCHRIS: Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi.Sponsored By:Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up or know if you're protected. Don't worry Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humour, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on apple podcasts & spotify, go check it out!\r\nTest Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.","content_html":"Greater Than Code Episode #170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi
\n\n02:50 - Project Gemini and Text Protocols
\n\n07:05 - Overusing Analytics & Tracking Scripts
\n\n12:18 - Innovations: Making Accessibility The Default
\n\n14:48 - Ad-Tech and Tooling
\n\n\n\n32:08 - HTMX
\n\n46:30 - Frontend Development is Hard
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Vanilla JavaScript + Privacy.
\n\nJacob: The web piqued at LiveJournal. Also, encouraging devs to think about what tool would be best for different jobs.
\nChris: Maintaining privacy on the web.
Sign up for Chris’s newsletter at gomakethings.com!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nREIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 256 of Greater Than Code, a nice round number. I’m your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I’m here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.
\n\nJACOB: Thank you so much! I'm joined with this week's guest, Chris Ferdinandi.
\n\nChris helps people learn vanilla JavaScript. He believes that there is a simpler, more resilient way to make things for the web. His Developer Tips newsletter is read by thousands of developers each day. Learn more at gomakethings.com.
\n\nWelcome to the show. Welcome back to the show, I should say. We had you on just before COVID, we were saying before the show started, so it's been quite a while.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me back. It's been kind of a wild 18 months.
\n\nLast time I was on the show, I think we spent a lot of time talking about how modern development best practices might be ruining the web and this time, I was hoping we might have a little bit of chat about how that's still kind of the case, but there's also a whole ton of new things that have happened in the last 18 months that maybe swinging the pendulum back in the other direction, creating a web that's faster, little bit more resilient, and works better for everybody.
\n\nREIN: That sounds great. But first, has your superpower changed? Do you still have the same superpower?
\n\nCHRIS: I don't remember exactly what I said last time, but assuming it's derailing conversations, then the answer is absolutely yes. [laughs] That has always been and always will be my superpower. I am great at tangents.
\n\nREIN: Well, this podcast is just a series of tangents stitched together, so.
\n\nCHRIS: Excellent. Always makes for a fun conversation.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah. Very true.
\n\nREIN: Have you heard about this new internet protocol, Gemini?
\n\nCHRIS: No, I have not.
\n\nREIN: So it's like somewhere between Gopher and HTTP and so, it's a plain text protocol with no mark, no markup, no XML, no HTML and you can have links, but they have to be on a separate line. So you basically are sharing these plain text documents and there's no JavaScript, there's no CSS and people are seeing it as a revitalization of what the web used to be about. No click tracking. No injected advertisements.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. This is weird. So there's a few years ago where I've been like, “Yes, that's what the web needs.” I feel like I'm a little bit more pragmatic now as I have less hair and more white in the beard. Like that seems really cool in some ways and a huge step back in others. I have very mixed feelings about that as a gut reaction; knowing nothing else about it other than what you just told me.
\n\nREIN: What do you think is the happy medium between where we are now and 1990’s text protocols?
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So in some ways, I feel like the web maybe peaked with LiveJournal, or maybe Myspace. Myspace made it really easy to hack on the web and that was really cool. But the text-only web, I don't necessarily think I'd like to go back to.
\n\nI think I'm actually not even really opposed to commercialization on the web in large part because I'm only able to do what I can do professionally because of that. But I would love something that really curtails all the spyware for profit stuff over tracking. I have none of that on any of my websites. I removed all of my analytics, all of my – I don't even track opens on my newsletter and so, I really like the interactive and immersive nature of the web. I don't mind the commerce side of the web. I really hate the whole Big Brother-esque “we’re always watching you” nature of the web. I think that's really awkward and creepy.
\n\nAlso, I feel like sometimes we try to run before we can walk on the web and so, we end up throwing a boatload of JavaScript at the frontend to make up for limitations in the platform and we have a tendency to create experiences that are really slow, brittle, and super prone to breaking. I think about how the web has gotten, or the internet as a whole has gotten four to five times faster in the last decade, but the average webpage still loads at about the same speed as it did a decade ago.
\n\n[chuckles] The original Space Jam website loaded in about the same amount of time that the new Space Jam website loaded, even though the internet [chuckles] has gotten so much faster in that time and a large part of that has to do with the way we build and the tooling that we use.
\n\nJACOB: Just consuming that extra capacity that we get through faster connections, et cetera. More people.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, for every extra megabit of internet speed that we get, we throw a bunch more JavaScript on the frontend and we have a tendency—it's really weird for me to, as someone who teaches JavaScript for a living, tell people to use less JavaScript. But the web keeps moving to a more JavaScript driven future and JavaScript is the most fragile and bad for performance part of the frontend stack. I feel like in the last maybe 5 years, or so, we saw the pendulum swing really far in the JavaScript end of things.
\n\nI still think the phrase, “Always bet on JavaScript” is a good one. I don't think JavaScript is going anywhere. I don't, in abstract, hate it. The interactivity that it brings is good. I think the challenge is around how we lean on it heavily for things that it's not necessarily the best tool for the job for. I'm starting to see a new slate of tools that take advantage of some of the things that's great at in a way that doesn't punish the users for those decisions so that's pretty cool.
\n\nWe can dig into that if you both want to. There's a lot of new stuff in the works that I think has the ability to maybe fix some of the challenges that we've been facing up to this point.
\n\nREIN: What would you say are some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of implementations, design that people could take that would just make their app a little bit better, play a little bit more nicely, be a little less extractive in terms of tracking everything the user does?
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So one of the weirdest things that I've just encountered on the web, there's a certain subset—a lot of times it's e-commerce vendors, sometimes it's SAAS—but they're loading eight different tracking and analytics scripts on a single page through all sorts of different vendors. So they'll load Google Analytics, Salesforce, and three, or four other vendors that I'll do some version of the same thing—racking what you click on and where you go next. The impression I've gotten from talking to folks is that this is a byproduct of having a bunch of different internal departments that all want access to data and no one wanting to be like, “This is the tool we're using,” [chuckles] and so, they all just chuck it in there.
\n\nSo that's probably a really big offender there and there's a couple things that you can do about that. First is I feel like a lot of developers and a lot of designers have this; I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to – I'm trying to think of the right phrase here, but it's almost like your job is to an advocate for the user. So just because your manager, or executive is saying, “We need this” doesn't necessarily mean your job is to just be like, “Okay, let me throw that in there.” I liken it to if you were building a house and a customer told you they wanted you to install a hair dryer in the bathtub. You could do that for them because they ask, but it's a really bad idea and maybe it's your professional responsibility to tell them that.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. That is the thing that distinguishes a profession is that you have ethical obligations to uphold,
\n\nCHRIS: And this is where I think you get into the pro and con of the web being an industry that you can get into without professional certifications and trainings. It's like anybody can do it, but there's also not necessarily that same level of there's no certification board that's like, “You're going to lose your certification if you do these things that are harmful.”
\n\nFor most of us, for a lot of what we do, the side effect of having eight tracking scripts on a website is not life-threatening, but depending on the type of site that you offer and the services that you provide, it can be. Like I think a lot of people get taken a little aback by that, but I've heard multiple stories in the last few years about utility companies—electricity, gas, whatever—where utilities get knocked out in a really bad storm. So people are relying on their smartphones on 3G and they live in areas where connectivity is not particularly great and their Wi-Fi's down because their power is out and trying to connect to the electric company website to be able to file a claim like, “My electricity's out,” or even just find the contact number to call them, the site just keeps crashing, reloading, and they can't open it.
\n\nNot having access to your utility company because somebody was irresponsible with how they built the website really sucks. And depending on what the weather is like, like I live in a very cold climate up in the US in the Northeast and if the temperatures drop below freezing and there's a down tree blocking your ability to get in and out of the area and you don't have electricity, or heat, that can be a really serious thing.
\n\nI think a lot of times we just think about like, “I'm just building websites.” But it can be so much more than that depending on the industry you work in and the type of work that you do.
\n\nSo the whole there's no equivalent of you're going to get disbarred if you do these bad things, there just isn't that for a profession, which can be a good thing, but is also – [crosstalk]
\n\nREIN: There's no equivalent of the city code that's 2,000 pages long, but also means that you can't build a bathroom that electrocutes people and you can't put asbestos in the walls. The counterargument is that regulations are onerous and they stifle innovation, but – [crosstalk]
\n\nCHRIS: And they can.
\n\nREIN: Do you want innovation in less safe ways to build houses? Like, is that what we're looking for?
\n\nCHRIS: Right. Yeah. I had a similar argument once with someone about accessibility on the web and how it shouldn't be legally required for sites to build themselves accessibly because it stifles innovation for one person shops who are just trying to throw something up quickly. I don't know, at some point it just boils down to a moral argument and it's really hard to have an objective conversation about should you care about other people and doing the right thing? Like, I don't really know how to have that kind of conversation in a logical kind of way.
\n\nJACOB: And I'm thinking about where the innovation can happen is the big platforms—your WordPresses, your Wixes, Squarespaces. What innovations can they think of that can make accessibility the default? Like help people fall into the pit of success? What are the new innovations that they haven't come up with yet that just make accessibility just happen magically for someone who is –?
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I also sometimes feel like it's a little bit of a – well, so there's two aspects here. I feel like the you can have innovation, or regulation, but not both thing is a bit of a false dichotomy. I think one of the things we've seen in—my liberalness is going to show a little bit here—but one of the things we've seen in unregulated capitalism is that it doesn't necessarily drive innovation. It just drives more ways to squeeze profit out of people. I think you see that on the web with the current state of internet surveillance and ad tech. Do you, as a consumer, feel like you’ve got a lot of innovation out of all the new ways that large companies have figured out how to track what you do on the web so they can sell more toothpaste to you? Because I certainly don't.
\n\nSo that's one aspect of it and the other is, I feel like sometimes we're overly obsessed with innovation for innovation's sake and there's something to be for the boring, predictable web. Websites that try to be different just for the sake of being different often just end up being confusing and unusable and I don't necessarily want that in my web experience. I find that particularly frustrating. I'm a really big advocate of “the boring web.” I like when I show up on a website and I know exactly how to use it, I know how to move around, and I don't have to follow a whole bunch of popup tutorials just to figure out how to achieve the task I'm there to achieve.
\n\nREIN: And if you look at the context that's driving, some of this behavior from startups, from UX engineers at startups, it's often that their business model depends on being able to sell customer data. There are a lot of mobile apps that if they lost the ability to sell their customer's data would cease to exist and so I guess, the question is, is it justified? Should they exist if that's the only way they can exist?
\n\nCHRIS: I struggle with this a fair bit because I use and have benefited from free sell customer data services in the past. I'm of the mind that I personally would pay for –like, let's just use Twitter as an example. If I had the ability to pay to use Twitter and they would stop recommending all these completely irrelevant ads to me in my timeline all the time, I would probably pay a not insignificant amount of money for that. But I know there's a lot of people who either wouldn't, or couldn't afford to and the value of Twitter to me would go down substantially if a bunch of people dropped off the service.
\n\nSo that's a really good question that I don't have a great answer for. I feel like there's a balance somewhere between where we are today and this ideal, you're never tracked ever state. I don't know what it is, but I know there is one.
\n\nOne just related things, since we're talking about ad tech, is a lot of these third-party scripts are some of the biggest offenders when it comes to slowing down performance on the web. They add a lot latency into sites. I just saw this interesting project this morning from a guy by the name of Adam Bradley called Partytown. I don't know if either of you have heard of this yet, but it's essentially a lightweight interface that allows you to load and run your third-party scripts from a web worker instead of on the main thread.
\n\nOne of the biggest challenges with a lot of these scripts in JavaScript is that JavaScript is single threaded and so, all of these things block other stuff from happening because they're on the one main, I shouldn't say single threads. Single thread within the browser, but service workers and other web workers run on the separate thread in the background but don't have access to the DOM.
\n\nSo Adam Bradley created this really interesting, that I haven't had time to properly play around with yet, library that allows you to bridge that gap. So you can run these scripts off that main thread, but still give them those hooks into the DOM where they're needed with ideally the potential of reducing the overall load on the main thread and the latency and performance issues that come from that.
\n\nThe other thing that I think a lot of – I guess, another angle you could pull out here is the fact that tracking and analytics don't have to be as privacy invasive as they are. I think you see this in things like Paul Jarvis's analytics platform, Fathom, which is so privacy minded that it doesn't require a GDPR notification on your website to use. So it's not doing this really invasive follow you all over the internet kind of tracking.
\n\nNaturally doing that dramatically reduces that data's value for advertisers. But if you're looking to use that data for you as a business, it still gets you the information you need without sacrificing your user's privacy. So it'll tell you things like what pages people are looking at and how frequently certain things on your site convert without you needing to know that after leaving your site, John Smith went to Colgate and bought a tube of toothpaste and then went to Amazon and bought a new kayak and all that kind of stuff.
\n\nThere's a balance somewhere. I'm not a 100% sure where it is, but I'm seeing a lot of interesting ways of coming at this problem.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah. I'm going to be very speculative here because I can't claim to know about all this stuff, but I would guess that a lot of users that are just plugging Google Analytics just drop it into their site. They have no personal interest in all that advanced stuff. Like, they're not going to use it. They do want to know about convergence and that simple stuff anyway and really, they're just [chuckles] funneling more data to Google [chuckles] in the first place.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. Honestly, a big part of the reason why I pulled Analytics from all of my stuff is it just wasn't giving me that much value. I was tracking all this data that I wasn't actually using. Well, not even track, I was basically giving Google all this data about my users for free that I wasn't really taking meaningful action on anyways. I'd imagine for a lot of, like you've said, folks who are using these scripts, they're not really doing much with them and probably don't need nearly as much information as they're sucking up.
\n\nSo ad tech is a big, a big part of the challenge with the modern web. But actually, I think one of the other kind of related problems is the fact that we're using JavaScript for all the things. The entire frontend is being powered and generated with JavaScript and that just creates not just performance issues, but extreme fragility in the things that we build just because as a scripting language, JavaScript is so unforgiving when it runs into errors, or when things go wrong. It's never fun when you click a navigation element, or click a button, or try to load a page and nothing happens and that just happens so often because of JavaScript.
\n\nSo for the last 3 years, I've been on this tirade about how JavaScript is ruining the frontend. We're starting to see a bunch of new tools now that take some of the best parts of all of the JavaScript we've been shipping to the frontend and get rid of all the stuff that makes it so terrible, or at least minimize it as much as possible. That's been really interesting to see. To the bigger trends I've seen here are around micro libraries and precompilers.
\n\nIf you're both interested, I'd love to dig into that a little bit. If you have another way, you'd like to take this conversation, that's totally fine, too.
\n\nJACOB: It sounds good to me.
\n\nREIN: Sounds interesting.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. So just to set the scene here. I have lost track of the number of times in the last few years that I've heard people say, “You need to use a JavaScript framework in your app because it's better for performance.” “The real DOM is slow; React uses a virtual DOM so it's faster.” Or “If you write vanilla JavaScript, you're just building your own framework.” I hear stuff like this all the time and it drives me nuts because it's not true.
\n\nBut the thing I think people don't always realize is that can potentially be true depending on how your UI is structured. So if you ever view source on Twitter, their Like button is nested within 13 other divs and is itself a div and so, doing the div thing whenever you update the UI with an absurdly nested structure like that is going to be costly. But I think you could also argue that that's just bad HTML and you could probably structure that differently and better.
\n\nReact itself is 30 kilobytes of JavaScript minified and gzipped that unpacks in the browser into, I think it's like a megabyte, or two of JavaScript when it's all done. It's huge and all that abstraction is really, really costly.
\n\nSo on one end of the spectrum, I've seen the rise of micro libraries, which take some of the best concepts of libraries like React and Vue—state-based UI, DOM diffing where when you make an update, you only change the stuff that needs changing—and then they provide it in a much smaller package that gets you closer to the metal is maybe the best phrase here. They remove as many abstractions as possible and in doing so, they mean you have to load less JavaScript, which is an instant win on initial page load time, and then by removing abstractions, the actual interactions are faster themselves as well.
\n\nSo for example, a state change in Preact, which is a 3-kilobyte alternative to React that uses the same API is four times faster than that same state change in React. Even though you're using the same patterns, you're just loading a much smaller footprint. You’ve shed some features, but not all and you end up with that same kind of user experience, or developer experience if you like the React developer experience, but with a much smaller footprint and a much friendlier experience for the people who ultimately use the thing you build.
\n\nSimilarly, for a while, Alpine.js was gaining some traction. It was another small library built based on the way view works. Evan You, who built Vue was so inspired by it that he just recently released Petite-vue, which is a small subset of Vue built for progressive enhancement. It's a fraction of the size.
\n\nSo I find those really, really intriguing because they take some of the best parts and then they get rid of all the cruft.
\n\nOn the other end of the spectrum though, are folks who have started to realize that you can get some of those same developer benefits without passing on any of that cost to the user and to be honest, I'm finding that aspect of things a lot more intriguing. This takes the form of proper frameworks, or compilers where rather than authoring your JavaScript, shipping it to the browser, and then having the browser generate the HTML from it at runtime in the browser, or in the client, you still author your content in JavaScript, but then a compiler builds that into HTML, converts your library-based code into plain old vanilla JavaScript without the abstractions and that's what's get ships to the browser.
\n\nSo Rich Harris, a couple years ago, built Svelte and it was, as far as I know, the first of these tools. I'm sure there have probably been others before it, but Rich’s is the one that got most popular. It's just really, really interesting because you write with a similar pattern that you might in React, but then it spits out just HTML files in old-school like DOM manipulation, interactions. It's doing all of the heavy lifting before the code gets shipped to the browser and the user gets a really nice, lightweight experience. He is in the process of building out this new tool called SvelteKit that gives you really, really awesome stuff like routing and built-in progressive enhancement.
\n\nActually, he just recently gave a talk and a demo on this at Jamstack Conf last week at time of recording. I'll make sure I get you both a link to that if you want to drop it in the show notes for this one.
\n\nBut in it, he gave this demo about how you can author this page with an interactive form and if JavaScript is supported and loads in the browser, it does Ajax form handling. And if for some reason that JavaScript fails, it does an old-school HTTP form submit and then manually reloads the page and gives you the same exact experience. But you, as an author, don't have to write two different applications, like your client-side code and then your server fallback. SvelteKit just takes care of all that for you.
\n\nI think this is one of the biggest reasons why people like JavaScript libraries is they have a single codebase to manage and these compilers are allowing you to get those same benefits without punishing the user for that developer experience.
\n\nThere's another tool that came out. I forget if it's called Atomic, or Astro. Astro, yeah. Similar kind of thing, slightly different angle. This one allows you to take all of your favorite client-side library components, mash them together, and then it spits out prerendered HTML and remove as much of the JavaScript as possible. So like you could use a dropdown menu component from React, a card component from Vue, and some Svelte files that you started working on and this will mash them all up together for you and spit out a ton of really small code.
\n\nJason Lengstorf—whose name I almost certainly butchered and Jason, I'm very sorry—over at Netlify recently tried this on a next JS project of his and the resulting build actually had 90%, less client-side JavaScript in it and decreased the page load time by 30%, even though it used almost all of the same project code. It just produced a much smaller, faster kind of frontend thing with the same am developer experience.
\n\nSo these are the kinds of things that I get really excited about because I'm seeing us taking everything that we've learned from the last 5, or 10 years and finally starting to swing in the other direction with tooling that doesn't harm the users and we'll hopefully, start to unbreak the web a little bit.
\n\nREIN: So the analogy I use to try to understand this is basically frameworks like React install a runtime into your browser. Just like Ruby installs a runtime, you're not just compiling down to C calls. You're compiling to C calls, but those C calls are a framework of runtime that is quite large and quite future rich. Maybe the most direct example is in Rust, if you compile with no standard and you don't have a runtime, you're somewhat limited in what you can do, but you're getting as close to the metal as possible.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. That's a good analogy. I like that. That's a good way to describe it.
\n\nJACOB: Safely.
\n\nCHRIS: You really are. Yeah, I like that.
\n\nJACOB: I think the analogy goes further and correct me if I'm wrong, but Rust gives you all of that memory safety you wouldn't get with C. Svelte is doing the same thing with, can we call it DOM safety? [chuckles] That it's going to help you not make the common errors that you would often get with state manipulation.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, for sure and really, it has the potential to just save you from this situation that happens where the JavaScript breaks and then the whole app falls apart. The less you can rely on that, the better. It's not that you can't still ship that nice, enhanced experience to your users if they can tolerate it, but you end up with something that's a lot more resilient, which is not just better for them, but it's better for you.
\n\nI've just lost track of how many things I haven't purchased because I couldn't get the site to work in these JavaScript heavy apps, or even there's been one, or two occasions where my wife has run into an issue on a web app she's been trying to use. I've opened up dev tools, found the error, gone into the JavaScript code, fixed to the error live, and then she's been able to continue and like, should I file that with their dev team and send them a bill for fixing it? It's just, JavaScript is so unforgiving in the browser and having tools that provide more fallbacks and safety nets around that is definitely a good thing.
\n\nREIN: Maybe the other thing is that the runtime starts take on a whole bunch of responsibilities like you just start to pack it full of features. So in Rust, the runtime does everything from a stack overflow of protection to processing command line arguments.
\n\nCHRIS: I don't know Rust that well so I don't have a really good comment on that, but, [laughs] or I can't necessarily make an analogy between that and JavaScript, but that sounds like a good thing.
\n\nI guess, the related thing here is we also have a bad habit, as developers—just not necessarily you guys personally, but just as a community—we have a bad habit of doing our work on really high-end machines and testing our work on really high-end machines and good internet connections, and then assuming that the majority of our user base is like that.
\n\nI think React works perfectly fine on modern smartphone, or modern computer and a really good internet connection. But so many of the people who use the things we build don't have either of those things, or have one but not the other and the house of cards really starts to fall apart in those situations. Things become really slow, really buggy really fast and this is again where we get into the whole there's no professional standards board that says your site has to load this fast on this type of internet connection. There's no threshold mandating, or fault tolerance testing, or anything like that like you might have with the electrical in your house, or anything like that and maybe there should be, I don't know.
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\n\nJACOB: I was reading something interesting. So I haven't tried it, but I guess, it's called HTMX, which are you familiar with it?
\n\nCHRIS: You are the second person to mention that to me. I have not played around with it myself, but I heard just a little bit about it. So I'd love to hear your take on it.
\n\nJACOB: We might know about the same, but what it looks like is it's coming from the other side, which is saying you as a developer should really, you're just going to author markup and from your perspective, you don't know if the browser's native capability is going to handle it, or if there's going to be JavaScript that's going to look at a certain attribute and handle it for you. You just want to handle markup and I just think that's a really interesting take because it gets developers back into the mindset of markup first.
\n\nCHRIS: You brought up another good point that I totally forgot to mention. So one of the things that I think we're starting to see is—and we saw this with jQuery, too—I call it paving of the cow path and I, by no means coined that term. I'm sure you're both heard it before, but.
\n\nSo when jQuery came about, there was no good way to get elements by classes, looping through things was really hard. Like everything about JavaScript kind of sucked and jQuery really showed the developer community what a good API around working with the DOM could look like. It took a long time, but eventually, the browsers standards’ bodies incorporated a lot of that into what we get out of the platform. So the reason query selector and query selector all exist today, and the array for each method, and all of these awesome ways for interacting with the DOM, the class list API, the only reason any of that stuff exists is because John Resig and the jQuery team showed us a better way and paved those cow paths.
\n\nAs much as the massive popularity of state-based UI libraries bugs me because I think they're overused, just like jQuery was probably overused in its day, they have really in many ways, paved the cow path for what a better browser native system could be.
\n\nOne of the trends I'd like to see more of is, to what you were just talking about, Jacob, HTML doing more of the work and JavaScript doing less of it. I think a really good model for this is in the details and summary elements, which allow you to create a browser native, show and hide disclosure component without any JavaScript at all. It's just entirely HTML. You can click it, it shows the thing, you click it again, it hides the thing. It's accessible out of the box. If the browser doesn't support it, it's progressively enhanced; you get the full text. Beautiful.
\n\nI want that for everything. I want that for tabs. I want that for carousels. I want that for image galleries and just any sort of interactive component. Like I want that and the really nice thing about details and summary where I feel they really nailed it is its styleable. So if you want it to look different, if you want the expand and collapse icon to be styled differently, you can do that. If you want to animate it in, you can do that. Like you can add CSS to make it look the way you want. And if you want to enhance it with some JavaScript, it also is a custom JavaScript event that you can hook into and build on top of, but you don't need to.
\n\nOne of, I think the biggest boons of JavaScript libraries is the ability to add interactive components, complex interactive components with ease. I feel like for a lot of developer teams, that's a real draw for them. They don't have to figure out how to redesign an accordion, because there's a component for that and that has the real benefit of adding more accessibility to the web, too. But it would be really cool if the platform just did that for you and we didn't have to reinvent the wheel, but this is where I feel like a lot of a lot of these libraries are paving the cow paths and hopefully, at some point, the platform will catch up and we'll have some of this stuff just baked right in.
\n\nI think the HTML enhanced thing you just referenced is another example of what that could look like. I think from what I've gathered from it, it's still a runs in the browser type tool, but it allows you to just focus on running HTML. I could be wrong. It could be a compiler, but I just really want that stuff out of the box in the browser, without me having to think about it. I'm also a lazy developer, though so that's [laughs] part of it.
\n\nJACOB: [chuckles] Me too.
\n\nREIN: I feel like the $2 trillion elephant in the room here is that the browser everyone's using is made by Google.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, and that used to not be the case, right? We've lost a lot of rendering engines in the last 3, or 4 years. You can do your part by not using Chrome. I'm not saying you should use Firefox. I'm on Edge. A lot of people like Brave. I have very mixed feelings about that one for a variety of reasons. But yeah, no, that is true. Chrome is like what, 70, or 80% of the market at this point? So that, just from a tracking and data absorption perspective, is not great.
\n\nOne interesting argument I've heard in the past is that it's not necessarily bad if there's only one rendering engine on the web and browsers are competing on different features. Like, imagine a world where you didn't have to worry about which APIs are supported by which browser; we're pretty close at this point. [chuckles] But I'm thinking back to when Firefox had more popularity and Edge was still running on its own operating system and they were always just a little bit out of sync.
\n\nIt would be awesome if the entire web ran on a single rendering engine and features were layered on top of that. Like, I think there is potentially an argument for that being a good thing. I think the real problem is that that rendering engine is controlled by Google and so, even if you're using a chromium-based browser that's not Chrome, it's still very much subject to the whims of what Google wants from the web. And you see that in a lot of the way things get prioritized, and what makes it into the platform and what doesn't. They have a nasty habit of if they can't get the rest of the folks in the standards board on board, they just plow ahead with it anyways and then users start using it and then everybody either follow suit, or riots happen. So that is an elephant in the room and I don't really have a good way to reconcile. That kind of sucks.
\n\nREIN: Have you heard about the new idle tracking API fiasco with Google Chrome?
\n\nCHRIS: No, I haven't, but I'd love to learn more.
\n\nREIN: This was in the news a couple weeks ago, so this is pretty fresh, but Google is basically introducing a new API to Chrome that detects when the users are idle and – [crosstalk]
\n\nCHRIS: That's gross.
\n\nREIN: Every other browser manufacturer is like, “This is an invasion of privacy and you should stop doing it.” Meanwhile, Google is also like, “Web tracking is out of control and has resulted in an erosion of trust,” and they say that out one side of their mouth. Now to the other side, they introduce this tracking API that for example, malicious sites could use to determine when it's okay to use your CPU to mine Bitcoin.
\n\nCHRIS: I'm thinking about how they recently insisted that alert had to be deprecated because it's bad for user security and now I'm hearing about this and it just really doesn't – like, I have a tough time consigning that what we say, what we do kind of aspect. Yeah, that's gross and that really sucks. I wish Firefox had maintained more of its market dominance, that would've been nice. Or if the W3C managed the rendering engine so that browser vendors weren't controlling that. This is all really, it's a little bit disheartening.
\n\nI don't have a really great solution for this kind of stuff. I'm by no means smart enough for that. But for some reason, it seems really, really hard to get a new browser engine in the market as evidenced by the fact that even big corporations who have tried it, eventually just give up and fold and switch over to chromium. I'm not enough of a computer science expert to really understand why that is, but I can imagine it's very hard, especially as the platform gets more complicated.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean and there's also a vendor lock-in. So on iOS, every browser is secretly WebKit under the hood.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBecause they literally aren't allowed to ship their own browser implementations.
\n\nCHRIS: Right, yeah. That one's always really fun. That one catches people by surprise; you're running Chrome, but you're actually running Safari under the hood.
\n\nJACOB: I think for a while, Mozilla wouldn't make an iOS app because they didn't want people to think that they were getting everything you associate with Mozilla's values when you download it. I think they have one now and it's because they are able to do certain privacy features, even if they can't do all of them but yeah, that's an interesting debate.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: S you could imagine a version of HTML that remove moves a whole bunch of features that makes it harder to track people, that makes it harder to implement extractive, hidden stuff. The problem is there's no way to enforce that a certain site is using that subset. That would have to be done at the browser level and Google has no incentive to ever make that possible
\n\nCHRIS: [laughs] Oh man, I'm thinking now about the web we lost.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. That was actually one of the motivations for Jim and I to not try to mess with HTML is oh look, we can specify this restrictive subset of HTML that meets our needs, but there's no way to guarantee that any particular site you access is actually well-behaving. So they came up with an entirely new protocol so that they could enforce very strict rules about what a site can do.
\n\nJACOB: Would that mean end users have to type in Gemini:// explicitly?
\n\nREIN: Yeah. So there is a – is that called the protocol call part of the URL?
\n\nJACOB: I think so.
\n\nREIN: So there is a Gemini:// protocol. Is it scheme? Anyway, there is that and it has its own protocol definition. One of the goals of the protocol is to be civil enough that you could implement it in about a hundred lines and keep it all in your head.
\n\nCHRIS: [chuckles] That's pretty wild. I'm on the Project Gemini website right now and this is very old-school. Ooh, and it uses the details and summary element.
\n\nREIN: That's basically an HTML proxy for an actual Gemini page.
\n\nCHRIS: Huh.
\n\nREIN: But there was no CSA. There's no JavaScript. There are no headers. Aside from the one header that you use to make the request, there are no headers so you can't insert anything in headers. There's no user agent.
\n\nCHRIS: See if this loads. No, this doesn't load. I wonder if there's any browsers that have actually incorporated this, or that allow you to – [crosstalk]
\n\nREIN: No, but there are like a hundred different clients that have been implemented in every language imaginable.
\n\nM: Ooh. I am noticing that it uses like a markdown-esque syntax. I'm looking at the advanced line types here where you use hashes for headings and asterisks for bulleted lists.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, but it doesn't allow inline links for example.
\n\nCHRIS: So you can always see what the actual URL that you're going to follow is? That's cool. Yeah, I – [crosstalk]
\n\nREIN: So there is this movement tool people are interested in moving away from the huge mess that is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some people, I think are interested in this for privacy reasons. Some people, I think are interested in this for the same, I think motivation that brought you towards vanilla JavaScript, which is can't we just build sites that work better by not doing all this extra stuff?
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, and they're separate, but they're also very tightly linked, I think where a lot of the privacy stuff is what causes a lot of the issues that bother me about the way that the web works today.
\n\nThis is an interesting project. Candidly, I'm not entirely sure this will ever really catch on in a mainstream fashion. I think the genie is just way too far into the bottle, but it is interesting to think about a way the web could be different.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. It's interesting because this is definitely fringe, but fringes are where the interesting stuff happens.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I could see parts of this informing what happens on the platform itself. The flipside here is I also do like some of the interactivity. I hate parallax and animation effects and all that, but I like being able to watch a video in a browser. I think that's pretty cool.
\n\nREIN: There are advantages to single-page applications to have – that user experience has some, I think real advantages over traditional hypermedia making a bunch of requests to new pages stateless. Basically, we’ve you figured out how to reimplement a stateful thick client right on top of HTTP.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah like, being able to keep media playing as you navigate around those near instant page loads, that’s pretty sweet. Man, you're making me really sad about [laughs] just where the web is today. I hadn't really sat on just how pervasive ad tech and web surveillance are until this conversation.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and it's also, React is almost a declaration that the REST manifesto was wrong.
\n\nCHRIS: [laughs] It's a bold claim.
\n\nREIN: I mean, React is – the original REST documentation basically would make React style SPAs impossible.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. Just one of the things in that talk Rich Harris from Svelte gave at Jamstack Conf talked about how there's this battle on the internet between the single-page apps are awesome people and the no, multi-page apps are better. They're way less complicated, better for accessibility, et cetera and admittedly, I tend to fall into that camp more often than not. He likened it to almost a bit of a false dichotomy where they both have really good points and they both serve important functions. Sometimes one is the right tool for the job over the other. So I absolutely have historically maybe come down a little bit too hard on the SPAs are always terrible, never use [chuckles] camp when they do sometimes have good uses.
\n\nBut so, his whole talk was about this new term that he was trying to get going called transitional apps, #transitionalapps, that [chuckles] took the best of both worlds and allowed you to seamlessly move from one to the other, when appropriate, without having to just choose out of the box like, I'm going to build this, or I'm going to build that. I thought that was a really interesting approach that I hope we see mature a little bit more over the next year, or two because I think it has a lot of teeth and could do a lot of good for the web.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. Once again, it's the boundary zone between these two things where the interesting stuff happens, right? So HTMX, I think of it as federated multi-page apps so you might make multiple requests, but this one's just for this part of the page and this one's just for this part of page.
\n\nJACOB: It’s called micro frontends is a term I've heard.
\n\nREIN: Ooh. So the main difference is the micro frontends are an SPA thing and so, you have different subsites rendering different parts of the page, but they each render their own SPA type thing. But what you have with HTMX, or GitHub, this for a long time was GitHub’s style is I want to click this button and when I click this button, it's going to make a request for a new HTML fragment, and then it's going to put this HTML fragment on the page.
\n\nJACOB: Tight coupling has its value sometimes.
\n\nREIN: And then you also have things like Phoenix LiveView, the Elixir framework, where it looks a lot like a single-page app, but is actually making tons of server push updates.
\n\nCHRIS: This might be a little bit of – I know they call it HTML Over the Wire, that Hotwire thing that Basecamp came out with a year, or two ago and it's also interesting, Basecamp politics aside, where you build your old-school monolithic multi-page app, and then you layer a light JavaScript client on top of it that simulates a single-page app, or progressively enhances in some ways into one. I was really, really intrigued by the idea, but the more I played around with it, the more it pulled in some of the best aspects of both, but also some of the worst aspects of both and ended up being in my opinion, this weird Franklin project that did neither one particularly well. It just didn't work for me. I'm sure for certain types of types of projects, it can be really useful.
\n\nBut I think the takeaway for the show is that frontend engineering is hard and there's a lot of trade-offs you have to make no matter what. I love to sit in my ivory tower and postulate about this stuff. We’re building really simple and really narrow apps that get by just fine as a multi-page vanilla JavaScript thing because they're not doing that much.
\n\nREIN: So speaking of frontend development is hard. There is a particular way in which frontend development is becoming incredibly complex and it is this movement away from client server models, away from Shannon communication style, I make a request. You give me a response. I make a request. You give me a response. This sort of a serial communication to a form of communication that's called joint activity, which is where just everything's happening all at once. I'm not making a request and waiting for a whole new page back. This part of the page is updating. This part of the page is updating. I'm typing over here, just a whole bunch of stuff happening at the same time and this is a paradigmatically different form of communication than request and response.
\n\nCHRIS: Do you have an example of that? I'm having a really tough time picturing what that looks like in my head.
\n\nREIN: So there's a book called Joint Cognitive Systems introduces this stuff if folks are interested, but think about incident response. During an incident, you're not synchronously causing things to happen and then getting the response. You have this person looking at this dashboard and you have this person on this machine doing this. It's all just happening all at once and you're not blocking waving on every next piece of information. The information arises in the environment whenever it does and you have to react to it in real time. There's no guarantee that only one thing will be happening at a time; any number of things can happen at the same time.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: It's basically non-blocking – [crosstalk]
\n\nJACOB: Several people are typing.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, several people are typing is actually a really good example. It's you no longer have an expectation that you're in this synchronous serial mode of communication with a single other entity. The entire environment is changing it in whatever ways it needs to and you have to respond to all of it. So React apps are starting to become more like this where the dashboards that you build today that you use to respond to incidents are like this. You've got 16 little widgets and they're all updating at the same time. Well, which one am I supposed to look at? Is that the one that shows me where the problem is, or is it this one?
\n\nCHRIS: Ah, this also kind of makes me wonder, not wonder, just think out loud. It sometimes feels like the things we build—and I'm admitting right up front, this is dumb. But it sometimes feels like the things we build are potentially more complicated than they need to be and I don't mean from the engineering under the hood, but there's a tendency to kitchen sink all the things like, if one is good, five is better and that's not always the case.
\n\nI think about, for example, Facebook, which has eight different things built into it and would each of those things be better if it was his own standalone application that had a very narrow focus potentially? That's just a really high-level throwaway comment that I think someone could very easily pick apart and point out all these examples of why it's stupid and wrong. But it also feels like if we didn't try and do this with everything we built, it would potentially alleviate a lot of the problems and challenges we have with all these moving parts and complexity. Admittedly, just a random thought that popped into my head so, not very well-developed in the slightest.
\n\nREIN: So it seems like we've organically moved into reflections, which is right on time.
\n\nCHRIS: Yes, indeed.
\n\nREIN: I think my reflection is, I don't think it's a coincidence, Chris, that you're, like you said, interested in both vanilla JavaScript and in privacy. We talked about it a little bit, but there are some deep connections between these two things, I think.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, absolutely.
\n\nREIN: And I think that the solution to one might be found in the other one and potentially vice versa. I think if we design – moving in the direction of vanilla JavaScript, I also think naturally moves us in the direction of increased privacy and maybe – [crosstalk]
\n\nCHRIS: Yes, potentially.
\n\nREIN: So the thing that I struggle with is how to motivate people to move in this direction because a lot of people have a lot of different conflicting goals. They may be in contexts that make it difficult for them to move in that direction. They work at a startup where selling user data is part of the business model and you're not going to get a product person on the same page with you on removing this tracker. It's not going to happen. Where are the actual levers that allow us to make progress in these directions?
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. For me, because I've been thinking about this a lot, I think this is one of the reasons why I'm particularly excited about this new bit of tooling that I'm seeing come out. Because I am not personally big on lots of tooling for the things that I built, but I noticed that a large chunk of the community is and I think tools that make it easier to build things, but also keep the cost to the user down, whether it's privacy, or just the amount of shipped code are a very good thing. So when I look at compilers like Astro and Svelte, or I look at that tool we were talking about earlier, Partytown, that keeps those third-party tracking scripts off the main thread, that's great.
\n\nI think the other lever here is browsers themselves and the platform itself and what gets baked in. I think we already talked a little bit about how I think as long as Google is the dominant player in the browser market, there's only so much we can really do there because it is very much against their corporate interest to do that. But having platform native ways to do the things we want to do in a way that's easy and painless, like that path of least friction is in my opinion, probably one of the more powerful paths forward.
\n\nJACOB: I have two reflections. The first is, I think the web did peak at LiveJournal [laughs] for lots of reasons.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah. The second is I'm thinking a lot about the software education industry and the whole space of just new developers generally and there is a lot of pressure in that spot that [inaudible]. It's all about single-page apps and showing that you can use “modern tooling,” which means React and probably lots of other complicated things that change every six months. I can't help but think about how that's actively shaping the web and it's making me wonder what would be different if we were encouraging developers to think about what would be best for what job and how React isn't the right tool for many jobs. So, yeah.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah. I strongly agree. Strongly agree. There's definitely this kind of perception that if you're not using React, you're not serious about what you're building and I think the education market plays a big role in that.
\n\nOn my end, I think one of the big things that came out of this talk, that I was not actually expecting to go in that direction so it was really interesting, was just around the whole privacy angle and how difficult it really is to maintain that privacy on the web. Even with tools like VPNs and adblockers and stuff, like the platform itself keeps making it harder and harder and I just really wish that weren't the case.
\n\nREIN: I really enjoyed this episode.
\n\nCHRIS: Yeah, no, I guess the only other thing I would add is if people enjoy having these conversations, or just want to tell me how wrong I was about something, I have a Daily Newsletter over at gomakethings.com that may, or may not be of interest to you.
\n\nREIN: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us again.
\n\nCHRIS: Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi.
Sponsored By:
02:47 - Anne’s Superpower: Empathy & Collaboration
\n\n17:45 - Framing and Shaping Relationships + Communication
\n\n29:47 - Helping People Learn – Work Therapists: Should/Could They Exist?
\n\n38:18 - Having Support Outside of Work: Networking
\n\n48:20 - Overcoming Job Responsibility Misperceptions
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: Being able to find strength and solidity within yourself so you can be someone that helps to contribute to moving things in a positive direction.
\n\nCasey: Coaching men on DEI. How could it be successful?
\n\nAnne: The future of where we need to go as a society, especially a tech-driven society, is to ask yourself how do you bring what you love to the table and to do it with love.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That's link.testdouble.com/greater.
\n\nJACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 255 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel. I'm joined by my co-panelist, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. I'm here with our other co-panelist, Arty Starr.
\n\nARTY: And I'm here with our guest today, Anne Griffin.
\n\nAnne is a product leader, a startup advisor, and subject matter expert in AI, blockchain, tech ethics, and inclusivity. She is the owner of Griffin Product & Growth, a product consulting and advising firm. Her workshop, Human First, Product Second, teaches organizations and professionals how to think about building more human, inclusive, and ethical tech products. She has lectured at prestigious universities across North America such as Columbia University and West Point, spoken at major events such as SXSW, and created courses for O’Reilly Media.
\n\nOutside of her work, she loves rest, barbecue, and beaches.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Anne.
\n\nANNE: Thank you so much. I am absolutely thrilled to be here today. It's a gorgeous day in New York.
\n\nArty, I know I've had a couple conversations with you. Jacob, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but we've had a conversation before and I just really love you guys. You guys are great. And Casey, I'm super excited to meet you.
\n\nARTY: Yeah, the last time we were recording, we had some challenges with audio issues and so, we weren't able to get the podcast together, which is really unfortunate because we had an amazing conversation. But we're all back here together and I'm sure we're going to have a really awesome conversation this time and it's probably going to be even better than before.
\n\nSo I'm excited to ask you our first question, Anne is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nANNE: I would say one of my best superpowers is, maybe this counts as two separate things, but it's a combination of empathy and also collaboration, which I think empathy definitely helps make for a good collaborator.
\n\nAnd where I got it, I think it’s a combination of places as well is really growing up, I was never the popular kid. I was always the kid that was picked last in the gym. I had some friends, but I was really – again, I was unpopular; I didn't really have that many friends. I was picked on a bit.
\n\nSo for me, I was in this position where I was always super conscious, or tried to be of how the things that I was doing was making other people feel. Because being in a position where I think some people thought like, “Ha ha ha, that's funny,” and don't think anything much further than that for me made me feel not very great. So I think some of that started from there and not to say I didn't have places where I was like, “Oh, I could improve in terms of empathy,” but I really think that's really where it came from.
\n\nAlso, in terms of my working style, I've always worked best being in a collaborative environment. I'm not super happy when I have to work completely solo and there's zero collaboration going on. Not saying there aren't things in product management where you are working solo, but one of the things I love about product management is by nature, it is a super collaborative role.
\n\nAnd really, you have to have empathy to be a good collaborator because I would rather have somebody doing really amazing and creative work because they feel inspired to, they feel like they can be themselves and bring them their best selves into the workplace, and that there is trust. That is the thing that makes me feel the best about anything I do honestly. And obviously, launching new things. That's great. I love that. Obviously, it's a big part of product management. I wouldn't be in it if that wasn’t important.
\n\nBut honestly, I think I get equal amounts, or possibly more fuel from knowing that my team feels empowered, knowing that my team actually loves being on the team, and is really just excited to be together and be able to just do their best work and not out of like a, “Oh man, I'm going to get in trouble by someone,” or “Oh, I have to be super scared of political stuff,” but really being like, “I got to show up as me today and that empowered me to be my most creative and best self.”
\n\nARTY: Wow. The story you were talking about at the beginning with how you were feeling growing, never the popular kid and how that made you kind of hyper aware of how your actions and the things that you did ended up influencing the people around you and just developing this hyperawareness that gave you this empathy and how you were thinking about things.
\n\nI'm curious, did you also have environments and context where you were accepted and well left?
\n\nANNE: Growing up, obviously, I'll say I was very fortunate that my family has always been very loving and accepting. So I'll say one of the most critical environments I had that I went to daycare for a really long time and I felt like there wasn't really this I was an outsider there, but in terms of school environments, and I'm not really sure what it was, pretty much from grade school all the way through high school, I was an outsider.
\n\nSo I think it's also having have been in certain other critical environments where I was loved and accepted and I think I met one of my then best friends in 5th grade, which then she eventually changed schools, all this other stuff. But having certain people, even if there wasn't a lot, and then having those critical environments where I was accepted. Knowing what it feels like when you are accepted and contrast to this whole thing of feeling like people don't really care you're there, or they don't really want you to like join them at lunch, or other things like that.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, that contrast sounds really powerful.
\n\nThis is kind of random, but it's reminding me of, I went to physical therapy last week because my posture is bad. My hands went numb 2 years ago. It's recovering. I'm pretty good now. But they were teaching me how to do a squat with good posture and they said, “Here's the right way to do it. Bend your back here, do this, make sure your shoulders aren’t tense,” and then they had me do it wrong. So I got to do it the right way and the wrong way and that helped so much. I've had like 4, or 5 PT people. This was the first one that showed me the wrong way for contrast. It's powerful.
\n\nANNE: Absolutely. I agree that it's so powerful and I think for me, that's part of where I originally fostered like here are the feelings I know I want to have and that I can have and how do I create that sense of safety in being one's self outside of these environment? I really felt like once I got to college and especially once I was working in environments that were healthy enough and safe enough for me to be able to create this is the right type of environment where there's trust and collaboration, I was able to do that because I had experienced the wrong way of—I'll say, the wrong way as in being excluded from things, people not really caring about how you feel based on comments, but had also, this area where I had learned also the right way.
\n\nActually, one person who was very, I think, fundamental in helping me translate that into the work world is one of my mentors Dana. Actually, she used to work at Microsoft. She actually early retired from Microsoft. So she was at Microsoft while I interned there and she really taught me that well, it shouldn't be on you to solve all your workplace's problems because they're not paying you to solve a culture problem that they should be handling. But you should really act at work in terms of implementing the type of culture that you would want to work in. Don't just be, “Oh, I'm just upset because all this bad stuff's happening,” and that kind of stuff. You have the right to be upset if bad things are happening in your workplace.
\n\nBut if there are certain things that you can foster that you have control over in terms of the attitude on your team and how you empower other people to be able to talk about what are the problems, what is going well, what don't we like, how can we change it, what are little things that can nudge the atmosphere and really foster that? Because there's some places, they're going to be toxic; [chuckles] they're not going to be big impact there.
\n\nBut there's also a lot that can be done in places where you are empowered to do that. Especially as a product manager on your own pod, or your own team, so that it is a happy place to be, that people do feel included. People don't feel like people can just jump into your Slack channel, say a bunch of trash, and then leave and it's completely fine. I think that's that contrast there is learning what is the right way, the right posture, I guess, for that type of environment really helped me and especially from my mentor Dana at Microsoft.
\n\nCASEY: Anne, I feel like you are saying so many things I say all the time and I’d love to hear it from another person's voice. I believe strongly that you can make a small bubble that you're in. Like a happy and effective environment, a team that you're on. Even if it's a toxic culture overall, you can have your own happy bubble, but I don't know. A lot of people don't value that, or they don't celebrate it when they manage to get even one bubble and that can be frustrating. That’s why it's so cool to hear that you have felt like you've made some bubbles happy before.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. When I say empathy and collaboration are my superpowers, I would say also creating bubbles are one of my superpowers, even in remote environments. Even before the pandemic, one of the places I worked was a remote first company. It's always really interesting because I think because again, empathy and collaboration are my superpowers, I crave that a lot and I'm going to be working for 8 hours a day so I try to create that everywhere I go.
\n\nNot saying I'm trying to exclude people from the bubble, but anybody who wants to be a part of that type of culture, I welcome them into that and it's amazing because I'll go into places and even that small startup people are like, “Whoa, when you started, I noticed this big culture shift.” It was really small so it was much easier to make that kind of impact, but people started feeling a lot more connected to each other, especially we were remote first.
\n\nWe weren't really centralized in New York, or in the United States. So there were people who were either based in Nepal, or Mumbai where they said because of the time zone differences, people didn't really think about okay, is that person getting the support they need when there's hours where people are not up and if we have more people in other time zones, how do we make sure those people feel included? Because there's a lot of ways you can actually make people feel excluded, even if it's unintentional and people may still resent that, or still may feel bad and even if they don't resent you, or blame you, those are things where I think a lot of people just say, “Well, it's not really my problem,” or organizations say, “Well, if they want to get a paycheck and they want to work remotely from that region, they're just going to have to deal with it.”
\n\nI also think I'm like, “But if you don't care, why are you hiring people in that region if you're not going to foster a culture and just an overall company bubble of making people feel like they matter, that they're included, that they're getting support and being creative with how you also support people asynchronously?”
\n\nJACOB: I think like in addition to that often is the case, the geographical differences, there's other differences at play that are specifically about power, or just in terms of country of origin. You might have a lot of circumstances where you've got people on salary in the States and everyone is a contractor in India, or something. I think there's a lot of intersecting issues that can come up with people working internationally.
\n\nANNE: I would say, I completely agree. At that startup, everyone was an employee, but I definitely think there was a difference because people are used to, “Oh, those people in that time zone are usually a contractor.”
\n\nI've worked at plenty of companies where if somebody was remote, it was because they were contractor and they usually were from a country of a lot of brown people and how people treated them was different. It's very fascinating because consistently I see in cultures where there is not conscious messaging from the leadership about “Yes, these people are contractors.” Yes, we've outsourced this work to this place.” Conscious culture shaping and messaging from the leadership. “Hey, they are part of our team. We're working on the same goal. This is how we treat each other in this environment.”
\n\nYou get very inconsistent results in how people choose to treat those people and I've seen it where I've worked with a team and it was like, “Oh wow. This was such an amazing project. We work really, really well together.” And then that same team gets passed to another person next project, that sort of thing and I talk to the contractors and they're like, “Yeah, no, that person just yells at us and tells us every time we do something wrong and they don't ever bother setting up time to discuss requirements in more detail.” They just feel like, ‘Oh, you should get it.’
\n\nYou have to think about okay well, why would you not have these conversations with somebody who's based in India, or Columbia, or Brazil, but you're having these conversations at the coffee cooler in-person and you expect them to pick up the same amount of information, to understand the same amount of context?
\n\nIt was just confusing to me because for me, I felt I would be very stressed out and have tons of anxiety if I feel like I'm missing lots of information, lots of context and my team is just telling me, “No, no, no, no. We gave you everything you should to just understand it. I don't think we really need a meeting because I sent you everything.” And me feeling like I still have questions and there is either this resistance to making time to talk to me about it, or this sense of I should already know this, which I think some of us have all experienced that at some point in our career like, “Oh my God, I'm scared people are going to think I already know this,” but when you're in that also power dynamic and you're on the side of less power, I know I would feel hyper anxious about the perception is that I'm not doing a good job when I'm really trying my best.
\n\nSo those are things that also really bother me when it comes to people decide we're going to have a team that's going to be based in this different time zone, or this is going to be the only team that's not based in the US and there's not thoughtfulness from leadership. How do we create a culture that everybody feels included and everybody is set up for success ultimately?
\n\nBecause people really liked the idea of remote work when it was like, “Oh, I can move to Ohio and get a really nice house and have a place in the suburbs.” But then there is all this stuff where people like that idea. But before it was like if you have someone who was based somewhere else, there was a lot of stuff where people are like, “I don't think we need to really do anything extra for them. They got it.”
\n\nAnd then people who are now experiencing remote work for the first time, they're like, wait, there are actually certain things that are pretty hard. Especially if certain people are centralized around certain time zones, or certain locations. That is just not something that is, I think well-thought-out and especially when we start talking about contractors. Even if a company decides these are going to be full-time employees in other countries, depending on how long a company has existed in a centralized location, there's sometimes resentment and fear that oh, they're just going to hire all these cheap people from this country and that seeps through in how people choose to communicate with those people.
\n\nI know I'm saying a lot, but I'm also super – I've been technically working with remote teams since I was in college and the first full-time job I ever had, my team was based in Belarus. I've worked with so many remote teams over the years and I have so many opinions [chuckles] about it. I just see again and again, and again that all it really takes is okay, if I would say something like this to someone at the coffee cooler about, oh, this project's happening, da, da, da, da and that little extra context, which sometimes seems insignificant. I need to make sure that there is some Slack message, email, how do they work best like some sort of thing so that they are getting an equivalent experience in a remote world.
\n\nARTY: Wow. One of the things I'm thinking about now is just how much very few words, very few communications that we might have with someone has in terms of impact and shaping that relationship, and impact and shaping all communication that cascades from that relationship. Like you were talking about this example where you had one experience with a team and then there's another relationship that takes place.
\n\nThe view, the perception of how they see these other people and this other team out there versus your experience—just the variance in the relationship and how it evolved the perception of the team and their capabilities and everything else—can just snowball from there, from the seed of a few conversations and the importance and the responsibility of leadership to frame that relationship, to frame it in a way that is supportive, and seeing of the humans and the challenges, and the power of going, “You know what, we're all on the same team.”
\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking back to the small bubble thing we touched on before. It sounds like if you were on a small bubble team with these remote people, you could fill them in. You're on it, you got this. But then if they're on another team, a small bubble that's not as remote aware and thoughtful, then they're not going to do as well. So I'm always thinking about this. I'm so confident I can get any small team to be a happy bubble if I'm in there long enough and I put my mind to it. But then the level up, it's not necessarily within my power as a PM to make a change above my level.
\n\nWhat experience have you had around trying to do that, whether it went well, or it didn't go well, or you made some amount of progress toward changing the company culture? I want to hear that.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. So one of the companies I was at, they opened up a new office that was many time zones away from the centralized time zone. This was a thing where the centralized office was in-person and they created another in-person office in this other time zone, full-time employees. There were just things that people would say that were so small, but it was driving me absolutely nuts. Because I was like, “I know you guys wouldn't say that in front of the people from that other office.” It would be things like, “We don't know what hours they work,” and this was after a whole quarter – I think that office had been open for at least a year and the people who were saying this, “We don't know what hours they work” had been in a meeting actually that I set up that was once a week with those specific developers.
\n\nI talked to my boss about this because I said, “Okay, so usually if I have a question about, ‘Hey, what hours are you working whether it's like, you're in my same time zone and you drop your daughter off every day at 3:00, or whether you're in some very remote time zone from where I am.’” I'm like, “Just ask them.” I'm like, “They're right there.” Like, how is their confusion? Why is it that you can talk to the people that you know in the US, but you can't talk to the people that are outside the US that also happen to be brown people?
\n\nThere were other little – and that's why they sound really small, but I was thinking, I was like, “But literally, we've been working with them.” [chuckles] like, directly with this specific team for now three whole months, how are we saying I spent three whole months in meetings with them and I never asked them this question? Google Calendar also has working hours, which our company utilizes. So I was like, “If you have a question about are their Google Calendar working hours up to date? That's a very simple question.”
\n\nThe fact that it was like, these were questions that were being asked to a broader group where people from this other office were not included and they were like, “I think we need to better understand ways of working,” which I agree. You want to understand what helps people work their best. But these were things where it was just like, this is hard working with them and I was thinking to myself, I was like, “This whole quarter, this team has actually been ahead of schedule and you've been in meetings where if you had questions, you could ask them directly. So why is this a organizational concern now?” It was something where I don't think anybody intentionally meant harm, but I thought to myself, I was like, “I would be mortified if any of this got back to anyone in that office.” Number one.
\n\nNumber two, I was like, “This doesn't have a place in our company, but I am not at a level where from a political standpoint, I can confront some of the people who said those things.” So it's something I had to go through my boss and say, “Here are my concerns. I don't think this was intentional. But the fact that these concerns only popped up with these specific people in the specific office that also happen to be in a country where realistically, they're getting paid less than us.” It's an office where there's only going to be brown people in there—and I don't say Black and brown because it's a place where it's like, there's definitely only brown people in that office.
\n\nBut I had to address it with my boss and my boss had a conversation and some of that stuff reduced, but it's the kind of thing where running into those things and running into people where I'll say a lot of times, it's not even direct, but it's things where I'm like, “They know what those things mean when they hear them and I know what those things mean when I hear them.” I just think people don't consider how does me thinking – even once the thought and gets in your head, you have to stop and think like, “Does this thought even make sense? Why should I be concerned about this? Maybe I should stop myself and be like, ‘What can I do to [chuckles] make sure that my questions don't make people feel excluded in this environment, especially because they work here?’” Contractor, or full-time. These are our full-time people. But even if they're contractors, they work here. We share the same goals. We are on the same team. We are part of the same culture.
\n\nI don't believe in having second class citizen people in a company. I don't believe in second class employees. So I'm like, either the way we ask questions about anything about them, or the way we think about them is not going to be different than how we're going to think about everybody else who's US based and also in a primarily white environment.
\n\nI'll say it did get better after that addressing with my boss. But it is something where it's a lot easier to handle when it's on your team and with people you have a lot more influence over. It gets harder when there are sometimes people above you, or are in other circles where you're like, “Those people did come to my meetings, but they were technically out of my bubble in a way and I had to kind of go a level above me and voice my concerns because if I don't voice those concerns, no one else is going to voice those concerns.”
\n\nAlso, I don't know if those people are necessarily empowered. If they had overheard those things, are they going to feel empowered enough to say the truth? Are they going to be afraid for their jobs if they speak the truth about how that type of thing makes them feel? So oftentimes, there's this thing that happens at companies where people feel, “Oh, well no one said anything so it must not be a problem.”
\n\nARTY: Yeah. The silence is a response. It's a thing that we feel and experience, too. When we say something and the response is silence, when something happens and the response is silence, it's a response. It's not an absence of response; that is a response.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. This sounds like a stark example of a power dynamic. So it's the main office/remote office. It's the culture and ethnicity, both. I'm wondering if the people on the more powerful side of the group, the main office, are they aware of this dynamic? If they're aware, are they interested in doing anything about it? If they're interested, are they committed to doing things?
\n\nI can tell, Anne you are committed to doing things, but of your peers. I wonder where they are in the spectrum of being aware. If they're not aware, it's hard to blame them. If they're completely unaware and no one's offered the ability to become aware like DEI workshops, I don't know, then nothing is a silver bullet.
\n\nANNE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: But there's a whole path that people go on to become such strong allies like you are.
\n\nANNE: I think it can be hard though, because in several companies, I've had trainings about unconscious bias, harassment, things you don't say about team members, things you don't do to exclude team members, how to create an inclusive environment. But then once you get into reality, things that people start thinking, for them maybe are in a gray area, or maybe a specific thing that wasn't covered by that training. There's a lot in which people are like, “I could never harm someone in that way because I'm not racist. I'm not sexist. I'm not homophobic. I'm not ableist.” I think that's one of the problems we have as a society, even bigger outside of the workplace, is this perception that I who took the DEI training, or I took the whatever training could not be racist. I'm married to somebody who is of this background. I have a friend that is this. I have friends who are gay. I can't be this.
\n\nThere's this whole thing where I think that's one of the harder things to learn that even someone like me where I'm like, “Yes, I'm committed to changing this,” and da, da, da, da. I can still harm people, I can still mess up and hurt people, and I don't get to just say, “I had good intentions so you should just be grateful for that,” or “I had good intentions. Therefore, it doesn't count as this.”
\n\nThat's something that I think we need to learn more that even if you have the best intentions, you can still hurt someone and it still counts as hurting someone. [chuckles] Doesn't mean it doesn't count because you had good intentions and sometimes you just have to say, “Oh my gosh, I did say that. That was this. I need to work on this area. I'm sorry.”
\n\nI think our reaction to society is we meet the reality of ourselves in ways and times that we don't expect and it can be a shock and out of fear of like, “Oh my God, if people think I'm racist, am I going to lose my job?” Or da, da, da, da. I'll say, if you're very racist, I do have opinions on that. [chuckles] But if it's like you made one comment, I’m like, “Apologize.” Realize you're like, “Yeah, me being concerned about how these people work maybe didn't make a lot of sense.” “Yeah, my best friend is this, or this, but for some reason, I still thought that thought,” and that's something where it's like we don't really teach people how to confront that, or that it's okay to be like, “Well, crap, I messed up here. Let me apologize.” Instead of putting out five non-apologies before I put out an apology later where nobody really believes and it's not sincere.
\n\nJACOB: Or how can we have an environment where that feedback loop related to microaggressions is just normal and low friction?
\n\nANNE: Yeah.
\n\nJACOB: And then certainly, people will should obviously make amends for it, but it doesn't have to have more drama than necessary.
\n\nARTY: I think those kind of conversations are always uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean we can't have uncomfortable conversations and learn how to be resilient working through challenging conversations. Like I don't think – it's not that it doesn't get easier with practice and things.
\n\nCASEY: For my work with my consulting group, I like to focus on people who are interested in learning and then how they just need practice. They need to know those tools and the techniques and they can practice it. I'm personally not interested in people who are totally unaware and disinterested. That is a harder battle and I want to get better at this middle step first before I would focus up stream, up the funnel. But there are a lot of people who are just oblivious and they would love to learn and have space to practice this and that's its own problem, its own difficult challenge.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. I agree in terms of giving people a place, who actually want to learn and I would say also are doing the work to learn because – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nANNE: And I'm not saying, okay, if somebody is on the receiving end, that they should be that person to have to put up with this, but it sounds like you have a consultancy where you're able to work with those people. People can pay money. So obviously, somebody is interested in being there to actually have that space and learn because some people, they would otherwise learn more, but there's certain things where it's nuanced.
\n\nAlso, I think there's a piece about in practice because there's one thing where you can read something like White Fragility, you can read all the books you want, you can find that article on the web, and still have things that come out of your mouth where you're like, “No, don't say that, don't do that,” or “In this situation, just your specific action even if it's not words was not great,” and teaching people the tools of recognizing for themselves because it's also reading self-help books.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nANNE: But then thinking, because you read the self-help books, that all your inner actions in real life are perfect and fine. That's why we also have therapists because therapists tell you – you're talking about your day and they can help you unpack well, why did you think that? Why was that your reaction? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? Because you can read all the self-help books and think you're doing these things and there could actually be all these layers under it that you're realizing, “Oh, in practice, I think I'm doing this, but here are the actual outcomes of what I thought I was achieving.”
\n\nJACOB: Because there's a feedback loop where you get to, for lack of a better word, experiment with what you learned and find out if you understand it correctly. I don't really like that word experiment—I can't think of a better way to put it. But it's like, I can learn a foreign language all I want by studying in a book, but it really cements when I go and have a conversation with a person that speaks that language.
\n\nCASEY: I like the parallel to therapy. You just inspired a new idea I never had before. What if there were some people who would coach others one-on-one like a therapist, like a session. I do more workshops where I end up having people in breakout groups and they talk to one, or two other coworkers about things. It's hard to make that safe space where they're comfortable and they'll make progress, but I'm pretty proud of that I can do that in a lot of the time, but then there is no expert involved. There's nobody who really knows; it's just peer feedback.
\n\nSo what if there was a coach for one-on-one training on how to be a better ally? I think that would be really powerful. And my question is how do we get companies to pay for it for their employees? That's its own problem because workshops scale better.
\n\nANNE: Yeah, and honestly, I really feel like they should just have that type of person on retainer for especially the leadership. Not saying individuals on teams don't need it because I think that's another thing where it's like I'm not saying, “Oh, reserve some of the most expensive resources for leadership and lock it away.”
\n\nBut also, we're talking about how do we teach people to recognize what they're doing and also, how that impacts the teams that they're responsible for managing and how that impacts the company culture. Because I think that's how we end up seeing a lot of these things keep repeating themselves in company culture again and again and again and again. Even the things that are perfectly legal, but are actually still harmful in some way, shape, or form to different underestimated and underrepresented groups and I think that would have a massive impact.
\n\nJACOB: This is a great idea because I feel like I've wanted to work out questions I've had about work with my therapist and there's so much I have to bring her up to speed on just in terms of she doesn't work in tech, she's a therapist [chuckles] and doesn't understand the company at all because again, she doesn't work there. I feel like that would be so helpful; just someone who understands generally what this company is working on and what my job is, but doesn't have an active day-to-day involvement in what I do and can give hopefully, a less biased perspective. I love it.
\n\nCASEY: I hear that from a lot of people. People want a work therapist.
\n\nANNE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Or whatever you call it.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah.
\n\nANNE: I think they exist a bit. I don't know specifically how you find them, but I will say so, it’s not a therapist and there's different types of career coaches. I have a career coach that I've been working with since I think 2015 and she's not a therapist, first and foremost and also, she is not this type of role that is helping me be less any of the things that potentially anyone could do to harm another group. She's not there to be like, “I heard you mention this. That sounds ableist.” She's not doing that.
\n\nBut one thing that has really helped me in my career is having somebody who actually knows what I do. She is not someone who is in tech. She is a third-party person and she actually knows the different problems I've had in different companies, where the themes are, what has been unique to different companies, and also asking questions to unpack things to help me also understand am I the asshole in this situation, or was something else going on that was completely out of my control?
\n\nThat has given me really good perspective in my career in where am I owning something that's happened versus this is out of your control. Maybe there's some things you could have done better, but also, don't beat yourself up over this thing when your leadership team should have been doing this. She also knows my habit. She also knows that hey, it feels like you're slipping back into this habit at work.
\n\nThere's different types of career coaches. There are different ones where they're like, “I am focused on product management thing, XYZ and this is what's going to get you specifically this promotion because I'm going to have you work on this specific product skill.” This one is, she's more of a generalist.
\n\nI actually started seeing her more for career influence product coaching, where I was much more junior at the time and really struggling to understand where the disconnect was in my career, where my actual project teams were saying things like, “Wow,” “You do such a great job. You're amazing,” da, da, da, da, and have very senior people I worked with that would say, “When are they going to promote you?”
\n\nAnd then when I would speak to my manager and my manager's manager, it felt like I was treated very junior, I didn't really know how to talk to them. So the things that I was updating them on, I thought were very important, which then I then learned oh, it really just made me sound like I don't know how to focus and I was just pouring information at them and they were like, “Oh, she doesn't know what to focus on and she doesn't know this.” I thought I was impressing them. [chuckles] It's one of those things where having somebody with that third-party perspective and also someone where they can help you work on specific things that are, I think more general also is very helpful.
\n\nShe's not a work therapist. She's not helping me unpack how my childhood experiences impacted how I reacted in the work situation. But she is someone who knows a lot of my work history because we've been working together for so long and I'm able to talk to her about when things are going really, really well. She's talked to me when I'm like, “I started looking for a new job because I can't take it here anymore.” So that's been something I really value.
\n\nCASEY: That's so cool. I love hearing it. You have support. Your support doesn't have to exclusively come from your manager and your current job. You hear that, everyone listening? You can have other support. It could be friends, too.
\n\nANNE: Highly recommend support outside of your manager and your current job.
\n\nJACOB: Not easy in a remote workplace, or maybe it is, I don't know, but I would think it
\nwould be harder.
ANNE: Networking is really big and I know people always are like, “Networking”! But to be specific about networking, because there's different types of networking, networking in a way where you are finding the online communities of people who value the same things as you and possibly even going through similar things, but not resorting to toxic ways of dealing with those things has been one of the biggest career hacks in terms of finding people that also understand outside of my career coach. Sometimes I can even ask them very specific questions to being in tech, or very specific questions to being a PM, or being a PM as a Black woman in tech.
\n\nThose type of things have made a big difference for me because there's a lot of things where you start seeing patterns and oh, other people are experiencing this. This is how other people are dealing with it and ways it didn't work out and the ways it did work out. That's something where just sending LinkedIn messages off to people who just seem like very successful. While I know that is a thing, I've really found the things that have made the biggest difference for me is finding these groups, whether they're private Facebook groups, or they're LinkedIn groups, or they’re private Slack groups for women in tech. Really, that is where I've been able to find additional support.
\n\nAlso, there's people where even they're my peers and I'm like, “Whoa, we're now collaborators on something that we both really value a lot, that my day job would never give me a project like this and now I'm getting to collaborate with somebody outside of my day job to work on this thing because I met somebody else who fits in turn of values, what they're interested in.”
\n\nI think that's one of the biggest things of networking is finding the communities first before you find the individuals because in those communities, you're going to start noticing who are the individuals I tend to align with and maybe I shoot them a message, or maybe they need help with interviews and I can do a mock interview and then that starts we reach out to help each other, that sort of thing. Those are all things where I highly recommend and I think are much more effective than just being like, “That person looks like they probably make a lot of money at that company,” that has always been the most helpful for me.
\n\nCASEY: So I'm wondering, how do you find these communities? One trick I love is to tell people you're looking for those communities, they might know. I don't know, why this is so far into a lot of people. You should tell people your goals publicly. Did you do any of that? How did you find yours?
\n\nANNE: Absolutely. Some of it is telling people, “I'm looking for these communities,” and some of it is people I've worked with in the past who have been part of my bubble, understanding those are the communities I would want to be in and saying, “Hey, are you in this Facebook group?” and me being like, “No, I've never heard of it,” and then they just add me.
\n\nThere's one that is for Black women in tech and it has been one of the most valuable online communities I've been in long before the pandemic because somebody just added me because they know my values align and also, being a Black woman in tech and having to experience certain things.
\n\nIn addition to everything else I do, I also run a small group coaching program called Attract Your Dream Job where basically, I teach people how to get companies to come to them, or if you do apply making it so that you have a better likelihood of them actually responding to you instead of applying to a hundred companies, just what I call spray and pray. So how do you avoid that?
\n\nOne of the things I always tell people is actually the thing you just said first step is number one, tell people that if you're looking for a job, don't blast it out on LinkedIn. If you have a current job, you don't want to get fired. But tell your inner network, get their email, send them a DM on LinkedIn something and if you're also looking for those groups because we actually have an assignment that is you actually need to find three groups like this for your job search and telling them reach out to people saying, “Do you know a group for people who are really into art and backend development?” I've made that up, but those things where it's not just like, “Here's just a generalist tech group, tell them what you're looking for.”
\n\nAnd then the other piece I always tell them is go to LinkedIn, go to Facebook, go to even just Twitter. Well, you could start with really LinkedIn and Facebook, you actually can search for such and such group in and then whatever your industry is and that's one way it's actually very easy to find people to connect with, or those communities. And then also on Twitter, starting to browse around, I'm looking at hashtags there's #BlackTechTwitter, which is like, I really love that and there's a lot.
\n\nActually, we did a whole barbecue here in New York in 2019 because of #BlackTechTwitter because I was like, “I have this idea that we're going to have a Black Tech New York cookout,” because I was like I never see other Black people in tech, unless this is a hiring event by this company for DEI stuff and I was like, “I’ve never see an event that you just get to hang out and talk and while we might talk tech, this is really just an opportunity to meet other people in the industry who are like you.” That really was all organized off of a thread on Twitter.
\n\nSo there's lots of places you should go, but you should always let people know what you're looking for, what type of community you're looking for, because people don't know. They don't know.
\n\nThe other thing I always tell people a lot. You'd be surprised how many people who have no idea what industry you're in, or what you do. You think your friends know. You might even think people you used to work with know. But one example I give a lot is one of the jobs I used to work at, I had a coworker who got peer feedback. He was a product manager. He got peer feedback from someone else that his wireframes were terrible and my coworker doesn't make wireframes. [chuckles] We have a whole UX designer on that team that was responsible for wireframes. But the peer feedback was like, “This person's wireframes aren't very good. This person's very nice, but the wireframes are bad.”
\n\nYou realize while this is not necessarily the most common thing, if somebody on your team that worked with you for a whole project can misunderstand what your role was in the project and what you actually produced, people who haven't talked to you in a year, or two can easily misunderstand what you are doing, or if you’ve changed industries. There are a lot of things that people can get confused about. They saw you post something on your Instagram once and now they think that you work there. So there's just a lot of ways in which people actually have no idea how they would even stay hard to help you if you don't tell them.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. People don't know. I got an award for the last company I worked at a year after and I was hesitant to post it because I'm like, “I don't work there. I've been gone a long time. I don't want to confuse everyone.” I did anyway, but I don't work there. Surprise! [chuckles] Yeah, people don't know unless you tell them, unless you talk to them about it and even then, they might not remember. That's normal human behavior, too. Especially in tech. What's a product manager anyway? [laughs] That's the question. I don’t.
\n\nANNE: That is the question and the reality is that while product management as a discipline has been around for a while, there are a lot of companies who did not have product managers, really, or a product manager discipline until the last 5 years. That's just the reality. We like to think, “Oh man, this has been around for a really long time.” It has, but there are a lot of companies where they were like, “We have a project manager and we have a BA,” and there's no one who's a product manager.
\n\nWhile some of those skills overlap, a product manager has also a lot more of this undercovering the why piece that technically isn't a solid responsibility of a project manager and a BA. Those people can do that type of thing, but they're technically not accountable in their career for those things. So if you want to make sure you hire someone who is going to be accountable for that, has a track record, and is much more focused on moving metrics than just, “Hey, the project is done,” you would want that separate discipline.
\n\nBut you have actually certain developers where oh, this discipline is really recent at this company and that developer has been there 10 years and they're like, “I only know the product managers I work with,” and half of them were basically just project managers where the title changed and – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Ah, I hate that.
\n\nANNE: Yeah, which some of those companies do stuff to upskill those people, but there's a lot of people out there who've never worked with a product manager and don't really understand well, what is the difference between that and a product manager?
\n\nI actually had someone at my current job, who actually is my best work friend, who didn't understand the differences between a project manager and a product manager. She thought it was a matter of semantics. She's not someone that I necessarily get to work with frequently so it's not like she's viewing my work and she's like, “It's the same,” but it's something where people even you work with, it's not even guaranteed that they understand what you're supposed to be doing and after you stopped working with them, they probably have no idea what you were [chuckles] supposed to be doing. They forgot. They were like, “Yeah, they did good things,” and like, “That person was a good project manager,” and you’re like, “No.” [chuckles]
\n\nBut it's the kind of thing where you have no idea what people's perception of what you're supposed to be doing at your job, where you could be a frontend developer and somebody saying, “That person was not very good at updating things from the database,” and they're like, “Yeah, because they're a frontend developer.” There's a lot of stuff where people don't necessarily know, or understand based on the industry and company they're coming from.
\n\nJACOB: Where do you think those misperceptions come from? You touched on a little bit, but why? Is it just that our brains are so full that we see one tweet from somebody and we just attach that to that person because we don't have enough energy to learn more, or?
\n\nANNE: I think there's some of that. I think there's also, some of it is how the human brain works and it tries to oversimplify things. I also think it also comes from there is often a fear of asking too many questions. Especially if you're not in an environment that fosters a culture of trust and safety and there can be a fear of asking, “I forgot. Can you please just explain to me what it is your responsibilities are and what it is you do?”
\n\nIt also gets really tricky when, because every organization does this to at least a few people, somebody starts filling gaps for things that they see missing in the organization. That's not their job, but they start doing it and then that person becomes auto-enrolled and being the person responsible for that thing. They might be, “Oh, that person's a frontend.” Their title might be frontend developer, or frontend engineer, but let's say that person started doing wireframes because they couldn't get enough of a UX designer’s time. So they started doing that and started getting really good at. The company started saying like, “Okay, well that person's on the project so that they could handle wireframes,” and then it becomes a thing where that person does talk about UX things. But the perception is that person's not a developer, that person's a UX person and people not actually ask them questions.
\n\nSometimes organizations not doing the right thing, sometimes it's because organizations can't afford to hire somebody, especially when you're talking about startups. Especially once you get into bigger organizations, sometimes they choose not to hire somebody else. Somebody starts trying to fill the gaps because they are the type of person where they cannot stand to see, “Okay. So we're just going to sit here and be blocked, or be yelled at, or something because nobody wanted to even just do a simple mockup in PowerPoint?”
\n\nThose are things where organizations also allowing for ill-defined roles and letting people be a catchall also creates that problem where people perceive you as one thing and in reality, well technically, this is your role and now people are saying, “Well, that person is not involved, but when I worked with them, they were doing wireframes.”
\n\nIt’s really a little bit organizational problem, also how our brains work, and also just the nature of people actually [chuckles] trying to be proactive and that sort of thing. Also, we said that lack of safety for people to just clarify what it is people do. Especially if you're working with a lot of different teams within your organization constantly, you might be dealing with a lot of people where you're like, “I know this person is on that team and that they're responsible for getting this from me, but I actually have no idea what the context of their role is outside of my relationship with them.”
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I end up making a spreadsheet where I put it all the responsibilities and rows and we see which ones are filled, or not and who's doing all of the stuff in the middle. That's the best visualization I've seen is a spreadsheet for it. I wish there were more, or easier ways that more people could do that because it's really powerful. Once you see it, it's glaringly obvious it's happening.
\n\nANNE: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think one of the dangers, though is people assuming, “Oh, well, because we're just adding copy to this design, that doesn't count as design work,” or we're assuming the PM, or the frontend person can handle that design work. But when we look at all of this persons over allocated, are they really going to do the best job to make sure that yes, this is the right place for the copy, this is how it works? Because even if we're talking like, “Oh, we just need to add one line of copy.” Okay. Cognitively, what does that do to the customer? Is somebody looking at the page holistically and thinking about it? And if you have somebody else, even if it's a small ask, who has a bazillion other things on their plate covering it, we can say, “Yeah, this is under this person.” But I think also, leadership needs to think about, “Okay, how have we resourced that person? Is that person really going to even be able to do that small task that we perceived because we don't need to fill in that design part of the sheet because it's something so small?” But I think that also comes from people not understanding the full value that some of these roles really provide outside of they produce a deliverable.
\n\nThere's a lot of stuff where I'm like, “You really need somebody’s time for them to even consult on your team and not even bringing in an outside consultant, just somebody who maybe isn't allocated to your team.” So you would just come in and consult and be like, “Yeah, that's great,” or “Wow! You added that line. Your page was already – now it’s the cognitive load on that person is going to be this.” They're not going to read any of this and you're going to have a bunch of customers calling you, complaining. When you have somebody who basically has to do a drive by, yes, or no, that looks okay. You're not going to get the same service.
\n\nJACOB: On the other end of that, I'm a backend engineer and I think in a lot of places, I don't think in my company, but I think in a lot of companies, there's been an overcompensation of saying, “We have to really protect engineer's time. We have to really protect their focus. We shouldn't have any too many meetings.” I've never liked that, the typical engineer that they get a ticket and there's something that's not completely clear about what they're supposed to do and they just throw it back to the PM immediately.
\n\nThat sort of culture has always just drove me nuts where it's like, “Sure, maybe we traditionally think of the PM's job maybe convene people, perform glue work.” If it's just this small, or medium question, why don't I do that?” Why don't I open a conversation and include my PM, but also talk to the other people that we need to get a question answered from so then I can unblock myself? I think there are some roles that necessarily have to protect “this is what I do.” I think there's other roles that are too protective of I only do this and could maybe stand to go outside their boundaries a little bit.
\n\nANNE: I agree.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo much and I am very much a supporter of everybody owns the product. Yes, you have a product manager. Do they have certain expectations with their role about how they manage that ownership? Yes. Does that mean that your developers are just there to do a bunch of tickets and never provide product type of feedback? No. I really think you get better results, better products when everybody is able to have ownership over it. I think it sometimes gets into this Steve Jobs syndrome where you're like, “I am the genius of the team. I was hired to be the Steve Jobs of the team and I just tell everybody what to do.” Oftentimes, that results in a lot of crap and also it creates a lot of inefficiencies; the PM becomes the bottleneck, other things.
\n\nIf you're really empowering your team and you're saying, “I led a testing and experimentation team for over a year and every Friday, we would go through the data.” My team would go through the data of all the experiments together because I'm like, ‘What is the point of them doing all this work to code up this experiment and then they just find out did it win, or lose?” They don't actually learn anything about what about the customer's behavior changed? Why do we think it changed? What problems do we think were in this? What do we iterate on this? And it really helps them not only have more ownership over the work that they did, it helped them be able to say, “Actually, I have this idea to iterate on this. I am not the person that wants to do everyone's job. I cannot come up with all the ideas in the universe.”
\n\nPeople come up with things where I'm like, “Wow, I really didn't think about we could iterate it on this way because of this information.” I really think that's also a big responsibility of PMs and other collaborative roles is to empower people to actually also have product ownership and I think there were days where the developer just does work and that's it, and don't ask questions you don't understand like what's going on.
\n\nBut one of the jobs I joined years and years ago, a relationship that was between the development team and the design team was incredibly toxic, which actually coincidentally enough was also a thing where it was like a team based in New York with a team that was based outside the US. They would basically do a bunch of designs and send over a big Adobe file, I think an email with no layers, or anything in it to this development team and say, “Cool. Let us know if you have questions,” and the development team would work on it and then say, “Hey, we finished building it.” And then design would say, “Holy crap, this is terrible.” Like, “What is this?”
\n\nWhen I first joined, I was like – they really don't get along, first and foremost and number two, why are these things happening? I started talking to different members of each team to understand what's going on here and a lot of it was, there was literally no process for collaboration. It was no one talked to the developers during the requirements gathering, or during the design phase. So designers would just design whatever, without anybody there to give feedback to like, “If you do this, it's actually going to make us, have to do this call and it's going to add this many seconds onto the page and you're probably going to have a lot of people leave.” There was none of that kind of feedback loop.
\n\nThe assumption was whatever we design can be done and the developers had feedback where they said, “We have tried to ask questions in the past upfront when somebody finally hands this off.” Oftentimes, it feels like people are speeding through trying to answer the questions, that people don't understand the question, or don't think it's not obvious what this is and they'll ask questions and they're like, “We sometimes get answers back that don't make sense to us and when we try to ask more clarifying questions, there's annoyance, dismissal.” So they basically said it is actually faster for us to just not ask any questions, build what we think needs to be built, and then just get all the feedback at the end than it is to try to ask questions throughout.
\n\nThe fascinating thing about this organization, it wasn't the developers and it wasn't the designers, but it was like, leadership was definitely scared of Agile for some reason. I suggested maybe we should use some Agile methodologies and I got a massive amount of pushback [chuckles] that said, “We don't do Agile here.” I was like, “Okay,” and I instead decided to make some suggestions.
\n\nI was like, “Would people be okay if maybe three times a week, we just had a 15-minute meeting where we talk about what's going on in design and development and anybody else who needs to be involved can just join for 15 minutes.” And people said, “Well, yeah. That sounds like it's okay. No problem,” and I was like, “Okay, cool,” and I was like, “And maybe we could plan out the work that we intend to do in two-week increments and we could have a meeting towards the beginning of that two-week thing where we plan out together what's going to happen,” and people were like, “That sounds good. I like that. That sounds nice.” I was like, “As needed, at the end of these two-week things, we could talk about what went well, what didn't go well,” and people said, “Yeah, that sounds fine. Cool. We'll do that.”
\n\nThe first time I implemented this on a project at that company, the designer at the end came to me and said, “This is the first time I've been able to use anything we built in my portfolio” because what actually got built was actually what the designers intended.
\n\nThe thing is that there were things that the client said, “I want to change this in design,” and then the developers were like, “Actually, here's a problem and we could do this, but this is what's going to happen,” and the designer was like, “My special animation is not going to work. That was the whole point.” Like, “Why can't we do this? It should be super simple,” and they were like, “Well, you have to use this weird, special technology for this specific type of animation you want to do,” but having that conversation in the moment.
\n\nAnd I think they also needed to facilitate and maybe understood tech a little bit more than in that specific design team—there's some design teams that are much more tech savvy. Help them understand you can have something that looks like animation that doesn't use any special technologies other than what we would use for a standard website here and that you're not going to have to worry about knowledge transfer if somebody leaves, you're not going to have to worry about does anybody else other than this one developer know how any of this works, and also, it's going to be really easy to update every time there's a content change, which we know happens for this client pretty much every three to four months.
\n\nAnd that was something where it was like the designer was like, “I'm sad that some of the beautiful sparkles and things around the soap and stuff aren't going to be as flowing as I had anticipated,” but she was a lot happier than had the development team just decided well, we can't do that so now it's a static image. We basically implemented something where it ended up being this carousel and we're just like, “Just give us these images so that when they go through the carousel, it looks like this animation is happening.” Pretty much like when you could draw things in a flipbook and make it look like something's moving. Basically, the website version of that, which is much easier to maintain, much easier to update the content. It was just really fascinating because there was such this animosity and almost hate between the design and the development teams, but it was also like your bridges of communication are completely broken and nobody wants to change.
\n\nOne team is like, “It's all this team's fault.” Other team is like, “It's all this other team's fault.” But also from a company level, they also previously didn't actually have someone in that role to help facilitate either and they were also definitely scared of trying a different process. They were scared of Agile when in reality, they actually had no problem with Agile. I think they just were scared that I don't know what was going to change their whole company process and I was like, “Just because somebody uses it one bubble isn't going to bring the whole company down,” and in fact, it worked out really well.
\n\nCASEY: I love that story. Yeah, small steps forward. You can make this incremental change to your team you're on. Anyone can do this on any level. You just might have to disguise it and do it very small. One step at a time.
\n\nANNE: Sneaky Agile. Secret Agile.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, secret Agile
\n\nANNE: I’m going to brand it. I guess, I can't brand it because Agile is already trademarked. [chuckles] There'll be like an off-brand secret Agile.
\n\nCASEY: Early in my career as a frontend developer, I suggested we could do a design this way in one day, or this way that you want in one month and after I talked to everyone involved, they agreed two developers times four weeks times 40 hours was worth it for this. But I absolutely don't think it was. I think the designer didn't have 30 minutes to talk to us. That's a different cause here. But that happens, too. 30 minutes of a designer's time could have saved. Imagine the amount of money that was. Ooh. [chuckles]
\n\nANNE: Yeah, and I think it goes back to what we were saying where it's like allowing everyone to have product ownership and if you're gatekeeping like, “Oh, we can't afford to have 30 minutes of that person's time,” or “We don't want the developer thinking about those things.” It actually takes longer and it actually results in less good product.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I visualized turbulence like if there's stuff going smoothly, it's just going. Otherwise, it's looping around, bubbling, and oh, all that wasted energy.
\n\nJACOB: I'm not a manager, but I've always felt like it would be better to, like you said, empower people to do what they need to get things done, even if they don't do so in the most efficient way, because then they at least know that they're empowered to do it. People are going to figure out and iterate on those fluid ways of navigating the organization to get what they need and you have to experiment to do that.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. I think that's really a part of a culture of learning. People say they want a culture of learning and they're like, “Oh, here's a stipend. Go take this class.” But if you don't get a chance to learn it in your organization and try to practice it, it's all theoretical. Not saying theory isn't good, but it's the difference between, I don't know, I'll just say, I studied engineering in college. It's the difference between when you're studying engineering versus when you actually get out into the real world and work in a real environment. It's very different. You learn things, but there's things you have to adjust based on what is reality. Everything in theory tends to work, but that's in theory. Once you hit the real world, there are certain things where you have to adjust based on the situation and the context.
\n\nCASEY: Totally. They apply it. It’s like theoretical versus applied and you need to apply it. Hands-on workshops! But even better than that, having people on the team able to help support and coach each other.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. I love that. I think that's something that doesn't happen enough is connecting people where it's like you want so-and-so to get stronger at this, this other person's really good at that, and that person needs to get better than this. Like, those are things where I don't think that happens enough.
\n\nI actually had a thing that worked today where somebody on our data team was like, “I was told to learn more things about product management” because they're like, “That's where a lot of this –” not that there's trying to become a product manager, but they're like, “It's going to help.” They're like, “It's supposed to help my career long-term to really be able to think about some of this data that I'm using, manipulate” I don’t want to say manipulating, but working with and thinking about it in a, I would say more so like customer way. I'll say more customer way because product can mean a lot of things.
\n\nMy thing is unlike I'm a product manager, I've taken data science classes, I know just enough SQL to be, I want to say dangerous, but whatever the level below dangerous is and that's the thing is that there's things where I'm like, “Do I do those things day-to-day?” No, I don't. I look at some Google Analytics reports, I look at Tableau, I use a number of things, but talking to someone who actually knows how this works and does the work in this organization is going to help. And we were like, “Yeah. So we should set up time to regularly exchange knowledge, basically do a brain exchange so that I can learn more about this type of thing, data and you can learn more about product and we both benefit.”
\n\nARTY: Maybe we need to change how we frame those conversations as to what we're here to do when we have these interactions generally. Because a lot of the times when things are framed in terms of oh, well, it's going to be a waste of their time. We don't want to infringe on their thoughts when they're supposed to be focused on these other things that framing that value proposition for everyone with respect to over the long-term, we're here to learn together and learn from one another. Even if during that time, what we get is a picture in her head of what this other person's context is like, such that over our careers down the road, we'll have a better picture in her head of what these other people's contexts are like. That has long-term value that far exceeds the cost of 15 minutes.
\n\nBut if we don't frame things that way and we frame it as this disruptive activity that only has this short-term potential gain like we were talking about at the beginning of how we frame these relationships that we have, how we frame these conversations, those few minutes that are involved in that initial relationship set up create this snowball of effects over the long-term.
\n\nIf we make an effort to think about how we want each of those relationships to go, if we think about what the value proposition is from a long-term perspective, and we make that the point, we're on the same team, I think that's the stuff that makes all the difference.
\n\nCASEY: I like this framing for you and the person you're talking to. Hopefully, the framing is there on your team. Hopefully, it's in the whole org. Hopefully, all the leaders have it. But if the framing doesn't sound palatable on some level, I see that happen a lot. It's like, we know this is good long-term, we know you and I, even our team, maybe the bubble, it breaks down somewhere. A lot of places, most places, I think.
\n\nANNE: Yeah. I think it can break down for a number of reasons. One is again, trust and safety. It's really interesting, I saw someone on Twitter talking about this specifically for product managers but obviously, it can exist outside of that, where they said, “Once people get to a certain level in their product management career, they notice that there's a lot less learning, even product people do between each other in an organization.” I think some of it is certain environments are hyper competitive and people don't want to seem like, “Oh, they don't know that,” or “They didn't think of that.”
\n\nAgain, I think some of it goes to this idea that—and not saying everybody believes this—but the product manager is supposed to be this genius like Steve Jobs and you're supposed to have all the knowledge and all the ideas and not everyone thinks that. But I think some organizations may people feel like scared of having that kind of exchange with somebody else in my discipline.
\n\nAnd then I think some of it also can be companies where they stretch people really thin. They're like, “I know this is my career. I have my little bubble, but I have no energy, or interest in going outside my bubble for that kind of thing.” It's interesting because I think a lot of these things – some of it is individuals, but I also think a lot of these things are different causes from a culture standpoint that leadership could shift.
\n\nBecause at the end of the day, if you're exhausted, do you want to add one more meeting to your calendar? Do you want to do another thing if you feel like you're already doing a lot right now and you're like, “Oh, I should do this, but I'm tired”? Also, there's that again, sometimes it's imposter syndrome, or other things that make people feel like in this company, I don't feel safe going to somebody else and being like, “I don't actually know this. Can we talk more about it?”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. A lot of companies, there's no headroom. There's negative headroom. You're already over overbooked in every way. Asking anything of that in that environment is a lot.
\n\nANNE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I love thinking on the organizational level. Glad you two don't mind going there. Jacob dropped off. It's really fun for me.
\n\nI'm just looking at the time here. So with reflections, we usually go in a circle. It's usually the panelists first and then we have guests give your own reflections. It can be a thing that was interesting, or memorable, something that will stick with you after the episode.
\n\nARTY: So the thing that stands out for me, I think about where we started this conversation with superpowers, empathy, and collaboration. When you were talking about growing up and being an outsider where things were really challenging, but at the same time, you developed this ability to understand what it was like to be on that other side of the wall. Such that now you're significantly more aware of what's going on in other people's heads and how they're perceiving these relationships that are going on. It's like being able to have eyes of what it feels like to be on the other side of that wall.
\n\nWe talked about contrast and these contrasting experiences from that to where in your home environment, you were loved and accepted as you are, and then in your journey and growth, you mentioned this desire for congruence to be able to be yourself in these different environments and why that was hard at the same time.
\n\nAs you were growing in that way, that congruence became your self-actualization of being able to find this strength in yourself, this belief and trusting in your own voice so that you could stand up when someone needed to stand up. So that you could go against the grain and be solid within yourself. To be able to do things and step into these uncomfortable situations. To create change. To create culture. To shape leadership. To shape these handfuls of super important, critical conversations that frame the entire relationship moving forward from contrast to congruence and just seeing you blossom in that, seeing what you've been able to do, what you've been able to bring to the table as a human being, as part of the team was really amazing.
\n\nYour journey of how you got there just says so much about who you are and I hope listeners will be inspired of just really seeing how important it is to be able to trust yourself in those ways, to be able to find that strength and solidity within yourself so you can be someone that helps to contribute to moving things in a positive direction.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, it's beautiful.
\n\nSo my reflection is a little on the coaching and DEI side. I said it earlier, too. I was very excited about this idea. I used to think DEI was not something I could help with because I'm a white man. What am I going to say to anything?
\n\nBut I do have the clear lens that gives me some kind of minority perspective that’s really valuable and white people, especially conservative white men, are more likely to listen to me, it's my power. So I'd like to wield that and do things like skills training, workshops, and coaching including for diversity, equity, and inclusion. But I never thought about specifically coaching people on DEI, making that content. I don't know why, because I don't know. All the formats of everything else that I do, but it was just like a light bulb went off in my head when you said it's like therapy, it could be talking through problems.
\n\nSo I want to think about that more. Maybe we can talk another time about that. What would it look like? What would make it look successful? What would be helpful? Who could ever pay for it? Even companies, I hope. How do we really help people change and grow, the people who are motivated to? That's what I'll be thinking about after this episode.
\n\nANNE: Yeah, I think that would be wonderful. I think mine is more of like a final message, really. It's a reflection, but it's more of, I think reflections of how am I feeling than necessarily a specific topic.
\n\nIt is related, but it's been a wild nearly 2 years in this pandemic and I really think the future of where we need to go as a society, which also being in a tech driven society, is very important for people in technology to consider is how do you bring what you love to the table? I'm not asking you to be exploited by your company—and sorry, this is going to be very hippy-sounding—but if more of us showed up with love in terms of how we build our products.
\n\nNot just like, “Oh, I really love just building the product,” but also, love for the people who we're building it for and the people who will be impacted, but maybe we're not building it for. Showing up with love in terms of how we're treating ourselves that day and how we can empower others to be their best selves in our bubble, or when we have influence beyond our bubble, and really reflecting how you can show up in some of these environments where you can show up with more love and create safe and trusting environments. Because I truly believe just because it's digital doesn't mean that what you put in it doesn't impact the outcome.
\n\nIf you put trash inside of a sausage, it's going to be trash in a sausage casing. If you put all your negative energy [chuckles] and disdain for what you're doing, or your team, or you just sort of like, “I don't care.” There's going to be things where obviously, you're going to work jobs just for a paycheck, but figuring out in which ways can you show up with love in that environment and whatever that means to you. That's my final thought for the day.
\n\nCASEY: I love it! Thank you so much, Anne for joining us here.
\n\nANNE: Yeah, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you and talk to you about these things. You said earlier in our conversation, “It's great hearing these things from somebody else's mouth reflected back,” and that's how I really feel about this where I'm very passionate about these topics and being able to talk to other people and hear them value that as well means so much.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. You're not alone. You're not crazy. You're not having ridiculous thoughts. You see somethings very clearly and you could enunciate them, articulate them, share them. I’m so glad we got to do that together today. All of us!
\n\nANNE: Yes, yes. I’m incredibly grateful for this. It is such a pleasure.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you again.
Special Guest: Anne Griffin.
Sponsored By:
01:17 - Danielle’s Superpower: Empathy & Communication
\n\n01:56 - Going From the Hospitality Industry => Tech
\n\n\n\n04:58 - Education Technology (EdTech)
\n\n07:18 - Anthropology + Tech / Working With People
\n\n10:25 - Making Education Fun + Inclusive
\n\n16:18 - Transitioning Into Tech
\n\n27:57 - Resources
\n\n32:39 - @CodeSchoolQA / twitch.tv/thejonanshow
\n\n34:08 - The Streaming Revolution
\n\n39:45 - Making Tech Safe, Secure, and Protected
\n\n\n\n44:03 - Advice For New Devs: Work on Technical Things Sooner
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: The secret in tech is that nobody knows what they’re doing!
\n\nDanielle: Ask questions and lean into community. Tech needs you.
\n\nArty: Don’t be afraid to reach out to community members for help.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Hey, everyone! It's Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest today, Danielle Thompson.
\n\nDanielle is a newly minted software engineer working in the education technology sphere of the nonprofit world, after making a major career change from working in hospitality and events for many years. As a code school graduate herself, she loves to help demystify tech for others with non-traditional backgrounds and works to open doors into tech with her friends at Code School Q&A, weekly on Wednesday nights at around 7:00 PM Pacific at twitch.tv/thejonanshow.
\n\nOutside of work, she can typically be found with a nose buried in a book, hanging out with her doggo, and making delicious craft beverages.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Danielle!
\n\nDANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me, Mandy and Arty!
\n\nMANDY: Awesome. It's great for you to be here. So before we get into the meat of our conversation, we always ask our guests the standard question of what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nDANIELLE: Totally. I think that my superpower is a combination of empathy and communication. I think I came by both pretty naturally—popped right out of my mom having both, I'm assuming. But both have definitely been amplified over the years by all sorts of experiences and hardships and just keep working to make them even more of a superpower.
\n\nMANDY: That's really great.
\n\nSo I want to know about before we dive into your experiences as a new developer, I wanted to know about how you came into technology from your career change in hospitality, because I did the same thing.
\n\nI was a waitress when my daughter was born 10 years ago and I was working for about a year before I was able to walk out. It was Mother’s Day, my boss was being a complete jerk to me, and I was making enough money at that point that I just said, “You know what? I don't need this. I quit,” and I started my career in tech full-time. So I'm curious about your journey as well.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah. Obviously, COVID has happened in the last couple of years and that was one of the major factors in me getting to this point of leaving hospitality and getting into tech. But I had already kind of been thinking about what comes next. I've been a manager for a few years and was trying to figure out how else I could grow and what new things I can learn and challenge myself with. And outside of ownership, which is a major headache, there wasn't really much that I could push further into, within hospitality.
\n\nSo when COVID happened and I lost my job because I was working as an events and bar manager for a local catering company, it was pretty obvious that things were not going to be coming back for the hospitality industry anytime soon and I needed to figure something else out then. And so, I started looking into different returning to education opportunities because I actually have an anthropology degree, of all helpful things that I could have gotten a degree in.
\n\nBut I found a code school in Portland, Oregon and jumped on that within a few months of COVID hitting to the full-time track and connected with a number of my cohort mates that we started doing the Code School Q&A on Twitch with the director of developer relations at New Relic and have been doing that for almost a year now and have officially made it in the industry as a software developer, too in the last few months. So you can do it, you can get into tech. [laughs]
\n\nIt's pretty funny, too because the type of job that I ended up getting is in education and technology sphere and I actually had a job in ed tech about a decade ago when I was still in college and had a remote job working with some family friends that got me hooked up with their company. And here I am doing something a little bit more in-depth technically than I was doing a decade ago, but it's funny how things come full circle.
\n\nARTY: Well, education in particular is something that also really needs some reinvention and innovation and with all the disruption, where do you see that area going? Just curious.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I feel that a lot of the changes that we've seen in COVID with remote work being such a prominent thing now and people wanting more balanced, more time with their family, more time with their critters, more time just not being miserable and commutes and stuff. I think that that's going to have a really long-term effect on how education happens and trying to make education more quality as well.
\n\nI think it's really rad what the company I do works for. Our whole mission is to work to make education in America more equitable. So we do that by working very hard to work with experts in the curriculum sphere that ensure that our curriculum materials are as inclusive and culturally relevant as possible, that they are representative of a large and diverse group of people, and they even do a ton of anti-racism work as well and work to embed that within our internal and external culture, as well as the products that we create.
\n\nSo I hope that our company will continue to grow and make changes in the education world in America in general, because I think what we're doing is really, really, really important.
\n\nARTY: Definitely important and with all the change and stuff happening, I'm expecting some new and cool and exciting things that do make things better. One of the upsides of lots of disruption is it's an opportunity for us to sit back and rethink how things could be.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: And one of the benefits of not being entrenched in the existing fields of the way things have been is it's also an opportunity to look at all the stuff we're doing with a fresh set of eyes from outside of that existing world and bring some new fresh insights to tech. Maybe my anthropology degree will come in handy in some different sorts of ways. I imagine some of those skills that you learned in that have some applicability in tech as well. Have you found your degree helpful in other ways?
\n\nDANIELLE: It's funny. I think I ended up using my anthropology degree as a bartender far more than I ever would have as an actual anthropologist. That whole study of humans thing is something that is directly translatable to working with people no matter what field you're in. I feel that both my anthropology degree and my many years of hospitality experience have all led to a specific skillset that is very different from a lot of people that come into tech with more traditional backgrounds especially folks that go to college and get computer science degrees, and then they go to the tech industry and that's all they've ever known.
\n\nI've known so many other experiences outside of that and my ability to think about what other people need and want, to be able to respond to that, and embed that in all of the work that I do as an engineer to really be thinking about the user and the people that are interacting with whatever I'm building and even just thinking about working on a team and how I have so many communication skills built up from what I've been doing for work in hospitality for many years. I think that it definitely gives me a very specific and unique way of moving through the world and way of being an engineer as well.
\n\nThat anthropologist hat definitely comes into play sometimes thinking about like, “Oh, like how do all of these dots connect?” and like, “How does this change over time and how do you see people like doing things differently now?” It's a definitely a fun lens to carry with me.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Having been done hospitality, I'm just shaking my head because –
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI know I've brought so many skills from being in that world for 10, 15 years at one point.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Just the way you talk to people and interact with teams and anticipate what other people need before they even know what they need, that's definitely a skill.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. I think that whole anticipating needs thing, too, it's like it can be both an internal and external benefit where you can think both about who you're building products for and also who you're building products with, and how best to communicate within teams, especially having management experience.
\n\nThat is definitely at the forefront of my brain a lot of the time, but then also thinking about like, “How can I make the best experience for somebody else that's actually going to be using this? How can I make this easy and intuitive and fun?” Especially within education, have to make sure that things are fun and interesting targeting kids that are K-12; it has to be meaningful, impactful, interesting, and engaging.
\n\nMANDY: So how do you do that? What are some ways that you and your company make education fun for young kids?
\n\nDANIELLE: I think I'm still figuring that out. We have many curriculum products that I'm still just touching for the first time, or haven't even looked at it yet and so, there's lots of fun, new things to discover.
\n\nBut I think the types of people that we bring on to work at my company, they're all experts in their field and renowned for the work that they do and so, I think that the quality of people that we bring into work with us and the kind of commitment that they have to work towards making education better and more inclusive, that is incredibly important. And how they also do an immense amount of work to make not just inclusivity a part of the major formula, but also that they work to make things culturally relevant. So like, thinking about how to tell stories to kids that actually means something to them today.
\n\nI don't know, a weird example is thinking about some outdated curriculum that's talking about using a landline for a phone, or something. Kids are like, ‘What's that?” Actually integrating modern things like cell phones and things like that into the curriculum where kids actually touch that and use that every single day so it means something to them. Whereas, outdated curriculum that is just some story to them. It doesn't have tangible meaning. Being able to bring that into materials is really important to keeping things engaging and also, relevant and fun.
\n\nMANDY: So the time when little Tommy was walking to the Xerox machine.
\n\nDANIELLE: [chuckles] Yes, yes.
\n\nMANDY: Somebody brought up a Xerox machine the other day.
\n\nDANIELLE: Oh wow.
\n\nMANDY: My goodness.
\n\nDANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. But I think it's just a constant looking at how we do things, and making improvements and making real connection with the people that are actually using our products to use. That both means working with teachers and getting a better understanding of what is helpful to them, what makes things easier for them, what helps them bring better quality curriculum to their classrooms?
\n\nBut then I think it's also connecting more directly with those kids that are engaging with our curriculum, too and figuring out what works and doesn't work for as many parties as possible. I think that's the anthropologist hat coming on again like, how can we bring as many people to the table as possible on the expert side, on the academic side, on the teacher side, on the student side? And even working to bring families to the table, too and looking at how families interact and not just parents, because it's really important to know that kids don't have just parents that are taking care of them—sometimes it's grandparents, sometimes it’s foster families. And really thinking about a wider range of who is around these kids, and how to get them onboard and make things easy for them to interact.
\n\nARTY: It seems like getting into tech and these new tech skills that you've learned are also relevant in figuring out how to teach kids tech because we've got this new generation of kids coming into the world and learning how to code becomes more like learning how to read and write is fundamental skills move forward in the future. Are there ways that some of the things that you've learned through your own tech experiences you can see application for in education?
\n\nDANIELLE: Absolutely. From what I've been seeing, I feel like there are a lot more resources out there for teaching kids how to code and teaching them more things about technology. I think that's amazing and should totally keep happening. I think having been a bit more focused on adults in my own outreach for helping people find their ways into tech I might be a bit more acquainted with reaching out to those folks. But I'm sure that that intersection of being in education for K-12 students and this passion that I have of helping to find their way into tech, or build more technical skills because they are skills that are so transferable in many industries. I'm in education, but I have a technical job.
\n\nSo there's lots of ways that those technical skills can be incredibly valuable and frankly, life-changing. The amount of opportunity and even just financial stability that can be found within tech is one of the main reasons that brought me to this industry and has really been a life-changing opportunity. It has opened so many doors already and I'm just like three months into my first developer job.
\n\nEven before I was ever actually officially an engineer, I was able to find community and able to find an outlet for helping others and outreach to immediately turn around and hold a handout to try to help others make their way into tech as well. I hope to continue doing that work in more meaningful and impactful ways over time, and have wider and wider reach as well.
\n\nARTY: You had mentioned earlier about some of the difficulties of getting into tech and some of the challenges with finding resources and things that you were specifically missing when you actually showed up on the job. I'm curious, what was your experience like going through coding bootcamp and what were some of the gaps that you experienced that once you got on the job, you were like, “Oh, I didn't learn that.”
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. Coding bootcamp was an incredibly grueling experience for me personally. I was on a full-time track six-month program and [chuckles] not having much technical experience whatsoever outside of editing my Myspace profile back when that was a thing and having [laughs] about a decade ago doing some basic HTML, CSS editing and maintenance for the company that I worked for an ed tech originally. That was what I was working with when I started coding bootcamp. So it was a real hard learning curve and a very fast-paced program for me to just dive into headfirst.
\n\nMy poor partner was like, “I basically didn't see you for six months. You were just a basement dweller at your computer constantly.” I would literally get out of bed, roll myself downstairs, get to my computer with a cup of tea in hand, and I would stay there until easily 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 every night just trying to keep my head above water.
\n\nBut a few months in, things started to click and I wasn't fighting with all of these computer puzzles [chuckles] trying to do this. Like, I always feel like learning coding languages is a combination of algebra and a foreign language. So at a certain point, my brain just started getting into that better and things started making sense. That was a very exciting moment where I got much less miserable [chuckles] in my code school experience and in the pace at which I had to move to keep my grades up and everything.
\n\nBut the gap in between finishing code school and actually getting that first job is also another often-grueling process. There's so many jobs open in the tech industry, but basically, it's mid-level and above. It's like, I think two-thirds of the industry positions that are available are for mid to senior roles versus one-third of roles that are for junior associates. That is a big struggle, especially if you're not able to lean into community and building real connections, just sending applications out to the ether and never even hearing a peep back from companies. I think that whole experience, it's really hard for yourself esteem, especially having put in many months around the clock of work towards this new career that you've been told that you can get, that you can achieve. It's almost as much as a process getting that first developer job as it is to actually build those tech skills.
\n\nI think one thing that is so important to stress in that in-between time is to lean into community, to connect with as many people as you can that are already in tech, even if they don't exactly have a developer job. Like, talk to anybody that will let you talk to them—talk to people in QA, talk to developers, talk to managers, talk to project managers. That was one of the things that I felt I needed to do early on in my coding experience to really have a better understanding of what was even an option for me of getting into tech and what could all these different jobs look like, and then making that transition to actually getting the first job. Yay, hooray for first jobs and being employed again.
\n\nBut I think one of the things that has been most striking in that change for me is going from this incredibly grueling pace. 8:00 in the morning, or so until 10:00 plus at night, non-stop coding for the most part, and then going to a 9:00 to 5:00 job where I can also make my own hours and I can take appointments as I need to. Like, I can go and get a haircut if that's something on my schedule and it's cool. As long as I'm getting my work done and showing up and contributing to my team, things are fine.
\n\nSo that transition of like, “Wait, I don't have to be at my computer a 1,000% of the time?” [laughs] and the pace at which you learn things, too is just much slower because you can have balance. That transition of feeling like you're not doing enough because you're so used to this hefty schedule, that's been a major transition for me.
\n\nI think also coming from hospitality, too where you have to be there in person and oftentimes, somebody is going to call out sick at least every other week, or so. So you might be working like a shift and a half, or a double. There isn't a lot of balance in the service industry, especially now with COVID adding so many extra layers of complication to how that job works. Being able to just be like, “I need to go make a doctor's appointment,” and can just do that. It's like, “Okay, cool. Just put it on the calendar. You don't really need to tell me. As long as it's on the calendar, that's great.” [laughs] That transition has also been very strange.
\n\nAnd I think maybe just the trauma of [chuckles] working in hospitality and not being able to just be a human sometimes and now all of a sudden, I'm like, “Oh, I'm a human and that's allowed? Okay.” Still have to check in with my boss frequently about like, “You sure it's okay? You sure it's okay that I'm a human, right? Yeah.” [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: [chuckles] That was one of the things that I really loved coming into tech was the scheduling, open schedule, making my own hours.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: And you're right, it was very strange at first. When I was waitressing, it was just always a go, go, go kind of thing and you had to be there, you had to be on, and if you didn't have tables, if you had time to lean, you had time to clean.
\n\nDANIELLE: [chuckles] Yeah. Always be closing. You know, ABCs. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: So yeah, sometimes I still find myself on a random Thursday. I'll have my work done and I'll just be sitting here and I'm like, “Why are you sitting at your computer? Go do something, then check it and if there's stuff there –” Like, you don't have to have your ass in the seat from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00. You don't have to sit here for 8 hours and just stare at your inbox waiting for work. It's totally asynchronous and it's totally okay. I find myself having to give myself permission to leave my desk and just go and do something and work that asynchronous schedule. So tech is a really big blessing when it comes to that.
\n\nDANIELLE: I totally agree. I think also, not being neurotypical myself, I have ADHD, and so, being able to actually allow my brain to work in the way that is best for how my brain just naturally operates. Like, I can sit at my desk and fidget constantly, and it's not going to bother anybody because I work from home, [chuckles] or I can shift between sitting and standing and sitting on my bed, or sitting on my stool and just move at my desk as much as I need to. I can also step away and go clean some dishes if that's what's making noise in my brain. I can go and take my dog on a walk and get some fresh air.
\n\nThat whole shift of having balance and being able to be empowered to advocate for what I need and how I learn and people are like, “Yeah, cool. Let's do that.” I think that's also very much a part of the company that I work for and the ethos that we have, which is all about making education better. So why wouldn't that also translate to the staff and how can we help you learn? It's such a wonderful thing to be a part of a team that's super invested in how I learn and helping me learn.
\n\nI think another thing that was a big, strange thing about my transition into tech was I ended up getting a junior engineer role in a tech stack that I hadn't worked with, which is pretty common from what I've heard from mid engineer on. Because once you have some of the foundational building blocks of a handful of programming languages and some of those computer science foundations, you can pick up most programming languages. But it's not so common as a junior engineer to get that opportunity to work with a full tech stack that you haven't really worked with before. So that was another big transition like, “All right, you trust me time to figure this out.”
\n\nARTY: So it sounds like you walked into another big learning curve with your new job, too. It sounds like you were also in a much more supportive culture environment with respect to learning and things, too. What was the ramp-up experience like at your new company?
\n\nDANIELLE: In some ways, I still kind of feel like I'm in ramp-up mode. I'm about three months in. But because we have so much of our product that is built around very specific curriculum components, that has very specific contextual knowledge, it's just going to be a process to figure out which projects have what information and have certain numbers of records, and are tied to certain standards that are required in different states and for common core versus for some of the states that we work with, what that looks like. But figuring out a whole new tech stack was and continues to be a very interesting challenge. I have to remind myself when I have gaps in my knowledge that it's actually to switch gears back into learning mode, that that is a thing that's supported and encouraged even.
\n\nI even have little sticky notes on my desk that say, “Start with what you know, not what you don't know,” and that tension of when I reached the end of what I know and then going and finding maybe not necessarily the right, or correct resources, because there's so much out there that's good. That can be helpful. I think it's more about finding something that does work with how my brain learns things and being cognizant of how I learn. But also, remembering to dig into that fate that is being a developer, which is constant learning and ever-growing evolution of how we do things, and what things we do within the sphere of the developer. So I've signed up for perpetual learning and that's pretty great.
\n\nMANDY: What are your favorite resources that you used and continue to use as you're still learning, and finding community, and things like that?
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah. I have certainly continued to lean on the curriculum for my school. It's online and it's free and that's rad. It's learnhowtoprogram.com. It's all put on online from Epicodus in the Portland area. Anybody can access it and that's wonderful. I'm a big fan of really great resources being available for free and making that more accessible. So continuing to use platforms that have that kind of ethos in mind is pretty great in my opinion.
\n\nReading the documentation is another great way to keep learning what you need to learn and sometimes documentation can be kind of dry, especially as a new developer, you don't always know what exactly it is that you're looking for. So being able to parse through documentation and figure out what's most important, but then also filling in the gaps of some of the things that you don't yet know, or understand with YouTube videos, or deeper dives into like, what does this one specific term mean? I don't know, let's go find out and plugging in some of those gaps is really helpful.
\n\nI think figuring out how you learn, too whether that be very hands-on, whether that be visually, whether that be with audio, getting lots of repetition in; it's super helpful to lean into whatever works best for your brain for learning.
\n\nI think perhaps even more important than digging into resources that are online is lean into community. I really can't say it enough, build community. If you work with Ruby, like I work with Ruby, build community within the Ruby community. Connect to people online, get on Twitter, connect to tech Twitter, follow different people that work with the languages and the tech stack that you work with, and join places like The Virtual Coffee and other really rad developer spaces that are meant to help you find the answers that you need and to maybe do it in a way that's a little less arduous because you're with people that are like, “Yes, happy helper.” Like, “How can I make things easier for you?” It seems like a much easier way to go through tech when you can do it with others and remember, that there are human resources out there for you, too.
\n\nMANDY: You also had mentioned that you were connecting with folks over Twitch.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Can you tell us a little more about that?
\n\nDANIELLE: Absolutely. So a friend of mine in my Epicodus cohort, she reached out to the director of developer relations that had done a lunchtime chat with us at one point and she was like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I am so stressed out. I don't know if I can actually finish this school and let alone finish school, but actually make it as a developer and I have questions. Do you have some time for some answers?” And he was like, “Yeah, do you want to actually do this online on Twitch? And how about you bring a couple of friends and let's just ask lots of questions and I'm going to record it?”
\n\nShe reached out to me and another friend of mine and here we are many months later still answering questions online about how to get into tech and what even are some of these things that we're talking about technically, or let's look at other roles outside of just developer, or engineer, that you can get into.
\n\nSo that has been an ongoing theme of how can I help others? How can I help provide community for people that might not have been as lucky as I have been to already have a preexisting community with many of my friends and my partner that were in tech? How can I help create that advantage for others and how can I help reach more people and help them understand what their options are and connect them to the people that need to know to get jobs?
\n\nI think Code School Q&A, we are super, super excited about open doors for people to whether that be better knowledge, whether that be real human connection; what's most important to us is just supporting people as they are making transitions into the industry like we've been doing over this last year and a half.
\n\nMANDY: So what is the Code School Q&A look like when you join? Walk me through it if I were to show up, what would I get?
\n\nDANIELLE: Absolutely. So there's generally four of us on the stream and we ask a handful of questions, whether that be from our own experiences of like, “Okay, I'm a developer now and I've got some questions about some of these transitions that I am experiencing.” But we also lean into the audience as well and see what kind of questions they have, whether that be folks that are still in code school, or folks that are thinking about maybe potentially going back to school, whether that be computer science in a university setting, or bootcamp, or even self-taught people. We even have a number of folks that are already in their careers, too that are there to reach out and chat and provide additional feedback and support.
\n\nSo I really feel like it's a bunch of friends just getting together on Wednesdays and that group of friends just keeps building and expanding. It is very much like a support group, but it's also fun. Like, our first question of the day is what are you drinking and how are you doing? Because we all hang out and chat, and drink while we're talking about how to get into tech and definitely try to make it as fun as we can and crack jokes and interrupt one another and it's a good fun time, but helping people is what's most important.
\n\nMANDY: And this is all live? Unedited?
\n\nDANIELLE: All live. Unedited. Yes, yes, and 7:00 PM-ish AV is a whole beast in and of itself. I just had to set up a Twitch stream for the first time in this whole time of streaming over the last year. I've been writing my princess pass and just shown up [chuckles] for every Twitch stream and now I know how much goes into that. I still had probably another few hours of set up to get past just a minimum viable product of we need to be online on the interwebs and you need to be able to hear and see me. Got there, but it's a whole thing.
\n\nMANDY: Twitch is certainly interrupting the industry, I believe.
\n\nDANIELLE: [inaudible].
\n\nMANDY: Especially since the pandemic. All of a sudden everyone's on Twitch. We're doing conferences live, we're doing like – how do you feel about the whole Twitch revolution and how is it different from how people traditionally came and connected in tech?
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah. Having been in events myself—that was part of what my role was within hospitality—I personally really love that there's now this whole new opportunity for connection. I think it also makes connection way more accessible because folks that were already living some kind of quarantine life because of autoimmune disorders, or disabilities, or whatever that looks like, they couldn't easily make it to those conferences and now they have a way to connect with those conferences because of hybrid events.
\n\nI think it's a really rad innovation that we're seeing and it's a really wonderful way to even just as an introvert. I'm like, “I don't have to leave my house to be able to see my friends and have a good time? Yes! I am super interested in this.” I can – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: [inaudible].
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah. I can hang out with my dog and give him scritches whenever I want, and still see my friends and build community within tech. Heck yes. Very interested in this. I think that accessibility feature that it provides is just, it's really wonderful to know that more people can become a part of tech communities because there's now this whole online outlet for folks that couldn't otherwise afford a flight to get halfway across the country to make it to this conference, or couldn't afford to get in the conference. There's lots of ways that just makes things more accessible.
\n\nMANDY: Do you think it's going to continue much beyond the pandemic? Like, do you think when it's all over, we're just going to be like, “Oh, we're back to conferences,” or do you think this is going to continue to the streaming and the slack chats and the live Q&As and things like that. Do you think that's going to continue?
\n\nDANIELLE: I hope so and I think so. I think that even just from a business sense, you can tap into whole new markets by having this addition of hybrid events. You can reach a whole new subset of markets and I think quite frankly, it'd be kind of foolish to not take advantage of the new ways that we've figured out that we can still have meaningful and authentic community.
\n\n[chuckles] There's definitely a way to monetize that and I'm sure plenty of people out there doing it, but I think it's also given voice to people that couldn't previously access those spaces and now they're like, “Don't take this away. This is community. This is this is what I've built,” and I think people are going to be willing to fight for that and I think that companies will see the business benefit of continuing to do both.
\n\nARTY: So anthropology question then. [laughs]
\n\nDANIELLE: Great.
\n\nARTY: How do you think this will affect us as a society of connecting more virtually instead of in-person in that we're significantly more isolated now than we were before, too in terms of in-person connection? How do you think that's going to affect us?
\n\nDANIELLE: One of the first things that comes to mind is infrastructure has to change. I think that support for higher speed internet across the states across the world has become much more of a priority that is striking to people, especially thinking about kids having to figure out how to do online school. All of a sudden, when COVID first hit, some kids didn't have access to the internet, let alone a computer, or a tablet, or a phone that they could go to class and do their homework on.
\n\nSo I think that we're going to be forced to make technology and the internet more accessible by building better infrastructure to support those things and I think it's only a matter of time before there is better social support for getting technology in the hands of kids, especially, but getting them devices. Like, I know there are a number of initiatives out there that are giving small grants and stuff for people to be able to get computers, or tablets, or whatever and I think that we're going to just keep seeing more of that. Hopefully, fingers crossed because it's super important to be able to keep connection moving and I think keep moving our society in the right direction.
\n\nARTY: So do you have any concerns about that as well as how –? We all get plugged in and are affected and in not so good ways, too. On the flip side of that, where do you see things going?
\n\nDANIELLE: My partner is in InfoSec. He is a security person. So that's definitely my first thought like, how do we keep the things that are most important to us and that are now online? How do we keep those things secure and safe and protected? Figuring out how to fill the gaps that are inherent within the security industry right now of there's just not enough bodies to fill all the jobs and build all of the security that needs to be built and maintain those things.
\n\nThat's going to be a whole new ball game that tech has to figure out and it's going to take a lot of manpower to make sure that we can protect people and protect the things that are most important to them, and even just protect those communities, too. Make sure that those communities can continue to thrive and also, be carefully moderated and curated so that there is safety for people to interact; that there is less bullying happening online, that there is less hate crimes that are being perpetuated online.
\n\nCreating safe spaces for people and providing agency for them online is a whole new ball game when we're not even really that great at doing so in real life, in-person. There are a lot of groups that are going to have to fight harder to be heard, to be seen, to feel safe, and I think that's just an ongoing thing that we need to work at being better at.
\n\nARTY: So we need ways to improve the connectivity community stuff and then also, need ways as we do those things to create safety in our communities.
\n\nDANIELLE: Absolutely.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, we just had a really great discussion with Eva PenzeyMoog about two episodes ago. She wrote the book Design for Safety and it was an excellent, excellent conversation about ways that as designers and engineers, we should be building our infrastructure safe from the beginning and not just going back – [overtalk]
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: And doing it after the fact, but realizing who the most vulnerable people are and protecting them from the get-go.
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's actually something that my company works really hard to do while we're designing our curriculum products is designing from the most vulnerable within our communities and using that as a starting point for how we build things and how we continue to maintain them. Because if you can keep the folks that are most vulnerable in mind, more people are actually going to be allowed to be safe, allowed to have agency, and allowed to grow. It's a far more inclusive space when we can think about the folks that don't always have access, or don't always have safety, or don't always have agency and designing with those people in mind first.
\n\nMANDY: And that's how we'll end up filling all these empty seats right now that are available in tech – [overtalk]
\n\nDANIELLE: Exactly.
\n\nMANDY: Is by not eliminating these people, designing a safe environment from the start, and attracting different kinds of people into tech because tech needs more diversity.
\n\nDANIELLE: Tech needs more diversity. Yeah, absolutely and I think that's one of the reasons why I keep doing Code School Q&A is because I want to see more people that look like me in tech. I want to see more people that don't look like me in tech. I'm very excited to bring as many people to the table as possible because I think that's when we also get the most creative and innovative. When more tool sets are brought to the table, more diverse experiences are brought to the table, we build far more robust systems, products, and things just get better when we have more differences from which to pull and more experiences from which to learn.
\n\nMANDY: As we said in the beginning, you're a fairly new developer. So I wanted to ask you the question: what was one thing you wish you knew, that you know now, that you would have known back then? If you could give Danielle advice a year ago, what advice would that have been?
\n\nDANIELLE: I think that advice would have been to start actually working on technical things sooner; to start digging into the educational materials that were provided for me for free before I ever started school. I think that actually digging into those materials and having the courage to not just wait until I was in a classroom setting to be able to interact with coding languages and learning how to program, I would have had such a less fraught time getting through school and giving myself the opportunity to get a bit of a head start and more of a foundation before just diving in head first and hoping that I kept my head above water.
\n\nBut I think also, again, leaning into community and not being afraid to ask for help, not being afraid to advocate for myself because it took me a good 2 and a half months before a really felt like I could speak up and say what I needed. That's 2 months of time that I could have been getting more of what I needed, getting more help learning faster and more efficiently, and just being less miserable in the early stages of learning and entirely new skillsets.
\n\nSo don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. I think especially as a woman coming into a technical space, there is some extra fears of not looking like I could do this, or not feeling like I belonged not knowing what I was doing. But the thing to remember was that nobody knew what they were doing; we were all figuring it out together in that school program. Being the one to be like, “Hold up, this is not making any sense to me. Can we start this over again? Can we dig into what's happening here?” Often times, other people were like, “Oh, I'm so grateful you said something because I also don't know what's going on.”
\n\nMANDY: Well, with that, I think that's an amazing thing to end on and we can move over to reflections, which I can go and start off with right away is that's the secret. Like, nobody knows what we're doing in tech.
\n\nDANIELLE: [laughs] Nobody knows, no. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Nobody knows.
\n\nDANIELLE: Nobody knows yet.
\n\nMANDY: That's the secret. Ask questions. Lean on your community. There are so many people out there. I know you mentioned tech Twitter, #techTwitter. There are so many nice amazing people that will have your back if you just put those questions out there and even say, “Hey, tech twitter, anybody free? Do you want to pair?” They'll be like, “Yeah, let's hop on for an hour, or two,” and especially right now is when people aren't really doing much again. [chuckles] People are out there. So again, it’s a secret. Nobody knows.
\n\nDANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah. I think I am totally on board with your reflections for the day lean into community and don't be afraid to ask questions.
\n\nI think it's so important to know that tech needs you. Whoever you are, tech needs you and whatever valuable skillset you bring to the table, whatever diverse experiences you bring to the table, it's needed. You need more people that aren't traditional and whatever that looks like. There is space and there is need for you.
\n\nI think come and ask your questions at Code School on Wednesdays. We need generally every Wednesday, 7:00 PM Pacific time. We are happy to answer your questions and help connect you to the people if we don't know answers because none of us totally know the right answer most of the time.
\n\nMANDY: And how can people do that work? What’s the URL?
\n\nDANIELLE: Yeah. Come visit us at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. We also have Code School Q&A is participating in Oktoberfest, too. So you can find us on GitHub by looking up the Oktoberfest hashtag tag and you can find us on Twitter at Code School Q&A as well.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome.
\n\nARTY: I just wanted to add that a little bit with lean into community, I was thinking about Mandy, when you were mentioning your story, when I was learning electron new technology I didn't know. I had this code base that I had to learn. I didn't know what was going on, I was frustrated, I couldn't get anything working, and then I tweeted and asked for someone to pair with me.
\n\nLo and behold, some random person from the internet was like, “Sure! I'd be happy to help! Let's meet up air on this,” and I managed to get over the major hurdles I had with getting my environment to set up and getting unstuck, figured out how to run the debugging tools, and all those things really happened as a consequence of nothing afraid to reach out.
\n\nEven when you might feel like you're struggling with these things alone, there really is a community out there and people that are willing to jump in and help and I think that's really great cool thing.
\n\nMANDY: All right, well with that, I think we're pretty set to wrap up.
\n\nIf you want to join us you are in Slack. Danielle will receive an invitation to join us as well in our Slack community. It is a Patreon where you can fudge to support us monetarily on a monthly basis. However, if you're not comfortable with that, or do not want to, you can DM anyone of the panelists and we will get you in there for free.
\n\nSo with that, I want to thank you, Danielle, for coming on the show.
\n\nDANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me for a great conversation.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome, and we'll see everyone next week.
Special Guest: Danielle Thompson.
","summary":"Danielle Thompson talks about entering tech as a former person in the hospitality industry with an anthropology degree, and how doing those things in the past have helped her to better work with people today. We also talk about the streaming revolution, and you can catch Danielle every Wednesday at 7PM Pacific, for Code School QA at twitch.tv/thejonanshow!","date_published":"2021-10-13T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f9ed3d7b-9334-4a65-a719-3c85f3a0459a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45430179,"duration_in_seconds":3088}]},{"id":"0e1f0e6a-75bb-413d-8ec0-e40f349976ae","title":"253: Reframing the Value of Open Source with Jen Weber","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/reframing-the-value-of-open-source","content_text":"00:47 - Jen’s Superpower: Being Optimistic\n\n\nRecognizing Negative Loops\nIntentionality & Prioritization\nPreventing Security Vulnerabilities\n\n\n10:13 - Working On Open-Source Projects vs Commercial Software/Products\n\n\nGathering Feedback (RFCs)\nBaby Steps = Big Impact\n\n\n12:57 - Major vs Minor Releases\n\n\nSemantic Versioning\nDeprecation Warnings\nAdvanced Notice\nIncremental Rollouts \n\n\n18:45 - RFC / Feedback Processes \n\n\nDealing with Contradictory Feedback\nReaching Consensus\nVisionary Leadership\n\n\nAdditions\n\n\n\n23:25 - The Ember Core Team \n\n\n~30 People\nFunding\n\n\nLinkedIn (Corporate Sponsorship)\nConsultants & Consultancies\nVolunteers\n\n\n\n26:31 - Doing Open Source Better\n\n\nSponsor Company (Time)\nKnowledge Sharing\nFraming Work As How It Values Contributors\nReframing How We Think About Open Source Sustainability (i.e. Company-Wide Open Source Work Days)\n\n\nFrame Value to Company\nFrame Value to Users\nFrame Value to Engineering Teams\n\nAttitude Shifts\n\n\n39:56 - Participation Encouragement & Engagement Tips\n\n\nUse The Buddy System\nHaving Well-Scoped Issues\nIncreasing Levels of Challenge (Subtle Cheerleading)\nHelp People Spin Up Quickly\n\n\n46:00 - Widening the Pool of Participants\n\n\nBeing Easy to Reach\nSocial Media Activity\nWorking In The Open\n\n\n47:36 - UX-Driven Design (User Experience-Driven Design)\n\nReflections:\n\nDamien: Perspective of those impacted. Sponsors, users, etc.\n\nArty: What it’s like to work on a big open source project and the challenges we face.\n\nJen: Exploring small-project lifecycles. \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone and welcome to Episode 253 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Damien Burke.\n\nDAMIEN: And we are here with our fabulous guest, Jen Weber. \n\nJen Weber is a member of the Ember.js core team and is a senior software engineer at ActBlue Technical Services. Jen loves open source, rapid prototyping, and making tech a more welcoming industry.\n\nJen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.\n\nJEN: Thank you so much for having me.\n\nDAMIEN: So you should have gotten an email preparing you for the first and most difficult part of every appearance on Greater Than Code. Are you ready for this? \n\nJEN: I am.\n DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nJEN: All right. So I did get that email and I've been thinking about those for the last couple of days. I think my superpower is being able to imagine the ways that things can go well. \n\nDAMIEN: Wow. That's very special. \n\nJEN: Thank you. \n\nDAMIEN: How did you acquire that?\n\nJEN: So I used to be very good at imagining all of the ways that things can go badly. Those are still the patterns that my mind walks whenever I'm confronted with a challenge, but someone gave me some advice. I was recounting to them all of the ways that things could go badly, they were like, “What would it look like if things went well?” I've been trying to build that as a muscle and a skill anytime I'm working on a new project, or something hasn't gone well, something's already gone badly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I found that helped me open up to more creative thinking.\n\nARTY: I really think that is a superpower and in order for things to go well, for us to manifest good things toward a good direction, we have to be able to see the steps to get there, imagine ourselves walking in that direction to be able to do it. And if we're caught in a loop of worrying about all the things that are going to go wrong, anticipating those things going wrong, then it's like we're going to be waiting for him and doing things that help bring those things that we don't want into being. \n\nSo if you find yourself in this mode, it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and learned this adaptive skill to break out of this pattern. So what kind of things do you do? Like, do you tell yourself things or ask yourself certain questions, or how do you snap out of that mode and get to a better place where you're thinking about things in a positive frame?\n\nJEN: Sure. I think for me, the first step is just recognizing when I'm in that negative loop and accepting that it's my first reaction, but that doesn't need to be my conclusion to my thought process. If I'm working on let's say, there's a real-world challenge. Just to give an example as part of my work on the Ember core team, I might think about how do I engage the community and announce that there's going to be this new version of Ember? \n\nIf I imagine things going badly, I imagine like, “O, wow, nobody even retweets it a single time,” and if I imagine things going well, I think like, “Wow, it's this big moment in tech.” And if it was a big moment in tech, what would have the involved people done to get to that successful end point and trying to work backwards from that to connect the dots. It takes some intentionality, it takes having enough rest, it takes not being over-caffeinated to be able to unlock that kind of thinking.\n\nDAMIEN: But it sounds so powerful, especially as an engineer, or as an advocate. It's like because we're in the role of making things into what we want them to be, which is things going well, right?\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it's a little different than a wishful thinking, I would say, because you're still thinking in order for things to go, well, you have to overcome challenges, you have to solve problems, you have to prioritize, there's going to be difficult moments. So you're not just dreaming that this good feature is going to come into existence, but actually figuring out what are the nuts and bolts, and pieces, like, what are the ingredients to that recipe? When we think and reflect on that, how can we take those ingredients and apply them to right now to get where we want to go?\n\nARTY: So you take that vision and then work backwards and translate that to actual action. These are things that we can do right now to walk the path of getting where we want to go.\n\nJEN: Mm hm, and it might take you somewhere totally different direction. It might be very different by the time you're done. But usually, you can figure out a few things here and there that are steps in the right direction, and the right direction could be one of many different directions.\n\nARTY: Do you find yourself ever getting disappointed that things don't go the way you envisioned?\n\nJEN: Oh yeah, for sure. \n\n[laughter]\n\nYeah, and I think that's a little bit part of the rollercoaster of being involved in software. Like every single day is a series of things going a little different than you thought they would. You read the code; you think it's going to go a certain way. You're wrong; you change your plan. You have this idea of a direction you're going to go, you've thought about what are the successful steps to get there, and then you end up in the wrong corner and you have to go back to the drawing board and surviving those cycles is just part of what we do.\n\nARTY: So does that superpower help you escape those feelings of disappointment then?\n\nJEN: Oh yeah, I think so because not that I have some way to see the future, but more that I have tools for helping to figure out what my next step could be.\n\nARTY: So then you're always focused back on action. \n\nJEN: Mm hm.\n\nARTY: And how can I take what I learned and this vision of what a good direction would be, taking these new data points and things into account, and then reimagine and translating that back into action. \n\nJEN: Yeah. \n\nARTY: I think that qualifies as a superpower.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I think about it, I guess because I was writing code this morning, and so often, when you're writing – when I'm writing code at least, it's like oh, the phrase was “defensive programming” from a long time ago. How can this go wrong? What happens if this is nil? What happens if some evil guy in a black hat comes in and tries to do something here? \n\nAnd what I've had to learn and still need to remind myself of is the good case. What is it that we're doing good for our users, or whoever else the code touches? What are they trying to accomplish and what experience are we trying to create for them? And so, both, as an engineer and a product manager, just being able to ask that question and see an answer on a small scale on a feature in stories, super important.\n\nJEN: Yeah, and even if you're thinking of that adversarial aspect where it's like, you're trying to think through all of the security risks that are involved in developing some software, you can still use this thinking to your advantage. What would a successful future be where somebody tries to exploit that vulnerability and they fail? You've got them. What are the things you built? What are the strategies and habits that that team had? What is the monitoring and infrastructure that resulted in successfully preventing this, or that problem from occurring?\n\nDAMIEN: It's not only a useful strategy and also, feels really good.\n\nJEN: Mm hm.\n\nDAMIEN: That’s great.\n\nARTY: I like that, though just thinking from a standpoint of just vulnerability, or even a case where things go “wrong,” in the case that you do have somebody hacking your system, or trying to exploit some vulnerability, what's the logging and information infrastructure? What does that story look like where even though these things are happening, we're prepared, we have the right things in place to give us visibility into what's going on, and be able to catch it and address it quickly. Like what do all those things look like such that we're ready to go and can still have a success story, even in the case of these challenges that come up?\n\nDAMIEN: That sounds connected to something, I think we want to talk about today, which is what goes well when you get a major library upgrade, what does that look like?\n\nJEN: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot lately; informed by two things. So one is that I'm involved in an Ember, which is a frontend JavaScript framework, and we're getting ready to do a 4.0 major release. So going through all of those exercises to have preparedness all comes back to how do we do this, or what do our users need, what are the resources that are missing? \n\nThat's one thing on my mind and the other is that I've recently updated some dependencies in the apps that I work in and had a hard time. What can I learn for myself about what to do differently? What can I learn that might be takeaways for library maintainers? What can I share with my coworkers and my collaborators to make this easier next time?\n\nARTY: What's it like working on an open source project and how does that feel different? What are the different aspects of that from working on a commercial product versus something in the open source community?\n\nJEN: There's a couple of pieces. The biggest one is that when you're working in your own code base, you have at least a fuzzy picture of what the product is, what the constraints are, how many users there are, and the things that the developers on your team generally know and the things that they don't know. You have all this information that would help you inform how do I roll out some new, big feature, or something like that. \n\nWhen you're working at open source, your universe of possible products, developers, and users is huge. Like, you could never write down a list of all the ways that somebody is going to be using that software and so, it becomes really different than having a set of well-defined products requirements; we want to get from point A to point B. It's like, we need to give everybody a path forward even though they're using this tool in all these different ways. \n\nTo do that, a lot of effort goes into gathering feedback from other people in the community. So we use a process called RFCs, or Requests for Comments where someone says, “Hey, I think this would be a good feature. Hey, I think this thing should be removed, or deprecated,” and you have to get feedback. Because we can't imagine all the ways ourselves that someone could use this feature, or tool and then once there's consensus amongst the core team, then something can move forward. But everything goes through a lot of iteration as part of that process. \n\nSo the overall progress can sometimes feel slow because you have to think through all of this extra weight—the weight of depending on thousands and thousands of developers and billions of users on you to make the right decision. It means you can't just “Oh, let's just merge this breaking change and I'll make this breaking change and I'll just post on Slack to everybody like, ‘Hey, watch out. I just changed this one thing. I documented it here. Good luck.’” You can't really quite pull that lever in the same way, but when you do have a step forward, it's a step forward for all of these apps, for all of these projects, for all of their users and so, little baby steps can still translate into really big impact.\n\nARTY: So when you have something that's a major release in that context, like a major release of Ember versus a minor release. How are those different? What kind of things do you do in major releases?\n\nJEN: Yeah, that's a good question. \n\nSo I'll just provide a little bit of background information on this vocabulary that we're using for anyone who's listening in. A lot of projects follow semantic versioning, which is a set of rules that a lot of projects agree to follow that if you ever see a version number that's like 4.2.1.—oftentimes, that's semantic versioning and action in the first number—is for major releases and a major release is one that has a breaking change. \n\nSo that means that I make a change in that code base. I would expect that other people would have to change the code in their own apps and they would be forced to go through that—make that change—in order to upgrade to that version for the library I'm working on. Minor is usually used for features. Patch, the last one, is used for bug fixes and internal refactors, things like that. \n\nNot all projects follow in the same way. Some projects have time-based cycles where they say, “Oh, we do a major release every six months,” or something like that. But for us major releases are breaking changes and the things that are different about them is that we have to give people a path forward to get to the next version. That could include putting some deprecation warnings, any code that's going to get removed or change any API that are going to shift in the next major version. We want to let people know, with a little warning, if they're using those older syntaxes, or APIs, whatever's going to be removed. We also want to try to give a lot of advanced notice about what's going to change, or be removed via blog posts, things like having a help channel set up maybe that's just for those upgrades. When it's time to actually do the major release, we try to make it boring.\n\nThis is something that I would like to see happen across the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. It does seem to be catching on more, which is that when you do a major version release, all it does is it removes the things that need to be removed. You make your breaking changes and that's it, and then in follow-up releases is when you add in all the new features. \n\nSo let's say, some API is just the old way of doing things. It doesn't match up with a new rendering engine, or something like that. You're going to want to remove the old thing and then incrementally work to roll out these big splashy, new, exciting features. So maybe your exciting release is actually going to be 4.1, or 4.2, or 4.3. \n\nThis has a couple benefits. It lets your major releases be a little less risky because you're not just removing code and then adding new code at the same time. It lets people not be as overwhelmed like, “Oh, first I have to deal with all of these things that are removed, or changed and then now I also have to learn this whole new way of thinking about how to write my app using this tool.” It lets you take little baby steps towards doing things in a different way.\n\nDAMIEN: Does this mean, in an ideal scenario, that if you don't have any deprecation warnings—if you're taking care of all the deprecation warnings—then your major release can go – you can upgrade some next major version without a code change. \n\nJEN: Yeah, that's the dream. \n\nDAMIEN: It does sound like a dream.\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it's not always perfect, but it's an important pathway towards including more people and participating in upgrades, app maintenance, and creating sustainable code bases so you don't have to follow the Twitter, the blog post, and be checking the JavaScript subreddit just to keep up on with what's going on. You're not going to be surprised by big sweeping changes. \n\nSo coming back to this experience I had with upgrading a different library recently, I was upgrading major Jest versions and was very surprised to see that there were a ton of breaking changes in a changelog and I got a little bit frustrated with that. And then I went back and I read the blog posts and I saw a blog post from 2 years ago saying, “These are the things that we are doing, this is what is happening,” and that was great, but I wasn't doing Jest tests 2 years ago and so, I missed all of that. Can we use the code base itself to connect those dots, make those suggestions, and guide people towards the work that they do?\n\nDAMIEN: If they put those deprecation warnings in 2 years ago, you would've had 2 years to make those changes.\n\nJEN: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: And then when you finally upgraded, it would have been a dream, or have been painless.\n\nJEN: Yeah, and maybe they're there. Maybe there are some and I just need to pass the debug flag, or something. Hopefully, there's nobody who's shouting at their computer. But there's this one thing that we put it in the console log output, or something. It's possible I overlooked it but.\n\nDAMIEN: I want to rewind a little bit back to the challenge of dealing with a product that is used in so many contexts by so many people, like Ember is, and the RFC process. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that is what do you do with contradictory feedback? Surely, you must have hundreds of engineers who say, “You have to get rid of this,” and hundreds who say, “No, this has to stay.” How does the core team manage that?\n\nJEN: Yeah. So I think the most important piece is the contradictory feedback needs to be considered. So it's not just like, “Oh, let's collect these comments as annual feedback forms,” or anything like that. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nThis isn't like, “Oh, let's do some natural language processing on these comments to figure out if the sentiment is positive, or negative.” \n\n[chuckles]\n\nNone of that stuff you have to actually read through them and think what could I do using this new feature to help meet this person's needs, or what's at the heart of the objection that they're making? If someone is saying, “This doesn't work for my team,” and entering that process with a willingness to iterate. In the end, we can't make everybody happy all the time, or no RFC would ever get moved forward. There's always going to be a point where you have to prioritize the pros and cons, and ultimately, the decision comes down to reaching consensus amongst the core team members. \n\nSo being able to say, as a group, “We believe that the feedback has been considered. We believe that the iterations have been incorporated, the people's concerns have been addressed,” or “We're going to work to create tools that think that problem be not a problem for them,” and find a way to move forward with whatever the proposal is. Or sometimes, the proposals don't move forward. Sometimes, they get closed.\n\nARTY: Is the work you end up choosing to do primarily driven by this feedback process, or do you have some visionary leadership within the core team that drives a lot of things forward that aren't necessarily coming via feedback? \n\nJEN: That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. So certainly, a lot of RFCs have come from the community and from people asking like, “Hey, can we have this better way of doing things? I have an idea.” And then other times, you do have to have that visionary leadership. \n\nSo to give an example, we have just started doing – well, I shouldn't say just started doing that. I think it's been like 2 years now. We have started doing this process called additions where if there's a big splashy set of cool features that are meant to be used together, we give it a name. That's separate from the breaking changes process, ideally. We can create nice, new splashy sets of features without breaking people's apps and trying to design that experience isn’t something that you can just piecemeal through RFCs waiting for feedback to come through.\n\nThere were quite a few members of the core team that designed a new way of building Ember apps that was better aligned with focusing on HTML as the core of building for the web and focusing on JavaScript features as opposed to requiring developers to know and understand the special API syntaxes. You can just write JavaScript classes instead of needing to understand what an Ember object is.\n\nSo aligning ourselves more with the skills that everybody, who works in the web, has at least a little bit of. That took a lot of brainstorming, a lot of planning, and ultimately, introducing those things still follows an RFC process. Somebody still has to say, “Here's the thing we want to change, or do, or add. Here's the greater vision for it.” But to get that big picture look still requires the big thinking. So the core team, I don't even know how much time. They must've spent countless hours trying to hash out those details. \n\nARTY: How big is the core team? \n\nJEN: So there's several core teams. Though when you say the core team as a whole encompasses people who work on the data layer, the command line tools, the learning tools, and then the framework itself. I want to say, could look this up, it's like upwards of 30 people, I think.\n\nARTY: Wow.\n\nJEN: I can get you the exact number later, [chuckles] but everyone's pulling out their different area of domain and so, all of those teams also have to coordinate around these major releases because we want to make sure the work that we're doing is complimentary. If we do the framework improvements, but we don't fix up the docs, we’re not on the good path for a successful release.\n\nARTY: Are people working on this stuff full-time? Are people funded, or doing this in their free time, or how does that work? Because there's this big picture challenge of we have this ideal of community sourced, open source projects, and then the realities of trying to fund and support that effort bumps up to constraints of needing to make a living and things and these sorts of difficulties. How do y'all manage that?\n\nJEN: It's a mixture. \n\nSo the Ember project is fortunate to have a major player—LinkedIn—that uses Ember and so, some of the core team members, their work on Ember is part of their LinkedIn work because of the frameworks doing well, then LinkedIn projects that are going to be doing well. There's also a number of people who are consultants, or who run consultancies that do Ember work, they're involved. Their voice is an important part of making sure that again, we're serving a variety of apps, not just ah, this is this tool that's just for the LinkedIn websites. But it's like, they've seen so many different kinds of apps; they're working on so many different kinds of apps right now. And then there's people who help out on more of a volunteer basis. \n\nSo I've been in my past work, it was at a different job. It was part of my job responsibilities to participate on the framework core team. These days, I'm more of a volunteer and I mostly help organize other volunteers—people who want to do some professional development to learn, people who want to network, people who found something that they're frustrated about enough that they want to fix it themselves. That’s how I got involved; I wanted to learn. So that's the sustainability of having people involved is always an ongoing challenge it is for every open source organization, I think.\n\nARTY: Yeah. Do you have any ideas on how we can do those sorts of things better? As you said, it's a concern, in general with how do we do open source better with these kinds of constraints? And then two, I feel like there's been some cultural shifts, I guess, you could say over time of you think about when the open source movement first started. \n\nWe had a lot more of this community ownership ideal where we really were going and building software together and now, there's a lot more of, well, there's all this free software out there that we use, that we build on top of to build our apps on, but that ownership piece isn't really there. It's an expectation that there should just be this free software out there that's maintained that we get and why is it falling apart? \n\nSo I feel like, culturally, just over time, some of those things have shifted as far as expectations around open source and then you talked about some of the corporate sponsorship aspects with usage as being one way these things get funded. But I'm wondering if you have ideas on how some of these things could work better.\n\nJEN: People have done PhDs on this topic, I'm pretty sure. [chuckles] Like, theses. I read a white paper, a really involved white paper, a few weeks ago that was about, what was it? it was called something like the Burden of Maintaining Software, or something like that and it did this deep dive into how much goes in and just keeping the ship afloat. How much goes into just if there's a package that needs to be updated? That kind of ongoing, constant, mundane work that adds up really, really big. \n\nSo for very large projects, I think it's a good thing to have some sort of an evolvement of a sponsor company, if you will and so, that sponsor company may not actually ever donate any money, but the time of their engineers that they say like, “Hey, we're willing to help support this project” is really important. \n\nI think another piece is that the leadership of projects should consider the people involved, that that group is going to be rotating. That people's involvement is ephemeral. Every time somebody changes jobs, maybe they're not going to be involved in that project anymore. If we can think about that ahead of time, plan for it, and make sure that we are sharing knowledge with each other such that the project can survive somebody moving onto something else, it can survive somebody going on vacation for a while. \n\nSo I think that's another key component of success is how do you make it so that you're not just relying on the same set of people still being there so many years later? We’ve been very fortunate within the Ember community that a lot of the same people have stuck around, but I try really hard not to bank on that. The group of contributors that I help organize, I think, “Hey.” We have a chat every time somebody joins the learning core team and say, “Hey, we get that you're not going to be here forever. Please let us know what we can do to support you. Please let us know when you're thinking of taking a break, or taking a step back. Please involve other people on any project that you're working on so that they will also continue your work and also support you so you don't get burnt out. \n\nAnother thing I try to do is always framing the work into how it values the contributor. Sometimes in open source you hear this discussion of like, “Oh, well, everyone should participate in open source because we all benefit from it.” There's a better attitude that we can have, I think, which is that for people who are interested in participating, what can they get out of it? What can I do as a leader to help them get something out of this? \n\nIf you just approach it with this altruism of “This is a community and I want to help,” that'll get you like a little bit. But if you can say, “I want to help because I want to learn from other developers,” that's something I can deliver on. That's something that they can take. That's valuable for their future earning potential, income, confidence, maybe they'll make the connection that helps them find their next job. Even if someone isn't being paid to help out, is there something that they can take away from this? And lastly, just acknowledging that doing work for free is a privilege as well. \n\nWe have to reframe how we think about open source sustainability, too. Not everybody can devote a few hours after work here and there and involving them and including them means that it's got to be part of their workday. So continuing to socialize from the company level that engineers should have a little bit of time here and there to try to help improve an open source project. Everybody doing that just a little bit helps with quite a few of the problems that these projects face.\n\nARTY: I've been thinking about this myself and you work directly, you're significantly involved in a major open source project, and so, you see things that a lot of people don't have perspective on. So I appreciate your insights on this. \n\nI'm wondering what if major companies that were using open source software, if we made more efforts for companies to be a project sponsor and donate part of the company somebody who's on the company's time to help contribute to projects as like a thing. I feel like if that thing caught on, that the companies that were using this software for free [chuckles] had more of a sense of a social obligation to be one of the people that contribute some time to helping with that. Or get some companies that are big enough, too. It's probably easier and they have more interest in those sorts of things. \n\nBut I feel like if we did make that more of a thing, that that would be useful because as you're saying, somehow realistically speaking, this has to be something that can be worked into the workday.\n\nJEN: Yes.\n\nARTY: For us to be able to support and sustain these things. And people that can do that outside of their workday as an extra free time thing. It really is a privilege.\n\nJEN: Yeah. I think a couple of strategies that can help here are to frame it in the value to the company and frame it as a value to the users, frame it as a value to the engineering team. So rather than having it be like, “Oh, you use free software, you should do this thing.” Instead more like engineers, we always need to learn constantly in order to keep improving our own skills and to keep up with things that are changing. \n\nSo having an open source hour, or something like that—it takes a little more than an hour usually to accomplish much. But having a period of time that engineers were allowed to contribute to open sources. Professional development that you don't have to pay for a subscription. You don't have to pay for a licensing fee. You don't have to pay for somebody’s conference submission. If someone has the opportunity to reach outside of their sphere of knowledge, or comfort zone and it just so happens that if they succeed, it'll benefit your company maybe indirectly.\n\nAnother piece is what's the value to the users? So there were a bunch of people who all contributed effort towards bringing some improved linting tools for the template system within Ember. When we think of linting tools, we usually think that's like, “Oh, here's this thing to remind me to use nice tidy syntax and don't make my variable names too long and space everything out in a certain way,” but they can also help us find real actual problems in our apps. \n\nSo an example that this team worked on is they introduced some more linting rules for accessibility. If one person succeeds in introducing this new linting rule for accessibility, then it's there in their app for their team and they get to stop talking about, “Hey, make sure you do this one thing” over and over again because now it's enforced in the code base. Also, they've brought this benefit to all of the other apps that are out there. \n\nAgain, sometimes you can tie it back in to that value for the product and for the users, and really trying to think creatively about that connection. Because there's so many different things we can all spend our time on, you've really got to sell it in a way that aligns with the goals, or values of that organization.\n\nARTY: Yeah. I like that reframing. I can see just how important that is. Other things I'm thinking about if you had a dev team and one of your developers was really involved with the Ember core team, you'd have more knowledge about how things worked. So when something was broken, or something, you probably have more insight into what was going on and being able to help the team more effectively –\n\nJEN: Yeah. [overtalk]\n\nARTY: To build stuff. And then if there's any suggestions, or things that could make things easier for your team, you'd have the ability to have influence with getting RFPs through to get changes made and things. I think you're right. It needs to be reframed as a value proposition.\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it also requires an attitude shift on the side of the projects as well. There's tons of people who've tried to do open source and hit running straight into a wall of they open up pull requests that are never merged, or even reviewed and that can be a really frustrating experience. And some projects just don't have the feedback structure, or the governance structure that really allows open participation either.\n\nSo that's something that I think is an ongoing journey with lots of projects. It's like, how do we communicate? How do we involve other people? What types of decisions do we say like, “Hey, implementer, or community, you're in charge, you can make this” versus things that have to pass some sort of review. It’s not just a one side of companies need to step up, but also, maintainers seem to have a long-term vision of how they're interacting with everybody else.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I really love that frame of this is professional development and that you can get for free. That's like how would you like to educate your engineers and make them better engineers, especially on the tools you work on and not –? Yeah, that's really awesome. But then of course, on the other side, you need a welcoming environment. That's like, “Oh yeah, when you make a contribution, we're going to look at it. We're going to give you useful feedback on it.”\n\nJEN: Yeah. I tried to get an open source project going a few years ago and I struggled for a while and eventually ended up giving up. But some of the things I ran into, I'd have somebody that would volunteer to help out with things and I'd work with them long enough to just start to get a feel for things and be able to contribute and then they would disappear. [laughs] And I go through that process a few times. \n\nIt's like, “Oh, yay. I'm excited, I get –” another person has volunteered and so, then I go and start working with them and trying to – and I put a lot of attention into trying to get things going and then they disappear. t was difficult to try and get traction in that way and eventually, I went, “Well, I'm back by myself again” [laughs] and that I just need to keep going. \n\nARTY: Right. So what kind of things have you found help with getting that participation aspect going and what kind of things are barriers that get in the way that maybe we can be better at?\n\nJEN: Yeah. So my advice is always start with using the buddy system. Trying to pair program with people, who I'm hoping to stay involved, and the leveling up version of that is the people who are contributing pair with each other. It's so much more fun. There's so much more of a learning experience when it's two developers working on the project. \n\nLeft to my own devices, the projects that I work on, I have to really dig into my willpower to keep them moving if I'm the only person working on it versus if we're pairing, what's the value that I'm getting? It's like, I get to hear how the other person approaches the problem. I get to experience how they work. They teach me things. I teach them things. We have this good rapport.\n\nSo I pair once a week with my friend, Chris, and we work on everything from this kind of mundane stuff to the big vision, like what would we do if we could totally change how this thing works, or something like that, and that kind of energy and get ideas, they build up. So that's one piece. \n\nThe other, this one's difficult, but having well-scoped, well-written issues is a huge time sink, but also, it can be one of the best ways get people engaged and keep them engaged. If I stop writing really specific issues, people peter off. Someone will ask, maybe only once, they'll ask, “Hey, I want to help out, or something. What should I pick up next?” They don't usually ask a second time, but I don't have something right away to hand off to them.\n\nSo what is the momentum? Can I keep writing up issues and things that other people can follow through with? And then presenting them with increasing levels of challenge of like, “I have this unstructured problem. We've worked on this a lot together. You can do this. How would you approach this? What do you think we should do?” I don't necessarily say,” You can do this,” because it’s more of a subtle cheerleading that's happening than that. \n\nBut “I'd love to hear your proposal of what should happen next” just is a really powerful moment and sometimes, that can be the thing that catapults somebody into taking more ownership of a project and gathering together other people to help them out. And then people do come and go, but the commits are still there! So that's something, right? \n\n[chuckles]\n\nLike, things have taken some steps forward.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. People come and go, that's something you know you have to accept on an open source project, but it happens in other places, too. [chuckles] No team stays together for all of eternity.\n\nJEN: Right.\n\nDAMIEN: Is the project going to live on and how can you make it so that it does? So these are very good lessons, even for that.\n\nARTY: It seems like just investing in thinking about, we were talking initially about planning for the success case, even when things happen. So if we think about the case of okay, people are going to leave the team. [chuckles] What's the success case look like? Imagining the way that things go really well when people are leaving the team, what does that look like? What are the things that we wish we had in place to be able to ramp people up quickly, to be able to find new people, to work on the project quickly? All of those things that we can think about and open source has this to a much larger degree and challenge so that you really have to think about it a lot. \n\nWhere on a commercial project, it's one of those things that often happens when you wish it wouldn't and one of the things I see in corporate companies is you'll have a management change, or something will happen with a product that upsets a bunch of people and you'll have exodus phase on the project and then ending up often rewriting things because you lose your core knowledge on the project and nobody knows what's going on anymore and it actually becomes easier to rewrite the things than to [chuckles] figure out how it works. If we had imagined the ways that things could go well and prepared for those certain circumstances, maybe we wouldn't be in that situation. \n\nARTY: Yeah. You mentioned something really important there, too, which is what can we do to help people spin up more quickly on something. That's another big piece of sustained engagement because you need a group of people spun up quickly. You need a group of people who can figure out the next steps on their own. And so, we've spent a lot of time, the projects that I work most actively on, making sure that everything is there in the Read Me, making sure that if you run npm start that things work if you're running it on a different environment. Those types of little things, reducing those barriers can also go a long way and just widening the pool of people who could potentially help is another big one.\n\nDAMIEN: How do you do that? Because you're a core contributor on the project. You have the curse of knowledge. \n\nJEN: Yes.\n\nDAMIEN: You have a development scene that is tightly home to work on this project.\n\nJEN: That's a great question. Ah, I do have the curse of knowledge. Being easy to reach so that if people do encounter problems that they can find you and tell you, which can be, it can be a small step. Just making sure that if you have a documentation page, it's got a link at the bottom that’s like, “Find a problem, open an issue!” That sort of thing. \n\nAlso, I'm pretty active on Twitter. Sometimes other contributors, experienced contributors, they'll spot something that somebody else has posted and they'll say, “Hey, Jen, take a look at this,” and they bring it to my attention. There's this team effort to uncover those gaps. \n\nAnother aspect is just working in the open. So having open meetings, having open chat channels, places where people can interact with the people leading the projects, they can come to the meetings, things like that means that we're more likely to hear their feedback. So if we get feedback, “Hey, this thing was difficult,” making sure that we address it. \n\nDAMIEN: Wow. Well.\n\nJEN: I'm really big into user experience driven design. We've been talking about maintainability a lot, we’ve been talking about the code, and versions, and things, but coming back to what is the impact for our users. \n\nIf you accept a user experience driven way of developing software, it means that you're always going to need to be upgrading, you're always going to have to be flexing, changing, and growing because the products of 2 years ago versus the product of today can be really different. Open source library that you needed to rely on 2 years ago versus today. Maybe the web app ecosystem has shifted. Maybe there's new ways of doing things. Maybe there's new syntaxes that are available. \n\nSometimes, it can be a little frustrating because you feel like, “Oh, there's this endless pile of work. We made all these wrong choices back in the day and now this thing's hard to upgrade,” and all that. \n\nA different mindset is to think about what do we know today that is different than what we knew yesterday? What are the things we know today about our users that inform our next move? How do these upgrades, or improvements, or my choice of open source library help the end user have a better experience? And trying to come back to that big picture from time to time, because it can be pretty frustrating. When you get stuck, you think like, “Oh, I can't. I just tried to upgrade this major version and everything broke and everything's terrible. But what's the feature list look like, how am I going to use this to deliver something better to the users can really help?” \n\nDAMIEN: Wow.\n\nARTY: So at this part of the show, we usually do reflections and finish off with any final thoughts we had, or takeaways from the episode. \n\nDamien, you want to start?\n\nDAMIEN: The big takeaway I got from this is kind of… it's perspective. Jen, you mentioned a user experience driven design. I was already really close to that language, but from a perspective of contributors to an open source project, sponsors—both in terms of engineering and then money—and then also, users. Like, these are also users. These are also people who are impacted by the work we do. So in order to do it successfully, it's very important to think of how can this go well for them and then move to that direction. So thank you, that was really great.\n\nM: For me, the big takeaway, I feel like I learned a whole lot just perspective wise of what it's like to work on a big open source project. I haven't really had a conversation like this with someone that's been that involved with a major resource project before. So I found that really insightful. \n\nOne of the big questions I asked you about how do we make this sustainable? [laughs] Like all the challenges around things. I know they're big challenges that we face in figuring that out and you had some really key insights around how we can frame things differently as opposed to framing it as an obligation, like a social obligation, or you should do this altruistically because it's the right thing to do as the appeal that we make is when you're talking to a contributor, how do you frame things to be a value proposition for them as an individual. When we're talking to a company, how do we frame things in a way so there's a value proposition for the company to get involved with doing something? And change the way that we frame all these things to be able to get folks involved because they realize benefits as individuals, as company, as people being directly involved in things? \n\nI feel like if we can do some work to maybe change some of the framing around things. That maybe there's a pathway there to increase engagement and support of open source projects, which I think is one of those things that we really need to figure out. There's not really easy answers to that, but I feel like some of the insights you came to there are really key in finding a pathway to get there. So thank you, Jen. I appreciate the conversation.\n\nJEN: So for me, when I'm reflecting on the most is the story that you shared already of trying to get people involved and just having them leave. They show up for a little while and then they disappear and where does all that work go? I'm interested to explore a little bit more of that small project life cycle. \n\nI was pretty fortunate to just come in at a time where there was already a well-established community when I started getting involved in Ember and I'd love to hear more from other people about what are the success stories of those first few steps where someone began this little project and it really started to grow and take off. This might be a case where like some of the strategies I described, they work when you already have an established community. So it's kind of like a catch-22. I don’t know, that could be a really cool future episode is the beginning. \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. That's something I'd definitely like to hear about.\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us, Jen. It was really a pleasure talking with you. \n\nJEN: Thanks so much for having me!Special Guest: Jen Weber.","content_html":"00:47 - Jen’s Superpower: Being Optimistic
\n\n10:13 - Working On Open-Source Projects vs Commercial Software/Products
\n\n12:57 - Major vs Minor Releases
\n\n18:45 - RFC / Feedback Processes
\n\n23:25 - The Ember Core Team
\n\n26:31 - Doing Open Source Better
\n\n39:56 - Participation Encouragement & Engagement Tips
\n\n46:00 - Widening the Pool of Participants
\n\n47:36 - UX-Driven Design (User Experience-Driven Design)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: Perspective of those impacted. Sponsors, users, etc.
\n\nArty: What it’s like to work on a big open source project and the challenges we face.
\n\nJen: Exploring small-project lifecycles.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone and welcome to Episode 253 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: And we are here with our fabulous guest, Jen Weber.
\n\nJen Weber is a member of the Ember.js core team and is a senior software engineer at ActBlue Technical Services. Jen loves open source, rapid prototyping, and making tech a more welcoming industry.
\n\nJen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.
\n\nJEN: Thank you so much for having me.
\n\nDAMIEN: So you should have gotten an email preparing you for the first and most difficult part of every appearance on Greater Than Code. Are you ready for this?
\n\nJEN: I am.
\n
DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
JEN: All right. So I did get that email and I've been thinking about those for the last couple of days. I think my superpower is being able to imagine the ways that things can go well.
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. That's very special.
\n\nJEN: Thank you.
\n\nDAMIEN: How did you acquire that?
\n\nJEN: So I used to be very good at imagining all of the ways that things can go badly. Those are still the patterns that my mind walks whenever I'm confronted with a challenge, but someone gave me some advice. I was recounting to them all of the ways that things could go badly, they were like, “What would it look like if things went well?” I've been trying to build that as a muscle and a skill anytime I'm working on a new project, or something hasn't gone well, something's already gone badly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I found that helped me open up to more creative thinking.
\n\nARTY: I really think that is a superpower and in order for things to go well, for us to manifest good things toward a good direction, we have to be able to see the steps to get there, imagine ourselves walking in that direction to be able to do it. And if we're caught in a loop of worrying about all the things that are going to go wrong, anticipating those things going wrong, then it's like we're going to be waiting for him and doing things that help bring those things that we don't want into being.
\n\nSo if you find yourself in this mode, it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and learned this adaptive skill to break out of this pattern. So what kind of things do you do? Like, do you tell yourself things or ask yourself certain questions, or how do you snap out of that mode and get to a better place where you're thinking about things in a positive frame?
\n\nJEN: Sure. I think for me, the first step is just recognizing when I'm in that negative loop and accepting that it's my first reaction, but that doesn't need to be my conclusion to my thought process. If I'm working on let's say, there's a real-world challenge. Just to give an example as part of my work on the Ember core team, I might think about how do I engage the community and announce that there's going to be this new version of Ember?
\n\nIf I imagine things going badly, I imagine like, “O, wow, nobody even retweets it a single time,” and if I imagine things going well, I think like, “Wow, it's this big moment in tech.” And if it was a big moment in tech, what would have the involved people done to get to that successful end point and trying to work backwards from that to connect the dots. It takes some intentionality, it takes having enough rest, it takes not being over-caffeinated to be able to unlock that kind of thinking.
\n\nDAMIEN: But it sounds so powerful, especially as an engineer, or as an advocate. It's like because we're in the role of making things into what we want them to be, which is things going well, right?
\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it's a little different than a wishful thinking, I would say, because you're still thinking in order for things to go, well, you have to overcome challenges, you have to solve problems, you have to prioritize, there's going to be difficult moments. So you're not just dreaming that this good feature is going to come into existence, but actually figuring out what are the nuts and bolts, and pieces, like, what are the ingredients to that recipe? When we think and reflect on that, how can we take those ingredients and apply them to right now to get where we want to go?
\n\nARTY: So you take that vision and then work backwards and translate that to actual action. These are things that we can do right now to walk the path of getting where we want to go.
\n\nJEN: Mm hm, and it might take you somewhere totally different direction. It might be very different by the time you're done. But usually, you can figure out a few things here and there that are steps in the right direction, and the right direction could be one of many different directions.
\n\nARTY: Do you find yourself ever getting disappointed that things don't go the way you envisioned?
\n\nJEN: Oh yeah, for sure.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, and I think that's a little bit part of the rollercoaster of being involved in software. Like every single day is a series of things going a little different than you thought they would. You read the code; you think it's going to go a certain way. You're wrong; you change your plan. You have this idea of a direction you're going to go, you've thought about what are the successful steps to get there, and then you end up in the wrong corner and you have to go back to the drawing board and surviving those cycles is just part of what we do.
\n\nARTY: So does that superpower help you escape those feelings of disappointment then?
\n\nJEN: Oh yeah, I think so because not that I have some way to see the future, but more that I have tools for helping to figure out what my next step could be.
\n\nARTY: So then you're always focused back on action.
\n\nJEN: Mm hm.
\n\nARTY: And how can I take what I learned and this vision of what a good direction would be, taking these new data points and things into account, and then reimagine and translating that back into action.
\n\nJEN: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: I think that qualifies as a superpower.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I think about it, I guess because I was writing code this morning, and so often, when you're writing – when I'm writing code at least, it's like oh, the phrase was “defensive programming” from a long time ago. How can this go wrong? What happens if this is nil? What happens if some evil guy in a black hat comes in and tries to do something here?
\n\nAnd what I've had to learn and still need to remind myself of is the good case. What is it that we're doing good for our users, or whoever else the code touches? What are they trying to accomplish and what experience are we trying to create for them? And so, both, as an engineer and a product manager, just being able to ask that question and see an answer on a small scale on a feature in stories, super important.
\n\nJEN: Yeah, and even if you're thinking of that adversarial aspect where it's like, you're trying to think through all of the security risks that are involved in developing some software, you can still use this thinking to your advantage. What would a successful future be where somebody tries to exploit that vulnerability and they fail? You've got them. What are the things you built? What are the strategies and habits that that team had? What is the monitoring and infrastructure that resulted in successfully preventing this, or that problem from occurring?
\n\nDAMIEN: It's not only a useful strategy and also, feels really good.
\n\nJEN: Mm hm.
\n\nDAMIEN: That’s great.
\n\nARTY: I like that, though just thinking from a standpoint of just vulnerability, or even a case where things go “wrong,” in the case that you do have somebody hacking your system, or trying to exploit some vulnerability, what's the logging and information infrastructure? What does that story look like where even though these things are happening, we're prepared, we have the right things in place to give us visibility into what's going on, and be able to catch it and address it quickly. Like what do all those things look like such that we're ready to go and can still have a success story, even in the case of these challenges that come up?
\n\nDAMIEN: That sounds connected to something, I think we want to talk about today, which is what goes well when you get a major library upgrade, what does that look like?
\n\nJEN: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot lately; informed by two things. So one is that I'm involved in an Ember, which is a frontend JavaScript framework, and we're getting ready to do a 4.0 major release. So going through all of those exercises to have preparedness all comes back to how do we do this, or what do our users need, what are the resources that are missing?
\n\nThat's one thing on my mind and the other is that I've recently updated some dependencies in the apps that I work in and had a hard time. What can I learn for myself about what to do differently? What can I learn that might be takeaways for library maintainers? What can I share with my coworkers and my collaborators to make this easier next time?
\n\nARTY: What's it like working on an open source project and how does that feel different? What are the different aspects of that from working on a commercial product versus something in the open source community?
\n\nJEN: There's a couple of pieces. The biggest one is that when you're working in your own code base, you have at least a fuzzy picture of what the product is, what the constraints are, how many users there are, and the things that the developers on your team generally know and the things that they don't know. You have all this information that would help you inform how do I roll out some new, big feature, or something like that.
\n\nWhen you're working at open source, your universe of possible products, developers, and users is huge. Like, you could never write down a list of all the ways that somebody is going to be using that software and so, it becomes really different than having a set of well-defined products requirements; we want to get from point A to point B. It's like, we need to give everybody a path forward even though they're using this tool in all these different ways.
\n\nTo do that, a lot of effort goes into gathering feedback from other people in the community. So we use a process called RFCs, or Requests for Comments where someone says, “Hey, I think this would be a good feature. Hey, I think this thing should be removed, or deprecated,” and you have to get feedback. Because we can't imagine all the ways ourselves that someone could use this feature, or tool and then once there's consensus amongst the core team, then something can move forward. But everything goes through a lot of iteration as part of that process.
\n\nSo the overall progress can sometimes feel slow because you have to think through all of this extra weight—the weight of depending on thousands and thousands of developers and billions of users on you to make the right decision. It means you can't just “Oh, let's just merge this breaking change and I'll make this breaking change and I'll just post on Slack to everybody like, ‘Hey, watch out. I just changed this one thing. I documented it here. Good luck.’” You can't really quite pull that lever in the same way, but when you do have a step forward, it's a step forward for all of these apps, for all of these projects, for all of their users and so, little baby steps can still translate into really big impact.
\n\nARTY: So when you have something that's a major release in that context, like a major release of Ember versus a minor release. How are those different? What kind of things do you do in major releases?
\n\nJEN: Yeah, that's a good question.
\n\nSo I'll just provide a little bit of background information on this vocabulary that we're using for anyone who's listening in. A lot of projects follow semantic versioning, which is a set of rules that a lot of projects agree to follow that if you ever see a version number that's like 4.2.1.—oftentimes, that's semantic versioning and action in the first number—is for major releases and a major release is one that has a breaking change.
\n\nSo that means that I make a change in that code base. I would expect that other people would have to change the code in their own apps and they would be forced to go through that—make that change—in order to upgrade to that version for the library I'm working on. Minor is usually used for features. Patch, the last one, is used for bug fixes and internal refactors, things like that.
\n\nNot all projects follow in the same way. Some projects have time-based cycles where they say, “Oh, we do a major release every six months,” or something like that. But for us major releases are breaking changes and the things that are different about them is that we have to give people a path forward to get to the next version. That could include putting some deprecation warnings, any code that's going to get removed or change any API that are going to shift in the next major version. We want to let people know, with a little warning, if they're using those older syntaxes, or APIs, whatever's going to be removed. We also want to try to give a lot of advanced notice about what's going to change, or be removed via blog posts, things like having a help channel set up maybe that's just for those upgrades. When it's time to actually do the major release, we try to make it boring.
\n\nThis is something that I would like to see happen across the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. It does seem to be catching on more, which is that when you do a major version release, all it does is it removes the things that need to be removed. You make your breaking changes and that's it, and then in follow-up releases is when you add in all the new features.
\n\nSo let's say, some API is just the old way of doing things. It doesn't match up with a new rendering engine, or something like that. You're going to want to remove the old thing and then incrementally work to roll out these big splashy, new, exciting features. So maybe your exciting release is actually going to be 4.1, or 4.2, or 4.3.
\n\nThis has a couple benefits. It lets your major releases be a little less risky because you're not just removing code and then adding new code at the same time. It lets people not be as overwhelmed like, “Oh, first I have to deal with all of these things that are removed, or changed and then now I also have to learn this whole new way of thinking about how to write my app using this tool.” It lets you take little baby steps towards doing things in a different way.
\n\nDAMIEN: Does this mean, in an ideal scenario, that if you don't have any deprecation warnings—if you're taking care of all the deprecation warnings—then your major release can go – you can upgrade some next major version without a code change.
\n\nJEN: Yeah, that's the dream.
\n\nDAMIEN: It does sound like a dream.
\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it's not always perfect, but it's an important pathway towards including more people and participating in upgrades, app maintenance, and creating sustainable code bases so you don't have to follow the Twitter, the blog post, and be checking the JavaScript subreddit just to keep up on with what's going on. You're not going to be surprised by big sweeping changes.
\n\nSo coming back to this experience I had with upgrading a different library recently, I was upgrading major Jest versions and was very surprised to see that there were a ton of breaking changes in a changelog and I got a little bit frustrated with that. And then I went back and I read the blog posts and I saw a blog post from 2 years ago saying, “These are the things that we are doing, this is what is happening,” and that was great, but I wasn't doing Jest tests 2 years ago and so, I missed all of that. Can we use the code base itself to connect those dots, make those suggestions, and guide people towards the work that they do?
\n\nDAMIEN: If they put those deprecation warnings in 2 years ago, you would've had 2 years to make those changes.
\n\nJEN: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And then when you finally upgraded, it would have been a dream, or have been painless.
\n\nJEN: Yeah, and maybe they're there. Maybe there are some and I just need to pass the debug flag, or something. Hopefully, there's nobody who's shouting at their computer. But there's this one thing that we put it in the console log output, or something. It's possible I overlooked it but.
\n\nDAMIEN: I want to rewind a little bit back to the challenge of dealing with a product that is used in so many contexts by so many people, like Ember is, and the RFC process. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that is what do you do with contradictory feedback? Surely, you must have hundreds of engineers who say, “You have to get rid of this,” and hundreds who say, “No, this has to stay.” How does the core team manage that?
\n\nJEN: Yeah. So I think the most important piece is the contradictory feedback needs to be considered. So it's not just like, “Oh, let's collect these comments as annual feedback forms,” or anything like that.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nThis isn't like, “Oh, let's do some natural language processing on these comments to figure out if the sentiment is positive, or negative.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nNone of that stuff you have to actually read through them and think what could I do using this new feature to help meet this person's needs, or what's at the heart of the objection that they're making? If someone is saying, “This doesn't work for my team,” and entering that process with a willingness to iterate. In the end, we can't make everybody happy all the time, or no RFC would ever get moved forward. There's always going to be a point where you have to prioritize the pros and cons, and ultimately, the decision comes down to reaching consensus amongst the core team members.
\n\nSo being able to say, as a group, “We believe that the feedback has been considered. We believe that the iterations have been incorporated, the people's concerns have been addressed,” or “We're going to work to create tools that think that problem be not a problem for them,” and find a way to move forward with whatever the proposal is. Or sometimes, the proposals don't move forward. Sometimes, they get closed.
\n\nARTY: Is the work you end up choosing to do primarily driven by this feedback process, or do you have some visionary leadership within the core team that drives a lot of things forward that aren't necessarily coming via feedback?
\n\nJEN: That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. So certainly, a lot of RFCs have come from the community and from people asking like, “Hey, can we have this better way of doing things? I have an idea.” And then other times, you do have to have that visionary leadership.
\n\nSo to give an example, we have just started doing – well, I shouldn't say just started doing that. I think it's been like 2 years now. We have started doing this process called additions where if there's a big splashy set of cool features that are meant to be used together, we give it a name. That's separate from the breaking changes process, ideally. We can create nice, new splashy sets of features without breaking people's apps and trying to design that experience isn’t something that you can just piecemeal through RFCs waiting for feedback to come through.
\n\nThere were quite a few members of the core team that designed a new way of building Ember apps that was better aligned with focusing on HTML as the core of building for the web and focusing on JavaScript features as opposed to requiring developers to know and understand the special API syntaxes. You can just write JavaScript classes instead of needing to understand what an Ember object is.
\n\nSo aligning ourselves more with the skills that everybody, who works in the web, has at least a little bit of. That took a lot of brainstorming, a lot of planning, and ultimately, introducing those things still follows an RFC process. Somebody still has to say, “Here's the thing we want to change, or do, or add. Here's the greater vision for it.” But to get that big picture look still requires the big thinking. So the core team, I don't even know how much time. They must've spent countless hours trying to hash out those details.
\n\nARTY: How big is the core team?
\n\nJEN: So there's several core teams. Though when you say the core team as a whole encompasses people who work on the data layer, the command line tools, the learning tools, and then the framework itself. I want to say, could look this up, it's like upwards of 30 people, I think.
\n\nARTY: Wow.
\n\nJEN: I can get you the exact number later, [chuckles] but everyone's pulling out their different area of domain and so, all of those teams also have to coordinate around these major releases because we want to make sure the work that we're doing is complimentary. If we do the framework improvements, but we don't fix up the docs, we’re not on the good path for a successful release.
\n\nARTY: Are people working on this stuff full-time? Are people funded, or doing this in their free time, or how does that work? Because there's this big picture challenge of we have this ideal of community sourced, open source projects, and then the realities of trying to fund and support that effort bumps up to constraints of needing to make a living and things and these sorts of difficulties. How do y'all manage that?
\n\nJEN: It's a mixture.
\n\nSo the Ember project is fortunate to have a major player—LinkedIn—that uses Ember and so, some of the core team members, their work on Ember is part of their LinkedIn work because of the frameworks doing well, then LinkedIn projects that are going to be doing well. There's also a number of people who are consultants, or who run consultancies that do Ember work, they're involved. Their voice is an important part of making sure that again, we're serving a variety of apps, not just ah, this is this tool that's just for the LinkedIn websites. But it's like, they've seen so many different kinds of apps; they're working on so many different kinds of apps right now. And then there's people who help out on more of a volunteer basis.
\n\nSo I've been in my past work, it was at a different job. It was part of my job responsibilities to participate on the framework core team. These days, I'm more of a volunteer and I mostly help organize other volunteers—people who want to do some professional development to learn, people who want to network, people who found something that they're frustrated about enough that they want to fix it themselves. That’s how I got involved; I wanted to learn. So that's the sustainability of having people involved is always an ongoing challenge it is for every open source organization, I think.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. Do you have any ideas on how we can do those sorts of things better? As you said, it's a concern, in general with how do we do open source better with these kinds of constraints? And then two, I feel like there's been some cultural shifts, I guess, you could say over time of you think about when the open source movement first started.
\n\nWe had a lot more of this community ownership ideal where we really were going and building software together and now, there's a lot more of, well, there's all this free software out there that we use, that we build on top of to build our apps on, but that ownership piece isn't really there. It's an expectation that there should just be this free software out there that's maintained that we get and why is it falling apart?
\n\nSo I feel like, culturally, just over time, some of those things have shifted as far as expectations around open source and then you talked about some of the corporate sponsorship aspects with usage as being one way these things get funded. But I'm wondering if you have ideas on how some of these things could work better.
\n\nJEN: People have done PhDs on this topic, I'm pretty sure. [chuckles] Like, theses. I read a white paper, a really involved white paper, a few weeks ago that was about, what was it? it was called something like the Burden of Maintaining Software, or something like that and it did this deep dive into how much goes in and just keeping the ship afloat. How much goes into just if there's a package that needs to be updated? That kind of ongoing, constant, mundane work that adds up really, really big.
\n\nSo for very large projects, I think it's a good thing to have some sort of an evolvement of a sponsor company, if you will and so, that sponsor company may not actually ever donate any money, but the time of their engineers that they say like, “Hey, we're willing to help support this project” is really important.
\n\nI think another piece is that the leadership of projects should consider the people involved, that that group is going to be rotating. That people's involvement is ephemeral. Every time somebody changes jobs, maybe they're not going to be involved in that project anymore. If we can think about that ahead of time, plan for it, and make sure that we are sharing knowledge with each other such that the project can survive somebody moving onto something else, it can survive somebody going on vacation for a while.
\n\nSo I think that's another key component of success is how do you make it so that you're not just relying on the same set of people still being there so many years later? We’ve been very fortunate within the Ember community that a lot of the same people have stuck around, but I try really hard not to bank on that. The group of contributors that I help organize, I think, “Hey.” We have a chat every time somebody joins the learning core team and say, “Hey, we get that you're not going to be here forever. Please let us know what we can do to support you. Please let us know when you're thinking of taking a break, or taking a step back. Please involve other people on any project that you're working on so that they will also continue your work and also support you so you don't get burnt out.
\n\nAnother thing I try to do is always framing the work into how it values the contributor. Sometimes in open source you hear this discussion of like, “Oh, well, everyone should participate in open source because we all benefit from it.” There's a better attitude that we can have, I think, which is that for people who are interested in participating, what can they get out of it? What can I do as a leader to help them get something out of this?
\n\nIf you just approach it with this altruism of “This is a community and I want to help,” that'll get you like a little bit. But if you can say, “I want to help because I want to learn from other developers,” that's something I can deliver on. That's something that they can take. That's valuable for their future earning potential, income, confidence, maybe they'll make the connection that helps them find their next job. Even if someone isn't being paid to help out, is there something that they can take away from this? And lastly, just acknowledging that doing work for free is a privilege as well.
\n\nWe have to reframe how we think about open source sustainability, too. Not everybody can devote a few hours after work here and there and involving them and including them means that it's got to be part of their workday. So continuing to socialize from the company level that engineers should have a little bit of time here and there to try to help improve an open source project. Everybody doing that just a little bit helps with quite a few of the problems that these projects face.
\n\nARTY: I've been thinking about this myself and you work directly, you're significantly involved in a major open source project, and so, you see things that a lot of people don't have perspective on. So I appreciate your insights on this.
\n\nI'm wondering what if major companies that were using open source software, if we made more efforts for companies to be a project sponsor and donate part of the company somebody who's on the company's time to help contribute to projects as like a thing. I feel like if that thing caught on, that the companies that were using this software for free [chuckles] had more of a sense of a social obligation to be one of the people that contribute some time to helping with that. Or get some companies that are big enough, too. It's probably easier and they have more interest in those sorts of things.
\n\nBut I feel like if we did make that more of a thing, that that would be useful because as you're saying, somehow realistically speaking, this has to be something that can be worked into the workday.
\n\nJEN: Yes.
\n\nARTY: For us to be able to support and sustain these things. And people that can do that outside of their workday as an extra free time thing. It really is a privilege.
\n\nJEN: Yeah. I think a couple of strategies that can help here are to frame it in the value to the company and frame it as a value to the users, frame it as a value to the engineering team. So rather than having it be like, “Oh, you use free software, you should do this thing.” Instead more like engineers, we always need to learn constantly in order to keep improving our own skills and to keep up with things that are changing.
\n\nSo having an open source hour, or something like that—it takes a little more than an hour usually to accomplish much. But having a period of time that engineers were allowed to contribute to open sources. Professional development that you don't have to pay for a subscription. You don't have to pay for a licensing fee. You don't have to pay for somebody’s conference submission. If someone has the opportunity to reach outside of their sphere of knowledge, or comfort zone and it just so happens that if they succeed, it'll benefit your company maybe indirectly.
\n\nAnother piece is what's the value to the users? So there were a bunch of people who all contributed effort towards bringing some improved linting tools for the template system within Ember. When we think of linting tools, we usually think that's like, “Oh, here's this thing to remind me to use nice tidy syntax and don't make my variable names too long and space everything out in a certain way,” but they can also help us find real actual problems in our apps.
\n\nSo an example that this team worked on is they introduced some more linting rules for accessibility. If one person succeeds in introducing this new linting rule for accessibility, then it's there in their app for their team and they get to stop talking about, “Hey, make sure you do this one thing” over and over again because now it's enforced in the code base. Also, they've brought this benefit to all of the other apps that are out there.
\n\nAgain, sometimes you can tie it back in to that value for the product and for the users, and really trying to think creatively about that connection. Because there's so many different things we can all spend our time on, you've really got to sell it in a way that aligns with the goals, or values of that organization.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. I like that reframing. I can see just how important that is. Other things I'm thinking about if you had a dev team and one of your developers was really involved with the Ember core team, you'd have more knowledge about how things worked. So when something was broken, or something, you probably have more insight into what was going on and being able to help the team more effectively –
\n\nJEN: Yeah. [overtalk]
\n\nARTY: To build stuff. And then if there's any suggestions, or things that could make things easier for your team, you'd have the ability to have influence with getting RFPs through to get changes made and things. I think you're right. It needs to be reframed as a value proposition.
\n\nJEN: Yeah, and it also requires an attitude shift on the side of the projects as well. There's tons of people who've tried to do open source and hit running straight into a wall of they open up pull requests that are never merged, or even reviewed and that can be a really frustrating experience. And some projects just don't have the feedback structure, or the governance structure that really allows open participation either.
\n\nSo that's something that I think is an ongoing journey with lots of projects. It's like, how do we communicate? How do we involve other people? What types of decisions do we say like, “Hey, implementer, or community, you're in charge, you can make this” versus things that have to pass some sort of review. It’s not just a one side of companies need to step up, but also, maintainers seem to have a long-term vision of how they're interacting with everybody else.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I really love that frame of this is professional development and that you can get for free. That's like how would you like to educate your engineers and make them better engineers, especially on the tools you work on and not –? Yeah, that's really awesome. But then of course, on the other side, you need a welcoming environment. That's like, “Oh yeah, when you make a contribution, we're going to look at it. We're going to give you useful feedback on it.”
\n\nJEN: Yeah. I tried to get an open source project going a few years ago and I struggled for a while and eventually ended up giving up. But some of the things I ran into, I'd have somebody that would volunteer to help out with things and I'd work with them long enough to just start to get a feel for things and be able to contribute and then they would disappear. [laughs] And I go through that process a few times.
\n\nIt's like, “Oh, yay. I'm excited, I get –” another person has volunteered and so, then I go and start working with them and trying to – and I put a lot of attention into trying to get things going and then they disappear. t was difficult to try and get traction in that way and eventually, I went, “Well, I'm back by myself again” [laughs] and that I just need to keep going.
\n\nARTY: Right. So what kind of things have you found help with getting that participation aspect going and what kind of things are barriers that get in the way that maybe we can be better at?
\n\nJEN: Yeah. So my advice is always start with using the buddy system. Trying to pair program with people, who I'm hoping to stay involved, and the leveling up version of that is the people who are contributing pair with each other. It's so much more fun. There's so much more of a learning experience when it's two developers working on the project.
\n\nLeft to my own devices, the projects that I work on, I have to really dig into my willpower to keep them moving if I'm the only person working on it versus if we're pairing, what's the value that I'm getting? It's like, I get to hear how the other person approaches the problem. I get to experience how they work. They teach me things. I teach them things. We have this good rapport.
\n\nSo I pair once a week with my friend, Chris, and we work on everything from this kind of mundane stuff to the big vision, like what would we do if we could totally change how this thing works, or something like that, and that kind of energy and get ideas, they build up. So that's one piece.
\n\nThe other, this one's difficult, but having well-scoped, well-written issues is a huge time sink, but also, it can be one of the best ways get people engaged and keep them engaged. If I stop writing really specific issues, people peter off. Someone will ask, maybe only once, they'll ask, “Hey, I want to help out, or something. What should I pick up next?” They don't usually ask a second time, but I don't have something right away to hand off to them.
\n\nSo what is the momentum? Can I keep writing up issues and things that other people can follow through with? And then presenting them with increasing levels of challenge of like, “I have this unstructured problem. We've worked on this a lot together. You can do this. How would you approach this? What do you think we should do?” I don't necessarily say,” You can do this,” because it’s more of a subtle cheerleading that's happening than that.
\n\nBut “I'd love to hear your proposal of what should happen next” just is a really powerful moment and sometimes, that can be the thing that catapults somebody into taking more ownership of a project and gathering together other people to help them out. And then people do come and go, but the commits are still there! So that's something, right?
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nLike, things have taken some steps forward.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. People come and go, that's something you know you have to accept on an open source project, but it happens in other places, too. [chuckles] No team stays together for all of eternity.
\n\nJEN: Right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Is the project going to live on and how can you make it so that it does? So these are very good lessons, even for that.
\n\nARTY: It seems like just investing in thinking about, we were talking initially about planning for the success case, even when things happen. So if we think about the case of okay, people are going to leave the team. [chuckles] What's the success case look like? Imagining the way that things go really well when people are leaving the team, what does that look like? What are the things that we wish we had in place to be able to ramp people up quickly, to be able to find new people, to work on the project quickly? All of those things that we can think about and open source has this to a much larger degree and challenge so that you really have to think about it a lot.
\n\nWhere on a commercial project, it's one of those things that often happens when you wish it wouldn't and one of the things I see in corporate companies is you'll have a management change, or something will happen with a product that upsets a bunch of people and you'll have exodus phase on the project and then ending up often rewriting things because you lose your core knowledge on the project and nobody knows what's going on anymore and it actually becomes easier to rewrite the things than to [chuckles] figure out how it works. If we had imagined the ways that things could go well and prepared for those certain circumstances, maybe we wouldn't be in that situation.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. You mentioned something really important there, too, which is what can we do to help people spin up more quickly on something. That's another big piece of sustained engagement because you need a group of people spun up quickly. You need a group of people who can figure out the next steps on their own. And so, we've spent a lot of time, the projects that I work most actively on, making sure that everything is there in the Read Me, making sure that if you run npm start that things work if you're running it on a different environment. Those types of little things, reducing those barriers can also go a long way and just widening the pool of people who could potentially help is another big one.
\n\nDAMIEN: How do you do that? Because you're a core contributor on the project. You have the curse of knowledge.
\n\nJEN: Yes.
\n\nDAMIEN: You have a development scene that is tightly home to work on this project.
\n\nJEN: That's a great question. Ah, I do have the curse of knowledge. Being easy to reach so that if people do encounter problems that they can find you and tell you, which can be, it can be a small step. Just making sure that if you have a documentation page, it's got a link at the bottom that’s like, “Find a problem, open an issue!” That sort of thing.
\n\nAlso, I'm pretty active on Twitter. Sometimes other contributors, experienced contributors, they'll spot something that somebody else has posted and they'll say, “Hey, Jen, take a look at this,” and they bring it to my attention. There's this team effort to uncover those gaps.
\n\nAnother aspect is just working in the open. So having open meetings, having open chat channels, places where people can interact with the people leading the projects, they can come to the meetings, things like that means that we're more likely to hear their feedback. So if we get feedback, “Hey, this thing was difficult,” making sure that we address it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow. Well.
\n\nJEN: I'm really big into user experience driven design. We've been talking about maintainability a lot, we’ve been talking about the code, and versions, and things, but coming back to what is the impact for our users.
\n\nIf you accept a user experience driven way of developing software, it means that you're always going to need to be upgrading, you're always going to have to be flexing, changing, and growing because the products of 2 years ago versus the product of today can be really different. Open source library that you needed to rely on 2 years ago versus today. Maybe the web app ecosystem has shifted. Maybe there's new ways of doing things. Maybe there's new syntaxes that are available.
\n\nSometimes, it can be a little frustrating because you feel like, “Oh, there's this endless pile of work. We made all these wrong choices back in the day and now this thing's hard to upgrade,” and all that.
\n\nA different mindset is to think about what do we know today that is different than what we knew yesterday? What are the things we know today about our users that inform our next move? How do these upgrades, or improvements, or my choice of open source library help the end user have a better experience? And trying to come back to that big picture from time to time, because it can be pretty frustrating. When you get stuck, you think like, “Oh, I can't. I just tried to upgrade this major version and everything broke and everything's terrible. But what's the feature list look like, how am I going to use this to deliver something better to the users can really help?”
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow.
\n\nARTY: So at this part of the show, we usually do reflections and finish off with any final thoughts we had, or takeaways from the episode.
\n\nDamien, you want to start?
\n\nDAMIEN: The big takeaway I got from this is kind of… it's perspective. Jen, you mentioned a user experience driven design. I was already really close to that language, but from a perspective of contributors to an open source project, sponsors—both in terms of engineering and then money—and then also, users. Like, these are also users. These are also people who are impacted by the work we do. So in order to do it successfully, it's very important to think of how can this go well for them and then move to that direction. So thank you, that was really great.
\n\nM: For me, the big takeaway, I feel like I learned a whole lot just perspective wise of what it's like to work on a big open source project. I haven't really had a conversation like this with someone that's been that involved with a major resource project before. So I found that really insightful.
\n\nOne of the big questions I asked you about how do we make this sustainable? [laughs] Like all the challenges around things. I know they're big challenges that we face in figuring that out and you had some really key insights around how we can frame things differently as opposed to framing it as an obligation, like a social obligation, or you should do this altruistically because it's the right thing to do as the appeal that we make is when you're talking to a contributor, how do you frame things to be a value proposition for them as an individual. When we're talking to a company, how do we frame things in a way so there's a value proposition for the company to get involved with doing something? And change the way that we frame all these things to be able to get folks involved because they realize benefits as individuals, as company, as people being directly involved in things?
\n\nI feel like if we can do some work to maybe change some of the framing around things. That maybe there's a pathway there to increase engagement and support of open source projects, which I think is one of those things that we really need to figure out. There's not really easy answers to that, but I feel like some of the insights you came to there are really key in finding a pathway to get there. So thank you, Jen. I appreciate the conversation.
\n\nJEN: So for me, when I'm reflecting on the most is the story that you shared already of trying to get people involved and just having them leave. They show up for a little while and then they disappear and where does all that work go? I'm interested to explore a little bit more of that small project life cycle.
\n\nI was pretty fortunate to just come in at a time where there was already a well-established community when I started getting involved in Ember and I'd love to hear more from other people about what are the success stories of those first few steps where someone began this little project and it really started to grow and take off. This might be a case where like some of the strategies I described, they work when you already have an established community. So it's kind of like a catch-22. I don’t know, that could be a really cool future episode is the beginning.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. That's something I'd definitely like to hear about.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us, Jen. It was really a pleasure talking with you.
\n\nJEN: Thanks so much for having me!
Special Guest: Jen Weber.
","summary":"Jen Weber talks about differences between working on open source vs commercial software products, things you should keep in mind when it comes to pushing major vs minor releases, and ways we as an industry could do open source better as a collective whole.","date_published":"2021-10-06T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0e1f0e6a-75bb-413d-8ec0-e40f349976ae.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":43996939,"duration_in_seconds":3265}]},{"id":"ccc46d05-0d0b-41e9-b298-cd41417455e7","title":"252: Designing For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/designing-for-safety","content_text":"TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety\n\n01:26 - Eva’s Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus\n\n\nWorkplace Accommodation\nAt-Will Employment\n\n\n08:19 - Design for Safety\n\n\nTech Used For Interpersonal Harm\nMight vs When\nEva Penzey Moog | Designing Against Domestic Violence \nWeaponizing Technology\n\n\n12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know\n\n\nControl/Shared Accounts\nSurveillance\nLocation Data\n\n\n15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “User” Means \n\n\n“User as an abstraction.”\n\n\n20:43 - Parallels with Security\n\n\nPersonas / Archetypes\nAdding Layers of Friction\nOngoing Arms Race\n\n\n22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery\n\n\nSafety Designers as a Specialized Role?\nGeneralists vs Specialists; Literacy vs Fluency\nThis Book Is For Everyone: Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, etc.\n\n\n31:38 - Thinking Beyond The User\n\n\nConstituency\nDesign Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock \n\n\n35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy\n\n\nWe Prioritize The Safety of Marginalized People Over the Comfort of Unmarginalized People\nHow Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy (Workshop)\nKim Crayton: Intention Without Strategy is Chaos\nSitting with Discomfort\n\n\n40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls\n\n\n“Ergonomics is the marriage of design and ethics.” \nThe History of Seatbelts\nGovernment Regulation\nWorker Organizing\n\n\n45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege \n\n\nOverpaid/Underpaid\n\n\nReflections:\n\nMandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse.\n\nDamien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be.\n\nCoraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks. \n\nThe internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we’re breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences?\n\nEva: Who didn’t teach you about this? \n\nIt’s our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for user safety.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nMANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke.\n\nDAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.\n\nCORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today. \n\nHer name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety.\n\nBefore joining the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in user experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable users.\n\nEva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi!\n\nEVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.\n\nCORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it?\n\nEVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to until the age of 25, which is when I was diagnosed.\n\nFor people who don't know, hyperfocus is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a state of very intense focus that people with ADHD will sometimes go into. It's not something you really have control over, it's not something you can just turn on, or off, and it isn't necessarily good, or bad. \n\nBut for me, I'm really lucky because it often gets triggered when I start to code. So as I was starting to learn code and then I switched over to focusing on design and frontend like CSS and SAAS. But as I was learning that stuff, it gets triggered all the time. So I can sit down and code and oftentimes, hours have gone past and so long as I don't like miss any meetings or forget to eat, it's totally a superpower.\n\nCORALINE: That's amazing. \n\nI've talked about before, I live with bipolar disorder and I tend to stay in a low-grade manic state as my resting place and I experience very similar things with that hyper focus and just losing hours on a task and sometimes, it's very positive and I get a lot done and sometimes, I'm like, “What the hell did I do?” [chuckles]\n\nEVA: Right.\n\nCORALINE: But I think it's great that—I've been talking to some other folks with ADHD, with bipolar—the judo moves we can do takes something that really negatively affects us in a lot of ways and finding a way to turn it around, like you said, and use it as a superpower. Those are the strategies we develop when we live with things like this and I'm always happy when people have figured out how to get something good out of that.\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally and realizing that you have this thing that happens. Because I'm sure it's been happening my whole life, but I didn't recognize it, or understand it and then just being able to name it and see that it's happening is so powerful. And then to be like, “Oh, I can maybe do certain things to try to get into it,” or just being aware that it's a thing it's like very powerful.\n\nCORALINE: I'm kind of curious, Eva, if you don't mind us talking about ADHD for a little while?\n\nEVA: Sure. Yeah. \n\nCORALINE: Okay. I have a friend who is – actually, a couple of friends who were very recently diagnosed with ADHD and they had so much trouble in the traditional tech were workplace, especially working for companies that have productivity metrics like lines of code, or number of commits, or something like that. It was really difficult for both of these friends to operate in an environment where you're expected to have very consistent output day over day and not having accommodation, or not having the ability to design their work in such a way that maximizes the positives of how they work and minimizes the negatives of how they work. \n\nIs that something you've struggled with as well?\n\nEVA: Yeah, and that’s so unfortunate that your friends because like I said, I feel like it is a superpower and most workplaces, they should be trying to harness it and understand that, you can have really, really awesome employees with ADHD. If you set them up for success, they can be so successful. \n\nBut it is something – so I've only ever worked at 8th Light actually, when I was interviewing, over 5 years ago now, and started doing, trying to find my first job in tech, after doing a bootcamp, I interviewed at a couple different places and none of them felt super great. But obviously, I was just really eager to get my first job. \n\nBut then I went into 8th Light and 8th Light was one of the places where I really, really did want to work there and was really excited for the interview. But when I got to the office, it was very quiet and there was an open workspace, but people were working very quietly and there were like lots of rooms. \n\nI got into that and I was like, “Oh, thank God” like, this is exactly the space I need. I can't handle too much activity. I can't handle offices where they're actually playing music; that type of thing is my nightmare and I don't actually like wearing headphones all day like that. That's not just a easy fix for me and for a lot of people with ADHD. \n\nSo I felt like right away, now I want to work here even more and I've been really lucky that it's been a really good setup for someone like me to work and I have gotten some accommodations which has been good. I feel like if you don't give accommodations, they're breaking the law, they need to do that.\n\nDAMIEN: This is really, really validating because I've had similar experiences of that. Even just this morning where I was in the code and I had no idea how much time was going by and I had no awareness of anything else. That's possible because of the environment I have that I work in. Whereas, previous jobs I've had with bullpens and just open office plans, I was in incredibly miserable there and I didn't understand how people could get any work done in those environments. So just this understanding of how people are different; in what environments some people thrive in and other environments other people thrive in.\n\nEVA: Yeah. So have you always worked from home, or has this been a pandemic thing?\n\nDAMIEN: This has been probably about 10 years. Yeah. [laughs] I went home and never left. [laughs]\n\nEVA: Nice. [chuckles]\n\nCORALINE: I've done something very similar. I started working from home, I think in 2015 and not for a great reason, but I found the exact same thing that you're talking about. Like I am very sensitive to my environment. I use music to control my mood and like you, Eva, I hate headphones. So I do wonder, you mentioned accommodations and the legal perspective on that. In Illinois where – Eva, you live in Illinois, too. Are you local for 8th Light? \n\nEVA: Yeah. I live in Chicago. \n\nCORALINE: We have that will employment and it's really easy to discriminate against folks on multiple axes rather than providing our accommodations. Without will employment, they can just let you go and you have no proof that it was because they're ableist, or racist or transphobic, or whatever.\n\nEVA: Oh, yeah. That's so rough. Pritzker's got to get on that. Our governor. [chuckles]\n\nCORALINE: So do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote? I understand a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it and really opening their eyes to a lot of maybe issues they weren't aware of.\n\nEVA: Yeah. So my book, Design for Safety, came out in early August and it's been really great to see people's reactions to it. I got my first formal book review, which was really cool and it was overall very positive, which has been very exciting. \n\nI'm hopeful that it is helping people understand that this is a thing because it's different, I feel like than a lot of other problems. Someone else explained this to me recently and I had this light bulb moment that I'm not providing a solution to a problem that people know that they have this problem, like how their tech is used for interpersonal harm and now I have a solution like, here's this book that's going to tell you how to fix it. It's more that people don't even know that this is a problem. \n\nSo I'm educating on that as well as trying to give some of the solutions on how to fix it. It has been a lot of people just saying like, “I had no idea about any of this. It's been so eye-opening and now I'm going to think about it more and do these different things.” So that's been really great to see that just people’s awareness is going up, basically.\n\nMANDY: I really like on the website, the sentence that there's a pullout quote, or I'm not sure if it's even a pullout quote, but it says, “If abuse is possible, it's only a matter of time until it happens. There's no might, so let's build better, safer digital products from the start.” I like that.\n\nEVA: Yeah, thanks. I was very intentional and well, this goes back to when I was doing a conference talk. Before I wrote the book, I did a conference talk called Designing Against Domestic Violence and I thought a lot about the type of language should I use; should I say might happen, or should I say will happen? I eventually settled on it's going to happen even if it hasn't happened yet, or oftentimes, I think we just don't know that it's happened. \n\nPeople who have gone through domestic violence, some of then we'll talk openly about it. But most people just don't, which makes sense. It's this really intense, personal thing to go through and there's so much judgment and survivors get blamed for all these things. So it makes sense that people don't want to talk that much about it. I ended up thinking we just need to say that it will happen.\n\nDAMIEN: That's amazing. So I really want to know everything about this book. [chuckles] but to start with, you said the book is designing for safety and you witnessed this a little bit with domestic violence, violence and abuse. Can you talk about safe from what sort of things you mean when you say safety there?\n\nEVA: Yeah, for sure because I know safety is a big word that can mean a lot of different things. But the way that I'm talking about it in my work is in terms of interpersonal safety. So it's like how is someone who has a relationship with you in an interpersonal way going to use technology, weaponized technology, in a way that was not meant to be used? We aren't designing tech with these use cases in mind, but how is it ultimately going to be weaponized for some type of abuse? \n\nDomestic violence is really the emphasis and my big focus and was mentioned in the intro, some background in domestic violence space. But there's also issues with child abuse and elder abuse, especially in terms of surveillance of those groups as well as surveillance of workers is another thing that came up a lot as I was researching that I didn't get as much into in the book. But it's basically anytime there's an interpersonal relationship and someone has access to you in this personal way where you're not just an anonymous stranger, how is tech going to be used to exert some form of control, or abuse over that person?\n\nDAMIEN: Wow, that is a very important subject. So I'm an engineer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, anything of that nature and I know you've written a whole book [laughs] and we only have an hour, or so here, but what are the first things that people, or engineers need to know about this?\n\nEVA: Yeah, so I think the first thing is to understand that this is a problem and that it's happening and to go through some different examples of how this happens, which is what the first couple chapters of the book are all about. It's different forms of this interpersonal abuse via technology in the form of shared accounts is a really big one and this question of who has control and nebulous issues of control. There's also surveillance is a really big one and then location data as well. \n\nSo I guess, I don't want to say like, “Oh, just read the book,” but learning a little bit about the different – there's so many different examples of how this works. Just to start to build that mental model of how this happens like, someone taking advantage of certain affordances within a shared bank account software, or someone using an internet of things device to gaslight someone, or torment them. \n\nThere's so many different examples. Location data shows up in all sorts of really sneaky in terms of stalking. It's not purely putting a tracker on someone's car, or even like Google Map and sharing your location is a more straightforward thing. But there's also, it shows up in other ways like, a grocery store app that has a timestamp and location. You can learn someone's grocery shopping habits and maybe you're estranged from this person, or they've left you because you're abusive, but they don't know that their stuff is showing up in this app and their location data. So it shows up in all sorts of different ways.\n\nThis is a very long way to answer your question, but I think the first thing is to start to understand how this stuff works so that you're just aware of it and then from there, I have a whole chapter about how to implement a practice of designing for safety at your company. It is a little more design focused, but I think engineers can absolutely be doing this work, too. Even if it's just like quick research on how are any product with any type of message feature is going to be used for abuse and there’s lots of literature out there. So just looking at some articles, thinking about ways that aren't covered already, that just having a brainstorm about what are some new ways this might be used for abuse and then thinking about how to prevent them. \n\nCORALINE: One of the things that I was thinking about after reading your book, Eva, is at a metal level, or zooming out a bit. I think a lot of the ways that we design software, we have this idealized and homogenous notion of a user. I think that in a lot of cases, especially if you're working on a project that's like more, or less one of those scratch your own itch problems, you tend to think of yourself as the user. \n\nIt's great to have that empathy for the end user, but what we don't have, I don't think as a field, is an understanding that user is an abstraction and it is a useful abstraction. But sometimes you need to zoom down a little bit and understand the different ways that people want to use the software and will use the software and what makes them different from this average idealized user. \n\nThat was one of the things that really struck me, especially from the process you were describing, is expanding our understanding of what user means and anticipating the different use cases with hostile users, with actively abusive users, and I think thinking of abstraction is super helpful, but I feel like sometimes we need to zoom down and think differently about really who the people are and what their circumstances might be.\n\nEVA: Yeah. Oh man, I just wrote down what you said, user is an abstraction. That's such a good way to think about it that I haven't heard before, but you're absolutely right that it's encapsulating such a big group of people. Even if for a small product, something that's not like Twitter that's open to billions of people, even something that's a subscription, or something that's going to have a smaller user base. There's going to be such a diverse, different group within there and to just think of the term user as a catchall is definitely problematic. \n\nSorry, I'm just processing that user is an abstraction, that term because we use it so much as designers, definitely.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: And anyone in tech is always using this term, but problematizing that term in a new way is really interesting to me.\n\nAnd I think my other thought about this is that we talk a lot about needing to think about more than just happy path and I feel like even that, at least in my experience, has been other things that are also very important where it's like, let's think about someone who has a crappy Wi-Fi connection, or someone who's low vision. Like there are all these other very important things to think about in terms of accessibility and inclusivity. \n\nI think I see what I'm doing as just adding another group into the mix of let's think about people who are currently surviving domestic violence, which is maybe a little bit harder to bring up than those other two that I mentioned because it's just so dark and it's something that we just don't want to have to think about, or talk about during work. It's just such a bummer, but it is really important to have this new group added when we're thinking about inclusive and accessible tech.\n\nDAMIEN: There's a really great parallel here, I think with security minded design and research. Again, that's another user who is not behaving in the happy path. That's not behaving the way your normal users are behaving and you have to design your system in such a way to be resilient to that. \n\nSo I love this user as an abstraction, then breaking it down into all these ways and then also, there's a huge value to diversity in your team with this sort of thing. \n\nCORALINE: Absolutely.\n\nDAMIEN: You can understand the very different types of users having people on the team who can understand blackhat users who are going to be trying to use your servers to mine Bitcoin, or [laughs] blind users, low vision users, or colorblind users, for goodness’ sake. And then in addition to that, people again, who are experiencing domestic violence, other to terms of other forms of interpersonal abuse and just being able to understand all those users and their experiences with the things you're building and designing.\n\nEVA: Yeah, definitely those are all really good points. \n\nJust going back to what you said about the parallels with security is something I've actually been thinking about that a lot, because I think there are lots of parallels to that, or useful things about how security professionals think about their work and operate. \n\nEspecially the big one for me right now is thinking about a security professional. They're never going to be like, “Okay, we did it. Our system is secure. We're done. We have arrived.” That's not a thing and I feel like it's very similar with designing for safety, or even inclusion. There's just, you're never – I feel like we've had a mental model of “I can think about these things, I can check these boxes, and now, my product is inclusive, or my product is accessible.” \n\nI feel like we should be thinking more like security professionals where there's always going to be more things like, we always have to be vigilant about what's the next way that someone's going to misuse tech, or the group that’s going to be identified that we've totally left out and is being harmed in some way. So I think that's just a useful shift that I'm thinking a lot about.\n\nCORALINE: And Damien, I'm so glad you brought up the parallels with security. I was actually going there as well. \n\nOne of the things that I've been thinking about from an ethical source perspective is insecurity that, I think two tools that would be super useful. First of all, personas and secondly—I guess, three things—understanding that safety can be a matter of adding layers of friction to disincentivize abusive behavior and like you said, recognizing this is an ongoing arms race. Every new feature that you design opens up some kind of attack, or abuse factor and if you're not planning for that from the outset, you're going to be caught later when harm has been done.\n\nEVA: Yeah, absolutely. Since you brought up personas, there is something in the process that I created that's a similar tool where I call them archetypes because they're a little different from personas. But it's identifying who is the abuser in this scenario, who is the survivor, and what are their goals and that's basically it, we don't need to get into anything else. \n\nI don't think, but just articulating those things and then even having a little printout, kind of similar to the idea with personas like, oh, you can print them out for your sales team, or whoever it is to keep these people in mind. A similar idea of just having them printed out an on your wall so that it's something that you're thinking about like, “Oh, we have this new feature. We probably need to think about how is this abuser person that we've identified who would want to use our product to find the location data of their former partner,” whatever it is. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: Use this.\n\nCORALINE: From a mechanical perspective, Eva, one of the one of the challenges I had at GitHub when I was working on community and safety is that the other engineers and the other groups were creating so many new features. I felt like the knowledge about how feature can be abused, or like you said, will be abused wasn't spread very effectively throughout, especially a large software organization, and it fell on a small team of folks who frankly were not consulted. A feature would go out and we'd be like, “Holy crap, you can't do that because of this, this, and this.” \n\nSo do you have any do you have any thoughts? I know you said print it out, or put it on the wall, but do you have any thoughts for how to spread that awareness and that mode of thinking across teams who frankly may be very, very focused just on feature delivery and will see any consideration like that as slowing them down, or having negative impact on “productivity”?\n\nEVA: Yes. I have many thoughts. [chuckles] So this is bringing up something for me that I've struggled with and thought about is should there be specialized teams in this area? I feel like yes, we want people with special knowledge and experts and that's really important, but also, I feel like the ideal scenario is that it's just everyone's job. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: Those teams were already doing things and it wasn't seen as “Oh, Coraline’s team is going to come in and now we have to consult with those people,” or whatever because it's not our job, it's their job. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: Which this isn't a very maybe satisfying answer to your question because I feel like it involves a huge shift in the way that we think about this stuff, but it is something I've thought about in terms of should I call myself a safety designer? Is that something I want to do? Do I want this to be like a specialized role? Maybe is that a goal where people start to see that? Because there are people who specialize in inclusive design, or accessible design. \n\nBut then the downside of that is does that just give someone else even more leeway to be like, “Not my job, I don't have to worry about this. And then we have the problems, like what you just described. I don't know, I feel like it's such a big shift that needs to happen.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. One of the models I've been thinking about and I was thinking of this in terms of generalists versus specialists is generalists, or to map that to domain that we're talking about now, the other engineers in your group, or in your company. I feel like there has to be a balance between specialization and general knowledge. The way I describe that is everyone should have literacy on a particular topic and the basic vocabulary for it and a general knowledge of the concepts augmented by a specialist who has fluency. So kind of a dynamic relationship between literacy and fluency. Do you have any thoughts on that? \n\nEVA: I love that. I'm literally writing that down. \n\nA generalist with literacy and a specialist with fluency is such a good way to think about it because I feel like I do say this. I don't want people who read my book, or see my talk to think like, “Oh, I have to be like her, I have to learn all this stuff. I have to really dig into domestic violence works and what it means and laws.” I don't want people to feel like they have to do that because it's just such a dark, heartbreaking thing to have to think and read about every day and I don't think that's a realistic goal. But I think being a generalist with literacy is realistic augmented by specialist with fluency; I'm just like basically repeating what you just said.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nBut that's just a really brilliant way to think about it.\n\nDAMIEN: That pattern actually really matches something that I learned from another Greater Than Code guest. I'm sorry, I can't remember their name right now. I believe we were talking about inclusivity and what they said was like, “It's not the expert's job to make the product, or the company inclusive. [chuckles] It's the expert job to support – it's everybody's job to make it inclusive. It's the expert's job to be an expert and to support them.” We also use again, a metaphor from security. We don't have security experts whose job it is to make your app secure, we have security experts whose job it is to support everybody in keeping your app secure. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: So I feel like that this matches really well. The job of the person with this expertise is to support, to educate, to guide not because they can't do all the work together all themselves, like Coraline said. There's just too many features being added for [laughs] for some team somewhere to go, “Oh no, this is fine,” or “That's not fine.”\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally, and I feel like that just brought up something for me, Damien, about the speed at which we work, too many features being added, not enough time to actually do this work, and how—this is getting at just way bigger critique of tech in general. \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.\n\nEVA: But it's okay to slow down once in a while. I feel like just the urgency thing causes so many problems outside of just what we're talking about. But this is another big one that I feel like it's okay to spend an afternoon thinking through what are the ways this is going to be not inclusive, or unsafe and that's totally fine. But I fall into it, too where I'm like, “I want to deliver things quickly for my client,” or if I'm doing so internal for a flight, I want to get done quickly. I don't want to hold people up. So it is a really hard thing to break out of.\n\nCORALINE: It seems to me, Eva, that this kind of knowledge, or this kind of literacy, or this kind of making it part of the process can fall solely on engineers. Because in a lot of places, we have of product managers who are setting deadlines for us. How do you communicate to them why this work is so important when they may only see it as like, “Well, you're getting in the way of us hitting a release date and we have a press release ready,” or “We want our debut this feature at a particular time, or place”?\n\nMANDY: And now we want to take a quick time out to recognize one of our sponsors: Kaspersky Labs:\n\nRarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up, or know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week, their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humor, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts & Spotify, go check it out!\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally. So I think ideally, this comes from everyone. My book is called Design for Safety, but I really hope that people are reading it, who are also engineers and who are also project managers—basically anyone who has a say in how the product is actually going to function, I think should be doing this work. \n\nBut specifically, if you have a project manager who is rushing everyone and saying, “We don't have time for this,” I do have a couple different strategies in my book about this, where it's like we can use statistics to talk about that this is a thing that is impacting a lot of our users. It's 1 in 3 women, 1 and 4 men in the US have experienced severe physical, domestic violence and that's just severe physical, domestic violence. There's so much domestic violence that doesn't have a physical component to it so that could be like a third of our user base. \n\nSo bringing stuff up like that to try to get some buy-in, but then also my process, I have little time estimate. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: So saying like, “We want to do research; it's going to be 6 hours.” “We want to do a brainstorm; it's going to be 2 hours.” Giving people very specific things that they can say yes to is always going to be better than just an open-ended, “We want to design for safety.”\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: And someone being like, “I don't know what that means, but we have a deadline.” Saying like, “We're going to do a brainstorm to identify ways that our product will be used for harm. We want to do it next week and we want to spend 4 hours on it” is going to be a lot better.\n\nDAMIEN: And I want to call out how important and useful the language you use there was you said because when you find something, when you do that brainstorm, or whatever analysis process, you go like, “Oh, here's the way our products will be used for harm.” Because if you say to a product manager, “Here's a way our product might be used for harm,” they go, “Well, okay.” [laughs] “Might not be.” [laughs] If you say, “Here's a way our product will be used for harm.” Well, now that leaves a lot less of wiggle room.\n\nEVA: Hmm, yeah. That's a really good point that I actually hadn't thought about. \n\nI think the other thing is there's tangible outcomes from something like that brainstorm, or these different activities that I have outlined. You can actually show the person, like, “Here's what we did. Here's what we came up with,” which isn't necessarily – I wish we didn't have to always do that; always have some type of very explicit outcome from everything we do. But I do think that's a reality that we have that this process kind of helps with. \n\nCORALINE: I want to go back to the user thing. Again, one of the things that we're thinking about our ethical source is thinking beyond the user and thinking about not just who is using the technology that we're creating, but the people that the technology we're creating is being used on.\n\nEVA: Yes. That's such a good point. I'm actually curious, have you come up with a term for that type of user? Like nonuser?\n\nCORALINE: I have not yet, but that's a great call out. Language is so important so, yeah. \n\nEVA: Yeah. I don't know that it exists and I've seen nonuser, but I don't know that that's agreed upon.\n\nDAMIEN: I've gotten as far, the best I've come up with is constituency.\n\nCORALINE: That is very interesting, Damien because one of the things we're developing is a governance tool. The W3C, when they were working on the HTML standard—this was a couple of years ago, I think—they mentioned something called a priority of constituent and this was very much from a standards body perspective, but it was one sentence and I think it is such a powerful sentence. Just for their example, they said, “In times of conflict, we prioritize end users over developers, over browser manufacturers, over spec writers, over technical purity.” \n\n[laughter]\n\nEVA: Wow.\n\nCORALINE: That’s one sentence, but writing that down, I think can really help cut through a lot of a lot of the noise and a lot of the gray area maybe that's the most encountered. It's so simple and you can do it in a single sentence. So absolutely, the notion of constituencies and being explicit about whose safety, convenience, or what have you you're optimizing for.\n\nEVA: Yeah. That's really important and I have two thoughts. \n\nOne is that this comes up a lot in the surveillance space where it's like, what sort of rights, or priority should we be giving someone who is walking on the sidewalk in front of a house that has a Ring camera that's facing out to capture the porch, but is ultimately capturing the sidewalk in the street? What are the rights of that person, that nonuser, who has not agreed to be filmed and isn't part of this product's ecosystem, but is still being impacted by it? \n\nIt's something I think about a lot, especially there's so many in my neighborhood I see. Since I wrote the book, I see the Ring cameras everywhere, including in places where they're not really to be like on the outside of someone's gate, just facing the sidewalk. It's like, you're not even recording your own property at that point. It's just the gate, or it's just the sidewalk, I mean, which I feel is very problematic. \n\nYou also said that it's important to explicitly call out who you're prioritizing and that's something – I read this book called Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, which was very lifechanging and it's just such a good book. It's a little more theoretical. She explicitly says it's not a guide, but she talks about this, about how it's really important to, if you are going to choose not to be inclusive, or safe, or justice focused, whatever it is, you need to explicitly say, “We are choosing to prioritize the comfort of this group over the safety of this group.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: Or whatever it is. Like, you need to actually just spell that out and be upfront about it. \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. It reminds me of, I think I learned this from Marla Compton. Although, I don't know if she originated it. I guess, she probably didn't, but the phrase she taught me was, “We prioritize the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of non-marginalized people.” It's such a powerful statement.\n\nCORALINE: It really is.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and just making that explicit like, “These are the tradeoffs and these are where we side on them.”\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's such a good one. \n\nI did this workshop recently, it's called How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy, but they talked a lot about how feeling entitled to comfort is just such a white supremacist thing and I feel shows up in different forms of oppression as well like men's comfort, et cetera. But that's something I've been thinking about a lot is the feeling of a right to comfort and how that also includes a right to not have to have any type of conflict and a fear of conflict. How these things all play together and how it's all part of white supremacy and how it shows up in our culture, in our workplaces. It was a great workshop. I would highly recommend it because it's also been a lifechanging thing as I digest all of the different things from it. \n\nDAMIEN: It's so powerful to name that as comfort. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: Like, this is what we're protecting. We're protecting these people's comfort [chuckles] and this is what it will cost.\n\nCORALINE: I think about what Kim Crayton said for a year is, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”\n\nEVA: Yeah, that's such a good one. I love her.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: I quoted her in my book about, oh, I forget what it is. It's something about not having strategy is chaos.\n\nCORALINE: Oh my God.\n\nEVA: Like, the need for strategy. \n\nCORALINE: I learned so much from her from that one statement. That was literally lifechanging for me. That was literally lifechanging for me because I always had a negative feeling about strategy, like strategy is coercive, or insincere. And then another friend of mine I was talking to about it said strategy is good when it's not a zero-sum game.\n\nEVA: Mm.\n\nCORALINE: I think we maybe we can think about personal safety and abuse factors in that way.\n\nEVA: Yeah, definitely. I think the full quote is “Intention without strategy is chaos.” \n\nCORALINE: Yeah, that.\n\nEVA: That has been very definitely influential for me and as I feel like a big part of the reason, that idea is why I wrote my book and did my conference talk is because I was feeling frustrated with – it's a lot easier to raise awareness about an issue than it is to have actual strategies for fixing it. I felt like I would always get really fired up reading something, or listening to a talk and be like, “Yeah, this is such a huge problem. We need to fix it,” and then didn't have a takeaway, or anything that I could really do at work other than just being told to think about this, or consider this, which I'm like, “When do I do that?” \n\nCORALINE: And what does that look like? \n\nEVA: Yeah, you can't think about all of the different things we need to think about from 9:00 to 5:00 while we're at work every day. We need a strategy to do that, which is why I like made these different activities that I have in my process. \n\nBut going back to this white supremacy and design workshop that I did, I also learned in there about how some other ways that white supremacy shows up is having an action bias and a sense of urgency. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: And how a lot of that can come from people, especially white people, not being able to like sit with discomfort when we're faced with really uncomfortable topics and a desire to jump into action before we fully understand the problem and have internalized it. \n\nSo now I'm feeling like I need to backtrack a little bit and be like, “Yes, provide action.” But also, it is good to do deep learning. I think we need both, but I feel like a lot of people, it's one, or the other. Let's do a ton of learning, or let's jump right into action. I have always been a jump right into action person and now I'm realizing it's okay to take a beat and do some deep learning and to sit with all the discomfort of the heavy topic.\n\nCORALINE: A friend of mine gave me a concept that I like a lot. He has a definition of ergonomics that is the marriage of design and ethics. When I use the term ergonomics in that sense, what I mean is how easy is it to do a particular action. One of the things that I see quite a bit—something, I think is a terrible consequence of the web, frankly—is putting ergonomics behind paywalls and asking people who use our software to yield some degree of agency, or digital autonomy, or security in exchange for features.\n\nEVA: Hmm. So interesting.\n\nCORALINE: So I'm curious maybe how you would frame designing for safety, some of the other axes of oppression that we discussed on the show today, from the perspective of the ethical aspect of our design decisions. What workflows are we optimizing for? What workflows are we putting behind a paywall, or in exchange for okay, you’re signing up. The [inaudible] says you're buying into surveillance capitalism and you just simply have to do that if you want an email account, if you want a Twitter account, what have you.\n\nEVA: Yeah. I do feel like there is a bit of an issue with putting safety and security sometimes behind a paywall where you can literally pay more to not get advertised to, for example.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: Which it's like, I get that products have to charge money and it’s like we shouldn't – the flipside of that is well, we can't just work for free. I see that a lot with journalism when people are criticizing paywalls and it's like well, but journalists have to get paid. They can't work for free just like everyone else. \n\nBut I do feel that with things like being able to opt out of advertising and I feel like there are other things. Nothing's coming in right now, but different ways that you can ease some of the crappier parts of tech, if you have enough money, to buy into the paid versions of things is definitely problematic. Who are we keeping out when we do that and who are we saying doesn't deserve this privacy and the safety? What should just be standard? The seatbelt; I'm obsessed with the history of the seatbelts. \n\nCORALINE: [chuckles] I still have the [inaudible] that's been going around.\n\nEVA: Yeah.\n\nCORALINE: It’s amazing.\n\nEVA: I've talked about this in many different places, but the seatbelt used to be something that you had to pay extra for. In today's dollars, it would've been like 300 extra dollars when you bought a car to get seat belts and only 2% of the people, in 1956 when they were introduced, actually paid for them and probably even less were actually using them. And then there was a revolution in the auto industry led by activists and everyday people. It definitely not come from the auto industry; they had to be forced into these different things. But now seat belts, the government basically, they passed a law and they said, “You have to just include seat belts as a standard feature.” \n\nI think about that a lot in tech. The things now that we're making people pay for, should some of those just be standard features and how are we going to get there? Probably government regulation after a lot of activism and everyday people rallying against these different things with big tech. But I think we're going to get there with a lot of things and we're going to see a lot of seatbelts, so to speak, become just standard features and not something you have to pay for.\n\nCORALINE: And I wonder, you mentioned government regulation; I have literally zero faith in government doing anything effective in the online world at all because our government is powered by 65-year-old white men that are rich and there's no incentive for them to care about this even if they did have the basic literacy about how this stuff works. \n\nIt seems to me one of the things that we've been seeing really emphasize is, especially during in post lockdown, is worker organizing and I wonder if there's a strategy here for empowering the engineers, who frankly, we are being treated rockstars right now. I hate that term rockstar, but we're overpaid, we're pampered—a lot of folks, obviously, not everyone. \n\nSo can we leverage our power? Can we leverage the privilege of being in such an in-demand profession to affect change in organizations that have no financial incentive to think about stuff like this at all?\n\nEVA: Yeah. So many things I want to respond to. Definitely, I think worker power is like such a strong point in all of this and I feel like we are the ones leading out on this. A lot of it is coming from people who work in tech and understand the issues. Like, writing, speaking, and doing these different things to help everyday people who don't work in tech understand like, “Hey, actually, here's why Facebook is really terrible.” A lot of that is coming from people in tech, even former Facebook employees even. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: Which is different, I think from the paradigm shift we had with the auto industry. I don't know, I would have to look, but I'm pretty sure is not coming from car designers and engineers weren't helping lead that charge the way that we are. \n\nBut I also want to respond to something you said about tech workers being overpaid and pampered, which yes, I agree with you. But I also think there are privileges that everyone should have and that no one should of and I feel like everyone deserves to be well paid, to be comfortable and have all these perks, and whatnot. \n\nI had a career in nonprofit before this so I have so much internalized just baggage about and guilt around feeling with my pay, my benefits, and all these things. The work I do now, compared to the work I was doing in the nonprofit, which was helping kids who were basically on a road to dropping out before graduating high school, which was really important work and I made so much less money and worked so much harder. But I feel like everyone deserves to be as well paid as we are and it is possible. \n\nCORALINE: Yes. \n\nEVA: So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well that we – [chuckles] I feel like I'm trying to just absolve myself from being a well-paid tech worker. But I do think we deserve this and also, everyone else deserves similar treatment.\n\nCORALINE: Absolutely.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I feel the same way, especially—to take an example within a tech company—as an engineer, I get paid a lot more than customer service people.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nDAMIEN: And that doesn't mean I'm overpaid, [chuckles] it means they're underpaid.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nDAMIEN: A lot. [laughs]\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: Yeah, and I feel like this whole conversation, honestly, this is a freaking tactic. This is what the people at the top, this is how they want us to feel; pitting us against each other, feeling like it's not that – the sales people, that's normal and we're overpaid. It's like, no, actually we're paid a livable amount where we can live comfortably and they're exploited even more than we are. \n\nThat's how I'm trying to think about things because I do feel like this other way of looking at it is just absolutely a tactic of, I don't know, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. The company leaders definitely don't want us to feel like we're – they would rather us feel that we're overpaid and pampered than just compensated for the labor we do in a fair way, \n\nMANDY: Have us feel the shame and guilt around it, too. Before I was in tech, I went from welfare to making a reasonable standard of living in a year and sometimes, I still feel guilty about it. It's a heck of a feeling.\n\nEVA: Yeah, and I feel like that didn't just come out of nowhere. We've been taught that we should feel guilty for just surviving. I don't know. Because I think even in tech, it's a lot of people there's still so many issues with burnout, with—I don't know about you all, my body sometimes just hurts from not moving enough during – like, there's still all these like different things that could be better. But the feeling that we should feel guilty for having some comfort and decent pay, I think that's definitely a strategy that has come from these different powerful groups. It didn't just come out of nowhere.\n\nCORALINE: I appreciate y'all pushing back on that. I guess, I'm speaking from an emotional place. Eva, you went from nonprofit and the tech. In April, I went from tech and the nonprofit and personally, I took a 30% pay cut and – [overtalk]\n\nEVA: Oh, wow. \n\nCORALINE: It just really made very visible and very personal seeing what we value as a society and what we don't value as a society. I'm still comfortable; I still have a living wage and everything. But look at what happened during the lockdown with “frontline workers.’ They're heroes, but we don't want to pay them more than minimum wage. \n\nSo I definitely agree with what you're saying about other people being underpaid and I definitely hear what you're saying about that guilt, but guilt is a form of discomfort. What are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with the privileges and the power that we have as a result of the way we're treated in this industry? I feel like that's the more important thing and what do you do with it? Are you giving back? Are you giving back in a substantive way, or are you giving back to assuage your guilt? It's nuanced. As y'all are pointing out, it is nuanced.\n\nEVA: Yeah. It's very complicated, but I feel like agitating for those—sorry, Damien, I think you said support people—getting paid more, that's something we can agitate for. \n\nI know someone, I'll call her an online friend of mine in the infertility space, which I'm very involved in as I go through my journey. I hate that word, but I've made all these online friends who are going through it and one of them is a paralegal and she is obviously hoping, although it's not going well, to get pregnant. But she was looking into the parental benefits and realized that the lawyers where she works had, I think it's 18 weeks fully paid off and then everyone else got this weird piecemeal of 6 weeks paid off, then there's FMLA, and then there's PTO, and all this stuff that amounted to a lot less, and you had to like use all of your PTO and all these different things. She actually was able to—with some of the lawyers help, I believe—get that policy change that it was just the same for everyone because it was like, “I didn't go to law school. So therefore, I don't need as much time with my newborn? How does that make sense?” \nCORALINE: [chuckles] Yeah.\n\nEVA: So I feel there is a lot of potential to have more equality in our companies, especially as the most powerful people often in the companies, to push for that change to happen. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: There needs to be a lot of solidarity, I think, between these different types of workers.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's a great example of that.\n\nMANDY: Well, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation and I feel so privileged just to be sitting here kicking back and just taking in the back and forth between the rest of you. \n\nI wrote down a bunch of a things, but one of the biggest takeaways that I have had from this episode, and especially if you've been listening to the show the past couple episodes, we've been talking about a lot of accessibility things. Eva, you said something that was mind-blowing for me and it shouldn't be mind-blowing, but it was because I was like, didn't even ever think of that and what the hell is wrong with me for not even ever thinking about that? but inclusive and accessible includes people experiencing domestic abuse. It’s not something – I guess, because as what you said, people don't talk about it. So just keeping that in mind was pretty pertinent to me. \n\nI also liked what Coraline said about specialization and then the general knowledge and literacy versus fluency. That was really good as well. \n\nSo it's been an awesome conversation. Thank you.\n\nDamien, what do you have?\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, well, this has been really awesome and I want to of first thank Eva for being our guest here and for the work you do and this book.\n\nThe thing that's going to be sticking with me, I'll be reflecting on for a while, is this sentence both well, if the product can be used for harm, it will be, which is not only a really powerful thing to keep in mind when designing and building a thing, but also, a powerful sentence that is really useful in communicating these issues. So thank you very much for that.\n\nCORALINE: One of the things that and actually Eva, this was a reaction I had when I first read your book is, I think a lot of us, a growing number of us, have at least an awareness, if not a personal experience, with how systems are weaponized against marginalized, or vulnerable folks. So I think it's really important that in your book, you focus very specifically on a particular domain of abuse, abuse of power and loss of agency and loss of privacy, loss of physical safety. \n\nOne of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how the internet has been really good for connecting people with shared experiences and creating communities around the shared experiences. But I do worry that we're breaking into smaller and smaller and smaller groups and I see that. I don't know if it's intentional, but it certainly is a way, I think that we're propping up, that we're being coerced into propping up these systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences. \n\nI don't see that as a criticism. What I see it as is an opportunity to connect with other folks who experience that same kind of systemic damage in collaborating and trying to understand the different challenges that we all face. But recognizing that a lot of it is based frankly, white supremacy. We used to talk about patriarchy; I think the thinking broadly has evolved beyond that. \n\nBut I would love to see your publisher start putting books together on different particular axes, but also, looking at ways that we can bridge the differences between these different experiences of intentional, or unintentional harm. So that's something that I think I'm going to think about.\n\nEVA: Nice. I can't give any spoilers, but I do think my publisher might have something in the works that it's getting at some of this stuff. \n\nWonderful. \n\nEVA: Which is exciting. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nEVA: Yeah, okay. Man, those are all so good. \n\nMy reflection, I'm just thinking a lot about our conversation about the way that people in tech might feel like we're overpaid, or pampered and how that feels like an intentional thing that has come from somewhere and things like that don't just – it always comes from somewhere. \n\nI'm thinking Mandy, about what you said in your reflection. You said, “What's wrong with me for not thinking about this?” I always feel like when I hear people say things like that, it's like well, when were you – I think more who didn't teach you about this? Why wasn't this part of your education as you were learning to code and before you joined the industry? I feel like that's more where the blame lies than with individuals, but yeah.\n\nSomething I was thinking about earlier today, before we started recording, is that this idea of user safety, that it's like our job to keep ourselves safe on tech and there's so many resources out there, different articles, and different things. I've been thinking similarly about that, but that's a marketing campaign. That's something that the leaders of big tech done to intentionally shift responsibility from themselves and onto the end user. \n\nWe're expected to be legal experts, read these agreements, and understand every single thing about a product that no one uses every single feature, but we're expected to understand it. If we don't and something goes wrong, either interpersonal harm, what I do, or with like oh, someone guessed your password or whatever it was, it's your fault instead of it being the tech company's responsibility. I feel like that's another thing that I'm thinking like that didn't come from nowhere, that came from somewhere. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah.\n\nEVA: It feels like a very intentional strategy that big tech has used to blame us for when things go wrong. Not to say that we get to be absolved of everything, people have responsibilities and whatnot, but I feel like a lot of times it's like this comes from somewhere and I'm trying to think more about that kind of stuff. This conversation was really awesome for helping me process some of those and expand my thoughts a little bit more. So thank you all, this was just really awesome. \n\nDAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you for being here.\n\nMANDY: Thank you for coming. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. So happy to talk to you, Eva.\n\nEVA: Yeah. You, too.\n\nMANDY: All right, everyone. Well, with that, we will wrap up and I will put a plug in for our Slack community. You can join us and Eva will get an invitation as well to come visit us in Slack and keep these conversations going. \n\nOur website to do that is patreon.com/greaterthancode. Patreon is a subscription-based thing that if you want to you can pledge to support the show. However, if you DM any one of us and you want to be let in and you cannot afford, or just simply don't want to, monetarily support, we will let you in for free. So just reach out to one of the panelists and we'll get you in there. \n\nSo with that, I will say thank you again. Thank you, everybody and we'll see you next week!Special Guest: Eva PenzeyMoog.Sponsored By:Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up or know if you're protected. Don't worry Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humour, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on apple podcasts & spotify, go check it out!\r\n","content_html":"TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety
\n\n01:26 - Eva’s Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus
\n\n08:19 - Design for Safety
\n\n12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know
\n\n15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “User” Means
\n\n20:43 - Parallels with Security
\n\n22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery
\n\n31:38 - Thinking Beyond The User
\n\n35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy
\n\n40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls
\n\n45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse.
\n\nDamien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be.
\n\nCoraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks.
\n\nThe internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we’re breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences?
\n\nEva: Who didn’t teach you about this?
\n\nIt’s our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for user safety.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.
\n\nCORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today.
\n\nHer name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety.
\n\nBefore joining the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in user experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable users.
\n\nEva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi!
\n\nEVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
\n\nCORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it?
\n\nEVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to until the age of 25, which is when I was diagnosed.
\n\nFor people who don't know, hyperfocus is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a state of very intense focus that people with ADHD will sometimes go into. It's not something you really have control over, it's not something you can just turn on, or off, and it isn't necessarily good, or bad.
\n\nBut for me, I'm really lucky because it often gets triggered when I start to code. So as I was starting to learn code and then I switched over to focusing on design and frontend like CSS and SAAS. But as I was learning that stuff, it gets triggered all the time. So I can sit down and code and oftentimes, hours have gone past and so long as I don't like miss any meetings or forget to eat, it's totally a superpower.
\n\nCORALINE: That's amazing.
\n\nI've talked about before, I live with bipolar disorder and I tend to stay in a low-grade manic state as my resting place and I experience very similar things with that hyper focus and just losing hours on a task and sometimes, it's very positive and I get a lot done and sometimes, I'm like, “What the hell did I do?” [chuckles]
\n\nEVA: Right.
\n\nCORALINE: But I think it's great that—I've been talking to some other folks with ADHD, with bipolar—the judo moves we can do takes something that really negatively affects us in a lot of ways and finding a way to turn it around, like you said, and use it as a superpower. Those are the strategies we develop when we live with things like this and I'm always happy when people have figured out how to get something good out of that.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally and realizing that you have this thing that happens. Because I'm sure it's been happening my whole life, but I didn't recognize it, or understand it and then just being able to name it and see that it's happening is so powerful. And then to be like, “Oh, I can maybe do certain things to try to get into it,” or just being aware that it's a thing it's like very powerful.
\n\nCORALINE: I'm kind of curious, Eva, if you don't mind us talking about ADHD for a little while?
\n\nEVA: Sure. Yeah.
\n\nCORALINE: Okay. I have a friend who is – actually, a couple of friends who were very recently diagnosed with ADHD and they had so much trouble in the traditional tech were workplace, especially working for companies that have productivity metrics like lines of code, or number of commits, or something like that. It was really difficult for both of these friends to operate in an environment where you're expected to have very consistent output day over day and not having accommodation, or not having the ability to design their work in such a way that maximizes the positives of how they work and minimizes the negatives of how they work.
\n\nIs that something you've struggled with as well?
\n\nEVA: Yeah, and that’s so unfortunate that your friends because like I said, I feel like it is a superpower and most workplaces, they should be trying to harness it and understand that, you can have really, really awesome employees with ADHD. If you set them up for success, they can be so successful.
\n\nBut it is something – so I've only ever worked at 8th Light actually, when I was interviewing, over 5 years ago now, and started doing, trying to find my first job in tech, after doing a bootcamp, I interviewed at a couple different places and none of them felt super great. But obviously, I was just really eager to get my first job.
\n\nBut then I went into 8th Light and 8th Light was one of the places where I really, really did want to work there and was really excited for the interview. But when I got to the office, it was very quiet and there was an open workspace, but people were working very quietly and there were like lots of rooms.
\n\nI got into that and I was like, “Oh, thank God” like, this is exactly the space I need. I can't handle too much activity. I can't handle offices where they're actually playing music; that type of thing is my nightmare and I don't actually like wearing headphones all day like that. That's not just a easy fix for me and for a lot of people with ADHD.
\n\nSo I felt like right away, now I want to work here even more and I've been really lucky that it's been a really good setup for someone like me to work and I have gotten some accommodations which has been good. I feel like if you don't give accommodations, they're breaking the law, they need to do that.
\n\nDAMIEN: This is really, really validating because I've had similar experiences of that. Even just this morning where I was in the code and I had no idea how much time was going by and I had no awareness of anything else. That's possible because of the environment I have that I work in. Whereas, previous jobs I've had with bullpens and just open office plans, I was in incredibly miserable there and I didn't understand how people could get any work done in those environments. So just this understanding of how people are different; in what environments some people thrive in and other environments other people thrive in.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. So have you always worked from home, or has this been a pandemic thing?
\n\nDAMIEN: This has been probably about 10 years. Yeah. [laughs] I went home and never left. [laughs]
\n\nEVA: Nice. [chuckles]
\n\nCORALINE: I've done something very similar. I started working from home, I think in 2015 and not for a great reason, but I found the exact same thing that you're talking about. Like I am very sensitive to my environment. I use music to control my mood and like you, Eva, I hate headphones. So I do wonder, you mentioned accommodations and the legal perspective on that. In Illinois where – Eva, you live in Illinois, too. Are you local for 8th Light?
\n\nEVA: Yeah. I live in Chicago.
\n\nCORALINE: We have that will employment and it's really easy to discriminate against folks on multiple axes rather than providing our accommodations. Without will employment, they can just let you go and you have no proof that it was because they're ableist, or racist or transphobic, or whatever.
\n\nEVA: Oh, yeah. That's so rough. Pritzker's got to get on that. Our governor. [chuckles]
\n\nCORALINE: So do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote? I understand a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it and really opening their eyes to a lot of maybe issues they weren't aware of.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. So my book, Design for Safety, came out in early August and it's been really great to see people's reactions to it. I got my first formal book review, which was really cool and it was overall very positive, which has been very exciting.
\n\nI'm hopeful that it is helping people understand that this is a thing because it's different, I feel like than a lot of other problems. Someone else explained this to me recently and I had this light bulb moment that I'm not providing a solution to a problem that people know that they have this problem, like how their tech is used for interpersonal harm and now I have a solution like, here's this book that's going to tell you how to fix it. It's more that people don't even know that this is a problem.
\n\nSo I'm educating on that as well as trying to give some of the solutions on how to fix it. It has been a lot of people just saying like, “I had no idea about any of this. It's been so eye-opening and now I'm going to think about it more and do these different things.” So that's been really great to see that just people’s awareness is going up, basically.
\n\nMANDY: I really like on the website, the sentence that there's a pullout quote, or I'm not sure if it's even a pullout quote, but it says, “If abuse is possible, it's only a matter of time until it happens. There's no might, so let's build better, safer digital products from the start.” I like that.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, thanks. I was very intentional and well, this goes back to when I was doing a conference talk. Before I wrote the book, I did a conference talk called Designing Against Domestic Violence and I thought a lot about the type of language should I use; should I say might happen, or should I say will happen? I eventually settled on it's going to happen even if it hasn't happened yet, or oftentimes, I think we just don't know that it's happened.
\n\nPeople who have gone through domestic violence, some of then we'll talk openly about it. But most people just don't, which makes sense. It's this really intense, personal thing to go through and there's so much judgment and survivors get blamed for all these things. So it makes sense that people don't want to talk that much about it. I ended up thinking we just need to say that it will happen.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's amazing. So I really want to know everything about this book. [chuckles] but to start with, you said the book is designing for safety and you witnessed this a little bit with domestic violence, violence and abuse. Can you talk about safe from what sort of things you mean when you say safety there?
\n\nEVA: Yeah, for sure because I know safety is a big word that can mean a lot of different things. But the way that I'm talking about it in my work is in terms of interpersonal safety. So it's like how is someone who has a relationship with you in an interpersonal way going to use technology, weaponized technology, in a way that was not meant to be used? We aren't designing tech with these use cases in mind, but how is it ultimately going to be weaponized for some type of abuse?
\n\nDomestic violence is really the emphasis and my big focus and was mentioned in the intro, some background in domestic violence space. But there's also issues with child abuse and elder abuse, especially in terms of surveillance of those groups as well as surveillance of workers is another thing that came up a lot as I was researching that I didn't get as much into in the book. But it's basically anytime there's an interpersonal relationship and someone has access to you in this personal way where you're not just an anonymous stranger, how is tech going to be used to exert some form of control, or abuse over that person?
\n\nDAMIEN: Wow, that is a very important subject. So I'm an engineer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, anything of that nature and I know you've written a whole book [laughs] and we only have an hour, or so here, but what are the first things that people, or engineers need to know about this?
\n\nEVA: Yeah, so I think the first thing is to understand that this is a problem and that it's happening and to go through some different examples of how this happens, which is what the first couple chapters of the book are all about. It's different forms of this interpersonal abuse via technology in the form of shared accounts is a really big one and this question of who has control and nebulous issues of control. There's also surveillance is a really big one and then location data as well.
\n\nSo I guess, I don't want to say like, “Oh, just read the book,” but learning a little bit about the different – there's so many different examples of how this works. Just to start to build that mental model of how this happens like, someone taking advantage of certain affordances within a shared bank account software, or someone using an internet of things device to gaslight someone, or torment them.
\n\nThere's so many different examples. Location data shows up in all sorts of really sneaky in terms of stalking. It's not purely putting a tracker on someone's car, or even like Google Map and sharing your location is a more straightforward thing. But there's also, it shows up in other ways like, a grocery store app that has a timestamp and location. You can learn someone's grocery shopping habits and maybe you're estranged from this person, or they've left you because you're abusive, but they don't know that their stuff is showing up in this app and their location data. So it shows up in all sorts of different ways.
\n\nThis is a very long way to answer your question, but I think the first thing is to start to understand how this stuff works so that you're just aware of it and then from there, I have a whole chapter about how to implement a practice of designing for safety at your company. It is a little more design focused, but I think engineers can absolutely be doing this work, too. Even if it's just like quick research on how are any product with any type of message feature is going to be used for abuse and there’s lots of literature out there. So just looking at some articles, thinking about ways that aren't covered already, that just having a brainstorm about what are some new ways this might be used for abuse and then thinking about how to prevent them.
\n\nCORALINE: One of the things that I was thinking about after reading your book, Eva, is at a metal level, or zooming out a bit. I think a lot of the ways that we design software, we have this idealized and homogenous notion of a user. I think that in a lot of cases, especially if you're working on a project that's like more, or less one of those scratch your own itch problems, you tend to think of yourself as the user.
\n\nIt's great to have that empathy for the end user, but what we don't have, I don't think as a field, is an understanding that user is an abstraction and it is a useful abstraction. But sometimes you need to zoom down a little bit and understand the different ways that people want to use the software and will use the software and what makes them different from this average idealized user.
\n\nThat was one of the things that really struck me, especially from the process you were describing, is expanding our understanding of what user means and anticipating the different use cases with hostile users, with actively abusive users, and I think thinking of abstraction is super helpful, but I feel like sometimes we need to zoom down and think differently about really who the people are and what their circumstances might be.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. Oh man, I just wrote down what you said, user is an abstraction. That's such a good way to think about it that I haven't heard before, but you're absolutely right that it's encapsulating such a big group of people. Even if for a small product, something that's not like Twitter that's open to billions of people, even something that's a subscription, or something that's going to have a smaller user base. There's going to be such a diverse, different group within there and to just think of the term user as a catchall is definitely problematic.
\n\nSorry, I'm just processing that user is an abstraction, that term because we use it so much as designers, definitely.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: And anyone in tech is always using this term, but problematizing that term in a new way is really interesting to me.
\n\nAnd I think my other thought about this is that we talk a lot about needing to think about more than just happy path and I feel like even that, at least in my experience, has been other things that are also very important where it's like, let's think about someone who has a crappy Wi-Fi connection, or someone who's low vision. Like there are all these other very important things to think about in terms of accessibility and inclusivity.
\n\nI think I see what I'm doing as just adding another group into the mix of let's think about people who are currently surviving domestic violence, which is maybe a little bit harder to bring up than those other two that I mentioned because it's just so dark and it's something that we just don't want to have to think about, or talk about during work. It's just such a bummer, but it is really important to have this new group added when we're thinking about inclusive and accessible tech.
\n\nDAMIEN: There's a really great parallel here, I think with security minded design and research. Again, that's another user who is not behaving in the happy path. That's not behaving the way your normal users are behaving and you have to design your system in such a way to be resilient to that.
\n\nSo I love this user as an abstraction, then breaking it down into all these ways and then also, there's a huge value to diversity in your team with this sort of thing.
\n\nCORALINE: Absolutely.
\n\nDAMIEN: You can understand the very different types of users having people on the team who can understand blackhat users who are going to be trying to use your servers to mine Bitcoin, or [laughs] blind users, low vision users, or colorblind users, for goodness’ sake. And then in addition to that, people again, who are experiencing domestic violence, other to terms of other forms of interpersonal abuse and just being able to understand all those users and their experiences with the things you're building and designing.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, definitely those are all really good points.
\n\nJust going back to what you said about the parallels with security is something I've actually been thinking about that a lot, because I think there are lots of parallels to that, or useful things about how security professionals think about their work and operate.
\n\nEspecially the big one for me right now is thinking about a security professional. They're never going to be like, “Okay, we did it. Our system is secure. We're done. We have arrived.” That's not a thing and I feel like it's very similar with designing for safety, or even inclusion. There's just, you're never – I feel like we've had a mental model of “I can think about these things, I can check these boxes, and now, my product is inclusive, or my product is accessible.”
\n\nI feel like we should be thinking more like security professionals where there's always going to be more things like, we always have to be vigilant about what's the next way that someone's going to misuse tech, or the group that’s going to be identified that we've totally left out and is being harmed in some way. So I think that's just a useful shift that I'm thinking a lot about.
\n\nCORALINE: And Damien, I'm so glad you brought up the parallels with security. I was actually going there as well.
\n\nOne of the things that I've been thinking about from an ethical source perspective is insecurity that, I think two tools that would be super useful. First of all, personas and secondly—I guess, three things—understanding that safety can be a matter of adding layers of friction to disincentivize abusive behavior and like you said, recognizing this is an ongoing arms race. Every new feature that you design opens up some kind of attack, or abuse factor and if you're not planning for that from the outset, you're going to be caught later when harm has been done.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, absolutely. Since you brought up personas, there is something in the process that I created that's a similar tool where I call them archetypes because they're a little different from personas. But it's identifying who is the abuser in this scenario, who is the survivor, and what are their goals and that's basically it, we don't need to get into anything else.
\n\nI don't think, but just articulating those things and then even having a little printout, kind of similar to the idea with personas like, oh, you can print them out for your sales team, or whoever it is to keep these people in mind. A similar idea of just having them printed out an on your wall so that it's something that you're thinking about like, “Oh, we have this new feature. We probably need to think about how is this abuser person that we've identified who would want to use our product to find the location data of their former partner,” whatever it is.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Use this.
\n\nCORALINE: From a mechanical perspective, Eva, one of the one of the challenges I had at GitHub when I was working on community and safety is that the other engineers and the other groups were creating so many new features. I felt like the knowledge about how feature can be abused, or like you said, will be abused wasn't spread very effectively throughout, especially a large software organization, and it fell on a small team of folks who frankly were not consulted. A feature would go out and we'd be like, “Holy crap, you can't do that because of this, this, and this.”
\n\nSo do you have any do you have any thoughts? I know you said print it out, or put it on the wall, but do you have any thoughts for how to spread that awareness and that mode of thinking across teams who frankly may be very, very focused just on feature delivery and will see any consideration like that as slowing them down, or having negative impact on “productivity”?
\n\nEVA: Yes. I have many thoughts. [chuckles] So this is bringing up something for me that I've struggled with and thought about is should there be specialized teams in this area? I feel like yes, we want people with special knowledge and experts and that's really important, but also, I feel like the ideal scenario is that it's just everyone's job.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Those teams were already doing things and it wasn't seen as “Oh, Coraline’s team is going to come in and now we have to consult with those people,” or whatever because it's not our job, it's their job.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Which this isn't a very maybe satisfying answer to your question because I feel like it involves a huge shift in the way that we think about this stuff, but it is something I've thought about in terms of should I call myself a safety designer? Is that something I want to do? Do I want this to be like a specialized role? Maybe is that a goal where people start to see that? Because there are people who specialize in inclusive design, or accessible design.
\n\nBut then the downside of that is does that just give someone else even more leeway to be like, “Not my job, I don't have to worry about this. And then we have the problems, like what you just described. I don't know, I feel like it's such a big shift that needs to happen.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. One of the models I've been thinking about and I was thinking of this in terms of generalists versus specialists is generalists, or to map that to domain that we're talking about now, the other engineers in your group, or in your company. I feel like there has to be a balance between specialization and general knowledge. The way I describe that is everyone should have literacy on a particular topic and the basic vocabulary for it and a general knowledge of the concepts augmented by a specialist who has fluency. So kind of a dynamic relationship between literacy and fluency. Do you have any thoughts on that?
\n\nEVA: I love that. I'm literally writing that down.
\n\nA generalist with literacy and a specialist with fluency is such a good way to think about it because I feel like I do say this. I don't want people who read my book, or see my talk to think like, “Oh, I have to be like her, I have to learn all this stuff. I have to really dig into domestic violence works and what it means and laws.” I don't want people to feel like they have to do that because it's just such a dark, heartbreaking thing to have to think and read about every day and I don't think that's a realistic goal. But I think being a generalist with literacy is realistic augmented by specialist with fluency; I'm just like basically repeating what you just said.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nBut that's just a really brilliant way to think about it.
\n\nDAMIEN: That pattern actually really matches something that I learned from another Greater Than Code guest. I'm sorry, I can't remember their name right now. I believe we were talking about inclusivity and what they said was like, “It's not the expert's job to make the product, or the company inclusive. [chuckles] It's the expert job to support – it's everybody's job to make it inclusive. It's the expert's job to be an expert and to support them.” We also use again, a metaphor from security. We don't have security experts whose job it is to make your app secure, we have security experts whose job it is to support everybody in keeping your app secure.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: So I feel like that this matches really well. The job of the person with this expertise is to support, to educate, to guide not because they can't do all the work together all themselves, like Coraline said. There's just too many features being added for [laughs] for some team somewhere to go, “Oh no, this is fine,” or “That's not fine.”
\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally, and I feel like that just brought up something for me, Damien, about the speed at which we work, too many features being added, not enough time to actually do this work, and how—this is getting at just way bigger critique of tech in general.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: But it's okay to slow down once in a while. I feel like just the urgency thing causes so many problems outside of just what we're talking about. But this is another big one that I feel like it's okay to spend an afternoon thinking through what are the ways this is going to be not inclusive, or unsafe and that's totally fine. But I fall into it, too where I'm like, “I want to deliver things quickly for my client,” or if I'm doing so internal for a flight, I want to get done quickly. I don't want to hold people up. So it is a really hard thing to break out of.
\n\nCORALINE: It seems to me, Eva, that this kind of knowledge, or this kind of literacy, or this kind of making it part of the process can fall solely on engineers. Because in a lot of places, we have of product managers who are setting deadlines for us. How do you communicate to them why this work is so important when they may only see it as like, “Well, you're getting in the way of us hitting a release date and we have a press release ready,” or “We want our debut this feature at a particular time, or place”?
\n\nMANDY: And now we want to take a quick time out to recognize one of our sponsors: Kaspersky Labs:
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\n\nEVA: Yeah, totally. So I think ideally, this comes from everyone. My book is called Design for Safety, but I really hope that people are reading it, who are also engineers and who are also project managers—basically anyone who has a say in how the product is actually going to function, I think should be doing this work.
\n\nBut specifically, if you have a project manager who is rushing everyone and saying, “We don't have time for this,” I do have a couple different strategies in my book about this, where it's like we can use statistics to talk about that this is a thing that is impacting a lot of our users. It's 1 in 3 women, 1 and 4 men in the US have experienced severe physical, domestic violence and that's just severe physical, domestic violence. There's so much domestic violence that doesn't have a physical component to it so that could be like a third of our user base.
\n\nSo bringing stuff up like that to try to get some buy-in, but then also my process, I have little time estimate.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: So saying like, “We want to do research; it's going to be 6 hours.” “We want to do a brainstorm; it's going to be 2 hours.” Giving people very specific things that they can say yes to is always going to be better than just an open-ended, “We want to design for safety.”
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: And someone being like, “I don't know what that means, but we have a deadline.” Saying like, “We're going to do a brainstorm to identify ways that our product will be used for harm. We want to do it next week and we want to spend 4 hours on it” is going to be a lot better.
\n\nDAMIEN: And I want to call out how important and useful the language you use there was you said because when you find something, when you do that brainstorm, or whatever analysis process, you go like, “Oh, here's the way our products will be used for harm.” Because if you say to a product manager, “Here's a way our product might be used for harm,” they go, “Well, okay.” [laughs] “Might not be.” [laughs] If you say, “Here's a way our product will be used for harm.” Well, now that leaves a lot less of wiggle room.
\n\nEVA: Hmm, yeah. That's a really good point that I actually hadn't thought about.
\n\nI think the other thing is there's tangible outcomes from something like that brainstorm, or these different activities that I have outlined. You can actually show the person, like, “Here's what we did. Here's what we came up with,” which isn't necessarily – I wish we didn't have to always do that; always have some type of very explicit outcome from everything we do. But I do think that's a reality that we have that this process kind of helps with.
\n\nCORALINE: I want to go back to the user thing. Again, one of the things that we're thinking about our ethical source is thinking beyond the user and thinking about not just who is using the technology that we're creating, but the people that the technology we're creating is being used on.
\n\nEVA: Yes. That's such a good point. I'm actually curious, have you come up with a term for that type of user? Like nonuser?
\n\nCORALINE: I have not yet, but that's a great call out. Language is so important so, yeah.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. I don't know that it exists and I've seen nonuser, but I don't know that that's agreed upon.
\n\nDAMIEN: I've gotten as far, the best I've come up with is constituency.
\n\nCORALINE: That is very interesting, Damien because one of the things we're developing is a governance tool. The W3C, when they were working on the HTML standard—this was a couple of years ago, I think—they mentioned something called a priority of constituent and this was very much from a standards body perspective, but it was one sentence and I think it is such a powerful sentence. Just for their example, they said, “In times of conflict, we prioritize end users over developers, over browser manufacturers, over spec writers, over technical purity.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEVA: Wow.
\n\nCORALINE: That’s one sentence, but writing that down, I think can really help cut through a lot of a lot of the noise and a lot of the gray area maybe that's the most encountered. It's so simple and you can do it in a single sentence. So absolutely, the notion of constituencies and being explicit about whose safety, convenience, or what have you you're optimizing for.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. That's really important and I have two thoughts.
\n\nOne is that this comes up a lot in the surveillance space where it's like, what sort of rights, or priority should we be giving someone who is walking on the sidewalk in front of a house that has a Ring camera that's facing out to capture the porch, but is ultimately capturing the sidewalk in the street? What are the rights of that person, that nonuser, who has not agreed to be filmed and isn't part of this product's ecosystem, but is still being impacted by it?
\n\nIt's something I think about a lot, especially there's so many in my neighborhood I see. Since I wrote the book, I see the Ring cameras everywhere, including in places where they're not really to be like on the outside of someone's gate, just facing the sidewalk. It's like, you're not even recording your own property at that point. It's just the gate, or it's just the sidewalk, I mean, which I feel is very problematic.
\n\nYou also said that it's important to explicitly call out who you're prioritizing and that's something – I read this book called Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, which was very lifechanging and it's just such a good book. It's a little more theoretical. She explicitly says it's not a guide, but she talks about this, about how it's really important to, if you are going to choose not to be inclusive, or safe, or justice focused, whatever it is, you need to explicitly say, “We are choosing to prioritize the comfort of this group over the safety of this group.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Or whatever it is. Like, you need to actually just spell that out and be upfront about it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. It reminds me of, I think I learned this from Marla Compton. Although, I don't know if she originated it. I guess, she probably didn't, but the phrase she taught me was, “We prioritize the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of non-marginalized people.” It's such a powerful statement.
\n\nCORALINE: It really is.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and just making that explicit like, “These are the tradeoffs and these are where we side on them.”
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's such a good one.
\n\nI did this workshop recently, it's called How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy, but they talked a lot about how feeling entitled to comfort is just such a white supremacist thing and I feel shows up in different forms of oppression as well like men's comfort, et cetera. But that's something I've been thinking about a lot is the feeling of a right to comfort and how that also includes a right to not have to have any type of conflict and a fear of conflict. How these things all play together and how it's all part of white supremacy and how it shows up in our culture, in our workplaces. It was a great workshop. I would highly recommend it because it's also been a lifechanging thing as I digest all of the different things from it.
\n\nDAMIEN: It's so powerful to name that as comfort.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Like, this is what we're protecting. We're protecting these people's comfort [chuckles] and this is what it will cost.
\n\nCORALINE: I think about what Kim Crayton said for a year is, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
\n\nEVA: Yeah, that's such a good one. I love her.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: I quoted her in my book about, oh, I forget what it is. It's something about not having strategy is chaos.
\n\nCORALINE: Oh my God.
\n\nEVA: Like, the need for strategy.
\n\nCORALINE: I learned so much from her from that one statement. That was literally lifechanging for me. That was literally lifechanging for me because I always had a negative feeling about strategy, like strategy is coercive, or insincere. And then another friend of mine I was talking to about it said strategy is good when it's not a zero-sum game.
\n\nEVA: Mm.
\n\nCORALINE: I think we maybe we can think about personal safety and abuse factors in that way.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, definitely. I think the full quote is “Intention without strategy is chaos.”
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, that.
\n\nEVA: That has been very definitely influential for me and as I feel like a big part of the reason, that idea is why I wrote my book and did my conference talk is because I was feeling frustrated with – it's a lot easier to raise awareness about an issue than it is to have actual strategies for fixing it. I felt like I would always get really fired up reading something, or listening to a talk and be like, “Yeah, this is such a huge problem. We need to fix it,” and then didn't have a takeaway, or anything that I could really do at work other than just being told to think about this, or consider this, which I'm like, “When do I do that?”
\n\nCORALINE: And what does that look like?
\n\nEVA: Yeah, you can't think about all of the different things we need to think about from 9:00 to 5:00 while we're at work every day. We need a strategy to do that, which is why I like made these different activities that I have in my process.
\n\nBut going back to this white supremacy and design workshop that I did, I also learned in there about how some other ways that white supremacy shows up is having an action bias and a sense of urgency.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: And how a lot of that can come from people, especially white people, not being able to like sit with discomfort when we're faced with really uncomfortable topics and a desire to jump into action before we fully understand the problem and have internalized it.
\n\nSo now I'm feeling like I need to backtrack a little bit and be like, “Yes, provide action.” But also, it is good to do deep learning. I think we need both, but I feel like a lot of people, it's one, or the other. Let's do a ton of learning, or let's jump right into action. I have always been a jump right into action person and now I'm realizing it's okay to take a beat and do some deep learning and to sit with all the discomfort of the heavy topic.
\n\nCORALINE: A friend of mine gave me a concept that I like a lot. He has a definition of ergonomics that is the marriage of design and ethics. When I use the term ergonomics in that sense, what I mean is how easy is it to do a particular action. One of the things that I see quite a bit—something, I think is a terrible consequence of the web, frankly—is putting ergonomics behind paywalls and asking people who use our software to yield some degree of agency, or digital autonomy, or security in exchange for features.
\n\nEVA: Hmm. So interesting.
\n\nCORALINE: So I'm curious maybe how you would frame designing for safety, some of the other axes of oppression that we discussed on the show today, from the perspective of the ethical aspect of our design decisions. What workflows are we optimizing for? What workflows are we putting behind a paywall, or in exchange for okay, you’re signing up. The [inaudible] says you're buying into surveillance capitalism and you just simply have to do that if you want an email account, if you want a Twitter account, what have you.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. I do feel like there is a bit of an issue with putting safety and security sometimes behind a paywall where you can literally pay more to not get advertised to, for example.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Which it's like, I get that products have to charge money and it’s like we shouldn't – the flipside of that is well, we can't just work for free. I see that a lot with journalism when people are criticizing paywalls and it's like well, but journalists have to get paid. They can't work for free just like everyone else.
\n\nBut I do feel that with things like being able to opt out of advertising and I feel like there are other things. Nothing's coming in right now, but different ways that you can ease some of the crappier parts of tech, if you have enough money, to buy into the paid versions of things is definitely problematic. Who are we keeping out when we do that and who are we saying doesn't deserve this privacy and the safety? What should just be standard? The seatbelt; I'm obsessed with the history of the seatbelts.
\n\nCORALINE: [chuckles] I still have the [inaudible] that's been going around.
\n\nEVA: Yeah.
\n\nCORALINE: It’s amazing.
\n\nEVA: I've talked about this in many different places, but the seatbelt used to be something that you had to pay extra for. In today's dollars, it would've been like 300 extra dollars when you bought a car to get seat belts and only 2% of the people, in 1956 when they were introduced, actually paid for them and probably even less were actually using them. And then there was a revolution in the auto industry led by activists and everyday people. It definitely not come from the auto industry; they had to be forced into these different things. But now seat belts, the government basically, they passed a law and they said, “You have to just include seat belts as a standard feature.”
\n\nI think about that a lot in tech. The things now that we're making people pay for, should some of those just be standard features and how are we going to get there? Probably government regulation after a lot of activism and everyday people rallying against these different things with big tech. But I think we're going to get there with a lot of things and we're going to see a lot of seatbelts, so to speak, become just standard features and not something you have to pay for.
\n\nCORALINE: And I wonder, you mentioned government regulation; I have literally zero faith in government doing anything effective in the online world at all because our government is powered by 65-year-old white men that are rich and there's no incentive for them to care about this even if they did have the basic literacy about how this stuff works.
\n\nIt seems to me one of the things that we've been seeing really emphasize is, especially during in post lockdown, is worker organizing and I wonder if there's a strategy here for empowering the engineers, who frankly, we are being treated rockstars right now. I hate that term rockstar, but we're overpaid, we're pampered—a lot of folks, obviously, not everyone.
\n\nSo can we leverage our power? Can we leverage the privilege of being in such an in-demand profession to affect change in organizations that have no financial incentive to think about stuff like this at all?
\n\nEVA: Yeah. So many things I want to respond to. Definitely, I think worker power is like such a strong point in all of this and I feel like we are the ones leading out on this. A lot of it is coming from people who work in tech and understand the issues. Like, writing, speaking, and doing these different things to help everyday people who don't work in tech understand like, “Hey, actually, here's why Facebook is really terrible.” A lot of that is coming from people in tech, even former Facebook employees even.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Which is different, I think from the paradigm shift we had with the auto industry. I don't know, I would have to look, but I'm pretty sure is not coming from car designers and engineers weren't helping lead that charge the way that we are.
\n\nBut I also want to respond to something you said about tech workers being overpaid and pampered, which yes, I agree with you. But I also think there are privileges that everyone should have and that no one should of and I feel like everyone deserves to be well paid, to be comfortable and have all these perks, and whatnot.
\n\nI had a career in nonprofit before this so I have so much internalized just baggage about and guilt around feeling with my pay, my benefits, and all these things. The work I do now, compared to the work I was doing in the nonprofit, which was helping kids who were basically on a road to dropping out before graduating high school, which was really important work and I made so much less money and worked so much harder. But I feel like everyone deserves to be as well paid as we are and it is possible.
\n\nCORALINE: Yes.
\n\nEVA: So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well that we – [chuckles] I feel like I'm trying to just absolve myself from being a well-paid tech worker. But I do think we deserve this and also, everyone else deserves similar treatment.
\n\nCORALINE: Absolutely.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I feel the same way, especially—to take an example within a tech company—as an engineer, I get paid a lot more than customer service people.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: And that doesn't mean I'm overpaid, [chuckles] it means they're underpaid.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: A lot. [laughs]
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, and I feel like this whole conversation, honestly, this is a freaking tactic. This is what the people at the top, this is how they want us to feel; pitting us against each other, feeling like it's not that – the sales people, that's normal and we're overpaid. It's like, no, actually we're paid a livable amount where we can live comfortably and they're exploited even more than we are.
\n\nThat's how I'm trying to think about things because I do feel like this other way of looking at it is just absolutely a tactic of, I don't know, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. The company leaders definitely don't want us to feel like we're – they would rather us feel that we're overpaid and pampered than just compensated for the labor we do in a fair way,
\n\nMANDY: Have us feel the shame and guilt around it, too. Before I was in tech, I went from welfare to making a reasonable standard of living in a year and sometimes, I still feel guilty about it. It's a heck of a feeling.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, and I feel like that didn't just come out of nowhere. We've been taught that we should feel guilty for just surviving. I don't know. Because I think even in tech, it's a lot of people there's still so many issues with burnout, with—I don't know about you all, my body sometimes just hurts from not moving enough during – like, there's still all these like different things that could be better. But the feeling that we should feel guilty for having some comfort and decent pay, I think that's definitely a strategy that has come from these different powerful groups. It didn't just come out of nowhere.
\n\nCORALINE: I appreciate y'all pushing back on that. I guess, I'm speaking from an emotional place. Eva, you went from nonprofit and the tech. In April, I went from tech and the nonprofit and personally, I took a 30% pay cut and – [overtalk]
\n\nEVA: Oh, wow.
\n\nCORALINE: It just really made very visible and very personal seeing what we value as a society and what we don't value as a society. I'm still comfortable; I still have a living wage and everything. But look at what happened during the lockdown with “frontline workers.’ They're heroes, but we don't want to pay them more than minimum wage.
\n\nSo I definitely agree with what you're saying about other people being underpaid and I definitely hear what you're saying about that guilt, but guilt is a form of discomfort. What are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with the privileges and the power that we have as a result of the way we're treated in this industry? I feel like that's the more important thing and what do you do with it? Are you giving back? Are you giving back in a substantive way, or are you giving back to assuage your guilt? It's nuanced. As y'all are pointing out, it is nuanced.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. It's very complicated, but I feel like agitating for those—sorry, Damien, I think you said support people—getting paid more, that's something we can agitate for.
\n\nI know someone, I'll call her an online friend of mine in the infertility space, which I'm very involved in as I go through my journey. I hate that word, but I've made all these online friends who are going through it and one of them is a paralegal and she is obviously hoping, although it's not going well, to get pregnant. But she was looking into the parental benefits and realized that the lawyers where she works had, I think it's 18 weeks fully paid off and then everyone else got this weird piecemeal of 6 weeks paid off, then there's FMLA, and then there's PTO, and all this stuff that amounted to a lot less, and you had to like use all of your PTO and all these different things. She actually was able to—with some of the lawyers help, I believe—get that policy change that it was just the same for everyone because it was like, “I didn't go to law school. So therefore, I don't need as much time with my newborn? How does that make sense?”
\nCORALINE: [chuckles] Yeah.
EVA: So I feel there is a lot of potential to have more equality in our companies, especially as the most powerful people often in the companies, to push for that change to happen.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: There needs to be a lot of solidarity, I think, between these different types of workers.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's a great example of that.
\n\nMANDY: Well, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation and I feel so privileged just to be sitting here kicking back and just taking in the back and forth between the rest of you.
\n\nI wrote down a bunch of a things, but one of the biggest takeaways that I have had from this episode, and especially if you've been listening to the show the past couple episodes, we've been talking about a lot of accessibility things. Eva, you said something that was mind-blowing for me and it shouldn't be mind-blowing, but it was because I was like, didn't even ever think of that and what the hell is wrong with me for not even ever thinking about that? but inclusive and accessible includes people experiencing domestic abuse. It’s not something – I guess, because as what you said, people don't talk about it. So just keeping that in mind was pretty pertinent to me.
\n\nI also liked what Coraline said about specialization and then the general knowledge and literacy versus fluency. That was really good as well.
\n\nSo it's been an awesome conversation. Thank you.
\n\nDamien, what do you have?
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, well, this has been really awesome and I want to of first thank Eva for being our guest here and for the work you do and this book.
\n\nThe thing that's going to be sticking with me, I'll be reflecting on for a while, is this sentence both well, if the product can be used for harm, it will be, which is not only a really powerful thing to keep in mind when designing and building a thing, but also, a powerful sentence that is really useful in communicating these issues. So thank you very much for that.
\n\nCORALINE: One of the things that and actually Eva, this was a reaction I had when I first read your book is, I think a lot of us, a growing number of us, have at least an awareness, if not a personal experience, with how systems are weaponized against marginalized, or vulnerable folks. So I think it's really important that in your book, you focus very specifically on a particular domain of abuse, abuse of power and loss of agency and loss of privacy, loss of physical safety.
\n\nOne of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how the internet has been really good for connecting people with shared experiences and creating communities around the shared experiences. But I do worry that we're breaking into smaller and smaller and smaller groups and I see that. I don't know if it's intentional, but it certainly is a way, I think that we're propping up, that we're being coerced into propping up these systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences.
\n\nI don't see that as a criticism. What I see it as is an opportunity to connect with other folks who experience that same kind of systemic damage in collaborating and trying to understand the different challenges that we all face. But recognizing that a lot of it is based frankly, white supremacy. We used to talk about patriarchy; I think the thinking broadly has evolved beyond that.
\n\nBut I would love to see your publisher start putting books together on different particular axes, but also, looking at ways that we can bridge the differences between these different experiences of intentional, or unintentional harm. So that's something that I think I'm going to think about.
\n\nEVA: Nice. I can't give any spoilers, but I do think my publisher might have something in the works that it's getting at some of this stuff.
\n\nWonderful.
\n\nEVA: Which is exciting.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: Yeah, okay. Man, those are all so good.
\n\nMy reflection, I'm just thinking a lot about our conversation about the way that people in tech might feel like we're overpaid, or pampered and how that feels like an intentional thing that has come from somewhere and things like that don't just – it always comes from somewhere.
\n\nI'm thinking Mandy, about what you said in your reflection. You said, “What's wrong with me for not thinking about this?” I always feel like when I hear people say things like that, it's like well, when were you – I think more who didn't teach you about this? Why wasn't this part of your education as you were learning to code and before you joined the industry? I feel like that's more where the blame lies than with individuals, but yeah.
\n\nSomething I was thinking about earlier today, before we started recording, is that this idea of user safety, that it's like our job to keep ourselves safe on tech and there's so many resources out there, different articles, and different things. I've been thinking similarly about that, but that's a marketing campaign. That's something that the leaders of big tech done to intentionally shift responsibility from themselves and onto the end user.
\n\nWe're expected to be legal experts, read these agreements, and understand every single thing about a product that no one uses every single feature, but we're expected to understand it. If we don't and something goes wrong, either interpersonal harm, what I do, or with like oh, someone guessed your password or whatever it was, it's your fault instead of it being the tech company's responsibility. I feel like that's another thing that I'm thinking like that didn't come from nowhere, that came from somewhere.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nEVA: It feels like a very intentional strategy that big tech has used to blame us for when things go wrong. Not to say that we get to be absolved of everything, people have responsibilities and whatnot, but I feel like a lot of times it's like this comes from somewhere and I'm trying to think more about that kind of stuff. This conversation was really awesome for helping me process some of those and expand my thoughts a little bit more. So thank you all, this was just really awesome.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you for being here.
\n\nMANDY: Thank you for coming.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. So happy to talk to you, Eva.
\n\nEVA: Yeah. You, too.
\n\nMANDY: All right, everyone. Well, with that, we will wrap up and I will put a plug in for our Slack community. You can join us and Eva will get an invitation as well to come visit us in Slack and keep these conversations going.
\n\nOur website to do that is patreon.com/greaterthancode. Patreon is a subscription-based thing that if you want to you can pledge to support the show. However, if you DM any one of us and you want to be let in and you cannot afford, or just simply don't want to, monetarily support, we will let you in for free. So just reach out to one of the panelists and we'll get you in there.
\n\nSo with that, I will say thank you again. Thank you, everybody and we'll see you next week!
Special Guest: Eva PenzeyMoog.
Sponsored By:
01:09 - Todd’s Superpower: Advocacy For Accessibility
\n\n06:18 - Joining The W3C
\n\n\n\n07:44 - Getting People/Companies/Stakeholders to Care/Prioritize About Accessibility
\n\n15:20 - The Domino's Pizza Story
\n\n\n\n18:21 - Things That Typically Aren’t Accessible And Should Be
\n\n26:27 - Accessibility for Mobile Devices
\n\n28:08 - Color Contrast
\n\n33:02 - Designing w/ Accessibility in Mind From the Very Beginning
\n\n36:22 - Contrast (Cont’d)
\n\n38:11 - Automating Accessibility!
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMae: Eyeballing for contrast.
\n\nJohn: We are all only temporarily abled and getting the ball rolling on building accessibility in from the beginning of projects going forward and fixing older codebases.
\n\nMandy: Using alt-tags going forward on all social media posts.
\n\nTodd: Accessibility work will never end. Accessibility is a right not a privilege.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 251. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale.
\n\nMAE: Hi, there! And also, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Hi, everyone! I'm Mandy Moore and I'm here today with our guest, Todd Libby.
\n\nTodd Libby is a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years under many different technologies starting with HTML/CSS, Perl, and PHP. Todd has been an avid learner of web technologies for over 40 years starting with many flavors of BASIC all the way to React/Vue. Currently an Accessibility Analyst at Knowbility, Todd is also a member of the W3C. When not coding, you’ll usually find Todd tweeting about lobster rolls and accessibility.
\n\nSo before I ask you what your superpower is, I'm going to make a bet and my bet is that I'm 80% positive that your superpower has something to do with lobster rolls. Am I right?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAm I right?
\n\nTODD: Well, 80% of the time, you'd be right. I just recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona. So I was actually going to say advocacy for accessibility, but yes, lobster rolls and the consumption of lobster rolls are a big part.
\n\nMAE: I love it. That's fantastic.
\n\nMANDY: Okay. Well, tell me about the advocacy. [chuckles]
\n\nTODD: So it started with seeing family members who are disabled, friends who are disabled, or have family members themselves who are disabled, and the struggles they have with trying to access websites, or web apps on the web and the frustration, the look of like they're about ready to give up. That's when I knew that I would try to not only make my stuff that I made accessible, but to advocate for people in accessibility.
\n\nMAE: Thank you so much for your work. It is critical. I have personally worked with a number of different populations and started at a camp for children with critical illnesses and currently work at an organization that offers financial services for people with disabilities – well, complex financial needs, which the three target populations that we work with are people with disabilities, people with dementia, and people in recovery. So really excited to talk with you today. Thanks.
\n\nTODD: You’re welcome.
\n\nJOHN: When you started that journey, did you already have familiarity with accessibility, or was it all just like, “Oh, I get to learn all this stuff so I can start making it better”?
\n\nTODD: So I fell into it because if you're like me and you started with making table-based layouts way back in the day, because what we had—Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer—we were making table-based layouts, which were completely inaccessible, but I didn't know that.
\n\nAs the web progressed, I progressed and then I bought a little orange book by Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, and that pretty much started me on my journey—semantic HTML, progressive enhancement in web standards, and accessibility as well. I tend to stumble into a lot of stuff [laughs] so, and that's a habit of mine. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: It sounds like it's a good habit and you're using it to help all the other people. So I hate to encourage you to keep stumbling, but by all means.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLove it.
\n\nIf you were to advise someone wanting to know more about accessibility, would you suggest they start with that same book too, or what would you suggest to someone stumbling around in the dark and not hitting anything yet?
\n\nTODD: The book is a little outdated. I think the last edition of his book was, I want to say 2018, maybe even further back than that. I would suggest people go on websites like The A11Y project, the a11yproject.com. They have a comprehensive list of resources, links to learning there.
\n\nTwitter is a good place to learn, to follow people in the accessibility space.
\n\nThe other thing that, if people really want to dive in, is to join The W3C. That's a great place and there's a lot of different groups. You have the CSS Working Group, you have the accessibility side of things, which I'm a part of, the Silver Community Group, which is we're working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, which is still a little ways down the road, but a lot of great people and a lot of different companies. Some of those companies we've heard of—Google, Apple, companies like that all the way down to individuals. Individuals can join as individuals if your company isn't a member of the W3C.
\n\nSo those are the three things that I mainly point to people. If you don't really want to dive into the W3C side of things, there's a lot of resources on the a11yproject.com website that you can look up.
\n\nMANDY: So what does being a member entail? What do you have to do? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to do certain projects, maybe start as an individual level, because I'm sure we have mostly individuals listening to the show. Me as a newbie coder, what would I do to get started as a member of this initiative?
\n\nTODD: Well, I started out as an individual myself, so I joined and I can get you the link to The W3C Community Page. Go to sign up as an individual and someone will approve the form process that you go through—it's nothing too big, it's nothing complicated—and then that will start you on your way. You can join a sub group, you can join a group, a working group, and it doesn't cost an individual. Companies do pay dues to the W3C and if your company is in the W3C, you get ahold of your company's liaison and there's a process they go through to add you to a certain group.
\n\nBecause with me, it was adding me to The Silver Community Group. But as an individual, you can join in, you can hop right into a meeting from there, and then that's basically it. That's how you start.
\n\nJOHN: What are the challenges you see in getting not only the goals of a W3C, but I'm assuming specifically around accessibility?
\n\nTODD: Some of the things that I've seen is buy-in from stakeholders is probably the number one hurdle, or barrier. Companies, stakeholders, and board members, they don't think of, or in some cases, they don't care about accessibility until a company is getting sued and that's a shame.
\n\nThat's one of the things that I wrote about; I have an article on Smashing Magazine. Making A Strong Case for Accessibility, it's called and that is one of few things that I've come across. Getting buy-in from stakeholders and getting buy-in from colleagues as well because you have people that they don’t think about accessibility, they think about a number of different things. Mostly what I've come across is they don't think about accessibility because there's no budget, or they don't have the time, or the company doesn't have the time. It's not approved by the company.
\n\nThe other thing that is right up there is it's a process—accessibility—making things accessible and most people think that it's a big this huge mountain to climb. If you incorporate accessibility from the beginning of your project, it's so much easier. You don't have to go back and you don't have to climb that mountain because you've waited until the very end. “Oh, we have time now so we'll do the accessibility stuff,” that makes it more hard.
\n\nMAE: John, your question actually was similar to something I was thinking about with how you developed this superpower and I was going to ask and still will now. [chuckles] How did you afford all the time in the different places where you were overtime to be able to get this focus? And so, how did you make the case along the way and what things did you learn in that persuasion class of life [chuckles] that was able to allow you to have that be where you could focus and spend more time on and have the places where you work prioritize successful?
\n\nTODD: It was a lot of, I call it diplomatic advocacy. So for instance, the best example I have is I had been hired to make a website, a public facing website, and a SAAS application accessible. The stakeholder I was directly reporting to, we were sitting down in a meeting one day and I said, “Well, I want to make sure that accessibility is the number one priority on these projects,” and he shot back with, “Well, we don't have the disabled users,” and that nearly knocked me back to my chair. [laughs] So that was a surprise.
\n\nMAE: There's some groaning inside and I had to [chuckles] do it out loud for a moment. Ooh.
\n\nTODD: Yeah, I did my internal groaning at the meeting so that just was – [chuckles] Yeah, and I remember that day very vividly and I probably will for the rest of my life that I looked at him and I had to stop and think, and I said, “Well, you never know, there's always a chance that you're able, now you could be disabled at any time.” I also pointed out that his eyeglasses that he wore are an assistive technology. So there was some light shed on that and that propelled me even further into advocacy and the accessibility side of things.
\n\nThat meeting really opened my eyes to not everyone is going to get it, not everyone is going to be on board, not everyone is going to think about disabled users; they really aren't. So from there I used that example. I also use what I call the Domino's Pizza card lately because “Oh, you don't want to get sued.’ That's my last resort as far as advocacy goes. Other than that, it's showing a videotape of people using their product that are disabled and they can't use it. That's a huge difference maker, when a stakeholder sees that somebody can’t use their product.
\n\nThere's numbers out there now that disabled users in this country alone, the United States, make up 25% of the population, I believe. They have a disposable income of $8 trillion. The visually disabled population alone is, I believe it was $1.6 billion, I think. I would have to check that number again, but it's a big number. So the money side of things really gets through to a stakeholder faster than “Well, your eyeglasses are a assistive technology.”
\n\nSo once they hear the financial side of things, their ears perk up real quick and then they maybe get on board. I've never had other than one stakeholder just saying, “No, we're just going to skip that,” and then that company ended up getting sued. So that says a lot, to me anyways. But that's how I really get into it.
\n\nAnd then there was a time where I was working for another company. I was doing consulting for them and I was doing frontend mostly. So it was accessibility, but also at the same time, it was more the code side of things. That was in 2018. 2019, I went to a conference in Burlington, Vermont. I saw a friend of mine speaking and he was very passionate about it and that talk, and there was a couple others there as well, it lit that fire under me again, and I jumped right back in and ever since then, it's just then accessibility.
\n\nMAE: You reminded me one of the arguments, or what did you say? Diplomatic advocacy statements that I have used is that we are all temporarily abled. [chuckles] Like, that's just how it is and seeing things that way we can really shift how you orient to the idea of as other and reduce the othering. But I was also wondering how long it would be before Pizza Hut came up in our combo.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I haven't heard of that. Can you tell us what that is?
\n\nTODD: [chuckles] So it was Domino’s and they had a blind user that tried to use their app. He couldn't use their app; their app wasn't accessible. He tried to use the website; the website wasn't accessible. I have a link that I can send over to the whole story because I'm probably getting bits and pieces wrong. But from what I can recall, basically, this user sued Domino's and instead of Domino's spending, I believe it was $36,000 to fix their website and their app, they decided to drag it out for a number of years through court and of course, spent more money than just $36,000.
\n\nIn the end, they lost. I think they tried to appeal to the Supreme Court because they've gone up as high as federal court, but regardless, they lost. They had to – and I don't know if they still have an inaccessible site, or not, or the app for that matter because I don't go to Domino’s.
\n\nBut that's basically the story that they had; a user who tried to access the app and the website, couldn’t use it, and they got taken to court. Now Domino's claimed, in the court case, that he could have used the telephone, but he had tried to use the telephone twice and was on hold for 45 minutes. So [laughs] that says a lot.
\n\nJOHN: Looks like it actually did go to the Supreme Court.
\n\nTODD: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think they did not want to hear it. They just said, “No, we're not going to hear the case.” Yeah, and just think about all these apps we use and all the people that can't access those apps, or the websites. I went to some company websites because I was doing some research, big companies, and a lot of them are inaccessible. A little number that I can throw out there: every year, there's been a little over 2,500 lawsuits in the US. This year, if the rate keeps on going that it has, we're on course for over 4,000 lawsuits in the US alone for inaccessible websites. You've had companies like Target, Bank of America, Winn-Dixie, those kinds of companies have been sued by people because of inaccessible sites.
\n\nMAE: Okay, but may I say this one thing, which is, I just want to extend my apologies to Pizza Hut.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: What kinds of things do you see as not being accessible that should be or easily could be that companies just simply aren't doing?
\n\nTODD: The big one, still and if you go to webaim.org/projects/million, it's The WebAIM Million report. It's an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1 million home pages on the internet.
\n\nThe number one thing again, this year is color contracts. There are guidelines in place. WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that text should be a 4.5:1 ratio that reaches the minimum contrast for texts. It’s a lot of texts out there that doesn't even reach that. So it's color contrast.
\n\nYou'll find a lot of, if you look at—I’m looking at the chart right now—missing alt texts on images. If you have an image that is informative, or you have an image that is conveying something to a user, it has to have alternative text describing what's in the picture. You don't have to go into a long story about what's in the picture and describe it thoroughly; you can just give a quick overview as to what the picture is trying to convey, what is in the picture.
\n\nAnd then another one being another failure type a is form input labels; labels that are not labeled correctly. I wrote a article about that [chuckles] on CSS-Tricks and that is, there's programmatic and there’s accessible names for form labels that not only help the accessibility side of it, as far as making the site accessible, but also it helps screen reader users read forms and navigate through forms, keyboard users also.
\n\nThen you have empty links and then a big one that I've seen lately is if you look up in the source code, you see the HTML tag, and the language attribute, a lot of sites now, because they use trademarks, they don't have a document language. I ran across a lot of sites that don't use a document language. They're using a framework. I won't name names because I'm not out to shame, but having that attribute helps screen reader users and I think that's a big thing.
\n\nA lot of accessibility, people don't understand. People use screen readers, or other assistive technologies, for instance, Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice input. But at the same time, I’ve got to also add accessibility is more than just deaf, or blind. I suffer from migraines, migraine headaches so animation, or motion from say, parallax scrolling can trigger a migraine. Animations that are too fast, that also trigger migraine headache. You have flashing content that can potentially cause seizures and that's actually happened before where an animated GIF was intentionally sent to someone and it caused a seizure and almost killed the person.
\n\nSo there's those and then the last thing on this list that I'm looking at right now, and these are common failures, empty buttons. You have buttons that don't have labels. Buttons that have Click here. Buttons need to be descriptive. So you want to have – on my site to send me something on the contact form, it's Send this info to Todd, Click here, or something similar like that.
\n\nMAE: Can you think of any, John that you know of, too? I've got a couple of mind. How about you, Mandy?
\n\nMANDY: For me, because I'm just starting out, I don't know a whole lot about accessibility. That's why I'm here; I’m trying to learn. But I am really conscious and careful of some of the GIFs that I use, because I do know that some of the motion ones, especially really fast-moving ones, can cause problems, migraines, seizures for people. So when posting those, I'm really, really mindful about it.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, the Click here one is always bothers me too, because not only is it bad accessibility, it’s bad UX. Like HTML loves you to turn anything into a link so you can make all the words inside the button and it’s just fine. [laughs] There's so many other ways to do it that are just – even discounting the accessibility impact, which I don't want it.
\n\nTODD: Yeah, and touching upon that, I'm glad you brought up the button because I was just going to let that go [chuckles] past me. I have to say and I think it was in the email where it said, “What's bothering you?” What bothers me is people that don't use the button. If you are using a div, or an anchor tag, or a span, stop it. [laughs] Just stop it. There’s a button element for that. I read somewhere that anchor tag takes you somewhere, a div is a container, but button is for a button.
\n\nMAE: I love that. The only other ones I could think of is related to something you said, making sure to have tab order set up properly to allow people to navigate. Again, I liked your point about you don't have to be fully blind to benefit from these things and having keyboard accessibility can benefit a lot of people for all kinds of reasons.
\n\nThe other one is, and I would love to hear everybody's thoughts on this one, I have heard that we're supposed to be using h1, h2, h3 and having proper setup of our HTML and most of us fail just in that basic part. That's another way of supporting people to be able to navigate around and figure out what's about to be on this page and how much should I dig into it? So more on non-visual navigation stuff.
\n\nTODD: Yeah, heading structure is hugely important for keyboard users and screen reader users as well as tab order and that's where semantic HTML comes into play. If you're running semantic HTML, HTML by default, save for a few caveats, is accessible right out of the box. If your site and somebody can navigate through using let's say, the keyboard turns and they can navigate in a way that is structurally logical, for instance and it has a flow to it that makes sense, then they're going to be able to not only navigate that site, but if you're selling something on that site, you're going to have somebody buying something probably. So that's again, where tab order and heading structure comes into play and it's very important.
\n\nJOHN: I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you know this, that the same sort of accessibility enhancements are available in native mobile applications that aren't using each HTML, is that correct?
\n\nTODD: Having not delved into the mobile side of things with apps myself, that I really can't answer. I can say, though, that the WCAG guidelines, that does pertain to mobile as well as desktop. There's no certain set of rules. 2.2 is where there are some new features that from mobile, for instance, target size and again, I wrote another article on CSS-Tricks about target size as well. So it's if you ever noticed those little ads that you just want to click off and get off your phone and they have those little tiny Xs and you're sitting there tapping all day? Those are the things target size and dragging movements as well.
\n\nI did an audit for an app and there was a lot of buttons that were not named. A lot of the accessibility issues I ran into were the same as I would run into doing an audit on a website. I don't know anything about Swift, or Flutter, or anything like that, they pretty much fall into the same category with [inaudible] as far as accessible.
\n\nJOHN: I also wanted to circle back on the first item that you listed as far as the WebAIM million thing was color contrast, which is one of those ones where a designer comes up with something that looks super cool and sleek, but it's dark gray on a light gray background. It looks great when you've got perfect eyesight, but anybody else, they’re just like, “Oh my God, what's that?” That's also one of the things that's probably easiest to change site-wide; it's like you go in and you tweak the CSS and you're done in a half hour and you've got the whole site updated. So it's a great bit of low-hanging fruit that you can attach if you want to start on this process.
\n\nTODD: Yeah. Color contrast is of course, as the report says, this is the number one thing and let me look back here. It's slowly, the numbers are dropping, but 85.3%, that's still a very high number of failures and there's larger text. If you're using anything over 18 pixels, or the equivalent of 18—it's either 18 points, or 18 pixels—is a 3:1 ratio. With that color contrast is how our brains perceive color. It's not the actual contrast of that color and there are people far more qualified than me going to that, or that can go into that.
\n\nSo what I'll say is I've seen a lot of teams and companies, “Yeah, we'll do a little over 4.5:1 and we'll call it a day.” But I always say, if you can do 7:1, or even 10:1 on your ratios and you can find a way to make your brand, or whatever the same, then go for it. A lot of the time you hear, “Well, we don't want to change the colors of our brand.” Well, your colors of your brand aren’t accessible to somebody who that has, for instance, Tritanopia, which is, I think it's blues and greens are very hard to see, or they don't see it at all.
\n\nColor deficiencies are a thing that design teams aren't going to check for. They’re just not. Like you said, all these colors look awesome so let’s just, we're going to go with that on our UI. That's one thing that I actually ran into on that SAAS product that I spoke about earlier was there was these colors and these colors were a dark blue, very muted dark blue with orange text. You would think the contrast would be oh yeah, they would be all right, but it was horrible.
\n\nJOHN: You can get browser plugins, that'll show you what the page looks like. So you can check these things yourself. Like you can go in and say, “Oh, you're right. That's completely illegible.”
\n\nTODD: Yeah. Firefox, like I have right here on my work machine. I have right here Firefox and it does this. There's a simulator for a visual color deficiencies. It also checks for contrast as well. Chrome has one, which it actually has a very cool eyedropper to check for color contrast. If you use the inspector also in Firefox, that brings up a little contrast thing. The WAVE extension has a contrast tool.
\n\nThere's also a lot of different apps. If you have a Mac, like I do, I have too many color contrast because I love checking out these color contrast apps. So I have about five different color contrast apps on my Mac, but there's also websites, too that you can use at the same time. Just do a search for polar contrast. Contrast Ratio, contrast-ratio.com, is from Lea Verou. I use that one a lot. A lot of people use that one. There's so many of them out there choose from, but they are very handy tool at designer's disposal and at developers’ disposal as well.
\n\nJOHN: So I'm trying to think of, like I was saying earlier, the color contrast one is one of those things that's probably very straightforward; you can upgrade your whole site in a short amount of time. Color contrast is a little trickier because it gets into branding and marketing's going to want to care about it and all that kind of stuff. So you might have a bit more battle around that, but it could probably be done and you might be able to fix, at least the worst parts of the page that have problems around that.
\n\nSo I'm just trying to think of the ways that you could get the ball rolling on this kind of a work. Like if you can get those early easy wins, it’s going to get more people on board with the process and not saying like, “Oh, it's going to take us eight months and we have to go through every single page and change it every forum.” That sounds really daunting when you think about it and so, trying to imagine what those easy early wins are that can get people down that road.
\n\nTODD: Yeah. Starting from the very outset of the project is probably the key one: incorporating accessibility from the start of the project. Like I said earlier, it's a lot easier when you do it from the start rather than waiting till the very end, or even after the product has been launched and you go back and go, “Oh, well, now we need to fix it.” You're not only putting stress on your teams, but it's eating up time and money because you're now paying everybody to go back and look at all these accessibility issues there.
\n\nHaving one person as a dedicated accessibility advocate on each team helps immensely. So you have one person on the development team, one person on the dev side, one person on the marketing team, starting from the top. If somebody goes there to a stakeholder and says, “Listen, we need to start incorporating accessibility from the very start, here's why,” Nine times out of ten, I can guarantee you, you're probably going to get that stakeholder onboard. That tenth time, you'll have to go as far as maybe I did and say, “Well, Domino's Pizza, or Bank of America, or Target.” Again, their ears are going to perk up and they're going to go, “Oh, well, I don't really, we don't want to get sued.”
\n\nSo that, and going back to having one person on each team: training. There are so many resources out there for accessibility training. There are companies out there that train, there are companies that you can bring in to the organization that will train, that'll help train. That's so easier than what are we going to do? A lot of people just sitting there in a room and go, “How are you going to do this?”
\n\nHaving that person in each department getting together with everybody else, that's that advocate for each department, meeting up and saying, “Okay, we're going to coordinate. You're going to put out a fantastic product that's going to be accessible and also, at the same time, the financial aspect is going to make the company money. But most of all, it's going to include a lot of people that are normally not included if you're putting out an accessible product.” Because if you go to a certain website, I can guarantee you it's going to be inaccessible—just about 99% of the web isn't accessible—and it's going to be exclusive as it's going to – somebody is going to get shut out of the site, or app. So this falls on the applications as well.
\n\nAnother thing too, I just wanted to throw in here for color contrast. There are different – you have color contrast text, but you also have non-text contrast, you have texts in images, that kind of contrast as well and it does get a little confusing. Let's face it, the guidelines right now, it's a very technically written – it's like a technical manual. A lot of people come up to me and said, “I can't read this. I can't make sense of this. Can you translate this?”
\n\nSo hopefully, and this is part of the work that I'm doing with a lot of other people in the W3C is where making the language of 3.0 in plain language, basically. It's going to be a lot easier to understand these guidelines instead of all that technical jargon. I look at something right now and I'm scratching my head when I'm doing an audit going, “Okay, what do they mean by this?” All these people come together and we agree on what to write. What is the language that's going to go into this?
\n\nSo when they got together 2.0, which was years and years ago, they said, “Okay, this is going to be how we're going to write this and we're going to publish this,” and then we had a lot of people just like me scratching their heads of not understanding it. So hopefully, and I'm pretty sure, 99.9% sure that it's going to be a lot easier for people to understand.
\n\nMAE: That sounds awesome. And if you end up needing a bunch of play testers, I bet a lot of our listeners would be totally willing to put in some time. I know I would.
\n\nJust want to put in one last plug for anybody out there who really loves automating things and is trying to avoid relying on any single developer, or designer, or QA person to remember to check for accessibility is to build it into your CI/CD pipeline. There are a lot of different options.
\n\nAnother approach to couple with that, or do independently is to use the axe core gems, and that link will be in the show notes, where it'll allow you to be able to sprinkle in your tests, accessibility checks on different pieces. So if we've decided we're going to handle color contrast, cool, then it'll check that. But if we're not ready to deal with another point of accessibility, then we can skip it. So it’s very similar to Robocop.
\n\nAnyway, just wanted to offer in some other tips and tricks of the trade to be able to get going on accessibility and then once you get that train rolling, it can do a little better, but it is hard to start from scratch.
\n\nJOHN: That’s a great tip, Mae. Thank you.
\n\nTODD: Yeah, definitely.
\n\nMANDY: Okay. Well, with that, I think it's about time we head into reflections; the point of the show, where we talk about something that we thought stood out, that we want to think about more, or a place that we can call for a call of action to our listeners, or even to ourselves. Who wants to go first?
\n\nMAE: I can go first. I learned something awesome from you, Todd, which I have not thought of before, which is if I am eyeballing for “contrast,” especially color contrast, that's not necessarily what that means. I really appreciate learning that and we'll definitely be applying that in my daily life. [chuckles] So thanks for teaching me a whole bunch of things, including that.
\n\nTODD: You’re welcome.
\n\nJOHN: I think for me, it's just the continuing reminder to – I do like the thinking that, I think Mae have brought up and also Todd was talking about earlier at the beginning about how we're all of us temporarily not disabled and that I think it helps bring some of that empathy a little closer to us. So it makes it a little more accessible to us to realize that it's going to happen to us at some point, at some level, and to help then bring that empathy to the other people who are currently in that state and really that's, I think is a useful way of thinking about it.
\n\nAlso, the idea that I've been thinking through as we've been talking about this is how do we get the ball rolling on this? We have an existing application that's 10 years old that's going to take a lot to get it there, but how do we get the process started so we feel like we're making progress there rather than just saying, “Oh, we did HTML form 27 out of 163. All right, back at it tomorrow.” It's hard to think about, so feeling like there's progress is a good thing.
\n\nTODD: Yeah, definitely and as we get older, our eyes, they're one of the first things to go. So I'm going to need assistive technology at some point so, yeah. And then what you touched upon, John. It may be daunting having to go back and do the whole, “Okay, what are we going to do for accessibility now that this project, it’s 10 years old, 15 years old?” The SAAS project that I was talking about, it was 15-year-old code, .net. I got people together; one from each department. We all got together and we ended up making that product accessible for them. So it can be done. [laughs] It can be done.
\n\nJOHN: That’s actually a good point. Just hearing about successes in the wild with particularly hard projects is a great thing. Because again, I'm thinking about it at the start of our project and hearing that somebody made it all through and maybe even repeatedly is hard.
\n\nTODD: Yeah. It's not something that once it's done, it's done. Accessibility, just like the web, is an ever-evolving media.
\n\nMANDY: For me. I think my reflection is going to be, as a new coder, I do want to say, I'm glad that we talked about a lot of the things that you see that aren't currently accessible that can be accessible. One of those things is using alt tags and right now, I know when I put the social media posts out on Twitter, I don't use the alt tags and I should. So just putting an alt tag saying, “This is a picture of our guest, Todd” and the title of the show would probably be helpful for some of our listeners. So I'm going to start doing that. So thank you.
\n\nTODD: You’re welcome. I'm just reminded of our talk and every talk that I have on a podcast, or with anybody just reminds me of the work that I have to do and the work that is being done by a lot of different people, other than myself as well, as far as advocacy goes in that I don't think it's ever going to be a job that will ever go away. There will always be a need for accessibility advocacy for the web and it's great just to be able to sit down and talk to people about accessibility and what we need to do to make the web better and more inclusive for everybody. Because I tweet out a lot, “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege,” and I really feel that to my core because the UN specifically says that the internet is a basic human and I went as far as to go say, “Well, so as an accessibility of that internet as well.” So that is my reflection.
\n\nMAE: I'll add an alt tag for me right now is with a fist up and a big smile and a lot of enthusiasm in my heart.
\n\nMANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Todd. It's been really great talking with you and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share with us your knowledge and your expertise on the subject of accessibility.
\n\nSo with that, I will close out the show and say we do have a Slack and Todd will be invited to it if he’d like to talk more to us and the rest of the Greater Than Code community. You can visit patreon.com/greaterthancode and pledge to support us monthly and again, if you cannot afford that, or do not want to pledge to help run the show, you can DM anyone of us and we will get you in there for free because we want to make the Slack channel accessible for all. Have a great week and we'll see you next time. Goodbye!
Special Guest: Todd Libby.
","summary":"Todd Libby talks about getting people, companies, and stakeholders to care about accessibility via diplomatic advocacy. He tells us the “Domino’s Pizza Story,” and shares with us the biggest things that typically aren’t accessible and should be on websites.","date_published":"2021-09-22T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f75b0240-bbae-41d7-8676-2a978091317f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":39187182,"duration_in_seconds":2801}]},{"id":"f81700a5-cbf6-4910-af86-40f0a6193b0d","title":"250: Employee Resource Groups with Adrian Gillem","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/employee-resource-groups","content_text":"01:19 - Adrian’s Superpower: Humor\n\n\nMaking People Feel Comfortable Through Humor\nSelf-Deprecating Humor & Authenticity\n\n\n04:57 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): What are they?\n\n\nEmployees Share Effective, Measurable, Impactful Insights\nConnecting New Hires with People Who Look Like Them\nMaking Employee Experiences Better\n\n\n09:20 - How ERGs Operate\n\n\n“Build with not for”\nMaking Fellow Colleagues Heard\n\n\n18:03 - Successfully Policy Implementations: Examples\n\n\nTransgender Healthcare\n\n\n23:18 - ERGs and Management / Executive Sponsor Partnerships\n\n30:41 - ERGs vs Unions \n\n\nEquity\n\n\n34:19 - Inclusivity Training \n\nReflections:\n\nCasey: “ERGs are only as strong as the management supporting them.”\n\nMandy: Live programming + fireside chats over slideshows for inclusivity training.\n\nAdrian: Pushing ERGs and DEI initiatives to the next level is crucial and keeping these efforts authentic.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nMANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 250. My name is Mandy Moore and I’m here with my friend, Casey Watts.\n\nCASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And we’re both here with Adrian Gillem.\n\nAdrian is a Technical Project Manager with Booz Allen Hamilton focused on deploying next generation digital transformation capabilities to public sector clients in Washington D.C., Honolulu, Tokyo, and Seoul. \n\nBeyond his technical client-responsibilities, Adrian’s true passion is grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion program management and partnership building. Over the years, Adrian helped lead Booz Allen’s LGBTQIA+ and African American Employee Resource Groups to new heights; instituting new internal and external partnerships and programs under a DEI strategy committed to representing and empowering our BIPOC, Black, Indigenous and people of color, queer, and ally employees across the firm.\n\nWelcome, Adrian!\n\nADRIAN: Thanks, everybody! Good to be with you guys.\n\nCASEY: All right, we’re going to ask you our first question, we always ask. What, Adrian, is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nADRIAN: [laughs] I've had to think about this. My superpower is humor and I only acquired it because I was able to tell the same bad jokes over and over to my friends and loved ones, and I've just stuck with the ones that people laughed at.\n\nCASEY: Testing. You tested them live. \n\nADRIAN: That's right. That's right. They had no choice.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: How many of them did you get full on laughter versus nervous laughter versus glares, which were also a sign they liked your pun?\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. I would say that my sarcastic humor definitely got 70% eye rolls, 10% hm and has and then the other 20% were slight laughs, maybe a smirk, or two. But over the years, I hope that it's gotten better more in my favor. People tend to smile a little more when I make a joke, but can't say it's a 100% success rate so far. But we'll see. Maybe I will start my life career as a comedian in the next 10 years since and just retire from technology, or I'll just do both. Who knows, who knows?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. There's space for that.\n\nADRIAN: There is.\n\nCASEY: Multi-passionate. You can be multi-passionate; you're allowed.\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely. I can make live jokes and do live coding on a set. I'll probably do really bad coding, which will be enough for people to laugh at anyway, so I'll already have material ready to go. \n\nMANDY: That's awesome.\n\nCASEY: You've got me smiling and laughing. \n\n[laughter] \n\nEven just the levity you're describing is funny. \n\nMANDY: Yeah.\n\nADRIAN: Thanks. I appreciate you both for already bearing with me. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: So I have a feeling you incorporate humor like this into your work with employee resource groups. It's hard to imagine you wouldn't. Tell us something like that—some of the joke that you've told, some scenario that you've managed to reframe.\n\nADRIAN: Oh boy, that's a really tough question. I think the way I try to incorporate my humor, especially in my work with our employee resource groups within the firm and especially with our partners outside of our company, is just to make everyone feel comfortable through humor. You start to meet with different folks of different backgrounds for the first time, maybe even for the second, or third time, whether it be at your water cooler, or in the kitchen, or at an actual meeting where you're talking about a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. \n\nSome folks might walk in and not necessarily know everyone in a room, not feel comfortable to speak in the way that they would like, or act as authentic as they should. So luckily for me, humor seems to break that ice very quickly. It's always very – in my case, I choose to do self-deprecating humor first and then that just gets the ball rolling in making sure that everybody feels open and welcome to be themselves in the space that I'm in.\n\nBut absolutely, in the ERG, the last place you want to have this stoic, maybe stale environment is an ERG whether it be an ERG meeting, or an ERG get together, or anything like that. You want to make sure that everyone feels very comfortable being in that space and you don't want to have as any hesitancy to that authenticity. So I try to do my best with making many people laugh, even if it is at my own expense and that's perfectly okay, I signed up for it.\n\nCASEY: So for listeners who may, or may not have been part of an employee resource group before, an ERG, can you tell us a little bit about what it's like being part of one? \n\nADRIAN: Sure. So being in an ERG, it's an interesting mix. You either are in an organization that has had ERGs for a very long time and there are predetermined ways that it operates. There's a leadership structure. There are formal rules and procedures in place. There's a lot of hype behind it. Folks feel that it actually represents their interest and they can use that to communicate up. By up, I do mean up to management, senior leadership on ways they are not feeling included, or feeling equitably represented in a particular company. \n\nAnd then there are other organizations where unfortunately, a formal ERG structure might not exist and so, you'll have situations where employees informally get together based on shared experiences, based on shared connections, based on shared racial identities, or gender identities, or sexual orientation identities. But they don't have a formal way, or a formal mechanism to do that.\n\nSo in our case, in organizations that do have formal ERGs, really what it is used for is to make sure that staff have an effective, measurable, an impactful organized mechanism to really share insights on things that are affecting them as an individual employee and share it across colleagues that also might be feeling similar impacts, or might have similar experiences.\n\nTo provide a specific example in this case, I lead, or I'm on the board, rather of our African American Network. That's what we call it. Really, it's focused on engaging our African American and more generally, our brown and Black persons of color employees across the firm to make sure that their voice is not just heard, but felt, that their impact is not just seen, but felt in the way our company operates and the things that we focus on and try to improve on. \n\nIn that, most of what I'll do is typically liaise with our employees that are, let's say, onboarding for the first time to the company and they want to feel connected to that wider corporate group. We are a company of 26,000 employees, so it's very hard to feel like I can connect with a bunch of people pretty easily. \n\nSo connecting with new hires via this mechanism of an ERG provides an easy way for folks to get together with a smaller subsect of our staff. But get connected with a subsect that actually looks like them, talks like them, has had shared experiences and memories and livelihoods and lives just like them and so, that's just part of it. \n\nThe other part of it is representing our respective employees and our members within the ERG and their interest to upper management, to our human resources division, and folks with just a stake in understanding what is impacting our employees that are particularly aligned to this group and how can we make their experiences better. But better in the sense that they're able to be more effective in their job, feel more authentic in their day-to-day, and feel more appreciated for the unique contributions that they're bringing each and every day that they support the work that we do.\n\nSo I think that's a lot and I'm happy to break it down even further because I think that this is such a really, really important element that companies that have it formally structured sometimes take for granted because they might not be effectively funding it, or giving it the oomph, I'll say. The energy and relevance to do that kind of impact that I'm describing that I feel is unique to Booz Allen. But in a way, it's also a call-to-action for maybe smaller or mid-size companies that, like you mentioned, might not have a formalized structure like this and yet have employees who want to band together and make it so, so they have a way to drive that type of impact I was talking about earlier. \n\nMANDY: So you create these groups—people who look like me, act like me, are like me identify in the same way that I do and we see things, where do we go from there? We identify the things that we want, or need. Do we go management? Do we go to HR? What's the kind of, how is it structured?\n\nADRIAN: So that's a very good question. I think ERGs and really, business resource groups, depending on the company, have varied reporting structures. \n\nIn the case of Booz Allen, we as an ERG work very closely and almost hand-in-hand with our formal diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, our human resources specialists, our recruiters, all those within that part of the company, to make sure that what we're hearing at what we like to consider at the grassroots level is actually delivering change that can be felt by our employees. \n\nNow, what that does not mean is that employees would somehow come to us as an ERG with let's say, a formal employee level, or human resource level complaint, and we pass it on their behalf. No, no, no. That's not really the focus. The focus really is to make sure that everyone, broadly speaking, has a chance to voice things that are really important to them and their situation—basically connected to their identity and however they choose to identify in a particular space so that we collectively can share those insights to departments and components of a business that drive that policy discussion and policy change in response to situations arising. \n\nSo in our case, in the wake of the increased exposure of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, in the wake of the murder of our brother, George Floyd, in the wake of so many impactful events that have happened over the last 2 years, not to mention a pandemic that we're all kind of living through in our own way, ERGs have become the focal point to articulating what really is, or are the needs of our workers, our colleagues, our friends in this company—whichever company that you might work for—and how can we represent what they are actually dealing with on a day-to-day basis?\n\nBecause I think one of the things that we forget is not all employees feel comfortable to go to human resources with an issue. Not all employees feel comfortable going to management with an issue—and I speak as a project manager myself. Especially when it comes to particular situations that are specific to issues that might be affected by their race, by their sexual orientation, by their gender identity, and so on and so forth. \n\nSo an ERG provides that formal, but not management connected mechanism to gather all of those insights, gather all of those feelings, and tell a narrative that's structured, but impactful to the human resources and management leadership elements of a particular company to drive that change. \n\nNow, all of what I’ve described is the ideal. That's the ideal way that ERGs ought to operate in a particular environment. But I am very well aware that some, if not a lot, of companies don't do it that way. They're playbook for employee resource groups is I one of two things. \n\nEither you will have a loose band of employees that may have won, what we call, executive sponsor that doesn't have a lot of weight to throw on it and by extension, financial support, leadership recognition to then drive that kind of impact. And then another is where there is no ERG presence whatsoever. But in this context, I'm also still talking about big companies, larger companies, even companies at my scale where all of the discussions, all of these things that I've talked about are really just management led. \n\nSo to provide an even more specific example that I think we've all heard about time and time again, especially in the wake of all of what we've experienced over the last 2 years, a lot of companies just hire a chief diversity and inclusion officer and call it a day. That's their impact, or they put out a press release that says, “We are going to revamp our recruiting strategies and we're going to “do better” to represent our minority employees, our employees of minority, gender identities, or sexual orientations.” But at the end of the day, that doesn't really translate to a grassroots level initiative of that delivers that kind of change. \n\nSo taking it all back to your question of is an ERG seen as that formal mechanism to interface between staff and human resources? It is, but only in the context of with it, we can get a lot more critical insight that feels more authentic, that is more authentic, because it's driven by our employees, vice waiting for one or two employees to feel comfortable going to HR directly with an issue, or concern and not really driving that kind of impact the way we would like to.\n\nCASEY: It reminds me of the phrase “build with, not for.” So the second scenario where you just hire a DEI officer and they just do it on their own without including the people who are affected is like a build for. But if you get people involved who are affected without forcing them to either, which is the other end of the spectrum. [chuckles] Like you’ve got to invite them and they have to accept it and be content happy working with it. Maybe you have time. \n\nI'm wondering, do you feel like you have working hours, time dedicated you can spend on the ERG work, or do you squeeze it in between everything you do?\n\nADRIAN: That's a good question, actually and a good point to bring up. I, myself, am very passionate about this stuff and I love doing it. So even if I feel like I'm adding on to my day-to-day work, it's not really a big deal for me because I know that what I'm doing is driving an impact that I am very, very excited to do each and every day. But more importantly, I get to go to sleep at night because I know that I'm just not doing a day-to-day job, that is doing day-to-day monotonous work, that there is a value add to it that I'm able to do liver to my colleagues, my friends in my company, and send a clear message of what I stand for and what I want to represent, what I want to share. \n\nBut for others, and especially in some corporate environments, you might see two structures. One structure is companies might devote to each employee a set number of hours that they can use to do what we'll call volunteer work and sometimes, this volunteer work may include ERG support, or ERG leadership, or program management, or event management. Others do not. So other companies expect that you focus on your day-to-day and anything you do outside of that is volunteer work that can be tracked, but there is no formal mechanism to track it. \n\nAt Booz Allen, and I can at least speak for our company specifically, we actually have a requirement almost and if not a push, that's been significantly increased the last year to leverage what our employees are doing in ERGs across the firm to help advance their case for promotion, for role change, really, it's to make sure that our employees are feeling like even if they are doing this as a volunteer role and it feels it is on top of their day-to-day, that there is a value to it. It might not just be value that they feel internally, but rather it's also value that is shown up at the end of the day, when they're up for promotion, or they're looking for an expanded role, or they're looking for a reward for the comprehensive effort that they're putting into the company. \n\nBut I think, by and large, most people don't focus on that because for a lot of ERG work, it's just because you want to do it. You want to make your fellow colleagues heard, and you want to use the leadership and the voice that you have and the willingness you have to articulate their message on their behalf, and you want to do it well so much so that if it takes a couple extra hours, a week, or a month, it's worth it. \n\nCASEY: Cool. I love having the whole overview. I've got a clear image now. \n\nADRIAN: Yeah. [laughs] \n\nMANDY: So tell me a story. I like stories, okay. So I was wondering like, if you could give a specific example of something, a policy that an ERG advocated for that you're a part of and that it got changed, or improved, or something? Like, is there a specific, “I want this,” and then what happened?\n\nADRIAN: Sure. Actually, [laughs] I could give you like 15.\n\nMANDY: Go for it.\n\nADRIAN: But I'm going to boil it down to the one that I remember most and that really was a policy change that was implemented in, I think it was late 2017 perhaps, or maybe early 2018 where we were pushing for expanded, I would say, healthcare policies—I should say we say—better healthcare coverage for our transgender employees, one and on a side to that, trying to figure out how do we better represent our transgender employees who want to transition while working for the company and make sure that their benefits are covered. But also, articulate to the company, what are those benefits? What do they need? What are their healthcare needs? What is, or should be the needs that happen in the workplace outside of just healthcare? Things of that nature. What is a set list of guidance that Booz Allen can use to better represent and better support transgender employees? \n\nSo GLOBE, which is the LGBTQIA employee resource group at the firm, was at the forefront of that. We were taking the lead role in coordinating with our employee retention staff, human resources staff to articulate what exactly those needs will be and make sure that it is implemented in a timely fashion. What I mean by timely fashion is a lot of these initiatives that maybe ERG led could take months, if not years. But in this case, we were able to expedite it because we had built partnership with our HR departments, with our entities that could actually implement the kinds of policy changes we wanted for our transgender employees. \n\nSo based on our guidance, we were actually the ERG task with developing those initial guidelines and guidance on what should be medical coverage options for our transgender employees. In addition to that, we also set out guidance on what are the things that transgender employees want out of their management? What are the expectations on how they would like to be treated, how they would like to be addressed, how they would like to operate in our environment, in our corporate environment? So we set all of that up as one package that we were able to successfully route up to our leadership. \n\nAgain, I might be providing a cavalier-sounding story, but one thing I want to make sure everyone understands, and especially your viewers, is that we are a company of 26,000 people so making any change quickly is very hard. It takes an enormous effort. \n\nSo the fact that we were able to start from a piece of paper and one partnership and scale that up to an entire LGBTQIA board like ours, our leadership, and a set of sponsors at the human resource and management and leadership level at our company to also include our Chief People Officer, Betty Thompson, in span of just months was absolutely remarkable. \n\nIn fact, we were able to make that implementation, that change in time for our next pride summer session, which is really the hallmark and really, the focus that we had as our target. So by 2018, we had formalized the process, we had formalized these new changes to the policy, but the focus point was it was an ERG that led it. We led the discussion, we led the change, and we made the coordinated effort and we carried it along the finish line, along with our helpful partners in human resources, and especially under the leadership of our Chief People Officer.\n\nI don't want to sound like I'm drinking the Kool-Aid too much, but I was really glad that we were able to do that because it's stories like that that made me want to stay working for not just my company because I think all companies try to do good for their employees in one way, or another. But it made me specifically want to stay on the board of our ERG and continue supporting the work that we were doing just because I got to see what kind of impact we can actually do if we work together with them and actually empower them to do the type of work that we hopefully intend for them to do on a regular basis.\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, great story. I'm impressed.\n\nADRIAN: Yeah, don't be impressed about me. Be definitely impressed by the team that I was with. I was a member of the board, but it really was a collective effort, which is usually the story for all ERGs across most corporate environments.\n\nCASEY: I'm impressed with the structure that's set up that incentivizes all of this to happen. The ways that it should to have the people involved who are affected and all that, that is so cool. It's a good structure.\n\nADRIAN: Yeah, no, it was. [chuckles] I would say that it was a hard-fought battle. I don't think anything like this is easy. One, because one thing for, I think for all viewers to keep in mind is that employer resource groups are only as strong as the management that's supporting them. So that's why there has to be this partnership, this very strong tightly knit partnership, not just amidst the grassroots level members of the ERG, but also, the executive sponsors that you have behind it. \n\nWhat do I mean by executive sponsors? Because I brought that up a couple times when I was bringing up some of the stories. Typically, you hear the term sponsor and you might think like a brand sponsor, or for, I don't know, a sports event, or something like that. In our case, program, or executive sponsor is a dedicated leader within the company who provides strategic level direction, more important funding, to make sure that our activities and our ability to operate continue unabated. \n\nSo it took a lot of time, effort, and number of years for Booz Allen, and I can say that confidently, to recognize the importance of having a tightly knit, but influential set of executive sponsors aligned to each ERG. What I mean by that is some ERGs have two, or three vice presidents that have access to budgetary resources to fund events, programs, and partnerships that we'd like to do in a particular fiscal year. Others might just have one, but that one might be the Chief People Officer of the whole company. \n\nSo all of that is very, very critical because having a formal structure, meaning you have a board chair, or you have a board member set up and members is good. But at the end of the day, if you don't have a backing behind it, or help your organization, or your ERG be more influential, unfortunately, can almost appear like a club. People are going after hours, having a good time, but they're not really making change they want to see in their company. \n\nSo you always, always, always, if you're trying to stand up your own ERG within your small business, or in your mid-size business, or trying to even improve the effectiveness of your ERG in a large company, if not larger one, you want to make sure that you have executive sponsors behind you who have the backing of your C-suite leadership and can help you and your team really affect the change that you're trying to affect. \n\nBut in our case, we just got lucky and over the years, we've had pretty solid relationships with our executive sponsors. They're pretty cool people. I must say Betty, our Chief People Officer, she's pretty awesome. I remember talking to her for 20 minutes during a trip about Prada bags. If that doesn't tell you about my superficial love of Prada bags, I don't know what will.\n\nBut it is good and I think it is continuously great that we have that type of representation, have that type of backing, and I think that should be almost commonplace for most organizations.\n\nCASEY: This reminds me of two things I want to share. I think you'll find them interesting. \n\nOne is this idea of executive sponsors reminds me of how in high school, when you have afterschool groups that students want to self-organize, they need a teacher to sponsor it, or they cannot do it. They cannot stay in the classroom. Even if the teacher doesn't do anything, they don't have to do anything necessarily. The students can maybe run their club, like practicing improv from things they found online, but they need a sponsor. But it's even better if the teacher is involved and they're actually teaching improv, or whatever the afterschool activity is. A friend of mine is a teacher and does that so, I'm thinking of her. \n\nIt's interesting; you need that support for things to get done and you don't need babysitting in ERGs, but you do need it for other reasons like influence. They can influence a whole lot.\n\nThat reminds me a little bit of my friend was telling me about a choose your own story adventure game that Harvard Business Review put out where you were trying to make change in an organization like Trans Healthcare, or something like that. And then how do you do it? You make all these choices. Two things that surprise me how impactful they were, like those scores were way above the others, were the leadership support that you're describing and external consultant support. Even if—we know the story—the consultant says what the employees say gets done. \n\nSo it's funny, either source of authority can have a huge impact. We like to ignore it, but it's really powerful and we shouldn't ignore it if we want to get of things done. However you got it to happen at Booz—I'm sure it varies by company how you can get the support, what it looks like—but that's really powerful. \n\nWere you around for that part before you got Betty on your side?\n\nADRIAN: So, [laughs] no. Unfortunately, when I came in, we had already had a pretty strong relationship with Betty. It seems like Betty was ready to go and support everyone, which is always great. So no, I didn't get to see the lead up efforts to having to influence all of our leadership to provide that backing. \n\nBut I think that speaks to the enduring, I would say, commitment that that Booz Allen has to our employees via these employee resource groups. Because specifically, even as early as the 90s, Booz Allen had set out a policy to, in this case, specifically recognize support and empower all our LGBTQIA employees. Something that was completely unheard of in the time for a lot of companies that, again, were existing in the wake of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Defense Against Marriage Act, et cetera. Our company, for an enduring period of time, has made a very strong commitment to representing our LGBTQIA employees and making them feel not just welcome, but empowered and making them feel like they have someone on the CEO leadership level in their corner ready to defend them. \n\nBut I wouldn't want to just talk about my company only. I feel that, by and large, we have seen a significant uptick in major brands, over the last even 5 years, making stronger statements, making stronger efforts, making more substantial improvements in how they operate and engage with employees of diverse backgrounds. The respective ramp ups for them probably are very different than what was it was for Booz Allen, but I imagine, at least I would hope, that of those companies, ERGs played a role in making that lead up a little bit easier. I haven't worked in every company in the United States. I don't think everybody has. \n\nCASEY: Oh, not yet.\n\nADRIAN: As much as I would love to. \n\n[laughter]\n\nNot yet, not yet, but I would hope that the story is probably the same across the board; that it wasn't just a decision made in a vacuum by some director CEO, that it was a coordinated effort partnered by an employee resource group operating at that grassroots level capacity.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I believe that it's got to come from the top and the bottom. If you just have one, or the other, it's not really going to go far.\n\nADRIAN: No, it's going to hit an impasse, it's going to stop on the train tracks like, if you're on Washington Metro.\n\nCASEY: That single tracking red line, yeah. I’ve been there.\n\nADRIAN: That's right. That's right. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: This all reminds me a little bit of unions, but it's not unions. ERGs are not unions. They're different. They don't do formal requests, like you mentioned, complaints. But there is some formal structure; there's funding coming from the company. That's even the opposite of unions, too. But I don’t know, something about it feels similar. It's like, people coming together to support their points of view. \n\nADRIAN: Yeah. In a union, obviously, there's a membership, there's a formal charter, there's your set union president—they negotiate on your behalf for the company to do things that you want. You're absolutely right. Outside of the legalese language, if you will, there are very much a lot of similarities and even historical connections between unionizing and employee resource groups. \n\nReally, the only difference rests in what is the collective bargaining capability between the two. ERGs do not bargain in any official capacity, but unions do. But you still have absolute value in formally standing up and empowering and strengthening your ERGs in the same way that you would recognize the inherent legal power, legal capabilities, and legal recognition of any union that your business might be dealing with. \n\nIt's a very good point you bring up because a lot of times, folks just feel like ERGs are that thing that they might get an email about and hear an event about, but maybe not think twice about it because it's not impacting their day-to-day. As in, it's not impacting their salary, it's not impacting their livelihood, their employee experience at a particular company. But one thing people forget is that half the time, these ERGs are the reasons why companies have events and programming opportunities that talk about different ways to grow in a firm.\n\nFor example, the women's group of Booz Allen tends to be the leader in hosting a lot of events that talk about networking, career empowerment, career improvement specifically for women in the workforce. Now they might be targeted to women who work within Booz Allen, but the message is broad and the message far exceeds the walls and halls of our company in that they want our female colleagues, regardless of where they might see fit physical location wise, to succeed equally. But that also comes with the equity part and I think that equity part is what makes kind of union like efforts that ERGs play in our companies so important because equity is what makes sure that regardless of the situation, we are going to give you the resources that at respond to your situation and give you the tools to succeed in spite of whatever you might be dealing with.\n\nWhereas, before diversity and inclusion departments would just have an equal way of responding to a thing, but the way that they wanted to solve a problem might not necessarily work for Black and brown employees, the way they want to solve a problem might not work with women, employees, or Black female employees. \n\nSo to bring it all together when we're talking about [chuckles] the union-like functions of an ERG, you're absolutely right. We have organized ways to deliver mechanical if not systematic change, but change that have an impact and that impact every single member that might be tied to a particular group. But we also do it in a way that's structured. We do it in a way that ensures that there is an impact that can be felt in and outside of the organization.\n\nCASEY: This also makes me think about inclusivity training like a lot of HR departments give to their employees. I've heard mixed reviews, but the content's good. We want the content. People want to know how to treat their coworkers really well. They want the awareness of what to say and not to say to people. People like that, that I've worked with. \n\nBut a lot of the HR training often is like a PowerPoint presentation online that gets tracked, how many slides you look at—it's very cookie cutter and no one wants to talk about it afterwards, or share notes and that helps a lot, if you can talk about things. Anyway, it doesn't feel as impactful as it could be. Do you have experience with inclusivity training like that and does the ERG work in interact with that any?\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. So that's actually really interesting because a lot of companies are struggling with that. How do you bridge the gap between diversity equity inclusion and at a very large scale in making it as generalized as possible, but still target the employees that it matters to the most? \n\nSo a lot of trainings now, especially as we're in a remote environment, are just like you said, just a lot of PowerPoints, a lot of online trainings. You’ve got to click through slides on a video and hope to God that you can actually click and fast forward past the slides because if you don't – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah.\n\nADRIAN: Then you’ve got to actually wait through the slide and nobody wants that, but – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Just with a transcript. That's accessibility. [overtalk]\n\nADRIAN: That’s exactly right.\n\nCASEY: When accessibility makes that happen, I am so happy. I can read so much faster than listening.\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely. I have read so many books and that has proven to me that I can read through a transcript faster than listening to a [chuckles] slideshow presentation. \n\nBut what our ERGs try to focus on is live programming and I think that's the big distinction here because a lot of mechanized training programs that companies try to offer in diversity and inclusion, sensitivity training, inclusivity training, they're bound to systems and applications—technology that delivers the widest variety and the widest accessibility possible. \n\nWhereas for us, our focus is really just targeted to live events with speakers, fireside chats, having our members do round table discussions where we're bringing together our members to talk about the things that they want to hear. We're more flexible in that we actually can of course, solicit and obtain topics that our employees want to talk about and have experts connected to that, whether it be inside, or outside of the company, to share their insights and share their expertise.\n\nThe reason why I think that's so valid and so valuable is you ensure that the audience actually can connect to what you're talking about and they see a face behind it. They don't see a slideshow with a portrait of a guy, some weird just stable figure with a suit doing weird static things that's supposed to action an image. That doesn't do it anymore. Nobody wants that. People want live programming. Folks want to see someone that looks like them, talks like them, has lived experiences like them, share insights that can relate. \n\nSo for us, now more than ever, we have been doing a lot of fireside chats with Black and brown authors, queer authors in the space to articulate the creative side to anti-racism, anti-LGBTQIA hate, things that our employees want to hear as an ERG, but don't want to see via slideshows that management puts together or has an outside consultancy or vendor put together.\n\nIn fact, one of our more recent events that the African American forum, or African American Network, rather in partnership with GLOBE, the LGBTQIA resource group I mentioned earlier, we recently put together a live event focused on queers in the workplace. Specifically, queer people of color in the workspace and we targeted this specifically to focus on how are our brown and Black employees operating in a not just telework posture, but how are they feeling? \n\nHow are they feeling with their colleagues? How are they feeling working with their supervisors? How are they feeling working with their clients? Do they experience, or are they experiencing, or have they experienced issues where they didn't feel welcome in a particular client space? How are they dealing with responding to issues that management needs to hear about, but in a telework environment where the only thing you can do is set up a Zoom call?\n\nThose types of conversations can't be had effectively in a slideshow presentation that you're doing on a webcast. These are things where you want and have to have a grassroots level organization that is formally structured articulating the message, and having people who live those experiences articulate it for you and with you, and have that live dialogue to where your staff can feel that they're learning about the inclusivity that your company is trying to enforce, but actually have it stick because they heard it from a colleague. They actually heard a story that connected with them. \n\nI think that's one message I would want to harp on the most is that all of what we do and by we, I do mean the collective ERG enterprise, regardless of whatever company you work for, that's the focus is messaging. You want to make sure that your ERG is sending a message that when that employee joins it, or when that employee participates in an event, or when that employee sees the ERG's name, they know that it represents authenticity. It represents a connected feeling that they can take back and say, “Hey, if I don't feel comfortable going to HR, but I know that I can have a voice to hear my issue that looks like me, talks like me, sounds like me, but in my own company,” then that's exactly what we want to send. That's the type of manage we want to ring home.\n\nMANDY: Absolutely!\n\nCASEY: Yeah, that sounds great. That reminds me of a panel we did together before, Adrian. Years ago now. \n\n[laughter]\n\nTech Talk, D.C. We did Queeries in Tech. Queeries like queer, but also like the tech pun, like the aQueries.\n\n[laughter]\n\nADRIAN: See. You see, Casey, you're going to take my bad joke job away from me. I’m \n\nCASEY: We work together here. We're collaborative.\n\nMANDY: I love it. \n\nADRIAN: That's right. \n\nCASEY: Build with, not for. \n\nADRIAN: Yeah. I feel like I've been saying the same message, though since our last talk. So I’m at least improving that I'm consistent if even if my consistency falls on deaf ears from time to time.\n\nCASEY: That's okay. Repetition is key to influencing this kind of level. \n\nADRIAN: That's right, yeah. That's what my music teacher used to tell me, when I was singing really badly, “Just say the lyric and sing it louder and over and over, you'll get that.”\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nADRIAN: “Don't worry. Somebody will listen to you.” \n\nMANDY: That's why you’ve heard 250 episodes of this show. We [laughs] say it all over and over and over again in hope that people will pay attention.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Slightly different perspective, but always similar themes. It's true. \n\nADRIAN: That's right. Well, I hope it's this lucky 350th episode that somebody finally listens to it and says, “Ah, I get the message. I get what they're talking about.”\n\nMANDY: We're only at 250.\n\nADRIAN: 350 times, but here I am.\n\nMANDY: We're only at 250.\n\nADRIAN: Oh, 250? [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: But maybe a 100 more times. [laughs]\n\nADRIAN: [laughs] Okay. \n\nCASEY: I think this episode, we will get some ERGs at companies that didn't have them from this episode. I'm sure. People listen to it not just when it comes out, but for a long time afterward, it still comes up. I don't know, but we'll find out. If anyone does, let us know. We'd love to hear a success story, or even a challenge story where you just sang the notes wrong a lot. I’d love to hear that, too.\n\nMANDY: Please add us.\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. Or even then, I would love it if your users could even share their experiences with their own ERGs. \n\nCASEY: Yeah!\n\nADRIAN: Because my experience is not the only experience. I am obviously well aware I'm talking from the perspective of a member of two boards. So I imagine others might have different experiences and those are valid. Those are absolutely valuable because whatever insights you share about your experiences with an ERG, those are the experiences we want to hear so we can improve on them collectively. \n\nIt's a valid resource to have, but it can only be grown better if we have that kind of grassroots contributions on a regular basis. So don't be afraid. I always tell people, “Don't feel bad to tell me I'm doing something wrong because if you don't tell me I'm doing something wrong, I'm going to continue doing it and I won't know.”\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I'd love to hear more people's stories.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, and if anybody's out there that has one of these stories and wants to come on the show to talk about it, please get a hold of us because we love telling these stories, like I said, over and over and over again because that's how change is made.\n\nCASEY: We want your voice. You can reach out to us on Twitter, or we also have a Slack community you can join. Greater Than Code Slack; you can find the link to that on our website greaterthancode.com.\n\nMANDY: Yes, and it is a Patreon donation, but if you DM one of us panelists on Twitter, we will let you in regardless if you decide to sponsor us on any kind of basis, or not. We let everybody in as long as you, too are greater than code. \n\nCASEY: Ding! Love it. Adrian, you'll be in soon. \n\nMANDY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: We’ll bring you in.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, he'll be in. \n\nIt sounds like this is a good time to move over to reflections for the episode. We usually let our guests go last, Adrian. So Casey, do you want to give us a start?\n\nCASEY: My takeaway is Adrian, you said the sentence, whether you remember it, or not, “ERGs are only a start wrong as the management supporting them.” That's so true. \n\nADRIAN: Yes.\n\nCASEY: I've tried to do changes so many companies from the grassroots level without the opposite of support, whatever that would be. No one was shutting us down, but if no one was supporting us from above, it didn't go that far and that's a recipe for frustration.\n\nMANDY: For me, I really took away how the live programming over slideshows is so important. Just having the fireside chats and the round table discussions, inviting people who are behind the scenes advocating for this stuff on the frontlines is just much more impactful than sitting there through a slideshow a first day of training like, “This is how we –” we already know all this, okay. \n\nSo having that audience connection and being able to be interactive, I think is really important way to handle and get things done and not just being sat at and talked to. Being like, “Okay, so, let's have a discussion.” Open it up to the audience and do a back and forth. I love panels for that reason is that you can just feed off each other and yes and others and I feel that that's really good way to go about things.\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely. \n\nAt least for me, I have been just awestruck, I would say, especially on all of the conversation points that we've had so far, but most specifically the fact that we can share in the article that Casey had mentioned from Harvard Business Review and honing in on that idea that some organizations experience that ramp up where they have external consultants, they have external influences, internal influences, all trying to come together and figure out what's the best way to push an ERG, or a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, or effort to that next level. Get their employees a bit more engaged. They feel a bit more represented, feel a bit more committed to the mission that the company is trying to get after because it's so crucial.\n\nThe one thing I would add to that, as part of a final note for me, is for any company that is doing ERG work that has some formal structure, or even if you are a small business, or mid-size business and you have employees that are even talking about it, or hearing about it, make sure that that effort that either is already there, or you're seeing it grow into something, remains authentic. That it has authenticity tied to it and that authenticity can, will, and only can come from the employees who put it together. \n\nSo make sure that if the employees say want an ERG, make sure that they're absolutely committed to it, all facets of it because it's a lot of work, but it's good work. And if you have a preorganized and structured ERG that just wants to take it to the next level, make sure that you have management and executive sponsors who also believe in that vision for authenticity. \n\nI think we, as queers and allies in tech, need and see authenticity. We recognize it all the time and every day and everything and everything we say and do that is also represented in the employee resource groups that do such good work, but can only do such good work if there's an authentic passion behind it.\n\nMANDY: I love that. You're so right. A 100%.\n\nCASEY: I have a feeling you've said some of this before because it's so polished and clear. You're articulate, Adrian. I love it. \n\nADRIAN: I honestly have thought about becoming just a dish jockey and just going on radio and then just quitting my day job. But then I realized that would only be successful for maybe one episode and then I would just get boring and then I would forget. [laughs] So I'm going to keep my day job. I'm going to leave you two as the experts on this stuff and I'll just keep saying the same message for the next few 100 years and hope somebody listens. \n\nMANDY: Well, thank you so much for coming on this show. It's been wonderful. \n\nCASEY: Thank you.\n\nMANDY: You have been amazing in explaining all of this. I've honestly never heard of ERGs before. That's why I just sat here and was listening like, “Yes!” Thank you so much for talking about it. \n\nADRIAN: Sure.\n\nMANDY: And you are welcome back on this show anytime!Special Guest: Adrian Gillem.","content_html":"01:19 - Adrian’s Superpower: Humor
\n\n04:57 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): What are they?
\n\n09:20 - How ERGs Operate
\n\n18:03 - Successfully Policy Implementations: Examples
\n\n23:18 - ERGs and Management / Executive Sponsor Partnerships
\n\n30:41 - ERGs vs Unions
\n\n34:19 - Inclusivity Training
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey: “ERGs are only as strong as the management supporting them.”
\n\nMandy: Live programming + fireside chats over slideshows for inclusivity training.
\n\nAdrian: Pushing ERGs and DEI initiatives to the next level is crucial and keeping these efforts authentic.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 250. My name is Mandy Moore and I’m here with my friend, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And we’re both here with Adrian Gillem.
\n\nAdrian is a Technical Project Manager with Booz Allen Hamilton focused on deploying next generation digital transformation capabilities to public sector clients in Washington D.C., Honolulu, Tokyo, and Seoul.
\n\nBeyond his technical client-responsibilities, Adrian’s true passion is grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion program management and partnership building. Over the years, Adrian helped lead Booz Allen’s LGBTQIA+ and African American Employee Resource Groups to new heights; instituting new internal and external partnerships and programs under a DEI strategy committed to representing and empowering our BIPOC, Black, Indigenous and people of color, queer, and ally employees across the firm.
\n\nWelcome, Adrian!
\n\nADRIAN: Thanks, everybody! Good to be with you guys.
\n\nCASEY: All right, we’re going to ask you our first question, we always ask. What, Adrian, is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nADRIAN: [laughs] I've had to think about this. My superpower is humor and I only acquired it because I was able to tell the same bad jokes over and over to my friends and loved ones, and I've just stuck with the ones that people laughed at.
\n\nCASEY: Testing. You tested them live.
\n\nADRIAN: That's right. That's right. They had no choice.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: How many of them did you get full on laughter versus nervous laughter versus glares, which were also a sign they liked your pun?
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. I would say that my sarcastic humor definitely got 70% eye rolls, 10% hm and has and then the other 20% were slight laughs, maybe a smirk, or two. But over the years, I hope that it's gotten better more in my favor. People tend to smile a little more when I make a joke, but can't say it's a 100% success rate so far. But we'll see. Maybe I will start my life career as a comedian in the next 10 years since and just retire from technology, or I'll just do both. Who knows, who knows?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. There's space for that.
\n\nADRIAN: There is.
\n\nCASEY: Multi-passionate. You can be multi-passionate; you're allowed.
\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely. I can make live jokes and do live coding on a set. I'll probably do really bad coding, which will be enough for people to laugh at anyway, so I'll already have material ready to go.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome.
\n\nCASEY: You've got me smiling and laughing.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nEven just the levity you're describing is funny.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nADRIAN: Thanks. I appreciate you both for already bearing with me. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: So I have a feeling you incorporate humor like this into your work with employee resource groups. It's hard to imagine you wouldn't. Tell us something like that—some of the joke that you've told, some scenario that you've managed to reframe.
\n\nADRIAN: Oh boy, that's a really tough question. I think the way I try to incorporate my humor, especially in my work with our employee resource groups within the firm and especially with our partners outside of our company, is just to make everyone feel comfortable through humor. You start to meet with different folks of different backgrounds for the first time, maybe even for the second, or third time, whether it be at your water cooler, or in the kitchen, or at an actual meeting where you're talking about a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
\n\nSome folks might walk in and not necessarily know everyone in a room, not feel comfortable to speak in the way that they would like, or act as authentic as they should. So luckily for me, humor seems to break that ice very quickly. It's always very – in my case, I choose to do self-deprecating humor first and then that just gets the ball rolling in making sure that everybody feels open and welcome to be themselves in the space that I'm in.
\n\nBut absolutely, in the ERG, the last place you want to have this stoic, maybe stale environment is an ERG whether it be an ERG meeting, or an ERG get together, or anything like that. You want to make sure that everyone feels very comfortable being in that space and you don't want to have as any hesitancy to that authenticity. So I try to do my best with making many people laugh, even if it is at my own expense and that's perfectly okay, I signed up for it.
\n\nCASEY: So for listeners who may, or may not have been part of an employee resource group before, an ERG, can you tell us a little bit about what it's like being part of one?
\n\nADRIAN: Sure. So being in an ERG, it's an interesting mix. You either are in an organization that has had ERGs for a very long time and there are predetermined ways that it operates. There's a leadership structure. There are formal rules and procedures in place. There's a lot of hype behind it. Folks feel that it actually represents their interest and they can use that to communicate up. By up, I do mean up to management, senior leadership on ways they are not feeling included, or feeling equitably represented in a particular company.
\n\nAnd then there are other organizations where unfortunately, a formal ERG structure might not exist and so, you'll have situations where employees informally get together based on shared experiences, based on shared connections, based on shared racial identities, or gender identities, or sexual orientation identities. But they don't have a formal way, or a formal mechanism to do that.
\n\nSo in our case, in organizations that do have formal ERGs, really what it is used for is to make sure that staff have an effective, measurable, an impactful organized mechanism to really share insights on things that are affecting them as an individual employee and share it across colleagues that also might be feeling similar impacts, or might have similar experiences.
\n\nTo provide a specific example in this case, I lead, or I'm on the board, rather of our African American Network. That's what we call it. Really, it's focused on engaging our African American and more generally, our brown and Black persons of color employees across the firm to make sure that their voice is not just heard, but felt, that their impact is not just seen, but felt in the way our company operates and the things that we focus on and try to improve on.
\n\nIn that, most of what I'll do is typically liaise with our employees that are, let's say, onboarding for the first time to the company and they want to feel connected to that wider corporate group. We are a company of 26,000 employees, so it's very hard to feel like I can connect with a bunch of people pretty easily.
\n\nSo connecting with new hires via this mechanism of an ERG provides an easy way for folks to get together with a smaller subsect of our staff. But get connected with a subsect that actually looks like them, talks like them, has had shared experiences and memories and livelihoods and lives just like them and so, that's just part of it.
\n\nThe other part of it is representing our respective employees and our members within the ERG and their interest to upper management, to our human resources division, and folks with just a stake in understanding what is impacting our employees that are particularly aligned to this group and how can we make their experiences better. But better in the sense that they're able to be more effective in their job, feel more authentic in their day-to-day, and feel more appreciated for the unique contributions that they're bringing each and every day that they support the work that we do.
\n\nSo I think that's a lot and I'm happy to break it down even further because I think that this is such a really, really important element that companies that have it formally structured sometimes take for granted because they might not be effectively funding it, or giving it the oomph, I'll say. The energy and relevance to do that kind of impact that I'm describing that I feel is unique to Booz Allen. But in a way, it's also a call-to-action for maybe smaller or mid-size companies that, like you mentioned, might not have a formalized structure like this and yet have employees who want to band together and make it so, so they have a way to drive that type of impact I was talking about earlier.
\n\nMANDY: So you create these groups—people who look like me, act like me, are like me identify in the same way that I do and we see things, where do we go from there? We identify the things that we want, or need. Do we go management? Do we go to HR? What's the kind of, how is it structured?
\n\nADRIAN: So that's a very good question. I think ERGs and really, business resource groups, depending on the company, have varied reporting structures.
\n\nIn the case of Booz Allen, we as an ERG work very closely and almost hand-in-hand with our formal diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, our human resources specialists, our recruiters, all those within that part of the company, to make sure that what we're hearing at what we like to consider at the grassroots level is actually delivering change that can be felt by our employees.
\n\nNow, what that does not mean is that employees would somehow come to us as an ERG with let's say, a formal employee level, or human resource level complaint, and we pass it on their behalf. No, no, no. That's not really the focus. The focus really is to make sure that everyone, broadly speaking, has a chance to voice things that are really important to them and their situation—basically connected to their identity and however they choose to identify in a particular space so that we collectively can share those insights to departments and components of a business that drive that policy discussion and policy change in response to situations arising.
\n\nSo in our case, in the wake of the increased exposure of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, in the wake of the murder of our brother, George Floyd, in the wake of so many impactful events that have happened over the last 2 years, not to mention a pandemic that we're all kind of living through in our own way, ERGs have become the focal point to articulating what really is, or are the needs of our workers, our colleagues, our friends in this company—whichever company that you might work for—and how can we represent what they are actually dealing with on a day-to-day basis?
\n\nBecause I think one of the things that we forget is not all employees feel comfortable to go to human resources with an issue. Not all employees feel comfortable going to management with an issue—and I speak as a project manager myself. Especially when it comes to particular situations that are specific to issues that might be affected by their race, by their sexual orientation, by their gender identity, and so on and so forth.
\n\nSo an ERG provides that formal, but not management connected mechanism to gather all of those insights, gather all of those feelings, and tell a narrative that's structured, but impactful to the human resources and management leadership elements of a particular company to drive that change.
\n\nNow, all of what I’ve described is the ideal. That's the ideal way that ERGs ought to operate in a particular environment. But I am very well aware that some, if not a lot, of companies don't do it that way. They're playbook for employee resource groups is I one of two things.
\n\nEither you will have a loose band of employees that may have won, what we call, executive sponsor that doesn't have a lot of weight to throw on it and by extension, financial support, leadership recognition to then drive that kind of impact. And then another is where there is no ERG presence whatsoever. But in this context, I'm also still talking about big companies, larger companies, even companies at my scale where all of the discussions, all of these things that I've talked about are really just management led.
\n\nSo to provide an even more specific example that I think we've all heard about time and time again, especially in the wake of all of what we've experienced over the last 2 years, a lot of companies just hire a chief diversity and inclusion officer and call it a day. That's their impact, or they put out a press release that says, “We are going to revamp our recruiting strategies and we're going to “do better” to represent our minority employees, our employees of minority, gender identities, or sexual orientations.” But at the end of the day, that doesn't really translate to a grassroots level initiative of that delivers that kind of change.
\n\nSo taking it all back to your question of is an ERG seen as that formal mechanism to interface between staff and human resources? It is, but only in the context of with it, we can get a lot more critical insight that feels more authentic, that is more authentic, because it's driven by our employees, vice waiting for one or two employees to feel comfortable going to HR directly with an issue, or concern and not really driving that kind of impact the way we would like to.
\n\nCASEY: It reminds me of the phrase “build with, not for.” So the second scenario where you just hire a DEI officer and they just do it on their own without including the people who are affected is like a build for. But if you get people involved who are affected without forcing them to either, which is the other end of the spectrum. [chuckles] Like you’ve got to invite them and they have to accept it and be content happy working with it. Maybe you have time.
\n\nI'm wondering, do you feel like you have working hours, time dedicated you can spend on the ERG work, or do you squeeze it in between everything you do?
\n\nADRIAN: That's a good question, actually and a good point to bring up. I, myself, am very passionate about this stuff and I love doing it. So even if I feel like I'm adding on to my day-to-day work, it's not really a big deal for me because I know that what I'm doing is driving an impact that I am very, very excited to do each and every day. But more importantly, I get to go to sleep at night because I know that I'm just not doing a day-to-day job, that is doing day-to-day monotonous work, that there is a value add to it that I'm able to do liver to my colleagues, my friends in my company, and send a clear message of what I stand for and what I want to represent, what I want to share.
\n\nBut for others, and especially in some corporate environments, you might see two structures. One structure is companies might devote to each employee a set number of hours that they can use to do what we'll call volunteer work and sometimes, this volunteer work may include ERG support, or ERG leadership, or program management, or event management. Others do not. So other companies expect that you focus on your day-to-day and anything you do outside of that is volunteer work that can be tracked, but there is no formal mechanism to track it.
\n\nAt Booz Allen, and I can at least speak for our company specifically, we actually have a requirement almost and if not a push, that's been significantly increased the last year to leverage what our employees are doing in ERGs across the firm to help advance their case for promotion, for role change, really, it's to make sure that our employees are feeling like even if they are doing this as a volunteer role and it feels it is on top of their day-to-day, that there is a value to it. It might not just be value that they feel internally, but rather it's also value that is shown up at the end of the day, when they're up for promotion, or they're looking for an expanded role, or they're looking for a reward for the comprehensive effort that they're putting into the company.
\n\nBut I think, by and large, most people don't focus on that because for a lot of ERG work, it's just because you want to do it. You want to make your fellow colleagues heard, and you want to use the leadership and the voice that you have and the willingness you have to articulate their message on their behalf, and you want to do it well so much so that if it takes a couple extra hours, a week, or a month, it's worth it.
\n\nCASEY: Cool. I love having the whole overview. I've got a clear image now.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: So tell me a story. I like stories, okay. So I was wondering like, if you could give a specific example of something, a policy that an ERG advocated for that you're a part of and that it got changed, or improved, or something? Like, is there a specific, “I want this,” and then what happened?
\n\nADRIAN: Sure. Actually, [laughs] I could give you like 15.
\n\nMANDY: Go for it.
\n\nADRIAN: But I'm going to boil it down to the one that I remember most and that really was a policy change that was implemented in, I think it was late 2017 perhaps, or maybe early 2018 where we were pushing for expanded, I would say, healthcare policies—I should say we say—better healthcare coverage for our transgender employees, one and on a side to that, trying to figure out how do we better represent our transgender employees who want to transition while working for the company and make sure that their benefits are covered. But also, articulate to the company, what are those benefits? What do they need? What are their healthcare needs? What is, or should be the needs that happen in the workplace outside of just healthcare? Things of that nature. What is a set list of guidance that Booz Allen can use to better represent and better support transgender employees?
\n\nSo GLOBE, which is the LGBTQIA employee resource group at the firm, was at the forefront of that. We were taking the lead role in coordinating with our employee retention staff, human resources staff to articulate what exactly those needs will be and make sure that it is implemented in a timely fashion. What I mean by timely fashion is a lot of these initiatives that maybe ERG led could take months, if not years. But in this case, we were able to expedite it because we had built partnership with our HR departments, with our entities that could actually implement the kinds of policy changes we wanted for our transgender employees.
\n\nSo based on our guidance, we were actually the ERG task with developing those initial guidelines and guidance on what should be medical coverage options for our transgender employees. In addition to that, we also set out guidance on what are the things that transgender employees want out of their management? What are the expectations on how they would like to be treated, how they would like to be addressed, how they would like to operate in our environment, in our corporate environment? So we set all of that up as one package that we were able to successfully route up to our leadership.
\n\nAgain, I might be providing a cavalier-sounding story, but one thing I want to make sure everyone understands, and especially your viewers, is that we are a company of 26,000 people so making any change quickly is very hard. It takes an enormous effort.
\n\nSo the fact that we were able to start from a piece of paper and one partnership and scale that up to an entire LGBTQIA board like ours, our leadership, and a set of sponsors at the human resource and management and leadership level at our company to also include our Chief People Officer, Betty Thompson, in span of just months was absolutely remarkable.
\n\nIn fact, we were able to make that implementation, that change in time for our next pride summer session, which is really the hallmark and really, the focus that we had as our target. So by 2018, we had formalized the process, we had formalized these new changes to the policy, but the focus point was it was an ERG that led it. We led the discussion, we led the change, and we made the coordinated effort and we carried it along the finish line, along with our helpful partners in human resources, and especially under the leadership of our Chief People Officer.
\n\nI don't want to sound like I'm drinking the Kool-Aid too much, but I was really glad that we were able to do that because it's stories like that that made me want to stay working for not just my company because I think all companies try to do good for their employees in one way, or another. But it made me specifically want to stay on the board of our ERG and continue supporting the work that we were doing just because I got to see what kind of impact we can actually do if we work together with them and actually empower them to do the type of work that we hopefully intend for them to do on a regular basis.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, great story. I'm impressed.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah, don't be impressed about me. Be definitely impressed by the team that I was with. I was a member of the board, but it really was a collective effort, which is usually the story for all ERGs across most corporate environments.
\n\nCASEY: I'm impressed with the structure that's set up that incentivizes all of this to happen. The ways that it should to have the people involved who are affected and all that, that is so cool. It's a good structure.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah, no, it was. [chuckles] I would say that it was a hard-fought battle. I don't think anything like this is easy. One, because one thing for, I think for all viewers to keep in mind is that employer resource groups are only as strong as the management that's supporting them. So that's why there has to be this partnership, this very strong tightly knit partnership, not just amidst the grassroots level members of the ERG, but also, the executive sponsors that you have behind it.
\n\nWhat do I mean by executive sponsors? Because I brought that up a couple times when I was bringing up some of the stories. Typically, you hear the term sponsor and you might think like a brand sponsor, or for, I don't know, a sports event, or something like that. In our case, program, or executive sponsor is a dedicated leader within the company who provides strategic level direction, more important funding, to make sure that our activities and our ability to operate continue unabated.
\n\nSo it took a lot of time, effort, and number of years for Booz Allen, and I can say that confidently, to recognize the importance of having a tightly knit, but influential set of executive sponsors aligned to each ERG. What I mean by that is some ERGs have two, or three vice presidents that have access to budgetary resources to fund events, programs, and partnerships that we'd like to do in a particular fiscal year. Others might just have one, but that one might be the Chief People Officer of the whole company.
\n\nSo all of that is very, very critical because having a formal structure, meaning you have a board chair, or you have a board member set up and members is good. But at the end of the day, if you don't have a backing behind it, or help your organization, or your ERG be more influential, unfortunately, can almost appear like a club. People are going after hours, having a good time, but they're not really making change they want to see in their company.
\n\nSo you always, always, always, if you're trying to stand up your own ERG within your small business, or in your mid-size business, or trying to even improve the effectiveness of your ERG in a large company, if not larger one, you want to make sure that you have executive sponsors behind you who have the backing of your C-suite leadership and can help you and your team really affect the change that you're trying to affect.
\n\nBut in our case, we just got lucky and over the years, we've had pretty solid relationships with our executive sponsors. They're pretty cool people. I must say Betty, our Chief People Officer, she's pretty awesome. I remember talking to her for 20 minutes during a trip about Prada bags. If that doesn't tell you about my superficial love of Prada bags, I don't know what will.
\n\nBut it is good and I think it is continuously great that we have that type of representation, have that type of backing, and I think that should be almost commonplace for most organizations.
\n\nCASEY: This reminds me of two things I want to share. I think you'll find them interesting.
\n\nOne is this idea of executive sponsors reminds me of how in high school, when you have afterschool groups that students want to self-organize, they need a teacher to sponsor it, or they cannot do it. They cannot stay in the classroom. Even if the teacher doesn't do anything, they don't have to do anything necessarily. The students can maybe run their club, like practicing improv from things they found online, but they need a sponsor. But it's even better if the teacher is involved and they're actually teaching improv, or whatever the afterschool activity is. A friend of mine is a teacher and does that so, I'm thinking of her.
\n\nIt's interesting; you need that support for things to get done and you don't need babysitting in ERGs, but you do need it for other reasons like influence. They can influence a whole lot.
\n\nThat reminds me a little bit of my friend was telling me about a choose your own story adventure game that Harvard Business Review put out where you were trying to make change in an organization like Trans Healthcare, or something like that. And then how do you do it? You make all these choices. Two things that surprise me how impactful they were, like those scores were way above the others, were the leadership support that you're describing and external consultant support. Even if—we know the story—the consultant says what the employees say gets done.
\n\nSo it's funny, either source of authority can have a huge impact. We like to ignore it, but it's really powerful and we shouldn't ignore it if we want to get of things done. However you got it to happen at Booz—I'm sure it varies by company how you can get the support, what it looks like—but that's really powerful.
\n\nWere you around for that part before you got Betty on your side?
\n\nADRIAN: So, [laughs] no. Unfortunately, when I came in, we had already had a pretty strong relationship with Betty. It seems like Betty was ready to go and support everyone, which is always great. So no, I didn't get to see the lead up efforts to having to influence all of our leadership to provide that backing.
\n\nBut I think that speaks to the enduring, I would say, commitment that that Booz Allen has to our employees via these employee resource groups. Because specifically, even as early as the 90s, Booz Allen had set out a policy to, in this case, specifically recognize support and empower all our LGBTQIA employees. Something that was completely unheard of in the time for a lot of companies that, again, were existing in the wake of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Defense Against Marriage Act, et cetera. Our company, for an enduring period of time, has made a very strong commitment to representing our LGBTQIA employees and making them feel not just welcome, but empowered and making them feel like they have someone on the CEO leadership level in their corner ready to defend them.
\n\nBut I wouldn't want to just talk about my company only. I feel that, by and large, we have seen a significant uptick in major brands, over the last even 5 years, making stronger statements, making stronger efforts, making more substantial improvements in how they operate and engage with employees of diverse backgrounds. The respective ramp ups for them probably are very different than what was it was for Booz Allen, but I imagine, at least I would hope, that of those companies, ERGs played a role in making that lead up a little bit easier. I haven't worked in every company in the United States. I don't think everybody has.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, not yet.
\n\nADRIAN: As much as I would love to.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNot yet, not yet, but I would hope that the story is probably the same across the board; that it wasn't just a decision made in a vacuum by some director CEO, that it was a coordinated effort partnered by an employee resource group operating at that grassroots level capacity.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I believe that it's got to come from the top and the bottom. If you just have one, or the other, it's not really going to go far.
\n\nADRIAN: No, it's going to hit an impasse, it's going to stop on the train tracks like, if you're on Washington Metro.
\n\nCASEY: That single tracking red line, yeah. I’ve been there.
\n\nADRIAN: That's right. That's right. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: This all reminds me a little bit of unions, but it's not unions. ERGs are not unions. They're different. They don't do formal requests, like you mentioned, complaints. But there is some formal structure; there's funding coming from the company. That's even the opposite of unions, too. But I don’t know, something about it feels similar. It's like, people coming together to support their points of view.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. In a union, obviously, there's a membership, there's a formal charter, there's your set union president—they negotiate on your behalf for the company to do things that you want. You're absolutely right. Outside of the legalese language, if you will, there are very much a lot of similarities and even historical connections between unionizing and employee resource groups.
\n\nReally, the only difference rests in what is the collective bargaining capability between the two. ERGs do not bargain in any official capacity, but unions do. But you still have absolute value in formally standing up and empowering and strengthening your ERGs in the same way that you would recognize the inherent legal power, legal capabilities, and legal recognition of any union that your business might be dealing with.
\n\nIt's a very good point you bring up because a lot of times, folks just feel like ERGs are that thing that they might get an email about and hear an event about, but maybe not think twice about it because it's not impacting their day-to-day. As in, it's not impacting their salary, it's not impacting their livelihood, their employee experience at a particular company. But one thing people forget is that half the time, these ERGs are the reasons why companies have events and programming opportunities that talk about different ways to grow in a firm.
\n\nFor example, the women's group of Booz Allen tends to be the leader in hosting a lot of events that talk about networking, career empowerment, career improvement specifically for women in the workforce. Now they might be targeted to women who work within Booz Allen, but the message is broad and the message far exceeds the walls and halls of our company in that they want our female colleagues, regardless of where they might see fit physical location wise, to succeed equally. But that also comes with the equity part and I think that equity part is what makes kind of union like efforts that ERGs play in our companies so important because equity is what makes sure that regardless of the situation, we are going to give you the resources that at respond to your situation and give you the tools to succeed in spite of whatever you might be dealing with.
\n\nWhereas, before diversity and inclusion departments would just have an equal way of responding to a thing, but the way that they wanted to solve a problem might not necessarily work for Black and brown employees, the way they want to solve a problem might not work with women, employees, or Black female employees.
\n\nSo to bring it all together when we're talking about [chuckles] the union-like functions of an ERG, you're absolutely right. We have organized ways to deliver mechanical if not systematic change, but change that have an impact and that impact every single member that might be tied to a particular group. But we also do it in a way that's structured. We do it in a way that ensures that there is an impact that can be felt in and outside of the organization.
\n\nCASEY: This also makes me think about inclusivity training like a lot of HR departments give to their employees. I've heard mixed reviews, but the content's good. We want the content. People want to know how to treat their coworkers really well. They want the awareness of what to say and not to say to people. People like that, that I've worked with.
\n\nBut a lot of the HR training often is like a PowerPoint presentation online that gets tracked, how many slides you look at—it's very cookie cutter and no one wants to talk about it afterwards, or share notes and that helps a lot, if you can talk about things. Anyway, it doesn't feel as impactful as it could be. Do you have experience with inclusivity training like that and does the ERG work in interact with that any?
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. So that's actually really interesting because a lot of companies are struggling with that. How do you bridge the gap between diversity equity inclusion and at a very large scale in making it as generalized as possible, but still target the employees that it matters to the most?
\n\nSo a lot of trainings now, especially as we're in a remote environment, are just like you said, just a lot of PowerPoints, a lot of online trainings. You’ve got to click through slides on a video and hope to God that you can actually click and fast forward past the slides because if you don't – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah.
\n\nADRIAN: Then you’ve got to actually wait through the slide and nobody wants that, but – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Just with a transcript. That's accessibility. [overtalk]
\n\nADRIAN: That’s exactly right.
\n\nCASEY: When accessibility makes that happen, I am so happy. I can read so much faster than listening.
\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely. I have read so many books and that has proven to me that I can read through a transcript faster than listening to a [chuckles] slideshow presentation.
\n\nBut what our ERGs try to focus on is live programming and I think that's the big distinction here because a lot of mechanized training programs that companies try to offer in diversity and inclusion, sensitivity training, inclusivity training, they're bound to systems and applications—technology that delivers the widest variety and the widest accessibility possible.
\n\nWhereas for us, our focus is really just targeted to live events with speakers, fireside chats, having our members do round table discussions where we're bringing together our members to talk about the things that they want to hear. We're more flexible in that we actually can of course, solicit and obtain topics that our employees want to talk about and have experts connected to that, whether it be inside, or outside of the company, to share their insights and share their expertise.
\n\nThe reason why I think that's so valid and so valuable is you ensure that the audience actually can connect to what you're talking about and they see a face behind it. They don't see a slideshow with a portrait of a guy, some weird just stable figure with a suit doing weird static things that's supposed to action an image. That doesn't do it anymore. Nobody wants that. People want live programming. Folks want to see someone that looks like them, talks like them, has lived experiences like them, share insights that can relate.
\n\nSo for us, now more than ever, we have been doing a lot of fireside chats with Black and brown authors, queer authors in the space to articulate the creative side to anti-racism, anti-LGBTQIA hate, things that our employees want to hear as an ERG, but don't want to see via slideshows that management puts together or has an outside consultancy or vendor put together.
\n\nIn fact, one of our more recent events that the African American forum, or African American Network, rather in partnership with GLOBE, the LGBTQIA resource group I mentioned earlier, we recently put together a live event focused on queers in the workplace. Specifically, queer people of color in the workspace and we targeted this specifically to focus on how are our brown and Black employees operating in a not just telework posture, but how are they feeling?
\n\nHow are they feeling with their colleagues? How are they feeling working with their supervisors? How are they feeling working with their clients? Do they experience, or are they experiencing, or have they experienced issues where they didn't feel welcome in a particular client space? How are they dealing with responding to issues that management needs to hear about, but in a telework environment where the only thing you can do is set up a Zoom call?
\n\nThose types of conversations can't be had effectively in a slideshow presentation that you're doing on a webcast. These are things where you want and have to have a grassroots level organization that is formally structured articulating the message, and having people who live those experiences articulate it for you and with you, and have that live dialogue to where your staff can feel that they're learning about the inclusivity that your company is trying to enforce, but actually have it stick because they heard it from a colleague. They actually heard a story that connected with them.
\n\nI think that's one message I would want to harp on the most is that all of what we do and by we, I do mean the collective ERG enterprise, regardless of whatever company you work for, that's the focus is messaging. You want to make sure that your ERG is sending a message that when that employee joins it, or when that employee participates in an event, or when that employee sees the ERG's name, they know that it represents authenticity. It represents a connected feeling that they can take back and say, “Hey, if I don't feel comfortable going to HR, but I know that I can have a voice to hear my issue that looks like me, talks like me, sounds like me, but in my own company,” then that's exactly what we want to send. That's the type of manage we want to ring home.
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely!
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, that sounds great. That reminds me of a panel we did together before, Adrian. Years ago now.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nTech Talk, D.C. We did Queeries in Tech. Queeries like queer, but also like the tech pun, like the aQueries.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nADRIAN: See. You see, Casey, you're going to take my bad joke job away from me. I’m
\n\nCASEY: We work together here. We're collaborative.
\n\nMANDY: I love it.
\n\nADRIAN: That's right.
\n\nCASEY: Build with, not for.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. I feel like I've been saying the same message, though since our last talk. So I’m at least improving that I'm consistent if even if my consistency falls on deaf ears from time to time.
\n\nCASEY: That's okay. Repetition is key to influencing this kind of level.
\n\nADRIAN: That's right, yeah. That's what my music teacher used to tell me, when I was singing really badly, “Just say the lyric and sing it louder and over and over, you'll get that.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nADRIAN: “Don't worry. Somebody will listen to you.”
\n\nMANDY: That's why you’ve heard 250 episodes of this show. We [laughs] say it all over and over and over again in hope that people will pay attention.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Slightly different perspective, but always similar themes. It's true.
\n\nADRIAN: That's right. Well, I hope it's this lucky 350th episode that somebody finally listens to it and says, “Ah, I get the message. I get what they're talking about.”
\n\nMANDY: We're only at 250.
\n\nADRIAN: 350 times, but here I am.
\n\nMANDY: We're only at 250.
\n\nADRIAN: Oh, 250? [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: But maybe a 100 more times. [laughs]
\n\nADRIAN: [laughs] Okay.
\n\nCASEY: I think this episode, we will get some ERGs at companies that didn't have them from this episode. I'm sure. People listen to it not just when it comes out, but for a long time afterward, it still comes up. I don't know, but we'll find out. If anyone does, let us know. We'd love to hear a success story, or even a challenge story where you just sang the notes wrong a lot. I’d love to hear that, too.
\n\nMANDY: Please add us.
\n\nADRIAN: Yeah. Or even then, I would love it if your users could even share their experiences with their own ERGs.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah!
\n\nADRIAN: Because my experience is not the only experience. I am obviously well aware I'm talking from the perspective of a member of two boards. So I imagine others might have different experiences and those are valid. Those are absolutely valuable because whatever insights you share about your experiences with an ERG, those are the experiences we want to hear so we can improve on them collectively.
\n\nIt's a valid resource to have, but it can only be grown better if we have that kind of grassroots contributions on a regular basis. So don't be afraid. I always tell people, “Don't feel bad to tell me I'm doing something wrong because if you don't tell me I'm doing something wrong, I'm going to continue doing it and I won't know.”
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I'd love to hear more people's stories.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, and if anybody's out there that has one of these stories and wants to come on the show to talk about it, please get a hold of us because we love telling these stories, like I said, over and over and over again because that's how change is made.
\n\nCASEY: We want your voice. You can reach out to us on Twitter, or we also have a Slack community you can join. Greater Than Code Slack; you can find the link to that on our website greaterthancode.com.
\n\nMANDY: Yes, and it is a Patreon donation, but if you DM one of us panelists on Twitter, we will let you in regardless if you decide to sponsor us on any kind of basis, or not. We let everybody in as long as you, too are greater than code.
\n\nCASEY: Ding! Love it. Adrian, you'll be in soon.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: We’ll bring you in.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, he'll be in.
\n\nIt sounds like this is a good time to move over to reflections for the episode. We usually let our guests go last, Adrian. So Casey, do you want to give us a start?
\n\nCASEY: My takeaway is Adrian, you said the sentence, whether you remember it, or not, “ERGs are only a start wrong as the management supporting them.” That's so true.
\n\nADRIAN: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: I've tried to do changes so many companies from the grassroots level without the opposite of support, whatever that would be. No one was shutting us down, but if no one was supporting us from above, it didn't go that far and that's a recipe for frustration.
\n\nMANDY: For me, I really took away how the live programming over slideshows is so important. Just having the fireside chats and the round table discussions, inviting people who are behind the scenes advocating for this stuff on the frontlines is just much more impactful than sitting there through a slideshow a first day of training like, “This is how we –” we already know all this, okay.
\n\nSo having that audience connection and being able to be interactive, I think is really important way to handle and get things done and not just being sat at and talked to. Being like, “Okay, so, let's have a discussion.” Open it up to the audience and do a back and forth. I love panels for that reason is that you can just feed off each other and yes and others and I feel that that's really good way to go about things.
\n\nADRIAN: Absolutely.
\n\nAt least for me, I have been just awestruck, I would say, especially on all of the conversation points that we've had so far, but most specifically the fact that we can share in the article that Casey had mentioned from Harvard Business Review and honing in on that idea that some organizations experience that ramp up where they have external consultants, they have external influences, internal influences, all trying to come together and figure out what's the best way to push an ERG, or a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, or effort to that next level. Get their employees a bit more engaged. They feel a bit more represented, feel a bit more committed to the mission that the company is trying to get after because it's so crucial.
\n\nThe one thing I would add to that, as part of a final note for me, is for any company that is doing ERG work that has some formal structure, or even if you are a small business, or mid-size business and you have employees that are even talking about it, or hearing about it, make sure that that effort that either is already there, or you're seeing it grow into something, remains authentic. That it has authenticity tied to it and that authenticity can, will, and only can come from the employees who put it together.
\n\nSo make sure that if the employees say want an ERG, make sure that they're absolutely committed to it, all facets of it because it's a lot of work, but it's good work. And if you have a preorganized and structured ERG that just wants to take it to the next level, make sure that you have management and executive sponsors who also believe in that vision for authenticity.
\n\nI think we, as queers and allies in tech, need and see authenticity. We recognize it all the time and every day and everything and everything we say and do that is also represented in the employee resource groups that do such good work, but can only do such good work if there's an authentic passion behind it.
\n\nMANDY: I love that. You're so right. A 100%.
\n\nCASEY: I have a feeling you've said some of this before because it's so polished and clear. You're articulate, Adrian. I love it.
\n\nADRIAN: I honestly have thought about becoming just a dish jockey and just going on radio and then just quitting my day job. But then I realized that would only be successful for maybe one episode and then I would just get boring and then I would forget. [laughs] So I'm going to keep my day job. I'm going to leave you two as the experts on this stuff and I'll just keep saying the same message for the next few 100 years and hope somebody listens.
\n\nMANDY: Well, thank you so much for coming on this show. It's been wonderful.
\n\nCASEY: Thank you.
\n\nMANDY: You have been amazing in explaining all of this. I've honestly never heard of ERGs before. That's why I just sat here and was listening like, “Yes!” Thank you so much for talking about it.
\n\nADRIAN: Sure.
\n\nMANDY: And you are welcome back on this show anytime!
Special Guest: Adrian Gillem.
","summary":"Adrian Gillem introduces us to Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and what they do, what their goals are, and how they operate. He gives an example of how his employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has successfully implemented new policies surrounding transgender healthcare, and talks about how ERGs are only as strong as the management supporting them.","date_published":"2021-09-15T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f81700a5-cbf6-4910-af86-40f0a6193b0d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47434180,"duration_in_seconds":2970}]},{"id":"5e3e983c-531e-4b5d-ae3e-07ef83bc32d4","title":"249: #TechIsHiring + eSports and Software Engineering with Chad Stewart","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/techishiring-esports-and-software-engineering","content_text":"01:19 - Chad’s Superpower: Making People Laugh\n\n\nUsing Comedy to Deal with Problems\n\n\n03:46 - #TechIsHiring\n\n\nBot: @TechIsHiring \nAmplifying Others\nUsing Networks For Good\nBeing a Bridge/Connector\nActively Working to Benefit Others (Possibly Professionally?!?)\nDiversify Tech\n\n\n@DiversifyTechCo\nVeni Kunche\nGreater Than Code Episode #212: Diversify Tech with Veni Kunche \n\n\n\n31:03 - eSports and Software Engineering\n\n\nStreet Fighter\nStrategy & Feedback\nOnline vs In-Person Events\nGGPO Rollback Networking SDK\n\n\ngithub.com/pond3r/ggpo\nTony Cannon\n\nChad on Twitch\nNetherrealm Studios\nGuilty Gear Strive\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The simple act of connecting others with a hashtag.\n\nMandy: Follow @GreaterThanCode for new content and RTs! Amplify others.\n\nMando: Drawing comparisons and connections between playing fighting games and software development and engineering. Bringing experience from one realm to another.\n\nChad: The possibility of being a connector in a professional sense and the validation of comparing fighting games and software development as a discipline worth talking about.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 249. I’m John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla.\n\nMANDO: Thanks, John. Hi, and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore.\n\nMANDY: Hey! And I’m here with our guest, Chad Stewart. \n\nAs a software engineer and esports athlete with many years of experience in both fields, Chad dives deep into issues that he comes across, drilling down to the core of a problem and finds solutions others may miss, letting the lessons of the journey guide future expeditions into the unknown. If you’re confused at comparing esports to software engineering, you’d be surprised at how similar they are. \n\nWelcome, Chad. \n\nCHAD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I never imagined that writing that [chuckles] and it being literally the thing introduces me on a podcast. Wow, I’m sorry, I’m a little mesmerized.\n\nMANDY: I really do want to ask about how we compare esports to software engineering. But before we do that, we have to ask our standard question that we ask all of our guests, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? \n\nCHAD: So, funny enough, I listened to a few episodes before coming on and I wanted to tell a silly joke, but that segues into what my superpower is, is I make people laugh. That's just something I like doing, it’s a big thing for me and I guess, I acquired it by watching Cartoon Network way too early in my life [laughs] and just being, I don't know, I just enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy making myself laugh and I guess, it's just fun. To be honest, that's what I kind of do on Twitter all day, make people laugh. \n\nMANDY: That's awesome. That's a great coping mechanism. Especially these days, I find myself doing the same thing, trying to make light of situations so things don't seem as dark. [laughs] \n\nJOHN: Years ago, a friend of mine, it wasn’t exactly a criticism but he was like, “Man, you’ll laugh at any joke,” and I'm like, “Oh, that's the option. I can either laugh more, or I can laugh less and I choose more.”\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I always say I'd rather laugh than cry about it.\n\nCHAD: I completely agree. There's so much sadness in the world at the moment. We've been in this pandemic for an extended period of time now and there's been people who've lost family members and friends, people who've lost livelihoods. Obviously, comedy is not necessarily going to fix all of that, but at the very least, it makes it easier to deal with those problems. \n\nWe were all hoping that we were going to come out of that this year and it feels like that's not even going to happen. There is some level of normalcy, but long story short, definitely I'd much rather see people smiling and having a good time and if I can add more of that into the world, then great. Just trying to make people laugh and it's fun, it's good for you. It's physically good for you.\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. So I know that I reached out to you to come on the show because I wanted to talk to you specifically about, I think it's something you started around the beginning of the whole pandemic situation, The #TechIsHiring hashtag, do you want to talk about that a little bit?\n\nCHAD: Yeah. So #TechIsHiring is a hashtag that is specifically for job seekers and people who are looking for candidates for their jobs. What I noticed is people would post their jobs, or post that they're looking for a job on Twitter and depending on how strong their network is, it would get a lot of traction, or not so much traction at all. \n\nSo I was thinking, there are people out there who are maybe looking for work and to be fair, it started mostly from that in the first place. More people are looking for an opportunity and posting about it on Twitter and if their network isn't very strong, or for whatever reason, the tweet doesn't get a lot of traction, then it may potentially become difficult for them. \n\nI started the hashtag so that if I saw a tweet like that, I could add it to the hashtag. If you have a job tweet that you're looking for somebody to fill this position, I’d just go out and ask if I could add it to the hashtag and if you say yes, I just tag it with #TechIsHiring and obviously, the same for if somebody is looking for an opportunity. It's been fairly successful like within the last couple of weeks, there've been a lot more usage of it.\n\nI don't necessarily have great ways of coming up with data on obviously how, if people are really benefiting from it outside of me maybe probing to see, but for the most part, I have the Twitter bot that I created for the hashtag. I have notification alerts for that and it's like my phone goes off all the time with notifications and I'm just like, “Hey, at least people are using it and people are retweeting it.” So I'm pretty happy about that. There's a few things I'd like to do to kind of expand it, but I'm definitely happy with where it is right now. \n\nJOHN: So you're saying that the need you saw was that people are posting about that they're looking for a job, but maybe their network isn't particularly good, or they're not getting a lot of reach out of that and so, they're not really getting the benefit of all of Twitter being available to them. So you wanted to create this way to amplify those tiny voices that are saying, “Hey, I need a job.”\n\nCHAD: Yes, yes, yes. To be fair, the #TechIsHiring, it's growing, but ultimately, what I wanted to be is pretty much the thing that people can rely on. You know what I mean? So in essence, I want to build the network for #TechIsHiring so I go and look for like jobs and for people who are looking for jobs, I will actively go and search for them on Twitter and initially, this was to add to the hashtag because obviously, the hashtag didn't have too much when I started it and it's just become a habit of mine.\n\nThere are definitely some people who are looking who, by the time I get come across their tweet, which may be even a week after they've done it, they've maybe had two, or three, or so retweets and likes. I was like, “Hey, if I add this to the hashtag, maybe at the very least, people will see it.” My network is decent. It's not the best I'm not super Twitter famous, but I have a fair amount of people that follow me.\n\nSo what I do when I'm asking is I always make sure to like and retweet whatever I find and ask so at the very least, other people on my network could see it and so, even if they don't reply—and to be fair, some people don't reply for whatever reason, maybe they never see it, or whatever. But even if they don't reply, at least some people are seeing it potentially and even a lot more now, I will retweet some people's job postings, or some people's looking for jobs tweets and people will retweet it themselves.\n\nI'm just trying to, I guess, be that bridge, or I guess, middleman. I don’t know, I can't come up with a better term, but I've just tried to be that person that helps because it's like, everybody's kind of been there. Like, you're looking for a job and you're doing your absolute best and you're stuck with whatever information you have. Information, or resources you have and it's like, if I can make this thing so that people can of latch onto it and use that, then maybe a lot more people can get in contact with somebody who can offer them an opportunity. But that's pretty much it. \n\nMANDY: That's awesome. I used to use the Greater Than Code account to do a lot of that—amplify the voices of others—and I used to be on Mondays, I would go and fill a buffer queue of just content that I found on the internet that I could retweet others. Ever since my daughter got “laid off the school,” that's been a little more difficult, but I'm hoping that in the near future, I can start that up again and do the same thing with the #GreaterThanCode hashtag. \n\nBut what you're doing, it's not easy work and it takes time to sit there, look, curate, put all that stuff together, and then amplify it out and get people to notice it, and engage with posts and it’s hard work. So thank you for trying to be that bridge and trying to use your network for good. I think that was awesome and part of the reason I wanted to get you on the show was because you've been doing it for a really long time and you keep up with it and it's amazing. \n\nCHAD: Yes. Thank you, thank you. There's a few things that I want to do like, I would like to reach out to more employers and it’s just always an awareness thing. I just definitely like to reach out to more employers and be like, “Hey, there are candidates here who are tweeting on Twitter and they're in this hashtag, you can look through that.” \n\nI kind of do it, but I do it like – so I was thinking about it the other day and to be honest, I actually did this way before I actually officially started the hashtag. When I first got on Twitter, or at least when I first got on tech Twitter, what I would do is I'd be doing the Twitter thing and just kind of oh, this person's interesting so I'd make a reply and have maybe a small conversation. And then I would see somebody who's like, “Hey, I'm looking for work,” and I was like, “Hey, I passed the thread that's talking about all of these jobs.” So I’d just link it to them and I was like, “Hey, hopefully, they'll get something out of it,” and I just did that. \n\nThat was just something that just came to be naturally like sometimes I'll be on Reddit and they'll be like, “Oh there was some job posts here. I'll just link it to this person, they're looking for somebody,” and I guess, it makes sense that I ended up making a hashtag to do that in a more official capacity as opposed to one off.\n\nBut what I definitely want to do is just to reach out to people, or to more people actually who have positions and I probably should reach out directly to the people who I'm retweeting who’s saying that they're looking for people and link people, especially people who I've already retweeted and be like, “Hey there's a candidate here,” and just stuff like that. That's something I want to do. \n\nThere are a few organizations that talk about jobs on Twitter a lot and I want to reach out to them and just ask them if they could use the hashtag. I tend not to mess with them too much because they're out trying to make money and so on and so forth, and it feels kind of weird. I don't want to retweet their stuff. I don't know what their marketing plan is. But I just want to reach out to them and be like, “Hey I'm doing this thing” because I don't have any numbers on who benefits from the hashtag. It's all in hopes of type thing. So I just want it to be a little bit more direct with, “Hey employers, there's actually people here that you can look at.” \n\nSo that's pretty much the direction that I'm hoping to go in while obviously, also, actually adding opportunities and people who are looking for options. But hopefully, people start doing it on their own, which is the ultimate goal is that I don't have to curate it myself because everybody understands that it exists. But for now, I don't mind doing that work.\n\nMANDY: So I love the fact that you're a connector in that sense. That's what I consider myself and what I would do before actually being a host/panelist on the show. I feel like you should really hook up with this person and talk about this thing because do you know this person? And then I've had so many people come back from conversations with all the people that I've hooked up on podcasts and they're like, “So-and-so is like my new best internet friend now, thank you so much for introducing us.” \n\n[chuckles]\n\nI love being able to take people and being like, “You like this, you like this, do you two know each other?” and forging relationships like that. That's one of my greatest superpowers I feel so it seems like you're in the same boat, which is really cool.\n\nCHAD: Yeah. I would definitely say that I've been doing that for some time more in an unofficial capacity. It's more like, “Oh, this person needs something. I know somebody who can help with that.” So I go, “Hey, this person needs so-and-so,” and I just bring them together. \n\nI haven't been doing it too much of late. Well, I guess, I have because of the hashtag, but I haven't been doing it too much lately because I feel like the tables have turned; I'm the person that's in need more often than not. But it's definitely something I would definitely like to do more. Again, obviously I'm doing it with the hashtag, but it's definitely like, I've always been like that even as a kid. I've just always been the person who will just help just for helping’s sake. \n\nI'm not necessarily trying to like, “Oh, I'm going to help you so you can help me.” Like, no. “You need something. I think I can help you with that. What can we do?” I don't know, I like working to benefit people. I feel good doing that. You know what I mean? You hear people like, “Hey, things really worked out because of what you did,” and I'm just like, “Hey, I'm happy I could help.” I've always been like that since I was a kid and I intend on continuing to do that professionally. \n\nI guess, now that you bring it up, I'm like, “I really should think about it more actively” because I do it very passively. It's usually, I have a friend who’s looking for a specific job and I will just be minding my own business on Twitter and then I'll see a job that looks like something he wants and then I'll just send it to him. [laughs] He'll give me his reply and he'll be like, “Oh, thanks for thinking about me.” It's like, “Yeah, no problem. I just want to help.” I've always been that person. \n\nMANDO: I'm really glad you said that because I've been hearing you talk about how much you get out of this in addition to everything else that other folks get out sparked this question in my head, which was that have you thought about doing this professionally? Because there are a lot of people who get paid very well to do this kind of stuff very poorly and so, I wonder [laughs] if someone who knows someone who does it well and actually has a love for doing this kind of stuff, if you thought about making this an actual full-time job. \n\nI just went through a hiring process and we just hired an engineer over here. I would gladly engage with recruiters that I knew were doing the work that you're trying to do as opposed to folks that are just downloading whatever they can off of Indeed, or other resume sites and tossing them in my face with little to no filtering.\n\nCHAD: I actually have never thought of it as something professional to do only because I don't know, because I always viewed each event that happened where I'm helping somebody as “Hey, I helped that person.” I never viewed it as a group of, “I can do this professionally.” I don't know, like it's never really crossed my mind literally until you mentioned it. I don't know, it would be interesting. I would love for my career to be – to be honest, I don't even know what my career should look like at this point. \n\n[laughter]\n\nI'm just all over the place. I just like being here. [laughs] I just literally enjoy being here. Like I said, I haven't really thought about it professionally. Actually, literally after this, I'll probably give it some thought, but I'm going to continue doing this regardless. Even if, say for instance, I don't think about it as doing it as a job where I get paid, but definitely just because I did something that just feels good to me and I get to help other people, I do get the benefit of feeling good that I helped somebody else, I'm going to continue to do it. But I never even thought of it as something that you make money off but.\n\nMANDO: A lot of people super do. [laughs] I cannot stress that enough. A lot of people super do and it is my experience that very, very few of them are worth what you end up paying them. \n\nCHAD: Yeah. [laughs] I understand.\n\nJOHN: You were talking about connecting with other organizations on Twitter around hiring that made me think about Diversify Tech. We had the founder, Veni Kunche, on the show last year, I think it was and she's been doing fantastic work over there. That was the first organization that came to mind when you were talking about reaching out, so they do good stuff.\n\nCHAD: Yes. I was definitely thinking about reaching out to them especially because they do a lot of work on Twitter specifically. So right now, the way I think about it, the hashtag obviously lives on Twitter, but it's mainly focused for the Twitter community only because at the time, I was just like, “Hey, people on Twitter are posting these things, I should make some space to put all of these things on Twitter.” Obviously, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Could end up being an entire organization, an entire company, or something like that. But specifically, because they do so much work on Twitter already, I definitely want to reach out to them.\n\nMANDY: That’s cool. \n\nSo I want to go back to the thing we were talking about with reading your bio about comparing eSports to software engineering. Can you tell us more about that?\n\nCHAD: Yeah. So it's been something that I've been thinking about for a while. I say eSports athletes, I don't want to say professionally, but I compete playing fighting games. I've been doing that for about 11 years now. Pretty much the way I view it is when Street Fighter IV officially released on consoles, which was, I think February 9th. It was sometime in February 2009, that's when I kind of view my “eSports career” starting because I've been playing fighting games because of that. I played fighting games a lot longer before that, but when I started taking them seriously and competitively. \n\nDuring that time, I was in school for software engineering at Nova Southeastern University and what I have found, that I especially kind of feel this now, is my abilities as a software engineer and as a competitive fighting game player tend to complement each other. I haven’t had, I don't want to say official, but I haven't sat down and wrote this out, or have a thesis. \n\nBut I find that there's a lot of comparison to fighting games and to making software so much so that I've been playing fighting games for a while and I would consider myself, if we're going to use the same terminology as software engineering, a senior fighting game here.\n\nMANDO: Love it.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCHAD: As funny as it is, when I have conversations with people and what they would consider a senior software engineer, it's like I do more, or less the same things in fighting games. For instance, a question of tooling—and you can definitely chime in because I'm not going to pretend that I'm the most knowledgeable in the industry, especially from actual experience standpoint. \n\nBut from my understanding for a senior engineer, they understand various tools, they understand when to use them, what situations to use them in, when not to use them, how to tie things together, teaching other people how to do these things, they advocate for their project that's a little bit out of the fighting game. I guess, not really. But I guess the thing is that same thought process, the using the various tooling, is how I would—I'm looking literally back at my system just to think. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nBut it's the how I play fighting games at this point like, I have tooling in my head. For instance, I'll be playing a match against a type of player and I'm like, “Okay, this type of player is so on and so forth. This generally works on this type of player. So let me apply this,” and so, “Okay, it's working,” or, “Oh, it's not working. Let me make some adjustments here.” I just feel like it's the same type of – I can't speak directly on that, but it feels so much like the same type of decisions except with software tools.\n\nWhen do you use MySQL? When do you use Mongo? Obviously, you don't have an opponent. You could make a construct of what an opponent is if you want to keep that same type of thought process. But you use tools for specific situations and then you make adjustments based on the way the situation changes, maybe based on your features that the user wants, or based on what you've been finding has been successful, or you want to maybe add a feature, or so-and-so. \n\nI just feel like the thought process is similar. Even the way you use basic tools in programming variables, functions and so on and so forth and how you don't even necessarily think about them, but you obviously use them because you have to. You do the same thing with fighting games. In fighting games, our primitives is we call them normal where it’s you literally press the button and you do nothing else and an attack comes out. You know what I mean? So you can view them as primitives for, I guess, programming fighting games. I don't have a better term [laughs] to make the comparison, but I don't know. \n\nIt's like for me, as a fighting game player and as a software engineer, I feel like there's a huge comparison. I'm still growing as a software engineer, but I'm actually getting to the point where I'm trying to look at my fighting game career, or my growth in fighting games and try to compare them to my growth in software engineering and see oh, where did I have issues here and how did I solve them? But that's just my thing like, I just feel like there's a comparison there that I definitely would like to explore a lot more, especially since obviously I'm in both industries, you know what I mean? But that's kind of why I make that comparison.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I was thinking you could think of it okay, the opponent is a right heavy database load that needs to scale 10x and we're going to attack it with sharded Mongo and RabbitMQ. [laughs]\n\nCHAD: Right, and then how does that work? Because it's about the feedback, right? \n\nJOHN: Yeah.\n\nCHAD: It's the same thing in fighting games; it's about the feedback. I don't want to say it's more important than fighting games, but the thing is, a lot of people in fighting games, they have their strategy and they use it and it either works, or it doesn't work and they live and die by the strategy. But a lot of the times, it's you start with one thing because that's what you know and then you get feedback from the opponent, you know what I mean? You're generally trying to make the feedback favorable for you, but at the end of the day, it's just you leveraging the feedback from the opponent. \n\nIt's the same thing—in fact, it's extremely stressed in software engineering that you do get feedback from your users, or get feedback from wherever from either directly from your users, or say, for instance, there is some issue with your implementation, you have logs and so on and so forth. So it's like, what do you do with all of this information and like I said, I just feel like there is a comparison there that is really interesting. \n\nAgain, I don't necessarily have this as a thesis, or anything. It’s—I’ve been saying this a lot—something I definitely want to explore, but it's just really interesting to me. I still play fighting games. It's been years. I played two different Street Fighters and I've used the same mindset and I still have the same comparisons. I feel like there's something there that's worth exploring.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, man. Just like what you were saying, Mike Tyson had a famous quote, “Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the face,” and that's what you're talking about exactly with the fighting games and what John was talking about with the [laughs] heavy database load in an application. \n\nI come from the technical operations world where we absolutely view all kinds of things in adversarial terms everything from malicious users to external and internal systems to, on our very worst days, other developers and engineers. [laughs] It is through no fault, but you have to be careful to make sure that someone can't accidentally do something bad to a production database because no one's and everyone makes mistakes.\n\nGoing back to what you were saying about drawing the connections between being a senior engineer and a senior fighting game expert, which I love that idea. In both cases, you build up this experience, this learned experience over time to where you learn. \n\nThe reason that I don't want you to have production database access isn't because I want to keep things away from you, it's because nobody's perfect and I'm not perfect, which is why I don't have it either. It's too easy to make these kinds of mistakes, but you have to balance that with your ability to actually get your job done. Like, don't tell me I can't have database access when I need database access to get this stuff done. \n\nI imagine this the same way in fighting games. You want to win so you have to do stuff. You can't just sit there crouching in the back the whole time waiting, you know what I mean?\n\nCHAD: I'm literally trying to formulate a scenario, but trying to form it in a way where I can actually explain it without using terminology and just going over everybody's head. So a similar situation would be in fighting games is that you would play a specific range so that you can go in and out of the opponent's range, but they can't attack you. I don't know if this is actually a good scenario—the only other thing that they could do is jump and in essence – or jump at you and so, you're holding this range to force these two options. \n\nIn your scenario, it's more like oh, this is to make sure that things don't happen. Bad things don't happen in a project. This is more okay, I know that if I'm too close, they can do more, or less anything they want to me so I'm going to hold this range so that they can and then I'm just going to leave them with these two options that I can control. This is not necessarily [inaudible], right? [laughs]\n\nMANDO: No, it's 100% perfect, man. It's the same exact idea of me giving you production database access, but I only give it to you with a read-only user, or with certain CPU quotas, or something like that. So I'm making sure that what you can do is constrained in ways, like you said, that I can control and it's not only just to be defensive, it's to make sure that you get, I don't know, the most positive outcome of the situation. \n\nCHAD: Right.\n\nMANDO: Which, in a fighting game, is to win. \n\nCHAD: Right. Like – [overtalk]\n\nMANDO: And in my case, is to not get paged in the middle of the night.\n\nCHAD: Right, yes. In fighting games, the goal is to one, the whole thing is to generally avoid getting hit. But if you can get hit, you at least know where and you can deal with it. This is more from a defensive scenario; I can come up with offensive scenarios, too. I just lose it trying to keep it in line with the same thought process. \n\nMANDO: For sure.\n\nCHAD: But it's like, I personally have not been in that situation that you described in terms of a production database. But the fact that I could come up with a scenario that is similar to something you described and they're completely, I don't want to say, obviously it's not completely, but it's different realms. It's just something interesting to me and then again, obviously I'm still learning, but I'm not learning.\n\nI'm more of an expert in this thing. So I think that using my knowledge here to make the comparison to what I would say need to learn, or need to understand, or just how to approach a problem. I don't know. It's all jumbled in my head, but it's just fun. It’s just something fun that I want to explore more. I’ve been saying explore more a lot.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It’d make a great series of blog posts.\n\nCHAD: Yes. I've been thinking of that, or making videos because then especially since fighting games is a very visual thing. I've been streaming recently, so it's just like, I can actually play the game and then maybe I can make a video on the game a little bit and then make some comparisons to basic ideas in software development. \n\nIt's something that I really wanted to play with very recently, especially because I still play the game and I enjoy it, but sometimes, it's frustrating because the internet is internet, right? But it’s something I just want to explore, something that’s really fun for me.\n\nMANDO: So what are you playing right now, specifically? What are you competing in?\n\nCHAD: So I play Street Fighter V. I don't compete too much anymore mainly just because there aren't as many active communities. So I live in Jamaica and there aren’t that many communities, not necessarily for eSports in general, but specifically for Street Fighter. So I still watch a lot of events on Twitch and I watch a lot of match videos on YouTube, but I'll play the game here and there and then obviously, I'm still trying to grow as an engineer. \n\nI spend a lot of time doing that, but that, I would say a Street Fighter V. There are a few other fighting games that I'm interested in. Street Fighter V, it's being phased out. Eventually, a new version of that game will come out and for Street Fighter specifically, a lot of the times when they release a new game, it's fairly different from the previous one. So you take your fundamental tools and then you build on that with what the game gives you. But that's what I'm playing right now. \n\nWhen I say I'm a fighting game player, I mainly play Street Fighter. There's some people who play a variety of fighting games and it's extremely difficult because a lot of fighting games are very different. The intricate decisions that you make are very different like, just how you approach the opponent is very different. But that's mainly what I've been focusing on for right now. \n\nI'm hoping to get back into it once things settle down bit more—obviously, the pandemic put a damper on all manner of physical events. So once we are able to get back together when it's more safe, I'm really hoping to take part in that.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. That was going to be my next question was how many of these competitions happen online versus having to have to be in-person because of response times and refresh rates? I've known a couple of people throughout my life who do this competitive gaming and the idea of trying to do it over the internet would just make them gasp like, “Oh, never. Never.” [laughs]\n\nCHAD: Right. It's gotten significantly better than 10 years prior. 10 years prior, I won't say it was a nightmare, but it was pretty close. It's gotten better and I'm not going to pretend that, at the very least, the game that I play Street Fighter V is perfect. There are other fighting games where they've made significant strides in making the online experience better.\n\nFunny enough, there's a project that recently, what I mean by recently within the last 2 years, got open sourced called GGPO. It stands for Good Game Peace Out. It means absolutely nothing to nobody; it’s just everybody's just used GGPO. But the creator is somebody who used to run the largest fighting game event. He's more of an advisory person now, but he used to run the largest fighting game event in the world.\n\nHe created, they call it Netcode. It's an unofficial term for just how the network works in terms of dealing with multiple players, but he created a system where generally, when you have two video games, I don't want to say generally, but for the most part, a lot of video games would try to keep the game as synced as possible. So if one of the two systems—within fighting, it's usually two systems. If one of the two systems went out of sync, then the other one would immediately stop what it's doing and try to sync up with the other system. \n\nSo this person, I don't remember his name. He has a twin brother. We call them the Canon brothers. I don't remember which one did it. Either way, he created a system where the idea was instead of keeping both systems synced all the time, making that the main thing that the network does, is we'll have both video feeds play on their own. We still would do some syncing here and there. But what we will do is just ensure that – how do I describe it? Say for instance, you would have the one video feed being specifically on a specific frame. \n\nFor people who don't know anything about video is that to get video, you just literally redraw images over a period of time and you get motion from that and we, in fighting games, use that specifically to understand how fast things are, what are our options, and so on and so forth. So in fighting games, it’s generally 60 frames per second that we use. \n\nSay for instance, the video feed for one device is on frame two and the video feed for another device is on frame three. Like, the devices are out of sync, but what they will do is for the device that's ahead, they will say, “Okay, this is what happened from the device behind,” and they call it rollback. They call it rollback Netcode and they will roll ahead device back to what the behind device was. The idea is to keep the video feeds as fluid as possible, because timing is a big deal for fighting games. \n\nSo he did all of this work and it became a really, really popular option for net play, but he owned the rights to it at the time and he had owned the rights for 15, maybe not 15 years but for a long period of time and he recently opened sourced it. So it's something that I'm hoping that more game developers will be able to pick up on it and use it in their fighting games because otherwise, they would have to do one of two things.\n\nThey'd obviously have to get the licensing from him and use it in their game and he would provide technical support on how to implement it, or they would have to come up with their own thing and a lot of the times—in fact, funny enough, Street Fighter V is a famous example of this—is they won't get the implementation just quite right and then it just makes it a bad experience for the players. \n\nBut again, I guess, going back to the conversation about online fighting games, it's been getting better. Like I said, that's one option. There's a company called NetherRealm Studios for people who, if you remember Mortal Combat, they're the company that works with that, makes Mortal Combat. They themselves have developed, I don't know too much about that personally, but their Netcode—I use air quotes—is “exceptional.”\n\nOne of the big challenges is playing somebody from across the United States. So California to New York would be a good example. That's usually a horrible time for both people, but with both, GGPO and Mortal Combat, their Netcode is so good that that actually can happen. \n\nI'm sorry if I'm sounding super technical, but there's another game that got rereleased recently, Guilty Gear Strive, where the Netcode is so good that people are playing cross continents. Now it's reasonable for them. Whereas, if you left the state, or if you started playing as somebody from the East Coast to the Midwest, it wasn't even practical. It just didn't make sense. So there's been great strides in that. \n\nEspecially because of the pandemic, a lot of events have been online. As a community, we've transitioned fairly well into doing a lot of online events. There's a lot of games that have been running online events and a lot of people who run very famous offline events have now transitioned to running good online events until the time that we can actually get back together. It's been an interesting and tough time, but I feel like everybody has stepped up to meet the challenge.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. No, it looks like it's Tony and I was just like reading through the Read Me for GGPO and I don't know a thing about this thing, but if what the Read Me says is true, it is super, super cool. \n\nCHAD: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: It uses input prediction and speculative execution to send inputs to the lagging side, or the non-lagging side to mimic what the lagging side would normally be sending over. \n\nCHAD: Right.\n\nMANDO: So the person who isn't lagging, to them it just feels like they're still playing and then it does the same thing to the other side. So [chuckles] even though you may not necessarily be playing each other, it still feels as though you're playing and not hanging and trying to do the sync like you were describing.\n\nCHAD: Right, and it does that until both sides get information about the specific frame and what happened and so – [overtalk]\n\nMANDO: What actually happened, right.\n\nCHAD: Yeah, or what actually happened and then it would like, “Okay, this is what actually most people were trying to do.” It's really interesting. Well, I think I still have the project on my machine. Funny enough, something that I actually really wanted to do. I'm not allowed to say that because I’m, to be quite honest, outside of the explanation. I'm lost from a technical point of what exactly is going on, but I'm hoping somebody is maintaining the project. I haven't seen anybody do anything with it, maybe even extending it. To be honest, I would love to go into it. But for the moment, it's way out of my wheelhouse. [chuckles] \n\nBecause I think it's really important, you know what I mean and I would definitely love to see more game developers use it and if it kind of comes down to me doing something, you know.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCHAD: I just think it's a really important utility, at the very least, for fighting games because I've heard of other people trying to use it for other applications as well. It was obviously made specifically for fighting games.\n\nMANDO: Right.\n\nCHAD: But I just want to see the project continue and want to see more people using it. I don't know if it needs to be fleshed out because it was fleshed out during its development for an extended period of time, but I just definitely would like to see it leveraged more in fighting games. If nothing else, for my own sake, because I hate playing bad matches. \n\n[laughter]\n\nJOHN: So I think now is the time of the show where we do what we call reflections, which is basically each of us are going to talk about the things that we are going to take away from this conversation—maybe new ideas to think about, or just interesting points that have been made today. \n\nFor me, it's definitely just the tiny little act that you started with this hashtag; just connecting a couple people and just making this little thing and now it's gotten bigger and bigger and you're putting the effort into it to make it bigger and all those things. But just people have gotten jobs based on what you've done, undoubtedly. It seems inevitable even if you don't have numbers on it. It's such a simple act of just noticing two people that should be connected and could be connected and making that simple. It's a retweet, or it's a little DM, or whatever it is, sometimes those small acts can have such big consequences. \n\nSo it's wonderful to see that you noticed that that was a thing that could happen and that you could make happen and that you're continuing to put your effort into it just to make it bigger and bigger and be even more impactful.\n\nMANDY: For me, I also go back to the beginning of the conversation when I mentioned that we had the Greater Than Code Twitter handle and how I used to be super diligent about amplifying others, putting others content out there and then I stopped. I'm going to make that my back-to-school goal is to come back and get that done. \n\nSo listeners, stay tuned. There's going to be some new content on Twitter. Follow us if you aren't already and also, make the effort to do the same thing. Do some simple retweets for others, amplify others. If you've got an audience, somebody else might not and just that simple act, as John said, can really help others. So be more cognizant and do that sometimes.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, it's great. Or the way that Chad, you took this thing that you love, you spent a lot of time, a fair amount of your life devoting to becoming an expert at fighting games and then taking that and being able to draw comparisons and make connections between that and the stuff that you do every day. \n\nWhen you were describing these kinds of connections, the idea that popped into my mind was there's someone, or someone's out there right now who grew up playing fighting game and they're super, super, super deep into it like, talking about all the stuff that you were talking about. Talking about NetCode, talking about hit boxes and refresh rate, all that stuff, normal. And then at the same time, they might be trying to break into the software engineering world and they're an expert over here and not over here. \n\nSo hearing you talk about these connections and what if this in the fighting world could be reflected in the software engineering world? That might be just the kind of stuff that they need to hear so they can make those connections, those same types of connections in their minds and bring that experience from one realm into another, into the professional realm. \n\nIt just got me thinking about all the different ways like you hear people often say things like, “Well, I don't have anything to blog about. I don't have anything to make a talk, or a presentation app,” and it's just not true. It's just like, there's so many people in the world who need this kind of content and how John was saying, this kind of content can make a material difference in someone's life and then that little bit starts a chain reaction. It's like a snowball going down a hill and you get someone who is able to start working now as a software engineer and by the end of their career, imagine all of the money and all of the stuff they've been able to do for themselves and their family and their friends and their loved ones, all because of something that you thought was some dumb blog post, or getting too technical in a podcast about stuff, you know what I mean? \n\nLike, it's important, it matters, and we need it and we need more of it. So thanks. I guess, this part was my way of saying thanks for coming in and talking about this stuff, but also, encouraging other folks, myself included, to not be afraid to talk about things, or just a connection in your mind because it's not just you, it's other people as well.\n\nCHAD: My reflection is one about making the whole connector person. I didn't even know it was something that could be done in a professional sense. Like I said, I do it because I'm helping people. That's the only thing that's in my mind about it. It's like, “Oh, this person needs something. I can potentially help them get it done,” and that's all that was in my head. \n\nSo just having that as an option, as hey, you can actually make money doing this. There's that and to be honest, the validation that making the comparison to fighting games and all the technicalities of fighting games and software development as a discipline, there is that connection and it's something worth talking about and bringing it to other people and is potentially interesting. Obviously, I'm at least half decent at playing fighting games.\n\n[laughter]\n\nSo I can talk about that and I'm still growing as a software engineer so it's almost like I have a foundation. It's like, I haven't made that journey yet, but I have a roadmap and I can potentially draw that same map and then give it to other people and they may be able to potentially leverage it for themselves, which again, I'm helping. You know what I mean? [laughs]\n\nMANDO: Yeah, man. That's how it works, brother. That's how it works. \n\nCHAD: Well, yeah, that's definitely – I don't know. I'm really happy about at least that kind of validation, if nothing else. So thank you very much.\n\nMANDY: Well, Chad, it's been wonderful talking to you. \n\nMANDO: Thanks for coming on, man. It's been great. \n\nMANDY: Yeah. Thank you for so much for coming on this show and thank you to our listeners. So we'll see you all next week.Special Guest: Chad Stewart.","content_html":"01:19 - Chad’s Superpower: Making People Laugh
\n\n03:46 - #TechIsHiring
\n\n31:03 - eSports and Software Engineering
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The simple act of connecting others with a hashtag.
\n\nMandy: Follow @GreaterThanCode for new content and RTs! Amplify others.
\n\nMando: Drawing comparisons and connections between playing fighting games and software development and engineering. Bringing experience from one realm to another.
\n\nChad: The possibility of being a connector in a professional sense and the validation of comparing fighting games and software development as a discipline worth talking about.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 249. I’m John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla.
\n\nMANDO: Thanks, John. Hi, and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Hey! And I’m here with our guest, Chad Stewart.
\n\nAs a software engineer and esports athlete with many years of experience in both fields, Chad dives deep into issues that he comes across, drilling down to the core of a problem and finds solutions others may miss, letting the lessons of the journey guide future expeditions into the unknown. If you’re confused at comparing esports to software engineering, you’d be surprised at how similar they are.
\n\nWelcome, Chad.
\n\nCHAD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I never imagined that writing that [chuckles] and it being literally the thing introduces me on a podcast. Wow, I’m sorry, I’m a little mesmerized.
\n\nMANDY: I really do want to ask about how we compare esports to software engineering. But before we do that, we have to ask our standard question that we ask all of our guests, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nCHAD: So, funny enough, I listened to a few episodes before coming on and I wanted to tell a silly joke, but that segues into what my superpower is, is I make people laugh. That's just something I like doing, it’s a big thing for me and I guess, I acquired it by watching Cartoon Network way too early in my life [laughs] and just being, I don't know, I just enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy making myself laugh and I guess, it's just fun. To be honest, that's what I kind of do on Twitter all day, make people laugh.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. That's a great coping mechanism. Especially these days, I find myself doing the same thing, trying to make light of situations so things don't seem as dark. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: Years ago, a friend of mine, it wasn’t exactly a criticism but he was like, “Man, you’ll laugh at any joke,” and I'm like, “Oh, that's the option. I can either laugh more, or I can laugh less and I choose more.”
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I always say I'd rather laugh than cry about it.
\n\nCHAD: I completely agree. There's so much sadness in the world at the moment. We've been in this pandemic for an extended period of time now and there's been people who've lost family members and friends, people who've lost livelihoods. Obviously, comedy is not necessarily going to fix all of that, but at the very least, it makes it easier to deal with those problems.
\n\nWe were all hoping that we were going to come out of that this year and it feels like that's not even going to happen. There is some level of normalcy, but long story short, definitely I'd much rather see people smiling and having a good time and if I can add more of that into the world, then great. Just trying to make people laugh and it's fun, it's good for you. It's physically good for you.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. So I know that I reached out to you to come on the show because I wanted to talk to you specifically about, I think it's something you started around the beginning of the whole pandemic situation, The #TechIsHiring hashtag, do you want to talk about that a little bit?
\n\nCHAD: Yeah. So #TechIsHiring is a hashtag that is specifically for job seekers and people who are looking for candidates for their jobs. What I noticed is people would post their jobs, or post that they're looking for a job on Twitter and depending on how strong their network is, it would get a lot of traction, or not so much traction at all.
\n\nSo I was thinking, there are people out there who are maybe looking for work and to be fair, it started mostly from that in the first place. More people are looking for an opportunity and posting about it on Twitter and if their network isn't very strong, or for whatever reason, the tweet doesn't get a lot of traction, then it may potentially become difficult for them.
\n\nI started the hashtag so that if I saw a tweet like that, I could add it to the hashtag. If you have a job tweet that you're looking for somebody to fill this position, I’d just go out and ask if I could add it to the hashtag and if you say yes, I just tag it with #TechIsHiring and obviously, the same for if somebody is looking for an opportunity. It's been fairly successful like within the last couple of weeks, there've been a lot more usage of it.
\n\nI don't necessarily have great ways of coming up with data on obviously how, if people are really benefiting from it outside of me maybe probing to see, but for the most part, I have the Twitter bot that I created for the hashtag. I have notification alerts for that and it's like my phone goes off all the time with notifications and I'm just like, “Hey, at least people are using it and people are retweeting it.” So I'm pretty happy about that. There's a few things I'd like to do to kind of expand it, but I'm definitely happy with where it is right now.
\n\nJOHN: So you're saying that the need you saw was that people are posting about that they're looking for a job, but maybe their network isn't particularly good, or they're not getting a lot of reach out of that and so, they're not really getting the benefit of all of Twitter being available to them. So you wanted to create this way to amplify those tiny voices that are saying, “Hey, I need a job.”
\n\nCHAD: Yes, yes, yes. To be fair, the #TechIsHiring, it's growing, but ultimately, what I wanted to be is pretty much the thing that people can rely on. You know what I mean? So in essence, I want to build the network for #TechIsHiring so I go and look for like jobs and for people who are looking for jobs, I will actively go and search for them on Twitter and initially, this was to add to the hashtag because obviously, the hashtag didn't have too much when I started it and it's just become a habit of mine.
\n\nThere are definitely some people who are looking who, by the time I get come across their tweet, which may be even a week after they've done it, they've maybe had two, or three, or so retweets and likes. I was like, “Hey, if I add this to the hashtag, maybe at the very least, people will see it.” My network is decent. It's not the best I'm not super Twitter famous, but I have a fair amount of people that follow me.
\n\nSo what I do when I'm asking is I always make sure to like and retweet whatever I find and ask so at the very least, other people on my network could see it and so, even if they don't reply—and to be fair, some people don't reply for whatever reason, maybe they never see it, or whatever. But even if they don't reply, at least some people are seeing it potentially and even a lot more now, I will retweet some people's job postings, or some people's looking for jobs tweets and people will retweet it themselves.
\n\nI'm just trying to, I guess, be that bridge, or I guess, middleman. I don’t know, I can't come up with a better term, but I've just tried to be that person that helps because it's like, everybody's kind of been there. Like, you're looking for a job and you're doing your absolute best and you're stuck with whatever information you have. Information, or resources you have and it's like, if I can make this thing so that people can of latch onto it and use that, then maybe a lot more people can get in contact with somebody who can offer them an opportunity. But that's pretty much it.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. I used to use the Greater Than Code account to do a lot of that—amplify the voices of others—and I used to be on Mondays, I would go and fill a buffer queue of just content that I found on the internet that I could retweet others. Ever since my daughter got “laid off the school,” that's been a little more difficult, but I'm hoping that in the near future, I can start that up again and do the same thing with the #GreaterThanCode hashtag.
\n\nBut what you're doing, it's not easy work and it takes time to sit there, look, curate, put all that stuff together, and then amplify it out and get people to notice it, and engage with posts and it’s hard work. So thank you for trying to be that bridge and trying to use your network for good. I think that was awesome and part of the reason I wanted to get you on the show was because you've been doing it for a really long time and you keep up with it and it's amazing.
\n\nCHAD: Yes. Thank you, thank you. There's a few things that I want to do like, I would like to reach out to more employers and it’s just always an awareness thing. I just definitely like to reach out to more employers and be like, “Hey, there are candidates here who are tweeting on Twitter and they're in this hashtag, you can look through that.”
\n\nI kind of do it, but I do it like – so I was thinking about it the other day and to be honest, I actually did this way before I actually officially started the hashtag. When I first got on Twitter, or at least when I first got on tech Twitter, what I would do is I'd be doing the Twitter thing and just kind of oh, this person's interesting so I'd make a reply and have maybe a small conversation. And then I would see somebody who's like, “Hey, I'm looking for work,” and I was like, “Hey, I passed the thread that's talking about all of these jobs.” So I’d just link it to them and I was like, “Hey, hopefully, they'll get something out of it,” and I just did that.
\n\nThat was just something that just came to be naturally like sometimes I'll be on Reddit and they'll be like, “Oh there was some job posts here. I'll just link it to this person, they're looking for somebody,” and I guess, it makes sense that I ended up making a hashtag to do that in a more official capacity as opposed to one off.
\n\nBut what I definitely want to do is just to reach out to people, or to more people actually who have positions and I probably should reach out directly to the people who I'm retweeting who’s saying that they're looking for people and link people, especially people who I've already retweeted and be like, “Hey there's a candidate here,” and just stuff like that. That's something I want to do.
\n\nThere are a few organizations that talk about jobs on Twitter a lot and I want to reach out to them and just ask them if they could use the hashtag. I tend not to mess with them too much because they're out trying to make money and so on and so forth, and it feels kind of weird. I don't want to retweet their stuff. I don't know what their marketing plan is. But I just want to reach out to them and be like, “Hey I'm doing this thing” because I don't have any numbers on who benefits from the hashtag. It's all in hopes of type thing. So I just want it to be a little bit more direct with, “Hey employers, there's actually people here that you can look at.”
\n\nSo that's pretty much the direction that I'm hoping to go in while obviously, also, actually adding opportunities and people who are looking for options. But hopefully, people start doing it on their own, which is the ultimate goal is that I don't have to curate it myself because everybody understands that it exists. But for now, I don't mind doing that work.
\n\nMANDY: So I love the fact that you're a connector in that sense. That's what I consider myself and what I would do before actually being a host/panelist on the show. I feel like you should really hook up with this person and talk about this thing because do you know this person? And then I've had so many people come back from conversations with all the people that I've hooked up on podcasts and they're like, “So-and-so is like my new best internet friend now, thank you so much for introducing us.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nI love being able to take people and being like, “You like this, you like this, do you two know each other?” and forging relationships like that. That's one of my greatest superpowers I feel so it seems like you're in the same boat, which is really cool.
\n\nCHAD: Yeah. I would definitely say that I've been doing that for some time more in an unofficial capacity. It's more like, “Oh, this person needs something. I know somebody who can help with that.” So I go, “Hey, this person needs so-and-so,” and I just bring them together.
\n\nI haven't been doing it too much of late. Well, I guess, I have because of the hashtag, but I haven't been doing it too much lately because I feel like the tables have turned; I'm the person that's in need more often than not. But it's definitely something I would definitely like to do more. Again, obviously I'm doing it with the hashtag, but it's definitely like, I've always been like that even as a kid. I've just always been the person who will just help just for helping’s sake.
\n\nI'm not necessarily trying to like, “Oh, I'm going to help you so you can help me.” Like, no. “You need something. I think I can help you with that. What can we do?” I don't know, I like working to benefit people. I feel good doing that. You know what I mean? You hear people like, “Hey, things really worked out because of what you did,” and I'm just like, “Hey, I'm happy I could help.” I've always been like that since I was a kid and I intend on continuing to do that professionally.
\n\nI guess, now that you bring it up, I'm like, “I really should think about it more actively” because I do it very passively. It's usually, I have a friend who’s looking for a specific job and I will just be minding my own business on Twitter and then I'll see a job that looks like something he wants and then I'll just send it to him. [laughs] He'll give me his reply and he'll be like, “Oh, thanks for thinking about me.” It's like, “Yeah, no problem. I just want to help.” I've always been that person.
\n\nMANDO: I'm really glad you said that because I've been hearing you talk about how much you get out of this in addition to everything else that other folks get out sparked this question in my head, which was that have you thought about doing this professionally? Because there are a lot of people who get paid very well to do this kind of stuff very poorly and so, I wonder [laughs] if someone who knows someone who does it well and actually has a love for doing this kind of stuff, if you thought about making this an actual full-time job.
\n\nI just went through a hiring process and we just hired an engineer over here. I would gladly engage with recruiters that I knew were doing the work that you're trying to do as opposed to folks that are just downloading whatever they can off of Indeed, or other resume sites and tossing them in my face with little to no filtering.
\n\nCHAD: I actually have never thought of it as something professional to do only because I don't know, because I always viewed each event that happened where I'm helping somebody as “Hey, I helped that person.” I never viewed it as a group of, “I can do this professionally.” I don't know, like it's never really crossed my mind literally until you mentioned it. I don't know, it would be interesting. I would love for my career to be – to be honest, I don't even know what my career should look like at this point.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI'm just all over the place. I just like being here. [laughs] I just literally enjoy being here. Like I said, I haven't really thought about it professionally. Actually, literally after this, I'll probably give it some thought, but I'm going to continue doing this regardless. Even if, say for instance, I don't think about it as doing it as a job where I get paid, but definitely just because I did something that just feels good to me and I get to help other people, I do get the benefit of feeling good that I helped somebody else, I'm going to continue to do it. But I never even thought of it as something that you make money off but.
\n\nMANDO: A lot of people super do. [laughs] I cannot stress that enough. A lot of people super do and it is my experience that very, very few of them are worth what you end up paying them.
\n\nCHAD: Yeah. [laughs] I understand.
\n\nJOHN: You were talking about connecting with other organizations on Twitter around hiring that made me think about Diversify Tech. We had the founder, Veni Kunche, on the show last year, I think it was and she's been doing fantastic work over there. That was the first organization that came to mind when you were talking about reaching out, so they do good stuff.
\n\nCHAD: Yes. I was definitely thinking about reaching out to them especially because they do a lot of work on Twitter specifically. So right now, the way I think about it, the hashtag obviously lives on Twitter, but it's mainly focused for the Twitter community only because at the time, I was just like, “Hey, people on Twitter are posting these things, I should make some space to put all of these things on Twitter.” Obviously, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Could end up being an entire organization, an entire company, or something like that. But specifically, because they do so much work on Twitter already, I definitely want to reach out to them.
\n\nMANDY: That’s cool.
\n\nSo I want to go back to the thing we were talking about with reading your bio about comparing eSports to software engineering. Can you tell us more about that?
\n\nCHAD: Yeah. So it's been something that I've been thinking about for a while. I say eSports athletes, I don't want to say professionally, but I compete playing fighting games. I've been doing that for about 11 years now. Pretty much the way I view it is when Street Fighter IV officially released on consoles, which was, I think February 9th. It was sometime in February 2009, that's when I kind of view my “eSports career” starting because I've been playing fighting games because of that. I played fighting games a lot longer before that, but when I started taking them seriously and competitively.
\n\nDuring that time, I was in school for software engineering at Nova Southeastern University and what I have found, that I especially kind of feel this now, is my abilities as a software engineer and as a competitive fighting game player tend to complement each other. I haven’t had, I don't want to say official, but I haven't sat down and wrote this out, or have a thesis.
\n\nBut I find that there's a lot of comparison to fighting games and to making software so much so that I've been playing fighting games for a while and I would consider myself, if we're going to use the same terminology as software engineering, a senior fighting game here.
\n\nMANDO: Love it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHAD: As funny as it is, when I have conversations with people and what they would consider a senior software engineer, it's like I do more, or less the same things in fighting games. For instance, a question of tooling—and you can definitely chime in because I'm not going to pretend that I'm the most knowledgeable in the industry, especially from actual experience standpoint.
\n\nBut from my understanding for a senior engineer, they understand various tools, they understand when to use them, what situations to use them in, when not to use them, how to tie things together, teaching other people how to do these things, they advocate for their project that's a little bit out of the fighting game. I guess, not really. But I guess the thing is that same thought process, the using the various tooling, is how I would—I'm looking literally back at my system just to think.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nBut it's the how I play fighting games at this point like, I have tooling in my head. For instance, I'll be playing a match against a type of player and I'm like, “Okay, this type of player is so on and so forth. This generally works on this type of player. So let me apply this,” and so, “Okay, it's working,” or, “Oh, it's not working. Let me make some adjustments here.” I just feel like it's the same type of – I can't speak directly on that, but it feels so much like the same type of decisions except with software tools.
\n\nWhen do you use MySQL? When do you use Mongo? Obviously, you don't have an opponent. You could make a construct of what an opponent is if you want to keep that same type of thought process. But you use tools for specific situations and then you make adjustments based on the way the situation changes, maybe based on your features that the user wants, or based on what you've been finding has been successful, or you want to maybe add a feature, or so-and-so.
\n\nI just feel like the thought process is similar. Even the way you use basic tools in programming variables, functions and so on and so forth and how you don't even necessarily think about them, but you obviously use them because you have to. You do the same thing with fighting games. In fighting games, our primitives is we call them normal where it’s you literally press the button and you do nothing else and an attack comes out. You know what I mean? So you can view them as primitives for, I guess, programming fighting games. I don't have a better term [laughs] to make the comparison, but I don't know.
\n\nIt's like for me, as a fighting game player and as a software engineer, I feel like there's a huge comparison. I'm still growing as a software engineer, but I'm actually getting to the point where I'm trying to look at my fighting game career, or my growth in fighting games and try to compare them to my growth in software engineering and see oh, where did I have issues here and how did I solve them? But that's just my thing like, I just feel like there's a comparison there that I definitely would like to explore a lot more, especially since obviously I'm in both industries, you know what I mean? But that's kind of why I make that comparison.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I was thinking you could think of it okay, the opponent is a right heavy database load that needs to scale 10x and we're going to attack it with sharded Mongo and RabbitMQ. [laughs]
\n\nCHAD: Right, and then how does that work? Because it's about the feedback, right?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nCHAD: It's the same thing in fighting games; it's about the feedback. I don't want to say it's more important than fighting games, but the thing is, a lot of people in fighting games, they have their strategy and they use it and it either works, or it doesn't work and they live and die by the strategy. But a lot of the times, it's you start with one thing because that's what you know and then you get feedback from the opponent, you know what I mean? You're generally trying to make the feedback favorable for you, but at the end of the day, it's just you leveraging the feedback from the opponent.
\n\nIt's the same thing—in fact, it's extremely stressed in software engineering that you do get feedback from your users, or get feedback from wherever from either directly from your users, or say, for instance, there is some issue with your implementation, you have logs and so on and so forth. So it's like, what do you do with all of this information and like I said, I just feel like there is a comparison there that is really interesting.
\n\nAgain, I don't necessarily have this as a thesis, or anything. It’s—I’ve been saying this a lot—something I definitely want to explore, but it's just really interesting to me. I still play fighting games. It's been years. I played two different Street Fighters and I've used the same mindset and I still have the same comparisons. I feel like there's something there that's worth exploring.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, man. Just like what you were saying, Mike Tyson had a famous quote, “Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the face,” and that's what you're talking about exactly with the fighting games and what John was talking about with the [laughs] heavy database load in an application.
\n\nI come from the technical operations world where we absolutely view all kinds of things in adversarial terms everything from malicious users to external and internal systems to, on our very worst days, other developers and engineers. [laughs] It is through no fault, but you have to be careful to make sure that someone can't accidentally do something bad to a production database because no one's and everyone makes mistakes.
\n\nGoing back to what you were saying about drawing the connections between being a senior engineer and a senior fighting game expert, which I love that idea. In both cases, you build up this experience, this learned experience over time to where you learn.
\n\nThe reason that I don't want you to have production database access isn't because I want to keep things away from you, it's because nobody's perfect and I'm not perfect, which is why I don't have it either. It's too easy to make these kinds of mistakes, but you have to balance that with your ability to actually get your job done. Like, don't tell me I can't have database access when I need database access to get this stuff done.
\n\nI imagine this the same way in fighting games. You want to win so you have to do stuff. You can't just sit there crouching in the back the whole time waiting, you know what I mean?
\n\nCHAD: I'm literally trying to formulate a scenario, but trying to form it in a way where I can actually explain it without using terminology and just going over everybody's head. So a similar situation would be in fighting games is that you would play a specific range so that you can go in and out of the opponent's range, but they can't attack you. I don't know if this is actually a good scenario—the only other thing that they could do is jump and in essence – or jump at you and so, you're holding this range to force these two options.
\n\nIn your scenario, it's more like oh, this is to make sure that things don't happen. Bad things don't happen in a project. This is more okay, I know that if I'm too close, they can do more, or less anything they want to me so I'm going to hold this range so that they can and then I'm just going to leave them with these two options that I can control. This is not necessarily [inaudible], right? [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: No, it's 100% perfect, man. It's the same exact idea of me giving you production database access, but I only give it to you with a read-only user, or with certain CPU quotas, or something like that. So I'm making sure that what you can do is constrained in ways, like you said, that I can control and it's not only just to be defensive, it's to make sure that you get, I don't know, the most positive outcome of the situation.
\n\nCHAD: Right.
\n\nMANDO: Which, in a fighting game, is to win.
\n\nCHAD: Right. Like – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDO: And in my case, is to not get paged in the middle of the night.
\n\nCHAD: Right, yes. In fighting games, the goal is to one, the whole thing is to generally avoid getting hit. But if you can get hit, you at least know where and you can deal with it. This is more from a defensive scenario; I can come up with offensive scenarios, too. I just lose it trying to keep it in line with the same thought process.
\n\nMANDO: For sure.
\n\nCHAD: But it's like, I personally have not been in that situation that you described in terms of a production database. But the fact that I could come up with a scenario that is similar to something you described and they're completely, I don't want to say, obviously it's not completely, but it's different realms. It's just something interesting to me and then again, obviously I'm still learning, but I'm not learning.
\n\nI'm more of an expert in this thing. So I think that using my knowledge here to make the comparison to what I would say need to learn, or need to understand, or just how to approach a problem. I don't know. It's all jumbled in my head, but it's just fun. It’s just something fun that I want to explore more. I’ve been saying explore more a lot.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It’d make a great series of blog posts.
\n\nCHAD: Yes. I've been thinking of that, or making videos because then especially since fighting games is a very visual thing. I've been streaming recently, so it's just like, I can actually play the game and then maybe I can make a video on the game a little bit and then make some comparisons to basic ideas in software development.
\n\nIt's something that I really wanted to play with very recently, especially because I still play the game and I enjoy it, but sometimes, it's frustrating because the internet is internet, right? But it’s something I just want to explore, something that’s really fun for me.
\n\nMANDO: So what are you playing right now, specifically? What are you competing in?
\n\nCHAD: So I play Street Fighter V. I don't compete too much anymore mainly just because there aren't as many active communities. So I live in Jamaica and there aren’t that many communities, not necessarily for eSports in general, but specifically for Street Fighter. So I still watch a lot of events on Twitch and I watch a lot of match videos on YouTube, but I'll play the game here and there and then obviously, I'm still trying to grow as an engineer.
\n\nI spend a lot of time doing that, but that, I would say a Street Fighter V. There are a few other fighting games that I'm interested in. Street Fighter V, it's being phased out. Eventually, a new version of that game will come out and for Street Fighter specifically, a lot of the times when they release a new game, it's fairly different from the previous one. So you take your fundamental tools and then you build on that with what the game gives you. But that's what I'm playing right now.
\n\nWhen I say I'm a fighting game player, I mainly play Street Fighter. There's some people who play a variety of fighting games and it's extremely difficult because a lot of fighting games are very different. The intricate decisions that you make are very different like, just how you approach the opponent is very different. But that's mainly what I've been focusing on for right now.
\n\nI'm hoping to get back into it once things settle down bit more—obviously, the pandemic put a damper on all manner of physical events. So once we are able to get back together when it's more safe, I'm really hoping to take part in that.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. That was going to be my next question was how many of these competitions happen online versus having to have to be in-person because of response times and refresh rates? I've known a couple of people throughout my life who do this competitive gaming and the idea of trying to do it over the internet would just make them gasp like, “Oh, never. Never.” [laughs]
\n\nCHAD: Right. It's gotten significantly better than 10 years prior. 10 years prior, I won't say it was a nightmare, but it was pretty close. It's gotten better and I'm not going to pretend that, at the very least, the game that I play Street Fighter V is perfect. There are other fighting games where they've made significant strides in making the online experience better.
\n\nFunny enough, there's a project that recently, what I mean by recently within the last 2 years, got open sourced called GGPO. It stands for Good Game Peace Out. It means absolutely nothing to nobody; it’s just everybody's just used GGPO. But the creator is somebody who used to run the largest fighting game event. He's more of an advisory person now, but he used to run the largest fighting game event in the world.
\n\nHe created, they call it Netcode. It's an unofficial term for just how the network works in terms of dealing with multiple players, but he created a system where generally, when you have two video games, I don't want to say generally, but for the most part, a lot of video games would try to keep the game as synced as possible. So if one of the two systems—within fighting, it's usually two systems. If one of the two systems went out of sync, then the other one would immediately stop what it's doing and try to sync up with the other system.
\n\nSo this person, I don't remember his name. He has a twin brother. We call them the Canon brothers. I don't remember which one did it. Either way, he created a system where the idea was instead of keeping both systems synced all the time, making that the main thing that the network does, is we'll have both video feeds play on their own. We still would do some syncing here and there. But what we will do is just ensure that – how do I describe it? Say for instance, you would have the one video feed being specifically on a specific frame.
\n\nFor people who don't know anything about video is that to get video, you just literally redraw images over a period of time and you get motion from that and we, in fighting games, use that specifically to understand how fast things are, what are our options, and so on and so forth. So in fighting games, it’s generally 60 frames per second that we use.
\n\nSay for instance, the video feed for one device is on frame two and the video feed for another device is on frame three. Like, the devices are out of sync, but what they will do is for the device that's ahead, they will say, “Okay, this is what happened from the device behind,” and they call it rollback. They call it rollback Netcode and they will roll ahead device back to what the behind device was. The idea is to keep the video feeds as fluid as possible, because timing is a big deal for fighting games.
\n\nSo he did all of this work and it became a really, really popular option for net play, but he owned the rights to it at the time and he had owned the rights for 15, maybe not 15 years but for a long period of time and he recently opened sourced it. So it's something that I'm hoping that more game developers will be able to pick up on it and use it in their fighting games because otherwise, they would have to do one of two things.
\n\nThey'd obviously have to get the licensing from him and use it in their game and he would provide technical support on how to implement it, or they would have to come up with their own thing and a lot of the times—in fact, funny enough, Street Fighter V is a famous example of this—is they won't get the implementation just quite right and then it just makes it a bad experience for the players.
\n\nBut again, I guess, going back to the conversation about online fighting games, it's been getting better. Like I said, that's one option. There's a company called NetherRealm Studios for people who, if you remember Mortal Combat, they're the company that works with that, makes Mortal Combat. They themselves have developed, I don't know too much about that personally, but their Netcode—I use air quotes—is “exceptional.”
\n\nOne of the big challenges is playing somebody from across the United States. So California to New York would be a good example. That's usually a horrible time for both people, but with both, GGPO and Mortal Combat, their Netcode is so good that that actually can happen.
\n\nI'm sorry if I'm sounding super technical, but there's another game that got rereleased recently, Guilty Gear Strive, where the Netcode is so good that people are playing cross continents. Now it's reasonable for them. Whereas, if you left the state, or if you started playing as somebody from the East Coast to the Midwest, it wasn't even practical. It just didn't make sense. So there's been great strides in that.
\n\nEspecially because of the pandemic, a lot of events have been online. As a community, we've transitioned fairly well into doing a lot of online events. There's a lot of games that have been running online events and a lot of people who run very famous offline events have now transitioned to running good online events until the time that we can actually get back together. It's been an interesting and tough time, but I feel like everybody has stepped up to meet the challenge.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. No, it looks like it's Tony and I was just like reading through the Read Me for GGPO and I don't know a thing about this thing, but if what the Read Me says is true, it is super, super cool.
\n\nCHAD: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: It uses input prediction and speculative execution to send inputs to the lagging side, or the non-lagging side to mimic what the lagging side would normally be sending over.
\n\nCHAD: Right.
\n\nMANDO: So the person who isn't lagging, to them it just feels like they're still playing and then it does the same thing to the other side. So [chuckles] even though you may not necessarily be playing each other, it still feels as though you're playing and not hanging and trying to do the sync like you were describing.
\n\nCHAD: Right, and it does that until both sides get information about the specific frame and what happened and so – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDO: What actually happened, right.
\n\nCHAD: Yeah, or what actually happened and then it would like, “Okay, this is what actually most people were trying to do.” It's really interesting. Well, I think I still have the project on my machine. Funny enough, something that I actually really wanted to do. I'm not allowed to say that because I’m, to be quite honest, outside of the explanation. I'm lost from a technical point of what exactly is going on, but I'm hoping somebody is maintaining the project. I haven't seen anybody do anything with it, maybe even extending it. To be honest, I would love to go into it. But for the moment, it's way out of my wheelhouse. [chuckles]
\n\nBecause I think it's really important, you know what I mean and I would definitely love to see more game developers use it and if it kind of comes down to me doing something, you know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCHAD: I just think it's a really important utility, at the very least, for fighting games because I've heard of other people trying to use it for other applications as well. It was obviously made specifically for fighting games.
\n\nMANDO: Right.
\n\nCHAD: But I just want to see the project continue and want to see more people using it. I don't know if it needs to be fleshed out because it was fleshed out during its development for an extended period of time, but I just definitely would like to see it leveraged more in fighting games. If nothing else, for my own sake, because I hate playing bad matches.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJOHN: So I think now is the time of the show where we do what we call reflections, which is basically each of us are going to talk about the things that we are going to take away from this conversation—maybe new ideas to think about, or just interesting points that have been made today.
\n\nFor me, it's definitely just the tiny little act that you started with this hashtag; just connecting a couple people and just making this little thing and now it's gotten bigger and bigger and you're putting the effort into it to make it bigger and all those things. But just people have gotten jobs based on what you've done, undoubtedly. It seems inevitable even if you don't have numbers on it. It's such a simple act of just noticing two people that should be connected and could be connected and making that simple. It's a retweet, or it's a little DM, or whatever it is, sometimes those small acts can have such big consequences.
\n\nSo it's wonderful to see that you noticed that that was a thing that could happen and that you could make happen and that you're continuing to put your effort into it just to make it bigger and bigger and be even more impactful.
\n\nMANDY: For me, I also go back to the beginning of the conversation when I mentioned that we had the Greater Than Code Twitter handle and how I used to be super diligent about amplifying others, putting others content out there and then I stopped. I'm going to make that my back-to-school goal is to come back and get that done.
\n\nSo listeners, stay tuned. There's going to be some new content on Twitter. Follow us if you aren't already and also, make the effort to do the same thing. Do some simple retweets for others, amplify others. If you've got an audience, somebody else might not and just that simple act, as John said, can really help others. So be more cognizant and do that sometimes.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, it's great. Or the way that Chad, you took this thing that you love, you spent a lot of time, a fair amount of your life devoting to becoming an expert at fighting games and then taking that and being able to draw comparisons and make connections between that and the stuff that you do every day.
\n\nWhen you were describing these kinds of connections, the idea that popped into my mind was there's someone, or someone's out there right now who grew up playing fighting game and they're super, super, super deep into it like, talking about all the stuff that you were talking about. Talking about NetCode, talking about hit boxes and refresh rate, all that stuff, normal. And then at the same time, they might be trying to break into the software engineering world and they're an expert over here and not over here.
\n\nSo hearing you talk about these connections and what if this in the fighting world could be reflected in the software engineering world? That might be just the kind of stuff that they need to hear so they can make those connections, those same types of connections in their minds and bring that experience from one realm into another, into the professional realm.
\n\nIt just got me thinking about all the different ways like you hear people often say things like, “Well, I don't have anything to blog about. I don't have anything to make a talk, or a presentation app,” and it's just not true. It's just like, there's so many people in the world who need this kind of content and how John was saying, this kind of content can make a material difference in someone's life and then that little bit starts a chain reaction. It's like a snowball going down a hill and you get someone who is able to start working now as a software engineer and by the end of their career, imagine all of the money and all of the stuff they've been able to do for themselves and their family and their friends and their loved ones, all because of something that you thought was some dumb blog post, or getting too technical in a podcast about stuff, you know what I mean?
\n\nLike, it's important, it matters, and we need it and we need more of it. So thanks. I guess, this part was my way of saying thanks for coming in and talking about this stuff, but also, encouraging other folks, myself included, to not be afraid to talk about things, or just a connection in your mind because it's not just you, it's other people as well.
\n\nCHAD: My reflection is one about making the whole connector person. I didn't even know it was something that could be done in a professional sense. Like I said, I do it because I'm helping people. That's the only thing that's in my mind about it. It's like, “Oh, this person needs something. I can potentially help them get it done,” and that's all that was in my head.
\n\nSo just having that as an option, as hey, you can actually make money doing this. There's that and to be honest, the validation that making the comparison to fighting games and all the technicalities of fighting games and software development as a discipline, there is that connection and it's something worth talking about and bringing it to other people and is potentially interesting. Obviously, I'm at least half decent at playing fighting games.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I can talk about that and I'm still growing as a software engineer so it's almost like I have a foundation. It's like, I haven't made that journey yet, but I have a roadmap and I can potentially draw that same map and then give it to other people and they may be able to potentially leverage it for themselves, which again, I'm helping. You know what I mean? [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, man. That's how it works, brother. That's how it works.
\n\nCHAD: Well, yeah, that's definitely – I don't know. I'm really happy about at least that kind of validation, if nothing else. So thank you very much.
\n\nMANDY: Well, Chad, it's been wonderful talking to you.
\n\nMANDO: Thanks for coming on, man. It's been great.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Thank you for so much for coming on this show and thank you to our listeners. So we'll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Chad Stewart.
","summary":"Chad Stewart talks about starting the #TechIsHiring hashtag on Twitter to use networking for good and amplify others with not as big of reach.\r\n\r\nWe then pivot to nerding out about gaming! Drawing comparisons and connections between playing fighting games and software development and engineering. Bringing experience from one realm to another.","date_published":"2021-09-08T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/5e3e983c-531e-4b5d-ae3e-07ef83bc32d4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42946465,"duration_in_seconds":3286}]},{"id":"562ec10d-f195-401a-b444-996cc0170762","title":"248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/devloping-team-culture","content_text":"01:27 - Andrew’s Superpower: Stern Empathy\n\n03:30 - Setting Work Boundaries\n\n\nMatrix Organizations \n\n\n18F\n\nAcknowledging Difficult Situations (i.e. Burnout)\nHealth Checks\n\n\nProject Success\nTime Tracking\n\nHeart Connection / Motivation\nWork Distribution\n\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 162: Glue Work with Denise Yu \n\n\n\n18:54 - Providing Support During a Pandemic\n\n\nStretching/Growth Work\nComfortable/Safety Work\nSocial Connection\n\n\n23:37 - Keeping People Happy / Avoiding Team Burnout\n\n\nProject Aristotle by Google\nCollecting Honest Data\nPsychological Safety & Inclusion\nEarned Dogmatism \n“The Waffle House Solution”\n\n\n36:26 - Developing Team Culture\n\n\n“Gravity People”\nHoning Communication Skills\nStaying Ahead of Big Problems\nThe ACE Model of Leadership\n\n\nAppreciation\nCoaching\nEvaluation\n\nLearning Skills\n\n\nManagers: Coaching How To Coach\nCommunities of Practice\nHiring External Consultants\nOnline Courses, Books, Podcasts\n\n\n\n43:08 - Knowing When to Jump Ship and Understanding Your Skills\n\n\nTKI Assessment\n\n\nCompeting\nCollaborating\nCompromising\nAvoiding\nAccommodating\n\n\n\n46:51 - Developing & Enforcing Boundaries \n\n\nSummarization\nNormalization\nAsking For Support\n\n\n59:05 - Making Mistakes\n\n\nDemonstrating Vulnerability\nAcknowledge, Internalize, and Learn\nRebuilding Trust\nAcceptance: Start Over – There’s Other Opportunities\nDubugging Your Brain by Casey Watts\n\n\nReflections:\n\nArty: The intersection between identifying and acknowledging creates the precedent for the norm.\n\nJacob: Evolving culture to enable vulnerability more.\n\nCasey: Andrew’s river metaphor and Arty’s cardboard cutout metaphor. \n\nAndrew: Talking about and building psychological safety is foundational. Going first as leadership or being first to follow. \n\nHow to start a movement | Derek Sivers (being the first follower TED Talk) \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 248 of Greater Than Code. I'm Arty Starr and I'm here with my co-host, Jacob Stoebel.\n\nJACOB: Hello! Nice to be here, and I'm here with my other co-host, Casey Watts. \n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here together with our guest today, Andrew Dunkman. \n\nAndrew, he/him, is an engineering leader and software developer with 17 years of experience. He’s worked on and launched tools for contact relationship management, predictive sales, radiology and healthcare, learning and management, business-to-business timekeeping, and most recently in government at 18F, a part of the US General Services Administration that’s helping the federal government adopt user-centered technology approaches. He loves those.\n\nHe also likes building community in his free time. He helps moderate the DC Tech Slack, a 10,000-person community of tech workers in the DC area and he helps to run DC Code and Coffee, an informal hacking and community-building event every other weekend.\n\nEven though his cat, Toulouse, is glaring at him for talking too loud, he is excited to be here with us today. Hi, Andrew!\n\nANDREW: Hey, y'all! So nice to be here. I'm honored to be a guest.\n\nCASEY: Let's start with our standard question to kick stuff off here. Andrew, what's your superpower and how did you acquire it? \n\nANDREW: Thanks for asking. Yeah, this is whenever I answer the question of what my superpower is, it feels like bragging so I did what I normally do when I'm uncomfortable asking a question and I ask other people that question. I asked a few friends and they highlighted both, my ability to empathize with people and also, my sternness in that empathy. \n\nI think sometimes when you get caught up in empathizing with people, you can allow their emotions and their feelings to overwhelm you, or become a part of you in a way that you're not necessarily hoping for. So I like to draw a firm boundary there and then allow other people to see that boundary, I suppose. [laughs] I don’t know, it's hard for me to say that that's a superpower, but I'm just going to lean into what other people told me.\n\nARTY: That's a pretty good superpower. I like it. How did you acquire it?\n\nANDREW: I credit my mom a lot actually. My mother is a dual major in psychology and English and as growing up, she had the worst way of punishing me, which is anytime I’d do something wrong, she would say, “Can you describe to me what you did and tell me how it made the other person feel?” which is the absolute worst thing to do to a child to make them explain how they've hurt you. [laughs] So I credit that a lot for developing those skills.\n\nCASEY: That's so funny. You think it's the worst thing you can do? Could you imagine yourself doing it ever if you're around children like that?\n\nANDREW: Oh, totally. [laughs] Absolutely, yes. I now do it to my friend's children. I have no children myself, but I do to my friend's children and it's appropriately uncomfortable.\n\nCASEY: I like that. Yeah. It can be the worst and it can be helpful and productive. I believe it.\n\nANDREW: Yes. As one of my coworkers like to say, “Two things can be true.” \n\nJACOB: That boundary, I've been thinking about something along the lines of that recently, particularly in work settings where you can get really burnt out in everything is high stakes emotionally at work. I think that's a really good boundary to have. \n\nANDREW: Absolutely and it's also super hard to know. [chuckles] Both know where that boundary is and what to do when you are coming up to it. I think some people and myself occasionally notice you've crossed that boundary in retrospect, but not necessarily in the moment and it's hard to start off just know your tells when you're getting close to that line and when to pull the e-brake and take a walk, or go out and find some way to disengage, or reengage in yourself as a human and your human needs.\n\nCASEY: I'd love to hear an example of a time when you pulled the e-brake recently, Andrew. It's so vivid you must have a lot of stuff under that sentence.\n\nANDREW: So my current organization, 18F, is one that's a matrixed so we’ve got our chapters is what we call them which is our disciplines. Those are engineering and design, product acquisitions, they're groups of people that do the same kind of work, and then our other angle of the matrix is our projects. Those are business verticals like the kinds of people that we're helping and the organizations that we’re assisting around public benefits, or around national security, or around natural resources. \n\nSo the result of a matrix organization is that you have two aspects to who's managing you—you have the manager of your work and you have the manager of your discipline—and the positive thing about that is that you can use both angles of the organization to support you in different ways. Sometimes in your work, you need someone to speak up for you as a person, or as your skills development angle and sometimes you need someone to speak up for you in terms of the project work that you're doing, advocating for success in the specifics of your project, regardless of the way you're contributing to that project. \n\nThe result, as you zoom out into upper layers of management, is that you have a conflict designed into the system and that conflict, when things are working well, benefits the health of the organization, both the health of people and the health of projects are advocated for and supported. But when things get out of balance, which happens all the time, in every organization I've ever been in you've got pendulum swing back and forth between different balances and when things out of balance, then suddenly you find yourself overextended, or advocating to an empty room.\n\nA recent example was a conversation around advocating for the benefits of – I'm on the chapter side of the house so I support people within engineering and I had to pull an e-brake in a conversation where I was advocating for the health of people, but that I didn't have the right ears in the room to make a positive change. I found myself getting ahead of myself. One of the tells that I have is that I often feel tension in my jaw, which is usually a sign that I'm stressing too much about something. So I decided to take off a few hours and went to a gym [chuckles] and did a work out just to get the energy out of my system.\n\nARTY: It seems like those conflicts can become pretty emotional depending on the circumstances where you've got folks that are overworked and stressed out, and wanting an advocate to help support them in those challenging circumstances. You just think about product deadlines and things coming up and the company's trying to survive and it needs to survive so it can keep people employed. \n\nThose things are important too, but then we've got these challenges with trying to live and be human and enjoy our lives and things become too stressful that we lose our ability to the function and we need advocates on various sides. So when you engage with someone, let's say, there's someone on the team that's burnt out and really stressed out, how would you approach empathizing with where they're coming from to help work toward some good the solution to these things?\n\nANDREW: Great question. I think in these kinds of situations, I always come in with the acknowledgement that no one in this conversation owns the truth. We're both working together to understand what the best thing to do is and what the reality of the situation is. \n\nFrom my perspective, in trying to support someone seeing that they're burnt out, or overworked, that I think that's a misnomer. We can sometimes think of being burnt out overworked as an inherent state, or as something external. But I always try to encourage people to bring it internal because we all set boundaries and orders. The reality of an organization is that there will always be a resource constraint, whether that's people, or time, or money and it's up to the organization to effectively solve what they need to solve within the boundaries of those constraints.\n\nSo when people are feeling overworked, or when they're feeling burnt out, oftentimes there's an imbalance there where the organization perhaps is trying to achieve too much, or perhaps there aren't enough resources supplied here. If you can both internalize it to yourself and say, “Okay, it's up to me to set responsible boundaries so that I'm not burnt out, so that I'm not overworked and how do I, as a manager, support you in finding that boundary and helping push back when people try to violate your boundaries?” \n\nAlso, how do we, as an organization, understand where that line is and understand what kind of slack do we have? Because I think a lot of times in organizations, it's hard to see are we at 20% capacity, 200% capacity? It's hard to see because the more work you throw at people, unless you're getting pushback, it seems as if you still have more slack, more line you can pull. \n\nPart of this is acknowledging that there is a systems level problem here where there's a lack of visibility into how overworked someone is and also, helping someone recognize hey, here's my boundary. We're over at. Now let's figure out a, how do we move that boundary back to where it needs to be so that I'm a positive contributor to this team and I can live my life [chuckles] in a happy way and also, how do we raise this in a way that the organization can see so that we can ultimately be more successful?” \n\nIf an organization is burning people out and making them feel overworked all the time, the work is not going to be successful. You care for people first and great people who are cared for then care for your projects and deliver great work.\n\nJACOB: Yeah, and it’s like how can there'd be a health check for every person and what would that look like because I think if people are left to determine that for themselves, you can get really different conclusions from person.\n\nANDREW: That is a great question I don't know the answer to. [laughs] I've been thinking about this a lot recently. \n\nMy organization has a project health check where weekly, or bi-weekly, I can't remember, each project team talks about the different aspects of the work and whether, or not they're feeling well-supported, or if there are things external to the project that are getting in the way of project success. That gives you a data and interesting insights. \n\nWe also track our time and there is a way that we track our time that's flagged as support to the team. So that's where managers and people who are assisting in making big project decisions, those people track their time to that separate line. That's also interesting to look at because typically people ask for help after they already need it and the people that are close to the project can see that they need help. So if you're looking at the time tracking, usually a week, or two before something shows up on this project health tracker, you see a spike in hours in the kinds of support that people are providing to the project. \n\nWe have a lot of interesting data on the project health side of things, but it's really hard to collect data on the people part of this in a way that like makes people feel supported and it doesn't feel creepy. [chuckles] There's a whole aspect to this on whether, or not people feel comfortable reporting that they are feeling overworked and I haven't solved this problem. I'm curious if you all have ideas. [chuckles] I'd love to learn.\n\nARTY: One of the things I'm thinking about with burnout in particular is I don't think it's directly correlated to the volume of work you're doing. There's other aspects and dimensions of things that go into burnout. \n\nSo if I'm working on something that I'm really excited about, it can be difficult, it can be really challenging, it can be a huge amount of work, and yet as I work on it, as I get to the other side of that mountain I'm climbing, burnout isn't what I'm feeling like. It's a rush being able to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile as we don't necessarily burn out directly in correlation with working too many hours say, or something directly related to that. \n\nThe things I find that happen when people get burned out is when they lose their heart connection with what they're doing. When you love what you do, when you're excited about what you're working on, when you're engaged and connected to a sense of purpose with what you're doing, then we usually stay in a pretty good, healthy state. We’ve got to maintain not still keeping in someone in balance, but we're doing pretty okay.\n\nWhere I see developers usually burning out is there's some heart crushing aspect of things where people are disconnecting disengaging with what they're doing emotionally and they go into this mode of not caring anymore, not having those same compelling reasons to want to do those things and such that when that love connection dissipates, that work becomes too hard to maintain, to force yourself to do. So you start getting burnt out because you're forcing self yourself to do things that aren't an intrinsically motivated thing. \n\nI feel like the types of things that we need to do are activities that encourage this sense of heart connection with our team, with our project, with our customers. We do need visibility into those things, but maybe conversations, or even just knowing that those things are important, making time to scheduling time to invest in those sorts of things. I'm curious your thoughts on that.\n\nANDREW: Yeah. Thank you for flagging that specifically. I think there's one thing that comes to mind for me is that is this work that you once loved that you no longer love? Like, is this something that you've connected with in the past and this really motivated you and now you're not motivated, I should say and if that's the case, what changed? I think brains are tricky and I think that we've all over the last pandemic, [chuckles] the current pandemic, I should say, the COVID pandemic is the one I'm referring to. \n\nI think that as people have coped with lots of trauma in their lives and significant shifts and changes, it's come out in interesting ways. I think, especially as people are learning themselves a little more with new constraints, the impacts are not always directly connected between say, the project work that you're doing, maybe something that you once loved, and now suddenly you no longer feel attached to that. What is that? Is that the work is somehow different? Is it that you really just your threshold for everything else in your life is just ticking higher and higher and higher so now it's really hard to engage in any of the things that you once loved? \n\nI personally have found myself, through the COVID pandemic, really finding meaning in repetition. So now I'm like a 560-day Duolingo streak and I've got podcasts I listen to every day of the week, and this repetition helps mark time in a way that makes me feel more like I have my life together. That gives me more capacity and reduces that stress threshold for me. \n\nSo I think trying to narrow in on what specifically changed and how do we tackle that problem head on, and it might not be the work, or connection to the work.\n\nThe other side of the question is, is this work your love? Maybe this is work that they've never really loved. Maybe this is grunt work—and one thing that I like to acknowledge is that every project has a grunt work associated with it and if you don't really have a framework for rotating that grunt work, a lot of times it falls to the person who has the least privilege on the team. \n\nSo if as a positive team, you can work together and say, “Hey, these are the set of tasks that just needs to get done,” maybe that's notetaking in meetings, maybe that's sending out weekly status emails, or running a particular meeting. “Let's rotate that around so that we can find a balance between the grunt work and then the work that we're here to do this stuff that motivates us.” \n\nBecause if the grunt work doesn't get done, the project won't be successful, but also, we all really want to work on the other thing, too. So let's make sure that no one here gets shafted with all that work [chuckles] and I think especially if teams haven't deliberately thought about that, patterns start to emerge in which people with less privilege get shafted. So I think that's something to be well acknowledge.\n\nJACOB: Quick shoutout. Episode 162 of this podcast, we talked with Denise Yu who really is framing exactly what you're talking about. She calls it glue work and it's that work that's maybe not directly recognized as a value add, but is the work that holds all of it together. So all of the work that might get done in JIRA, or around a Wiki, or organizing meetings, taking notes, all the above. \n\nThe basic theory is like you said, how can that glue work be distributed equitably? Not to say that certain roles don't intrinsically need to do certain types of glue work because that's what their expertise is in. But it was a really good conversation. So if people are interested, go check that out, too.\n\nANDREW: What are some ways that you're seeing that pandemic affect people in their work?\n\nANDREW: I think the answer to that question is as varied as the number of people [laughs] that I support. I think each person is affected in dramatically different ways, which I didn't quite expect, but taking a step back and thinking about it, of course, each person's individual and each person reacts differently. \n\nBut I would say that for some people, especially people in care-taking roles, that kind of work has to shift to support them. So if you're someone caretaking, you're often dealing with a lot of details in your out of work life and especially through the pandemic, now those lives are merging together. \n\nI'm currently at a remote organization and have been at a remote organization for the last 10 years, or so. The remote work thing is not necessarily new, but the complete merging of all of the things life and work is something that's still new and I think a lot of people who work remotely regularly often find ways to get out and get more exposure to people in their personal time, which is also something that has been limited. Especially if you're caretaking, you likely are doing that even less of your threshold for getting out is even lower. \n\nSo if you're constantly dealing with details in your life, it might be good for you to take on more of that glue work, or more of the when you're thinking about the – I think I've worked in three categories. \n\nYou've got the stretching work, or your growth work and that's work that is right on the cusp of your understanding. You're not really good at it yet, but by failing and by having moderate success, you grow as an individual. \n\nThere's also your comfortable work, or your safety work and that's work that you're good at, you can knock it out of the park, do it really fast. I think for folks who are dealing with a lot in their personal life at the moment, leaning more towards the glue work, more towards the safety work is really important for making you feel successful and you're not really hungering that growth. I wished I remember the reference, but I heard someone referring to growth as being in a boat in a river before. Sometimes the river is wide and sometimes the river is narrow. When the river is wide, you really need to row. \n\nI found myself personally, in the last couple of years, not necessarily needing to grow as much and the river feels more narrow to me. So the current is faster and you're taken away with growth and you don't really need to do a lot to get there. Instead, you need to hold on [laughs] and try not to capsize. So that's one aspect, I would say I've seen people…\n\nCASEY: That's such a cool metaphor. I'm going to remember that. \n\nANDREW: Yeah. I wish I remembered where I heard it from so that I can reference it for you all. It's definitely not an original idea of mine. \n\nBut another aspect of the way people have individually in coping and needing support is around their social connection and that's an easy example. I think we've all felt differences in our social connection through COVID and sometimes that takes the form of having more structured meetings. \n\nSome people find more structure gives them the ability to communicate with each other in a way that makes you feel social and also isn't as draining and other people are the exact opposite where they want to get together in a room with less structure so that you can all just hang out and the structure gives people a sense of feeling stressed. \n\nThe way that I've been looking across my organization is what kind of things are we providing and are they varied enough that we're capturing the majority of people in the support that they need?\n\nCASEY: I thought about a lot in the dance communities I am in that there is a lot of introverts that love to go dancing, partner dancing, because it's structured and they'll say so. Like, I love that I can just show up and do the thing and it's social, but I haven't thought about the other side of that, which you just said, which is some people don't want the structure. I'm sure those people exist and I just probably know a lot of them, but I haven't heard people say that about themselves as much. The introverts in the dance communities know and they say it. The other side, I'm going to look out for it. That's cool.\n\nANDREW: I used to play music for religious music ministry and one of the rules we had is that if you're always picking things you like, you're leaving people out. I think of that not necessarily attached to music ministry, but attached to all the other work that I do and that’s if your preferences are always represented, someone else's preferences are not. So trying to look around and say, “Who's not in the room right now, who could be benefiting from having their preferences heard once in a while?”\n\nCASEY: I want to jump back to how can we tell if people are about to be burnt out at work? How can we help people have a healthier environment? \n\nOne of the lenses that I think about all the time is Project Aristotle by Google that came out, I don't know, maybe 5 years ago at this point and we're mentioning a lot of that aspects of it in our conversation already. Earlier, we were talking about on their list four and five are meaning of work like personal importance and impact of work, which is the company mission a little bit more. The other three that we touched on a little bit but not as much is psychological safety, which is number one on their list, dependability, like depending on each other, the coworkers, and structure and clarity, like goals, roles, and execution. \n\nI'm sure this is not a full list of what keeps individual employees happy. But I think a team environment that hits all of these five really well is going to have less burnout. More than individually, it's been studied. That's true. \n\nSo when I did team health surveys before for the team, for the people, I like these five questions a lot. I bet it's a lot like the project surveys, Andrew, you were talking about. A lot of team health surveys are similar, but you got me thinking now what's missing from that list that's focused on the team that would show up in the individual one and I don't have a clear answer for that.\n\nANDREW: And adding onto that, is there a way where you can collect honest data? I think one of the benefits of having one-on-one relationships with your immediate manager is that they can read between the lines and what you're saying after they get to know you well enough. \n\nI think for me, that usually happens about a year in with a new employee where you get to know someone well enough that you can understand. If they come to you and say, “Hey, I'm struggling with this right now in this project.” Is that a huge red flag, or is that normal? I think it takes a while to get to know someone and then you can read between the lines of what they're saying and say, “Okay, this is a big deal. It deserves my attention. I'm going to focus on this.”\n\nOne of the things I struggle with capturing this information is that a, it's hard to capture that sort of interpretation part in these kinds of surveys and b, the data that you get is – when we were talking about burnout a lot, sometimes when people are burned out, they don't have the energy to submit these surveys. [chuckles] So the data is not particularly representative, but that's a hard thing to keep track of because how do you know? So it's a really tricky problem. I'm going to continue to try things [chuckles] to get this data, but I do like the idea of looking between the lines on if we're surveying team health, is there a way we can focus in on individuals?\n\nARTY: There's also a lot of things that we don't talk about. Like Casey brought up psychological safety, for example and if you don't feel safe, you're not likely to necessarily bring up the reasons that you don't feel safe because you don't feel safe. [chuckles] \n\nI'm thinking about just some team dynamics of some teams I've worked on in the past where we had someone on the team that had a strong personality, and we would do code reviews and things, and some folks that were maybe more junior on the team felt sensitive and maybe attacked by certain things. But the response was to shut down and fall in line with things and not rock the boat and you ask him what's going on and everything's fine. \n\nSo there's dynamics of not having psychological safety, but you might not necessarily get at those by talking to folks. Yet, if you're sitting in the room and you know the people and see the interactions taking place, you see how they respond to one another in context. Because I'm thinking about where those dynamics were visible and at the time, the case I'm thinking of was before the days where we were doing pull requests and stuff, where we did our code reviews in a room throwing code up on the screen and would talk through things that way. \n\nYou'd see these dynamics occur when someone would make a comment and how another human would just respond to that person and you see people turn in words on themselves. These sorts of just dynamics of interaction where people’s confidence gets shut down, or someone else is super smart and so they won't challenge them because well, they're a super smart person so obviously, they know. Some people speak in a certain way that exudes confidence, even if they're not necessarily confident about their idea, they just present in a certain way and other people react to that. \n\nSo you see these sorts of dynamics in teams that come up all the time that are the silent undercurrents of how we all manage to get along with one another and keep things flowing okay. \n\nHow do we create an environment and encourage an environment where people feel safer to talk about these things?\n\nANDREW: To me, psychological safety and inclusion are very closely tied and I believe that inclusion is everyone's responsibility on a team and in the situation you described there, who else was in that room and why didn't they stop it? I think that it's easy to say, “Oh, these two people are having a disagreement here,” but if we all truly believe that it's our responsibility to create a safe environment and include everyone and their ideas. As you mentioned, everyone in that room could see what was happening. [chuckles] \n\nSo I think there's a cultural thing there that perhaps needs some work as an organization and I'm not saying that that is something that I don't experience in my teams as well. I think this is work that's constant and continual. Every time you notice something, it's to bring it up and invite someone back into the conversation.\n\nSome people like to think about calling out, or versus calling in and I really like that distinction. When someone oversteps a boundary, or makes a mistake, they've removed themselves from this safe community, and it's up to you as a safe community to invite them back in and let them know their expectations and I like the idea of that aspect of calling people in. \n\nObviously, that requires some confidence and I encourage people, especially people that have institutional privilege, to especially looking out for this because you can really demonstrate to your team how much you're willing to support them if you keep an eye out for these kinds of dynamics. \n\nOne thing you mentioned really made me think about earned dogmatism. When people are around for a longer time, they become more closed-minded. That's the earned dogmatism effect and it's the idea that since you've been here for so long, or since you've been working in this industry so long, you're the expert and it causes you to become more and more closed-minded to new ideas, which obviously is not good. [laughs]\n\nSo anytime I see that pattern popping up, I try to just let people know like, “Hey, do you know about this effect? Do you know that this happens with people in teams and is that how you would like to be? Would you like to become more close-minded, or would you like to continue learning?” I think just the awareness of the fact that that's something that you're going to inherently start doing helps people fight against that.\n\nJACOB: I'm trying to imagine just a typical, if you can call it that, team in a tech company and they're probably in a state where a lot of these things we're talking about might not come so easy because I think what we're saying is that a lot of this is dependent on everyone on the team being vulnerable about where they're at. \n\nI wonder if you have any ideas about how a team can get from there to the ideal state because it sounds like that's a really big barrier. I can't have better psychological safety and inclusion without somehow getting people's feedback and I can get feedback if they don't feel safe. So is there some iterative way to improve on that?\n\nANDREW: Yeah. So one thing that I have direct experience with is in the federal government, there's a lot of funding models between the federal government and local governments where the federal government will pay for a majority of something as long as the local government follows a set of rules on implementing a program. So like Medicare and Medicaid are examples of this and other benefits programs as well. Even the federal highway system; the reason why our interstates are all the same is because the federal government pays for a majority of them if the local authorities building roads follows a set of rules and guidelines. \n\nI think that's one of the most dramatic examples of a power difference. If you're forming a joint team to make changes to Medicare, or build a new highway, or improve rail service in your city and one person in the room controls 90% of the money. I think that's a pretty dramatic example of what could be a really psychologically unsafe environment and it requires a lot of effort to break down that boundary of, “Hey, I'm here to say yes to what you want.” \n\nBut then the reality is the federal government representatives in those situations are often looking to collaborate and help solve problems because they're looking out to see how do I best spend this money to achieve the best effect. But the tendency is that other members of the team coming from the 10% side of the house, they're responsible for the execution of the program and so, they tend to hide mistakes, or hide hiccups as much as possible so that they don't get their funding cut. \n\nThat's just a very natural thing that happens and the experience that I have in this situation is what I like to think of as the Waffle House solution. I heard of a particular person in this situation taking the whole team to Waffle House. This obviously works better in-person. It's hard to take people to Waffle House remotely; that's definitely not something that you can't do. \n\nThe idea behind that conversation is just the problem here is that you're not connecting with each other on a human level and you want to be safe to share your vulnerability with each other, but before you can be vulnerable with each other, you have to recognize each other's humanity and let everyone know that you respect each other. \n\nI think an easy way to do that is to share a meal, maybe it's to play a game together, maybe it's to schedule a meeting for 30 minutes in which you talk about note work. In the example that I gave it's up to the person in the position of power here to set that example, because if you're someone without that privilege, if you are someone who pays for 10% of a project instead of 90%, it's hard for you to go to your 90% funder and say, “Can I waste 30 minutes of your time? Can I waste half a day?” Because waste in this case is the idea from the business side of the house. You're wasting time. \n\nBut in reality, if you slow down and connect with each other on a human level—slow is smooth and smooth is fast—so you can help the team develop that sense of humanity with each other, create an environment where hopefully you can be more vulnerable with each other and collaborate more humanly with each other. \n\nSo I wouldn't necessarily say that this is a textbook plan like okay, you've got problems on your team, let's go to Waffle House and the problem solves. [chuckles] I'm not saying that but I am saying perhaps look for opportunities for you to recognize each other's humanity, and break down perhaps a structure that might be standing in the way of connecting with each other, and then just focusing on that can hopefully help you find that vulnerability better.\n\nJACOB: You can't take yourself seriously at a Waffle House. It's just not possible.\n\nANDREW: [laughs] I'm pretty serious about Waffle House. I don’t know about you. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: I'm starting to get a craving here. \n\nYeah, totally agree. I love that this is being talked about more and more, how do we build psychological safety on teams? It comes from trust, human connection, vulnerability, and how do we build that? By treating each other as humans.\n\nARTY: The things I think about just contrasting some teams I've seen over time and how they ended up developing and the culture that emerged is the technical leadership on the team that organically evolves. Some people have strong personalities. They tend to naturally act in a leader-oriented way. Even if they don't officially have the title hat on their head, they're somebody that people respect and look up to. They value their opinion and thoughts and whoever those people are that have the natural gravity tend to have a lot of influence over the emergent culture. \n\nSo when I've seen people in that position, be really supportive of listening to the ideas of other folks on the team, creating space and treating people with respect, creating an environment where people are heard and listened to and it's about the ideas that the behavior of those people have an outsized impact on the culture that emerges by just how they interact and treat you respect others and other folks on the team tend to mimic and model that behavior of wherever that natural kind of gravity is going toward. \n\nIf you've got folks on the team that are like that, that have a tendency to lift up other people around them, then what emerges is a much more psychologically safe environment. When you've got somebody in that gravity position that has an ego defensive response, they want to continue to feel like the confident expert ones, when people say counter things that are positioned as a challenge and you get a very different set of dynamics that emerge where people tend to be more walk on eggshells, try to say things very carefully to not upset things.\n\nI feel like it's just human instinct response depending on who's in the room, who you're talking to, how you anticipate they will react to something, that emergent interactions come from that and that whoever those gravity people are tend to have this outsize influence. So who you have in your organization of those folks? I'd say probably being really careful to hire people that have a tendency to and a desire to want to lift other people up and to maybe not have such a fragile competitive ego dynamic going on.\n\nANDREW: Absolutely. Well, I have lots of feelings on hiring, [chuckles] but I do think that in the tech industry, we don't spend as much time focusing on communication and then I think that we should. I think a lot of times people who are in that ego situation are expressing vulnerability, but poorly and I think if they had more communication skills, they could potentially express that differently in a way that was more positive to culture. \n\nSo zooming back to one of the things you said around leadership, evolution, evolutionary culture, and who steps into leadership roles, I think one of the things that is really important to me about good leadership is staying ahead of what your big problems are and that isn't necessarily saying working ahead of everyone else. That’s saying keeping your eye on the horizon. Like, are you looking out to where we're going and what kind of problems are we seeing here? \n\nIf there's an acknowledgement of an issue with psychological safety on teams, letting leaders emerge naturally may not be the right approach. You can deliberately select someone who demonstrates the culture that you want to create on a team has that technical leader and give them –\n\nI like the ACE model, the appreciation, the coaching, and the evaluation of leadership, where you give them that appreciation on the particular things that they're doing really well and in front of the team so that the team can say, “Oh, that's what the norm is here. That's what we should be doing.” \n\nThat also gives the person, who may have perhaps more of a natural leadership role, if that would have naturally emerged, but perhaps it's missing some of those communication skills, or other skills that makes them a more around teammate, gives them an opportunity to be out of the spotlight so that they can work on developing those skills and becoming a more active contributor to the team instead of holding it back in some ways.\n\nCASEY: I love that we keep saying the word “skill: because these are all learnable skills. You can learn how to communicate well. You can learn how to be a strong, effective leader. You can learn how to foster a psychologically safe and inclusive environment. You can learn all these things. \n\nI love to work at places where they want this, the culture that the leaders, the people who run the company, want it even if they don't know how yet because that growth is possible as long as there's the desire for that. I think we all have a base level of desire, but some people are aware of it and articulate it and say – I saw a tweet the other day. Someone was looking for a job and of their five criteria, top five they listed in the tweet, psychological safety was on the list. That person knows they want to work on a team like that. That's pretty cool. \n\nSo someone wants their team to learn these skills. A natural way is managers coaching their employees to do that kind of thing like coaching how to coach. That can work pretty well. It's pretty powerful. \n\nAnother one is communities of practice, where you have people come together and talk. It could even literally be about culture. Some companies have a culture, community of practice, where they talk about how to influence the culture. Some places don't have the skills yet and they hire external coaches. There's a whole bunch of companies including me. For myself, I'm a consultant for making happy teams. I do coaching and training, too. There's online courses, there's books, there's podcasts like Greater Than Code. It's pretty good. You should check it out. [chuckles] \n\nBut acknowledging the problem, being aware of it is a huge key first step and I don't like to push for a psychological safety in a place that doesn't value it. That's just a recipe for burnout for me. It's happened to me a lot, but in an environment where it is already desired, getting people from wanting to, to being able to. That’s super satisfying work. I think that's true for anyone in tech who is talking about this kind of stuff, who cares about it. You want to make a difference where you can.\n\nANDREW: Absolutely knowing when to jump ship at an organization because you are fighting upstream at a time when you are either being taken away in the current, or there aren't enough other people around you to swim upstream with you, it is super important. \n\nOne of the things that helped me open a door in my life that I'd be happy to share with you all is an assessment I took a couple of years back called the TKI assessment, Thomas Kincaid Institute assessment, or something. I could've gotten that all wrong, but it's a tool that helps you understand what skills you already have around conflict resolution and what skills you can grow around conflict resolution. \n\nThat unlocked a lot in my life specifically because it allowed me to understand how I naturally resolve conflict, to understand when I should push against my natural instincts to resolve conflict, and when I should feel that I have exhausted my abilities to resolve this conflict. That last step is a great indicator if you've tried everything you can to resolve the conflict, and maybe that conflict is around creating a psychologically safe workspace, you yourself cannot do this. So can you bring in other people that can help resolve this, or is it time to walk away and find a team that supports you better? \n\nThe five different modes that they reference in TKI are competing, collaborative, collaborating, I should say, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. When I first took the assessment, I scored a 0 in competing which means I had no recognizable skill in competing. When I look back into my history, my childhood, how I was raised, that totally makes sense. I was raised in a household where when people wronged you, you let it go. You moved on to find people who would support you and believed that that person would eventually experience justice and that was not your responsibility to do that. \n\nApplying to my work-life today, that means people can walk over me. [laughs] So how do you pick up those skills? The assessment doesn't necessarily dive too much into how you pick up the skills, but I think just knowing where your blind spots are was really helpful for me, because then I could recognize a situation where a, I flagged that I'm experiencing conflict. B, my natural tendency is to accommodate this conflict, or avoid it. C, is that the right approach for this environment? Is that a right approach for this problem? And then d, either do that approach, or change it. \n\nIt's really uncomfortable. Often, when I'm competing, it makes me feel selfish and I acknowledge that. So when I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to change my approach and I'm going to compete here. I'm going to argue.” It's like, “Okay, I'm readying myself,” like, “Okay, I'm going to feel selfish now, be ready to feel selfish, go for it.” [laughs] And that's just sort of how I counteract those natural tendencies. \n\nSo I wouldn't say there's one particular magic bullet, or this is the assessment that you should do, or anything like that, but there are a number of tools out there to sort of help you understand yourself and what skills you have and what skills you might want to grow into. They can also provide a sense of completeness around a particular skill area, like conflict avoidance, or conflict resolution, and let you know when you've exhausted the available options in front of you.\n\nARTY: That's interesting to me just thinking about where we started this discussion with boundaries and just people can react in a different way, and if you have someone who's kind of overstepping boundaries, how do you learn to stand up for yourself? If your instinct is to just run away from conflict, whenever it comes up, then we've got other sorts of problems and stuff that emerges. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to stand up for yourself and to be able to have the confidence to feel like you can. \n\nOne of the things that that helps me with that is when someone else is upset and reacting and stuff is maybe they're attacking me, or something is to separate myself personally for that. So if I imagine them in their head and I'm a cardboard cutout character that I'm like, “Okay, they're kicking the cardboard character and that's not me.” They have a picture in their head of this little cardboard character that they've got an upset relationship with that that's separate from me. \n\nI can look at the dynamics that are of what's going on with them and why they're upset with this cardboard character, understand what's going on in their world with separating myself from that, and then I can respond in a way that is standing up for myself without necessarily reacting to the situation where I feel like I need to defend myself against an attack that something going on that really has nothing to do with me, but still, I need to be able to stand up for myself and not necessarily back away from the situation. So I find those kinds of skills really help with being able to not take other people's stuff so personally.\n\nYou talked about the challenge with boundaries and over empathizing can put us in a situation where the things that other people say can end up hurting us a lot, or we internalize somebody else's feeling so much, or someone else's worldview so much that we can lose ourselves in someone else's emotions and feels. How do we separate enough so that we can have a solidity in our own self and our own sense of knowing such that we can have our own compass that doesn't fall over, that we can feel bolstered in ourselves, independent of what everyone else is doing? That's where that empathy and boundaries and resilience and stuff come in. \n\nSo a question for you, you did mention this boundary thing early on, what are some of the things that have helped you to develop boundaries, or some of the tools that you use to help in those challenging situations? \n\nANDREW: I love the cardboard cutout analogy. I personally like to replay situations as if they're soap operas. I'll describe the characters, especially when things get heated emotionally, it's easy for me to recognize it as a soap opera, which helps me chuckle about the emotional component of it in a way that externalizes it from my feelings. \n\nIt's a really tough situation. That's a tough ask. I think one thing that I do in the exact moments when I am feeling hurt, or valued, or some kind of emotional component is attached to something someone just told me is to again, pull that e-brake and say, “Okay, stop. I am not my work.” Similar to when you submit a pull request, you are not your code. I am not my work. I am not this conversation. I'm a whole self, I am valued as myself. I'm surprised by something that just happened and I'm reacting to it in a particular emotion, emotional reaction. \n\nSo if you can create a pattern, when people get you into that emotional state, whether, or not they were intending on getting you there, of saying, “Hold on, I'm caught off guard by that. Can you tell me more?” Like, “I don't understand that comment.” It shifts the power dynamic from someone putting you on the spot, which they may, or may not have intended to do, to shift it back towards them to say, “Now the responsibility is on you as the person who has made me feel upset, or I'm caught off guard by that and the responsibility now is on you to describe more so that I can contextualize the emotion that I'm feeling, or just give me time to react to that.” \n\nYou don't always have to immediately respond and oftentimes, I find myself reacting too quickly. All of the tools that I have in my toolbox are slowing down. That's one of the tools that I definitely use to help acknowledge that something is unusual. \n\nAnother tool is I'm asking people to summarize so acknowledging that, “Hey, I'm surprised by that and I'm starting to get lost in the details of this meeting. Would it be all right if I asked you to summarize the main points here, or could you follow-up in Slack after this, or follow-up an email after this?” That's another one of those, like my natural tendency to avoid. It's like okay, I can take a step back here and avoid this immediate conflict, or this immediate emotion, and then take a breather. \n\nOften, in the before times, as I would go out and speak at conferences and I'm not a natural extrovert. I have this tendency after I speak at a place to go find a closet, or some dark room somewhere [chuckles] just to recharge a little bit, do nothing. I often will just sit there and sweat in a closet for 30 minutes, or something like that. That process allows me to reset my blood chemistry and say, “Okay, how do I fully acknowledge this situation?” Like, do I feel like I did a good job? Am I proud of the work that I'm doing? Am I proud of this? Is this where my boundaries should be? It allows me to give that moment to step away, to reset a little bit. \n\nSo it’s something I think that I will spend the rest of my life learning, which is how to recognize my boundaries and set them appropriately, and I think that's right. I should be continuing to learn as I continue to change.\n\nARTY: I really liked the summary thing. Just thinking about someone's really upset, it's a pretty safe question to ask and at the same time, it forces them to take a step back and really think about what it is that they're trying to say. Because usually when we're upset, we just spew lots of words of upsetness, but it forces you to shift into more of a thinking mode away from emotional mode, which I feel like would have a really good impact on level setting the conversation. Just take a deep breath. What is it you're trying to communicate here? What are the main points? I really liked that summarization idea.\n\nANDREW: The one thing I always myself in those moments is, “Nothing is more important than my next breath,” and that helps me to unplug from the situation and focus on breathing and focus on relaxing and then be able to show back up and reengage. \n\nJACOB: Something that I think can be important is if I'm at work and I'm realizing that I need to be vulnerable in one way, or another because I need to draw a boundary, or for some other reasons, something that I feel like would be really important that I would really need to have is an example that would give me some idea of what will happen when I do that. \n\nHow can team members get examples of what happens when I'm vulnerable, because if they don't know what will happen, they're probably going to be left to their own personal experiences from maybe at another job, or something like that, that probably don't apply, that probably would be completely different. So it's like, how can managers, or leaders help people see, or experience examples of this is how we talk about difficult conversations to normalize it and just help people understand, like, this is what will happen and this is the way we go about it and yes, it will be safe. \n\nANDREW: I don't think you can say that. [laughs]\n\nJACOB: I know.\n\nANDREW: And that maybe is controversial, but I don't think you can say, “Yes, this will be safe.” I think you can strive for it and you can work for an environment that's safe, but in a professional setting, there's always a line and maybe it's not safe to share something that you think is appropriate to share and there are lots of reasons for that. Maybe it's the impact on other people. \n\nBut the pattern I like to encourage and people just ask for permission, which is something that is maybe not always universally applicable advice, but oftentimes, I find myself talking to people when they're on teams where they want to say something controversial, or they want to say something difficult, or they want to share something that's personal and how they attach to this project, or this work, or something that happened in the team.\n\nI think there's a lot of power in asking people to support you to coming in and saying, “I really want to share something with you all and I'm not sure how it's going to go. Can you support me in this? What are you interested in hearing?”\n\nThe way I often say it, when I'm trying to say something controversially is, “Can I be spicy for a moment?” [laughs] And that's an acknowledgement of saying like, “Hey, I'm going to say something comfortable.” It gives people a moment to set their expectations and it gives them a moment to recognize how they should respond before they hear what you say and then are caught up in the emotion of the response. \n\nI think that's a really kind thing you can do to your team to say like, “Hey, can I be vulnerable for a second here?” Like, “This is a project which involves researching prison populations and three of my family members are in prison.” If you lead off with saying, “Three of my family members are in prison,” people don't know how to understand that comment. But if you start by saying, “Can I be vulnerable for a second?” People will recognize that hey, you're showing something deep about you and your personality and it's something tied to your sense of identity, or something deep within you in a way that is not the responsibility of the team to validate, or say it's right, or wrong. \n\nBut it is the responsibility to the team to hear you and to understand you and ask questions to say, “Hey, tell me more about that. Tell me more about how that connects to this work,” or “Do you want to interview some of your family for research on this project?” [chuckles] Or “Do you want them to stay out of this project?” Or “How do we support you as a team member? Is this something that you want to acknowledge, but you'd prefer to put that in a box and keep it on the shelf, or is that a part of your identity that you'd like to bring to this conversation and bring to this work?” \n\nI think those conversations like can really benefit from that asking for permission step and you don't really need to wait for people's answers there, [chuckles] but it gives you an opportunity to set the tone for the conversation. \n\nJACOB: I feel like if I was working on your team and I saw Andrew use that phrase, “Can I have permission to be vulnerable? Can I be spicy?” I feel like later when I felt like I needed to be vulnerable, I would feel a lot more comfortable because now here's a map that's if I do this, it's probably not completely out of bounds and that now I have a way to know here’s how we go about that on this team, because there’s a leader who modeled it. \n\nARTY: Yeah, bingo. I was just thinking about all the different ways I've screwed things up and stuff and learned, I guess, the hard way, what boundaries are the hard way of what unsafe things are is by making mistakes and screwing things up. I think about some of these experiences that I had and I feel like the saving grace for me, even when I messed something up, is that I genuinely cared and that people knew that and could see that and so, that when I apologize for something, it was authentic and that we could move forward and stuff because I cared. Underneath it all, I genuinely care. So even though I made some mistakes and stuck with things that was okay. \n\nAnd then after that, when I was thinking about being in more of a leadership position, one of the things I made a point of doing was putting mistakes and stuff I've made on center stage. Making it okay and safe for people to talk about when they screwed something up. Being in a leadership position, when I talked about all the things that “Well, I screwed up this thing, I screwed up this thing;” it makes it okay when our leaders demonstrate vulnerability, or create ways and pathways that show us how to do those things safely, too.\n\nANDREW: That reminds me of a friend of mine had a conversation with me last weekend specifically around a mistake that they had made and that mistake was in an online community. They were discussing building a world in a video game and they suggested building something that was offensive. They immediately dove into how they didn't know it was offensive at the time and that the reaction that other people gave to them was inappropriate and that they felt like they didn't know how to apologize in a way that would help support growth, or reengagement with the community, and that they felt like, “Maybe I'm just being canceled,” or maybe people are overreacting here. \n\nAfter the whole conversation, I just let them talk out and they ended with like, “How do I reengage here when people are now ignoring me?” and I just said, “Well, you don't deserve a second chance.” Not that anyone deserves to be canceled immediately, or cut out, but when someone says something offensive that you take offense in, it's up to that person how much tolerance they have for you. If someone has decided that this in this situation was so offensive, or that their tolerance for that offense is low, you don't get a second chance there. That's a mistake that becomes part of you and hopefully, you can allow that burden to not rest on your shoulders and hold you down, but you can internalize it and learn from it, and it becomes part of the foundation you stand on so that you don't make these kinds of mistakes next time. \n\nAnd also, [chuckles] demonstrating an aspect of my superpower, I disagree with you. I don't think you didn't know that that was offensive. [chuckles] I think you had that part of your brain turned off and hey, can we like talk about that? I think that this particular thing, you knew it was offensive, but you were thinking about this in a different context, or you thought this would be okay, and now you're rewriting this and placing yourself as a victim. That is a dangerous pattern so don't do that. [chuckles]\n\nI think that in a work setting, tying this back, when you are having these difficult, or vulnerable conversations, being able to acknowledge when you've made a mistake, maybe perhaps when you've shared something that is offensive, or perhaps you've made a comment about someone else's moment that's offensive, it's really important to acknowledge the mistake to provide the opportunity for others to give your feedback and acknowledge that you've damaged trust here. \n\nIt's your responsibility as the person who damaged that trust to then rebuild it and maybe rebuilding that trust means leaving the organization, or changing teams, or maybe that means really, truly deeply listening and empathizing with people moving into that position of hurt that you've caused and being uncomfortable with it, especially when you're personally wrong. \n\nWhen I'm personally wrong, I really feel that I want people to understand how much I'm hurt and if there isn't a great opportunity to share that pain with someone it's hard to accept their apology, because you don't feel like they understand. In those situations, it's up to the person who's done the controversial thing, or overstepped that boundary to step in and say, “Let's talk about this when you're ready.”\n\nARTY: And also, the other thing I'm just thinking is that when things do happen, we need opportunities and stuff to start over, too. Sometimes the right thing to do is walk away from the whole thing, but learn from it and there's always, there's so many people out there, there's so many opportunities out there, and we're surfing on the waves of life. We learn things along the way and there's always new relationships and things we can build and if we take those lessons and stuff with us for when we do screw things up that maybe we can navigate the next opportunity a little bit different.\n\nI've had enough facepalm moments and stuff of just relationships where the things that come to mind for me are things where someone was put off from me because I'm kind of the passionate, excited person and not everyone knows how to deal with that, or might think I'm a weirdo, or something. So I'll scare someone away and I don't mean to. I'm like, “But I'm a nice person” kind of thing, but sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. \n\nIt's like this first impression thing that you can never really fix, but there's other opportunities out there, there's other relationships, and maybe the purpose of this interaction in your life is just for you to internalize and learn this lesson so that you carry it with you forward. We're all surfing on the waves of life and these kinds of things happen and it's not the end. It's just an opportunity. It's an opportunity to learn a lesson that then we can take with us into the future.\n\nANDREW: Absolutely. Yeah, I know. I've been fired from jobs, had friends cut me out of their lives and made a lot of mistakes. That becomes part of who I am and I carry that forward and I'm happy that I've made these mistakes in my past because they prepared me for making bigger mistakes in the future. What could be more fun?\n\nCASEY: A lot of people get stuck on these experiences, thinking about them over and over and over in a loop and one way to get out of the loop is to correct the situation, which people like to try first, of course. Like, try to get back into that relationship, or community. Another way is to realize there's nothing you can do and move on, that's often called acceptance in meditation mindfulness terms. But it can be hard to get to acceptance if you feel like there's something you can do still, or something you could learn, you didn't learn everything you could yet and how to do that is hard. \n\nIt's a lot of the chapters in the book I wrote, Debugging Your Brains. I'm not going to go into that right now, but there are things you can do to get out of the loop when you're stuck in the loop. I feel so awkward ever plugging my own stuff, but it's so relevant. That's what we're talking about here. \n\n[laughter]\n\nY'all don't mind, I know. \n\nJACOB: No, I'm glad to hear about it. \n\nCASEY: Now let's go to reflections. So at this is the part of the episode where we each reflect on something that stuck out to us. Something we'll take with us. Something that was interesting from today's episode.\n\nARTY: One of the things that stood out to me as we were talking about psychological safety, and these dynamics of leadership and who we choose as leaders as being important is this intersection between once we identify what the kinds of things are that we want to select for, that we can identify those people and then give them acknowledgement, the baton of an official hat to wear, and what the effect of that is, is a way to say to the organization of, “Oh, these are the normal things that we want to build around those characteristics.”\n\nSo there's this intersection between identifying those things and acknowledging that with – I'm holding up a little ball right now, give someone that baton, the thing, or whatever and that the combination of those two things is what creates the precedent for what is the normal we're trying to move towards. So it's not just the hiring, it's not just management things that we do; it’s the intersection of those two things that sets the norm.\n\nJACOB: I'm thinking a lot about a possibility of getting stuck in a loop where people want to be vulnerable with each other, but they can't because they don't want to be the first one. [laughs] So I'm really thinking a lot about what are ways to break out of that and I don't know, it might just involve finding ways that people can be vulnerable about maybe something a little bit lower stakes and see if you can iteratively build up on that. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that like, how do you evolve the culture to enable vulnerability a little bit more?\n\nCASEY: I'm taking away some metaphors and I wish I wrote them all down, but I have to go through the episode again. I remember Andrew's river metaphor, that it's wide, or narrow and you might have to row, or not and Arty, your cardboard cutout that if someone's arguing with you, you can imagine the cardboard cutout of yourself that they're working with to separate it from you. That visual metaphor is so powerful, I can't wait to use that myself sometime. \n\nAndrew, how about you?\n\nANDREW: For me, to add to your list of metaphors talking about psychological safety, building psychological safety, and building a culture of being able to share vulnerable things and be able to provide each other feedback. That really builds the strong foundation so that you can build the house—the house being the project that you're actually doing, the work that you're doing without that strong foundation. I think the house is shaky. Doesn't have that firm foundation. \n\nOn the subject of being vulnerable and how do you break into that vulnerability, I think it's important to acknowledge the leadership here. Being the first to be vulnerable and being the first to follow are both demonstrations of leadership. So if you're looking at who on your team you'd like to nominate, or select to be your next leader, to create that sense of that culture shift, the person who's vulnerable and the person who follows, I think are great people to look at.\n\nCASEY: Like that TED Talk, the first follower. \n\nANDREW: Exactly.\n\nCASEY: I think you showed me that years ago, Andrew. \n\nANDREW: [laughs] Yes. The TED Talk about dancing on a hillside. \n\nRight at the end here, if you don't mind, I'd love to put in a little plug. 18F is a part of the federal government and that means that I'm a federal employee and a civil servant. My salary is paid by all the folks that are paying the taxes. I just want to put on a plug for civil service. Not necessarily for 18F; that's just the area where I've found my talents seem to be best used. \n\nBut maybe for you, dear listener, that is your local government, maybe that's your state government, or maybe that means running for office. The government that we have is not perfect. It is the best one we figured out how to create and if you want to be involved in changing what the best is, or demonstrating that what we have is not as good as what you want, one of the great ways to do that is to be involved in changing it. \n\nSo if you haven't considered looking for a position as a programmer, as a project manager, as a product person, designer, all across the board, the government both, federally and state, and locally needs people like that so, trying to find those and figure out how to support them.\n\nARTY: Well, thank you, Andrew, for joining us. This was a great conversation.\n\nANDREW: It was such a pleasure. It was an honor to be a guest and hope you all have a great day including those that are listening.Special Guest: Andrew Dunkman.","content_html":"01:27 - Andrew’s Superpower: Stern Empathy
\n\n03:30 - Setting Work Boundaries
\n\n18:54 - Providing Support During a Pandemic
\n\n23:37 - Keeping People Happy / Avoiding Team Burnout
\n\n36:26 - Developing Team Culture
\n\n43:08 - Knowing When to Jump Ship and Understanding Your Skills
\n\n46:51 - Developing & Enforcing Boundaries
\n\n59:05 - Making Mistakes
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: The intersection between identifying and acknowledging creates the precedent for the norm.
\n\nJacob: Evolving culture to enable vulnerability more.
\n\nCasey: Andrew’s river metaphor and Arty’s cardboard cutout metaphor.
\n\nAndrew: Talking about and building psychological safety is foundational. Going first as leadership or being first to follow.
\n\nHow to start a movement | Derek Sivers (being the first follower TED Talk)
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 248 of Greater Than Code. I'm Arty Starr and I'm here with my co-host, Jacob Stoebel.
\n\nJACOB: Hello! Nice to be here, and I'm here with my other co-host, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here together with our guest today, Andrew Dunkman.
\n\nAndrew, he/him, is an engineering leader and software developer with 17 years of experience. He’s worked on and launched tools for contact relationship management, predictive sales, radiology and healthcare, learning and management, business-to-business timekeeping, and most recently in government at 18F, a part of the US General Services Administration that’s helping the federal government adopt user-centered technology approaches. He loves those.
\n\nHe also likes building community in his free time. He helps moderate the DC Tech Slack, a 10,000-person community of tech workers in the DC area and he helps to run DC Code and Coffee, an informal hacking and community-building event every other weekend.
\n\nEven though his cat, Toulouse, is glaring at him for talking too loud, he is excited to be here with us today. Hi, Andrew!
\n\nANDREW: Hey, y'all! So nice to be here. I'm honored to be a guest.
\n\nCASEY: Let's start with our standard question to kick stuff off here. Andrew, what's your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nANDREW: Thanks for asking. Yeah, this is whenever I answer the question of what my superpower is, it feels like bragging so I did what I normally do when I'm uncomfortable asking a question and I ask other people that question. I asked a few friends and they highlighted both, my ability to empathize with people and also, my sternness in that empathy.
\n\nI think sometimes when you get caught up in empathizing with people, you can allow their emotions and their feelings to overwhelm you, or become a part of you in a way that you're not necessarily hoping for. So I like to draw a firm boundary there and then allow other people to see that boundary, I suppose. [laughs] I don’t know, it's hard for me to say that that's a superpower, but I'm just going to lean into what other people told me.
\n\nARTY: That's a pretty good superpower. I like it. How did you acquire it?
\n\nANDREW: I credit my mom a lot actually. My mother is a dual major in psychology and English and as growing up, she had the worst way of punishing me, which is anytime I’d do something wrong, she would say, “Can you describe to me what you did and tell me how it made the other person feel?” which is the absolute worst thing to do to a child to make them explain how they've hurt you. [laughs] So I credit that a lot for developing those skills.
\n\nCASEY: That's so funny. You think it's the worst thing you can do? Could you imagine yourself doing it ever if you're around children like that?
\n\nANDREW: Oh, totally. [laughs] Absolutely, yes. I now do it to my friend's children. I have no children myself, but I do to my friend's children and it's appropriately uncomfortable.
\n\nCASEY: I like that. Yeah. It can be the worst and it can be helpful and productive. I believe it.
\n\nANDREW: Yes. As one of my coworkers like to say, “Two things can be true.”
\n\nJACOB: That boundary, I've been thinking about something along the lines of that recently, particularly in work settings where you can get really burnt out in everything is high stakes emotionally at work. I think that's a really good boundary to have.
\n\nANDREW: Absolutely and it's also super hard to know. [chuckles] Both know where that boundary is and what to do when you are coming up to it. I think some people and myself occasionally notice you've crossed that boundary in retrospect, but not necessarily in the moment and it's hard to start off just know your tells when you're getting close to that line and when to pull the e-brake and take a walk, or go out and find some way to disengage, or reengage in yourself as a human and your human needs.
\n\nCASEY: I'd love to hear an example of a time when you pulled the e-brake recently, Andrew. It's so vivid you must have a lot of stuff under that sentence.
\n\nANDREW: So my current organization, 18F, is one that's a matrixed so we’ve got our chapters is what we call them which is our disciplines. Those are engineering and design, product acquisitions, they're groups of people that do the same kind of work, and then our other angle of the matrix is our projects. Those are business verticals like the kinds of people that we're helping and the organizations that we’re assisting around public benefits, or around national security, or around natural resources.
\n\nSo the result of a matrix organization is that you have two aspects to who's managing you—you have the manager of your work and you have the manager of your discipline—and the positive thing about that is that you can use both angles of the organization to support you in different ways. Sometimes in your work, you need someone to speak up for you as a person, or as your skills development angle and sometimes you need someone to speak up for you in terms of the project work that you're doing, advocating for success in the specifics of your project, regardless of the way you're contributing to that project.
\n\nThe result, as you zoom out into upper layers of management, is that you have a conflict designed into the system and that conflict, when things are working well, benefits the health of the organization, both the health of people and the health of projects are advocated for and supported. But when things get out of balance, which happens all the time, in every organization I've ever been in you've got pendulum swing back and forth between different balances and when things out of balance, then suddenly you find yourself overextended, or advocating to an empty room.
\n\nA recent example was a conversation around advocating for the benefits of – I'm on the chapter side of the house so I support people within engineering and I had to pull an e-brake in a conversation where I was advocating for the health of people, but that I didn't have the right ears in the room to make a positive change. I found myself getting ahead of myself. One of the tells that I have is that I often feel tension in my jaw, which is usually a sign that I'm stressing too much about something. So I decided to take off a few hours and went to a gym [chuckles] and did a work out just to get the energy out of my system.
\n\nARTY: It seems like those conflicts can become pretty emotional depending on the circumstances where you've got folks that are overworked and stressed out, and wanting an advocate to help support them in those challenging circumstances. You just think about product deadlines and things coming up and the company's trying to survive and it needs to survive so it can keep people employed.
\n\nThose things are important too, but then we've got these challenges with trying to live and be human and enjoy our lives and things become too stressful that we lose our ability to the function and we need advocates on various sides. So when you engage with someone, let's say, there's someone on the team that's burnt out and really stressed out, how would you approach empathizing with where they're coming from to help work toward some good the solution to these things?
\n\nANDREW: Great question. I think in these kinds of situations, I always come in with the acknowledgement that no one in this conversation owns the truth. We're both working together to understand what the best thing to do is and what the reality of the situation is.
\n\nFrom my perspective, in trying to support someone seeing that they're burnt out, or overworked, that I think that's a misnomer. We can sometimes think of being burnt out overworked as an inherent state, or as something external. But I always try to encourage people to bring it internal because we all set boundaries and orders. The reality of an organization is that there will always be a resource constraint, whether that's people, or time, or money and it's up to the organization to effectively solve what they need to solve within the boundaries of those constraints.
\n\nSo when people are feeling overworked, or when they're feeling burnt out, oftentimes there's an imbalance there where the organization perhaps is trying to achieve too much, or perhaps there aren't enough resources supplied here. If you can both internalize it to yourself and say, “Okay, it's up to me to set responsible boundaries so that I'm not burnt out, so that I'm not overworked and how do I, as a manager, support you in finding that boundary and helping push back when people try to violate your boundaries?”
\n\nAlso, how do we, as an organization, understand where that line is and understand what kind of slack do we have? Because I think a lot of times in organizations, it's hard to see are we at 20% capacity, 200% capacity? It's hard to see because the more work you throw at people, unless you're getting pushback, it seems as if you still have more slack, more line you can pull.
\n\nPart of this is acknowledging that there is a systems level problem here where there's a lack of visibility into how overworked someone is and also, helping someone recognize hey, here's my boundary. We're over at. Now let's figure out a, how do we move that boundary back to where it needs to be so that I'm a positive contributor to this team and I can live my life [chuckles] in a happy way and also, how do we raise this in a way that the organization can see so that we can ultimately be more successful?”
\n\nIf an organization is burning people out and making them feel overworked all the time, the work is not going to be successful. You care for people first and great people who are cared for then care for your projects and deliver great work.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, and it’s like how can there'd be a health check for every person and what would that look like because I think if people are left to determine that for themselves, you can get really different conclusions from person.
\n\nANDREW: That is a great question I don't know the answer to. [laughs] I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
\n\nMy organization has a project health check where weekly, or bi-weekly, I can't remember, each project team talks about the different aspects of the work and whether, or not they're feeling well-supported, or if there are things external to the project that are getting in the way of project success. That gives you a data and interesting insights.
\n\nWe also track our time and there is a way that we track our time that's flagged as support to the team. So that's where managers and people who are assisting in making big project decisions, those people track their time to that separate line. That's also interesting to look at because typically people ask for help after they already need it and the people that are close to the project can see that they need help. So if you're looking at the time tracking, usually a week, or two before something shows up on this project health tracker, you see a spike in hours in the kinds of support that people are providing to the project.
\n\nWe have a lot of interesting data on the project health side of things, but it's really hard to collect data on the people part of this in a way that like makes people feel supported and it doesn't feel creepy. [chuckles] There's a whole aspect to this on whether, or not people feel comfortable reporting that they are feeling overworked and I haven't solved this problem. I'm curious if you all have ideas. [chuckles] I'd love to learn.
\n\nARTY: One of the things I'm thinking about with burnout in particular is I don't think it's directly correlated to the volume of work you're doing. There's other aspects and dimensions of things that go into burnout.
\n\nSo if I'm working on something that I'm really excited about, it can be difficult, it can be really challenging, it can be a huge amount of work, and yet as I work on it, as I get to the other side of that mountain I'm climbing, burnout isn't what I'm feeling like. It's a rush being able to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile as we don't necessarily burn out directly in correlation with working too many hours say, or something directly related to that.
\n\nThe things I find that happen when people get burned out is when they lose their heart connection with what they're doing. When you love what you do, when you're excited about what you're working on, when you're engaged and connected to a sense of purpose with what you're doing, then we usually stay in a pretty good, healthy state. We’ve got to maintain not still keeping in someone in balance, but we're doing pretty okay.
\n\nWhere I see developers usually burning out is there's some heart crushing aspect of things where people are disconnecting disengaging with what they're doing emotionally and they go into this mode of not caring anymore, not having those same compelling reasons to want to do those things and such that when that love connection dissipates, that work becomes too hard to maintain, to force yourself to do. So you start getting burnt out because you're forcing self yourself to do things that aren't an intrinsically motivated thing.
\n\nI feel like the types of things that we need to do are activities that encourage this sense of heart connection with our team, with our project, with our customers. We do need visibility into those things, but maybe conversations, or even just knowing that those things are important, making time to scheduling time to invest in those sorts of things. I'm curious your thoughts on that.
\n\nANDREW: Yeah. Thank you for flagging that specifically. I think there's one thing that comes to mind for me is that is this work that you once loved that you no longer love? Like, is this something that you've connected with in the past and this really motivated you and now you're not motivated, I should say and if that's the case, what changed? I think brains are tricky and I think that we've all over the last pandemic, [chuckles] the current pandemic, I should say, the COVID pandemic is the one I'm referring to.
\n\nI think that as people have coped with lots of trauma in their lives and significant shifts and changes, it's come out in interesting ways. I think, especially as people are learning themselves a little more with new constraints, the impacts are not always directly connected between say, the project work that you're doing, maybe something that you once loved, and now suddenly you no longer feel attached to that. What is that? Is that the work is somehow different? Is it that you really just your threshold for everything else in your life is just ticking higher and higher and higher so now it's really hard to engage in any of the things that you once loved?
\n\nI personally have found myself, through the COVID pandemic, really finding meaning in repetition. So now I'm like a 560-day Duolingo streak and I've got podcasts I listen to every day of the week, and this repetition helps mark time in a way that makes me feel more like I have my life together. That gives me more capacity and reduces that stress threshold for me.
\n\nSo I think trying to narrow in on what specifically changed and how do we tackle that problem head on, and it might not be the work, or connection to the work.
\n\nThe other side of the question is, is this work your love? Maybe this is work that they've never really loved. Maybe this is grunt work—and one thing that I like to acknowledge is that every project has a grunt work associated with it and if you don't really have a framework for rotating that grunt work, a lot of times it falls to the person who has the least privilege on the team.
\n\nSo if as a positive team, you can work together and say, “Hey, these are the set of tasks that just needs to get done,” maybe that's notetaking in meetings, maybe that's sending out weekly status emails, or running a particular meeting. “Let's rotate that around so that we can find a balance between the grunt work and then the work that we're here to do this stuff that motivates us.”
\n\nBecause if the grunt work doesn't get done, the project won't be successful, but also, we all really want to work on the other thing, too. So let's make sure that no one here gets shafted with all that work [chuckles] and I think especially if teams haven't deliberately thought about that, patterns start to emerge in which people with less privilege get shafted. So I think that's something to be well acknowledge.
\n\nJACOB: Quick shoutout. Episode 162 of this podcast, we talked with Denise Yu who really is framing exactly what you're talking about. She calls it glue work and it's that work that's maybe not directly recognized as a value add, but is the work that holds all of it together. So all of the work that might get done in JIRA, or around a Wiki, or organizing meetings, taking notes, all the above.
\n\nThe basic theory is like you said, how can that glue work be distributed equitably? Not to say that certain roles don't intrinsically need to do certain types of glue work because that's what their expertise is in. But it was a really good conversation. So if people are interested, go check that out, too.
\n\nANDREW: What are some ways that you're seeing that pandemic affect people in their work?
\n\nANDREW: I think the answer to that question is as varied as the number of people [laughs] that I support. I think each person is affected in dramatically different ways, which I didn't quite expect, but taking a step back and thinking about it, of course, each person's individual and each person reacts differently.
\n\nBut I would say that for some people, especially people in care-taking roles, that kind of work has to shift to support them. So if you're someone caretaking, you're often dealing with a lot of details in your out of work life and especially through the pandemic, now those lives are merging together.
\n\nI'm currently at a remote organization and have been at a remote organization for the last 10 years, or so. The remote work thing is not necessarily new, but the complete merging of all of the things life and work is something that's still new and I think a lot of people who work remotely regularly often find ways to get out and get more exposure to people in their personal time, which is also something that has been limited. Especially if you're caretaking, you likely are doing that even less of your threshold for getting out is even lower.
\n\nSo if you're constantly dealing with details in your life, it might be good for you to take on more of that glue work, or more of the when you're thinking about the – I think I've worked in three categories.
\n\nYou've got the stretching work, or your growth work and that's work that is right on the cusp of your understanding. You're not really good at it yet, but by failing and by having moderate success, you grow as an individual.
\n\nThere's also your comfortable work, or your safety work and that's work that you're good at, you can knock it out of the park, do it really fast. I think for folks who are dealing with a lot in their personal life at the moment, leaning more towards the glue work, more towards the safety work is really important for making you feel successful and you're not really hungering that growth. I wished I remember the reference, but I heard someone referring to growth as being in a boat in a river before. Sometimes the river is wide and sometimes the river is narrow. When the river is wide, you really need to row.
\n\nI found myself personally, in the last couple of years, not necessarily needing to grow as much and the river feels more narrow to me. So the current is faster and you're taken away with growth and you don't really need to do a lot to get there. Instead, you need to hold on [laughs] and try not to capsize. So that's one aspect, I would say I've seen people…
\n\nCASEY: That's such a cool metaphor. I'm going to remember that.
\n\nANDREW: Yeah. I wish I remembered where I heard it from so that I can reference it for you all. It's definitely not an original idea of mine.
\n\nBut another aspect of the way people have individually in coping and needing support is around their social connection and that's an easy example. I think we've all felt differences in our social connection through COVID and sometimes that takes the form of having more structured meetings.
\n\nSome people find more structure gives them the ability to communicate with each other in a way that makes you feel social and also isn't as draining and other people are the exact opposite where they want to get together in a room with less structure so that you can all just hang out and the structure gives people a sense of feeling stressed.
\n\nThe way that I've been looking across my organization is what kind of things are we providing and are they varied enough that we're capturing the majority of people in the support that they need?
\n\nCASEY: I thought about a lot in the dance communities I am in that there is a lot of introverts that love to go dancing, partner dancing, because it's structured and they'll say so. Like, I love that I can just show up and do the thing and it's social, but I haven't thought about the other side of that, which you just said, which is some people don't want the structure. I'm sure those people exist and I just probably know a lot of them, but I haven't heard people say that about themselves as much. The introverts in the dance communities know and they say it. The other side, I'm going to look out for it. That's cool.
\n\nANDREW: I used to play music for religious music ministry and one of the rules we had is that if you're always picking things you like, you're leaving people out. I think of that not necessarily attached to music ministry, but attached to all the other work that I do and that’s if your preferences are always represented, someone else's preferences are not. So trying to look around and say, “Who's not in the room right now, who could be benefiting from having their preferences heard once in a while?”
\n\nCASEY: I want to jump back to how can we tell if people are about to be burnt out at work? How can we help people have a healthier environment?
\n\nOne of the lenses that I think about all the time is Project Aristotle by Google that came out, I don't know, maybe 5 years ago at this point and we're mentioning a lot of that aspects of it in our conversation already. Earlier, we were talking about on their list four and five are meaning of work like personal importance and impact of work, which is the company mission a little bit more. The other three that we touched on a little bit but not as much is psychological safety, which is number one on their list, dependability, like depending on each other, the coworkers, and structure and clarity, like goals, roles, and execution.
\n\nI'm sure this is not a full list of what keeps individual employees happy. But I think a team environment that hits all of these five really well is going to have less burnout. More than individually, it's been studied. That's true.
\n\nSo when I did team health surveys before for the team, for the people, I like these five questions a lot. I bet it's a lot like the project surveys, Andrew, you were talking about. A lot of team health surveys are similar, but you got me thinking now what's missing from that list that's focused on the team that would show up in the individual one and I don't have a clear answer for that.
\n\nANDREW: And adding onto that, is there a way where you can collect honest data? I think one of the benefits of having one-on-one relationships with your immediate manager is that they can read between the lines and what you're saying after they get to know you well enough.
\n\nI think for me, that usually happens about a year in with a new employee where you get to know someone well enough that you can understand. If they come to you and say, “Hey, I'm struggling with this right now in this project.” Is that a huge red flag, or is that normal? I think it takes a while to get to know someone and then you can read between the lines of what they're saying and say, “Okay, this is a big deal. It deserves my attention. I'm going to focus on this.”
\n\nOne of the things I struggle with capturing this information is that a, it's hard to capture that sort of interpretation part in these kinds of surveys and b, the data that you get is – when we were talking about burnout a lot, sometimes when people are burned out, they don't have the energy to submit these surveys. [chuckles] So the data is not particularly representative, but that's a hard thing to keep track of because how do you know? So it's a really tricky problem. I'm going to continue to try things [chuckles] to get this data, but I do like the idea of looking between the lines on if we're surveying team health, is there a way we can focus in on individuals?
\n\nARTY: There's also a lot of things that we don't talk about. Like Casey brought up psychological safety, for example and if you don't feel safe, you're not likely to necessarily bring up the reasons that you don't feel safe because you don't feel safe. [chuckles]
\n\nI'm thinking about just some team dynamics of some teams I've worked on in the past where we had someone on the team that had a strong personality, and we would do code reviews and things, and some folks that were maybe more junior on the team felt sensitive and maybe attacked by certain things. But the response was to shut down and fall in line with things and not rock the boat and you ask him what's going on and everything's fine.
\n\nSo there's dynamics of not having psychological safety, but you might not necessarily get at those by talking to folks. Yet, if you're sitting in the room and you know the people and see the interactions taking place, you see how they respond to one another in context. Because I'm thinking about where those dynamics were visible and at the time, the case I'm thinking of was before the days where we were doing pull requests and stuff, where we did our code reviews in a room throwing code up on the screen and would talk through things that way.
\n\nYou'd see these dynamics occur when someone would make a comment and how another human would just respond to that person and you see people turn in words on themselves. These sorts of just dynamics of interaction where people’s confidence gets shut down, or someone else is super smart and so they won't challenge them because well, they're a super smart person so obviously, they know. Some people speak in a certain way that exudes confidence, even if they're not necessarily confident about their idea, they just present in a certain way and other people react to that.
\n\nSo you see these sorts of dynamics in teams that come up all the time that are the silent undercurrents of how we all manage to get along with one another and keep things flowing okay.
\n\nHow do we create an environment and encourage an environment where people feel safer to talk about these things?
\n\nANDREW: To me, psychological safety and inclusion are very closely tied and I believe that inclusion is everyone's responsibility on a team and in the situation you described there, who else was in that room and why didn't they stop it? I think that it's easy to say, “Oh, these two people are having a disagreement here,” but if we all truly believe that it's our responsibility to create a safe environment and include everyone and their ideas. As you mentioned, everyone in that room could see what was happening. [chuckles]
\n\nSo I think there's a cultural thing there that perhaps needs some work as an organization and I'm not saying that that is something that I don't experience in my teams as well. I think this is work that's constant and continual. Every time you notice something, it's to bring it up and invite someone back into the conversation.
\n\nSome people like to think about calling out, or versus calling in and I really like that distinction. When someone oversteps a boundary, or makes a mistake, they've removed themselves from this safe community, and it's up to you as a safe community to invite them back in and let them know their expectations and I like the idea of that aspect of calling people in.
\n\nObviously, that requires some confidence and I encourage people, especially people that have institutional privilege, to especially looking out for this because you can really demonstrate to your team how much you're willing to support them if you keep an eye out for these kinds of dynamics.
\n\nOne thing you mentioned really made me think about earned dogmatism. When people are around for a longer time, they become more closed-minded. That's the earned dogmatism effect and it's the idea that since you've been here for so long, or since you've been working in this industry so long, you're the expert and it causes you to become more and more closed-minded to new ideas, which obviously is not good. [laughs]
\n\nSo anytime I see that pattern popping up, I try to just let people know like, “Hey, do you know about this effect? Do you know that this happens with people in teams and is that how you would like to be? Would you like to become more close-minded, or would you like to continue learning?” I think just the awareness of the fact that that's something that you're going to inherently start doing helps people fight against that.
\n\nJACOB: I'm trying to imagine just a typical, if you can call it that, team in a tech company and they're probably in a state where a lot of these things we're talking about might not come so easy because I think what we're saying is that a lot of this is dependent on everyone on the team being vulnerable about where they're at.
\n\nI wonder if you have any ideas about how a team can get from there to the ideal state because it sounds like that's a really big barrier. I can't have better psychological safety and inclusion without somehow getting people's feedback and I can get feedback if they don't feel safe. So is there some iterative way to improve on that?
\n\nANDREW: Yeah. So one thing that I have direct experience with is in the federal government, there's a lot of funding models between the federal government and local governments where the federal government will pay for a majority of something as long as the local government follows a set of rules on implementing a program. So like Medicare and Medicaid are examples of this and other benefits programs as well. Even the federal highway system; the reason why our interstates are all the same is because the federal government pays for a majority of them if the local authorities building roads follows a set of rules and guidelines.
\n\nI think that's one of the most dramatic examples of a power difference. If you're forming a joint team to make changes to Medicare, or build a new highway, or improve rail service in your city and one person in the room controls 90% of the money. I think that's a pretty dramatic example of what could be a really psychologically unsafe environment and it requires a lot of effort to break down that boundary of, “Hey, I'm here to say yes to what you want.”
\n\nBut then the reality is the federal government representatives in those situations are often looking to collaborate and help solve problems because they're looking out to see how do I best spend this money to achieve the best effect. But the tendency is that other members of the team coming from the 10% side of the house, they're responsible for the execution of the program and so, they tend to hide mistakes, or hide hiccups as much as possible so that they don't get their funding cut.
\n\nThat's just a very natural thing that happens and the experience that I have in this situation is what I like to think of as the Waffle House solution. I heard of a particular person in this situation taking the whole team to Waffle House. This obviously works better in-person. It's hard to take people to Waffle House remotely; that's definitely not something that you can't do.
\n\nThe idea behind that conversation is just the problem here is that you're not connecting with each other on a human level and you want to be safe to share your vulnerability with each other, but before you can be vulnerable with each other, you have to recognize each other's humanity and let everyone know that you respect each other.
\n\nI think an easy way to do that is to share a meal, maybe it's to play a game together, maybe it's to schedule a meeting for 30 minutes in which you talk about note work. In the example that I gave it's up to the person in the position of power here to set that example, because if you're someone without that privilege, if you are someone who pays for 10% of a project instead of 90%, it's hard for you to go to your 90% funder and say, “Can I waste 30 minutes of your time? Can I waste half a day?” Because waste in this case is the idea from the business side of the house. You're wasting time.
\n\nBut in reality, if you slow down and connect with each other on a human level—slow is smooth and smooth is fast—so you can help the team develop that sense of humanity with each other, create an environment where hopefully you can be more vulnerable with each other and collaborate more humanly with each other.
\n\nSo I wouldn't necessarily say that this is a textbook plan like okay, you've got problems on your team, let's go to Waffle House and the problem solves. [chuckles] I'm not saying that but I am saying perhaps look for opportunities for you to recognize each other's humanity, and break down perhaps a structure that might be standing in the way of connecting with each other, and then just focusing on that can hopefully help you find that vulnerability better.
\n\nJACOB: You can't take yourself seriously at a Waffle House. It's just not possible.
\n\nANDREW: [laughs] I'm pretty serious about Waffle House. I don’t know about you. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I'm starting to get a craving here.
\n\nYeah, totally agree. I love that this is being talked about more and more, how do we build psychological safety on teams? It comes from trust, human connection, vulnerability, and how do we build that? By treating each other as humans.
\n\nARTY: The things I think about just contrasting some teams I've seen over time and how they ended up developing and the culture that emerged is the technical leadership on the team that organically evolves. Some people have strong personalities. They tend to naturally act in a leader-oriented way. Even if they don't officially have the title hat on their head, they're somebody that people respect and look up to. They value their opinion and thoughts and whoever those people are that have the natural gravity tend to have a lot of influence over the emergent culture.
\n\nSo when I've seen people in that position, be really supportive of listening to the ideas of other folks on the team, creating space and treating people with respect, creating an environment where people are heard and listened to and it's about the ideas that the behavior of those people have an outsized impact on the culture that emerges by just how they interact and treat you respect others and other folks on the team tend to mimic and model that behavior of wherever that natural kind of gravity is going toward.
\n\nIf you've got folks on the team that are like that, that have a tendency to lift up other people around them, then what emerges is a much more psychologically safe environment. When you've got somebody in that gravity position that has an ego defensive response, they want to continue to feel like the confident expert ones, when people say counter things that are positioned as a challenge and you get a very different set of dynamics that emerge where people tend to be more walk on eggshells, try to say things very carefully to not upset things.
\n\nI feel like it's just human instinct response depending on who's in the room, who you're talking to, how you anticipate they will react to something, that emergent interactions come from that and that whoever those gravity people are tend to have this outsize influence. So who you have in your organization of those folks? I'd say probably being really careful to hire people that have a tendency to and a desire to want to lift other people up and to maybe not have such a fragile competitive ego dynamic going on.
\n\nANDREW: Absolutely. Well, I have lots of feelings on hiring, [chuckles] but I do think that in the tech industry, we don't spend as much time focusing on communication and then I think that we should. I think a lot of times people who are in that ego situation are expressing vulnerability, but poorly and I think if they had more communication skills, they could potentially express that differently in a way that was more positive to culture.
\n\nSo zooming back to one of the things you said around leadership, evolution, evolutionary culture, and who steps into leadership roles, I think one of the things that is really important to me about good leadership is staying ahead of what your big problems are and that isn't necessarily saying working ahead of everyone else. That’s saying keeping your eye on the horizon. Like, are you looking out to where we're going and what kind of problems are we seeing here?
\n\nIf there's an acknowledgement of an issue with psychological safety on teams, letting leaders emerge naturally may not be the right approach. You can deliberately select someone who demonstrates the culture that you want to create on a team has that technical leader and give them –
\n\nI like the ACE model, the appreciation, the coaching, and the evaluation of leadership, where you give them that appreciation on the particular things that they're doing really well and in front of the team so that the team can say, “Oh, that's what the norm is here. That's what we should be doing.”
\n\nThat also gives the person, who may have perhaps more of a natural leadership role, if that would have naturally emerged, but perhaps it's missing some of those communication skills, or other skills that makes them a more around teammate, gives them an opportunity to be out of the spotlight so that they can work on developing those skills and becoming a more active contributor to the team instead of holding it back in some ways.
\n\nCASEY: I love that we keep saying the word “skill: because these are all learnable skills. You can learn how to communicate well. You can learn how to be a strong, effective leader. You can learn how to foster a psychologically safe and inclusive environment. You can learn all these things.
\n\nI love to work at places where they want this, the culture that the leaders, the people who run the company, want it even if they don't know how yet because that growth is possible as long as there's the desire for that. I think we all have a base level of desire, but some people are aware of it and articulate it and say – I saw a tweet the other day. Someone was looking for a job and of their five criteria, top five they listed in the tweet, psychological safety was on the list. That person knows they want to work on a team like that. That's pretty cool.
\n\nSo someone wants their team to learn these skills. A natural way is managers coaching their employees to do that kind of thing like coaching how to coach. That can work pretty well. It's pretty powerful.
\n\nAnother one is communities of practice, where you have people come together and talk. It could even literally be about culture. Some companies have a culture, community of practice, where they talk about how to influence the culture. Some places don't have the skills yet and they hire external coaches. There's a whole bunch of companies including me. For myself, I'm a consultant for making happy teams. I do coaching and training, too. There's online courses, there's books, there's podcasts like Greater Than Code. It's pretty good. You should check it out. [chuckles]
\n\nBut acknowledging the problem, being aware of it is a huge key first step and I don't like to push for a psychological safety in a place that doesn't value it. That's just a recipe for burnout for me. It's happened to me a lot, but in an environment where it is already desired, getting people from wanting to, to being able to. That’s super satisfying work. I think that's true for anyone in tech who is talking about this kind of stuff, who cares about it. You want to make a difference where you can.
\n\nANDREW: Absolutely knowing when to jump ship at an organization because you are fighting upstream at a time when you are either being taken away in the current, or there aren't enough other people around you to swim upstream with you, it is super important.
\n\nOne of the things that helped me open a door in my life that I'd be happy to share with you all is an assessment I took a couple of years back called the TKI assessment, Thomas Kincaid Institute assessment, or something. I could've gotten that all wrong, but it's a tool that helps you understand what skills you already have around conflict resolution and what skills you can grow around conflict resolution.
\n\nThat unlocked a lot in my life specifically because it allowed me to understand how I naturally resolve conflict, to understand when I should push against my natural instincts to resolve conflict, and when I should feel that I have exhausted my abilities to resolve this conflict. That last step is a great indicator if you've tried everything you can to resolve the conflict, and maybe that conflict is around creating a psychologically safe workspace, you yourself cannot do this. So can you bring in other people that can help resolve this, or is it time to walk away and find a team that supports you better?
\n\nThe five different modes that they reference in TKI are competing, collaborative, collaborating, I should say, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. When I first took the assessment, I scored a 0 in competing which means I had no recognizable skill in competing. When I look back into my history, my childhood, how I was raised, that totally makes sense. I was raised in a household where when people wronged you, you let it go. You moved on to find people who would support you and believed that that person would eventually experience justice and that was not your responsibility to do that.
\n\nApplying to my work-life today, that means people can walk over me. [laughs] So how do you pick up those skills? The assessment doesn't necessarily dive too much into how you pick up the skills, but I think just knowing where your blind spots are was really helpful for me, because then I could recognize a situation where a, I flagged that I'm experiencing conflict. B, my natural tendency is to accommodate this conflict, or avoid it. C, is that the right approach for this environment? Is that a right approach for this problem? And then d, either do that approach, or change it.
\n\nIt's really uncomfortable. Often, when I'm competing, it makes me feel selfish and I acknowledge that. So when I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to change my approach and I'm going to compete here. I'm going to argue.” It's like, “Okay, I'm readying myself,” like, “Okay, I'm going to feel selfish now, be ready to feel selfish, go for it.” [laughs] And that's just sort of how I counteract those natural tendencies.
\n\nSo I wouldn't say there's one particular magic bullet, or this is the assessment that you should do, or anything like that, but there are a number of tools out there to sort of help you understand yourself and what skills you have and what skills you might want to grow into. They can also provide a sense of completeness around a particular skill area, like conflict avoidance, or conflict resolution, and let you know when you've exhausted the available options in front of you.
\n\nARTY: That's interesting to me just thinking about where we started this discussion with boundaries and just people can react in a different way, and if you have someone who's kind of overstepping boundaries, how do you learn to stand up for yourself? If your instinct is to just run away from conflict, whenever it comes up, then we've got other sorts of problems and stuff that emerges. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to stand up for yourself and to be able to have the confidence to feel like you can.
\n\nOne of the things that that helps me with that is when someone else is upset and reacting and stuff is maybe they're attacking me, or something is to separate myself personally for that. So if I imagine them in their head and I'm a cardboard cutout character that I'm like, “Okay, they're kicking the cardboard character and that's not me.” They have a picture in their head of this little cardboard character that they've got an upset relationship with that that's separate from me.
\n\nI can look at the dynamics that are of what's going on with them and why they're upset with this cardboard character, understand what's going on in their world with separating myself from that, and then I can respond in a way that is standing up for myself without necessarily reacting to the situation where I feel like I need to defend myself against an attack that something going on that really has nothing to do with me, but still, I need to be able to stand up for myself and not necessarily back away from the situation. So I find those kinds of skills really help with being able to not take other people's stuff so personally.
\n\nYou talked about the challenge with boundaries and over empathizing can put us in a situation where the things that other people say can end up hurting us a lot, or we internalize somebody else's feeling so much, or someone else's worldview so much that we can lose ourselves in someone else's emotions and feels. How do we separate enough so that we can have a solidity in our own self and our own sense of knowing such that we can have our own compass that doesn't fall over, that we can feel bolstered in ourselves, independent of what everyone else is doing? That's where that empathy and boundaries and resilience and stuff come in.
\n\nSo a question for you, you did mention this boundary thing early on, what are some of the things that have helped you to develop boundaries, or some of the tools that you use to help in those challenging situations?
\n\nANDREW: I love the cardboard cutout analogy. I personally like to replay situations as if they're soap operas. I'll describe the characters, especially when things get heated emotionally, it's easy for me to recognize it as a soap opera, which helps me chuckle about the emotional component of it in a way that externalizes it from my feelings.
\n\nIt's a really tough situation. That's a tough ask. I think one thing that I do in the exact moments when I am feeling hurt, or valued, or some kind of emotional component is attached to something someone just told me is to again, pull that e-brake and say, “Okay, stop. I am not my work.” Similar to when you submit a pull request, you are not your code. I am not my work. I am not this conversation. I'm a whole self, I am valued as myself. I'm surprised by something that just happened and I'm reacting to it in a particular emotion, emotional reaction.
\n\nSo if you can create a pattern, when people get you into that emotional state, whether, or not they were intending on getting you there, of saying, “Hold on, I'm caught off guard by that. Can you tell me more?” Like, “I don't understand that comment.” It shifts the power dynamic from someone putting you on the spot, which they may, or may not have intended to do, to shift it back towards them to say, “Now the responsibility is on you as the person who has made me feel upset, or I'm caught off guard by that and the responsibility now is on you to describe more so that I can contextualize the emotion that I'm feeling, or just give me time to react to that.”
\n\nYou don't always have to immediately respond and oftentimes, I find myself reacting too quickly. All of the tools that I have in my toolbox are slowing down. That's one of the tools that I definitely use to help acknowledge that something is unusual.
\n\nAnother tool is I'm asking people to summarize so acknowledging that, “Hey, I'm surprised by that and I'm starting to get lost in the details of this meeting. Would it be all right if I asked you to summarize the main points here, or could you follow-up in Slack after this, or follow-up an email after this?” That's another one of those, like my natural tendency to avoid. It's like okay, I can take a step back here and avoid this immediate conflict, or this immediate emotion, and then take a breather.
\n\nOften, in the before times, as I would go out and speak at conferences and I'm not a natural extrovert. I have this tendency after I speak at a place to go find a closet, or some dark room somewhere [chuckles] just to recharge a little bit, do nothing. I often will just sit there and sweat in a closet for 30 minutes, or something like that. That process allows me to reset my blood chemistry and say, “Okay, how do I fully acknowledge this situation?” Like, do I feel like I did a good job? Am I proud of the work that I'm doing? Am I proud of this? Is this where my boundaries should be? It allows me to give that moment to step away, to reset a little bit.
\n\nSo it’s something I think that I will spend the rest of my life learning, which is how to recognize my boundaries and set them appropriately, and I think that's right. I should be continuing to learn as I continue to change.
\n\nARTY: I really liked the summary thing. Just thinking about someone's really upset, it's a pretty safe question to ask and at the same time, it forces them to take a step back and really think about what it is that they're trying to say. Because usually when we're upset, we just spew lots of words of upsetness, but it forces you to shift into more of a thinking mode away from emotional mode, which I feel like would have a really good impact on level setting the conversation. Just take a deep breath. What is it you're trying to communicate here? What are the main points? I really liked that summarization idea.
\n\nANDREW: The one thing I always myself in those moments is, “Nothing is more important than my next breath,” and that helps me to unplug from the situation and focus on breathing and focus on relaxing and then be able to show back up and reengage.
\n\nJACOB: Something that I think can be important is if I'm at work and I'm realizing that I need to be vulnerable in one way, or another because I need to draw a boundary, or for some other reasons, something that I feel like would be really important that I would really need to have is an example that would give me some idea of what will happen when I do that.
\n\nHow can team members get examples of what happens when I'm vulnerable, because if they don't know what will happen, they're probably going to be left to their own personal experiences from maybe at another job, or something like that, that probably don't apply, that probably would be completely different. So it's like, how can managers, or leaders help people see, or experience examples of this is how we talk about difficult conversations to normalize it and just help people understand, like, this is what will happen and this is the way we go about it and yes, it will be safe.
\n\nANDREW: I don't think you can say that. [laughs]
\n\nJACOB: I know.
\n\nANDREW: And that maybe is controversial, but I don't think you can say, “Yes, this will be safe.” I think you can strive for it and you can work for an environment that's safe, but in a professional setting, there's always a line and maybe it's not safe to share something that you think is appropriate to share and there are lots of reasons for that. Maybe it's the impact on other people.
\n\nBut the pattern I like to encourage and people just ask for permission, which is something that is maybe not always universally applicable advice, but oftentimes, I find myself talking to people when they're on teams where they want to say something controversial, or they want to say something difficult, or they want to share something that's personal and how they attach to this project, or this work, or something that happened in the team.
\n\nI think there's a lot of power in asking people to support you to coming in and saying, “I really want to share something with you all and I'm not sure how it's going to go. Can you support me in this? What are you interested in hearing?”
\n\nThe way I often say it, when I'm trying to say something controversially is, “Can I be spicy for a moment?” [laughs] And that's an acknowledgement of saying like, “Hey, I'm going to say something comfortable.” It gives people a moment to set their expectations and it gives them a moment to recognize how they should respond before they hear what you say and then are caught up in the emotion of the response.
\n\nI think that's a really kind thing you can do to your team to say like, “Hey, can I be vulnerable for a second here?” Like, “This is a project which involves researching prison populations and three of my family members are in prison.” If you lead off with saying, “Three of my family members are in prison,” people don't know how to understand that comment. But if you start by saying, “Can I be vulnerable for a second?” People will recognize that hey, you're showing something deep about you and your personality and it's something tied to your sense of identity, or something deep within you in a way that is not the responsibility of the team to validate, or say it's right, or wrong.
\n\nBut it is the responsibility to the team to hear you and to understand you and ask questions to say, “Hey, tell me more about that. Tell me more about how that connects to this work,” or “Do you want to interview some of your family for research on this project?” [chuckles] Or “Do you want them to stay out of this project?” Or “How do we support you as a team member? Is this something that you want to acknowledge, but you'd prefer to put that in a box and keep it on the shelf, or is that a part of your identity that you'd like to bring to this conversation and bring to this work?”
\n\nI think those conversations like can really benefit from that asking for permission step and you don't really need to wait for people's answers there, [chuckles] but it gives you an opportunity to set the tone for the conversation.
\n\nJACOB: I feel like if I was working on your team and I saw Andrew use that phrase, “Can I have permission to be vulnerable? Can I be spicy?” I feel like later when I felt like I needed to be vulnerable, I would feel a lot more comfortable because now here's a map that's if I do this, it's probably not completely out of bounds and that now I have a way to know here’s how we go about that on this team, because there’s a leader who modeled it.
\n\nARTY: Yeah, bingo. I was just thinking about all the different ways I've screwed things up and stuff and learned, I guess, the hard way, what boundaries are the hard way of what unsafe things are is by making mistakes and screwing things up. I think about some of these experiences that I had and I feel like the saving grace for me, even when I messed something up, is that I genuinely cared and that people knew that and could see that and so, that when I apologize for something, it was authentic and that we could move forward and stuff because I cared. Underneath it all, I genuinely care. So even though I made some mistakes and stuck with things that was okay.
\n\nAnd then after that, when I was thinking about being in more of a leadership position, one of the things I made a point of doing was putting mistakes and stuff I've made on center stage. Making it okay and safe for people to talk about when they screwed something up. Being in a leadership position, when I talked about all the things that “Well, I screwed up this thing, I screwed up this thing;” it makes it okay when our leaders demonstrate vulnerability, or create ways and pathways that show us how to do those things safely, too.
\n\nANDREW: That reminds me of a friend of mine had a conversation with me last weekend specifically around a mistake that they had made and that mistake was in an online community. They were discussing building a world in a video game and they suggested building something that was offensive. They immediately dove into how they didn't know it was offensive at the time and that the reaction that other people gave to them was inappropriate and that they felt like they didn't know how to apologize in a way that would help support growth, or reengagement with the community, and that they felt like, “Maybe I'm just being canceled,” or maybe people are overreacting here.
\n\nAfter the whole conversation, I just let them talk out and they ended with like, “How do I reengage here when people are now ignoring me?” and I just said, “Well, you don't deserve a second chance.” Not that anyone deserves to be canceled immediately, or cut out, but when someone says something offensive that you take offense in, it's up to that person how much tolerance they have for you. If someone has decided that this in this situation was so offensive, or that their tolerance for that offense is low, you don't get a second chance there. That's a mistake that becomes part of you and hopefully, you can allow that burden to not rest on your shoulders and hold you down, but you can internalize it and learn from it, and it becomes part of the foundation you stand on so that you don't make these kinds of mistakes next time.
\n\nAnd also, [chuckles] demonstrating an aspect of my superpower, I disagree with you. I don't think you didn't know that that was offensive. [chuckles] I think you had that part of your brain turned off and hey, can we like talk about that? I think that this particular thing, you knew it was offensive, but you were thinking about this in a different context, or you thought this would be okay, and now you're rewriting this and placing yourself as a victim. That is a dangerous pattern so don't do that. [chuckles]
\n\nI think that in a work setting, tying this back, when you are having these difficult, or vulnerable conversations, being able to acknowledge when you've made a mistake, maybe perhaps when you've shared something that is offensive, or perhaps you've made a comment about someone else's moment that's offensive, it's really important to acknowledge the mistake to provide the opportunity for others to give your feedback and acknowledge that you've damaged trust here.
\n\nIt's your responsibility as the person who damaged that trust to then rebuild it and maybe rebuilding that trust means leaving the organization, or changing teams, or maybe that means really, truly deeply listening and empathizing with people moving into that position of hurt that you've caused and being uncomfortable with it, especially when you're personally wrong.
\n\nWhen I'm personally wrong, I really feel that I want people to understand how much I'm hurt and if there isn't a great opportunity to share that pain with someone it's hard to accept their apology, because you don't feel like they understand. In those situations, it's up to the person who's done the controversial thing, or overstepped that boundary to step in and say, “Let's talk about this when you're ready.”
\n\nARTY: And also, the other thing I'm just thinking is that when things do happen, we need opportunities and stuff to start over, too. Sometimes the right thing to do is walk away from the whole thing, but learn from it and there's always, there's so many people out there, there's so many opportunities out there, and we're surfing on the waves of life. We learn things along the way and there's always new relationships and things we can build and if we take those lessons and stuff with us for when we do screw things up that maybe we can navigate the next opportunity a little bit different.
\n\nI've had enough facepalm moments and stuff of just relationships where the things that come to mind for me are things where someone was put off from me because I'm kind of the passionate, excited person and not everyone knows how to deal with that, or might think I'm a weirdo, or something. So I'll scare someone away and I don't mean to. I'm like, “But I'm a nice person” kind of thing, but sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.
\n\nIt's like this first impression thing that you can never really fix, but there's other opportunities out there, there's other relationships, and maybe the purpose of this interaction in your life is just for you to internalize and learn this lesson so that you carry it with you forward. We're all surfing on the waves of life and these kinds of things happen and it's not the end. It's just an opportunity. It's an opportunity to learn a lesson that then we can take with us into the future.
\n\nANDREW: Absolutely. Yeah, I know. I've been fired from jobs, had friends cut me out of their lives and made a lot of mistakes. That becomes part of who I am and I carry that forward and I'm happy that I've made these mistakes in my past because they prepared me for making bigger mistakes in the future. What could be more fun?
\n\nCASEY: A lot of people get stuck on these experiences, thinking about them over and over and over in a loop and one way to get out of the loop is to correct the situation, which people like to try first, of course. Like, try to get back into that relationship, or community. Another way is to realize there's nothing you can do and move on, that's often called acceptance in meditation mindfulness terms. But it can be hard to get to acceptance if you feel like there's something you can do still, or something you could learn, you didn't learn everything you could yet and how to do that is hard.
\n\nIt's a lot of the chapters in the book I wrote, Debugging Your Brains. I'm not going to go into that right now, but there are things you can do to get out of the loop when you're stuck in the loop. I feel so awkward ever plugging my own stuff, but it's so relevant. That's what we're talking about here.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nY'all don't mind, I know.
\n\nJACOB: No, I'm glad to hear about it.
\n\nCASEY: Now let's go to reflections. So at this is the part of the episode where we each reflect on something that stuck out to us. Something we'll take with us. Something that was interesting from today's episode.
\n\nARTY: One of the things that stood out to me as we were talking about psychological safety, and these dynamics of leadership and who we choose as leaders as being important is this intersection between once we identify what the kinds of things are that we want to select for, that we can identify those people and then give them acknowledgement, the baton of an official hat to wear, and what the effect of that is, is a way to say to the organization of, “Oh, these are the normal things that we want to build around those characteristics.”
\n\nSo there's this intersection between identifying those things and acknowledging that with – I'm holding up a little ball right now, give someone that baton, the thing, or whatever and that the combination of those two things is what creates the precedent for what is the normal we're trying to move towards. So it's not just the hiring, it's not just management things that we do; it’s the intersection of those two things that sets the norm.
\n\nJACOB: I'm thinking a lot about a possibility of getting stuck in a loop where people want to be vulnerable with each other, but they can't because they don't want to be the first one. [laughs] So I'm really thinking a lot about what are ways to break out of that and I don't know, it might just involve finding ways that people can be vulnerable about maybe something a little bit lower stakes and see if you can iteratively build up on that. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that like, how do you evolve the culture to enable vulnerability a little bit more?
\n\nCASEY: I'm taking away some metaphors and I wish I wrote them all down, but I have to go through the episode again. I remember Andrew's river metaphor, that it's wide, or narrow and you might have to row, or not and Arty, your cardboard cutout that if someone's arguing with you, you can imagine the cardboard cutout of yourself that they're working with to separate it from you. That visual metaphor is so powerful, I can't wait to use that myself sometime.
\n\nAndrew, how about you?
\n\nANDREW: For me, to add to your list of metaphors talking about psychological safety, building psychological safety, and building a culture of being able to share vulnerable things and be able to provide each other feedback. That really builds the strong foundation so that you can build the house—the house being the project that you're actually doing, the work that you're doing without that strong foundation. I think the house is shaky. Doesn't have that firm foundation.
\n\nOn the subject of being vulnerable and how do you break into that vulnerability, I think it's important to acknowledge the leadership here. Being the first to be vulnerable and being the first to follow are both demonstrations of leadership. So if you're looking at who on your team you'd like to nominate, or select to be your next leader, to create that sense of that culture shift, the person who's vulnerable and the person who follows, I think are great people to look at.
\n\nCASEY: Like that TED Talk, the first follower.
\n\nANDREW: Exactly.
\n\nCASEY: I think you showed me that years ago, Andrew.
\n\nANDREW: [laughs] Yes. The TED Talk about dancing on a hillside.
\n\nRight at the end here, if you don't mind, I'd love to put in a little plug. 18F is a part of the federal government and that means that I'm a federal employee and a civil servant. My salary is paid by all the folks that are paying the taxes. I just want to put on a plug for civil service. Not necessarily for 18F; that's just the area where I've found my talents seem to be best used.
\n\nBut maybe for you, dear listener, that is your local government, maybe that's your state government, or maybe that means running for office. The government that we have is not perfect. It is the best one we figured out how to create and if you want to be involved in changing what the best is, or demonstrating that what we have is not as good as what you want, one of the great ways to do that is to be involved in changing it.
\n\nSo if you haven't considered looking for a position as a programmer, as a project manager, as a product person, designer, all across the board, the government both, federally and state, and locally needs people like that so, trying to find those and figure out how to support them.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you, Andrew, for joining us. This was a great conversation.
\n\nANDREW: It was such a pleasure. It was an honor to be a guest and hope you all have a great day including those that are listening.
Special Guest: Andrew Dunkman.
","summary":"Andrew Dunkman talks about setting boundaries both as an employee and a leader. He talks about ways to perform health checks on teams, keeping members happy to avoid things like burnout, and how psychological safety is of the utmost importance in a workplace.","date_published":"2021-09-01T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/562ec10d-f195-401a-b444-996cc0170762.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61058831,"duration_in_seconds":4379}]},{"id":"7ce12a36-dd5a-479a-ae6e-7dd8e0378529","title":"247: Approaching Learning and Content Creation with Sy Brand","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/approaching-learning-and-content-creation","content_text":"02:01 - Sy’s Superpower: Making Complex Topics Digestible\n\n\nSy on YouTube: \"Computer Science Explained with my Cats\"\n\n\n06:28 - Approaching Learning to Code: Do Something That Motivates You\n\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper\nRuby For Good \nTerrastories \n\n\n11:25 - Computers Can Hurt Our Bodies!\n\n\nLogitech M570 Max\nDvorak Keyboard\n\n\n13:57 - Motivation (Cont’d)\n\n\nWeekend Game Jams\nThe I Do, We Do, You Do Pattern\n\n\n22:15 - Sy’s Content (Cont’d)\n\n\nSy on YouTube: \"Computer Science Explained with my Cats\"\nContent Creation and Choosing Topics\n\n\n33:58 - Code As Art\n\n\ncode:art / @codeart_journal \ntrashheap / @trashheapzine\nSubmission Guidelines\nCasey's Viral TikTok!\n\n\n41:34 - #include ＜C++＞ \n\n\nLessons learned creating an inclusive space in a decades old community (Sy's Talk)\nQueerJS \nEmscripten\nGraphiz it! \n\n\nReflections:\n\nMandy: Digging into Sy’s videos.\n\nCasey: Working within content creation constraints.\n\nSy: Make a video on register allocation.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.\n\nMANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 247. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. \n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here with our guest today, Sy Brand.\n\nSY: Hey, everyone!\n\nCASEY: Sy is Microsoft’s C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators. They’re particularly interested in generic library design, making complex concepts understandable, and making our communities more welcoming and inclusive. They can usually be found on Twitter, playing with their three cats, writing, or watching experimental movies.\n\nHi, Sy! Good to have you. \n\nSY: Hey, thanks for having me on.\n\nCASEY: The first question we like to ask, I think you're prepared for it, is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nSY: Yeah, so very topically, I think one of my superpowers is forgetting what topics I want to talk about when recording podcasts and that, I acquired through having ADHD and forgetting to write things down. But I did write things down this time so maybe that won't be too much of a problem.\n\nBut I think one of my other ones is making complex topics digestible, trying to take computer science topics and distill them down into things which are understandable without necessarily having a lot of the background knowledge, the resources you’d expect. I gained that mostly through my background in computer science and then my interest in public speaking and communication and performance poetry, trying to blend those together to make things easier to understand, lower the barrier for entry.\n\nCASEY: I love it. Making complex topics digestible. That's definitely a skill we need more of in the world.\n\nMANDY: Absolutely. So Casey told me you are a bit of a teacher and you do a lot of teaching on, is it YouTube? So making things easier to digest. Like I said, during the preshow, I've been trying to learn to code on and off for 12 years, as long as I've had this career, and I've started and stopped, gotten frustrated and stopped, and I've tried different things. I've had mentors and I feel like I've let my mentors down and I've tried this and that. I've tried the code academy and I don't know. So how do you do it? Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that?\n\nSY: Sure. So most of the topics that I am interested in teaching is, because I come from a background of compilers and debuggers and very low-level systems, those are the things that I want people to get excited about because I think people look at compilers, or C++, or low-level programming and think, “Oh, this is not very interesting,” or new, or it's too complex, or it requires too much of a degree, or whatever. \n\nBut none of that is true. You can write a compiler without having to have a lot of the background knowledge you might expect and you can learn C++ without having to – it can be a lot easier than people make art. So I want to make these concepts seem interesting and understandable because they're deeply interesting to me and they've been working on them for a large part of my life and I still love it and find them fascinating. So I want to share that with people.\n\nCASEY: What's your motivation when you're working on these? Is it to understand things that are complex, or are you solving problems you have, or other people have, or maybe a blend, or other motivations? I'm wondering what gets you so pumped about it.\n\nSY: Yeah, so I think it's a few different things. I make videos on Twitter, or YouTube, things like that of explaining concepts that I'm already familiar with and it's pretty much stuff that I could write an entire video off the top of my head without having to do any research. \n\nSo I've done videos on explaining what a compiler is and all the stages of compilation, or a video on higher cash performance works, or [in audible 05:48] cash configurancy, garbage collection. These are all things I could just sit down and write something on and don't have to do a lot of research. \n\nThen there's the more exploratory stuff. I've been live streaming the development of a Ranges library for C++, which is being able to compose operations, building up a pipeline of operations for your data and then declarative manner so that you don't have to deal with a lot of memory allocations and moving data, or a range yourself. You just say, “Here's all the steps that I want to occur,” and then someone who has written all of these pipeline operations deals with how that actually happens. I've been developing that library live and trying to teach myself hired to do all of these things as while also teaching other people at the same time.\n\nMANDY: So is it right to assume that maybe I've been going about learning to code in all the wrong ways and that I've just picked a language and tried to dive in, or did I miss some of the conceptual stuff? And if so, as I suspect, a lot of the conceptual stuff has gone over my head. \n\nSo where do you suggest, if you were giving me advice, which yes, you are giving me advice. \n\n[laughter]\n\nWhere would you suggest, as a brand-new beginner coder, what kind of software concepts I need to research and understand before actually diving into an actual programming language?\n\nSY: Honestly, I don't think that there's a single answer there and I don't think there's a lot of wrong answers there. From my perspective, the best way to learn how to code is doing something that motivates you and that gets you excited because coding is hard and when you hit those bumps and things are going wrong, if you don't have that motivation to keep going, then it's very easy to stop. I know I've done it in trying to learn certain concepts and things like that before, because I felt like, “Oh, I should learn this thing, but I wasn't really interested in it,” and then I find out it was hard and stopped. \n\nThe best way that I learn is finding something where I'm like, “Hey, I want to build this thing,” or “I want to understand this because I want to solve this problem,” or “because I want to dove on that knowledge with something else.” It's always the motivation, but then I'm coming from if you're someone with ADHD, or something like me, then it's pretty much impossible to do anything without [chuckles] having a strong motivation behind it. So that kind of comes into my way of learning as well.\n\nMANDY: That's super interesting. Actually, the last episode we did was with Rudo Kemper and he did a project with Ruby for Good. I went to that and I actually got really excited, intrigued, and wanted to get involved and learn how to code because I was really interested and passionate about the project that he presented, which was Terrastories, which was handing down indigenous knowledge technologically so that stories aren't lost in just having oral traditions, that these stories are actually being recorded and are living somewhere on the internet. So that's really interesting. I went to that and then of course, pandemic happened. It didn't happen again last year, but I'm thinking about going back this year. \n\nI'm hoping maybe I can be on a team with somebody that could just shadow and sit there and maybe Casey would let me be that person because rumor has it, Casey is going to be there. Ruby for Good on the East Coast in the fall.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I'll be there. I'd be happy to have you shadow me. Also, my role lately has been a higher level. Last time I was a product manager for the team not coding and this year I'm going to be helping the teams be happy and effective across the board because there's always a team, or two that need some alignment work so that they can be productive the whole weekend.\n\nMANDY: That's interesting. Okay. Well, I'm sure I'll find somebody who wouldn't mind me doing a kind of shadow. \n\nCASEY: For sure. \n\nMANDY: Yeah, cool.\n\nCASEY: That's the kind of environment it is.\n\nMANDY: Absolutely.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. \n\nSY: That definitely sounds like the right kind of thing like something where you hear about something, or you look at this project and you think, “Hey, I want to get involved. I want to contribute to this.” That's what can drive a positive learning experience, I think it's that motivation and that motivation could just be, “Hey, I want to get into the tech industry because it pays well and we need money to live because capitalism.” That's like totally legit as well. Whatever you find motivates you to work.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, that's why I'm here. I had to find a way for my daughter and I to live.\n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: So I got into tech and podcasts and then I'm working for all these people who I always considered so much smarter than me. I was like, “I could never learn that. I'm not good enough.” But now since joining the podcast as a host and coming on here, I'm feeling more and more like I am smart enough, I could do the thing and so, I'm actually really getting into it more. But it's just that being on the computer for so many hours doing the work stuff makes it hard to also break into the wanting to do the learning outside of my work hours – [overtalk]\n\nSY: Right, yeah.\n\nMANDY: Because it's so much computering.\n\nSY: Yeah, or just split the good screen from bad screen.\n\nCASEY: I've been computering so much, I have a tendonitis in my right pinky now from using the arrow keys on the keyboard too much, I think and bad posture, which I've been working on for years. Computers can hurt our bodies.\n\nSY: Yeah, definitely. I use the Logitech M570 mouse, which I switched to a number of years ago and was one of the best changes I ever made for using the computer and also, switching to Dvorak for keyboard layout.\n\nCASEY: Okay. I use that, too.\n\nSY: Nice!\n\nCASEY: Dvorak. It's not better, but I learned it. \n\n[laughter]\n\nIt might be more better for my health maybe, but I'm not faster. That's what people always ask. \n\nSY: I'm definitely – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Instead of ASDF, it's a AOEU under your fingers; the common letters right at your fingertips. You don't need the semicolon under your right pinky. \n\n[laughter]\n\nWhy is that there? \n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I was going to ask for us what you were even talking about there. So it's just basically reconfiguring your keyboard to not be QWERTY thing?\n\nSY: Yeah, exactly. \n\nMANDY: Okay.\n\nSY: That means you have to completely relearn how to type, which can take a while. Like when I completely stopped using QWERTY at all and just switched to Dvorak, I didn't even buy a Dvorak keyboard, I just printed out the keyboard layout and stuck it to my monitor and just learned. \n\nFor the first while, it's excruciating because you're trying to type an email and you're typing 15 words per minute, or something. That's bad. I did definitely did get faster shifting to Dvorak. Before I think I used to type at like 70, 80; I type around a 100 words per minute so it changed my speed a bit. But to be fair, I don't think I typed properly on QWERTY. I switched 10 years ago, though so I can't even remember a whole lot. [chuckles]\n\nMANDY: That's interesting, though. That gives me something I want to play around with right there and it's not even really coding.\n\n[laughter]\n\nIt's just I’ll be just trying to teach myself to type in a different way. That's really interesting. Thank you.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It was fun for when I learned it, too. I think I learned in middle school and I was I practiced on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, and RuneScape.\n\nSY: Nice.\n\nCASEY: I didn't dare practice while I had essays due and I had to write those up. That was too stressful.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Summer was better for me.\n\nSY: Yeah, I switched during a summer break at university.\n\nCASEY: Low stakes. I needed the low stakes for that to succeed. \n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah. \n\nCASEY: We were talking about what motivates you to learn programming and I wrote up a story about that for me actually recently. \n\nSY: Okay.\n\nCASEY: At the highest level, my first programming class, we modeled buoys and boats and it was so boring. I don't know why we were doing it. It didn't have a purpose. There was no end goal, no user, nobody was ever going to use the code. It was fine for learning concepts, I guess, but it wasn't motivated and I hated it and I stopped doing CS for years until I had the opportunity to work on an app that I actually used every day. I was like, “Yeah, I want to edit that.” I just want to add this little checkbox there. Finally, I'll learn programming for that and relearn programming to do useful things for people. Motivation is key.\n\nSY: Yeah. I think because I started doing programming when I was quite young, I knew it was definitely the classic video games, wanting to learn how to make video games and then by the time I actually got to university, then I was like, “Yeah, don't want go into the games industry.” So didn't end up doing that. But I still enjoy game jams and things like that. If you're not again.\n\nCASEY: That's another thing you might like, Mandy. It's a weekend game jam. \n\nMANDY: Hm.\n\nCASEY: I don’t know how into gaming you are, but it's also fun, lower stakes. People are just partying. Not unlike Ruby for Good. They happen more often and I like how it feels at a game jam, a little better than a hackathon because you're building something fun and creative instead of using a company's API because they told you to.\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I was honestly never exposed to video games as a child. They were a no-no in my household and that's one of the things that I always cursed my parents for is the fact that I am the worst gamer. [laughs] My daughter makes fun of me. I'll sit down and like try to – she's 12 and I'll try to do something. She'll be like, “Wow, this is hurting me to watch you, Mom,” [laughs] and I'm like – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: Ouch.\n\nMANDY: No, she called me a try hard and I was like, “Yeah, I'm trying really hard to just go forward.” Like I'm trying really hard to just jump over this object, [chuckles] I was like, “If that makes me a try hard well, then yes, I'm trying very hard. Thank you.”\n\nSY: Yeah. My 6-year-old has now got to the point where he can beat me at Super Smash Brothers so I'm not feeling too good about that. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My 6-year-old nephew beat us all in Mario Kart a couple weeks.\n\nSY: Yeah. [laughs] I can still beat in the Mario Kart. That, I could do. [laughs]\n\nMANDY: Yeah. A lot of the games she does looks fun, though so it's something I would be interested in, it's just something that I haven't been exposed to. I'm really excited now that—I don't want to say the pandemic is nearing an end because it seems to be not happening, but I’m excited – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: True. Things are opening up.\n\nMANDY: Right now. Until they start closing down again.\n\nCASEY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Because I'm so excited for things like Ruby for Good, driving down to D.C. and seeing some of my friends, and I would be interested in going to one of those game things, as long as people are just like, “Oh yeah, we can be patient with her because she's never done a game before.” [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My last game jam had eight people on the team and zero had ever done game development before. We figured something out. \n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah.\n\nMANDY: Oh, that's fun.\n\nSY: Like muddle along. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. Somebody did like level design. They did a title map. Someone did sprites. They were like, “I'm going to do a sprite tutorial now.” Sprite is moving like a walking character. We had learned all the terms for it. We didn't know the terms either, but it was a good environment to learn.\n\nMANDY: It seems it. It seems like if you have a happy, healthy environment. For me, it was just, I was becoming stressed out. I had a standing meeting once a week with a really, really awesome person and it felt like it was more of like, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to work this into my already busy workweek and if I don't, then I'm completely wasting their time,” and I started to feel guilty to the point it brought me down. \n\nI was just like, “I don't think this is good for either one of us right now” because I’m feeling too much pressure, especially with the once-a-week thing and it's like to get through this chapter and then get through this chapter, and then I'd have a question and I'm not good at writing things down and then I'd forget. It seems like that might be more of a strategy to learn for me. \n\nI think a lot of people, there's different strategies like you have your visual learners, or you have your audio learners and I think for me, it would be cool just like I said, shadowing somebody. Like, if I just like sat there and it wasn't weird for me just to watch it over somebody's shoulder while they're doing this thing, that would a more conducive environment to the way I learn.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I like the pattern, You do, We do, I do. Have you heard of that one?\n\nMANDY: No. \n\nCASEY: Or I do, We do, You do depending on the perspective. So it's like shadowing first and then doing it together where you're both involved and then you can do it on your own. It's a three-step process to make it a little bit easier to learn things from other people. \n\nSY: Yeah, that makes sense. \n\nMANDY: Yeah, that sounds like how kids learn. It’s how we teach our children like I do, now we're going to do it together, now you do it. Yeah, I definitely have used that with my kid.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nCASEY: And it's just completely reasonable to do that as adults. That's how human brains work.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. No, I don't feel – that's the thing I would have to not almost get over, but just be like, “Oh my gosh, I'm 2 years old. I'm learning like I'm a toddler and that's so embarrassing.” But I think that that is a great way to learn and a great way to approach learning in general. \n\nI just started a book on learning more about crystals and it's the beginner's guide and she said, “You read this book and then you can move on to reading this other 700-page book that I've authored, but you should probably read this concise guide first.” I think a lot of people feel the pressure to dive into the super smart, or what they perceive as being the super smart way of diving in like, picking up the Ruby book, or the books that everyone talks about when there's so many other great resources exist that break it into smaller, bite-sized, digestible chunks. I think there's no shame in learning like that and I think a lot of people think that they just need to dive right in and be like, “Oh, this is the hard book, I'm going to go for the hard book first.” Like no, start with the easiest, start small.\n\nSY: Yeah. I think as you say, it definitely depends on how you learn what kind of resources you find interesting and engaging.\n\nCASEY: I've heard a similar story from a lot of friends, Mandy, where they really want to learn something, maybe programming in general, or a language, and then they psych themselves out, or they don't have the bandwidth in the first place, but they don't realize it and they struggle through that and the guilt because they want to, but they don't have time, or energy, which you also need. It's really common. \n\nA lot of people that I know are really motivated to do a lot of stuff; they want to do everything. I know some people who are fine not doing everything and that's great because they're probably more grounded. [chuckles]\n\n[laughter]\n\nBut a lot of people I know really want to learn at all and it's a tension; you don't have infinite time and energy.\n\nSY: Yeah. I definitely fall into wanting to learn absolutely everything and right now.\n\nMANDY: So what kind of things are you teaching right now, Sy? What kind of content are you putting out there?\n\nSY: Yeah. So like I said, a lot of it's to do with low-level programming, like how memory actually works on a computer and how it affects how we program things. Because for a lot of people, if you come from a higher-level programming background, you're used to memory being abstracted away from what you do. You deal with variables, you deal with objects, and the implementation of the programming language deals with how that actually maps onto the underlying hardware. But if you really need to get the most performance you possibly can out of your system and you're using a little bit lower-level language like C, or C++, or Rust, or Swift, or something, then you need to understand how your processor is actually handling the instructions and that is actually handling your memory accesses in order for your performance to actually be good. \n\nSome of it is not obvious as well and does not match with how you might think memory works because the processors which we're using today are based in so much history and legacy. A lot of the time, they're essentially trying to mimic behavior of older processors in order to give us a programming model, which we can understand and work with, but then that means that they have to work in certain ways in order to actually get performance for the high-performance modern systems we need. \n\nSo having an understanding of how our caches work, how instruction pipelines work, and things like that can actually make a really big difference down with the low-level programming.\n\nMANDY: Okay. So I'm looking at your Twitter and then looking at your pinned tweet, it says, “I made a YouTube channel for my ‘Computer Science Explained with my Cats’ videos.” How do you explain computer science with your cats? Because that's something I could probably get into.\n\nSY: Yeah. So I have three cats and – [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: I've got you beat by one.\n\nSY: Nice. What were your cats called?\n\nMANDY: I have four. I have Nicks after Stevie Nicks. I have Sphinx because he looks so regal and I have Chessy and I have Jolie.\n\nSY: Cool. Mine are Milkshake, Marshmallow, and Lexical Analysis cat.\n\nMANDY: [laughs] Cool.\n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah. So the things explained with my cats, it's mostly I wanted to explain things with my cats and random things, which I find around my house. So I remember I have a Discord server, which I help to moderate called #include , which is a welcoming inclusive organization for the C++ community. We were talking about hash maps and how hash maps are actually implemented, and I realized that there's a lot of different design areas in hash maps, which can be difficult to understand. \n\nI wanted to try and explain it using boxes and teddies and my cats so I set up a bunch of boxes. These are all of the buckets, which your items could go into it and then there's some way to map a given teddy to a given box. Let's say, it could be how cute it is. So if it's super cute and it goes in the west most box, and if it's kind of cute, then it goes into the box after that and so on and so forth. That's kind of how hash maps work. They have a bunch of memory, which is allocated somewhere, a bunch of boxes, and they have some way of mapping given items to a given box, which is called a hash function. \n\nIn this case, it was how cute they are and then you have some way of what happens if two teddies happened to be as cute as each other, how do you deal with that? There's a bunch of different ways that you could handle that and that's called hash collision. Like, what do you do with collisions? Do you stick them in the same box and have a way of dealing with that, or do you just put them in the next box up, or a few boxes up, or something like that? There's whole decades worth of research and designing, which go into these things, but the concepts map quite nicely onto boxes and teddies and how cute they are. [chuckles]\n\nMANDY: I love that.\n\nSY: They are also explaining how caching works with chocolate, like the intuition with memory access is you ask for some chunk of memory and you get that chunks. You ask for a single chunk of chocolate and you get that chunk of chocolate, but in reality, that's not what happens in most cases. In most cases, you're actually going to get back a whole row of chocolate because it's most likely that if you're going to get a bit of chocolate, you're probably going to be accessing the bits which are right next to it. Like, if you have an array and you're processing all of the elements in that array, then you're just going to be stepping along all of those elements. So it's much faster to bring all of those elements would be right into memory at once. \n\nThat's what happens in modern processors. Without you having to ask for it, they just bring in that whole row of chocolate. So I tried to – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: That’s so polite. [laughs] When your friend asks for a single chip, or a single piece of chocolate, you know what they want more.\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah. \n\nCASEY: How generous of you to give them the whole bag. [laughs] Whether they want it, or not though. \n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: So are these videos relatively short, or are they more long-form videos?\n\nSY: Yeah, they are 2 minutes long. \n\nMANDY: Oh, cool.\n\nSY: I try and keep them within the video limit for Twitter videos, which is 2 minutes, 20 seconds.\n\nMANDY: Okay, cool. See, that's something I could probably commit to is watching one of those videos not even maybe once a day because sometimes that's a little bit, much pressure every day. So maybe I try to work out three to four times a week. So saying I'm going to do this three to four times a week and I'm going to not stress on I'm going to do this every Monday. Generally three to four times a week, I think that's something I could, could commit to.\n\nSY: Yeah. Trying to get them within 2 minutes, 20 seconds can be really tough sometimes. Like it's quite – [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: Do you do a lot of editing?\n\nSY: Yeah. I would sit down and I'll write the whole episode, or video, or whatever and just get in all of the content that I want, just put it onto a text document and then I'll start filming it in whatever order I want, and then I start editing and then quite often, I realized that I've got 2 minutes, 40 seconds worth of content, or something and I can't quite cut it down and I have to reshoot something and then reedit it. \n\nI try to get it all done within a single day because if I don't get it done in a single day, then it ends up taking even longer because I get distracted and things like that. I need to focus just getting this one thing done.\n\nMANDY: So you're doing these within hours?\n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: From start to finish, how many hours would you say you invest in these videos?\n\nSY: Start to finish, about 5, 6 hours, something like that. Like I said, I don't really have to do a lot of research for them because they're things I know very well, so I can pretty much sit down and just write something and then most of the time is spent in editing and then captioning as well. \n\nMANDY: Very cool.\n\nCASEY: I've been doing a bit of video editing lately and it takes so long.\n\nSY: Yeah, it really does.\n\nCASEY: I'm not surprised it takes 5, or 6 hours.\n\n[laughter]\n\nMANDY: No, I'm not either. I do all the podcasts editing. For those of you listening, who do not know, I edit all these podcasts and it takes roughly even 5 to 6 hours for audio, because I also put other work into that, like doing the show notes and getting the transcripts. Now I have those outsourced because I don't have enough hours in the day, but there's a lot of different parts to editing, podcasting, screen casting, and stuff that I don't think a lot of people know that these 2-minute videos that you do really do take 5 to 6 hours and you're putting these out there for free?\n\nSY: Yeah. \n\nMANDY: Wow. That's amazing. I assume you have a full-time job on top of that.\n\nSY: Yeah. Because my position is a developer advocate, I can count that as is doing work so I don't have to do that in my own time.\n\nMANDY: Very cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love DevRel so working in DevRel, I do that, too. I'm a Renaissance woman, basically. Podcast editing, DevRel conference organizing, it's a lot. \n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nMANDY: So I give you mad props for putting stuff out there and just giving a shout out to people who might not be aware that content creation is not easy and it does take time. So thank you. Thank you for that. Because this seems like the kind of stuff I would be able to ingest.\n\nSY: Yeah, thanks.\n\nMANDY: And that's cool.\n\nCASEY: I'm especially impressed, Sy that you have these interests that are complex would expand and you can explain the well and you find the overlap with what people want to know about. \n\n[chuckle]\n\nI think maybe in part from the Discord, you hear people asking questions. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's like? How do you decide what's interesting?\n\nSY: Yeah. I ask people on Twitter what they would find it interesting, but I also, because right now I'm not really going to conferences, but previously I’d go to a lot of conferences and people would come up to me and if I give a talk on compilers, for example, come and say like, “Oh hey, I never knew how register allocation worked. It was super interesting to know.” So I don't think I've done a video on register allocation yet actually. I should do one of those.\n\nMANDY: Write that down.\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah. That's the kind of thing. Just because I spent a lot of time in communities, conferences, Discords, on Twitter, you get a feel for the kind of topics which people find interesting and maybe want to know how they work under the covers and just haven't found a good topic. Even function calls like, how does a function call work in C at the hardware level? If you call a function, what's actually happening? I did a video on that because it feels like such a fundamental thing, calling a function, but there's a lot of magic which goes into it, or it can seem like a lot of magic. It's actually, I want to say very well-defined, sometimes less so, but [laughs] they are real so there is random reason.\n\nMANDY: Very cool. I want to talk about the other content creation that you do. So code art journal and trashheap zine, do you want to talk about those a minute?\n\nSY: Sure. So code art was an idea that I had. It's a journal of code as art. I'd hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, coding is an art form.” I'd be like, “Okay. Yes. Sometimes, maybe. When is it an art form? When is it not? What's the difference between these?” Like, I spent a lot of time thinking about art because I'm a poet and I spend most of my free time researching and watching movies. \n\nCode as art is something which really interested me so I made this journal, which is a collection of things which people send in of code which they think is art and sometimes, it's something you might immediately see and look at it and think, “Okay, right, this is code and it's fulfilling some functional purpose,” and maybe that functional purpose gives it some artistic qualities just by how it achieved something, or if it does something in a very performant manner, or a very interesting manner. \n\nOther times, you might look at it and say, “Okay, well, this is code, but it's more aesthetic than functional.” And sometimes it's things which you might look at and think, “Okay, is this even code?” Like there was someone sent in a program written in a language called Folders, which is a esoteric programming language entirely programmed using empty folders on your hard drive, which I absolutely love. I'm super into esoteric programming languages so I absolutely loved that one. [chuckles] But yeah, so the – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: That sounds so cool. Where can people find it? Is it online also?\n\nSY: Yes, it’s in print and there's also, you can get the issues online for free in PDF form. There is a third issue, which is pretty much fully put together on my machine, I just haven't done the finishing touches and it's been one of those things that's just sat, not doing anything for months and I need to get finished. [chuckles]\n\nAnd then trashheap zine is another thing that I co-edit, which is just utter trash, because as much as I love more explicitly artistic films and writing and things like that, I also have a deep love of utter, utter trash. So this is the trashiest stuff that we could possibly find, even the submission guidelines that I wrote for that is essentially a trash pond, but random submission guidelines. So if you have trash, please send our way.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I was going to say, what you consider trash? What trashiest [laughs] enough to be in these zines? \n\nSY: I can read out, where's my submission guidelines? The URL for the zine is trashyheap.party, which I was very, very pleased with and the website looks awful. I spent a lot of time making it as awful as I possibly could. Things like any kind of – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: I love the sparkles. \n\nSY: Yes!\n\nCASEY: When the mouse moves, it sparkles. \n\nSY: Isn’t it the best, seriously? Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Every website should have that. \n\nSY: Yeah, totally. Like texts you sent your crush at 4:00 AM while drunk where you misspelled their name and they never spoke to you again, or draft tweets which you thought better of sending, purely Photoshop pictures of our website. \n\n[laughter]\n\nA medically inaccurate explanation of the digestive system of raccoon dogs. All good stuff. \n\nMANDY: That's amazing.\n\nCASEY: I know a lot of people who would be cracking up reading this together. \n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: That sounds great. There's so much treasure in this trash heap.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Don’t worry, folks, we'll put links in the show notes. \n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah.\n\nSY: Yeah. One of my favorite things with it was when we'd get all of the submissions, we would get together and just project them up on a wall and read them together and so much so bad, it's hilarious in the most wonderful way.\n\nCASEY: That sounds like a party itself.\n\nSY: It is, yes.\n\nCASEY: The be trashheap party. \n\nSY: Absolutely.\n\nCASEY: It's kind of taking me back to early pre-YouTube internet when we watch flash cartoons all the time and a lot of those were terrible, but we loved them.\n\nSY: Yes. I made some as well, they were so bad. \n\n[laughter]\n\nI remember getting a very non legal version of flash and making the worst stick flash renovations I possibly could.\n\nCASEY: Oh, speaking of content creation, I've been learning some animation and 3D modeling animation lately. I had my first ever viral TikTok; it had over 9,000 views. \n\nSY: Wow! Nice. \n\nCASEY: And so when I look at my phone, if it's not the notifications muted, it's annoying. I have to turn it off. \n\n[laughter]\n\nSY: Yeah – [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: Congratulations! [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Thank you. So the video is a USB thumb drive that won't insert, even though you flip it over. That's been done before, but what I added was misheard lyrics by the band Maroon 5. Sugar! USB! That's what I hear every time. \n\nMandy, have you done any art?\n\nMANDY: Have I done any art?\n\nCASEY: Lately? \n\nMANDY: Oh. Yeah. Well, actually – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: You've been doing some home stuff, I know. \n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've been doing plant stuff, gardening, but this weekend, I actually took my daughter to a workshop. It was called working with resin—epoxy.\n\nSY: Oh, cool.\n\nMANDY: And we got to make coasters. The teacher brought stickers, feathers, and crystals and it was like a 3-hour workshop and I think my daughter had extra resin. Her birthday is on Thursday this week and I noticed she was making kind of the same ones and I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I'm making gifts for my friends that come to my birthday party.” I just thought it was so sweet that I was like – [overtalk]\n\nSY: Oh, so sweet.\n\nMANDY: Usually birthday parties, you receive gifts, or whatever and she's like, “No, I would like to give them gifts for my birthday,” and I was like, “Oh, that's adorable.” So I've been trying to do more things with my hands and get off the screens more, which has been the major thing keeping me back from being on code.\n\nI've made a strict weekend policy where I do not touch my computer from Friday evening to Monday morning, unless it's an absolute dumpster fire, I need to do something, or if a takeout menu looks better on my computer than it does on my phone.\n\n[laughter]\n\nThen I'll pop it open, but I won't read the email, or do the Slack. And then this Saturday I'm taking a course in astrology. It's all-day workshop so I'm excited to kind of dive into that stuff a little bit more.\n\nCASEY: So cool. It's hard to believe we can do these in person again. I'm not over it.\n\nMANDY: I know. I'm so afraid to get excited over it and then have it be taken away again.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Sy, tell us a little more about #includes . I've actually heard of it. It's a little bit famous online. It's an inclusive community, I know from the name. \n\nSY: Yes. \n\nCASEY: Tell us more about it.\n\nSY: So it actually started off on Twitter as a half joke; Guy Davidson tweeted being like, “Hey, so why isn't there a diversity and inclusion organization for C++ called #include?” Because #include is it's like a language concept in C and C++ and people were like, “Hahaha yeah, you're right,” and then Kate Gregory was like, “You're right. We should make one.” So we did [chuckles] and we started off with like six of us in a Slack channel and then ended up moving to Discord and starting our own server there and now we are a few thousand members. Back when we had in-person conferences, we would have a booth at pretty much every major C++ conference, we had scholarships, which we would send people on, we got conferences to improve by having live captioning and wheelchair accessible stages and gender-neutral bathrooms instituting and upholding code of conduct, things like that. \n\nWe started off thinking, “Hey, if we could get some conferences to have a code of conduct or something that would be great,” and then it ended up being way, way, way bigger than any of us thought it would become, which is amazing to see.\n\nCASEY: That's so cool. What a success story. \n\nSY: Yeah. \n\nCASEY: How long has it been going on now?\n\nSY: I guess about 3, or 4 years. Yeah, probably closer to 4 years. My sense of time is not good the best of times, but something around 4 years.\n\nCASEY: I'm curious if another language community wanted to do something similar if they're inspired. Is there a writeup about what y'all have done? \n SY: I've given talks.\n\nCASEY: That we can point people to. We can put that in the show notes. \n\nSY: Yeah. I've given a couple of talks, as I said.\n\nCASEY: Talks, that would be good.\n\nSY: Other people have given talks as well. I gave a slightly longer form talk DevRelCon, London in 2019, I think, which was on the lessons which we learned through trying to build a welcoming and inclusive community. Community which has already been around for decades because C++ was first standardized in 1998 so it's been around for quite a long time and has a lot of history.\n\nCASEY: That sounds great. I can't wait to watch it.\n\nSY: Yeah. I know that there's other languages. You have JavaScript, QueerJS, which is a really cool community and I'm sure there are other languages which have similar things going as well.\n\nCASEY: I had never heard of QueerJS. I'm queer and JS.\n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I'm glad I had this moment just now.\n\nSY: It’s cool. They have a Discord and I can't remember how active the Discord is, but they would have meetups across the world, they have one in London and in Berlin and bunch of other places, and talks and community. It seems really cool. \n\nCASEY: That's awesome. \n\nSY: I wanted to give a talk about C++ and JavaScript because you could link target JavaScript with C++ these days, which is kind of cool.\n\nCASEY: I’ve used Emscripten before. \n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I didn't use it directly, other people did. It turned Graphviz into a JavaScript. A program that runs in JavaScript instead of normally, it's just CSS. So I could draw circles pointing to other circles in the browser, which is what I always wanted to do. Graphviz.it, that “it” is my favorite Graphviz editor. It's online. \n\nSY: Cool. I like Graphviz a lot. Emscripten is really cool, though. Basically a way of compiling C++ plus to JavaScript and then having the interoperation with the browser and the ecosystem that you might want to be able to call JS functions from C++, or other way around, and do things which seem operating systems E, but have to be mapped inside the browser environment.\n\nCASEY: That's powerful. I'm also glad I've never had to use it directly. Other people made libraries doing it what I needed. Thank goodness.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nAbstraction!\n\nSY: Yeah. I've not used a whole lot, but I did find it fairly nice to work with when I did. I made a silly esoteric programming language called Enjamb, which is a language where the programs are cones and it runs on a stack-based abstract machine and the interpreter for it is written in C++. I wrote a command line driver for it and also, a version which runs in the browser and that compiles using Emscripten. \n\nIt was really cool and I picked it all up with CMake, which is the main C++ build systems that you could just say, “Hey, I want to build the combine line version for my platform” like Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever, or “Hey, I want to build it for the web,” and it would build the JavaScript version in HTML page and things like that. It's pretty cool. \n\nI recently made another esoteric programming language, which you program using MS Paint. You literally make shapes with MS Paint and you give the compiler an image file, and then it uses OCR and computer vision in order to parse your code and then generate C from that. [laughs] It's pretty ridiculous, but I had so much fun with it.\n\nCASEY: OCR is Optical Character Recognition?\n\nSY: Yes, exactly.\n\nCASEY: So I'm picturing if I wrote a program on a napkin and a computer could maybe OCR that into software.\n\nSY: Yeah. So it uses OCR for things like function names because it supports function calls and then uses shapes for most things. It has things like a plus sign, which means increment what it's currently being pointed to, or right, or left, or up, or down arrow is for moving things around. You would actually make an image file with those symbols and then I used OpenCV for working out what the shapes were. \n\nIt was the first time I've ever done any kind of image recognition stuff. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be; I thought we'd have to write a lot of code in order to get things up and running and to do image detection. But most of the simple things like recognizing hey, this is a triangle, or this is a plus sign, or this is a square, and things like that were pretty, you don't need a lot of code in order to do them. That was mostly when you had to say like, “Okay, this is a triangle, but which direction is it pointing in?” It got a little bit more complicated; I had to do some maths and things like that and I'm terrible at maths. [chuckles] So that was a little bit more difficult, but it was a lot fun to get started with and I had a much lower barrier to entry than I expected.\n\nCASEY: Now I want to play with OCR and image recognition. I haven't done that for 10 years. It was not easy when I tried it last time with whatever tool that was.\n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah, I did it – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: For the future!\n\nSY: [laughs] Definitely. Yeah. I did it with Python and Python has fairly nice OpenCV bindings and there's a ton of resources out there for predicting most of the basic stuff that you would expect. So there's a lot of learning resources and decent library solutions out there now. \n\nCASEY: Cool. \n\nAll right. We're getting near the end of time. At the end, we like to go through reflections, which is what's something interesting that stood out to you, something you'll take with you going forward from our conversations today.\n\nMANDY: I really am excited to dig into Sy’s videos. They seem, like I said earlier in the show, something I could commit to a few times a week to watching these videos especially when they are concepts that seem so much fun, like cats, teddy bears, cuteness levels, and things like that. I think that would be a great start for me just to in the morning while I'm still drinking tea just before I even dive into my email, check out one of those videos. So I think I'll do that. \n\nSY: Thanks. \n\nCASEY: Sy, I liked hearing about your process side with your constraints like 2 minutes, 20 seconds on Twitter, that's such a helpful constraint to make sure it's really polished and dense. It takes you 5 to 6 hours and you make things that people ask about, that they're interested in. That whole process is fascinating to me as I try to make more viral TikToks.\n\n[laughter]\n\nOr whatever I'm making at the time. \n\nSY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I always wondered how you made such good stuff that got retweeted so often. Cool things of insight.\n\nSY: Yeah. Mostly just time. [laughs] I guess, it makes me remember that I definitely want to make a video on register allocation because I love register allocation. It's such a cool thing. For those who don't know, it's like if you have a compiler which takes your code and maps it onto the hardware, your hardware only has a certain number of resources so how do you work out how to use those resources in the best manner? It maps onto some quite nice computer science algorithms like graph coloring, which means it maps quite nicely visually, I could probably make a pretty cool graph coloring visualization with some random things I have strewn around my room.\n\nCASEY: I can't imagine this yet, but I will understand that clearly soon I bet.\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. Well, I just want to wrap up by saying thank you so much for joining us today, Sy. This has been a really awesome conversation. \n\nAnd to folks who have been listening, thank a content creator. It takes time. It takes energy. It's a lot of work that I don't think a lot of people, unless you've done it, really understand how long and in-depth of a process it is. So thank one of us content creators, especially when we're putting this content out for you for free.\n\nTo do that for us Greater Than Code, we do a Patreon page and we will invite Sy to join us and we would like you to join us as well. If you are able to donate on a monthly basis, it's awesome. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode. All episodes have show notes and transcripts, and we do a lot of audio editing. So join us if you're able. If you are still a person who is greater than code and cannot afford a monthly commitment, you are still welcome to join us in our Slack community. Simply send a DM to one of the panelists and we will let you in for free. So with that, thank you so much, Casey. Thank you again, Sy. And we'll see you all next week.Special Guest: Sy Brand.","content_html":"02:01 - Sy’s Superpower: Making Complex Topics Digestible
\n\n\n\n06:28 - Approaching Learning to Code: Do Something That Motivates You
\n\n11:25 - Computers Can Hurt Our Bodies!
\n\n\n\n13:57 - Motivation (Cont’d)
\n\n22:15 - Sy’s Content (Cont’d)
\n\n33:58 - Code As Art
\n\n41:34 - #include ＜C++＞
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Digging into Sy’s videos.
\n\nCasey: Working within content creation constraints.
\n\nSy: Make a video on register allocation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.
\n\nMANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 247. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here with our guest today, Sy Brand.
\n\nSY: Hey, everyone!
\n\nCASEY: Sy is Microsoft’s C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators. They’re particularly interested in generic library design, making complex concepts understandable, and making our communities more welcoming and inclusive. They can usually be found on Twitter, playing with their three cats, writing, or watching experimental movies.
\n\nHi, Sy! Good to have you.
\n\nSY: Hey, thanks for having me on.
\n\nCASEY: The first question we like to ask, I think you're prepared for it, is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nSY: Yeah, so very topically, I think one of my superpowers is forgetting what topics I want to talk about when recording podcasts and that, I acquired through having ADHD and forgetting to write things down. But I did write things down this time so maybe that won't be too much of a problem.
\n\nBut I think one of my other ones is making complex topics digestible, trying to take computer science topics and distill them down into things which are understandable without necessarily having a lot of the background knowledge, the resources you’d expect. I gained that mostly through my background in computer science and then my interest in public speaking and communication and performance poetry, trying to blend those together to make things easier to understand, lower the barrier for entry.
\n\nCASEY: I love it. Making complex topics digestible. That's definitely a skill we need more of in the world.
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely. So Casey told me you are a bit of a teacher and you do a lot of teaching on, is it YouTube? So making things easier to digest. Like I said, during the preshow, I've been trying to learn to code on and off for 12 years, as long as I've had this career, and I've started and stopped, gotten frustrated and stopped, and I've tried different things. I've had mentors and I feel like I've let my mentors down and I've tried this and that. I've tried the code academy and I don't know. So how do you do it? Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that?
\n\nSY: Sure. So most of the topics that I am interested in teaching is, because I come from a background of compilers and debuggers and very low-level systems, those are the things that I want people to get excited about because I think people look at compilers, or C++, or low-level programming and think, “Oh, this is not very interesting,” or new, or it's too complex, or it requires too much of a degree, or whatever.
\n\nBut none of that is true. You can write a compiler without having to have a lot of the background knowledge you might expect and you can learn C++ without having to – it can be a lot easier than people make art. So I want to make these concepts seem interesting and understandable because they're deeply interesting to me and they've been working on them for a large part of my life and I still love it and find them fascinating. So I want to share that with people.
\n\nCASEY: What's your motivation when you're working on these? Is it to understand things that are complex, or are you solving problems you have, or other people have, or maybe a blend, or other motivations? I'm wondering what gets you so pumped about it.
\n\nSY: Yeah, so I think it's a few different things. I make videos on Twitter, or YouTube, things like that of explaining concepts that I'm already familiar with and it's pretty much stuff that I could write an entire video off the top of my head without having to do any research.
\n\nSo I've done videos on explaining what a compiler is and all the stages of compilation, or a video on higher cash performance works, or [in audible 05:48] cash configurancy, garbage collection. These are all things I could just sit down and write something on and don't have to do a lot of research.
\n\nThen there's the more exploratory stuff. I've been live streaming the development of a Ranges library for C++, which is being able to compose operations, building up a pipeline of operations for your data and then declarative manner so that you don't have to deal with a lot of memory allocations and moving data, or a range yourself. You just say, “Here's all the steps that I want to occur,” and then someone who has written all of these pipeline operations deals with how that actually happens. I've been developing that library live and trying to teach myself hired to do all of these things as while also teaching other people at the same time.
\n\nMANDY: So is it right to assume that maybe I've been going about learning to code in all the wrong ways and that I've just picked a language and tried to dive in, or did I miss some of the conceptual stuff? And if so, as I suspect, a lot of the conceptual stuff has gone over my head.
\n\nSo where do you suggest, if you were giving me advice, which yes, you are giving me advice.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhere would you suggest, as a brand-new beginner coder, what kind of software concepts I need to research and understand before actually diving into an actual programming language?
\n\nSY: Honestly, I don't think that there's a single answer there and I don't think there's a lot of wrong answers there. From my perspective, the best way to learn how to code is doing something that motivates you and that gets you excited because coding is hard and when you hit those bumps and things are going wrong, if you don't have that motivation to keep going, then it's very easy to stop. I know I've done it in trying to learn certain concepts and things like that before, because I felt like, “Oh, I should learn this thing, but I wasn't really interested in it,” and then I find out it was hard and stopped.
\n\nThe best way that I learn is finding something where I'm like, “Hey, I want to build this thing,” or “I want to understand this because I want to solve this problem,” or “because I want to dove on that knowledge with something else.” It's always the motivation, but then I'm coming from if you're someone with ADHD, or something like me, then it's pretty much impossible to do anything without [chuckles] having a strong motivation behind it. So that kind of comes into my way of learning as well.
\n\nMANDY: That's super interesting. Actually, the last episode we did was with Rudo Kemper and he did a project with Ruby for Good. I went to that and I actually got really excited, intrigued, and wanted to get involved and learn how to code because I was really interested and passionate about the project that he presented, which was Terrastories, which was handing down indigenous knowledge technologically so that stories aren't lost in just having oral traditions, that these stories are actually being recorded and are living somewhere on the internet. So that's really interesting. I went to that and then of course, pandemic happened. It didn't happen again last year, but I'm thinking about going back this year.
\n\nI'm hoping maybe I can be on a team with somebody that could just shadow and sit there and maybe Casey would let me be that person because rumor has it, Casey is going to be there. Ruby for Good on the East Coast in the fall.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I'll be there. I'd be happy to have you shadow me. Also, my role lately has been a higher level. Last time I was a product manager for the team not coding and this year I'm going to be helping the teams be happy and effective across the board because there's always a team, or two that need some alignment work so that they can be productive the whole weekend.
\n\nMANDY: That's interesting. Okay. Well, I'm sure I'll find somebody who wouldn't mind me doing a kind of shadow.
\n\nCASEY: For sure.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, cool.
\n\nCASEY: That's the kind of environment it is.
\n\nMANDY: Absolutely.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nSY: That definitely sounds like the right kind of thing like something where you hear about something, or you look at this project and you think, “Hey, I want to get involved. I want to contribute to this.” That's what can drive a positive learning experience, I think it's that motivation and that motivation could just be, “Hey, I want to get into the tech industry because it pays well and we need money to live because capitalism.” That's like totally legit as well. Whatever you find motivates you to work.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, that's why I'm here. I had to find a way for my daughter and I to live.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So I got into tech and podcasts and then I'm working for all these people who I always considered so much smarter than me. I was like, “I could never learn that. I'm not good enough.” But now since joining the podcast as a host and coming on here, I'm feeling more and more like I am smart enough, I could do the thing and so, I'm actually really getting into it more. But it's just that being on the computer for so many hours doing the work stuff makes it hard to also break into the wanting to do the learning outside of my work hours – [overtalk]
\n\nSY: Right, yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Because it's so much computering.
\n\nSY: Yeah, or just split the good screen from bad screen.
\n\nCASEY: I've been computering so much, I have a tendonitis in my right pinky now from using the arrow keys on the keyboard too much, I think and bad posture, which I've been working on for years. Computers can hurt our bodies.
\n\nSY: Yeah, definitely. I use the Logitech M570 mouse, which I switched to a number of years ago and was one of the best changes I ever made for using the computer and also, switching to Dvorak for keyboard layout.
\n\nCASEY: Okay. I use that, too.
\n\nSY: Nice!
\n\nCASEY: Dvorak. It's not better, but I learned it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt might be more better for my health maybe, but I'm not faster. That's what people always ask.
\n\nSY: I'm definitely – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Instead of ASDF, it's a AOEU under your fingers; the common letters right at your fingertips. You don't need the semicolon under your right pinky.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhy is that there?
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I was going to ask for us what you were even talking about there. So it's just basically reconfiguring your keyboard to not be QWERTY thing?
\n\nSY: Yeah, exactly.
\n\nMANDY: Okay.
\n\nSY: That means you have to completely relearn how to type, which can take a while. Like when I completely stopped using QWERTY at all and just switched to Dvorak, I didn't even buy a Dvorak keyboard, I just printed out the keyboard layout and stuck it to my monitor and just learned.
\n\nFor the first while, it's excruciating because you're trying to type an email and you're typing 15 words per minute, or something. That's bad. I did definitely did get faster shifting to Dvorak. Before I think I used to type at like 70, 80; I type around a 100 words per minute so it changed my speed a bit. But to be fair, I don't think I typed properly on QWERTY. I switched 10 years ago, though so I can't even remember a whole lot. [chuckles]
\n\nMANDY: That's interesting, though. That gives me something I want to play around with right there and it's not even really coding.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's just I’ll be just trying to teach myself to type in a different way. That's really interesting. Thank you.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It was fun for when I learned it, too. I think I learned in middle school and I was I practiced on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, and RuneScape.
\n\nSY: Nice.
\n\nCASEY: I didn't dare practice while I had essays due and I had to write those up. That was too stressful.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Summer was better for me.
\n\nSY: Yeah, I switched during a summer break at university.
\n\nCASEY: Low stakes. I needed the low stakes for that to succeed.
\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: We were talking about what motivates you to learn programming and I wrote up a story about that for me actually recently.
\n\nSY: Okay.
\n\nCASEY: At the highest level, my first programming class, we modeled buoys and boats and it was so boring. I don't know why we were doing it. It didn't have a purpose. There was no end goal, no user, nobody was ever going to use the code. It was fine for learning concepts, I guess, but it wasn't motivated and I hated it and I stopped doing CS for years until I had the opportunity to work on an app that I actually used every day. I was like, “Yeah, I want to edit that.” I just want to add this little checkbox there. Finally, I'll learn programming for that and relearn programming to do useful things for people. Motivation is key.
\n\nSY: Yeah. I think because I started doing programming when I was quite young, I knew it was definitely the classic video games, wanting to learn how to make video games and then by the time I actually got to university, then I was like, “Yeah, don't want go into the games industry.” So didn't end up doing that. But I still enjoy game jams and things like that. If you're not again.
\n\nCASEY: That's another thing you might like, Mandy. It's a weekend game jam.
\n\nMANDY: Hm.
\n\nCASEY: I don’t know how into gaming you are, but it's also fun, lower stakes. People are just partying. Not unlike Ruby for Good. They happen more often and I like how it feels at a game jam, a little better than a hackathon because you're building something fun and creative instead of using a company's API because they told you to.
\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I was honestly never exposed to video games as a child. They were a no-no in my household and that's one of the things that I always cursed my parents for is the fact that I am the worst gamer. [laughs] My daughter makes fun of me. I'll sit down and like try to – she's 12 and I'll try to do something. She'll be like, “Wow, this is hurting me to watch you, Mom,” [laughs] and I'm like – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: Ouch.
\n\nMANDY: No, she called me a try hard and I was like, “Yeah, I'm trying really hard to just go forward.” Like I'm trying really hard to just jump over this object, [chuckles] I was like, “If that makes me a try hard well, then yes, I'm trying very hard. Thank you.”
\n\nSY: Yeah. My 6-year-old has now got to the point where he can beat me at Super Smash Brothers so I'm not feeling too good about that. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My 6-year-old nephew beat us all in Mario Kart a couple weeks.
\n\nSY: Yeah. [laughs] I can still beat in the Mario Kart. That, I could do. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. A lot of the games she does looks fun, though so it's something I would be interested in, it's just something that I haven't been exposed to. I'm really excited now that—I don't want to say the pandemic is nearing an end because it seems to be not happening, but I’m excited – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: True. Things are opening up.
\n\nMANDY: Right now. Until they start closing down again.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Because I'm so excited for things like Ruby for Good, driving down to D.C. and seeing some of my friends, and I would be interested in going to one of those game things, as long as people are just like, “Oh yeah, we can be patient with her because she's never done a game before.” [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My last game jam had eight people on the team and zero had ever done game development before. We figured something out.
\n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Oh, that's fun.
\n\nSY: Like muddle along.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Somebody did like level design. They did a title map. Someone did sprites. They were like, “I'm going to do a sprite tutorial now.” Sprite is moving like a walking character. We had learned all the terms for it. We didn't know the terms either, but it was a good environment to learn.
\n\nMANDY: It seems it. It seems like if you have a happy, healthy environment. For me, it was just, I was becoming stressed out. I had a standing meeting once a week with a really, really awesome person and it felt like it was more of like, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to work this into my already busy workweek and if I don't, then I'm completely wasting their time,” and I started to feel guilty to the point it brought me down.
\n\nI was just like, “I don't think this is good for either one of us right now” because I’m feeling too much pressure, especially with the once-a-week thing and it's like to get through this chapter and then get through this chapter, and then I'd have a question and I'm not good at writing things down and then I'd forget. It seems like that might be more of a strategy to learn for me.
\n\nI think a lot of people, there's different strategies like you have your visual learners, or you have your audio learners and I think for me, it would be cool just like I said, shadowing somebody. Like, if I just like sat there and it wasn't weird for me just to watch it over somebody's shoulder while they're doing this thing, that would a more conducive environment to the way I learn.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I like the pattern, You do, We do, I do. Have you heard of that one?
\n\nMANDY: No.
\n\nCASEY: Or I do, We do, You do depending on the perspective. So it's like shadowing first and then doing it together where you're both involved and then you can do it on your own. It's a three-step process to make it a little bit easier to learn things from other people.
\n\nSY: Yeah, that makes sense.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, that sounds like how kids learn. It’s how we teach our children like I do, now we're going to do it together, now you do it. Yeah, I definitely have used that with my kid.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: And it's just completely reasonable to do that as adults. That's how human brains work.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. No, I don't feel – that's the thing I would have to not almost get over, but just be like, “Oh my gosh, I'm 2 years old. I'm learning like I'm a toddler and that's so embarrassing.” But I think that that is a great way to learn and a great way to approach learning in general.
\n\nI just started a book on learning more about crystals and it's the beginner's guide and she said, “You read this book and then you can move on to reading this other 700-page book that I've authored, but you should probably read this concise guide first.” I think a lot of people feel the pressure to dive into the super smart, or what they perceive as being the super smart way of diving in like, picking up the Ruby book, or the books that everyone talks about when there's so many other great resources exist that break it into smaller, bite-sized, digestible chunks. I think there's no shame in learning like that and I think a lot of people think that they just need to dive right in and be like, “Oh, this is the hard book, I'm going to go for the hard book first.” Like no, start with the easiest, start small.
\n\nSY: Yeah. I think as you say, it definitely depends on how you learn what kind of resources you find interesting and engaging.
\n\nCASEY: I've heard a similar story from a lot of friends, Mandy, where they really want to learn something, maybe programming in general, or a language, and then they psych themselves out, or they don't have the bandwidth in the first place, but they don't realize it and they struggle through that and the guilt because they want to, but they don't have time, or energy, which you also need. It's really common.
\n\nA lot of people that I know are really motivated to do a lot of stuff; they want to do everything. I know some people who are fine not doing everything and that's great because they're probably more grounded. [chuckles]
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut a lot of people I know really want to learn at all and it's a tension; you don't have infinite time and energy.
\n\nSY: Yeah. I definitely fall into wanting to learn absolutely everything and right now.
\n\nMANDY: So what kind of things are you teaching right now, Sy? What kind of content are you putting out there?
\n\nSY: Yeah. So like I said, a lot of it's to do with low-level programming, like how memory actually works on a computer and how it affects how we program things. Because for a lot of people, if you come from a higher-level programming background, you're used to memory being abstracted away from what you do. You deal with variables, you deal with objects, and the implementation of the programming language deals with how that actually maps onto the underlying hardware. But if you really need to get the most performance you possibly can out of your system and you're using a little bit lower-level language like C, or C++, or Rust, or Swift, or something, then you need to understand how your processor is actually handling the instructions and that is actually handling your memory accesses in order for your performance to actually be good.
\n\nSome of it is not obvious as well and does not match with how you might think memory works because the processors which we're using today are based in so much history and legacy. A lot of the time, they're essentially trying to mimic behavior of older processors in order to give us a programming model, which we can understand and work with, but then that means that they have to work in certain ways in order to actually get performance for the high-performance modern systems we need.
\n\nSo having an understanding of how our caches work, how instruction pipelines work, and things like that can actually make a really big difference down with the low-level programming.
\n\nMANDY: Okay. So I'm looking at your Twitter and then looking at your pinned tweet, it says, “I made a YouTube channel for my ‘Computer Science Explained with my Cats’ videos.” How do you explain computer science with your cats? Because that's something I could probably get into.
\n\nSY: Yeah. So I have three cats and – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: I've got you beat by one.
\n\nSY: Nice. What were your cats called?
\n\nMANDY: I have four. I have Nicks after Stevie Nicks. I have Sphinx because he looks so regal and I have Chessy and I have Jolie.
\n\nSY: Cool. Mine are Milkshake, Marshmallow, and Lexical Analysis cat.
\n\nMANDY: [laughs] Cool.
\n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah. So the things explained with my cats, it's mostly I wanted to explain things with my cats and random things, which I find around my house. So I remember I have a Discord server, which I help to moderate called #include
I wanted to try and explain it using boxes and teddies and my cats so I set up a bunch of boxes. These are all of the buckets, which your items could go into it and then there's some way to map a given teddy to a given box. Let's say, it could be how cute it is. So if it's super cute and it goes in the west most box, and if it's kind of cute, then it goes into the box after that and so on and so forth. That's kind of how hash maps work. They have a bunch of memory, which is allocated somewhere, a bunch of boxes, and they have some way of mapping given items to a given box, which is called a hash function.
\n\nIn this case, it was how cute they are and then you have some way of what happens if two teddies happened to be as cute as each other, how do you deal with that? There's a bunch of different ways that you could handle that and that's called hash collision. Like, what do you do with collisions? Do you stick them in the same box and have a way of dealing with that, or do you just put them in the next box up, or a few boxes up, or something like that? There's whole decades worth of research and designing, which go into these things, but the concepts map quite nicely onto boxes and teddies and how cute they are. [chuckles]
\n\nMANDY: I love that.
\n\nSY: They are also explaining how caching works with chocolate, like the intuition with memory access is you ask for some chunk of memory and you get that chunks. You ask for a single chunk of chocolate and you get that chunk of chocolate, but in reality, that's not what happens in most cases. In most cases, you're actually going to get back a whole row of chocolate because it's most likely that if you're going to get a bit of chocolate, you're probably going to be accessing the bits which are right next to it. Like, if you have an array and you're processing all of the elements in that array, then you're just going to be stepping along all of those elements. So it's much faster to bring all of those elements would be right into memory at once.
\n\nThat's what happens in modern processors. Without you having to ask for it, they just bring in that whole row of chocolate. So I tried to – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: That’s so polite. [laughs] When your friend asks for a single chip, or a single piece of chocolate, you know what they want more.
\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: How generous of you to give them the whole bag. [laughs] Whether they want it, or not though.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So are these videos relatively short, or are they more long-form videos?
\n\nSY: Yeah, they are 2 minutes long.
\n\nMANDY: Oh, cool.
\n\nSY: I try and keep them within the video limit for Twitter videos, which is 2 minutes, 20 seconds.
\n\nMANDY: Okay, cool. See, that's something I could probably commit to is watching one of those videos not even maybe once a day because sometimes that's a little bit, much pressure every day. So maybe I try to work out three to four times a week. So saying I'm going to do this three to four times a week and I'm going to not stress on I'm going to do this every Monday. Generally three to four times a week, I think that's something I could, could commit to.
\n\nSY: Yeah. Trying to get them within 2 minutes, 20 seconds can be really tough sometimes. Like it's quite – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: Do you do a lot of editing?
\n\nSY: Yeah. I would sit down and I'll write the whole episode, or video, or whatever and just get in all of the content that I want, just put it onto a text document and then I'll start filming it in whatever order I want, and then I start editing and then quite often, I realized that I've got 2 minutes, 40 seconds worth of content, or something and I can't quite cut it down and I have to reshoot something and then reedit it.
\n\nI try to get it all done within a single day because if I don't get it done in a single day, then it ends up taking even longer because I get distracted and things like that. I need to focus just getting this one thing done.
\n\nMANDY: So you're doing these within hours?
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: From start to finish, how many hours would you say you invest in these videos?
\n\nSY: Start to finish, about 5, 6 hours, something like that. Like I said, I don't really have to do a lot of research for them because they're things I know very well, so I can pretty much sit down and just write something and then most of the time is spent in editing and then captioning as well.
\n\nMANDY: Very cool.
\n\nCASEY: I've been doing a bit of video editing lately and it takes so long.
\n\nSY: Yeah, it really does.
\n\nCASEY: I'm not surprised it takes 5, or 6 hours.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMANDY: No, I'm not either. I do all the podcasts editing. For those of you listening, who do not know, I edit all these podcasts and it takes roughly even 5 to 6 hours for audio, because I also put other work into that, like doing the show notes and getting the transcripts. Now I have those outsourced because I don't have enough hours in the day, but there's a lot of different parts to editing, podcasting, screen casting, and stuff that I don't think a lot of people know that these 2-minute videos that you do really do take 5 to 6 hours and you're putting these out there for free?
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Wow. That's amazing. I assume you have a full-time job on top of that.
\n\nSY: Yeah. Because my position is a developer advocate, I can count that as is doing work so I don't have to do that in my own time.
\n\nMANDY: Very cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love DevRel so working in DevRel, I do that, too. I'm a Renaissance woman, basically. Podcast editing, DevRel conference organizing, it's a lot.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: So I give you mad props for putting stuff out there and just giving a shout out to people who might not be aware that content creation is not easy and it does take time. So thank you. Thank you for that. Because this seems like the kind of stuff I would be able to ingest.
\n\nSY: Yeah, thanks.
\n\nMANDY: And that's cool.
\n\nCASEY: I'm especially impressed, Sy that you have these interests that are complex would expand and you can explain the well and you find the overlap with what people want to know about.
\n\n[chuckle]
\n\nI think maybe in part from the Discord, you hear people asking questions. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's like? How do you decide what's interesting?
\n\nSY: Yeah. I ask people on Twitter what they would find it interesting, but I also, because right now I'm not really going to conferences, but previously I’d go to a lot of conferences and people would come up to me and if I give a talk on compilers, for example, come and say like, “Oh hey, I never knew how register allocation worked. It was super interesting to know.” So I don't think I've done a video on register allocation yet actually. I should do one of those.
\n\nMANDY: Write that down.
\n\nSY: [laughs] Yeah. That's the kind of thing. Just because I spent a lot of time in communities, conferences, Discords, on Twitter, you get a feel for the kind of topics which people find interesting and maybe want to know how they work under the covers and just haven't found a good topic. Even function calls like, how does a function call work in C at the hardware level? If you call a function, what's actually happening? I did a video on that because it feels like such a fundamental thing, calling a function, but there's a lot of magic which goes into it, or it can seem like a lot of magic. It's actually, I want to say very well-defined, sometimes less so, but [laughs] they are real so there is random reason.
\n\nMANDY: Very cool. I want to talk about the other content creation that you do. So code art journal and trashheap zine, do you want to talk about those a minute?
\n\nSY: Sure. So code art was an idea that I had. It's a journal of code as art. I'd hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, coding is an art form.” I'd be like, “Okay. Yes. Sometimes, maybe. When is it an art form? When is it not? What's the difference between these?” Like, I spent a lot of time thinking about art because I'm a poet and I spend most of my free time researching and watching movies.
\n\nCode as art is something which really interested me so I made this journal, which is a collection of things which people send in of code which they think is art and sometimes, it's something you might immediately see and look at it and think, “Okay, right, this is code and it's fulfilling some functional purpose,” and maybe that functional purpose gives it some artistic qualities just by how it achieved something, or if it does something in a very performant manner, or a very interesting manner.
\n\nOther times, you might look at it and say, “Okay, well, this is code, but it's more aesthetic than functional.” And sometimes it's things which you might look at and think, “Okay, is this even code?” Like there was someone sent in a program written in a language called Folders, which is a esoteric programming language entirely programmed using empty folders on your hard drive, which I absolutely love. I'm super into esoteric programming languages so I absolutely loved that one. [chuckles] But yeah, so the – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: That sounds so cool. Where can people find it? Is it online also?
\n\nSY: Yes, it’s in print and there's also, you can get the issues online for free in PDF form. There is a third issue, which is pretty much fully put together on my machine, I just haven't done the finishing touches and it's been one of those things that's just sat, not doing anything for months and I need to get finished. [chuckles]
\n\nAnd then trashheap zine is another thing that I co-edit, which is just utter trash, because as much as I love more explicitly artistic films and writing and things like that, I also have a deep love of utter, utter trash. So this is the trashiest stuff that we could possibly find, even the submission guidelines that I wrote for that is essentially a trash pond, but random submission guidelines. So if you have trash, please send our way.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I was going to say, what you consider trash? What trashiest [laughs] enough to be in these zines?
\n\nSY: I can read out, where's my submission guidelines? The URL for the zine is trashyheap.party, which I was very, very pleased with and the website looks awful. I spent a lot of time making it as awful as I possibly could. Things like any kind of – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: I love the sparkles.
\n\nSY: Yes!
\n\nCASEY: When the mouse moves, it sparkles.
\n\nSY: Isn’t it the best, seriously? Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Every website should have that.
\n\nSY: Yeah, totally. Like texts you sent your crush at 4:00 AM while drunk where you misspelled their name and they never spoke to you again, or draft tweets which you thought better of sending, purely Photoshop pictures of our website.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nA medically inaccurate explanation of the digestive system of raccoon dogs. All good stuff.
\n\nMANDY: That's amazing.
\n\nCASEY: I know a lot of people who would be cracking up reading this together.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: That sounds great. There's so much treasure in this trash heap.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. Don’t worry, folks, we'll put links in the show notes.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah.
\n\nSY: Yeah. One of my favorite things with it was when we'd get all of the submissions, we would get together and just project them up on a wall and read them together and so much so bad, it's hilarious in the most wonderful way.
\n\nCASEY: That sounds like a party itself.
\n\nSY: It is, yes.
\n\nCASEY: The be trashheap party.
\n\nSY: Absolutely.
\n\nCASEY: It's kind of taking me back to early pre-YouTube internet when we watch flash cartoons all the time and a lot of those were terrible, but we loved them.
\n\nSY: Yes. I made some as well, they were so bad.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI remember getting a very non legal version of flash and making the worst stick flash renovations I possibly could.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, speaking of content creation, I've been learning some animation and 3D modeling animation lately. I had my first ever viral TikTok; it had over 9,000 views.
\n\nSY: Wow! Nice.
\n\nCASEY: And so when I look at my phone, if it's not the notifications muted, it's annoying. I have to turn it off.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSY: Yeah – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: Congratulations! [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Thank you. So the video is a USB thumb drive that won't insert, even though you flip it over. That's been done before, but what I added was misheard lyrics by the band Maroon 5. Sugar! USB! That's what I hear every time.
\n\nMandy, have you done any art?
\n\nMANDY: Have I done any art?
\n\nCASEY: Lately?
\n\nMANDY: Oh. Yeah. Well, actually – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: You've been doing some home stuff, I know.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I've been doing plant stuff, gardening, but this weekend, I actually took my daughter to a workshop. It was called working with resin—epoxy.
\n\nSY: Oh, cool.
\n\nMANDY: And we got to make coasters. The teacher brought stickers, feathers, and crystals and it was like a 3-hour workshop and I think my daughter had extra resin. Her birthday is on Thursday this week and I noticed she was making kind of the same ones and I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I'm making gifts for my friends that come to my birthday party.” I just thought it was so sweet that I was like – [overtalk]
\n\nSY: Oh, so sweet.
\n\nMANDY: Usually birthday parties, you receive gifts, or whatever and she's like, “No, I would like to give them gifts for my birthday,” and I was like, “Oh, that's adorable.” So I've been trying to do more things with my hands and get off the screens more, which has been the major thing keeping me back from being on code.
\n\nI've made a strict weekend policy where I do not touch my computer from Friday evening to Monday morning, unless it's an absolute dumpster fire, I need to do something, or if a takeout menu looks better on my computer than it does on my phone.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThen I'll pop it open, but I won't read the email, or do the Slack. And then this Saturday I'm taking a course in astrology. It's all-day workshop so I'm excited to kind of dive into that stuff a little bit more.
\n\nCASEY: So cool. It's hard to believe we can do these in person again. I'm not over it.
\n\nMANDY: I know. I'm so afraid to get excited over it and then have it be taken away again.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Sy, tell us a little more about #includes
SY: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: Tell us more about it.
\n\nSY: So it actually started off on Twitter as a half joke; Guy Davidson tweeted being like, “Hey, so why isn't there a diversity and inclusion organization for C++ called #include?” Because #include is it's like a language concept in C and C++ and people were like, “Hahaha yeah, you're right,” and then Kate Gregory was like, “You're right. We should make one.” So we did [chuckles] and we started off with like six of us in a Slack channel and then ended up moving to Discord and starting our own server there and now we are a few thousand members. Back when we had in-person conferences, we would have a booth at pretty much every major C++ conference, we had scholarships, which we would send people on, we got conferences to improve by having live captioning and wheelchair accessible stages and gender-neutral bathrooms instituting and upholding code of conduct, things like that.
\n\nWe started off thinking, “Hey, if we could get some conferences to have a code of conduct or something that would be great,” and then it ended up being way, way, way bigger than any of us thought it would become, which is amazing to see.
\n\nCASEY: That's so cool. What a success story.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: How long has it been going on now?
\n\nSY: I guess about 3, or 4 years. Yeah, probably closer to 4 years. My sense of time is not good the best of times, but something around 4 years.
\n\nCASEY: I'm curious if another language community wanted to do something similar if they're inspired. Is there a writeup about what y'all have done?
\n
SY: I've given talks.
CASEY: That we can point people to. We can put that in the show notes.
\n\nSY: Yeah. I've given a couple of talks, as I said.
\n\nCASEY: Talks, that would be good.
\n\nSY: Other people have given talks as well. I gave a slightly longer form talk DevRelCon, London in 2019, I think, which was on the lessons which we learned through trying to build a welcoming and inclusive community. Community which has already been around for decades because C++ was first standardized in 1998 so it's been around for quite a long time and has a lot of history.
\n\nCASEY: That sounds great. I can't wait to watch it.
\n\nSY: Yeah. I know that there's other languages. You have JavaScript, QueerJS, which is a really cool community and I'm sure there are other languages which have similar things going as well.
\n\nCASEY: I had never heard of QueerJS. I'm queer and JS.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I'm glad I had this moment just now.
\n\nSY: It’s cool. They have a Discord and I can't remember how active the Discord is, but they would have meetups across the world, they have one in London and in Berlin and bunch of other places, and talks and community. It seems really cool.
\n\nCASEY: That's awesome.
\n\nSY: I wanted to give a talk about C++ and JavaScript because you could link target JavaScript with C++ these days, which is kind of cool.
\n\nCASEY: I’ve used Emscripten before.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I didn't use it directly, other people did. It turned Graphviz into a JavaScript. A program that runs in JavaScript instead of normally, it's just CSS. So I could draw circles pointing to other circles in the browser, which is what I always wanted to do. Graphviz.it, that “it” is my favorite Graphviz editor. It's online.
\n\nSY: Cool. I like Graphviz a lot. Emscripten is really cool, though. Basically a way of compiling C++ plus to JavaScript and then having the interoperation with the browser and the ecosystem that you might want to be able to call JS functions from C++, or other way around, and do things which seem operating systems E, but have to be mapped inside the browser environment.
\n\nCASEY: That's powerful. I'm also glad I've never had to use it directly. Other people made libraries doing it what I needed. Thank goodness.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nAbstraction!
\n\nSY: Yeah. I've not used a whole lot, but I did find it fairly nice to work with when I did. I made a silly esoteric programming language called Enjamb, which is a language where the programs are cones and it runs on a stack-based abstract machine and the interpreter for it is written in C++. I wrote a command line driver for it and also, a version which runs in the browser and that compiles using Emscripten.
\n\nIt was really cool and I picked it all up with CMake, which is the main C++ build systems that you could just say, “Hey, I want to build the combine line version for my platform” like Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever, or “Hey, I want to build it for the web,” and it would build the JavaScript version in HTML page and things like that. It's pretty cool.
\n\nI recently made another esoteric programming language, which you program using MS Paint. You literally make shapes with MS Paint and you give the compiler an image file, and then it uses OCR and computer vision in order to parse your code and then generate C from that. [laughs] It's pretty ridiculous, but I had so much fun with it.
\n\nCASEY: OCR is Optical Character Recognition?
\n\nSY: Yes, exactly.
\n\nCASEY: So I'm picturing if I wrote a program on a napkin and a computer could maybe OCR that into software.
\n\nSY: Yeah. So it uses OCR for things like function names because it supports function calls and then uses shapes for most things. It has things like a plus sign, which means increment what it's currently being pointed to, or right, or left, or up, or down arrow is for moving things around. You would actually make an image file with those symbols and then I used OpenCV for working out what the shapes were.
\n\nIt was the first time I've ever done any kind of image recognition stuff. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be; I thought we'd have to write a lot of code in order to get things up and running and to do image detection. But most of the simple things like recognizing hey, this is a triangle, or this is a plus sign, or this is a square, and things like that were pretty, you don't need a lot of code in order to do them. That was mostly when you had to say like, “Okay, this is a triangle, but which direction is it pointing in?” It got a little bit more complicated; I had to do some maths and things like that and I'm terrible at maths. [chuckles] So that was a little bit more difficult, but it was a lot fun to get started with and I had a much lower barrier to entry than I expected.
\n\nCASEY: Now I want to play with OCR and image recognition. I haven't done that for 10 years. It was not easy when I tried it last time with whatever tool that was.
\n\nSY: [chuckles] Yeah, I did it – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: For the future!
\n\nSY: [laughs] Definitely. Yeah. I did it with Python and Python has fairly nice OpenCV bindings and there's a ton of resources out there for predicting most of the basic stuff that you would expect. So there's a lot of learning resources and decent library solutions out there now.
\n\nCASEY: Cool.
\n\nAll right. We're getting near the end of time. At the end, we like to go through reflections, which is what's something interesting that stood out to you, something you'll take with you going forward from our conversations today.
\n\nMANDY: I really am excited to dig into Sy’s videos. They seem, like I said earlier in the show, something I could commit to a few times a week to watching these videos especially when they are concepts that seem so much fun, like cats, teddy bears, cuteness levels, and things like that. I think that would be a great start for me just to in the morning while I'm still drinking tea just before I even dive into my email, check out one of those videos. So I think I'll do that.
\n\nSY: Thanks.
\n\nCASEY: Sy, I liked hearing about your process side with your constraints like 2 minutes, 20 seconds on Twitter, that's such a helpful constraint to make sure it's really polished and dense. It takes you 5 to 6 hours and you make things that people ask about, that they're interested in. That whole process is fascinating to me as I try to make more viral TikToks.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOr whatever I'm making at the time.
\n\nSY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I always wondered how you made such good stuff that got retweeted so often. Cool things of insight.
\n\nSY: Yeah. Mostly just time. [laughs] I guess, it makes me remember that I definitely want to make a video on register allocation because I love register allocation. It's such a cool thing. For those who don't know, it's like if you have a compiler which takes your code and maps it onto the hardware, your hardware only has a certain number of resources so how do you work out how to use those resources in the best manner? It maps onto some quite nice computer science algorithms like graph coloring, which means it maps quite nicely visually, I could probably make a pretty cool graph coloring visualization with some random things I have strewn around my room.
\n\nCASEY: I can't imagine this yet, but I will understand that clearly soon I bet.
\n\nMANDY: That's awesome. Well, I just want to wrap up by saying thank you so much for joining us today, Sy. This has been a really awesome conversation.
\n\nAnd to folks who have been listening, thank a content creator. It takes time. It takes energy. It's a lot of work that I don't think a lot of people, unless you've done it, really understand how long and in-depth of a process it is. So thank one of us content creators, especially when we're putting this content out for you for free.
\n\nTo do that for us Greater Than Code, we do a Patreon page and we will invite Sy to join us and we would like you to join us as well. If you are able to donate on a monthly basis, it's awesome. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode. All episodes have show notes and transcripts, and we do a lot of audio editing. So join us if you're able. If you are still a person who is greater than code and cannot afford a monthly commitment, you are still welcome to join us in our Slack community. Simply send a DM to one of the panelists and we will let you in for free. So with that, thank you so much, Casey. Thank you again, Sy. And we'll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Sy Brand.
","summary":"Sy Brand talks about their gift of making complex topics digestible in teaching others to learn how to code through short (and cute!) Twitter and YouTube videos. They talk about how important it is to find something that motivates you when you’re first learning anything, and shares a little bit about their own content creation strategies, especially by seeing code as art.","date_published":"2021-08-25T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/7ce12a36-dd5a-479a-ae6e-7dd8e0378529.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":43624188,"duration_in_seconds":3263}]},{"id":"e475150d-1e10-4ea6-afeb-b76bec1fc4c1","title":"246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/digital-democracy-and-indigenous-storytelling","content_text":"02:45 - Rudo’s Superpower: Being Pretty Good At Lots of Things!\n\n\nLearning How to Learn on the Fly\n\n\nDigital Democracy\nEarth Defenders Toolkit\nRuby For Good\n\nProblem-Solving & Mastery: “Fake it until you make it!”\n\n\n13:14 - Digital Democracy & Terrastories\n\n\nThe Amazon Conservation Team (ACT)\nMatawai People \nCapturing & Recording Oral History\nRuby For Good\nMapbox\nIndiginous-Requested, Indiginous-Led\n\n\nTaking Action When Invited\nListen Before Action\nCo Creation\n\nMapeo\n\n\n27:39 - Defining an “Earth Defender”\n\n\nEarth Defenders Toolkit\n\n\n30:40 - Community Collaboration/Development Best Practices Without Overstepping Boundaries\n\n\nTech Literacy\n\n\n35:52 - Getting Involved/Supporting This Work\n\n\nDigital Democracy & Earth Defenders Toolkit\nStakeholders & Ownership\n\n\n45:03 - Experiences Working w/ These Projects\n\n\nAnyone Can Contribute\nMeeting Fellow Dreamers\n\n\n47:33 - Oral Traditions & Storytelling: Preserving History\n\nReflections:\n\nJacob: Getting involved and connecting virtually.\n\nMandy: Register for Ruby For Good! Happening in-person this year from September 23-26 at the Shepherd's Spring Retreat, in Sharpsburg, Maryland!\n\nMae: Being able to adapt and learn as a superskill. Be proud of the things you can do.\n\nRudo: It’s inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript: \n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.\n\nMAE: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code. My name is Mae Beale and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore, who will introduce our guest.\n\nMANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy and I'm here with Rudo Kemper. \n\nHe is a human geographer with a background in archives and digital storytelling, and a lifelong technology tinkerer. For the past decade, he has worked in solidarity with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Amazon to map their ancestral lands and document their traditional knowledge and oral histories. He is passionate about co-creating and applying technology to support marginalized communities in defending their right to self-determination and representation, and being in control of telling their own stories.\n\nRudo currently works with Digital Democracy, where he is accompanying local communities across the globe in defending their lands, and stewarding the development of the Earth Defenders Toolkit, a new collaborative space for earth defender communities and their allies. He also serves on the executive boards of Native Land Digital and the International Society for Participatory Mapping, and is one of the core stewards of the open-source geostorytelling application, Terrastories. Rudo is originally from Curaçao, but currently based in Springfield, Virginia.\n\nAnd I know personally, Mae and I have both gotten to work with Rudo at Ruby for Good. I was in D.C. I'm not sure where you were, Mae. But before we delve into that, we do need to ask our standard question from Greater Than Code, which is what is your superpower, Rudo and how did you acquire it?\n\nRUDO: [laughs] Okay. I love it. Thanks Mandy. It's so great to be on the podcast and to be having this conversation with you all, this is really exciting. \n\nMy superpower and how did I acquire it? I think the way that I usually answer is that I don't have any one superpower. I'm not great at anything, but I'm pretty good at lots of things and I've acquired that from just having different roles and just done different things across my life in my career, where I'm able to kind of mess with a little bit of code but I'm not a developer, I've made maps before, but I'm not an expert cartographer in that way either. I speak some languages based off of places that I've lived, but not fluently. [laughs] You get the idea. \n\nSo I think that's kind of my super power is just being pretty decent at a lot of stuff, but not amazing at any one thing. I don't know if that's a typical answer or not, but [laughs] that's what comes to mind.\n\nMANDY: That's a great answer! I like it. I like it; being good at a lot of things is a good skill to have.\n\nRUDO: Being decent at a lot of things, let's not get too out of hand here.\n\n[laughter]\n\nMAE: Well, it’s awesome, Rudo because it's not just that you have acquired some skills. I'll try to go in line with what you're putting down here on the good, although I have some personal experience to disagree, [chuckles] but I'll follow you. But it seems like you are always learning new skills and picking up new things that you're able to be adept at very quickly. So I don't know if you have any further thoughts about how did you learn how to learn so well and so quickly?\n\nRUDO: Wow. I think by necessity, [chuckles] like you're just put into a position where you find yourself having to learn something completely on the fly. \n\nFor example, I recently joined Digital Democracy in November and one of the projects that I started to work with is this Earth Defenders Toolkit, where I pretty much discovered right away that I had to play the role of a product manager. Now I've worked with product managers before, including yourself, Mae, on some Ruby for Good projects, but I've never had to do it before, or really had a good sense of what that entails. \n\nSomebody told me two months into this project and trying to figure out how to basically coordinate a lot of moving pieces and keeping track of a roadmap, et cetera, et cetera, “Rudo, you're basically a product manager right now. You should know that,” and I'm like, “Okay, let me look up on Google what product manager means and what that all entails,” and that was helpful because I'm like, “Okay, got it.” This is kind of what I've been doing on the fly without much knowledge, or thought put into it and then you learn because you have no choice. [laughs] So I feel like it's been a lot of that. \n\nAlso, when I was younger, I would apply for jobs where I'm not exactly sure how to do the thing yet, but two weeks before the job, you figure out what that is. And then the job on the first day, like, “All right, I know how to like mess with a little bit of HTML CSS now because I just spent a few nights brushing up on that.”\n\nAnd then just also, in my more professional work in South America, you find yourselves in positions very often where you figure out how to do things very quickly working with indigenous peoples and certain contexts where there's a lot of specific local knowledge that is important for you to know and you just pick that up as you go. So I feel like it's been a lot of kind of, sort of ad hoc learning and then after you do a lot of that, you become more mentally, I think trained to do that more often. \n\nMAE: Absolutely. Love it. Yeah. \n\nMANDY: I can totally relate to that because that's why I'm here. 12 years ago. My daughter is turning 12 next week.\n\nRUDO: Hey, congrats! \n\nMANDY: And I know exactly how long I've been in tech because it's from almost the exact day she's been born. So I was never interested in getting into tech, or it was never a thing that I had planned on doing, but I can really identify that just out of necessity, getting in there and finding myself in a place where I always saw myself in a job. I was waitressing and as a single parent and doing it alone, you can imagine bartending isn't a very lucrative career, or easy-to-have career for someone who has to work till 2, or 3 o'clock in the morning. \n\nSo I was like, “Where can I find any job that I can work online that's not a scheme, or multilevel, or sales because I'm just not a salesperson.” No offense to anyone who is, I think salespeople are great. I just didn't like really laid back in the fact that you really don't have to buy this thing unless you want to. [laughs] So I make a really crappy salesperson. \n\nBut learning how to do things on necessity and 12 years later, here I am. Actually, I started out just being the person who produced these shows and now, here I am second time being a panelist because I've grown into that self-confidence in that I feel like maybe I don't code, but I still have technology skills that I've come into and picked up along my 12-year career that I can also contribute to Greater Than Code conversations. So I love it.\n\nRUDO: Awesome. Yeah. That sounds totally relatable in that regard where you figure out how to do the little things and then eventually, those become bigger things and before you know it, you're running the ship. [laughs] \n\nMANDY: Yeah, and a lot of it is reputation too, which I'm guessing that is where you are. Like, if you're just one of those kinds of people that jumps in and put yourself in these situations, that can be really, really scary sometimes and then all of a sudden, people are asking you for more things and they're like, “Oh, can you do this?” and I'm like thinking to myself, “No, but I'm going to learn.” \n\nRUDO: Right.\n\nMANDY: So when somebody always asks me, “Can you do this thing? Can I hire you to do this thing?” I'm like, “I have no idea how to do this thing.” I will learn to do this thing and just they say fake it till you make it, I guess that's what I did for 12 years. So that's how I'm here. [chuckles] \n\nBut we're not here to tell them about my story. We are here to talk about Ruby for Good and especially Terrastories and Digital Democracy and all the stuff that you do that's improving our world as a whole. \n\nI just want to quickly say that our friend, Jacob Stoebel, has joined us so he is now here, too. \n\nRUDO: Hey, Jacob.\n\nMAE: Hey!\n\nJACOB: Hi!\n\nMANDY: So I'm excited to get into the meat of this conversation and where should we start? \n\nMAE: Well, if it's okay, I would love to add one thing to what we were just talking about, where I thought going into coding that it was something that is masterable. I didn't that actually the whole entire time, you're just reteaching yourself, or you're just teaching yourself things that you've never seen before. \n\nSo I tell people that I get paid to solve puzzles I've never seen before and that's a pretty good life [chuckles] and it's very similar to what both of you are describing and what I know of both of you. I still feel it sometimes, but there's this orientation that the coders, or the code is the most important part, which just isn't. being in community and figuring out how to connect people and make things happen, that's what all of y'all do brilliantly. \n\nSo anyway, I just want to say from the perspective of being a coder, it’s like that's one part of what makes things happen and so many coders I know have so many projects that just never see the light of day because they don't have all of these other pieces to pull it together, or connections, or the ability to make them. So I just want to effusively credit both of you with being amazing and helping all of us be here right now. So way to go and thank you.\n\nRUDO: I love that. I actually just want to add to that before I started working with coders and developers and getting into the more direct tech development space, I had this idea that the programmers are totally people that mastered to know how to do this entire code base. I can just pull different pieces of code from nothing and there's very systematic kind of way and that was my conception of the coder and then I started working with developers. \n\nInitially threw me for good and now with Digital Democracy, I realized it's exactly as you say, Mae. It's problem-solving like, “Okay, well, let's look at that. Let's examine what this does and mess with it and figure out how to get it to behave the way that we want to,” which is actually how I do things, too and it made me feel like, “Oh, wow, actually, maybe I could one day become a coder because they think and work exactly as I do just at a higher capacity, of course. It was more of a toolkit, if you will. But the methodology is pretty much the same. It’s really cool. \n\nJACOB: It really is. It's the attitude of given enough time, I theoretically could learn anything, but that doesn't mean I want to because there's only so many seconds I have in my life. But theoretically, if it feels worth it, I can do it.\n\nMAE: I think that's true for anyone ideally. I used to play pool full time and someone asked this famous pool player, who I was standing next to and who I know, and they said, “Well, do you think that Mae can be a pro pool player?” and he said the same thing you just said, Jacob, like, “Well, yeah, if she puts enough time in, of course she can.” So there's this thing about mastery is more about time commitment. \n\nI tell my niece all the time, she rolls her eyes, but I ask her, “How do you succeed, or get good at something?” and she's like, “You do it a lot,” and I'm like, “What else?” She goes, “You fail.” [laughs] Like I've got her trained on this is how you just have to put in the time.\n\nRudo, it's now been, I think 7 years since we first met that you have been stewarding this Terrastories program and your commitment and devotion to this project and just effusiveness in general help it continue to thrive and I'm just so excited that you're here. \n\nI don't know if it would make sense for you to maybe share with our listeners something about either how you came into Digital Democracy through the Terrastories angle, or if you wanted to go from Digital Democracy back out, whichever way might be just some framing of we said a lot of words so far and I don't know that everybody knows what – I don't definitely know that I know what they all mean.\n\nRUDO: Sure. Yeah. Gosh, has it been 7 years already? Man, time flies. [laughs] It's been quite a journey, no doubt. Yeah, I think the way I would frame that is more like by entry point of like how I got started working with code and doing Terrastories and how that all emerged. \n\nSo it was a little bit of background. I've always had a little bit of a background in web development. I used to build basic websites in the early 2000s and I know a little bit of HTML and CSS and so, I've always had that in my back pocket later working with WordPress and stuff like that. \n\nI joined an organization in 2014 called the Amazon Conservation Team where basically my role was doing participatory mapping with indigenous people. So by training, I've background in geography and so, that's what a lot of my work has been in the past 7, or 8 years is working with communities to help them map their lens and to do that in a participatory way. That means we're not doing it, we're helping communities use the tools, build capacity to do it themselves. \n\nSo I was working with the community in Suriname, which is in South America. Dutch-speaking country with an Afro-descendant group called the Matawai and we were doing this participatory mapping project where they were – it's really amazing, actually. It's this community that the ancestors are formerly escaped slaves that were brought over in the 1700s and were able to escape into the rainforest. They fought against the colonial power at the time, which was the Dutch, and they successfully fought for their freedom to exist there and they continue to live there today.\n\nIt's this really kind of amazing community. They have a lot of pride in their history of course, as well and there's a lot of storytelling about the first time that their ancestors arrived in a completely new world, new forest, new things to eat, [chuckles] new medicines, completely different space and had to adapt to living there and have a lot of really fascinating stories about their ancestors. What they first did and where they first settled and what are the sacred spaces and almost mythological stories about their history that are really informative for who they are as a people. It's part of their self-identity is this amazing history.\n\nSo we were doing this mapping work with this community basically helping them use technology like GPS and smartphone applications to map their lands and out of that came this desire to want to do more. Because when you're mapping, it's place names, but that's only a part of the puzzle. It's only a part of the story. There's so much richness and information and knowledge about places that people are carrying. They basically carry with them in their heads. Basically, the mapping spurred this broad community level reflection of wanting to do more to capture that oral history that's contained by the elders and so, that spurred a desire to want to capture some of that. \n\nLong story short, we start working with this community to record oral histories and we were trying to think of creative ways that we could use technology to maybe produce something that would appeal to the young people especially. Like younger people anywhere, the kids in the Matawai had cell phones and they're not really so interested in sitting around listening to the stories of their elders. \n\nWe wanted to create this new technology, or some way to make it exciting for them to learn about their oral histories. With my previous hacky web developer background, I'm like, “Well, we could probably maybe spin up, I don't know, an offline WordPress, or something with some interactive maps. We'd get it working on local hosts, it'll be fine.\n\nMAE: It’ll take like two months; we’ll have it rolling.\n\nRUDO: Yeah. No big deal. I knew about Wham Stacks and stuff where you can locally have servers and like, “Yeah, we'll figure it out. No worries.” So we tried to do that and it was not quite so easy. Interactive maps, as it turns out, are very hard to get running offline. They're very dependent on APIs and all kinds of stuff that's available on the internet and that's where that industry is going, especially. So that was the first thing. The second thing is you need to get it working on smartphones and all that. Basically have it running in the jungle turned out to be a little more complicated than anticipated. [chuckles]\n\nSo we had a lot of setbacks where we tried to do that ourselves and we tried to hire some consultants that were interested, but then gradually ducked out after they themselves realized like, “Hmm, this is tricky, I don't know if I can do this.” \n\nAnd then one thing led to another, after a long year of just trying to put this application together, we ended up encountering a network called Ruby for Good, which is what Mae as a part of as well and I think has been featured on this podcast before and basically, it's this amazing collective of volunteer developers that like to build software for good and that can be something like a diaper service to get diapers that are no longer being used by a family into the hands of another family. So building software to engender and enable those kinds of services, or it can be building really amazing storytelling applications for communities in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.\n\nAs we told the community about that, we pitched the ideas like, wouldn't it be amazing to build this application and the community really loves it and was inspired by it and out of nothing, the first Ruby for Good, which I think it was 2018, Mae, if I'm not mistaken. \n\nMAE: Yeah. You might be right. I thought it was earlier, but.\n\nRUDO: Yeah. Who knows? The idea was around longer. In 2018, there was a D.C.-based events where a team got together and was like, “All right, how do we make this happen?” I was fortunate enough to be there as well and in the span of a weekend, an application materialized out of nothing, which is amazing to see. Of course, it was buggy, it was scrappy, it didn't do everything we needed it to, that took years before we got to the point where we even talked about an MVP, or anything like that. \n\nBut that was just so powerful and incredible to see what you can do with a group of people that are motivated and that want to help out and that was really, I think my first foray into code and that was mainly watching people do things and being like, “Okay, that makes sense. This little module does this,” and eventually, I got to be good enough that I could make little changes, like changing the color of something and hiding something and then making it appear again and eventually, smaller, but still more in-depth changes to the application.\n\nMAE: Love it. So cool, Rudo and Ruby for Good, what's cool is it's not only developers, but there are designers, product managers, other community people, and generally, we try to have someone from the organization that we're serving come to the event and Rudo was one of the first people that that actually worked out with. So there was an event and there might've been one other group that had a representative. So it was like, “Whoa, hey, hi!” It was really fun to have Rudo there.\n\nAnd then another connection is one of the organizers was Brazilian and so really was motivated to help with Amazonian preservation and also had a connection to Mapbox and Mapbox was a huge supporter early on for Terrastories to get off the ground, too. So there's just so many different connections that have come along to contribute and it's just such an honor in the world to have opportunities to contribute. So thank you, Rudo for continuing to make that be available to people to help with. \n\nWhat I'm curious about is just to rewind the timeline just slightly to when and how did the Amazon Conservation Team get connected and asked to make these maps and then it became –? Because one of the things that moves me most about this project is that it was indigenous requested, indigenous-led partnerships and so many times, especially from the States, there's a lot white savior stuff and like, we're going to bring our modern technology to help you do…. \n\nSo just the fact that this exists at all and the way it came to exist is just so beautiful and I was hoping maybe if you share a little bit more of that, people might be interested to hear.\n\nRUDO: Yeah, absolutely. So the way the ACT operates in many other organizations that are very grassroots and oriented towards working closely with communities take on a similar approach, which is first of all, to only take action when invited. So instead of coming to a community with an idea in advance and being like, “Hey, wouldn't it be cool if?” It's a request that comes from the community. \n\nIn the case of this example of the Matawai from Suriname, they had learned about similar mapping work done elsewhere and wanted to do their own map and inquired in their network who can we speak to that can help us make a map like this and that's what led them to be connected with ACT. So it's that initial contact from the community that's really key to that and then there's different modalities of that, too as it plays out. \n\nAnother concept that's really important that doesn't get practiced enough, to be honest is very simple, but it's always to first listen before taking any action. Such a simple concept, but it's so often not practiced, especially when it comes to NGO worlds where there's funders and they have their own deliverables and timelines and things like this and they want to see something. No, listen to the community first and see what they want and take the time to do that as well. \n\nWith indigenous peoples, this is especially relevant because decision-making and consensus building is not the same based on community to community, it differs. So taking the time to go by the local processes and hanging out a while and not showing up only for 48 hours and then leaving, expecting to have a fully fleshed idea of what that community needs. It takes time and it can evolve as well. \n\nSo having that open-endedness is really important when it comes to working with communities and the flexibility for projects to adapt and evolve, and to never come with solutions that are pre-made. Never. That's so pivotal. \n\nAnd then the final thing, the final piece of that to take it one extra level—and this is something that Digital Democracy we take very seriously—is co-creation. So when solutions are proposed and specifically tools, even digital tools, and those start to be worked on, define ways of co-creating that as much as possible with communities. \n\nI would even say for example, with Ruby for Good, I was able to show up and that's fine, but ideally, somebody from the community would have been able to show up as well to have that kind of co-creation relationship be even more direct and more complete rather than via proxy. Of course, that was the best we could do, but ideally, we want community members to be as involved in a co-creation of technology as possible. That can be tricky. It can be hard, it takes time. Donors don't understand that; it's very hard in our space to find donors that really realize what that takes and what that entails. But that's what we believe is the right way forward. \n\nMapeo, which is one of the tools that we're building at Digital Democracy, with Terrastories as well, there's always this process of constantly verifying and validating if what we're building is actually matching the needs and if not, what needs to be adapted and that goes from the code and how it's built and the different principles that communities find to be very important like data sovereignty to the user interface.\n\nOne example, people in the Amazon sometimes have eyesight issues and don't have glasses and so, looking at a phone and a small application can sometimes not be very helpful. So it's across the board from the backends to the way that the frontend of applications is built and of course, that's technology, but really this goes to any project design to have that co-creation being really core of it. \n\nJACOB: Are there ongoing needs that have to be fulfilled? Support if something goes wrong, or maintaining infrastructure, like, I don't know what any of that might mean.\n\nRUDO: Yeah, this is a huge part of it and it's something that at Digital Democracy for example, there's a technology team, which is software engineers, developers, UX designers, product managers, all of that, and then we have a programs team, which is more folks and that's what I'm serving over at Digital Democracy, where our role is that accompaniments and ensuring that the communities that are using the tools have the resources that they need, whether that's training guides, or modules, or something breaks in the field and they need support and that happens a lot. \n\nIt is one of the, I don't want to say tensions, but difficulties in doing this work is that we are developing open source technology and things can sometimes break and communities have expectations. Sometimes when something breaks in the field, if it's not clear why it broke, the person might feel like it's their fault somehow, that they somehow broke it and that can be very tricky to work with. Especially in the case of the pandemic where nobody is able to travel and so, there's a level of remote support, so that has to happen.\n\nWe're very sensitive to that ensuring that while co-creating and involving communities in the early stages of software is very powerful, it can also lead to disappointment if it's not done in the right way and that people aren't clear about well, this is an early phase at this particular software and that people don't feel like guinea pigs as well that they're just being used to develop a software that's not working and there's a lot of frustration that can result from that.\n\nMAE: Absolutely. Yeah, we experienced that—we being me and anyone else with whom I've done any kind of software venture that is for good whether, or not through Ruby for Good—and to have the cultural barriers and historical exploitation to try to figure out how to mitigate that is super complicated. So awesome that that is the priority of Digital Democracy. \n\nSomething I noticed from Digital Democracy’s website is the use of the term earth defender and you're talking about co-creating and listening to the people themselves, I'm curious if you might be willing to share with us some more about what defines an earth defender. Do people call themselves earth defenders? Who gets named an earth defender? Who gets to wear the earth defender sash, or superhero costume, and how does that work? And if it's relevant, how did Digital Democracy come to have that as a priority and a phrase that's got as much privacy as it does on its website.\n\nRUDO: Yeah. I love it. It's such a good question. So whenever we have any kind of session, or workshop about Earth Defenders Toolkit, or any discussion, any chance that we have to talk to people, we always start with that question actually of like, what does earth defender mean to you? If you were to interpret this term, what is your takeaway? What comes to mind when thinking about this? We almost intentionally don't define it because we want people to be able to have their own version, or definition of it, or their own interpretation, because it can mean so much.\n\nSo definitely, we're thinking of some things when we started to use the term. Of course, we've done a lot of work with indigenous peoples in the Amazon, more recently in Africa and Southeast Asia as well, but there's also other communities, like local communities, that are not indigenous, that are also on the front lines of fighting for their rights to their land, or protecting biodiversity, fighting extractivism taking place that's nearby, and these kinds of big global forces that are threatening the livelihoods of both lands and communities on a local basis. \n\nSo we wanted to have something a little bit more broad to be able to essentially, apply to many different communities that are in that same position. But then at the same time, I think gesturing to your question, Mae anybody can be an earth defender if you're taking an action to defend the earth. That can be any of us as well. That can be somebody who wants to get involved to do something, to contribute to that broad pursuits and that can be many things. That can be climate action, that can be working on the front lines with communities combating extractivism, like I said, it can be political activism, it can be many different things.\n\nSo this notion of earth defender, I know we haven't defined it, or you might've even looked on the website, like, “Let's see how they define it,” and we've almost intentionally kept it that way because we want it to be an open definition where people can decide for themselves what that means. \n\nAnd then also, the platform that we're building, Earth Defenders Toolkit, also has an intentionally open-ended structure where the resources that we're providing focus on some things that we hear a lot about from communities in terms of pain points and obstacles and resources that they wish existed. But there's a lot of room to again, co-create it with anybody that wants to use it and own it and make this be a hub, or a platform, or a community. So that lack of parameterization is almost intentional there.\n\nJACOB: This is making me think in – well, if I have any incorrect assumptions about what I meant to say, please check them, but I'm thinking about a community that has been doing something along the lines of what you're talking about and they've been doing it well for a long time and they have a lot of genuine connections in their own community, but they've never made software before. \n\nI'm thinking about collaborating with a community and wanting them to be the leaders, but at the same time, helping them understand what are good ways to go about, what are best practices to go about making quality software, which might not – I come from the nonprofit world in a previous life and I think those work cultures are very different and for a good reason. But I'm wondering like how helping a community pick up those best practices while also letting them be in charge seems like an interesting challenge to me.\n\nRUDO: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's so interesting and I think of one community that, I haven't worked with them, but a colleague of mine has in Guyana where there was an application that was being built. I think sometimes when software is being developed, there's almost this intention to keep the community, or whoever it's serving out of the kitchen, if you will, out of the development process of what that looks like. In this case, in this community in Guyana, he tried to do the opposite and actually explain how the tech is built and why the pieces are what they are and what they're doing. This was in an indigenous community that, I think sometimes the assumption might be better not to involve them, or have them considering those kinds of technical details, even though in a way where you assume that indigenous people wouldn't understand that somehow. But in fact, they really gravitated towards that and actually appreciated the application all the more understanding how it's built and we actually got a lot of enthusiasm out of learning the technology. \n\nI feel like it speaks to a broader interest in tech literacy and just how that as a whole, like when you work with the community on their tech literacy, it enables them to achieve things far beyond just a creation of one application. It has much more broad impact in terms of interacting with all technology. So it has a benefit beyond just the application development cycle itself. But also, I think we don't give people enough credit in terms of how much they actually are able to get involved in that process and make sense of the different pieces of the application. So there can be a huge benefit actually to having that.\n\nI hope I articulated that well. I thought it was a really interesting question. \n\nJACOB: No, definitely and I didn't have any particular answer in mind, [chuckles] but I just think it's an interesting problem because I think about my family, or my friends who were not in the tech industry and they just want technology to work. Like, they know what they want, they just want it to work. The best practice is iteration, which are really important like, I'm the stakeholder, this is the software that matters to me and then saying, “Hey, go use the software that works and doesn't do everything you told us you'd want us to do and tell us what you think,” [laughs] I just feel like would be just such a new concept to people who haven't worked in that way.\n\nRUDO: Yeah. One of my colleagues once described this as the way that browsers used to tell you what was going on behind the scenes and then even if you don't know about technology, you can figure it out. You associate certain lines of texts that are obscure to you, but something happening in the application, even if you can't make sense of what exactly that is, or the sound of a modem, the old dial-up modems, and you could figure out by the sounds when it's actually connecting versus when it's [laughs] not doing its job. \n\nTo give that slight exposure to what's going on with the tech can be really helpful and powerful for people that usually are shielded from that more backend stuff and then also might not have a sense of why something isn't working.\n\nMAE: Yeah. Any project that I've been involved in helping people understand, not only how does technology work, but how to establish processes that have resilience and are able to be replicable and all of these more structural organizational things, how can we help improve that? Because it translates way beyond the specific project and that's another—oh, I don't know if I even love referencing this. I'm trying to think if I know of a different one. But that teach someone how to fish and then they can be able to self-sustain whereas, going and bringing some fish is a one-time situation. So yeah, I love that angle and thanks for bringing that up, Jacob. That's awesome. \n\nIt's cool too, because it connects right into what I was going to ask next and I'm channeling Casey Watts a little bit in how if any listener wanted to be involved and that person could be a coder, they could not be a coder. How can people become involved and/or support this work, any part of the Earth Defender Toolkit? Rudo, you probably have a great idea of all the different ways in which any human could be of service, or connection, or whatever. I don't know if you already have a – hopefully, you have an elevator speech ready to go about this topic. \n\n[laughter]\n\nRUDO: I think yeah. What occurs to me thinking about that question is that there's so many communities that need help with many, many, many different things and sometimes that can just be accessing resources, or just helping communicate what's going on in their lens to an outside audience, or help configuring phones, or help translating materials, or just being somebody who has exposure to how the Western world, or forces that are now emerging in their lens. \n\nSo communities never needed help with the management of their own lands. But now that these external forces are frequently impacting their livelihoods, somebody who can help navigate those changes that are taking place is a tremendous need that so many communities express.\n\nLike in the past couple of weeks, we've had a couple of forums, virtual, with communities in Africa. Just this morning actually, we had an Africa forum where they were saying something over a hundred different community members from Africa present where we were discussing basically what the work and what sort of actions are looking like in different parts of Africa, from Senegal to Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Congo and providing those opportunities for learning from one another and there was just so much requests for how can we apply this toolkit? How can we take similar actions where we are? \n\nSo I think just anybody that wants to get involved, there's so many communities and the question isn't how to find those communities. In my own experience, just showing up somewhere is actually an effective way of finding a way to be helpful because you might have skills that you don't even know about, that could be something you take for granted. Just to name a silly example, file management, knowing how to navigate a directory of files with trees and subdirectories and things like that is something that a lot of people don't know, or quite understand because they didn't grow up with it like many of us did. Just little things that you might not think are valuable skills can actually be tremendous assets to a community that is trying to solve a problem, even before you even get to something like technical stuff like coding, or mapping, or whatever. Just being a resource is such a huge asset. \n\nSo we are creating spaces for more communities to post help requests to we're dealing with this, is there anybody that can help us and vice versa. If you are somebody that wants to get involved, to write about what you have to offer. Under Earth Defender Toolkit, there's a form for that where let's say that you have 10 hours per week to dedicate to whatever it may be and anybody that wants to get in touch, that this is what you have to offer and what your skills are. \n\nBeyond that, of course, there's if you are a programmer, if you are a developer, there's definitely open source software that one can contribute to and there's processes to plug into that. So in the Earth Defenders Toolkit, we do have a contribute page where there's lots of different ways to get involved. Financial, of course, is an elephant in the room. There's tons of communities that need support financially to be able to take actions, or to travel somewhere, or to get resources that they need. So there's all of that and we try to point to different places that responsibly where one can contribute in that regard. [laughs] I think that's what comes to mind.\n\nMAE: Awesome. And what is the relationship between Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit like, what is the larger mission of Digital Democracy and how does this help fit in the picture?\n\nRUDO: Yeah, so Digital Democracy is basically, we're an NGO. We're an odd NGO in the sense that we're a tech company in a way with a product manager and a roadmap and all that stuff and familiar processes, but we're a nonprofit. So we also then have to work with finding funding from a nonprofit space, which can be tricky for tech, because as I mentioned earlier, donors don't often understand exactly the work that we do and then the other thing is the programmatic company and for the tools that we're building.\n\nIt’s interesting because we take on this value of tech Gnosticism, but then we're also building specific tools and so, our approach isn't done to like, “Hey, we have this hammer, let's go find nails.” It's still very inspired by this philosophy of not wanting to promote any kind of one tool in advance when starting to work with a community. \n\nOut of that idea is where Earth Defender's Toolkit came from, which is this new platform where we're thinking very open-ended about actions and tools and what even is a tool. Does it need to be digital? Can it be something analog? Can it be something like a human connection. Those are things that we're learning when we ask communities about the different tools that they need and resources that they need. \n\nOne thing that we're really trying to take seriously in terms of software—there's Mapeo, there's Terrastories and frequently, we get inquiries where a community might write to us and say, “Hey, I love this. How do I use this? How do I get started?” and the only thing that we have to provide is a software guide of here's how you install it, or here's how you set it up and things like that. But the question they're asking is much bigger. They're asking, “How do I get started? How do I find resources? How do I make a team? [laughs] How do I apply this thing that you've created?” We usually don't have anything for that. \n\nThat's where the accompaniment comes in where we can walk somebody through that process, or perhaps share a case study of somebody else who has, but there's no real resources to target that and that's really what communities are asking and then when they find out that something like that doesn't exist, they say, “Hmm, I don't know. I won't download this application, or use it because it's too complicated. I don't have a sense of how to really apply it in practice.” \n\nSo that's what we're trying to do with the Earth Defenders Toolkit is providing guides on how to get started, how to even figure out what kind of action to take. For a community in the Amazon and the Ecuadorian Amazon that's facing petroleum concessions being given out in their lens like, how do you fight that? How do you take action? That's such a huge phenomenon that it can be hard to figure out how to even meaningfully fight back against that. It may take time also to figure out what that looks like and so, we try to provide guides, or case studies of how other communities have taken action as well. In some cases, using software successfully so for example, mapping software to create maps.\n\nWe'll also while generally always recognizing that it's much bigger than the tools, it's also the human networks; the solidarity that comes out of using a software and the processes around it can be just as meaningful, if not more than the tool itself. So honoring that broad ecosystem that exists around the usage of a tool is what we're trying to create materials about and how to engender that and how to meaningfully use tools as part of this broader scaffolding.\n\nJACOB: And proving out because there's always the story of seeing a piece of technology and like, “Oh yeah, we'll use this and it’s going to solve all of our problems,” but there's no buy-in in the team, or the community, or as a group. How can a community prove out, “Oh yeah, it’s going to solve this very specific problem and look how exciting this is.”\n\nRUDO: Yeah. I think one of it is seeing it be created and playing a part in that. Like, filing a request of oh, well, this is almost exactly what we need, but can it also do this one thing and then seeing that happen and knowing that that was your request that made that happen is, I think a huge part of it. Right, Mae this also goes to Ruby for Good in how stakeholders of projects become involved in it and really start to embrace it.\n\nMAE: Absolutely.\n\nRUDO: They play a role actually in the creation of it and so, that generally is helpful in terms of ownership. If you've developed a project, or designed a project, rather than having somebody else to design it and bring it to you, you feel more ownership over the process, you feel like it's yours and a lot of the communities have expressed that. Like Mapeo is ours, we had a role in building it, I think is a huge part of it and then the other thing is seeing other communities use it and what they've been able to accomplish. \n\nIt's also really important for especially local communities and indigenous peoples to see how another indigenous community has taken action is hugely inspiring for themselves because they are fighting the same things we are with the same constraints and they've been able to do this. We want to do that, too. So I think knowing about those other stories of communities can be really helpful, too. \n\nI would love to hear more from me as well about how what your experience has been like working with one of these projects, which is Terrastories.\n\nMAE: Sure, yeah. Thanks for asking. The first year that Terrastories, which apparently was 2018, was that Ruby for Good, I was leading a different team and I was so jealous because I didn't know about this project and I wanted to be part of it from the very first moment and then later on, I did have the pleasure of co-leading a team for a virtual Ruby for Good. \n\nWhat I love most about the Terrastories project, second to the part I was saying about it being in existence because of indigenous request and interest, is that anyone can contribute. Tou could just read the Read Me and send a Slack message through Ruby for Good Slack, “Hey, we were wondering about this.” You don't have to be a developer. But people who are new developers, the team and all the different people that have ever been involved in coding the pterosaurs repo are super supportive of any brand-new coder. Like if you've never even committed to GitHub before, or never done open source before, there's a lot of community building.\n\nWhat inspires me is the energy of that, of let's all do whatever it is that we can in that moment and let's all gain more skills to work toward a world we want to be living in and want our future generations to live in. It's this really resonant thing going on between how it happens and what it is and where it leads us all together. \n\nSo that's pretty much my answer. I get inspired by community and building a future that I dream of and meaning fellow dreamers, like everybody on this call. Just want to encourage anybody who might have a concrete interest in Terrastories and that visual video storytelling app to consider trying to get involved. We'll leave some links in the show notes about how to get ahold of Rudo, who is amazing and can direct anybody to anybody else. [chuckles] You'll find a way to become involved if Rudo is there. [laughs] I think that's probably what I would share. \n\nMANDY: I was involved in 2018 with Terrastories and I was just blown away from the second I heard about it. I was like, “That's the team I want to be on,” and it was more because I’m not – yeah, I am technical, I need to stop having this imposter syndrome. I am technical, but I'm not a coder. \n\nBut I loved the whole concept behind Terrastories, especially it was because I'm a reader. I love to read. I love memoirs. I love history, the whole concept behind Terrastories and just right now, there's oral traditions, oral traditions, everything is passed down and as people are unfortunately, dying, or those stories are getting lost. So now the big draw for me was that this is how these stories are getting told and they'll be here for future generations and that that won't be the case anymore. And now that you know and also, there's that what's it called? Is it the game that they play the telephone game and it's like, “Well, you said this,” and then it gets turned into, “Well, they said this,” and then it's completely wrong by the end of the time, it gets the whole way down the telephone line? \n\nThe visual storytelling is just so compelling because you will actually have this concrete stuff now that you can actually go and look up because technology is advanced. I don't have that with my grandparents. I only know what I've been told and who knows if those things are even true! [chuckles] So I love that this exists and I love that this is a way to preserve history as a whole.\n\nRUDO: Right. Yeah, totally, Mandy. I think that's what's so inspiring about it. Of course, it came from an indigenous community and their specific needs, but really, this is something that's applicable to all of us. Because everybody has oral histories in their own family history that has been passed down from generation to generation and that we may lose at some point as well, or like you're saying, the telephone game, or changes, or just perhaps details that are not quite so clear. \n\nFor any community, really, whether it's a subculture, people talk a lot about oral histories of underground music, for example and to different venues in a city. Terrastories can be used to map something like that, or your own personal family, history of migration, for example, and where people came from. I feel like as humans, we all live place bound lives and so, an application like this is really applicable and useful to everybody. \n\nJACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to wrap up by everyone reflecting on something that they're going to take away from this conversation, maybe have a call-to-action. Well, first of all, I have wanted to do the Ruby for Good in D.C., I think every summer since 2018 and for every single summer, there was a reason why I couldn’t do it. [chuckles] The pandemic of course, being last year, [chuckles] but no, and I can't do it this year. I don't even know when it’s happening.\n\nAny who, I think it's probably time to get on the GitHub page and see how we can get involved because I have been trying to find ways to connect in new ways with new people because of the pandemic and this seems like an interesting way to do it while maybe hopefully contributing something that I might be perfectly good at. So I guess, that's my takeaway.\n\nMANDY: Cool. So yeah, on that note, I will say that I was just informed yesterday via email that Ruby for Good is happening this year. It's going to be from September 23rd to 26th at the Shepherd's Spring Retreats. That is in Sharpsburg, Maryland. So I'm planning on going, I know our fellow friend and panelist, Casey Watts, is going. Mae, are you coming? \n\nMAE: Oh yeah, I don't miss Ruby for Good. \n\nMANDY: Rudo, will you be there this year?\n\nRUDO: I have to check and see if I'm around.\n\nMANDY: Okay.\n\nRUDO: Date wise. Yeah, I'd love to.\n\nMANDY: It’s actually longer. The last one I was at was only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I think they're actually adding a day to it this year. So it's going to be four days and I will have to leave a day early because I, unfortunately, have another commitment that I have to come back for. But I'm planning on being there and if you want to go, I suggest you go to rubyforgood.org and sign up. Tickets do tend to go fast and there's an option to just get a ticket if you are paying by yourself, or if you're perhaps a bigger company and feel like donating, or sponsoring a cause like Terrastories, or the other causes that we talked about throughout this episode. There are options for you to be a sponsor and you should check it out.\n\nMAE: Thanks, Mandy. Yeah, same for Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit. These projects, like Rudo said, depend on support from donors as well. So in our middle of the pandemic situation where we are right now, all of these kinds of things to preserve and protect goodness in our world and the ability for humans to be here at all, [chuckles] as much as you can contribute, please consider that.\n\nFor my reflection, I loved the part, Rudo where you were talking just at the very beginning about being able to adapt and learn and I am naturally good at that, but can sometimes not think of that necessarily as a super skill and you were reluctant to do so also. [laughs] But anyway, it just reinspired me to be more proud of the things I can do and that ties into some of the stuff Mandy was talking about, too and like, no, actually I do do this. So y'all gave me a nice boost to that today.\n\nRUDO: Awesome. So maybe I'll go last on inspirations. So for me, for the past 3, or 4 years, it's been just tremendously inspiring to work and volunteering open source developers and with Terrastories, I think the last time I checked, there were more than 60 people had contributed to the code and that's just a code. That's not even talking about designers, or people who have just had an idea, or a suggestion, or things like that. They're not documented on something like GitHub and it's just been really tremendously inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. \n\nIn the pandemic, we've let that lapse a little bit because of course, everybody has priorities in their lives and other things are going on, but it's really inspiring me again to start building more community again and to start sharing more of the word of Terrastories and being more involved in that.\n\nAnd then the other thing is, I think to go back to the beginning again about everybody can be a coder is to motivate myself to do more of this and just get to that point where you realize like, “Oh gosh, now I'm suddenly –” like you were saying Mandy in terms of the podcast suddenly, you're in charge of this now. [chuckles] But it started with just little steps here and there to continue that journey for myself and to become more of a better developer and to own that title instead of being like, “No, I'm not a developer. I just happened to know how to do a few things with code.” [laughs]\n\nMAE: I'm so proud of you! You said to be a better developer. Yes!\n\nRUDO: First time I’ve ever said it. [laughs]\n\nMAE: You heard it here, folks.\n\nMANDY: Yes, I love it. I think we would all do that more as people is you know what, I am going to do this, or I can do this, or get rid of that imposter syndrome. \n\nWell, Rudo, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We really appreciated having you here and I hope to see you at Ruby for Good in September.\n\nTo everyone else, I urge you to check out the show notes, get involved. We provide transcripts. We also have a Greater Than Code Slack committee, which Rudo will also be getting an invite to for being a guest. You can come talk to us and hang out there. You can go to our Patreon page to get into that. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode, or if you can't afford to donate, or give, just DM me on Twitter and I'll let you in as long as you’re also greater than code. And with that, we will see you all next week.Special Guest: Rudo Kemper.Sponsored By:Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join.","content_html":"02:45 - Rudo’s Superpower: Being Pretty Good At Lots of Things!
\n\n13:14 - Digital Democracy & Terrastories
\n\n27:39 - Defining an “Earth Defender”
\n\n\n\n30:40 - Community Collaboration/Development Best Practices Without Overstepping Boundaries
\n\n35:52 - Getting Involved/Supporting This Work
\n\n45:03 - Experiences Working w/ These Projects
\n\n47:33 - Oral Traditions & Storytelling: Preserving History
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Getting involved and connecting virtually.
\n\nMandy: Register for Ruby For Good! Happening in-person this year from September 23-26 at the Shepherd's Spring Retreat, in Sharpsburg, Maryland!
\n\nMae: Being able to adapt and learn as a superskill. Be proud of the things you can do.
\n\nRudo: It’s inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.
\n\nMAE: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code. My name is Mae Beale and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore, who will introduce our guest.
\n\nMANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy and I'm here with Rudo Kemper.
\n\nHe is a human geographer with a background in archives and digital storytelling, and a lifelong technology tinkerer. For the past decade, he has worked in solidarity with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Amazon to map their ancestral lands and document their traditional knowledge and oral histories. He is passionate about co-creating and applying technology to support marginalized communities in defending their right to self-determination and representation, and being in control of telling their own stories.
\n\nRudo currently works with Digital Democracy, where he is accompanying local communities across the globe in defending their lands, and stewarding the development of the Earth Defenders Toolkit, a new collaborative space for earth defender communities and their allies. He also serves on the executive boards of Native Land Digital and the International Society for Participatory Mapping, and is one of the core stewards of the open-source geostorytelling application, Terrastories. Rudo is originally from Curaçao, but currently based in Springfield, Virginia.
\n\nAnd I know personally, Mae and I have both gotten to work with Rudo at Ruby for Good. I was in D.C. I'm not sure where you were, Mae. But before we delve into that, we do need to ask our standard question from Greater Than Code, which is what is your superpower, Rudo and how did you acquire it?
\n\nRUDO: [laughs] Okay. I love it. Thanks Mandy. It's so great to be on the podcast and to be having this conversation with you all, this is really exciting.
\n\nMy superpower and how did I acquire it? I think the way that I usually answer is that I don't have any one superpower. I'm not great at anything, but I'm pretty good at lots of things and I've acquired that from just having different roles and just done different things across my life in my career, where I'm able to kind of mess with a little bit of code but I'm not a developer, I've made maps before, but I'm not an expert cartographer in that way either. I speak some languages based off of places that I've lived, but not fluently. [laughs] You get the idea.
\n\nSo I think that's kind of my super power is just being pretty decent at a lot of stuff, but not amazing at any one thing. I don't know if that's a typical answer or not, but [laughs] that's what comes to mind.
\n\nMANDY: That's a great answer! I like it. I like it; being good at a lot of things is a good skill to have.
\n\nRUDO: Being decent at a lot of things, let's not get too out of hand here.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: Well, it’s awesome, Rudo because it's not just that you have acquired some skills. I'll try to go in line with what you're putting down here on the good, although I have some personal experience to disagree, [chuckles] but I'll follow you. But it seems like you are always learning new skills and picking up new things that you're able to be adept at very quickly. So I don't know if you have any further thoughts about how did you learn how to learn so well and so quickly?
\n\nRUDO: Wow. I think by necessity, [chuckles] like you're just put into a position where you find yourself having to learn something completely on the fly.
\n\nFor example, I recently joined Digital Democracy in November and one of the projects that I started to work with is this Earth Defenders Toolkit, where I pretty much discovered right away that I had to play the role of a product manager. Now I've worked with product managers before, including yourself, Mae, on some Ruby for Good projects, but I've never had to do it before, or really had a good sense of what that entails.
\n\nSomebody told me two months into this project and trying to figure out how to basically coordinate a lot of moving pieces and keeping track of a roadmap, et cetera, et cetera, “Rudo, you're basically a product manager right now. You should know that,” and I'm like, “Okay, let me look up on Google what product manager means and what that all entails,” and that was helpful because I'm like, “Okay, got it.” This is kind of what I've been doing on the fly without much knowledge, or thought put into it and then you learn because you have no choice. [laughs] So I feel like it's been a lot of that.
\n\nAlso, when I was younger, I would apply for jobs where I'm not exactly sure how to do the thing yet, but two weeks before the job, you figure out what that is. And then the job on the first day, like, “All right, I know how to like mess with a little bit of HTML CSS now because I just spent a few nights brushing up on that.”
\n\nAnd then just also, in my more professional work in South America, you find yourselves in positions very often where you figure out how to do things very quickly working with indigenous peoples and certain contexts where there's a lot of specific local knowledge that is important for you to know and you just pick that up as you go. So I feel like it's been a lot of kind of, sort of ad hoc learning and then after you do a lot of that, you become more mentally, I think trained to do that more often.
\n\nMAE: Absolutely. Love it. Yeah.
\n\nMANDY: I can totally relate to that because that's why I'm here. 12 years ago. My daughter is turning 12 next week.
\n\nRUDO: Hey, congrats!
\n\nMANDY: And I know exactly how long I've been in tech because it's from almost the exact day she's been born. So I was never interested in getting into tech, or it was never a thing that I had planned on doing, but I can really identify that just out of necessity, getting in there and finding myself in a place where I always saw myself in a job. I was waitressing and as a single parent and doing it alone, you can imagine bartending isn't a very lucrative career, or easy-to-have career for someone who has to work till 2, or 3 o'clock in the morning.
\n\nSo I was like, “Where can I find any job that I can work online that's not a scheme, or multilevel, or sales because I'm just not a salesperson.” No offense to anyone who is, I think salespeople are great. I just didn't like really laid back in the fact that you really don't have to buy this thing unless you want to. [laughs] So I make a really crappy salesperson.
\n\nBut learning how to do things on necessity and 12 years later, here I am. Actually, I started out just being the person who produced these shows and now, here I am second time being a panelist because I've grown into that self-confidence in that I feel like maybe I don't code, but I still have technology skills that I've come into and picked up along my 12-year career that I can also contribute to Greater Than Code conversations. So I love it.
\n\nRUDO: Awesome. Yeah. That sounds totally relatable in that regard where you figure out how to do the little things and then eventually, those become bigger things and before you know it, you're running the ship. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, and a lot of it is reputation too, which I'm guessing that is where you are. Like, if you're just one of those kinds of people that jumps in and put yourself in these situations, that can be really, really scary sometimes and then all of a sudden, people are asking you for more things and they're like, “Oh, can you do this?” and I'm like thinking to myself, “No, but I'm going to learn.”
\n\nRUDO: Right.
\n\nMANDY: So when somebody always asks me, “Can you do this thing? Can I hire you to do this thing?” I'm like, “I have no idea how to do this thing.” I will learn to do this thing and just they say fake it till you make it, I guess that's what I did for 12 years. So that's how I'm here. [chuckles]
\n\nBut we're not here to tell them about my story. We are here to talk about Ruby for Good and especially Terrastories and Digital Democracy and all the stuff that you do that's improving our world as a whole.
\n\nI just want to quickly say that our friend, Jacob Stoebel, has joined us so he is now here, too.
\n\nRUDO: Hey, Jacob.
\n\nMAE: Hey!
\n\nJACOB: Hi!
\n\nMANDY: So I'm excited to get into the meat of this conversation and where should we start?
\n\nMAE: Well, if it's okay, I would love to add one thing to what we were just talking about, where I thought going into coding that it was something that is masterable. I didn't that actually the whole entire time, you're just reteaching yourself, or you're just teaching yourself things that you've never seen before.
\n\nSo I tell people that I get paid to solve puzzles I've never seen before and that's a pretty good life [chuckles] and it's very similar to what both of you are describing and what I know of both of you. I still feel it sometimes, but there's this orientation that the coders, or the code is the most important part, which just isn't. being in community and figuring out how to connect people and make things happen, that's what all of y'all do brilliantly.
\n\nSo anyway, I just want to say from the perspective of being a coder, it’s like that's one part of what makes things happen and so many coders I know have so many projects that just never see the light of day because they don't have all of these other pieces to pull it together, or connections, or the ability to make them. So I just want to effusively credit both of you with being amazing and helping all of us be here right now. So way to go and thank you.
\n\nRUDO: I love that. I actually just want to add to that before I started working with coders and developers and getting into the more direct tech development space, I had this idea that the programmers are totally people that mastered to know how to do this entire code base. I can just pull different pieces of code from nothing and there's very systematic kind of way and that was my conception of the coder and then I started working with developers.
\n\nInitially threw me for good and now with Digital Democracy, I realized it's exactly as you say, Mae. It's problem-solving like, “Okay, well, let's look at that. Let's examine what this does and mess with it and figure out how to get it to behave the way that we want to,” which is actually how I do things, too and it made me feel like, “Oh, wow, actually, maybe I could one day become a coder because they think and work exactly as I do just at a higher capacity, of course. It was more of a toolkit, if you will. But the methodology is pretty much the same. It’s really cool.
\n\nJACOB: It really is. It's the attitude of given enough time, I theoretically could learn anything, but that doesn't mean I want to because there's only so many seconds I have in my life. But theoretically, if it feels worth it, I can do it.
\n\nMAE: I think that's true for anyone ideally. I used to play pool full time and someone asked this famous pool player, who I was standing next to and who I know, and they said, “Well, do you think that Mae can be a pro pool player?” and he said the same thing you just said, Jacob, like, “Well, yeah, if she puts enough time in, of course she can.” So there's this thing about mastery is more about time commitment.
\n\nI tell my niece all the time, she rolls her eyes, but I ask her, “How do you succeed, or get good at something?” and she's like, “You do it a lot,” and I'm like, “What else?” She goes, “You fail.” [laughs] Like I've got her trained on this is how you just have to put in the time.
\n\nRudo, it's now been, I think 7 years since we first met that you have been stewarding this Terrastories program and your commitment and devotion to this project and just effusiveness in general help it continue to thrive and I'm just so excited that you're here.
\n\nI don't know if it would make sense for you to maybe share with our listeners something about either how you came into Digital Democracy through the Terrastories angle, or if you wanted to go from Digital Democracy back out, whichever way might be just some framing of we said a lot of words so far and I don't know that everybody knows what – I don't definitely know that I know what they all mean.
\n\nRUDO: Sure. Yeah. Gosh, has it been 7 years already? Man, time flies. [laughs] It's been quite a journey, no doubt. Yeah, I think the way I would frame that is more like by entry point of like how I got started working with code and doing Terrastories and how that all emerged.
\n\nSo it was a little bit of background. I've always had a little bit of a background in web development. I used to build basic websites in the early 2000s and I know a little bit of HTML and CSS and so, I've always had that in my back pocket later working with WordPress and stuff like that.
\n\nI joined an organization in 2014 called the Amazon Conservation Team where basically my role was doing participatory mapping with indigenous people. So by training, I've background in geography and so, that's what a lot of my work has been in the past 7, or 8 years is working with communities to help them map their lens and to do that in a participatory way. That means we're not doing it, we're helping communities use the tools, build capacity to do it themselves.
\n\nSo I was working with the community in Suriname, which is in South America. Dutch-speaking country with an Afro-descendant group called the Matawai and we were doing this participatory mapping project where they were – it's really amazing, actually. It's this community that the ancestors are formerly escaped slaves that were brought over in the 1700s and were able to escape into the rainforest. They fought against the colonial power at the time, which was the Dutch, and they successfully fought for their freedom to exist there and they continue to live there today.
\n\nIt's this really kind of amazing community. They have a lot of pride in their history of course, as well and there's a lot of storytelling about the first time that their ancestors arrived in a completely new world, new forest, new things to eat, [chuckles] new medicines, completely different space and had to adapt to living there and have a lot of really fascinating stories about their ancestors. What they first did and where they first settled and what are the sacred spaces and almost mythological stories about their history that are really informative for who they are as a people. It's part of their self-identity is this amazing history.
\n\nSo we were doing this mapping work with this community basically helping them use technology like GPS and smartphone applications to map their lands and out of that came this desire to want to do more. Because when you're mapping, it's place names, but that's only a part of the puzzle. It's only a part of the story. There's so much richness and information and knowledge about places that people are carrying. They basically carry with them in their heads. Basically, the mapping spurred this broad community level reflection of wanting to do more to capture that oral history that's contained by the elders and so, that spurred a desire to want to capture some of that.
\n\nLong story short, we start working with this community to record oral histories and we were trying to think of creative ways that we could use technology to maybe produce something that would appeal to the young people especially. Like younger people anywhere, the kids in the Matawai had cell phones and they're not really so interested in sitting around listening to the stories of their elders.
\n\nWe wanted to create this new technology, or some way to make it exciting for them to learn about their oral histories. With my previous hacky web developer background, I'm like, “Well, we could probably maybe spin up, I don't know, an offline WordPress, or something with some interactive maps. We'd get it working on local hosts, it'll be fine.
\n\nMAE: It’ll take like two months; we’ll have it rolling.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah. No big deal. I knew about Wham Stacks and stuff where you can locally have servers and like, “Yeah, we'll figure it out. No worries.” So we tried to do that and it was not quite so easy. Interactive maps, as it turns out, are very hard to get running offline. They're very dependent on APIs and all kinds of stuff that's available on the internet and that's where that industry is going, especially. So that was the first thing. The second thing is you need to get it working on smartphones and all that. Basically have it running in the jungle turned out to be a little more complicated than anticipated. [chuckles]
\n\nSo we had a lot of setbacks where we tried to do that ourselves and we tried to hire some consultants that were interested, but then gradually ducked out after they themselves realized like, “Hmm, this is tricky, I don't know if I can do this.”
\n\nAnd then one thing led to another, after a long year of just trying to put this application together, we ended up encountering a network called Ruby for Good, which is what Mae as a part of as well and I think has been featured on this podcast before and basically, it's this amazing collective of volunteer developers that like to build software for good and that can be something like a diaper service to get diapers that are no longer being used by a family into the hands of another family. So building software to engender and enable those kinds of services, or it can be building really amazing storytelling applications for communities in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
\n\nAs we told the community about that, we pitched the ideas like, wouldn't it be amazing to build this application and the community really loves it and was inspired by it and out of nothing, the first Ruby for Good, which I think it was 2018, Mae, if I'm not mistaken.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. You might be right. I thought it was earlier, but.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah. Who knows? The idea was around longer. In 2018, there was a D.C.-based events where a team got together and was like, “All right, how do we make this happen?” I was fortunate enough to be there as well and in the span of a weekend, an application materialized out of nothing, which is amazing to see. Of course, it was buggy, it was scrappy, it didn't do everything we needed it to, that took years before we got to the point where we even talked about an MVP, or anything like that.
\n\nBut that was just so powerful and incredible to see what you can do with a group of people that are motivated and that want to help out and that was really, I think my first foray into code and that was mainly watching people do things and being like, “Okay, that makes sense. This little module does this,” and eventually, I got to be good enough that I could make little changes, like changing the color of something and hiding something and then making it appear again and eventually, smaller, but still more in-depth changes to the application.
\n\nMAE: Love it. So cool, Rudo and Ruby for Good, what's cool is it's not only developers, but there are designers, product managers, other community people, and generally, we try to have someone from the organization that we're serving come to the event and Rudo was one of the first people that that actually worked out with. So there was an event and there might've been one other group that had a representative. So it was like, “Whoa, hey, hi!” It was really fun to have Rudo there.
\n\nAnd then another connection is one of the organizers was Brazilian and so really was motivated to help with Amazonian preservation and also had a connection to Mapbox and Mapbox was a huge supporter early on for Terrastories to get off the ground, too. So there's just so many different connections that have come along to contribute and it's just such an honor in the world to have opportunities to contribute. So thank you, Rudo for continuing to make that be available to people to help with.
\n\nWhat I'm curious about is just to rewind the timeline just slightly to when and how did the Amazon Conservation Team get connected and asked to make these maps and then it became –? Because one of the things that moves me most about this project is that it was indigenous requested, indigenous-led partnerships and so many times, especially from the States, there's a lot white savior stuff and like, we're going to bring our modern technology to help you do….
\n\nSo just the fact that this exists at all and the way it came to exist is just so beautiful and I was hoping maybe if you share a little bit more of that, people might be interested to hear.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah, absolutely. So the way the ACT operates in many other organizations that are very grassroots and oriented towards working closely with communities take on a similar approach, which is first of all, to only take action when invited. So instead of coming to a community with an idea in advance and being like, “Hey, wouldn't it be cool if?” It's a request that comes from the community.
\n\nIn the case of this example of the Matawai from Suriname, they had learned about similar mapping work done elsewhere and wanted to do their own map and inquired in their network who can we speak to that can help us make a map like this and that's what led them to be connected with ACT. So it's that initial contact from the community that's really key to that and then there's different modalities of that, too as it plays out.
\n\nAnother concept that's really important that doesn't get practiced enough, to be honest is very simple, but it's always to first listen before taking any action. Such a simple concept, but it's so often not practiced, especially when it comes to NGO worlds where there's funders and they have their own deliverables and timelines and things like this and they want to see something. No, listen to the community first and see what they want and take the time to do that as well.
\n\nWith indigenous peoples, this is especially relevant because decision-making and consensus building is not the same based on community to community, it differs. So taking the time to go by the local processes and hanging out a while and not showing up only for 48 hours and then leaving, expecting to have a fully fleshed idea of what that community needs. It takes time and it can evolve as well.
\n\nSo having that open-endedness is really important when it comes to working with communities and the flexibility for projects to adapt and evolve, and to never come with solutions that are pre-made. Never. That's so pivotal.
\n\nAnd then the final thing, the final piece of that to take it one extra level—and this is something that Digital Democracy we take very seriously—is co-creation. So when solutions are proposed and specifically tools, even digital tools, and those start to be worked on, define ways of co-creating that as much as possible with communities.
\n\nI would even say for example, with Ruby for Good, I was able to show up and that's fine, but ideally, somebody from the community would have been able to show up as well to have that kind of co-creation relationship be even more direct and more complete rather than via proxy. Of course, that was the best we could do, but ideally, we want community members to be as involved in a co-creation of technology as possible. That can be tricky. It can be hard, it takes time. Donors don't understand that; it's very hard in our space to find donors that really realize what that takes and what that entails. But that's what we believe is the right way forward.
\n\nMapeo, which is one of the tools that we're building at Digital Democracy, with Terrastories as well, there's always this process of constantly verifying and validating if what we're building is actually matching the needs and if not, what needs to be adapted and that goes from the code and how it's built and the different principles that communities find to be very important like data sovereignty to the user interface.
\n\nOne example, people in the Amazon sometimes have eyesight issues and don't have glasses and so, looking at a phone and a small application can sometimes not be very helpful. So it's across the board from the backends to the way that the frontend of applications is built and of course, that's technology, but really this goes to any project design to have that co-creation being really core of it.
\n\nJACOB: Are there ongoing needs that have to be fulfilled? Support if something goes wrong, or maintaining infrastructure, like, I don't know what any of that might mean.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah, this is a huge part of it and it's something that at Digital Democracy for example, there's a technology team, which is software engineers, developers, UX designers, product managers, all of that, and then we have a programs team, which is more folks and that's what I'm serving over at Digital Democracy, where our role is that accompaniments and ensuring that the communities that are using the tools have the resources that they need, whether that's training guides, or modules, or something breaks in the field and they need support and that happens a lot.
\n\nIt is one of the, I don't want to say tensions, but difficulties in doing this work is that we are developing open source technology and things can sometimes break and communities have expectations. Sometimes when something breaks in the field, if it's not clear why it broke, the person might feel like it's their fault somehow, that they somehow broke it and that can be very tricky to work with. Especially in the case of the pandemic where nobody is able to travel and so, there's a level of remote support, so that has to happen.
\n\nWe're very sensitive to that ensuring that while co-creating and involving communities in the early stages of software is very powerful, it can also lead to disappointment if it's not done in the right way and that people aren't clear about well, this is an early phase at this particular software and that people don't feel like guinea pigs as well that they're just being used to develop a software that's not working and there's a lot of frustration that can result from that.
\n\nMAE: Absolutely. Yeah, we experienced that—we being me and anyone else with whom I've done any kind of software venture that is for good whether, or not through Ruby for Good—and to have the cultural barriers and historical exploitation to try to figure out how to mitigate that is super complicated. So awesome that that is the priority of Digital Democracy.
\n\nSomething I noticed from Digital Democracy’s website is the use of the term earth defender and you're talking about co-creating and listening to the people themselves, I'm curious if you might be willing to share with us some more about what defines an earth defender. Do people call themselves earth defenders? Who gets named an earth defender? Who gets to wear the earth defender sash, or superhero costume, and how does that work? And if it's relevant, how did Digital Democracy come to have that as a priority and a phrase that's got as much privacy as it does on its website.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah. I love it. It's such a good question. So whenever we have any kind of session, or workshop about Earth Defenders Toolkit, or any discussion, any chance that we have to talk to people, we always start with that question actually of like, what does earth defender mean to you? If you were to interpret this term, what is your takeaway? What comes to mind when thinking about this? We almost intentionally don't define it because we want people to be able to have their own version, or definition of it, or their own interpretation, because it can mean so much.
\n\nSo definitely, we're thinking of some things when we started to use the term. Of course, we've done a lot of work with indigenous peoples in the Amazon, more recently in Africa and Southeast Asia as well, but there's also other communities, like local communities, that are not indigenous, that are also on the front lines of fighting for their rights to their land, or protecting biodiversity, fighting extractivism taking place that's nearby, and these kinds of big global forces that are threatening the livelihoods of both lands and communities on a local basis.
\n\nSo we wanted to have something a little bit more broad to be able to essentially, apply to many different communities that are in that same position. But then at the same time, I think gesturing to your question, Mae anybody can be an earth defender if you're taking an action to defend the earth. That can be any of us as well. That can be somebody who wants to get involved to do something, to contribute to that broad pursuits and that can be many things. That can be climate action, that can be working on the front lines with communities combating extractivism, like I said, it can be political activism, it can be many different things.
\n\nSo this notion of earth defender, I know we haven't defined it, or you might've even looked on the website, like, “Let's see how they define it,” and we've almost intentionally kept it that way because we want it to be an open definition where people can decide for themselves what that means.
\n\nAnd then also, the platform that we're building, Earth Defenders Toolkit, also has an intentionally open-ended structure where the resources that we're providing focus on some things that we hear a lot about from communities in terms of pain points and obstacles and resources that they wish existed. But there's a lot of room to again, co-create it with anybody that wants to use it and own it and make this be a hub, or a platform, or a community. So that lack of parameterization is almost intentional there.
\n\nJACOB: This is making me think in – well, if I have any incorrect assumptions about what I meant to say, please check them, but I'm thinking about a community that has been doing something along the lines of what you're talking about and they've been doing it well for a long time and they have a lot of genuine connections in their own community, but they've never made software before.
\n\nI'm thinking about collaborating with a community and wanting them to be the leaders, but at the same time, helping them understand what are good ways to go about, what are best practices to go about making quality software, which might not – I come from the nonprofit world in a previous life and I think those work cultures are very different and for a good reason. But I'm wondering like how helping a community pick up those best practices while also letting them be in charge seems like an interesting challenge to me.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's so interesting and I think of one community that, I haven't worked with them, but a colleague of mine has in Guyana where there was an application that was being built. I think sometimes when software is being developed, there's almost this intention to keep the community, or whoever it's serving out of the kitchen, if you will, out of the development process of what that looks like. In this case, in this community in Guyana, he tried to do the opposite and actually explain how the tech is built and why the pieces are what they are and what they're doing. This was in an indigenous community that, I think sometimes the assumption might be better not to involve them, or have them considering those kinds of technical details, even though in a way where you assume that indigenous people wouldn't understand that somehow. But in fact, they really gravitated towards that and actually appreciated the application all the more understanding how it's built and we actually got a lot of enthusiasm out of learning the technology.
\n\nI feel like it speaks to a broader interest in tech literacy and just how that as a whole, like when you work with the community on their tech literacy, it enables them to achieve things far beyond just a creation of one application. It has much more broad impact in terms of interacting with all technology. So it has a benefit beyond just the application development cycle itself. But also, I think we don't give people enough credit in terms of how much they actually are able to get involved in that process and make sense of the different pieces of the application. So there can be a huge benefit actually to having that.
\n\nI hope I articulated that well. I thought it was a really interesting question.
\n\nJACOB: No, definitely and I didn't have any particular answer in mind, [chuckles] but I just think it's an interesting problem because I think about my family, or my friends who were not in the tech industry and they just want technology to work. Like, they know what they want, they just want it to work. The best practice is iteration, which are really important like, I'm the stakeholder, this is the software that matters to me and then saying, “Hey, go use the software that works and doesn't do everything you told us you'd want us to do and tell us what you think,” [laughs] I just feel like would be just such a new concept to people who haven't worked in that way.
\n\nRUDO: Yeah. One of my colleagues once described this as the way that browsers used to tell you what was going on behind the scenes and then even if you don't know about technology, you can figure it out. You associate certain lines of texts that are obscure to you, but something happening in the application, even if you can't make sense of what exactly that is, or the sound of a modem, the old dial-up modems, and you could figure out by the sounds when it's actually connecting versus when it's [laughs] not doing its job.
\n\nTo give that slight exposure to what's going on with the tech can be really helpful and powerful for people that usually are shielded from that more backend stuff and then also might not have a sense of why something isn't working.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. Any project that I've been involved in helping people understand, not only how does technology work, but how to establish processes that have resilience and are able to be replicable and all of these more structural organizational things, how can we help improve that? Because it translates way beyond the specific project and that's another—oh, I don't know if I even love referencing this. I'm trying to think if I know of a different one. But that teach someone how to fish and then they can be able to self-sustain whereas, going and bringing some fish is a one-time situation. So yeah, I love that angle and thanks for bringing that up, Jacob. That's awesome.
\n\nIt's cool too, because it connects right into what I was going to ask next and I'm channeling Casey Watts a little bit in how if any listener wanted to be involved and that person could be a coder, they could not be a coder. How can people become involved and/or support this work, any part of the Earth Defender Toolkit? Rudo, you probably have a great idea of all the different ways in which any human could be of service, or connection, or whatever. I don't know if you already have a – hopefully, you have an elevator speech ready to go about this topic.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nRUDO: I think yeah. What occurs to me thinking about that question is that there's so many communities that need help with many, many, many different things and sometimes that can just be accessing resources, or just helping communicate what's going on in their lens to an outside audience, or help configuring phones, or help translating materials, or just being somebody who has exposure to how the Western world, or forces that are now emerging in their lens.
\n\nSo communities never needed help with the management of their own lands. But now that these external forces are frequently impacting their livelihoods, somebody who can help navigate those changes that are taking place is a tremendous need that so many communities express.
\n\nLike in the past couple of weeks, we've had a couple of forums, virtual, with communities in Africa. Just this morning actually, we had an Africa forum where they were saying something over a hundred different community members from Africa present where we were discussing basically what the work and what sort of actions are looking like in different parts of Africa, from Senegal to Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Congo and providing those opportunities for learning from one another and there was just so much requests for how can we apply this toolkit? How can we take similar actions where we are?
\n\nSo I think just anybody that wants to get involved, there's so many communities and the question isn't how to find those communities. In my own experience, just showing up somewhere is actually an effective way of finding a way to be helpful because you might have skills that you don't even know about, that could be something you take for granted. Just to name a silly example, file management, knowing how to navigate a directory of files with trees and subdirectories and things like that is something that a lot of people don't know, or quite understand because they didn't grow up with it like many of us did. Just little things that you might not think are valuable skills can actually be tremendous assets to a community that is trying to solve a problem, even before you even get to something like technical stuff like coding, or mapping, or whatever. Just being a resource is such a huge asset.
\n\nSo we are creating spaces for more communities to post help requests to we're dealing with this, is there anybody that can help us and vice versa. If you are somebody that wants to get involved, to write about what you have to offer. Under Earth Defender Toolkit, there's a form for that where let's say that you have 10 hours per week to dedicate to whatever it may be and anybody that wants to get in touch, that this is what you have to offer and what your skills are.
\n\nBeyond that, of course, there's if you are a programmer, if you are a developer, there's definitely open source software that one can contribute to and there's processes to plug into that. So in the Earth Defenders Toolkit, we do have a contribute page where there's lots of different ways to get involved. Financial, of course, is an elephant in the room. There's tons of communities that need support financially to be able to take actions, or to travel somewhere, or to get resources that they need. So there's all of that and we try to point to different places that responsibly where one can contribute in that regard. [laughs] I think that's what comes to mind.
\n\nMAE: Awesome. And what is the relationship between Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit like, what is the larger mission of Digital Democracy and how does this help fit in the picture?
\n\nRUDO: Yeah, so Digital Democracy is basically, we're an NGO. We're an odd NGO in the sense that we're a tech company in a way with a product manager and a roadmap and all that stuff and familiar processes, but we're a nonprofit. So we also then have to work with finding funding from a nonprofit space, which can be tricky for tech, because as I mentioned earlier, donors don't often understand exactly the work that we do and then the other thing is the programmatic company and for the tools that we're building.
\n\nIt’s interesting because we take on this value of tech Gnosticism, but then we're also building specific tools and so, our approach isn't done to like, “Hey, we have this hammer, let's go find nails.” It's still very inspired by this philosophy of not wanting to promote any kind of one tool in advance when starting to work with a community.
\n\nOut of that idea is where Earth Defender's Toolkit came from, which is this new platform where we're thinking very open-ended about actions and tools and what even is a tool. Does it need to be digital? Can it be something analog? Can it be something like a human connection. Those are things that we're learning when we ask communities about the different tools that they need and resources that they need.
\n\nOne thing that we're really trying to take seriously in terms of software—there's Mapeo, there's Terrastories and frequently, we get inquiries where a community might write to us and say, “Hey, I love this. How do I use this? How do I get started?” and the only thing that we have to provide is a software guide of here's how you install it, or here's how you set it up and things like that. But the question they're asking is much bigger. They're asking, “How do I get started? How do I find resources? How do I make a team? [laughs] How do I apply this thing that you've created?” We usually don't have anything for that.
\n\nThat's where the accompaniment comes in where we can walk somebody through that process, or perhaps share a case study of somebody else who has, but there's no real resources to target that and that's really what communities are asking and then when they find out that something like that doesn't exist, they say, “Hmm, I don't know. I won't download this application, or use it because it's too complicated. I don't have a sense of how to really apply it in practice.”
\n\nSo that's what we're trying to do with the Earth Defenders Toolkit is providing guides on how to get started, how to even figure out what kind of action to take. For a community in the Amazon and the Ecuadorian Amazon that's facing petroleum concessions being given out in their lens like, how do you fight that? How do you take action? That's such a huge phenomenon that it can be hard to figure out how to even meaningfully fight back against that. It may take time also to figure out what that looks like and so, we try to provide guides, or case studies of how other communities have taken action as well. In some cases, using software successfully so for example, mapping software to create maps.
\n\nWe'll also while generally always recognizing that it's much bigger than the tools, it's also the human networks; the solidarity that comes out of using a software and the processes around it can be just as meaningful, if not more than the tool itself. So honoring that broad ecosystem that exists around the usage of a tool is what we're trying to create materials about and how to engender that and how to meaningfully use tools as part of this broader scaffolding.
\n\nJACOB: And proving out because there's always the story of seeing a piece of technology and like, “Oh yeah, we'll use this and it’s going to solve all of our problems,” but there's no buy-in in the team, or the community, or as a group. How can a community prove out, “Oh yeah, it’s going to solve this very specific problem and look how exciting this is.”
\n\nRUDO: Yeah. I think one of it is seeing it be created and playing a part in that. Like, filing a request of oh, well, this is almost exactly what we need, but can it also do this one thing and then seeing that happen and knowing that that was your request that made that happen is, I think a huge part of it. Right, Mae this also goes to Ruby for Good in how stakeholders of projects become involved in it and really start to embrace it.
\n\nMAE: Absolutely.
\n\nRUDO: They play a role actually in the creation of it and so, that generally is helpful in terms of ownership. If you've developed a project, or designed a project, rather than having somebody else to design it and bring it to you, you feel more ownership over the process, you feel like it's yours and a lot of the communities have expressed that. Like Mapeo is ours, we had a role in building it, I think is a huge part of it and then the other thing is seeing other communities use it and what they've been able to accomplish.
\n\nIt's also really important for especially local communities and indigenous peoples to see how another indigenous community has taken action is hugely inspiring for themselves because they are fighting the same things we are with the same constraints and they've been able to do this. We want to do that, too. So I think knowing about those other stories of communities can be really helpful, too.
\n\nI would love to hear more from me as well about how what your experience has been like working with one of these projects, which is Terrastories.
\n\nMAE: Sure, yeah. Thanks for asking. The first year that Terrastories, which apparently was 2018, was that Ruby for Good, I was leading a different team and I was so jealous because I didn't know about this project and I wanted to be part of it from the very first moment and then later on, I did have the pleasure of co-leading a team for a virtual Ruby for Good.
\n\nWhat I love most about the Terrastories project, second to the part I was saying about it being in existence because of indigenous request and interest, is that anyone can contribute. Tou could just read the Read Me and send a Slack message through Ruby for Good Slack, “Hey, we were wondering about this.” You don't have to be a developer. But people who are new developers, the team and all the different people that have ever been involved in coding the pterosaurs repo are super supportive of any brand-new coder. Like if you've never even committed to GitHub before, or never done open source before, there's a lot of community building.
\n\nWhat inspires me is the energy of that, of let's all do whatever it is that we can in that moment and let's all gain more skills to work toward a world we want to be living in and want our future generations to live in. It's this really resonant thing going on between how it happens and what it is and where it leads us all together.
\n\nSo that's pretty much my answer. I get inspired by community and building a future that I dream of and meaning fellow dreamers, like everybody on this call. Just want to encourage anybody who might have a concrete interest in Terrastories and that visual video storytelling app to consider trying to get involved. We'll leave some links in the show notes about how to get ahold of Rudo, who is amazing and can direct anybody to anybody else. [chuckles] You'll find a way to become involved if Rudo is there. [laughs] I think that's probably what I would share.
\n\nMANDY: I was involved in 2018 with Terrastories and I was just blown away from the second I heard about it. I was like, “That's the team I want to be on,” and it was more because I’m not – yeah, I am technical, I need to stop having this imposter syndrome. I am technical, but I'm not a coder.
\n\nBut I loved the whole concept behind Terrastories, especially it was because I'm a reader. I love to read. I love memoirs. I love history, the whole concept behind Terrastories and just right now, there's oral traditions, oral traditions, everything is passed down and as people are unfortunately, dying, or those stories are getting lost. So now the big draw for me was that this is how these stories are getting told and they'll be here for future generations and that that won't be the case anymore. And now that you know and also, there's that what's it called? Is it the game that they play the telephone game and it's like, “Well, you said this,” and then it gets turned into, “Well, they said this,” and then it's completely wrong by the end of the time, it gets the whole way down the telephone line?
\n\nThe visual storytelling is just so compelling because you will actually have this concrete stuff now that you can actually go and look up because technology is advanced. I don't have that with my grandparents. I only know what I've been told and who knows if those things are even true! [chuckles] So I love that this exists and I love that this is a way to preserve history as a whole.
\n\nRUDO: Right. Yeah, totally, Mandy. I think that's what's so inspiring about it. Of course, it came from an indigenous community and their specific needs, but really, this is something that's applicable to all of us. Because everybody has oral histories in their own family history that has been passed down from generation to generation and that we may lose at some point as well, or like you're saying, the telephone game, or changes, or just perhaps details that are not quite so clear.
\n\nFor any community, really, whether it's a subculture, people talk a lot about oral histories of underground music, for example and to different venues in a city. Terrastories can be used to map something like that, or your own personal family, history of migration, for example, and where people came from. I feel like as humans, we all live place bound lives and so, an application like this is really applicable and useful to everybody.
\n\nJACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to wrap up by everyone reflecting on something that they're going to take away from this conversation, maybe have a call-to-action. Well, first of all, I have wanted to do the Ruby for Good in D.C., I think every summer since 2018 and for every single summer, there was a reason why I couldn’t do it. [chuckles] The pandemic of course, being last year, [chuckles] but no, and I can't do it this year. I don't even know when it’s happening.
\n\nAny who, I think it's probably time to get on the GitHub page and see how we can get involved because I have been trying to find ways to connect in new ways with new people because of the pandemic and this seems like an interesting way to do it while maybe hopefully contributing something that I might be perfectly good at. So I guess, that's my takeaway.
\n\nMANDY: Cool. So yeah, on that note, I will say that I was just informed yesterday via email that Ruby for Good is happening this year. It's going to be from September 23rd to 26th at the Shepherd's Spring Retreats. That is in Sharpsburg, Maryland. So I'm planning on going, I know our fellow friend and panelist, Casey Watts, is going. Mae, are you coming?
\n\nMAE: Oh yeah, I don't miss Ruby for Good.
\n\nMANDY: Rudo, will you be there this year?
\n\nRUDO: I have to check and see if I'm around.
\n\nMANDY: Okay.
\n\nRUDO: Date wise. Yeah, I'd love to.
\n\nMANDY: It’s actually longer. The last one I was at was only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I think they're actually adding a day to it this year. So it's going to be four days and I will have to leave a day early because I, unfortunately, have another commitment that I have to come back for. But I'm planning on being there and if you want to go, I suggest you go to rubyforgood.org and sign up. Tickets do tend to go fast and there's an option to just get a ticket if you are paying by yourself, or if you're perhaps a bigger company and feel like donating, or sponsoring a cause like Terrastories, or the other causes that we talked about throughout this episode. There are options for you to be a sponsor and you should check it out.
\n\nMAE: Thanks, Mandy. Yeah, same for Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit. These projects, like Rudo said, depend on support from donors as well. So in our middle of the pandemic situation where we are right now, all of these kinds of things to preserve and protect goodness in our world and the ability for humans to be here at all, [chuckles] as much as you can contribute, please consider that.
\n\nFor my reflection, I loved the part, Rudo where you were talking just at the very beginning about being able to adapt and learn and I am naturally good at that, but can sometimes not think of that necessarily as a super skill and you were reluctant to do so also. [laughs] But anyway, it just reinspired me to be more proud of the things I can do and that ties into some of the stuff Mandy was talking about, too and like, no, actually I do do this. So y'all gave me a nice boost to that today.
\n\nRUDO: Awesome. So maybe I'll go last on inspirations. So for me, for the past 3, or 4 years, it's been just tremendously inspiring to work and volunteering open source developers and with Terrastories, I think the last time I checked, there were more than 60 people had contributed to the code and that's just a code. That's not even talking about designers, or people who have just had an idea, or a suggestion, or things like that. They're not documented on something like GitHub and it's just been really tremendously inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves.
\n\nIn the pandemic, we've let that lapse a little bit because of course, everybody has priorities in their lives and other things are going on, but it's really inspiring me again to start building more community again and to start sharing more of the word of Terrastories and being more involved in that.
\n\nAnd then the other thing is, I think to go back to the beginning again about everybody can be a coder is to motivate myself to do more of this and just get to that point where you realize like, “Oh gosh, now I'm suddenly –” like you were saying Mandy in terms of the podcast suddenly, you're in charge of this now. [chuckles] But it started with just little steps here and there to continue that journey for myself and to become more of a better developer and to own that title instead of being like, “No, I'm not a developer. I just happened to know how to do a few things with code.” [laughs]
\n\nMAE: I'm so proud of you! You said to be a better developer. Yes!
\n\nRUDO: First time I’ve ever said it. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: You heard it here, folks.
\n\nMANDY: Yes, I love it. I think we would all do that more as people is you know what, I am going to do this, or I can do this, or get rid of that imposter syndrome.
\n\nWell, Rudo, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We really appreciated having you here and I hope to see you at Ruby for Good in September.
\n\nTo everyone else, I urge you to check out the show notes, get involved. We provide transcripts. We also have a Greater Than Code Slack committee, which Rudo will also be getting an invite to for being a guest. You can come talk to us and hang out there. You can go to our Patreon page to get into that. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode, or if you can't afford to donate, or give, just DM me on Twitter and I'll let you in as long as you’re also greater than code. And with that, we will see you all next week.
Special Guest: Rudo Kemper.
Sponsored By:
03:03 - Rony’s Superpower: Being a Space Cadet: Free-Willing Imagination, Insight, and Intuition
\n\n06:54 - Becoming Interested in Technology
\n\n10:30 - Unstructured Play and Maintaining a Sense of Wonder and Free-Spiritedness
\n\n15:15 - Power Structures and Hierarchies
\n\n35:04 - Using Technology to Decentralize Social Structures: Is it possible?
\n\n01:05:19 - The Game of Capitalism
\n\n01:09:39 - Are We Technology?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nTim: We as a global community, need to bring our drums to the drum circle.
\n\nChanté: How do we build decentralized guilds?
\n\nArty: 1) Breaking out of nets and creating opportunities to innovate, invent, rethink, and enable new things to happen. 2) How do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen?
\n\nRony: Empathy, Compassion, Imagination, Freedom, Courage.
\n\nBONUS:
\n\nThe lost classic "Fire" (from one of Rony’s early bands)
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 245. My name is Chanté Martinez Thurmond, and I am here with my friend, Tim Banks.
\n\nTIM: Hey, everybody! I’m Tim Banks, and I am here with my friend, Damian Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Hi, I'm Damian Burke and I'm here with my friend, Arty Starr.
\n\nARTY: Thank you, Damien, and I'm here with our guest today, Rony Abovitz.
\n\nThis is actually the second time Rony has been with us on the show. The first time we unfortunately had some problems with our audio recording. We had a really great conversation so, disappointing, but I'm sure we will have an even better conversation the second time around.
\n\nRony is a technology founder, pioneer inventor, visionary leader, and strategic advisor with a diverse background in computer-assisted surgery, surgical robots, AI, computer graphics, and visualization sensing advanced systems, media animations, spatial audio, and spatial computing XR.
\n\nRony has a strong history of creating new technology fields in businesses from the startup garage onward, including Magic Leap, the world's leading spatial computing company founded back in 2011. His new still start at Sun & Thunder he plans to launch in 2021 and prior to Magic Leap, he also founded MAKO Surgical, a medical software and robotics company specialized in manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance technology.
\n\nHe is deeply into film, art, animation, music recording, AI, robotics, ethics, and philosophy. He is also a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group advising a small group of deeptech startups and a few Fortune 50 companies, a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, and a two-time World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Rony.
\n\nRONY: Thank you for having me again.
\n\nARTY: It’s a pleasure. So our first question we always ask on this show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nRONY: I think my superpower is not being able to do a podcast the first time correctly. Actually, I think I had a really good response last time, but I think the main one is I’m just like a space cadet and you could translate that into just, I have a very freewheeling imagination so I think that's always been my superpower. I could always imagine, or have a creative idea around a problem and really imagine things that don't exist, that aren't there yet. I think that's been always really helpful in anything I've done. So that's probably my main superpower. I don't know what that would look like as a superhero outfit.
\n\nI think I gained a second achievement level, which is some level of insight, or intuition into knowing things, which I think it's really hard to explain, but I feel like I didn't have that. And then in college, it was a really interesting experience, which I probably won't get into a lot of detail here, but I think I gained that achievement level. I feel like I have both of those now.
\n\nI feel like I leveled up and gained this insight intuition kind of thing that I didn't have before and I think those two together have been helpful. So there's probably many more achievements to unlock, but I think I got those two so far in the game.
\n\nDAMIEN: You leveled up on intuition as a result of an experience in college.
\n\nRONY: Yes. It was an interesting experience. I had a transcendent experience.
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, that sounds exciting.
\n\nARTY: I think before my question was, how did you develop that? Tell us a little bit about your background. What kind of family did you come from? Was this something that you think was cultivated in childhood, or was this something that happened as you got to adolescence and then to into college?
\n\nRONY: My mom's a painter. So she's an artist and she was pregnant with me walking around the campus at Kent State during the Kent State shootings and had to run away to not be shot. That was kind of there, but not there. She was an art student at Kent State at the time. I think she said to me at some point, there was difficulty in the pregnancy such they had to give her some morphine, or something. It probably got into my brain [chuckles] so probably scrambled it a little bit. I'm not sure if I had all that, but who knows what they did back then.
\n\nSo there's a little bit of that, but my mom's a freewheeling artist so I grew up that way. Dad passed away a couple of years ago, but always entrepreneurial, also artistic. So had this freewheeling imaginative household where no one told you, you couldn't do anything. I think that actually helped a lot.
\n\nNobody was born with a silver spoon. Both my parents were born but I was dirt poor as you could imagine. My Dad grew up in a house that had no windows so when we'd visit, my grandmother’s chickens would literally fly through the window [laughs] and knock your head. When you're a kid, you think it's the greatest thing in the world. I think I swam in a bathtub that also served as the place to cheat fish. I think my Dad's mom would bring fish to the market and sell them, like a carp, or something and I thought they were my friends and didn't realize they were turning into dinner. I think that's why I became a vegetarian.
\n\nSo we grew up really poor on both sides. Everyone was self-made, freewheeling, and imaginative so that probably did help.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. I think for myself, too. Just growing up poor helped with my imagination; I just dreamed of all these amazing things I would one day have as an adult. So I happen to think it's a superpower, too. It's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing all that.
\n\nTIM: So I guess, what I'd like to know is when you’re coming from that kind of background, what first was your jumpstart into using technology, or being interested in technology?
\n\nRONY: I think I was always simultaneously interested in science and art at the exact same time, which is odd, which makes for a good misfit because either you're the art damaged kid in school and you hang out with the art crowd, or you're the science nerd and you hang out with – but I liked both so there's not really a good place where if you're both to hang out. Probably just being really curious about how everything works and what's going on behind the scenes. Like, why are things the way they are, trying to imagine them, but I'm not totally sure. I just sort of always was into both.
\n\nThat is a very good question. It's kind of asking if you're a fish, how did you get fins? I'm like, “I guess, they grew?” But I don't know, I just seem to be equally into that. Probably Star Wars, if you really get down to it. I saw Star Wars as a kid and suddenly, that's what you want to do. You want to build an X-wing, fly an X-wing, blow up the Death Star. That probably had a lot to do with it. Actually got to meet George Lucas, which was super awesome and I'm like, “You're responsible for my entire path in my life. Science and engineering, wanting to do all these crazy things. It's all your fault.” He was like, “Oh my God, don't blame me for this.” [chuckles]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Wow.
\n\nRONY: But no, it was in a funny way.
\n\nCHANTÉ: That's funny because the last time the conversation we had, Rony, we talked about all these cool people that you've met that have influenced you and I asked you like, “Is this a SIM? How are you meeting all these amazing people?” [laughs]
\n\nRONY: I'm pretty damn sure it's a SIM at this point.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDefinitely a SIM. I'm very close to that. [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: Become convinced now, for sure.
\n\nRONY: We can get into that later, if you want. I think it's a SIM. I'm not sure who's running it right now, but it’s a SIM. [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: [inaudible] wanting to do that.
\n\nARTY: So with all this creativity, what were some of the first things you started dreaming about building?
\n\nRONY: I think as a kid, I wanted to make a solar-powered airplane, which sounds like an odd thing, but I was weirdly into solar power. Like, I wanted solar-powered cars, I started to get solar cells from Radio Shack and soldered them up in stuff and spin motors. I'm like, “That's so cool, it's free, there's no battery needed,” and then of course, you need batteries to store it if there's clouds. But I was thinking that was really neat. It was just like this magic of sun on this thing, on this chip and suddenly, you get electricity out of it. It was like, whoa.
\n\nI think my uncle gave me some Radio Shack science kit when I was really small. I started messing with it. I had a solar cell and I figured that was magical and I got really into it.
\n\nI don't know why I didn't pursue that because it seems like that'd be a good thing to do today. But I was like really into in the very beginning, solar-powered, building solar-powered everything, especially solar-powered airplanes. I wanted to build some perpetually flying. Actually, I designed something that won a state science fair award that pretty much looks like later on and after that, it was a plane that I think flew across the United States, a solar-powered plane, and it was very similar design.
\nSo I was actually kind of happy I was a little bit in front of all of that, maybe 5 years or 10 years ahead of that one.
ARTY: Just thinking about there's so many things like that that are magical. Just you've got this conversion of sun energy to electricity and there's so many things now we take for granted that are just kind of there like, “Oh, I have the internet in my pocket.” I feel like we've lost some bit of that wonder with taking some of these things for granted.
\n\nI was talking with Chanté a little bit earlier about how dreaming gets stifled, how creativity gets stifled, and we ended up in this mode where we're doing things the way the world expects us to. We've got jobs in this path of life that we're supposed to follow and these rules, or the ways that things are supposed to be versus that passion of creativity, of discovery, of wonder, of wow, isn't this amazing that sun energy can be converted to electricity? I wonder what I could do with that. I wonder what I could build. I wonder what I could create that doesn't already exist.
\n\nWhere do you think that spirit comes from and is there a way that we can create more of that in our culture?
\n\nRONY: It's a great question because I think there are still kids who have this experience, but I think less kids. I think it was just totally unstructured imagination, unstructured play. All my friends when we were kids – I didn't let my daughter do this, but we were like 8, 9, 10 years old, we’d grab a garbage can lid, make a sword out of a branch, and then we'd run around in the woods fighting dragons. There's no adults around, dozens of kids having some kind of like full on whatever we wanted. Like, we're just running about till almost nighttime deep in the woods like the kids from Stand By Me, the movie, or something. We got our bikes; we're riding miles away. We’d do whatever adventures we wanted.
\n\nI remember a couple of friends of mine and I, we'd walk along the highway, which was incredibly stupid, collecting beer cans because we thought, “Wow, look at that, we can collect beer cans.” I don't know why. We're like 9 years old, we thought that would be a cool thing to do and we would figure it and then we'd cut them and make airplanes out of them and just craft stuff. That's probably dangerous. I won’t recommend kids do that right now.
\n\nBut the idea of unstructured play; there's not a game, there's not something someone designed, you're not watching television. You're just running around in the world, doing stuff and your brain and your imagination have to fill in the gaps, I think that's what people really should be doing. Whereas, I think a lot of kids do this now, here's a tablet. It forces you to think in patterns; you’re thinking in a certain way and that's actually scary because everyone's copy pasting the same device and running on the same popular app, or whatever and that's patterning your brain to be caught in a certain way of thinking versus this unstructured thinking, which is more rare right now, I think.
\n\nDAMIEN: So that sounds like something that would be lovely to get back as an adult. Do you have any techniques? Is this something you do? Do you have ways of structuring that? [chuckles] Of getting to that unstructured play as an adult?
\n\nRONY: I'm an anomaly because I don't think I ever got structured, which is, I think unfortunate. Not unfortunate, I think it's fortunate that I never got structured. So trying to think if you got caught and how would you break free. But I think I really never got caught in that net. I think I've always been like a wild fish in the ocean, but – [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: How do you stay out of the net? That's also something I'd like to hear.
\n\nRONY: That's an interesting, I never had a job, like an actual job job. College, I started my first company and never really worked for anybody. I figured I'm unmanageable so I can't work for anybody, I might as well start my own companies. That was a saving grace because I think it would have been difficult to work for somebody. To conform and work in somebody else's system rather than to build something and try to make that a place people want to be at. But then it's weird, it's like you become the man and you're like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” That's a whole another topic I won't get into this second.
\n\nDAMIEN: But do you provide that sort of structure and patterns for people who work for you?
\n\nRONY: In the beginning of all the companies I started—and I'm doing this again with a new one—it's always been freewheeling, awesome – I think the people that are beginning, that was the greatest time ever. But then as you get bigger, once you get to pass 20, 30 people, even 30 people unstructured, big, crazy, some folks start to come in and crave that structure. This is chaos, like what's going on and then you're like, “Okay, we’ve got to order this and we’ve got to processes and operating plans and all these other things,” and then next thing you know, there's 2,000 people working for you.
\n\nI'm still trying to figure out how do you maintain that wonderful, free-spirited, freewheeling environment at bigger scale because at bigger scale, it feels like you’ve got to create all this framework and all these boxes for people to be in and processes. People are demanding it like, sometimes employees get upset that it's not there because they're so used to being in that cage for somebody else that they're not used to being free and they want to run around and go back to that cage and I'm like, “Be free,” and they're like, “No.”
\n\nPeople who worked for me in the past will tell you that. They'll basically say it was this odd thing that I was pushing them to be more free than they wanted and then the ones who really liked it, got shunned as the things got bigger because what's that person not conforming? They're supposed to follow the procedures and why are you spending all your time with them because they're the ones that don't follow the rules. I'm like, “I don't like following the rules.”
\n\nSo I guess, what is a good technique? I have a recording studio, so I think playing really loud guitar helps. It lets you feel like you can like do anything. Really loud guitar through a big amp, a lot of fuzz pedals, or things like that, or you go on a long hike. We would do ocean kayaking, go a whole day ocean kayaking where there's sharks and weird stuff and some of you are far away from a computer. There's the universe and wild animals and you're back to primal nature again; you feel like you're just a wild, free spirit. I try to do that as much as possible.
\n\nI think those things help, but it's hard, though and then you’ve got to go back on a Monday morning and there are some office space type manager asking you for TPS reports. That's really difficult.
\n\nI feel bad because as the companies I've built got bigger, I probably had someone who had someone who made someone do a TPS report and it always bothered me. But it's like, you can't run at a certain size without the TPS report even though nobody knows what a TPS report is. If you don't know what it is, watch the movie but it's like why at some point you'd have someone two, or three levels below you make someone else do a TPS report?
\n\nARTY: Yeah. That's a great question. It's like who created this damn report? And why are we so coming to the demand of a report, or empirical data to move forward and work it in our life?
\n\nAs you were sitting there talking and everything, it brought me back to that comment I had again of Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute who talked about his concept of scaling, how that happens in all things that exist in the universe. There's a ratio of scale that we can't really escape and it's an interesting phenomenon that I'm still trying to understand, but I think, Rony where I feel really kindred spirited to you is I hate to be tamed and then once I feel like we have to scale, or tame, I'm like, “Oh, this I want out of this.” Get me out of this game, get me to the new game where I get to germinate something and start it, and there's no form and I love that.
\n\nI wonder, though. Somebody like you who's created all this amazing technology, aren't you the guy who could maybe make this a reality where we can create those experiences [chuckles] using technology to help us get in and out of these dreams, dates in and out of these waking and normal states that the society has locked into?
\n\nRONY: Well, here's a couple things to think about from what you're saying. One of them, I have a notion of can you build a gigantic decentralized—I won't even call it a company, but a guild—of free people who are connected through blockchains? And it does not look the pyramid of structure of a company, but it's some kind of guild of artisans and we blockchain to each other and emerge and do things together? Like orcas will form packs because it's the right thing to do but there’s no – well, there actually is an alpha orca so you do have a small pyramid. So it's the alpha orca have fights and then you become the ronin orca. There's a little bit of that.
\n\nBut is there a decentralized guild blockchain thing that could have hundreds of thousands of people that could build totally new tech platforms that are not the central power tech companies? I've always been pondering that and wondering how is that possible and every time I've thought about it, it seems like people collapse back into the same structure of the pyramid. Like they want a king, you try to create something that doesn't have a king, or a queen, and they want the king again. Why do we keep doing that? But somehow, I believe that there is a way to do that to have that democratic free-spirited thing.
\n\nI think that's what the United States was founded on. Let's not have a king. Let's just have someone who's kicked out every 4 years. They're nothing special. Don't make a big deal about them. But now, 200 years later, we made that person more into a king. We give them special powers; they can do things and they don't get – they're above normal citizens. How did that fall apart?
\n\nBut I just keep wondering, is that possible? Because I think big tech companies reflect more of a monarchy. There is a central figure that have massive power, there's the inner court that have massive power, and then there's the serfs who all work for the central authority. It's basically, we fought against that to free ourselves of monarchies, but our companies and tech companies look more like monarchies. They could be benevolent, or not benevolent, but we still have not been able to get past that king over people thing. It perplexes me and why we keep repeating that.
\n\nTIM: Well, I think there's a few things with that. You mentioned scale, like as you get bigger and as you add more people, you add more ideas and you add more notions on what the right thing to do is, or what the right way to go is. Obviously, as you do that, more folks are going to agree, or disagree on it. You're going to have various ways of opinions; you end up getting factions, or tribes, or whatever it is. Certainly, this is where people think that way, this group of people think that way, and then you introduce politics because you have to find some way to get all these folks with different ideals to agree on a common purpose, or a common goal. When you do that, once you introduce politics, then you start to introduce the notion of leadership like that.
\n\nBut I think it's interesting when we look at it in the guise of big tech companies and how we have these regions, a lot of this ends up coming is because of the people that ended up profiting the most off of the tech company are the ones that get to make all the decisions. It would be an interesting thing if there was a truly democratic company where everybody from top to bottom made the same amount of money, had the same amount of equity, have the same amount of say in the company. And then if you are a leadership role, it's more like maybe a strategic vision, but your CEO is going to make the same amount of money as your junior developer. Because unless you do that, you don't have a democratic, you don't function; you have a hierarchy by definition.
\n\nDAMIEN: What we're talking about is power structures and every time there's a power differential, there's going to be a power structure that supports that. The reason why you said earlier when you were about talking how you were having to be like, “No, be free. There are no rules here. It's not a cage.”
\n\nPeople resist that because they've been lied to. They say, “You don't have to stick to my rules.” All that really means is I'm not going to tell you what the rules are, which is horribly traumatizing. So until you have that equally distributed power, you're going to have that hierarchy and that structure and somebody is going to want a TPS report before they can go forward on something.
\n\nRONY: Are there any examples where that's existed for some period of time, even in a small form? Like the equally distributed power, anything?
\n\nDAMIEN: I've seen it in co-ops. It requires a lot of trust and the more people you involve, the more differentials you're going to find. [overtalk]
\n\nCHANTÉ: And I think there are some [inaudible] in this communities.
\n\nARTY: I think scale. [overtalk]
\n\nRONY: Like a small co-op.
\n\nCHANTÉ: We can definitely do this.
\n\nRONY: A small co-op.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. There's definitely people that are trying to do the sorts of things that you're talking about from an organizational structure standpoint, but as you've also pointed out, there's dynamics of resistance to it of it not necessarily being what people want.
\n\nI mentioned this book before, Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book and the thought that comes to mind as we're talking about this dynamic of being pulled toward wanting order and structure is a big part of his thesis in the book is that we have a desire for order in our consciousness and we have a gravity toward wanting order in that chaos and disorder is uncomfortable.
\n\nSo when we're in that uncomfortable situation, we can learn skills to create our own order out of the disorder, to be creative, to think about ways to construct new ideas and stuff in our head and make new games. But our brain wants some kind of game to play, wants some kind of order to build around, and I feel like, we were talking about these nets that we get caught in and the way that our education system is structured, the way that we learn in school is a net in itself. We learn how to play the game of school and teach people how to follow the rules and be really good at following the rules and in playing the game that's given to you.
\n\nI feel like if we want to teach people how to create order out of disorder from their own consciousness, through creative play, that we need a learning environment that is oriented toward those things so that we can get practiced at it. Being in a situation of being uncomfortable, being around people that are good at those kinds of things that we can learn how to mimic perhaps and shift those shifts, those things around that way.
\n\nAn acquaintance of mine, we had on the show a while back, Sam Aaron, he does Sonic Pi and he teaches little kids how to code, learn how to be a music DJ and it's the coolest thing. I was reading this post about a little 6-year-old, who was super excited about DJing it at her next birthday party coming up and she was going to get really good at DJing and mixing her own beats. She's 6 years old and I'm just looking at this how beautiful it is and that seeing that fire, that inspiration to create light up in someone, once that fire's lit, it keeps fueling itself. It keeps fueling that desire.
\n\nI feel like there's something very powerful about music, because you've got some basic rules of how things work, but this huge space to create in, and almost everything we can relate in various ways to music. What if we changed the way that we educated to focus on some of those musical principles and this could be something that's adult learning, too is how can we learn to riff together in a musical context and learn how to do jazz?
\n\nRONY: That’s very cool.
\n\nDAMIEN: What I heard is that we should all start jazz bands.
\n\nTIM: Yeah, same.
\n\nRONY: That's all good with me.
\n\nTIM: Let’s see if they get too big, then you have to have a conductor.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Like a quartet, big band at most. No orchestra. [overtalk]
\n\nTIM: You see, big band has to have a conductor, right? That's one of the things.
\n\nDAMIEN: I have played in a big band without a conductor.
\n\nTIM: I was in a couple of myself. We'll talk about that one later.
\n\nRONY: Well, actually that's a good thing because if you have a trio, or a quartet, everyone can go and it somehow works. You all have to pay attention, but if you try to do that with 10 people, 20, 50, a 100, it turns into noise.
\n\nDAMIEN: I also think it depends on what kind of music you're making. A symphonic orchestra generally needs a conductor, at the very least a concert master who can wave the bow and get people on time. But I've been in drum circles of 300 people that made beautiful music with absolutely no leadership, or any sort of control like that.
\n\nTIM: Well, I think the difference is that in the drum circle, I don't think there's a preconceived plan that's being executed. It's all improv, right? It's all made on the fly and then you pick a direction. I think it's different when you have a set task, or a thing you’re going to accomplish. In the case of a symphony, or any other thing where we have we're not making up music on the point on the spot, we have a set score. We know what notes they're going to be and we're going to be done.
\n\nI think there's space for both of those. There's space to say that we're just going to see what comes out of this and then there's another bullet that says, “Okay, well we have to do this.” One is very much creative and I love that. The other part is executive. You don't want, for example, surgeons to just go in there willy nilly and just saying, “We're just going to see what we find and just do whatever.” There has to be a plan. There has to be something that gets executed. Any kind of engineering feat, it has to be done with a plan and structure and different things that have to be done at certain times.
\n\nSo I think there's a place for both in any healthy culture and society where people that create and people who design certainly should not be encumbered by definitions of structure. But if you're going to create, or design something that's going to withstand a hurricane, there obviously needs to be some concerns about a structure and how things are put together.
\n\nRONY: But let me give you guys a comment on power structure and I'm a bit of anomaly because I've always been super uncomfortable being in that alpha power spot, but I've always had to be there to build a company. Some of them got quite big and the bigger they got, the more uncomfortable I was because I didn't think a human being should have that power.
\n\nBy the way, the question about smart people and billionaires, I've met a bunch of those billionaires that you've mentioned, I've also met some incredibly smart people; they're not always directly correlated. There may be a smart billionaire, but it's not one-to-one—a billionaire who’s someone who's highly optimized at a certain function. Some of those brilliant people I know are super poor and they have built-in things in their mind that they don't want to do the things that they might see oppress others to get to a certain place. They just don't. So they're more happy in their lot making $25,000 a year, or whatever they're doing.
\n\nBut I think what's interesting about trying to not have a power structure is how people just default go into this algorithm in people's brains. I'll give an example. When one of my companies was small, I had a largely empty office and a couple cool collectible vinyl toy things. I love weird, those kind of animate vinyl toys and then just Star Wars thing. I just have a couple of my shelves. When people would visit, like new employees, or partners, they would bring something and put it on the shelf like an homage offering. I'm like, “That's weird,” and then the more that people thought now it was required to bring one of those and make an offering and leave it on my shelf.
\n\nSo a few years later, my shelves are covered the hundreds of these offerings and I'm like, “What in the heck is going on here?” I didn't ask anyone to do it, but people felt like if you're going to go see the alpha wolf, you have to bring them a dead rabbit and leave it as an offering and it was just amazing. It's like all this stuff and I would give most of it away, but it was really weird how everyone has this algorithm that they feel like if you're going to go visit the alpha leader, you've got to bring a gift, an offering, a moose, whatever you happen to have caught.
\n\nEven when we dealt with people from outside the US, it was even more extreme like you'd have this whole formal exchange; you had to bring them a gift and they would bring you this gift. I was like, “What is going on here?” This is thousands of years of evolutionary biology wired into people's brains making them do things. I'm like, “I don't want to be that!” Like, that's not what we're doing. We're totally building a different social order, no one's paying attention to me at all, and everyone is just like, “Nope, we have this code built into our brain and we're just going to do that.”
\n\nI found that to be really strange to the point where I build two decent sized companies and each time, I felt like I had to throw the ring into the volcano like in The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings, because if you don't, it just kind of gets to you. I felt like if it started to get to me, I just need to throw it into the volcano and start over again. Hand the ring to someone else and go back to base camp and try it again, which I'm doing now.
\n\nBut I found that both times I built successful tech, but not the nonhierarchical culture I had in mind at the beginning, which I'm trying to do now again. I'm not sure how do you fight human biology? I'm like, “Don't do that. Stop bringing the moose and the rabbits by! What on earth are you people doing?” and they just keep doing it. I don't know what it ism or why, but it's like, we are hard wired as humans to follow an alpha wolf. In fact, the alpha two and threes feel like they actually have to challenge you in a tribal fight and if you don't put them down and show the rest of the wolf pack that you're the alpha, then they'll try to eat you. It's like what is going on?
\n\nBut that is what happens at every company, in every country, in every government, and it's so weird that we have not evolved past the way we were thousands and thousands of years ago.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Is it possible, Rony the endeavor that you're working on now to use technology, to dream of new futures and realities that does decentralize social structures in the sense – because my feeling is the collective consciousness is why we're doing this. Like, we can't escape ourselves.
\n\nSo if we give ourselves new experiences and we know what it feels like to have decentralized collectivism, then we may choose to build new cities, families, and companies in a decentralized structure. Because that power and oppression, it feels like a human instinct that we can't escape it. but I'm just not convinced that that's real. I think it's been something, a story, a narrative that we've been stuck in. So I think we have to build a new story, or create a new story and a new reality and I think technology can allow us to do that and people like you and everyone on this call, we can do that together.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about that, too of software gives us this ability of reality construction and if we've learned certain ways of doing things, if we operate in a certain net in a certain rails playing certain games and we don't have a template for anything else so that outside of that is just disorder and unstructured and unknown, then we're going to cling to the familiar structure. We're going to cling to what feels safe and known and predictable, and that we know how to operate.
\n\nI feel like the way to escape that is to create an alternative that offers structure of a system that gives you a set of rails that reorients things and creates opportunities for creativity, for entrepreneurship, for ideation, but creates new structures where those things can thrive. I don't think we're going to get away from technology, but we can reinvent our interface with technology. We can reinvent the shape of our social software infrastructure and how we relate to one another through technology. I feel like to overcome that gap, what needs to happen is a vision, really, is the putting together a vision of what that might look like such that we can build it.
\n\nRONY: I spent the last decade going really deep into that, about as deep as you could possibly imagine, and it started out actually a few years earlier, 2008, 2009, working on this call it a Miyazaki film world project with my friends at Weta and we spent a few years on that. And then one of the things I felt was if you're going to – I won't get into the details of the project is actually something Sun & Thunder will hopefully be releasing. But if I was going to go into this idea of hacking into reality, what is that? I actually needed to go do that in order to be credible about making a story about it, or making a film about it, or film world.
\n\nSo I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to go on a tangent.” So I started a tech company with the idea that we're going to be reality hackers. Like, we're going to figure that out and we're just going to go all the way. We're going to hack into the visual cortex, we're going to go full on, and it was amazing because all these people, like people who created The Matrix and Neal Stephenson from Snow Crash, all these people started showing up.
\n\nAnd then some of the very early stuff we did, we started to go really there, like really deep. That's stuff that you can productize, but we're starting to unlock things about how the human brain works in our connection to this weird connection between the physics and how our brain constructs reality. What does that mean and how do you actually get in there and actually hack it?
\n\nWe did some stuff that freaked me out so much. Everyone in the early days was like, ‘Whoa, maybe we need to take a step back.” I think that's actually what happened. We had those whoa moments. “Let's take a step back and let's not unlock full atomic fusion right now. Let's do something that you can actually maybe ship,” but we're going to places that were not ready for as a species. We really had those moments where we would see over the horizon. That was intense.
\n\nOne of the things that made me walk back and I think a couple of early folks that we just felt like human software, our human biology is totally unprepared for this. Like, we're not prepared to hack reality. We are not equipped. We're not ready as a species. We would screw things up beyond all belief. Look how badly we're doing on social media, which is so thin and almost nothing. When I think of digital realities, whether it's AR, spatial computing, VR, those are simulation training grounds for the real thing.
\n\nIt scares me when people are talking about neural implants in the brain like, no, no, no, we are not ready for that. In our SIM testing on social media and digital reality, we're not doing a good job. We’re creating fairly awful places with occasional cool places. I thought, “Okay, we're going to unleash this like Renaissance of art and imagination.” It's like, no, that's not what's going on. It's going on in little pockets. But for every art and Renaissance thing, you've got like nine, or ten horrible things. Some things I can't even mention.
\n\nI used to tell our investors, “Someone's going to make trillions of dollars doing the things we refuse to do” because the level of control and weird stuff you can pump into someone's brain. There are companies I'm not naming; you could imagine why they're spending $6 to $8 to $10 billion a year trying to conquer digital reality. Why they have reality labs. You should be really frightened about why they're doing it. L
\n\nARTY: Right.
\n\nRONY: I started out with a notion of can there be this real creative imagination Renaissance and I actually believe there can. But at the same time, it's like every time you have a superhero, there's something else like the super villain appears. It's a law of the universe and I feel like the more we were trying to do good in hacking reality, you would have bad equally emerging and equal strength, maybe sometimes even larger. I don't know what's going on, but it did get me to take a step back and wonder.
\n\nThe human software is totally unprepared and so backwards. Like we're running Dos 1972 right now, or even worse than that. Our software is like Middle Ages and it's so easily manipulatable and triggerable and all kinds of horrible – the human, we have not transcended. We are not where we need to be collectively. That doesn't mean there's not individuals, or groups who are transcending and becoming more enlightened and evolving in a good way. But the net human condition seems to be quite in the bad place right now. It actually scares the crap out of me.
\n\nSo I did take a step back from the notion of I don't know we're ready and maybe we just need to take a breath and figure out our social system, our human biology, like what's going on because we are evolving at so much slower pace than the rapid accelerating pace of our tech capabilities. We're building insane tech. AI will pass us all in this decade, like, what the heck are we doing to ourselves? We're unleashing things in the world we have no idea and society is not capable of predicting. The nonlinear event impact is really scary and we just keep doing it.
\n\nI don't mean to be all pessimistic, but I think the hope of this creative Renaissance is something that's a beacon—it should be a beacon for some—where you're free, you’re decentralized, you're not controlled by this monarchal power. But too much of the other side is actually winning right now, too much of the other side is dominating everything because they're playing the game that I think our brain is wired to. We're wired to a pyramid structure.
\n\nThe people who realize that manipulate it, they take advantage. They do all the things; they’ve figured out the social psychology, they've hacked the code of the human brain, and they're making tons of money doing it because they know how we are. I don't know if that's just how it will be forever, or is there going to be an actual enlightenment for people. That made me take a step back from hoping that everyone will just have this inner artist wake up and now, I’m not so sure.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that question now. I think it makes me go back to something I continue to say, it's just like, do we get off of our technologies, or get off of the things that we believe connect us? Because we are ourselves technologies so, do we need to be constantly manipulating something else? There's a lot of power in just being together in real time, in real life together and I think if we can go back to some of that, we can remind ourselves because—and this is coming from somebody who spent a lot of time and money in meditation and self-transcendence.
\n\nNow I'm at this place where I'm like, “Do I need to transcend, or should I just be right where I am because the past, the present, and the future are actually all one and should I pay attention to who I am and what I am and where I am a little bit more versus constantly thinking in the future?
\n\nThis is so hard for me because I'm a futurist. I love to think and imagine new possibilities. But I just wonder. That’s kind of one of the mantras I've been sitting with in the last six months, or so.
\n\nRONY: Thinking of what you're saying, we had a pretty high-level of Tibetan Buddhist who built one of the great temples in Tibet where monks meditate and they built it from memory. There's no architectural plans and he was one of the leaders that he came by and I showed him some stuff we were doing. It was maybe 5, 6 years ago. He's like, “That's amazing and you're cheating.” He goes, “We take years to learn how to do that, but we could do more than what you're doing. You're just level jumping.” I get what you're doing, I understand it but you're taking the elevator, the sky tram up the mountain, and there's something about – but you're not equipping people to know,” or.
\n\nI didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. I think I have a better grasp now, but we're not spiritually ready for what we can do and they spent a lot of time doing this. They have their own virtual reality.
\n\nIn fact, it was interesting was I said, “We're not really building technology. We're simply trying to unlock what's in the human brain, which is an amazing computer, best GP in the world is the visual cortex. Best display is our brain. That's all there, we're just trying to tap into it.” He's like, “We do the same thing using different tech, but you're kind of cheating.”
\n\nI thought that was interesting. It’s like you don't really have the satisfaction of climbing up to mid base camp on Everest; you just took the elevator and suddenly, you're there. But your lungs aren't ready. You didn't climb the mountain. You're not fit. I feel like technology is doing that for us. Spiritually, we're just not ready.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. I spend a lot of time in somatics. I'm in a couple of somatic communities and we talk a lot about those somatic reps. There's a lot of wisdom in experiencing something firsthand and witnessing somebody else do it alongside you in that community because we learn that way, too. If you're picking up on other people's energetic vibes and feel, you collectively whoever's in that space, in that room, It is something that cellularly somatically, you will become a little bit wiser from.
\n\nI can't describe it. It's only when I'm in a collective with my yogis who we're doing deep breathing together, or we're doing POS in a practice together and there's just this thing that I experience that I've never had on any drug, or any kind of tech, using technology, what do I put on a headset, or something? I can't describe it. It feels out of this world and it's almost like only those of us in that room would ever be able to describe it and maybe indescribable, but it's powerful. So I keep going back to that.
\n\nRONY: One of the things he told me was, “Okay, you'll help people realize that reality is just an illusion, but are they equipped to understand that?” That will just freak them out, they're going to break down, and now what? When you actually really get that, when you really understand like how reality is constructed, if you go deep and get into that, which we had to do to build some of the things we were doing, it does weigh heavily on you because you're like, “What the heck is actually going on?”
\n\nA lot of things you were taught growing up that your parents, or grandparents might believe and then you’re – where you might read in a book and you're suddenly facing that the reality you know is not stable; it's liquid, it's hackable, it's editable. You're like, “What is going on?” That kind of opening up of your mind is an interesting place, but no one's equipped to really go there. You almost got to step back and say, “I'm going to forget I saw that. Let me just go back and watch a football game,” and it's way easier to go back and play X-Box right now. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Those sorts of discoveries have been happening for all of recorded history and I think farther. People get there via gyms, they get there via sitting on a mountain in the modus pose and sometimes, they come back and go, “Okay, I'm just going to pretend that it's real.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd sometimes, they don't and die under a Bodhi tree, whatever. But these are things that these are not new realizations, or discoveries.
\n\nRONY: No, they're not. But what weird is that the vast majority of people have not had that.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Right.
\n\nRONY: Vast majority like, think about how many people in this country are not even on the first step of any form of enlightenment. The actions they take, the things they believe, the people they vote for, you're like, “They're so orthogonal and distant from that.” So you do have pockets of people who've had enlightenment and transcendence over the last thousands years, but it's a fractional minority and that's what's like why are the rest stuck? Where is everybody's stuck on and why?
\n\nDAMIEN: Because they want to be.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Well, I don’t know. [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Ego death is death. Nobody wants death.
\n\nCHANTÉ: We’re programmed to be. I think we're conditioned and makes me think, too also Stanislav Grof, I'm not sure if you all know him, a famous transcendent, or transpersonal kind of.
\n\nRONY: What’s his last name?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Stanislav Grof talks about the spiritual emergency. I'll drop the link here. Really interesting, too and did a lot of holotropic breathwork to get people through transcendence and used a lot of other, I think drugs and synthetics to have those transcendental experiences. But talks a lot about the spiritual emergency and I think you're right, Rony talking about when we have this realization that oh my God, what is reality? [chuckles] Because reality is something that we all can define differently and even this is something that I think quite a bit about what the future of work and technology and all of us coming together, this convergence of who am I without that role, without that title? Who am I without my computer and without my phone with the internet in my pocket?
\n\nI don't know that we've spent enough time examining who we are going in. We're always looking out and I think we have to come back into ourselves to be home and I'd like to see and I am trying to do more of that, trying to cultivate those experiences with the communities that I run circles with, or the things that I have influence on is just, let's go back into ourselves because there's so much power there.
\n\nDAMIEN: I talk about this as the high school basketball version of reality. If you've ever been to a high school basketball game, championship, league championship, whatever, and you got the crowds yelling and screaming and everybody's enthused and excited about what's going on. If you were to go down to center court and wave your hands and go, “Hey, hey, hey! Hey everybody, everybody, whoa, whoa, none of this matters.” That's really rude.
\n\nYou're right it doesn't matter. It's high school basketball, but we have chosen to make it matter because that's what makes the game. If you don't care about the rules, you don't have a game. If you don't care about the characters, you don't have a movie. If you don't care about the desk and the computer, you don't have a job.
\n\nSo we make these decisions. We can see through it, if we choose to and see that it's an illusion, it doesn't really matter. But if that's what you're here for, go for it. Have fun. If that’s not –
\n\nRONY: Here's a question, just because it's an illusion, does it mean it doesn't matter?
\n\nDAMIEN: Exactly.
\n\nRONY: Actually, just a hint at that. We made this digital person, her name was Micah, and people's reactions to her were unbelievable. They began to have relationships and we had to change behavior code around Micah and if you actually broke her personal space, she would leave. She'd walk away and actually open up a door in a wall and disappear. If you behave badly around her, you would lose access. We had to create this social code of conduct because people were – it was odd. I won't get into all of it. But then we fixed that and it was just interesting that people would want to be with her because she would gaze into your eye and pay attention to you. Looked amazingly real, but almost hyper real, like the most real person who was totally focused on you and that attention level from this illusion made people feel good.
\n\nEven though she is an illusion, that feeling was real and reality is illusion anyway so is she just as real as anything else, or was something going on? It was kind of odd, like is what you feel, or what you carry with you actually that thing anyway, even if it's all an illusion?
\n\nDAMIEN: And you get to decide that for yourself with and among your culture and your peers, your group.
\n\nARTY: Well, I think joy matters for its own sake. Connecting with one another, having fun, experiencing joy, it’s a reason to live, it's a reason to be. And if we're playing a basketball game together, it's fun. The people that are in the crowd, enjoying the game and getting involved with it emotionally, too, it's fun and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with having fun and enjoying those experiences and then being meaningful for their own sake.
\n\nIf we have an experience with a digital person and figure out ways to have some feeling of connection, of being paid attention to, of being listened to, there's definitely some risks with regards to dynamics of attachment and just messing with us as humans that I think are definitely of concern. There's just risks with creating emotional love attachments to digitalness that I think is unexplored, unpredictable riskiness because heartbreak is a real phenomenon experience that can be devastating.
\n\nThat aside, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with experiencing good feelings from those things happening in our lives.
\n\nTIM: I just wonder, though what does it say about the human condition when with 7 and a half billion people on the earth that we need to be with, we would think that we need to create a digital person with which to interact? There are so many of us out there with which we could be interacting and probably should be interacting. We've gotten this far as a species without needing to have an artificial person. [overtalk]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, we have our emotional people. We have our pet canines, we have the robot people, people make friends with Roombas. Before that, people made friends with stars in the sky. They’ll look back to Orion and that’s Ra, Ra loves me and so on.
\n\nTIM: Sure.
\n\nDAMIEN: It’s the same relationship we have with other human beings.
\n\nTIM: To some extent, but we were still, the person who was having that relationship was the one who actually defined what that person is, who that was, was essentially the imagination. With an artificial person, or artificial intelligence, you don't have that; someone else is deciding that. So would you want to have that type of interaction?
\n\nI feel like we could probably, as a society, do way better of devoting our resources to improving the human condition among each other by interacting with each other and understanding each other's hopes and dreams and heartbreaks and struggles than if we were going to spend the resources and the time to develop an artificial person with which to interact. If I think of what we want to do to help people, we want to help everyone to help the human condition, to help and just improve lives and create joy around people? I feel like spending toil creating an artificial person is a fool's errand to that end.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, what you’re describing would be more effective, but it's outside of our skillset. [chuckles] We need George Lucas for that.
\n\nRONY: Let me agree, but disagree on one thing, I'll give you a couple examples. Imagine your family has, let's call it an artificial person who's with your family for hundreds of years and is the keeper of the cumulative wisdom of your great, great, great grandparents and is that wise uncle, or aunt, or grandparent that just has the whole history of your family all the way through and can be pulled up and is that kind of totem with the family all the way. It's just an example, something a human being can't do, but could be interesting. It's like we keep photo albums. Now we have video albums of family. What if you had almost like a shaman of the family who you could talk to and it could give you the accumulated wisdom of all your ancestors? Wouldn’t that be kind of interesting?
\n\nTIM: We've had that accumulated wisdom passed down without having the demonstrable technological privilege of being able to afford to purchase not only an artificial person, but the means with which to property to keep that artificial person going. They've had books and scrolls, they had cultural passed downs, they've had just word of mouth passing down these stories that have been great and rich stories for those of us who are descendants of slaves. I know who my family members were not because they were written down anywhere, not because of any technology preserved, but when they were preserved through word of mouth. Linnaeus was written in Bibles somewhere.
\n\nSo we have that and we have the stories behind that, that to me, it speaks to why carrying those things forward is important, but it also speaks to that even if such technology existed back then, it would still be only to the very, very privileged. I think that we need to acknowledge that with a lot of the things we're talking about, talking about why people haven't become enlightened, it is definitely, almost certainly an essential clue that you have the time and the ability to be able to spend time enlightening yourself versus trying to survive.
\n\nI think if we spend the time to improve everyone's conditioned to where survival is not a struggle, then we will see much more enlightenment. We would actually see, I think, a dramatic leap forward in what we're capable of as a culture and as humanity. But we spend time shooting billionaires in the space instead.
\n\nRONY: When you say moving people from survival not being a struggle, what is that level that you think everyone is beyond the day-to-day struggle and is in that place? What does that mean you think across our collective country, or countries?
\n\nTIM: I know for me, I have been in a place where I didn't know where my next meal was coming from and I haven't had that worry in decades. I don't think any of us here probably have worried about really, are we going to eat today? Are we going to have a place to live today? Maybe we've had those struggles before, but right now, we're five of us sitting around here talking on the internet. Those are probably not our struggles. But there are people in this world that we can all imagine, we have folks that don't have that they are wondering, like, am I going to have the lights one day in the country we are on that only has the power on for 4 hours a day as our food going to spoil?
\n\nThere are various conditions under which people struggle, I think if we could get a baseline and just have a baseline opportunities where people have power, they have access to clean water, they have access to healthcare, they have access to what we define the basic needs of food, health, power, access to the rest of the world via the internet as a baseline so that when they're not concerned with what we take for granted as the basic things. Like, I know if I get sick, there's a hospital I can go to. I don't know how much could it cost, but I can go right now and I can ask the hospital.
\n\nTo have those kinds of things handled allows people the privilege to be able to really then look beyond the essence of struggle, taking care of the animal brain, and we can now look beyond those things. We can now say, “Hey, what does it mean now?” They can examine the condition a lot better when they're not hungry.
\n\nI feel like for us, these things are all great to talk about, but I think if there's a place where I'm going to turn my attention, if I can, beyond the basics of feeding my family, I would love to do that and then see what the world becomes in 50 years, or a 100 years when so many more people are freed from having the struggle of survival and we have now the point where we talked about before, where now we're all equal people in this society of the globe and now we all have our equal ideas that we can contribute to moving us forward instead of so many of us just trying to stay alive.
\n\nRONY: I'll tell you what's interesting. I agree with you. The thing that I wonder about first of all, I think it would be great if there is a way – by the way, I think technologically, there is a way to get everyone on the planet out of their survival mode. I really think we have the smarts, the capabilities, the resources to actually do that. Why we can't organize to do that, I'm not sure, but I totally believe we can. There's zero reason.
\n\nIn fact, I was at this thing in 2005, it was the World Economic Forum where it's just the biggest billionaires and people that run the countries, the world, they get together. I was there as a technology pioneer. So every year, they'll pick a number of startup people and they want you to co-mingle with the people that run the biggest things on the planet.
\n\nIt was a very weird experience. But one of the things they were talking about was this issue, how do we solve that and I'm just sitting there going, “All of you in this effing room could actually solve this today. Right now. You really could.” There's meetings, there's dinners, people are talking about it. I'm like, “That's good that you're doing, but you literally can. All of you have the means to do it.” Like, where is the – but they didn't. They didn't do it, but they were talking about doing it. I'm like, “Do you like talking about doing it more than doing it?”
\n\nSo that was one thing. I don't know why we haven't able to organize, but the other piece is my grandparents, my great-grandparents, everyone was as dirt poor as you can imagine. But they were more spiritual and transcendent and enlightened and that as we got up, I look at my cousins, everyone's struggled and then my parents did a little better and we did a little better. People seem to be less concerned about becoming enlightened and improving and more concerned about what's the next car they're going to buy and we do need to bring everyone to that baseline, I totally agree.
\n\nBut I haven't seen it make people get spiritually better, get themselves together more. It's more of they go down a different path of just wanting more cars, more things, and less enlightened. It's kind of weird. I don't know why. In fact, the more money, maybe the inverse proportion that the whole enlightenment, it's a weird phenomenon. Not that you want people to be impoverished like, we want to pull people out of that. I think that's important. But as you go to the other side, you almost zap that part of your brain away. You have too much money, it makes you not sensitive anymore to what's happening in the world.
\n\nARTY: There's this game of capitalism that is this game of business of how much money can we make and you see different folks at different tiers of playing these various games, whether you're in the workforce and you're thinking about how do I get the highest paying job and be able to buy a nice house and there's a set of rules and thinking of how to excel in that. Then you've got this world of investment and just playing at another level of abstraction.
\n\nBut in both of those dynamics, there's this game and these rules and this idea of what it means to win that seems to anchor people's thinking and drive. And then as we learn from others, what it means to win and we see other people being successful in that and they go and buy a new fancy car and then we're like, “Whoa, they want a fancy car. Well, I want a fancy car, too.” So we mimic these desires from other folks in our culture at whatever game we're fascinated by and I feel like some of those things are some of the fundamental things that need to shift is these game mechanics that we're incurring around.
\n\nOne of the things from the Flow book is Csikszentmihalyi talks about how symbols are deceptive and they have a way of distracting us from the realities they're supposed to represent. So there's these symbols of things that we chase—a better job, a bigger house, more money, et cetera—and these symbols are things that are supposed to make us happy and then we end up chasing the symbol. Often, people that have all kinds of money playing these games, doing all this stuff, they still haven't found a way, even with all these things, to find happiness, to find joy in their lives.
\n\nI feel like if we can learn and reorient around the experience of joy, the experience of creation, of creating with other people, of learning how to have and how to experience these really cool highs in life and turn those kinds of experiences into the goals that we have, that maybe we can break free of the chains of things that we play of what it means to win, what it means to win at life. This is effectively what we're talking about here.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I was going to say, as you were describing that, it’s like okay, then how do we rebuild – maybe not rebuild as a word – it's how do we cultivate a culture amongst those of us who are interested to orient us towards this collectivism and community versus this self-actualization and individualization that we tend to be orienting to here in this country and other first world countries? I happen to believe we have the ability to build culture and that is something we’ve got to spend more time and money doing.
\n\nSo makes me think also of this blog post I stumbled upon a few years ago that was comparing Maslow's hierarchy of needs structure to that of the Blackfoot Indian community and saying how he had taken that for inspiration and used his own cultural and his own lived experience to change the narrative around what that was to create this new conceptual model. They started with self-actualization and I believe as it went up, it was more oriented towards community.
\n\nSo I keep going back to our first nations people around the world and I think there's a lot of wisdom there that we haven't tapped into and we sometimes believe that there's no technology there, but there's a ton of technology in those communities that we just have discarded, or the belief is now that that's not revolutionary when in fact, it probably has been revolutionary the whole time and we've just set out to believe something different.
\n\nRONY: I totally agree. Chanté, you asked the question, are we technology? I think so.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThere's probably very little doubt that we are. I think we're just becoming aware of that and we're becoming aware that we're in some kind of SIM with rules and not just one rule set. So I think depending on where you're going, you could play the accumulate the gold coins rules, amass the kingdom, or you go down the enlightenment path. I think there's multiple games in the SIM at the same time and that makes the game design quite interesting. [chuckles] I'm becoming more and more convinced that's what's going on.
\n\nDAMIEN: It’s like the Total Front. There's multiple games, people compete in different things.
\n\nRONY: Yes. It's an open game world.
\n\nCHANTÉ: It is and I think we have to continue to remind ourselves of that. One of the questions I had written down just between our last call and this one is just who are we going to give the power? How are we going to empower people who maybe don't have the technology and the resources to develop and design these games? How do we get them the tools and how do we make it a little bit more equitable so that we can have new lived experiences and realities? Because if I go back to this first nations, or indigenous people, are we including them in these conversations? Are we talking to folks who aren't using this technology every day? And then once we bring them into the conversation, how do we say, “Okay, here's something.” Maybe they don't want it, but here's something let's see what you build.
\n\nRONY: I think one of the things that's going on, one of the game mechanics are one uncovered, which is survival of the fittest. I think that's happening and I think technically savvy people are using their capabilities to evolve past non-technically savvy people. Those capabilities give you huge advantages of resource control and then that gives them an ability to create even more technology.
\n\nIf you think about a survival of the fittest game mechanic, technology actually plays into that really well. I think it's emerging out of that. It's like the human mind, if you don't believe in Darwin, it doesn't matter it's happening. It believes in you. Just like, don't believe in gravity, don't believe in climate change, we believe in you anyway. We're going to flood the earth. We're going to burn down California. Climate change is going to do its thing. Physics is going to do its thing. It doesn't care who believes in you, or not. Doesn’t need you to believe in it. I think Darwin doesn't need you to believe in Darwin either, it's just happening and those who don't believe in it, you're going to get evolved away because the people that believe in it tend to be more on the science, tech understanding what's going on side and they are disproportionally winning past the people who are stuck.
\n\nI actually think the way we're a product of some version of us that evolves past other versions of us that went extinct, I kind of worry, but probably realize that's what's happening. The tech enabled folk are the ones who are literally winning the survival of the fittest and they're just zooming past everyone else and in 50 years, it's going to be the gap is so unbelievably wide that I don't know what's going to happen, but it feels like a Darwinian lever. That's what it feels like what's going on and we're having a spike.
\n\nEvolution is not just linear; it has these discontinuities. It feels like tech is one of those discontinuities that's creating a spike and we're evolving into something else, we’re fusing into tech to be these tech bio things that will outrun, out pass, out intelligence our classic selves, what we are right now.
\n\nI don't know what you do with everyone who is not keeping up; that's where the compassion and empathy has to come in. How do you pull everyone forward, educate everyone? Because if they don't, they literally are in the Darwin rule going to get left behind in a serious way. That's what's kind of scary. Sounds very doom and gloom, I didn't mean to go there. We need to end on a much happier note.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, should we move on to reflections? Does anyone have a happy reflection they want to kick off with?
\n\nTIM: I think that the thing that when we're all talking about it, I do like Damien's notion of the drum circle where I feel like we as a global community, hopefully, can get to the point where we can all bring our drums to the circle and just see what comes out of it. Right now, we are playing sheet music. [chuckles] We probably need to get on the same sheet of music and then learn to just bring our drums to the circle.
\n\nI think a lot of the things we talked about are steps along the way, but I do think that we all have to do our part to make sure everybody can be included in this and get to that democratic anarchistic notion where everybody is equal and everybody's input is as valuable as everyone else's, but that's the goal, right? I feel where everybody is valued, everyone is heard and everybody is seen and I think that's a noble goal for anybody.
\n\nRONY: I totally agree.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I love that reflection, by the way, Tim and I think where I'm really curious is just going back to something that Rony said around how do we build these decentralized guilds protected by blockchains. That's something that I wrote down, but I would love to just continue to dream about and of course, those of us on this call today, it's like let's continue this conversation offline somewhere, at Rony’s, [laughs] because technology is not being nice to us today. [laughs] But I'm really inspired and just so happy, we got a chance to have this conversation again. Thank you.
\n\nARTY: The thing I keep coming back to is this breaking out of these nets. How do we break out of the nets and create opportunity to innovate, invent, to rethink, to enable new sorts of things to happen? As long as we're stuck in this current path of momentum that already exists, that we're already moving toward, it's a challenging road. We've got a lot of big problems that need solving, that can be solved, that we're capable of solving, and yet we don't do it and why don't we do it at an abstract level? Well, we're stuck in these nets.
\n\nI think about your background, Rony that you talked about with starting pretty much as a founder, you're going down the entrepreneur route because you don't fit in easily in existing systems. So it's much easier to operate in a mode of building your own.
\n\nOne of the things I've been thinking about is how do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen and teach and create space for those sorts of skills. I feel like this goes together with the distributed self-organizing, whatever that emergence of new social order is, that speaking that way of being in that unstructured space of being okay with the discomfort and being able to create your way out of the box is something that we need to create a deliberate effort to cultivate and to make space for. It won't happen on its own, unless we make a deliberate effort to bring that world into existence.
\n\nRONY: I think we need empathy, compassion, imagination, freedom, courage coupled to our crazy new technology. It's my version of we need Jimmy Hendrixs, Gandhis, and MLKs. Because they existed, that gives me hope that more of that's possible and that wasn't technology we made, that was those people found something in them that I think we all have, we just got to tap into. So I think that's really important.
\n\nThe other last funny thing I want to I'll send it to you. This is about the glitch and crashing audio equipment. One of the best things I ever recorded in my band, we jammed for 10 minutes and then we went back and played. We recorded, it's a tape. We only recorded 35 seconds of it. I'll send you that. It was the best 35 seconds I ever did. But it's like, what happened to that 10 minutes? It was like, oh my God, that was the best session ever and then went back to play and we're like, “No, no, that couldn't possibly have happened.” We have no idea what we did. It was like the spirit came and took us and in 32 seconds, you see it taking off and then it's just the tape broke. I salvaged that 35 seconds. I'll send it to you guys. You can stick it into the podcast, but it's really funny and it's like, it's that glitch just when you're on the groove, it crashes everything.
\n\nSo I'm going to get off because I've got to jump into something, but I also hope I don't crash this session. Hopefully, this one works out. But thank you so much for having me. This was great.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you for being here, Rony.
\n\nRONY: I really appreciate it. It was awesome. We went to some cool places. Thank you, everyone.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Thank you so much. It was great.
\n\nRONY: All right, peace.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Thank you. Bye, bye.
Special Guest: Rony Abovitz.
Sponsored By:
01:52 - Brianna’s Superpower: Intense Empathy and Feeling Deeply
\n\n\n\n06:28 - Practicing Acceptance vs Resignation
\n\n12:04 - Delicious Democracy: A Creative Advocacy Lab
\n\n17:14 - Community-Owned AI
\n\n24:51 - Trust
\n\n40:41 - Outcomes > Outputs
\n\n46:56 - Equitism
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Unique approaches to door knocking: Changing the script.
\n\nCasey: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Thinking about how growth mindset and outcomes not outputs relate.
\n\nDamien: Being able to work with nonbinary is the only way to deal with things like trust and confidence levels.
\n\nBrianna: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Meandering conversations!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nSoftware is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join.
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 244. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Hi, I’m Damien Burke and I’m here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I am Casey and we're all here with our guest today, Bri McGowen.
\n\nBri is the Chief Technology Officer of Delicious Democracy. She is a developer, poet, data scientist, advocate, and modern dancer passionate about intersecting worlds, developing community-owned AI, and building Equitism.
\n\nWelcome, Bri! So glad we have you.
\n\nBRIANNA: Hello! Happy to be here.
\n\nCASEY: So Bri, our first question for guests is always the same. It's what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nBRIANNA: It's both, my superpower and my kryptonite. It's both, a strength and also the thing that will keep me up at night, but it's just the science fiction author, fantasy author, Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower and the main character, Olamina, is what's called a sharer and a sharer is basically someone who can see someone's pain and experience it as if it's their own, which is a whole other level than empathy. But I think maybe my superpower is just intense empathy to the point where I will actually physically not be okay if I experience, or hear, or see someone in pain, or in need.
\n\nAnd then I think it's the thing that is my Achille’s heel, too because sometimes I'm feeling helpless, or I don't have a good path to help someone. It'll just keep me up at night, honestly. So it's both my superpower. I feel good that I have this ability to feel deeply, but also, it's hard to sometimes draw emotional boundaries. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I love Octavia Butler, too.
\n\nBRIANNA: Me too!
\n\nCASEY: How did you get that power? When did you realize you had it maybe?
\n\nBRIANNA: As a kid maybe? I don't know. I can't pinpoint it, but I know that maybe that's what drove me to do a lot of advocacy in my teen, early adult years is because I wanted to not feel helpless all the time. Yeah, I don't know the moment I realized I had that power, I guess.
\n\nCASEY: Well, that's an interesting answer too.
\n\nDAMIEN: I love the concept that your superpower is also a weakness; it feels so true to the superhero genre, which I’m a big fan of, or even the [inaudible]. That which makes you extraordinary is also what destroys you.
\n\nBRIANNA: I don't know. I feel like I knew more about the superhero world in silos. [laughs] I feel like I get by. [laughs]
\n\nJOHN: You feel like the opposite can also be true and if it's something that I like to think about when I'm thinking about adverse and traumatic events that happen to people, and then maybe you grew up in a terrible environment, that can really affect you through the rest of your life.
\n\nBut if you can take the coping skills that you have to learn in order to make it through, those coping skills can make you, for example, really empathetically, because you had to pay attention to what everyone was feeling around you in order to stay safe. But that does make it so that you can pay attention to other people to that degree to be really tuned into what they're feeling. So you can even take that burden and turn it into a superpower as well.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah, totally. So I was helping co-lead a team a couple months ago and I think that's honestly what makes me a good leader, team leader, is because I'm very much attuned to – even like during scrums, I can just hear something in someone's voice and I'm like, “Hey, what was that?” Like, “What is the closed captioning of what you're trying to say there?”
\n\nI sometimes find it maybe I'm overly checking in, but also, during the lockdown, I found that to be actually very helpful. So it's trying to balance that, but I think that's also why I feel good at leading things is because I can also use that burden sometimes to be persuasive and make arguments for people to also get them to feel and see things and have a paradigm shift of sorts.
\n\nDAMIEN: I can definitely relate to that as a leadership skill. I'm the product lead for a product where I know the least about it and my opinion matters the least.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI know the least and my opinion matters at least, and that's what makes me a good leader. I'm forced to listen because I don't know anything and so, being able to have that naturally is where you're always listening and you're always aware of what's happening with people, that would be really powerful.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. I also just go back to the boundaries of, I said a little earlier, the input feed. When to be able to move forward, or practice acceptance. That's, I think the one thing I've been doing lately is trying to practice more acceptance of things without being resigned.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, that's tricky.
\n\nDAMIEN: Can you elaborate on that distinction between acceptance and resignation?
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. Okay. So for me, it's between the finite and infinite games that are at play in the world. Finite being something that you play to win and infinite games being you play to continue play.
\n\nI tend to think of resignation as a give up, as a place where you abandoned hope and it's a very finite way to experience, I think the world, because I always believe in change and new perspective and that's very easy to say. Sometimes, it's very painful, but acceptance is maybe accepting where things are in the moment without feeling strung-out and to keep pushing for an outcome, but maybe changing how you play the game, or changing what outcome you even want. Acceptance to me just feels like making peace without giving up.
\n\nDAMIEN: I love that. To me, it dovetails with the connection, or the distinction between past and future. The past will not change; it will always have been what it was and so, that's something to accept. The future has not yet been written and so, we're not resigned to what we think it might be, or fear it might be.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That sounds just right to me and what you were saying, but I was picking up Bri. Acceptance is about accepting the past and resigning would be accepting the future such that you're not going to work on it any. I feel like you've got it more. I know it's not your many sentences, but I see this paradigm.
\n\nBRIANNA: [laughs] I think there's also maybe nuance between problems, or tasks versus people. Sometimes practicing acceptance of where people are. Maybe there's a lot of misinformation around and you're maybe expanding a lot of energy trying to dispel, or refute when maybe you need to practice acceptance of understanding where people are versus instead of being resigned and instead of being like, “Oh, that's just where they are. They'll never change, blah, blah, blah,” practicing acceptance of where they are and being curious about what could be that thread, or narratives that might change someone's perspective.
\n\nI see this all the time. So I'm saying this as if it's a thing that happens a lot, which I have no idea, but in my experiences of even in the workplace with coding, or in advocacy, to me, it's never like, “Oh, these people are forever this way.” It's like, “Okay, that's where they are now,” and it really is sometimes the right moment, the right person, the right dollar amounts even that might change someone's mind. So that's always interesting to me.
\n\nI don't accept people not growing no matter how old you are.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of something. I think Arnold Caplan had a talk about where you were saying that if you're trying to refute maybe an idea you don't agree with, or misinformation, you can try and say, “Just stop believing that,” or “Stop thinking that spaces are better than tabs,” but they're probably not going to just stop doing it when you tell them to; they're probably going to dig in and argue against that.
\n\nBut if you can provide an alternate narrative that says, “Okay, that's your narrative right now, but there's this other one that is a path forward from where you currently are,” that you can just switch tracks and start believing that other narrative about how things are working, it's a much more effective than saying, “Just stop doing what you're doing” without providing the alternative to “Oh, in here is a way forward for you to think about how things are.” I always thought that was a really useful distinction and way of thinking about how to work with people.
\n\nBRIANNA: Totally. The worst thing is someone entrenching further into their worldview and becoming a rigid. I think that's always and I notice in my body whenever I feel tight, that's when I'm also the most susceptible to arrogance and being dismissive.
\n\nSo I totally believe that because you don't want someone to be further entrenched and my philosophy is, I’m the co-director of Delicious Democracy, which is D.C.’s creative advocacy lab, and our fundamental philosophy is figuring out ways to make things a pleasurable and enjoyable experience for folks specifically merging culture and politics.
\n\nSo what is that point where people who might be apathetic to politics, who feel like things will never change, what would make them feel like it's an enjoyable, or even celebratory experience to participate? That's always rule number one, don't try and just refute off at the first go.
\n\nDAMIEN: You described Delicious Democracy as a creative advocacy?
\n\nBRIANNA: Creative advocacy lab, yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: What does that mean?
\n\nBRIANNA: So it's more because of the pandemic. Before lockdown, when we were still gathering and not worrying about the coronavirus, we did a yearlong project where once a month we would gather and we would experiment in how we gathered in spaces. Even from showing up into a space and maybe the prompt is just see everything, notice everything without saying anything to anybody and what kind of conversations can you have with that. It'd be like 30 people in a room just nodding and noticing each other without saying anything.
\n\nOr it'll be an event where we did biomimicry where we were inspired by nature. There is a turtle event where how turtle peeks its head out of its shell and goes back in? So we would start with what would that look like as an actual gathering event? We'd start with two people,1-on-1 pairs, and then 2-and-2. The one-on-ones form 2-on-2s and the 2-on-2s form 4-on-4s and then keep going until it’s 32-on-32, and then you would go back down, then the groups would break apart and then you go back into your 1-on-1s.
\n\nWhy that's important is because you're changing how you approach a space so it's not just another political event where you're expecting a panel and people are experts talking to a group of folks to receive information. It's more like everyone's an active participant and your experience is your expertise. So I think it's just a different way to approach politics that's more ground up grassroots approach and it allows for everyone to feel like they can have ownership in a movement and so, Delicious Democracy is all about experimenting with creative ways we can form grassroots coalitions.
\n\nDAMIEN: That’s amazing.
\n\nBRIANNA: It's fun! The pandemic, we went digital. What did our digital bodies look like?
\n\nThere is something called online town where you can see your digital body on the screen and you can virtually meet up with people and have conversations and the further you'd get to someone, the more in-focus their video is and the more clear you can hear them in the further away, the less you'd be out of focus. So everyone was just running around talking to each other online, it was really funny.
\n\nAnd then now we have a project called Delicious Summer where we are door knocking in specific neighborhoods and Ward 5, which is the ward I live in, asking a question what is your top local concern? It's really interesting to hear people's and then we educate them on resources they might need like mutual aid, or programs they could tap into and also, the coalitions that exist in D.C.
\n\nJOHN: I love that you start door knocking with a question about what the person's concern is, rather than “I want to give you all this information, you just have to sit there and take it, which is the typical, I feel like way of doing it. So that whole drawing them out into let's take your concerns seriously and then you can connect them to what they're interested in and what they care about as a way of bringing them to into ti. I love that.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. It's kind of tricky where you can listen and then take what someone says and then say, “Oh, if you care about that, there's this movement happening around just that,” or something like that. It's really fun.
\n\nBut I agree normally when people door knock, it's usually during campaign season and it's usually when people are like really asking for someone to contribute to something in a very again, I'll say finite way usually to an end of either electing someone, or whatever and sometimes it can just feel so predatory. So this is definitely a way to flip that script and have it be a pleasurable experience for both, the doorknocker and the resident.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. In fact, I've noticed that of the few emails that I've engaged with from my senator, who I love and I love all the stuff he talks about, but the only ones I really engage with are the ones where he was just like, “What are your priorities? What do you think I should be focusing on?” and I was like, “Oh, I'd love to do that. [laughs] I will fill in this survey, sure thing.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo it was a very different interaction than the usual either fundraising, or this is an issue I'm like, “I know it's an issue.”
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah, and I think in between election cycles is the great time to listen. So for future because like Ward 5 is having a council member; there is going to be an election literally next year. So this is a great way to listen to what folks in Ward 5 actually have as concern and connect neighbors to each other so that they can also like build some sort of community power or groups to advocate for the issues that they care about in their ward.
\n\nBecause I think one of the things that I'm most afraid of, and this really keeps me up at night, is just reinforcement. In data science, there's this concept of reinforcement learning where your algorithm just learns on itself and one of the things that scares me is that with technology and I guess, the biases we have in our algorithms and the way in which we even go about our logic of creation scares me because it feels like there is a certain malleability to the human that may not in an algorithm in terms of how far it goes in its learning cycle and how much effort it might take to reverse some of the things it creates.
\n\nWhat scares me is inequities and the trauma being systematically programmed in our systems and then that being the foundation for future artificial intelligence and things like that. So I really am trying to figure out a way to merge the human with the algorithm in a not so linear way and I think one of the biggest things that I think that can be achieved is by listening to people and making policy that makes sense for people and figuring out a way to maybe merge technology with a government that works for people. There's just a lot of non-linearity in that trying to figure out, but it's not so clear.
\n\nDAMIEN: Is this connected with your work with community-owned AI?
\n\nBRIANNA: Yes.
\n\nDAMIEN: So how does that work? What does that even mean?
\n\nBRIANNA: So when I say community-owned, I think cooperative and so, like a worker-owned business and it can mean a lot of different things. So I don't want to be so prescriptive with it because I say it as a thing that is meant to be explored. But the way I interpret that is building some sort of artificial intelligence tool that can help mediate maybe burdens that can exist in a community where the community owns it as a tool rather than a private company owning it and extracting the community's data, or whatever as profit, and then the community seeing none of those benefits coming back into the community.
\n\nSo anything from a door knocking app that's community0owned, that'd be cool where the community can literally learn from each other and then if they want to, as a community, sell that data to developers who would love to have that data, I'm sure about who's living in what and what they want and what kind of businesses they want and whatever. That would be really cool and the community seeing profits from that back into the community, I feel like it could also be just a platform co-op, too. Anything from a website to an app, or whatever that is community owned.
\n\nCASEY: What's the closest thing you've seen to have something like what you're imagining here? Do you have anything like it yet?
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. So there's this conference called Platform Co-op and I've never been, but it's something I've wanted to go to, but I'm sure that things like this are ideas other people have, I haven't seen it personally, but I'm pretty sure it's out there.
\n\nCASEY: Cool.
\n\nDAMIEN: It sounds like an excellent way to get worlds intersecting and preventing that reinforcement that happens when you have bias built into people building in tech, which generates bias in tech reinforces that way. By getting more people involved, more ownership more broadly distributed, you get that community benefit from the things being built. Am I getting this right?
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. Think of a community-owned social media app where instead of all the profits going to this very small pool of owners of say, I don't know, Twitter, or Facebook. or whatever making it to where every user can either own their own data, or their digital body, or earn profits that that app makes. That's another way to look at it too, is maybe even a community-owned social media and then what kind of rules and regulations would you want for it? It just opens a whole world of how do you govern it then? What does it mean to have ownership? What does ownership even look like?
\n\nI think there's so many alternative ways that you can think of what even ownership is. So when I say community-owned AI, there's a lot of layers of how to even go about it.
\n\nCASEY: The closest thing I can think of that I've used is Mastodon.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yes!
\n\nCASEY: The open-source Twitter. I want that.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yes, it’s one of them.
\n\nCASEY: Unfortunately, very few people I know are active on it. I try once in a while to double post Twitter and Mastodon for those few friends that I have there, but I haven't gotten to stick there yet because the power of social networks is annoying; the monopolies already got it. the couple of different forums of it have different monopolies, I guess, long form/short form, Facebook/Twitter.
\n\nBRIANNA: Oh, is Twitter short form?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. Mastodon is cool. I'm not on it, but I love the idea of it [chuckles] and that's also a problem like, how do you make it desirable for people to want to own something together as a community because it just goes back to people. People sometimes don't always get along. We're messy, messy creatures at times. So there's also a level of how do I even go about building where those relationships and building that trust?
\n\nI think also another thing that I have a frustration with is this trend to build trustless systems like blockchain and whatever and I'm like, “Okay, I get it.” I understand the desire to go that way, but there's something that doesn't sit right with me about wanting a trustless system.
\n\nI think building better systems where trust means something and more points where if trust is broken, the whole thing isn't broken and so, making more resilient systems, I think is worth exploring and that also looks like a DisCO and that's a distributed cooperative. So instead of decentralized, it's distributed and—they actually have a cool website you should also check it out—but they propose ways in which you can build more trust in your systems. That it's an alternative way to think of what I think blockchain could be. But right now, it's all the rave about blockchain and cryptocurrency is like, oh, it's completely decentralized and you don't have to have trust in it and it feels counterintuitive at times.
\n\nCASEY: The way you're describing it makes me think of how a lot of organizations say, “Oh, we'll just use Scrum the prescribed thing,” which it says not to do actually in Scrum, but they say, “We'll just do the thing as it's prescribed and that'll fix all of our problems. We don't need to trust our employees. That would be dumb,” and then that never works out because the core of any functioning team is trust.
\n\nBRIANNA: It’s also so fragile.
\n\nCASEY: Any community needs trust.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: These large things just aren't as good, they're not large trustless. The way you put it with trustless is just so vivid to me. I hate it. That sounds terrible.
\n\nBRIANNA: Sounds anti-human a little bit. It's just like, what does that even mean?
\n\nDAMIEN: It is anti-human, it's an industrialization of a very human thing, but there's an amazing book. Oh God, I think it's Francisco Ferdinand. One of the premises of the book is that trust is a verb. So when you trust somebody, there's a necessity that there's a possibility of betrayal. If there's no possibility of betrayal, that's not trust and so, authentic trust is where there is a possibility of betrayal and you've acknowledged that and accepted that. We all know that it stinks when that happens so we're looking for ways to make it not happen and that's where we get the industrialization of trust, which is the basis behind cryptocurrencies, blockchain, Airbnb, FICO, [chuckles] and so many other things.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, what strikes me is there was, sometime in the past 15 years, some concept of a web of trust where you can build out a network of like, “I trust you,” and then there's a transitive trust to the people that you trust. So it was built through those social connections rather than imposed by the network, or whatever it was. I don't think it ever went where everyone was hoping it was going to go; to turn into a way of connecting people, but I think you’re right, that’s so alienating to have trustless environments.
\n\nDAMIEN: That was absolutely a fascinating shift. That was a way of distributing trustees in public key cryptography and creating that web of trust and in theory, it was absolutely amazing. I think where it fell down beyond the fact that public key cryptography is not something humans innately understand, but also, that the trust was very binary. So it was binary and it was transitive and that's not how humans trust and nor is it a practical way of dealing with trust.
\n\nCASEY: I was just playing with some speech recognition tool, Amazon’s Transcribe, and I like how it had a confidence level, 0 to a 100%, for every word in the entire transcript. So I think about that now, even when another person's talking to me, sometimes they say a sentence, or a phrase that just isn't quite right and I know it and I have like only 70% confidence in that part of their sentence. Getting very granular there, or the concept under it, if I can.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that actually reminds me. I was reading an article about how when an algorithm, or a robotic system, or something that presents data, a decision is made, “I'm about to do this. I think you should do that,” most of the time, the UX around that is, “Here's what you should do,” or “Here's what's going to happen.” Not a, “I think this is the way to go and I'm 70% confident that this is the way to go.”
\n\nGiving that confidence in the decision makes humans able to parse the interaction so much more rather than, “Oh, the computer says this is the 100% exactly the right thing to do,” and then when it fails, you're like, “Oh my God, these are terrible.” But if they had said, “I think this is what we should do, but I'm only 70% confident,” then you'd be like, “Oh, okay, well, we'll see how this goes. Oh, it didn't work out. Well.”
\n\nWe understand how things can go and with that confidence level, it's a much more human way of understanding an action, or a choice, or a recommendation to say, “I think this is going to work, but I'm only 40% sure.” That's a very different statement than “You're going to love these new shoes, no matter what.”
\n\nBRIANNA: Oh my God, totally. So one of the biggest things that I would do if I were developing some sort of tool that where I had to use some algorithm that generates a probability of what someone should do, like an owner, whoever the end user is, I always put in the confidence level and I got in trouble once because they're like, “No, this is what you should do,” and you click a button and it allows you to do it, or whatever. But I just hated that.
\n\n[laughs] It's just kind of funny, one time I had an app for my partner and it's just like, whenever I'm feeling XYZ, how I want to be treated. So it's like a Quizzlet almost where it goes through a series of questions like, is it late at night? Have I had a good night sleep? Blah, blah, blah. Have you asked these things yet? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Are we at a party, or is it a quiet social gathering? It literally just goes through a couple of – and it's just 10 solid questions where I know I'll probably feel like whatever, or have I had a couple drinks, or not. It's like, “Yes, a little bit. You’re wasted.” [laughs]
\n\nAnd it then generates a series of things, or a couple of suggestions of what I would like to receive, or questions I would like to be asked, maybe just like a, “Hey, checking in,” or maybe it's, “Ask me to just dance it out,” like ask if you want to dance with me because sometimes that totally throws me off. Especially if I'm in a heated argument, if someone's like, “Will you just dance with me?” It'll totally throw me off and makes things so ridiculous, absurd, and silly.
\n\nSo I think that's one of the things I felt was this series of questions and then I did the backend logic of if you answered this, this and this, but this and this, and it's probably going to be this outcome. And then it gives you four choices each time with a confidence level of what percentage I might want. Is it like, “Just leave me alone, I'll be okay, whatever”? Or is it like, “Hey, maybe the space isn't working, you could probably try asking again,” or “Maybe just dance it out.”
\n\nSo I just gave a series of possible things that he could do and he used it for six months solid straight and it was so fun because it wasn't just one thing to do. It was like a suggestion of many different things with percentages of how likely that is to maybe work in that instance, or whatever. I think applying that logic to even something a decision that needs to be made, say at an executive level, and then just giving options of what percentages things might work.
\n\nAnd then also having fallback options of like, “Okay, you chose this answer. Here are the probable outcomes of what happens,” I think is a great way to test not only your blind spots, because hopefully, you're not working in a silo. Hopefully, you have other developers checking in on you and also having those meetings with what those outcomes could be. But also, it's a great way to show that it's problematic to feel 100% about anything, if that makes any sense.
\n\nDAMIEN: Mm hm.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. But on a similar note, I was talking about how if expressing your own confidence and the position that you're expressing is also a great way to diffuse those testing arguments about a technical tricks, or whatever you can say. I definitely think we should use JWT for this, but definitely means 70%, it doesn't mean 99%. And then if everyone can give that confidence, then you can be like, “Oh, that's what we're working with” is different people confident in different ways about different things rather than, “Oh, well the senior developer thinks that we should use JWTs. I guess, we have to use JWTs even though, I'm not really comfortable with the it.” But it allows a much more fluid conversation than everyone just saying, “I think you should do X.”
\n\nCASEY: Confidence level. It's like scale of 1 to 10. How much pain are you feeling that the doctor's offices have? It's like getting a number is so much clearer than just trying to say regular where it's like, “I'm fine. It's just a 9.”
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, and the illustrated ones really give you different activities of how much does this hurt like, stumped toe, B. Bs! Like, my legs off, what you consider to be a 9?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. People are really good at relative like greater than, more than that, or less than that, worse than that. People good are that. People are not as good at absolute scales, but the numbers still help communicate it better than just hand-waving for sure.
\n\nIt's like for the vaccine, some people say they won't get the vaccine because it won't help more than it hurts them, maybe whatever. But if you put numbers to it, some people haven't thought about the numbers enough to put it into words yet and that's the step forward in that process of talking through it and some people maybe would accept the vaccine if they knew more about it, some people would accept the vaccine if the risk of COVID having a fatal outcome was worse.
\n\nA lot of people aren't having this conversation on these terms, but you can talk about it and put numbers to all these things like, how bad would COVID have to be? How likely would you have to be to get it? Like, everyone you're around has it then what do you consider getting it? Or if you tweak all these variables, everyone probably has some point where they might consider the vaccine will be more worthwhile than not.
\n\nBRIANNA: Earlier in the year, I door knocked for the vaccine campaign in D.C. to just let neighbors know that they could get the vaccine and I don't know if this happened with y'all, but in D.C. was a hot mess at first because the system was crashing and it was The Hunger Games for getting an appointment. When the digital divide is so real in D.C., a lot of folks who did not have access to internet, or fast internet were often left not being able to even secure an appointment and then I can't imagine folks who are not computer savvy having to deal with that system so.
\n\nCASEY: It was terrible.
\n\nBRIANNA: It was horrible.
\n\nCASEY: It was really bad.
\n\nBRIANNA: It was bad. [laughs]
\n\nSo there was a whole door-knocking campaign, just vocally. It wasn't a part of actually government led thing, but one of the questions I would ask folks, especially folks who are hesitant, or believing even some of the conspiracy theories, or Bill Gates going to track you, or whatever, I would say, “So what would be the thing that would convince you to get the vaccine? What would be that?” And just giving that wedge of doubt to there, I think firm believe was really interesting because then they would actually have to challenge themselves and be like, “Oh, if I –” like, it just seemed to change the conversation rather than saying, “I'm not going to get it.”
\n\nIt's like, “Okay, what would be that variable that would make you be more open to it?” And I think that's when the conversations were easier to have, but it's hard because that right there deals with a lot of layers of fear and then poor education around what even it was and then also really bad, I think education around prevention. It was just this individualistic protect you in your own mentality rather than wearing a mask isn't for you, it's for your neighbors. I don't know. I don't think there was ever a moment where there was an actual educational campaign around what it meant to be a part of this greater, I guess, cause not for yourself, but for other people. But with the vaccine specifically, I don't know, there was a huge level of fear around it that I encountered door-knocking and then having to dispel some of the myths was interesting.
\n\nCASEY: I always want to know how effective communication is on things like that and apparently, it can be hard, or expensive to get the information you were getting by door-knocking on a wider scale, large enough to make estimates for the population in D.C. I don't see many groups doing that. Do you know of any that even ad hoc have ample sets of data that they use to extrapolate in D.C.? I'd like to see more of that.
\n\nBRIANNA: I don't know specifically about the vaccine, but I know working families party has interesting datasets sometimes and I know even some campaigns have interesting datasets that may not be necessarily public. But communication around people who are hesitant to get the vaccine, sometimes it's not even going to be your conversation that does it so I can be like, “Okay, well, who do you trust? In this entire role, who is it that you go to?” Because if I'm realizing that I'm not getting across, I'll just switch it up to be like, “Okay, whoever you trust the most, talk with them and have that conversation and see what y'all come up with.”
\n\nSo it's always encouraging people not to be referring to a YouTube video conspiracy theory, but going to an actual person, hashing it out with a person is always my strategy.
\n\nCASEY: There's more trust with literally the people you trust. Back to that theme.
\n\nBRIANNA: Full circle. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: I love these strategies because they all start with meeting people where they are, accepting where they are and going, “Okay, well, what can we do from here?”
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Not only the reality of the situation, but also the humanity of the person you’re dealing with.
\n\nBRIANNA: Oh yeah, people will sometimes be just yelling, “Absolutely not! No! Forget that!” and it's just like, “Okay, well I'm not going to change your mind, but I bet I could get you to be curious about something.” So that's always a –
\n\nCASEY: [inaudible]! [overtalk]
\n\nBRIANNA: [laughs] Yeah. Then again, it's like maybe I didn't get the outcome I wanted going into it, but I still think it was a different game to be played.
\n\nDAMIEN: And then back to the infinite versus a finite game. A finite game, there's a win, or a loss and in the infinite, you move in a direction and we can keep moving in a direction.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I always feel like you've made a fantastic opening in this situation with that where you can get them to think what would me them roll with this, or who would I trust to actually talk this over with where they're changing the foundation on which they've made the decision and once that happens, more possibilities open up from there. And if you can get even just that little shift in the little interaction, then so many more possibilities are capable of down the line. Even convincing that day, or maybe they'll think about it for a couple weeks and maybe they'll notice some things that some friends are saying and then start to think, “Oh, well maybe it wouldn't be that bad,” and that's still totally a success.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. I think I'm always present to especially with people who have a completely different world view than me, it's never going to be just one conversation that does much, it's going to be forming that relationship. So it's always good to understand what even capacity I have sometimes for that relationship building.
\n\nAnd then also, realizing what I think might be good for maybe trusted either elected official, or whatever, like what arguments they should be making, because I can take that to an elected official and say, “Hey, so-and-so, this person was like they're not getting the vaccine until you say that you got it and you liked it.” Blah, blah, blah.
\n\nI'm always present to, it's not going to be just one conversation, but I am excited about putting that wedge of doubt in there. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: There's a spectrum I'm building in my head just now during this conversation. In product management, we often say we want outcomes, not outputs. So if you do ship the project that doesn't help anyone in the end, but you shipped it, check done. That's not good enough. You need the outcome of helping them with their problem.
\n\nBut here, we're going a step further. It's not just the outcome that they are now changed their mind they're going to get the vaccine, but progress toward that goal, that really is what matters. It's the growth mindset kind of idea, throw it in there. So progress is better than outcomes is better than outputs. What do you think of that?
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh.
\n\nCASEY: You all are inspiring.
\n\nBRIANNA: I think progress is interesting. I’m personally sometimes hesitant to say that word just because I think a lot of relationship, especially, I don't know, in America, the idea of exponential growth in progress can sometimes be very toxic, but I do like the way you used it.
\n\nCASEY: [inaudible] better word for it.
\n\nDAMIEN: I always feel like if things are getting better, then what more could I possibly ask for? My grandmother had a sign in her kitchen, “If you're well, there's nothing to worry about. If you're sick, there's only two things to worry about: I'm going to get better; I'm going to get worse. You're going to get better, there’s nothing to worry about. You're going to get worse, there are only two things to worry about: you’re going to die, or you’re going to live. You're going to live, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’ve got to die, [laughter] well, there's only two things to worry about: you’re going to go to heaven; you’re going to go to hell. And if you go to heaven, there’s nothing to worry about. If you're going to hell, well, you can be so busy shaking hands with old friends, you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo going off the bottom into that little tree there. As long as things are getting better, things are getting better and what else could we possibly want?
\n\nBRIANNA: I wish I were able to accept that. [laughs] I just feel like better for who and at what cost, but it's interesting that you memorized that on off your grandma. [laughs] Wow, you must've seen that a lot.
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, that was a good 30, or 40 years and better is doing a lot of words. A lot of work in that, in what I just said, because better for whom, like you said. Better how?
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. I got into an argument the other day. It was a good argument, but it was about the term economic growth and it was with a friend and he was like, “Yeah, well, third world countries, they just need more economic development and that's how you improve their country,” and whatever. And I was like, “Well, one, where to begin,” [laughs] and two, it was just like, “Okay, well define economic development.” And then we just like kept on going down and down and it just, I don't know. She just said, “Well, making things more efficient and having good outcomes,” and I was like, “Uh, how do you define what is good and shouldn't they be defining what is good for them?”
\n\nI don’t know, I'm always really worried sometimes with layman terms like that of good and better because sometimes, the people who are deciding that are often the ones that may not be the ones that impact, or feel the impact of the consequences. So I'm always hesitant to say those things, but I totally hear what you said. I hear what you're saying.
\n\nDAMIEN: We get to where our measurement is never of the thing we want, it's of the thing we can measure. GDP is an extraordinary example of that. If a parent stays home and takes care of the child, the contribution to GDP is 0. If they go and get a job, it's been 105% of that money on childcare. Well, that's massive contribution to GDP, but nobody's life's got better there.
\n\nBRIANNA: Isn't that crazy how we have measurements that sometimes are totally meaningless?
\n\nDAMIEN: It's inherent to measurement theory that you're never going to measure what you actually want to know and then people are sticky so they come up with a measurement that's useful in one context and they like it and they stick with it and they keep going.
\n\nJOHN: Like BMI.
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that one hurt.
\n\nBRIANNA: Let’s just go around the table naming all these horrible measurements. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Someone stop me from spending 20 minutes on BMI right now.
\n\nBRIANNA: I know, right? It’s like even in agricultural industry, some measurements of success are usually around yields rather than balancing. How much you’re able to take out and put in to keep your land producing and healthy versus just creating this monocrops that are totally susceptible to pathogens and they're all alike. It's a very fragile system, but yet, you get more investments and loans even if you have higher yields, but higher yields often tend to mean really ravaging the land. So I always think about what measurements of success are and if they even make any sense. BMI, GDP, perfect examples.
\n\nCASEY: This sounds like we shouldn't measure anything, which isn't what any of us are saying right now.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI like to use the phrase “proxy measure: a lot because I'm measuring something, but it's just a proxy. It's only ever a proxy for the thing that I really care about. So the health of the country, not GDP. GDP is a proxy measure. It's just the economic half of it, but maybe we could add another proxy measure, or two and get a little closer. All measures are proxy measures the way I use them, at least my models of the world and as a product manager.
\n\nBRIANNA: Proxy measures.
\n\nDAMIEN: I love that. All measures of proxy measures and so, knowing where they fall down and being aware of GDP went up, but everybody's more miserable. [chuckles]
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah, right. [laughs] Oh, you're the richest country in the world and you're also the most depressed. [laughs] But yeah, I like proxy measure because also, there is the foundation that it's limited and I always think that that is healthy.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It helps you see that there's going to be an error percentage in there and that you should be looking for it to see is it still applicable in this situation? Is the measure actually useful, or accurate versus where it was originally?
\n\nDAMIEN: So Bri, there's a word in your bio that I don't think I've heard before, but I wonder if you'd be willing to tell us what this is and what this means: equitism?
\n\nBRIANNA: Oh, yes. That is a word I used to describe myself in the future that I believe in. So I call myself an equitist, which to me, means the fusion of soulful political movement where you are seeking balance and accepting change, staying curious, and believing in a world that can be nourishing for you and your community.
\n\nIt’s the idea of empowering community and finding a role in a community that is meaningful for you. I think a lot of people experienced meaninglessness in jobs, or whatever. So finding roles where you can actually feel you have agency and the power to affect good—I use that word loosely—into the world. Being probiotic in your approach, and to me, it's very political, but it's also just a way of being.
\n\nSo that to me is what equitist is. It's like a balance. So it's not a conservative, or a moderate, or a liberal, or a progressive, or a socialist, or a democratic socialist. It's like it doesn't fall into the spectrum in terms of politics, it's just an alternative way to not necessarily reject the political spectrum, but add a Z measure to it.
\n\nDoes that make sense? Was that too [laughs] dilute to break that down a little bit, or is that too weird? [laughs] Let me know.
\n\nCASEY: I think this is partly why we get along so well. I care a lot about having people feel included and things are being built by the people who need them more than building stuff for people, or at least in the middle of building with people. I think about that in the workplace a lot and in the community a lot. Like, with ranked choice voting we worked on together, that's a big part of that, too.
\n\nI have family that are conservative and liberal and all different types and I talk to all of them and my big thing is I want everyone's voice to be heard and part of it. I support all these people; I just want them to be involved and it sounds like it gets pretty related to equitism.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I want to get the people involved in the stuff for the people.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. It's like saying that the way systems are set up sometimes just aren't very people-centric and even the way we think about the political spectrum to me is bullshit. It's just like, “Oh, you're conservative,” or “You're liberal, or progressive,” and it's just like, people are way too complex to box themselves in. The people who putting labels to themselves tend to be the more rigid politically. It's like rigid radicalism in a way and so, I just feel that okay, so you have a very strong view of what you would, you would like to see in what you think ought to be, but if your proposal is toxic, or unhealthy, I don't know. If you aren't able to bring people in and they feel good about the way they want the world to be with that idea. I don't know, it's just like rejecting dogma in a way. I feel like this itself is its own conversation.
\n\nCASEY: [inaudible]. [overtalk]
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. That's a lot to digest, I would say right there.
\n\nCASEY: To pull it into tech a little bit, this reminds me of user-centered design where you’re building stuff with the person in mind, you're incorporating them and ideally, they're even part of your team, the kinds of people who would use your application are on your team, that'll be the best.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. I personally am not on the UI/UX side of things, but I'm always wanting to know what users think about the things I build, because it means absolutely nothing if you build something that you think is so cool, but no one finds useful. So I always am very sensitive to that.
\n\nI agree, working on a team with all men has been sometimes the most challenging thing in my life and it can be very, very alienating and isolating. It's just nice to have allies, but it's so nice to also feel in solidarity with someone, too. So yeah, I totally agree with that, Casey.
\n\nJOHN: So now it's the time of the episode where we go into what we call reflections, which are the thoughts, or the ideas, or the things that we're going to take with us after this conversation and maybe keep seeking them out, or talking about with others.
\n\nI think for me, the thing that's sticking with me is the changes that you made into the senior political script of not only the door-knocking, but also, the way you approached the space to break down the hierarchy and to bring relation at an even level. It's very dare I say, anarchist because if there isn't that hierarchy between the people who know and who are telling, and the people who are just being told. I really liked that because it’s so inclusive and it’s so welcoming and that is really what I want to keep thinking about [inaudible] new to my life.
\n\nCASEY: I've got two things I want to share. One is I like, Damien, your quote of me that said all measures are proxy measures. I probably even said, I don't know, but that it's very succinct, the way you put it. I love it. And my second one, I need to work on this one a little more, but thinking about how growth mindset and outcomes not outputs relate. Progress, I'm not sold on that word either, but it seems like that should fit into that framework in my head someday. I hope it sits nicely.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, Casey, thank you for repeating that, all measures of proxy measures because I had already forgotten it. You said it first and I repeated it because it was so awesome and so, now I've heard it four times, I’m going to hold on to that.
\n\nI would have used that as my reflection, but I was thinking how there seems to be so much – [laughs] this is a hilarious thing to say. In the computer software engineering, there's so much binary thinking—things either are, or they aren’t—and being able to work with non-binary is the only way to deal with things like trust, it's the only way to deal with things like confidence levels. Nothing either is, or isn't, that's not how human cognition works, or how the world around us works. So it's important to know our limitations when we put things into binary and to avoid putting things into binary as much as possible, which is at odds with the entire science and theory. [laughs] So that’s going to be something I’m going to think a lot about into the future. Thank you.
\n\nBRIANNA: I just want to say, I do think there is space for having the binary in terms of having an advanced exploration, but I do think binary as something that is strictly to be followed can be toxic, might be the demise of our culture.
\n\nBut my reflections is, I love all measures are proxy measures. I think that's fantastic in terms of just thinking of something as you can use measures and try and have metrics for things, but with the grain of salt on what it is you're actually measuring and that whole quantum thinking of the more you try and measure and pin down, the more it's not there. I think there is that little magic in between trying to measure and also not have to confine something, or define something, I should say.
\n\nI also enjoyed the fact that this conversation is kind of meandered. We had a lot of topics and I feel like there's a lot to unpack so I feel like I'll have a lot more reflections even two days after this. [laughs] I'm like, “Well, we talked about this one thing.” [laughs] I take a long time to process, so.
\n\nJOHN: That’s a good sign.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: Good conversation.
\n\nBRIANNA: Yeah. Thank you all for having me on.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, thank you for joining us. This has been wonderful.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, thank you.
Special Guest: Brianna McGowen.
Sponsored By:
02:51 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Kindness & Empathy
\n\n07:37 - Equitable Design and Inclusive Design
\n\n15:43 - Biases and Prejudices
\n\n22:57 - So...What do we do? How do we get people to care?
\n\n33:22 - How Ego Plays Into These Things
\n\n44:05 - Empathy and Accessibility
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey: Animals can have cognitive disabilities too.
\n\nDamien: Equitable design initiatives and destroying the tenants of white supremacy.
\n\nJennifer: Rest is key.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDO: Hello, friends! Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 243. My name is Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my wonderful friend, Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you, Mando, and I am here with our wonderful friend, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Jennifer Strickland.
\n\nWith more than 25 years of experience across the product lifecycle, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services. She first heard of Ohana in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, “Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.” People don’t know what they don’t know and are often unaware of the corners they cut that exclude people. Empathy, compassion, and humility are vital to communication about these issues. That’s Jennifer focus in equitable design initiatives.
\n\nWelcome, Jennifer!
\n\nJENNIFER: Hi!
\n\nDAMIEN: You’re welcome.
\n\nMANDO: Hi, Jennifer. So glad you’re here.
\n\nJENNIFER: I'm so intrigued. [laughs] And I'm like 243 and this is the first I'm hearing of it?!
\n\nDAMIEN: Or you can go back and listen to them all.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That must be 5, almost 6 years?
\n\nJENNIFER: Do you have transcripts of them all?
\n\nCASEY: Yes.
\n\nJENNIFER: Great!
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. I think we do. I think they're all transcribed now.
\n\nJENNIFER: I'm one of those people [chuckles] that prefers to read things than listen.
\n\nDAMIEN: I can relate to that.
\n\nCASEY: I really enjoy Coursera courses. They have this interface where you can listen, watch the video, and there's a transcript that moves and highlights sentence by sentence. I want that for everything.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, yeah. That's fantastic. It's like closed captioning [laughs] for your audio as well.
\n\nJENNIFER: You can also choose the speed, which I appreciate. I generally want to speed things up, which yes, now that I'm getting older, I have to realize life is worth slowing down for. But when you're in a life where survival is what you're focused on, because you have a bunch of things that are slowing your roll and survival is the first thing in your mind, you tend to take all the jobs, work all the jobs, do all of the things because it's how you get out of poverty, or whatever your thing is.
\n\nSo I've realized how much I've multitasked and worked and worked and worked and I'm realizing that there is a part of the equality is lost there, but we don't all have the privilege of slowing down.
\n\nDAMIEN: I can relate to that, too. So I believe every one of our past 243 episodes, we asked our guests the same question. You should know this is coming. Jennifer, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nJENNIFER: I don't know for sure. People have told me that I'm the kindest person they've ever met, people have said I'm the most empathetic person I've ever met, and I'm willing to bet that they're the same thing. To the people, they just see them differently.
\n\nI acquired being empathetic and kind because of my dysfunction in my invisible disabilities. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma and then repeated life trauma, and the way it manifests itself is trying to anticipate other people's needs, emotions, moods, and all of that and not make people mad.
\n\nSo that's a negative with a golden edge. Life is full of shit; how you respond to it shows who you are and rather than molesting kids, or hurting people, I chose to do what I could to make sure that no one else goes through that and also, to try to minimize it coming at me anymore, too.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nBut there’s positive ways of doing it. You don't have to be like the people who were crappy to you and the same goes like, you're in D.C.? Man, they're terrible drivers and it's like, [laughter] everybody's taking their bad day and putting it out on the people they encounter, whether it's in the store, or on the roads. I was like, “Don't do that.” Like, how did it feel when your boss treated you like you were garbage, why would you treat anyone else like garbage? Be the change, so to speak.
\n\nBut we're all where we are and like I said in my bio, “You don't know what you don't know.” I realized earlier this week that it actually comes from Donald Rumsfeld who said, “Unknown unknowns.” I’m like, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
\n\nMANDO: You can find good in lots of places, right? [laughs]
\n\nJENNIFER: If you choose to.
\n\nMANDO: Absolutely. Yeah.
\n\nJENNIFER: Look at, what's come out of the horror last year. We talk about shit that we didn't use to talk about. Yeah, it's more exhausting when lots of people, but I think in the long run, it will help move us in the right direction. I hope.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. That's absolutely the hope, isn't it?
\n\nJENNIFER: We don't know what we don't know at this time.
\n\nMy sister was volunteering at the zoo and she worked in the Ape House, which I was super jealous of. There's an orangutan there named Lucy who I love and Lucy loves bags, pouches, and lipstick. So I brought a backpack with a pouch and some old lipstick in it and I asked a volunteer if I could draw on the glass.
\n\nThey gave me permission so I made big motions as I opened the backpack and I opened the pouch and you see Lucy and her eyes are like, she's starting to side-eye me like something's going on. And then she runs over and hops up full-time with her toes on the window cell and she's like right up there. So I'm drawing on the glass with the lipstick and she's loving it, reaches her hand behind, poops into her hand, takes the poop and repeats this little actions on the glass.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Which is amazing. It's hilarious so that's amazing.
\n\nJENNIFER: It's fantastic. I just think she's the bomb. My sister would always send pictures and tell me about what Lucy got into and stuff. Lucy lived with people who would dress her in people clothing and so, she's the only one of the orangutans that didn't grow up only around orangutans so the other orangutans exclude her and treat her like she's a weirdo and she's also the one who likes to wear clothes.
\n\nLike my sister gave her an FBI t-shirt so she wears the FBI t-shirt and things like that. She's special in my heart. Like I love the Lucy with all of it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, that's a pretty good display of your super empathetic superpower there.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd it sounds like it might be really also related to the equitable design initiatives?
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah. So I'm really grateful. I currently work at a place that although one would think that it would be a big, scary place because of some of the work that we do. I've found more people who know what equity is and care about what equity is.
\n\nThe place I worked before, I talked about inclusive design because that's everywhere else I've worked, it's common that that's what you're doing these days. But they told me, “Don't say that word, it's activism,” and I was stunned. And then I'm like, “It's all in GSA documents here,” and they were like, “Oh,” and they were the ones that were really bad about like prioritizing accessibility and meeting section 508 compliance and just moving it off to put those issues in the backlog. The client's happy, no one's complained, they think we're doing great work.
\n\nIt's like, you're brushing it all under the rug and you're telling them what you've done and you're dealing with people who don't know what section 508 is either because who does? Very few people really know what it means to be section 508 compliant because it's this mystery container. What is in this? What is this? What is this thing?
\n\nDAMIEN: So for our listeners who don't know, can you tell us a bit what section 508 is?
\n\nJENNIFER: Sure. So section 508 means that anything paid for with federal funds must be section 508 compliant, which means it must meet WCAG 2.0 success criteria and WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
\n\nIf you're ever looking for some really complicated, dense, hard to understand reading, I recommend opening up the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I think the people that are on the working groups with me would probably agree and that's what we're all working towards trying to improve them.
\n\nBut I think that they make the job harder. So rather than just pointing at them and complaining like a lot of people do on Twitter, or deciding “I'm going to create a business and make money off of making this clear for people,” I decided instead to join and try to make it better. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are based on Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust, POUR. Pour like this, not poor like me. [laughs]
\n\nSo there's just a bunch of accessibility criteria that you have to meet to make your work section 508 compliant. It's so hard to read and so hard to understand that I feel for everybody like of course, you don't know what section 508 compliance is. It's really, really hard to read. But if somebody who is an accessibility specialist tells you and writes up an issue ticket, you don't argue with them. You don't say, “This isn't a thing,” you say, “Okay, how soon do I need to fix it?” and you listen to them, but that's not what I experienced previously.
\n\nWhere I am now, it's amazing. In the place I worked before here, like just the contracting, they welcomed everything I said to them regarding accessibility. So I just clearly worked at a contractor that was doing a lot of lip service and not talking the talk, not walking the talk, sorry. [laughs]
\n\nSuper frustrating. Because accessibility is only a piece of it. I am older probably than anybody on this call and I'm a woman working in tech and I identify as non-binary. The arguments I've had about they/them all my life have been stupid, but I'm just like, “Why do I have to be female?” It's just, why do I have to be one, or the other? Anyway, everyone has always argued with me so I'm so grateful for the young ones now for pushing all that.
\n\nI'm Black, Native, Mexican, and white all smushed together and my grandma wouldn't let me in the house because apparently my father was too dark so therefore, I'm too dark. Hello? Look at this!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCurrently, some people are big on the one drop rule and I always say to people, “If you hate me, or want to exclude me so much because somewhere in me you know there is this and how do you feel about so-and-so? I’m done with you and you are bad people and we've got to fight this stupidity.”
\n\nI have also invisible disabilities. So I'm full of all these intersectional things of exclusion. I personally experience a lot of it and then I have the empathy so I'm always feeling fuzzy people who are excluded. So what am I supposed to do with the fact that I'm smart, relatively able-bodied, and have privilege of being lighter skin so I can be a really good Trojan horse? I have to be an advocate like, what else am I supposed to do with my life? Be a privileged piece of poop that just wants to get rich and famous, like a lot of people in tech? Nope.
\n\nAnd I don't want to be virtue signaling and savior complex either and that's where equitable design has been a wonderful thing to learn more about. HmntyCntrd.com and Creative Reaction Lab out in Missouri, those are two places where people can do a lot of learning about equity and truly inclusion, and challenging the tenants of white supremacy in our working ways.
\n\nI'm still trying to find better ways of saying the tenants of white supremacy because if you say that in the workplace, that sounds real bad, especially a few months back before when someone else was in office. When you say the tenants of white supremacy in the workplace, people are going to get a little rankled because that's not stuff we talk about in the workplace.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, it's not just the workplace.
\n\nJENNIFER: Ah, yes.
\n\nDAMIEN: They don't like that at sports bars either. Ask me how I know.
\n\nMANDO: No, they sure don't.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNIFER: We should go to sports bars together. [laughs] Except I’m too scared to go to them right now unless they're outdoors.
\n\nBut when we talk to people about the actual individual tenants about power hoarding, perfectionism, worship of the written word, and things like that, people can really relate and then you watch their faces and they go, “Yeah, I do feel put my place by these things and prevented from succeeding, progressing, all of these things.” These are things that we've all been ingrained to believe are the way we evaluate what's good and what's bad. But we don’t have to. We can talk about this stuff when we can reject those things and replace them with other things. But I'm going to be spending the rest of my life trying to dismantle my biases.
\n\nI'm okay with my prejudices because even since I was a kid, I recognized that we were all prejudice and it's okay. It's our knee jerk first assumption, but you always have to keep an open mind, but that prejudice is there to protect you, but you always have to question it and go, “What is that prejudice? Is that bullshit? Is it right? Is it wrong?” And always looking at yourself, it's always doing that what you call self-awareness stuff, and always be expanding it, changing it, and moving it.
\n\nBut prejudice? Prejudice has a place to protect, speaking as someone who's had guns in her face, knives through her throat, and various other yucky things, I know that when I told myself, “Oh, you're being prejudiced, push yourself out into that vulnerable feeling,” things didn't go very well. So instead, recognize “Okay, what are you thinking in this moment about this situation? Okay, how can you proceed and keep an open mind while being self-protective?”
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 Thinking. We have these instinctive reactions to things and a lot of them are learned—I think they're all learned actually. But they're instinctive and they're not things we decide consciously. They're there to protect us because they're way faster, way more efficient than most of what we are as humans as thinking and enacting beings. But then we also have our rational mind where we can use to examine those things and so, it's important to utilize both. It's also important to know where your instinctive responses are harmful and how to modify them so that they're not harmful. And that is the word.
\n\nJENNIFER: I've never heard of it. Thanks for putting that in there. Power accretion principles is that it?
\n\nCASEY: Oh, that’s something else.
\n\nJENNIFER: Oh.
\n\nCASEY: Type 1 and type 2 thinking.
\n\nJENNIFER: But I know with a lot of my therapy work as a trauma survivor, I have to evaluate a lot of what I think and how I react to things to change them to respond things. But there are parts of having CPTSD that I am not going to be able to do that, too. Like they're things where for example, in that old workplace where there was just this constant invalidation and dismissal of the work, which was very triggering as a rape survivor/incest survivor, that I feel really bad and it made me feel really unsafe all the time.
\n\nSo I felt very emotional in the moment and so, I'd have to breathe through my nose, breathe out to my mouth, feel my tummy, made sure I can feel myself breathing deeply, and try to calmly explain the dire consequences of some of these decisions.
\n\nPeople tend to think that the design and development decisions we make when we're building for the web, it's no big deal if you screw it up. It's not like an architect making a mistake in a building and the building falls down. But when you make a mistake, that means a medical locator application doesn't load for an entire minute on a slow 3G connection—when your audience is people who are financially challenged and therefore, unlikely to have always high-speed, or new devices—you are making a design decision that is literally killing people.
\n\nWhen you make a design decision, or development decision not to QA your work on mobile, tablet, and desktop, and somebody else has to find out that your Contact Us options don't open on mobile so people in crisis can't reach your crisis line.
\n\nPeople are dying. I'm not exaggerating. I have a talk I give called You're Killing Your Users and it got rejected from this conference and one of the reviewers wrote, “The title is sensationalism. No one dies from our decision,” and I was just like, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Like, that’s the point.
\n\nJENNIFER: What a privileged life you live. What a wonderfully privileged life! There's a difference between actions and thoughts and it's okay for me to think, “I really hope you fall a flight of stairs and wind up with a disability and leave the things that you're now trying to put kibosh on.” But that's not me saying, “I'm going to go push you down a flight of stairs,” or that I really do wish that on someone. It's emotional venting, like how could you possibly close yourself off to even listening to this stuff?
\n\nThat's the thing that like, how do we get to a point in tech where so many people in tech act like the bad stereotype of surgeons who have this God complex, that there are particular entities working in government tech right now that are told, “You're going to save government from itself. You've got the answers. You are the ones that are going to help government shift and make things better for the citizen, or the people that use it.”
\n\nBut the people that they hire don't know what they don't know and they keep doing really horrible things. Like, they don't follow the rules, they don't take the time to learn the rules and so, they put user personal identifying information, personal health information on the public server without realizing it that's a no-no and then it has to be wiped, but it can never really fully be wiped.
\n\nAnd then they make decisions like, “Oh, well now we're only worried about the stuff that's public facing. We're not worried about the stuff that's internally facing.” Even though, the internally facing people are all some of the vulnerable people that we're serving. I'm neutralizing a lot of what I'm talking about. [chuckles]
\n\nMANDO: Of course.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, convinced me of the problems. It was an easy sell for me. Now, what do we do?
\n\nJENNIFER: The first thing we do is we all give a fuck about other people. That's the big thing, right? Like, how do I convince you that you should care about people who aren't you?
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I always think about the spectrum of caring. I don't have a good word for it, but there are active and passive supporters—and you can be vocal, or quiet—like loud, or quiet. I want more people to be going around the circle of it so if they're vocally opposed, just be quiet, quietly opposed, maybe be quietly in support, and if you're quietly in support, maybe speak up about it. I want to nudge people along around this, the four quadrants.
\n\nA lot of people only focus on getting people who passively care to be more vocal about it. That's a big one. That's a big transition. But I also like to focus on the other two transitions; getting a lot of people to be quiet about a thing that as opposed. Anyway, everywhere along that process is useful.
\n\nJENNIFER: I think it’s important to hear the people who were opposed because otherwise, how are we ever going to help understand and how are we going to understand if maybe where we’ve got a big blind spot? Like, we have to talk about this stuff in a way that's thoughtful.
\n\nI come from a place in tech where in the late 90s, I was like, “I want to move from doing print to onscreen and printing environmental to that because it looks like a lot of stuff has gone to this web thing.” I picked up Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards and Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design and all of them talk about using web standards and web standards means that you prioritize accessibility from the beginning.
\n\nSo the first thing you build is just HTML tagging your content and everyone can use it. It's not going to be fancy, but it's going to be completely usable. And then you layer things on through progressive enhancement to improve the experience for people with fancy phones, or whatever.
\n\nI don't know why, but that's not how everybody's coming into doing digital work. They’re coming in through React out of the box, thinking that React out of the box is – and it's like nope, you have to build in the framework because nobody put the framework in React. React is just a bunch of hinges and loops, but you have to put the quality wood in and the quality glass panes and the handles that everybody can use. I'm not sure if that analogy is even going to work.
\n\nBut one of the things I realized talking with colleagues today is I tend to jump to three steps in when I really need to go back, start at the beginning, and say, “Here are the terms. This is what section 508 is. This is what accessibility is. This is what A11Y is. This is WCAG, this is how it's pronounced, this is what it means, and this is the history of it.”
\n\nI think understanding history of section 508 and what WCAG is also vital in the first version of WCAG section 508, it adopted part of what was WCAG 1.0, but it wasn't like a one to one for 1.0, it was just some of it and then it updated in 2017, or 2018, I forget. Without my cheat sheet, I can't remember this stuff. Like I got other things to keep in my brain.
\n\nCASEY: I just pulled up my favorite cheat sheet and I put it in the chat sidebar here.
\n\nJENNIFER: Oh, thank you. It's in my slides for Ohana for Digital Service Design that I gave at WX Summit and I think I also gave it recently in another thing. Oh, UXPA DC.
\n\nBut the thing is, the changes only recently happened where it went to WCAG 2.0 was 2018, I think it got updated. So all those people that were resisting me in 2018, 2019, 2020 likely never realized that there was a refresh that they need to pay attention to and I kept trying to like say, “No, you don't understand, section 508 means more now.”
\n\nTechnically, the access board that defines what section 508 is talking about moving it to 2.1, or 2.2 and those include these things. So we should get ahead of the ball, ahead of the curve, or whatever you want to call it and we should be doing 2.1 and 2.2 and even beyond thinking about compliance and that sort of stuff. The reason we want to do human beings is that 2.1 and 2.2 are for people who are cognitively fatigued and I don't think there's anyone who's been through the pandemic who is not cognitively fatigued. If you are, you are just a robot. I don't know. I don't know who could not be not cognitive fatigue.
\n\nAnd then the other people that also helps are mobile users. So if you look at any site, look at their usage stats, everything moving up and up and up in mobile devices. There's some people who don't have computers that they only have phones. So it just seems silly not to be supporting those folks. But we need, I don't know. I need to think more about how to get there, how to be more effective in helping people care, how to be more effective in teaching people.
\n\nOne of the big pieces I've learned in the last six months is the first step is self-care—sleep, exercise, eat, or maybe those two need to be back and forth. I haven't decided yet because I'm still trying to get the sleep workout.
\n\nBefore I moved to D.C., I was a runner, hiker, I had a sit spot at the local pond where I would hang out with the fishes and the turtles and the frogs and the birds and here, I overlook the Pentagon and there's swarms of helicopters. I grow lots of green things to put between me and it, but it's hard. The running is stuck because I don't feel safe and things like that.
\n\nI live in an antiseptic neighborhood intentionally because I knew every time I went into D.C. and I saw what I see, I lose hope because I can't not care. It kills me that I have to walk by people who clearly need – this is a messed up world. We talk about the developing world as the place where people are dying on the side of the road. Do you have blinders on like, it's happening here? I don't know what to do. I care too much. So what do we do? What do you think?
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I think you have a hint. You've worked at places that are really resistant to accessibility and accessibility to improvements, and you've worked at some that are very welcoming and eager to implement them. So what were the differences? What do you think was the source of that dichotomy?
\n\nJENNIFER: I think at the place I worked after I left the hellhole; the product owner was an Asian woman and the other designer was from India. Whereas, before the other place was a white woman and a white man and another white man who was in charge. And then the place I work now, it's a lot of people who are very neurodiverse. I work at MITRE, which is an FFRDC, which is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. It's full of lots of smart people who are very bookish.
\n\nIt's funny when I was a little kid, I was in the gifted and talented kids and so, they would put us into these class sessions where we were to brainstorm and I love brainstorming. I love imagining things. I remember thinking, “I want to work in a think tank and just all I do all the time is brainstorm and we'd figure out a way to use some of those things!” And I feel a little bit like I'm there now, which is cool and they treat one another really well at MITRE, which is nice. Not to say it's perfect there. Nowhere is perfect. But compared to a lot of places, it's better.
\n\nI think it’s the people are taking the time to listen, taking the time to ask questions. The people I work with don't have a lot of ego, generally. At least not the ones I'm working with. I hear that they do exist there, but I haven't run into many of them. Whereas, the other place, there was a lot of virtue signaling and a lot of savior complex. Actually, very little savior conflicts. They didn't really care about saving anyone, sorry. Snark! [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Can you tell us a little more about ego and how ego plays into these things?
\n\nJENNIFER: How do you think ego plays into these things?
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, I think it causes people to one up and turn questions around it on me, that's one way.
\n\nEgo means a lot of things to a lot of different people, which is why I asked the question. I think it was introduced to English by Freud and I don't want to use a Freudian theory for anything ever.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd then when I talk to people about death of the ego and [inaudible] and all of these things, it seems really unpleasant. People like their self-identity, people like being themselves, and they don't want to stop being themselves. So I'm not sure how that's related to what you were saying.
\n\nCASEY: The way I'm hearing you use ego here sounds like self-centered, thinking about your own perspective, not taking the time and effort and energy to think about other people's perspectives. And if you don't have a diverse set of experiences to lean on your own, you're missing out on a lot.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah. I tend to think about, I guess, it's my dysfunction. Once again, it's like, how do my actions impact others? Why are other people thinking about how their actions impact others? When you're out in public and you’ve got to cut the cheese, are you going to do it when there are a lot of people around? Are you going to take a stinky deuce in a public bathroom that you know other people in there? If you think about the community around you, you would go find a private one if you cared at all. But most people don't care and they think, “I do what I got to do.”
\n\nI just think we need to think a little bit more about the consequences of our actions and I tweeted yesterday, or this morning about how – oh, it was yesterday. I was watching TV and a new, one of those food delivery commercials came on. This one, they send you a stove, you get a little oven, and you cook all of their meals in this little throwaway dishes. So you have no dishes, nothing. How much are we going to just keep creating crap?
\n\nWhen you think about all of this takeout and delivery, there's just so much trash we generate. We should be taxing the bleep out of companies that make these sorts of things like, Amazon should have the bleep taxed out of it because of all the cardboard and I'm just as guilty because I ordered the thing and the box of staples arrives in a box. It has a plastic bubble wrap all around it. Like it's just a box at $2.50 staples, but I couldn't be bothered to go – I don't know if they have them at Walgreens. Like for real, I don't know.
\n\nWe need to do better. We need to think about the consequences of these decisions and not just do it like, that's the thing that tech has been doing is let's make an MVP and see if it has wheels. Let's make a prototype, but do the thing. Okay, let's do the thing. Oh, it's got wheels. Oh, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. Who cares about the consequences of all of it? Who cares? Your kids, your grandkids someday maybe will when the world is gone.
\n\nWe talk about climate change. We talk about 120-degree temperatures in Seattle and Portland, the ocean on fire, the beaches are eroding, like the ice cap—most of the Arctic is having a 100 and some odd degree temperature day. Like we are screwing it up and our legislation isn't keeping pace with the advances in technology that are just drawing things.
\n\nWhere are the people who care in the cycle and how are they interrupting the VCs who just want to like be the next big tech? Everybody wants to be the next Zuckerberg, or Jack, or Bezos, or Gates, or whatever, and nobody has to deal with the consequences of their actions and their consequences of those design and development decisions.
\n\nThat's where I think it's ego, it’s self-centeredness, it's wanting to be famous, it’s wanting to be rich instead of really, truly wanting to make the world a better place. I know my definition of better. We've got four different visions of what better is going to be and that's hard work. Maybe it is easier to just focus on getting famous and getting rich than it is on doing the hard work of taking four different visions of what good is and trying to find the way forward.
\n\nDAMIEN: Making the world a better place. The world will be a better place when I'm rich and famous. But that also means – and that's the truth.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut what else you said was being empathetic and having a diverse – well, marginalized people in charge where you can see that that's why the impact that things are having on other people. It's not just about me being rich and famous, but it's also about things being better for other people, too.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah. I don't necessarily mean marginalized people have to be in charge.
\n\nDAMIEN: Right. I took that jump based on your description of the places you worked for. I should have specified that. I wasn’t clear enough.
\n\nJENNIFER: I do have to say that in general, when I've worked for people who aren't the status quo, more often than not, they bring a compassionate, empathetic approach. Not always. There have been some that are just clearly driven and power hungry, and I can't fault them either because it's got to take a lot to come up from wherever and fight through the dog-eat-dog world.
\n\nBut in the project work, there's the for, with and by. The general ways that we redesign and build things for people, then the next piece is we design and build things with the people that we're serving, but the newer way of doing things is that we don't design and build the things, the people that we're serving design the things and tell us what they want to design, and then we figure out how to make sure that it's built the way they tell us to. That goes against the Steve Jobs approach where Steve Jobs said people don't know what they want sort of thing. Wasn't that was he said?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Well, there was Henry Ford who said, “If you ask people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses.”
\n\nJENNIFER: Right.
\n\nD And Steve Jobs kind of did the same thing.
\n\nJENNIFER: Right. And we, as designers, have to be able to work with that and pull that out and suss it out and make sure that we translate it into something useful and then iterate with to make sure that we get it.
\n\nLike when I do research, listening sessions with folks, I have to use my experience doing this work to know what are the – like, Indi Young’s inner thinking, reactions, and guiding principles. Those are the things that will help guide you on what people are really wanting and needing and what their purpose is. So you make sure that whatever your understanding is closer to what they're really saying, because they don't know what can be built. They don't know what goes on, but they do know what their purpose is and what they need. Maybe they don't even know what they need, but they do know what their purpose is, or you keep validating things.
\n\nCASEY: I want to amplify, you said Indi Young. I read a lot of her work and she just says so many things that I wish someone would say, and she's been saying them for a while. I just didn't know about her. Indi Young.
\n\nJENNIFER: It’s I-N-D-I and Y-O-U-N-G. I am so grateful that I got to take her courses. I paid for them all myself, except for one class—I let that other place pay for one through my continuing ed, but I wanted to do it so badly that I paid for all myself. The same thing with all the Creative Reaction Lab and HmntyCntrd stuff; I paid for those out of my own money that probably could have gone to a vacation, [chuckles] or buying a car, or something. But contributing to our society in a responsible and productive way, figuring out how to get my language framework better.
\n\nLike you said earlier, Damien, I'm really good at pointing out what the problems are. I worry about figuring out how we solve them, because I don't really have the ego to think that I know what the answer is, but I'm very interested in working with others to figure out how we solve them. I have some ideas, but how do you tell a React developer that you really have to learn HTML, you have to learn schematic HTML. That's like learning the alphabet. I don't understand.
\n\nCASEY: Well, I have some ideas around that. Amber is my go-to framework and they have accessibility baked into the introduction tutorial series. They have like 13 condoned add-ons that do accessibility related things. At the conference, there's always a whole bunch of accessibility tracks. Amber is like happy path accessibility right front and center.
\n\nReact probably has things like that. We could have React’s onboarding docs grow in that direction, that would be great, and have more React add-ons to do that that are condoned and supported by the community could have the same path. And it could probably even use a lot of the same core code even. The same principles apply.
\n\nJENNIFER: If you want to work together and come up with some stuff to go to React conferences, or work with the React team, or whatever.
\n
CASEY: Sounds fun.
DAMIEN: Well, one of the things you talked about the way you described it and made it sound like empathy was so much of the core of it. In order to care about accessibility, you have to empathize with people who need that functionality. You have to empathize with people who are on 3G flip phones. That's not a thing, is it? [laughs] But nonetheless, empathizing.
\n\nJENNIFER: A flat screen phone, a smartphone looking thing and it's still – if anyone's on a slow 3G, it’s still going to be a miserable experience.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, 3G with a 5-year-old Android OS.
\n\nJENNIFER: But I don't think it's necessarily that people have to empathize. In an ideal world would, but maybe they could be motivated by other things like fast. Like, do you want to fast cumulative layout shift? Do you want like a great core vitals Google score? Do you want a great Google Lighthouse score? Do you want the clear Axe DevTools scan? Like when I get a 100% little person zooming in a wheelchair screen instead of issues found. Especially if I do it the first time and like, I hadn't been scanning all along and I just go to check it for the first time and it's clean, I'm like, “Yes!” [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Automation helps a lot.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: When I worked at USCIS, I don't know what this meant, but they said we cannot automate these tests. I think we can and they didn't do it yet, but I've always been of baffled. I think half of it, you can automate tests around and we had none at the time.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah, you catch 30 to 50% of the accessibility issues via the Axe rule set and JSX Alley and all that. You can catch 30 to 50.
\n\nCASEY: Sounds great.
\n\nJENNIFER: That's still better than catching none of them. Still not great, but it's still better than nothing. They're not here to tell us why they can't, but adding things into your end-to-end test shouldn't be that hard if you know how to write tests. I don't personally know how to write tests. I want to. I don't know. Like, I have to choose which thing am I going to work on?
\n\nI'm working on an acquisition project, defining the requirements and the scope and the red tape of what a contract will be and it's such foreign territory for me. There's a lot of pieces there that I never ever thought I would be dealing with and my head hurts all the time. I feel stupid all the time, but that's okay. If you're not doing something you haven't done before, maybe you're not learning, it's growing. I'm growing. I'm definitely growing, but in different ways and I miss the code thing of I have a to-do list where I really want to get good at Docker, now I want to learn few, things like that and I want to get back to learning Python because Python, I think is super cool.
\n\nCASEY: There's one thing I wanted to mention earlier that I just remembered. One thing that was eye-opening to me for accessibility concerns is when I heard that screen reader has existed, which was several years into my programming career. I didn't know they were a thing at all. I think it's more common now that people know about them today than 10, 15 years ago. But I still haven't seen someone use a screen reader and that would be really important for me as a developer. I'm not developing software lately either so I'm not really coding that. But if anyone hasn't, you should use a screen reader on your computer if you're developing software that might have to be used by one.
\n\nJENNIFER: So everyone on a Mac has voiceover. Everyone on an iPhone has voiceover. It's really hard on the iPhone, I feel like I can't, oh, it's really hard. I've heard great things about Talkback on Android. And then on Windows, newer versions have Microsoft Narrator, which is a built-in screen reader. You can also download NVDA for free and install it. It depends on how much money you want to spend. There a bunch of different ways to get Jaws, do Jaws, too. Chrome has Chromebox so you can get another screen reader that way.
\n\nCASEY: So many options. It's kind of overwhelming. If I had to recommend one for a Windows user and one for a Mac user, would you recommend the built-in ones just to start with, to play with something?
\n\nJENNIFER: So everywhere I've tested, whether it was at the financial institution, or the insurance place, or the government place, we always had to test with Jaws, NVDA, and voiceover. I test with voiceover because it's what I have on my machine, because I'm usually working on a Mac.
\n\nBut the way I look at the screen reader is the number of people who are using screen readers is significantly fewer than the number of people with cognitive considerations. So I try to use good semantic markup, basic web standards so that things will work; things have always been pretty great in screen readers because of that. I try to keep my code from being too complicated, or my UI is from being complicated, which might do some visual designers seem somewhat boring to some of them. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Do you ever turn off CSS for the test?
\n\nJENNIFER: Yes, and if it makes sense that way, then I know I'm doing it right and is it still usable without JavaScript. Better yet, Heydon Pickering's way of like, it's not usable unless you turn off the JavaScript, that was fabulous. I pissed off so many people.
\n\nBut to me, I try to focus on other things like how clear is, how clean is it? Can I tab through the whole UI? Can I operate it with just a keyboard? Your keyboard is your best assistive tech tester. You don’t skip. If you can tap through anything without getting stuck, excellent. If you don't skip over nav items.
\n\nCASEY: My biggest pet peeve is when websites don't work when you zoom in, because all of my devices I zoom in not because my vision is bad, but because for my posture. I want to be able to see my screen from a far distance and not lean in and craning my neck over laptop and my phone, both and a lot of websites break.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: You zoom in the text at all, you can't read anything.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah. At the one place I worked before, we required two steps of zoom in and two steps of zoom out, and it still had to be functional. I don't see that in most places; they don't bother to say things like that.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah.
\n\nJENNIFER: At the government, too –
\n\nCASEY: I wonder how common it is if people do that. I do it so I think it's very common, but I don't know the right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJENNIFER: But that's how the world is, right? I can tell you that once you hit this old age and your eyes start to turn against you and things are too small, or too light, you suddenly understand the importance of all of these things so much more.
\n\nSo for all of those designers doing your thin gray text on white backgrounds, or thin gray text on gray backgrounds, or your tiny little 12 and under pixels for your legaleas, karma is out to get you. [chuckles] We've all done it. Like there was a time I thought nobody cared about the legaleas. That's not true. Even your footer on your website should be big enough for people to read. Otherwise, they think I'm signing away my soul to zoom because I can't read it. If you can zoom it in, that's great. But some apps disable the zoom.
\n\nDAMIEN: So we usually end on a series of reflections. How do you feel about moving to that?
\n\nJENNIFER Sure!
\n\nDAMIEN: We let our guests go last.
\n\nCasey, do you have a reflection you want to share with us?
\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking back to Mando's dog and I thought it was interesting, Jennifer, that you linked your experiences with the dog’s experiences. Like, some of the symptoms you have might be similar if a dog has CPTSD, too and I think that's really insightful. I think a lot of animals have that kind of set up, but we don't treat them like we treat humans with those issues even if they're similar.
\n\nDAMIEN: It was in your bio, equitable design initiatives, I really want it to dig into that because that fascinates me and I guess, if draws that bridge between things that I think are very important, or very important for me, both accessibility, that sort of work, especially in software design, because that's where I'm at. And then destroying the tenants of white supremacy and being able to connect those as things that work together and seeing how they work together. Yeah, that's what I'm going to be reflecting on.
\n\nJENNIFER: Yeah. Whenever we're doing our work, looking for opportunities to surface and put it out for everyone to look at who has power, if this changes who has power, if this doesn't change who has power, what is motivating the players, are people motivated by making sure that no one's excluded, or are people motivated by making sure that their career moves forward, or they don't get in trouble rather than truly serving?
\n\nI still am in the mindset of serving the people with a purpose that we're aiming to meet the needs of kind of thing. I still have that mindset. A lot of the prep work, we're still talking about the people we aim to serve and it's still about getting them into the cycle. That is a very big position of power that a designer has and acknowledging that that's power and that I wield that power in a way that I consider responsible, which is to make sure that we are including people who are historically underrepresented, especially in those discussions.
\n\nI'm really proud of a remote design challenge where all of our research participants were either people of color, or people with disabilities. Man, the findings insights were so juicy. There was so much that we could do with what we got. It was really awesome.
\n\nSo by equitable design initiatives, it's really just thinking about acknowledging the power that we have and trying to make sure we do what we can to share it, transfer it, being really respectful of other perspectives. I've always thought of it as infinite curiosity about others and some people have accused me being nosy and they didn't realize it's not about getting up in their private business. It’s just, I want to be gracious and respect others.
\n\nWhat I will reflect on was how I really need to rest. I will continue to reflect on how I rest is key. I'm making a conscious decision for the next couple of months to not volunteer because I tend to do too much, as Casey may, or may not know. [chuckles] Yeah, I want to wake up in the morning and feel energized and ready to take full advantage of, which is not the right way to phrase it, but show up as my best self and well-prepared for the work. Especially since I now have found myself a new incredibly compassionate, smart place that genuinely aims to improve equity and social justice, and do things for the environment and how grateful I am. I totally thought this place was just about let’s them all and it’s so not. [laughs]
\n\nSo there’s so many wonderful people. I highly recommend everybody come work with me if you care about things.
\n\nDAMIEN: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer for being our guest today. It’s been a pleasure.
\n\nThe author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only, and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, thepositions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author. ©2021 The MITRE Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Approved for public release. Distribution unlimited 21-2206.
Special Guest: Jennifer Strickland.
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Jackson\nOpen Systems\n\n\nMechanical\nAnimate\nSocial\nEcological\n\nOn Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events \n\n\n09:14 - The Origins of Sociotechnical Systems\n\n\nTaylorism \nTrond Hjorteland: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines”* \n\n\nNorwegian Industrial Democracy Program\n\n\n\n18:42 - Design From Above vs Self-Organization \n\n\nParticipative Design\nIdealized Design\nSolving Problems is not Systems Thinking\n\n\n29:39 - Systemic Change and Open Systems\n\n\nOrganizationally Closed but Structurally Open\nGetting Out of the Machine Age and Into Systems Thinking (The Information Age)\nThe Basis for the Viable System Model / Stafford Beer // Javier Livas\nWhat is Cybernetics? Conference by Stafford Beer\nJean Yang: Developer Experience: Stuck Between Abstraction and a Hard Place?\nThe Embodiment and Hermeneutic Relations\n\n\n37:47 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution\n\n\n4 Historical Stages in the Development of Work\n\n\nMechanization\nAutomation\nCentralization\nComputerization\n\nIronies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge\nTen challenges for making automation a \"team player\" in joint human-agent activity\nJessica Kerr - Principles of Collaborative Automation\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see.” – Trond\n\nTrond: In physics we do our best to remove the people and close it as much as possible. In IT it's opposite; We work in a completely open system where the human part is essential.\n\nRein: What we call human error is actually a human’s inability to cope with complexity. We need to get better at managing complexity; not controlling it.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nREIN: Welcome to Episode 242 of Greater Than Code. I’m here with my friend, Jessica Kerr. \n\nJESSICA: Thanks, Rein and I'm excited because today we are here with Trond Hjorteland.\n\nTrond is an IT architect aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no—that's no as in the country code for Norway, not no as in no science. Trond has many years of experience with large, complex, business critical systems as a developer and an architect on middleware and backend applications so he's super interested in service orientation, domain driven design—went like that one—event driven architectures and of course, sociotechnical systems, which is our topic today! These happen in industries across the world like telecom, media, TV, government.\n\nTrond’s mantra is, “Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.” I concur.\n\nTrond, welcome to Greater Than Code!\n\nTROND: Thank you for having me. It's fun being here.\n\nJESSICA: Trond, as a Northern European, I know our usual question about superpowers makes you nervous. So let me change it up a little bit: what is your superpower of sociotechnical system design?\n\nTROND: Oh, that's a good one. I'm glad you turned it over because we are from the land of the Jante, as you may have heard of, where people are not supposed to be anything better than anybody else. So being a superhero, that's not something that we are accustomed to now, so to speak. \n\nSo the topic there, sociotechnical system, what makes you a superhero by having that perspective? I think it's in the name, really. Do you actually join the social and the technical aspects of things, whatever you do? \n\nBut my focus is mainly in organizations and in relation to a person, or a team cooperating, designing IT solutions, and stuff like that, that you have to consider both the social and the technical and I find that we have too much – I have definitely done that. Focused too much on the technical aspects and not ignoring the social aspects, but at least when we are designing stuff we frequently get too attached to the technical aspects. So I think we need that balance.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. \n\nTROND: So I guess, that is my superpower I get from that.\n\nJESSICA: When we do software design, we think we're designing software, which we think is made of technical code and infrastructure, and that software is made by people and for people and imagine that. Social side matters. \n\nTROND: Yeah, and I must say that since Agile in the early 2000s, the focus on the user has been increasing. I think that's better covered than it used to be, but I still think we miss out on we part that we create software and that is that humans actually create software. \n\nWe often talk about the customer, for example. I guess, many of your listeners are creating such a system that actually the customers are using, like there’s an end user somewhere. But frequently, there's also internal users of that system that you create like backend users, or there's a wide range of others stakeholders as well and – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Internal users of customer facing systems?\n\nTROND: For example, yes. Like back office, for example. I'm working for our fairly large telecom operation and of course, their main goal is getting and keeping the end users, paying customers, but it's also a lot of stuff going on in the backend, in the back office like supporting customer service support, there is delivery of equipment to the users, there's shipment, there is maintenance, all that stuff, there's assurance of it. So there's a lot of stuff going on in that domain that we rarely think of when we create their IT systems, I find at least. \n\nJESSICA: But when we're making our software systems, we're building the company, we're building the next version of this company, and that includes how well can people in the back office do their jobs. \n\nTROND: Exactly. \n\nJESSICA: And us, like we're also creating the next version of software that we need to change and maintain and keep running and respond to problems in. I like to think about the developer interface.\n\nTROND: Exactly, and that is actually, there’s an area where the wider sociotechnical term has popped up probably more frequently than before. It's actually that, because we think of the inter policies we need and organize the teams around for example, services are sometimes necessary and stuff like that. \n\nJESSICA: Inter policies, you said.\n\nTROND: Yeah, the inter policies offices go into this stuff. So we are looking into that stuff. We are getting knowledge on how to do that, but I find we still are not seeing the whole picture, though. Yes, that is important to get the teams right because you want them to not interact too much but enough so we want – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Oh yeah, I love it that the book says, “Collaboration is not the goal! Collaboration is expensive and it's a negative to need to do it, but sometimes you need to.”\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly. So that'd be a backstory there. So the main system, I think and the idea is that you have a system consisting of parts and what sociotechnical systems focus a lot about is the social system. There is a social system and that social system, those parts are us as developers and those parts are stakeholders of course, our users and then you get into this idea of an open system. I think it was Bertanlanffy who coined that, or looked into that.\n\nJESSICA: Bertanlanffy open systems. \n\nTROND: Open system, yeah. \n\nJESSICA: Fair warning to readers, all of us have been reading this book, Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson and we may name drop a few systems thinking historical figures. \n\nTROND: Yes, and Bertanlanffy is one of those early ones. I think he actually developed some of the idea before the war, but I think he wrote the book after—I'm not sure, 1950s, or something—on general system thinking. It's General Systems Theory and he was also looking into this open system thing and I think this is also something that for example, Russell Ackoff took to heart. \n\nSo he had to find four type of systems. He said there was a mechanical system, like people would think of when they hear system, like it's a technical thing. Like a machine, for example, your car is a system. But then they also added, there was something more that's another type of system, which is animal system, which is basically us. We consist of parts, but we have a purpose that is different from us than a car that makes us different. \n\nAnd then you take a lot of those parts and combine them, then you've got a social system. The interesting thing with the social system is that that system in of its own have a purpose, but also, the parts have a purpose. That's the thing which is different from the other thing. For an animal system, your parts don't have a purpose. Your heart doesn't really have a purpose; it's not giving a purpose. It doesn't have an end goal, so to speak that. There's nothing in – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: No, it has a purpose within the larger system.\n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nJESSICA: But it doesn't have self-actualization. \n\nTROND: It's not purposeful. That's probably the word that I – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Your heart isn't sitting there thinking, going beat, beat, beat. It does that, but it's not thinking it. \n\nTROND: No, exactly.\n\n[laughter]\n\nTROND: So I think actually Ackoff and I think there was a book called On Purposeful Systems, which I recommend. It's really a dense book. The Jackson book, it's long, but it's quite verbose so it's readable. Like the On Purposeful Systems is designed to be short and concise so it's basically just a list of bullet points almost. It's just a really hard read. But they get into the difference between a purposeful system and a goal-seeking system. Your heart will be goal-seeking. It has something to achieve, but it doesn't have a purpose in a sense. \n\nSo that's the thing, which is then you as a person and you as a part of a social system and that's where I think the interesting thing comes in and that's where we're sociotechnical system really takes this on board is that in a social system, you have a set of individuals and you also have technical aspects of those system as well so that's the sociotechnical thing. \n\nJESSICA: Now you mentioned Ackoff said four kinds of systems.\n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nH: Mechanical, animal, social?\n\nTROND: And then there’s ecological.\n\nJESSICA: And then ecological, thanks.\n\nTROND: Yeah. So the ecological one is that where every parts have a purpose like us, but the whole doesn't have a purpose on its own. Like the human kind is not purposeful and we should be probably. [laughs] For example, with climate change and all that, but we are not. Not necessarily.\n\nREIN: This actually relates a little bit to the origins of sociotechnical systems because it came about as a way to improve workplace democracy and if you look at the history of management theory, if you look at Taylorism, which was the dominant theory at the time, the whole point of Taylorism is to take purposefulness away from the workers. \n\nSo the manager decides on the tasks, the manager decides how the tasks are done—there's one right way to do the tasks—and the worker just does those actions. Basically turning the worker into a machine. So Taylorism was effectively a way to take a social system, affirm a company, and try to turn it into an animate system where the managers had purpose and the workers just fulfilled a purpose. \n\nTROND: Exactly. \n\nREIN: And sociotechnical system said, “What if we give the power of purposefulness back to the workers?” Let them choose the task, let them choose the way they do their tasks.\n\nTROND: Exactly, and this is an interesting theme because at the same time, as Taylor was developing his ideas, there were other people having similar ideas, like sociotechnical, but we never heard of them a late like Mary Parker Follett, for example. She was living at the same time, writing stuff at the same time, but the industry wasn't interested in listening to her because it didn't fit their machine model. She was a contrary to that and this was the same thing that sociotechnical system designers, or researchers, to put it more correctly, also experienced, for example, in a post-war England, in the coal mines.\n\nJESSICA: Oh yeah, tell us about the coal mines.\n\nTROND: Yeah, because that's where the whole sociotechnical system theory was defined, or was first coined what was there. There was a set of researchers from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which actually came about like an offshoot of the Tavistock Clinic, which was working actually with people struggling from the war after the Second World War. \n\nJESSICA: Was that in Norway?\n\nTROND: No, that was exactly in England, that was in London. Tavistock is in London.\n\nJESSICA: Oh!\n\nTROND: Yeah. So it was an offshoot of that because there were researchers there that had the knowledge that there was something specific about the groups. There was somebody called Bion and there was a Kurt Lewin, which I think Jessica, you probably have heard of.\n\nJESSICA: Is that Kurt Lewin?\n\nTROND: Yes, that's the one. Absolutely. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah. He was a psychologist. \n\nTROND: Yeah. So he was for example, our main character of the sociotechnical movement in England in the post-war was Eric Trist and he was working closely with Lewin, or Lewin as you Americans call him. \n\nThey were inspired by the human relations movement, if you like so they saw they had to look into how the people interact. So they observed the miners in England. There was a couple of mines where they had introduced some new technology called the longwall where they actually tried to industrialize the mining. They have gone from autonomous groups into more industrialized, like – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Taylorism?\n\nTROND: Yes, they had gone all Taylorism, correct.\n\nJESSICA: “Your purpose is to be a pair of hands that does this.”\n\nTROND: Exactly, and then they had shifts. So one shift was doing one thing, then other shift was doing the second thing and that's how they were doing the other thing. So they were separating people. They had to have been working in groups before, then they were separated to industrialize like efficiently out of each part.\n\nJESSICA: Or to grouplike tasks with each other so that you only have one set of people to do a single thing. \n\nTROND: Yeah. So one group was preparing and blowing and breaking out the coal, somebody was pushing it out to the conveyors, and somebody else was moving into the instrument, or the machinery to the next place. This is what's the three partnership shifts were like.\n\nWhat they noticed then is that they didn't get the efficiency that they expected from this and also, people were leaving. People really didn't like this way of working; there was a lot of absenteeism and there were a lot of crows and uproar and it didn't go well, this new technology which they had too high hopes for. \n\nSo then Trist and a couple of others like Bamford observed something that happened in one of the mines that people actually, some of them self-organized and went back to the previous way of working in autonomous teams plus using this new technology. They self-organized in order to actually to be able to work in this alignment, but this was the first time that I saw this type of action that they actually created their own semi-autonomous teams as they called them.\n\nJESSICA: So there was some technology that was introduced and when they tried to make it about the technology and get people to use it the way they thought it would be most efficient, it was not effective.\n\nTROND: Not effective?\n\nJESSICA: But yet the people working in teams were able to use the technology.\n\nTROND: Yeah. Actually, so this is the interesting part is when you have complex systems then you can have self-organization happening there and these workers, they were so frustrated. They’re like, “Okay. Let's take matters in our own hands, let's create groups where we can actually work together.” So they created these autonomous groups and this was something that Eric Trist and Ken Bamford observed. So they saw that when they did that, the absenteeism and the quality of work-life increased a lot and also, productivity increased a lot. \n\nThere were a few mines observed that did this and they compared to other mines that didn't and the numbers were quite convincing. So you should think “Oh, this would use them,” everybody would start using this approach. No, they didn't. Of course, management, the leadership didn't want this. They were afraid of losing the power so they worked against it. \n\nSo just after a few research attempts, there wasn't any leverage there and actually, they increased the industrialization with a next level of invention was created that made it even worse so it grinded to a halt.\n\nSociotechnical was a definer, but it didn't have the good fertile ground to grow. So that's when they came to my native land, to Norway. \n\nJESSICA: Ah.\n\nTROND: Yeah. So Fred Emery was one of those who worked with Trist and Bramforth a lot back then and also traced himself, actually came to Norway as almost like a governmental project. There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program, I think it was called, it was actually established by – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program. That is so not American.\n\nTROND: [laughs] Exactly. So that probably only happen in Norway, I suppose and there were a lot of reasons for that. One of them is, especially as that we struggled with the industry after the war, because we were just invaded by Germany and was under rule so we had nothing to build. \n\nSo they got support from America, for example, to rebuild after the war, but also, Norwegians are the specific type of persons, if you like. They don't like to be ruled over. So the high industrial stuff didn't go down well with the workers even worse than in England, but not in mines because we don't have any mines so just like creating nails, or like paper mills.\n\nAlso, the same thing happened as I said, in England, that people were not happy with the way these things were going. But the problem is in Norway that this was covering all the mines, not just a few mines here and there. This was going all the way up to the – the workers unions were collaborating with the employers unions. So they were actually coming together. \n\nThis project was established by these two in collaboration and actually, the government was also coming and so, there were three parts to this initiative. And then the Tavistock was called in to help them with this project, or the program to call it. So then it started off your experiments in Norway and then I went more – in England, they observed mostly, like the Tavistock, and in Norway, they actually started designing these type of systems, political systems, they're autonomous work groups and all that. \n\nThey did live experiments and the like so there was action research as a way of – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Oh, action research. \n\nTROND: Yeah, where you actually do research on the ground. This was also from Kurt Lewin, I believe. \n\nSo I know they did a lot of research there and got similar results as in England. But also, this went a bit further than Norway. This actually went into the law, how to do this. So like work participation, for example and there was also this work design thing that came out of it. It’s like workers have some demands that goes above just a livable wage. They want the type of job that meant something, where they were supposed to grow, they were supposed to learn on the job, they were supposed to – there were a lot of stuff that they wanted and that was added to actually the law. So this is part of Norwegian law today, what came out of that research.\n\nJESSICA: You mentioned that in Norway, they started doing design and yet there's the implication that it's design of self-organizing teams. Is that conflict? Like, design from above versus self-organization.\n\nTROND: Yes, it did and that is also something that I discovered in Norway so well-observed, Jessica. This is actually what happened in Norway. So the researchers saw that they were struggling to getting this accepted properly by the workers, then I saw okay, they have to get the workers involved. Then they started with this, what they call participative design. The workers were pulled in to design the work they worked on, or to do together with the researchers, but the researchers were still regarded as experts still. So there was a divide between the researches and the workers, but the workers weren't given a lot of freewill to design how they wanted this to work themselves. \n\nOne of the latest experiments, I think the workers weren't getting the full freedom to design and I think it was the aluminum industry. I think they were creating a new factory and the workers weren’t part of designing how they should work in that factory, this new factory. They saw that they couldn't just come in and “This is how it works in the mines in England, this is how we're going to do it.” That didn't work in Norway.\n\nREIN: And one of the things that they've found was that these systems were more adaptable than Taylorism. So there was one of these programs in textile mills in India that had been organized according to scientific management AKA Taylorism. And what they found, one of the problems was that if any perturbation happened, any unexpected event, they stopped working. They couldn't adapt and when they switched to these self-organizing teams, they became better at adaptation, but they also just got more production and higher quality. So it was just a win all around. You're not trading off here, it turns out.\n\nJESSICA: You can say we need resilience because of incidents. But in fact, that resilience also gives you a lot of flexibility that you didn't know you needed.\n\nTROND: Exactly. You are capable of taking in stuff that you couldn't foresee like anything that happens because the people on the ground who know this best and actually have all the information they need are actually able to adapt. Lots better then to have a structure like a wild process, I think.\n\nREIN: One of the principles of resilience engineering is that accidents are normal work. Accidents happen as a result of normal work, which means that normal work has all of the same characteristics. Normal work requires adaptation. Normal work requires balancing trade-offs competing goals. That's all normal work. It just, we see it in incidents because incidents shine a light on what happened.\n\nTROND: I think there was an American called Pasmore who coined this really well. He said, “STS design was intended tended to produce a win-win-win-win. Human beings were more committed, technology operated closer to the potential and the organization performed better overall while adapting more readily to changes in its environment.” This has pretty much coining what STS is all about.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I’m always on the lookout because they're rare for these solutions that are just strictly better in a particular space. Where you're not making trade-offs, where you get to have it all, that's almost unheard of.\n\nJESSICA: It's almost unheard of and yet I feel like we could do a lot of more of it. Who was it who talks about dissolving the problem?\n\nREIN: Ackoff.\n\nTROND: That’s Ackoff, yeah.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, that’s Ackoff in Idealized Design.\n\nTROND: Where he said – [overtalk]\n\nREIN: He said, “The best way to solve a problem is to redesign the system that contains it so that the problem no longer exists.”\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly. \n\nJESSICA: And in software, what are some examples of that that we have a lot? Like, the examples where we dissolve coordination problems by saying the same team is responsible for deployment?\n\nREIN: I've seen problem architectures be dissolved by a change in the product. It turns out that a better way to do it for users also makes possible a better architecture and so you can stop solving that hard problem that was really expensive.\n\nJESSICA: Oh, right. So the example of item potency of complete order buttons: if you move the idea generation to the client, that problem just goes away.\n\nTROND: Yeah, and I have to say another example is if you have two teams that work well together. [chuckles] You have to communicate more. Okay, but that doesn't help because that's not where our problem is. If you redesign the teams, for example, then if they – instead of having fun on the backend teams, if you redesign, you have no verticals, then you haven't solved the problem. You have resolved it. It is gone because they are together now in one thing. \n\nSo I think there is a lot of examples of this, but it is a mindset because people tend to say, if there is something problem, they want to analyze it as it is and then figure out how to fix the parts and then – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, this is our obsession with solving problems!\n\nTROND: Yes. \n\nJESSICA: Solving problems is not systems thinking.\n\nTROND: No, it’s not. Exactly.\n\nJESSICA: Solving problems is reactive. It feels productive. It can be heroic. Whereas, the much more subtle and often wider scope of removing the problem, which often falls into the social system. When you change the social system, you can resolve technical problems so that they don't exist. That's a lot more congressive and challenging and slower.\n\nTROND: It is and that is probably where STS has struggled. It didn't struggle as much, but that is also here compared to the rest of the world. They said because you have to fight – there is a system already in place and that system is honed in on solving problems as you were saying.\n\nJESSICA: That whole line management wants to solve the problem by telling them what workers want to do and it's more important that their solution work, then that a solution work.\n\nTROND: Yes, exactly and also, because they are put in a system where that's normal. That is common sense to them. So I often come back to that [inaudible] quote is that I get [inaudible], or something like that is that because a person in a company, he’s just a small – In this large company, I'm just a small little tiny piece of it; there's no chance in anyhow that I can change it.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. So as developers, one reason that we focus on technical dilutions and technical design is because we have some control over that. \n\nTROND: Yes.\n\nJESSICA: We don't feel control over the social system, which is because you can never control a social system; you can only influence it.\n\nTROND: So what I try to do in an organization is that I try to find a, change agents around in the organization so I get a broader picture not only understanding it, but also record broader set of attacks, if you like it—I'm not just calling it attacks, but you get my gist—so you can create a more profound change not just a little bit here, a little bit though. Because when you change as society, if we solve problems, we focus on the parts and we focus on the parts, we are not going to fix the hole. That is something that Ackoff was very adamant about and he’s probably correct. You can optimize – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Wait. Who, what? I didn’t understand.\n\nTROND: Ackoff.\n\nJESSICA: Ackoff, that was that.\n\nTROND: So if you optimize every part, you don't necessarily make the system better, but he said, “Thank God, you usually do. You don't make it worse.” [laughs]\n\nREIN: Yeah. He uses the example of if you want to make a car, so you take the best engine and the best transmission, and you take all of the best parts and what do you have? You don't have a car. You don't have the best car. You don't even have a car because the parts don't fit together. It's entirely possible to make every part better and to make the system worse and you also sometimes need to make a part worse to make the system better.\n\nTROND: And that is fascinating. I think that is absolutely fascinating that you have to do that. I have seen that just recently, for example, in our organization, we have one team that is really good at Agile. They have nailed it almost, this team. But the rest of the organization are not as high level and good at Agile and the organization is not thrilled to be Agile in a sense because it's an old project-oriented organization so it is industrialized in a sense. Then you have one team that want to do STS; they want to be an Agile super team. But when they don't fit with the rest, they actually make the rest worse. \n\nSo actually, in order to make it the whole better, you can't have this local optimizations, you have to see the whole and then you figure out how to make the whole better based on the part, not the other one. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Because well, one that self-organizing Agile team can't do that properly without having an impact on the rest of the organization. \n\nTROND: Exactly.\n\nJESSICA: And when the rest of the organization moves much more slowly, you need a team in there that's slower. And I see this happen. I see Agile teams moving too fast that the business isn't ready to accept that many changes so quickly. So we need a slower – they don't think of it this way, but what they do is they add people. They add people and that slows everything down so you have a system that's twice as expensive in order to go slower. That's my theory.\n\nTROND: The fascinating thing, though—and this is where the systems idea comes in—is that if you have this team that really honed this, that they have nailed the whole thing exactly, they’re moving as fast as they can and all that. But the rest of it, they’ll say it’s not, then you have to interact the rest of organization, for example. \n\nSo they have been bottlenecked everywhere they look. So what they end up doing is that they pull in work, more work than they necessarily can pull through because they have to. Unless they just have to sit waiting. Nobody feels – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: And then you have nowhere to fucking progress.\n\nTROND: Exactly. So then you make it worse – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Then you couldn’t get anything done.\n\nTROND: Exactly! So even a well-working team would actually break in the end because of this.\n\nREIN: And we’ve organized organizations around part maximization. Every way of organizing your business we know of is anti-systemic because they're all about part optimization. Ours is a list of parts and can you imagine going to a director and saying, “Listen, to make this company better, we need to reduce your scope. We need to reduce your budget. We need to reduce your staff. \n\nTROND: Yeah. [laughs] That is a hard sell. It is almost impossible. \n\nSo where I've seen it work—no, I haven't seen that many. But where I’ve seen that work, you have to have some systemic change coming all the way from the top, basically. Somebody has to come in and say, “Okay, this is going to be painful, but we have to change. The whole thing has to change,” and very few companies want to do that because that’s high risk. Why would you do that? So they shook along doing that minor problem-solving here and there and try to fix the things, but they are not getting the systemic change that they probably need.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why startups wind up eating the lunch of bigger companies; because startups aren't starting from a place that's wrong for what they're now doing.\n\nTROND: Exactly. They are free to do it. They have all the freedom that we want the STS team to have. The autonomous sociotechnical systems teams, those are startups. So ideally, you’re consisting a lot of startups.\n\nREIN: And this gets back to this idea of open systems and the idea of organizationally closed, but structurally open. \n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nREIN: It comes from [inaudible] and this idea is that an organization, which is the idea of the organization—IBM as an organization is the idea of IBM, it's not any particular people. IBM stays IBM, but it has to reproduce its structure and they can reproduce its structure in ways that change, build new structure, different structure, but IBM is still IBM. \n\nBut organizations aren't static and actually, they have to reproduce themselves to adapt and one of the things that I think makes startups better here is that their ability to change their structure as they produce it, they have much more agility. Whereas, a larger organization with much more structure, it's hard to just take the structure and just move it all over here.\n\nTROND: Exactly.\n\nJESSICA: It’s all the other pieces of the system fit with the current system.\n\nTROND: Yeah. You have to share every part in order to move. \n\nJESSICA: Right.\n\nREIN: And also, the identity of a startup is somewhat fluid. Startups can pivot. Can you imagine IBM switching to a car company, or something?\n\nTROND: I was thinking exactly the same; you only see pivots in small organizations. Pivots are not normal in large organizations. That will be a no-go. Even if you come and suggested it, “I hear there's a lot of money in being an entrepreneur.” I wouldn't because that would risk everything I have for something that is hypothetical. I wouldn't do that.\n\nREIN: Startups, with every part of them, their employees can turn over a 100%, they can get a new CEO, they can get new investors.\n\nJESSICA: All at a much faster time scale.\n\nTROND: Also, going back to Ackoff, he's saying that we need to go get out of the machine age. Like he said, we have been in the machine age since the Renaissance, we have to get out of that and this is what system thinking is. It’s a new age as they call it. Somebody calls it the information age, for example and it’s a similar things. But we need to start thinking differently; how to solve problems. The machine has to go, at least for social systems. The machine is still going to be there. We are going to work with machines. We're going to create machines. So machines – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: We use machines, but our systems are bigger than that. \n\nTROND: Yes.\n\nJESSICA: Systems are interesting than any machine and when we try build systems as machines, we really limit ourselves.\n\nTROND: So I think that is also one of the – I don't know if it's a specific principle for following STS that says that man shouldn't be an extension of the machine, he should be a part of machine. He should be using the machine. He should be like an extension of the machine.\n\nJESSICA: Wait. That the man being an extension of machine, the machine should be an extension of man?\n\nTROND: Yeah. \n\nJESSICA: Right. [inaudible] have a really good tool, you feel that?\n\nTROND: Mm hm.\n\nREIN: This actually shows up in joint cognitive systems, which shares a lot with sociotechnical systems, as this idea that there are some tools through which you perceive the world that augment you and there are other tools that represent the world. Some tools inside you and you use them to interact with the world, you interact with the world using them to augment your abilities, and there are other tools that you have just a box here that represents the world and you interact with the box and your understanding of the world is constrained by what the box gives you. \n\nThese are two completely different forms of toolmaking and what Stafford Beer, I think it might say is that there are tools that augment your variety, that augment your ability to manage complexity, and there are tools that reduce complexity, there are tools that attenuate complexity.\n\nJESSICA: Jean Yang was talking about this the other day with respect to developer tools. There are tools like Heroku that reduce complexity for you. You just deploy the thing, just deploy it and internally, Heroku is dealing with a lot of complexity in order to give you that abstraction. And then there are other tools, like Honeycomb, that expose complexity and help you deal with the complexity inherent in your system. \n\nTROND: Yeah. Just to go back so I get this quote right is that the individual is treated as a complimentary to machine rather than an extension of it.\n\nJESSICA: Wait, what is treating this complimentary to machine? \n\nTROND: The individual.\n\nJESSICA: The individual.\n\nTROND: The person, yeah. Because that is what you see in machine shops and those are also what happened in England when they called mining work again, even more industrialized, people are just an extension of the machine.\n\nJESSICA: We don't work like that.\n\nTROND: Yeah. I feel like that sometimes, I must admit, that I'm part of the machine. That I'm just a cog in the machine and we are not well-equipped to be cogs in machines, I think. Though, we should be. \n\nREIN: Joint cognitive systems call this the embodiment relation where the artifact is transparent and it's a part of the operator rather than the application so you can view the world through it but it doesn't restrict you. And then the other side is the hermeneutic relation. So hermeneutics is like biblical hermeneutics is about the interpretation of the Bible. So the hermeneutic relation is where the artifact interprets the world for you and then you view the artifact. \n\nSo like for example, most of the tools we use to respond to incidents, logs are hermeneutic artifacts. They present their interpretation of the world and we interact with that interpretation. What I think of as making a distinction between old school metrics and observability, is observability is more of an embodiment relationship. Observability lets you ask whatever question you want; you're not restricted to what you specifically remember to log, or to count.\n\nTROND: Exactly. And this is now you're getting into the area where I think actually STS – now we have talked about a lot about STS in the industrial context here, but I think it's not less, maybe even more relevant now because especially when we're moving into the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution where the machines have taken over more and more. Like, for example, AI, or machine learning, or whatever. Because then the machine has taken more and more control over our lives. \n\nSo I think we need this more than even before because the machines before were simple in comparison and they were not designed by somebody in the same sense that for example, AI, or machine learning was actually developed. I wouldn't say AI because it's still an algorithm underneath, but it does have some learning in it and we don't know what the consequences of that is, as I said. So I think it's even more relevant now than it was before. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah.\n\nTROND: [chuckles] I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or see, that is.\n\nJESSICA: Or hear something about it. You want to define it to our listeners?\n\nTROND: Somebody called it this hyperphysical systems.\n\nJESSICA: Hyperphysical?\n\nTROND: Yes, somebody called it hyperphysical systems. I'm not sure if you want to go too much into that, to be honest, but. \n\nSo the Fourth Industrial Revolution is basically about the continuous automation of manufacturing and industrial practices using smart technology, machine-to-machine communication, internet of things, machine learning improves communication and self-monitoring and all that stuff. We see the hint of it, that something is coming and that is that different type of industry than what we currently are in. \n\nI think the Industrial 4.0 was probably coined in Germany somewhere. So there's a definition that something is coming out of that that is going to put the humans even more on the sideline and I think for us working in I, we see some of this already. The general public, maybe don't at the same level.\n\nREIN: So this reminds me of this other idea from cognitive systems that there are four stages, historical stages, in the development of work. There's mechanization, which replaces human muscle power with mechanical power and we think of that as starting with the original industrial revolution, but it's actually much older than that with agriculture, for example. Then there's automation, there's a centralization, and then there's computerization. Centralization has happened on a shorter time span and computerization has happened at a very short time span relative to mechanization. \n\nSo one of the challenges is that we got really good at mechanization because we've been doing it since 500 BC. We're relatively less good at centering cognition in the work. The whole point of mechanization and automation was to take cognition out of the work and realizing you have to put it back in, it's becoming much more conspicuous that people have to think to do their work.\n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nJESSICA: Because we're putting more and more of the work into the machine and yet in much software system, many software systems especially like customer facing systems, we need that software to not just be part of the machine, to not do the same thing constantly on a timescale of weeks and months. We need it to evolve, to participate in our cognition as we participate in the larger economy. \n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nREIN: And one of the ironies of this automation—this comes from Bainbridge’s 1983 paper—is that when you automate a task, you don't get rid of a task. You make a new task, which is managing the automation, and this task is quite different from the task you were doing before and you have no experience with it. You may not even have training with it. So automation doesn't get rid of work; automation mutates work into a new unexpected form.\n\nJESSICA: Right. One of the ironies of automation is that now you have created that management at the automation and you think, “Oh, we have more automation. We can pay the workers less.” Wrong. You could pay the workers more. Now collectively, the automation plus the engineers who are managing it are able to do a lot more, but you didn't save money. You added a capability, but you did not save money. \n\nREIN: Yeah, and part of that is what you can automate are the things we know how to automate, which are the mechanical tasks and what's left when you automate all of the mechanical tasks are the ones that require thinking.\n\nTROND: And that's where we're moving into now, probably that's what the Fourth Industrial Revolution is. We try and automate this stuff that probably shouldn't be automated. Maybe, I don’t know.\n\nJESSICA: Or it shouldn’t be automated in a way that we can’t change.\n\nTROND: No, exactly.\n\nREIN: This is why I'm not buying stock in AI ops companies because I don't think we figured out how to automate decision-making yet.\n\nJESSICA: I don't think we want to automate decision-making. We want to augment.\n\nTROND: Yeah, probably. So we're back to that same idea that the STS said we should be complimentary to machine, not an extension of it.\n\nJESSICA: Yes. That's probably a good place to wrap up?\n\nTROND: Yeah.\n\nREIN: Yeah. There's actually a paper by the way, Ten Challenges in Making Automation A Team Player.\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Or you can watch my talk on collaborative automation.\n\nTROND: Yeah. \n\nJESSICA: Do you want to do reflections? \n\nREIN: Sure.\n\nJESSICA: I have a short reflection. One quote that I wrote down that you said, Trond in the middle of something was “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see,” and that speaks to, if you don't know you see it, you can't automate the seeing of it. Humans are really good at the everything else of what is going on. This is our human superpower compared to any software that we can design and that's why I am big on this embodiment relation. Don't love the word, but I do love tools that make it easier for me to make and implement decisions that give me superpowers and then allow me to combine that with my ability to take input from the social system and incorporate that.\n\nTROND: I can give it a little bit of an anecdote. My background is not IT. I come from physics—astrophysics, to be specific—and what we were drilled in physics is that you should take the person out of the system. You should close the system as much as possible. Somebody said you have to take a human out of it if you want observe. Physics is you have no environment, you have no people, there's nothing in it so it's completely closed, but we work and here, it's complete opposite. I work in a completely open system where the human part is essential.\n\nJESSICA: We are not subject to the second law of thermodynamics.\n\nTROND: No, we are not. That is highly restricted for a closed system. We are not. So the idea of open system is something that I think we all need to take on board and we are the best one to deal with those open systems. We do it all the time, every day, just walking with a complex open system. I mean, everything.\n\nJESSICA: Eating.\n\nTROND: Eating, yeah.\n\nREIN: And actually, one of the forms, or the ways that openness was thought of is informational openness. Literally about it.\n\nJESSICA: That’s [inaudible] take in information.\n\nTROND: Yeah. Entropy.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly. And we are capable of controlling that variance, we are the masters of that. Humans, so let's take advantage of that. That's our superpower as humans.\n\nREIN: Okay, I can go. \n\nSo we've been talking a little bit about how the cognitive demands of work are changing and one of the things that's happening is that work is becoming higher tempo. Decisions have to be made more quickly and higher criticality. Computers are really good at making a million mistakes a second. So if you look at something like the Knight Capital incident; a small bug can lose your company half a billion dollars in an instant. \n\nSo I think what we're seeing is that this complexity, if you combine that with the idea of requisite variety, the complexity of work is exploding and what we call human error is actually a human's inability to cope with complexity. I think if we want to get human error under control, what we have to get better at is managing complexity, not controlling it – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: And not by we and by we don’t mean you, the human get better at this! This system needs to support the humans in managing additional complexity.\n\nREIN: Yeah. We need to realize that the nature of work has changed, that it presents these new challenges, and that we need to build systems that support people because work has never been this difficult.\n\nJESSICA: Both, social and technical systems.\n\nTROND: No, exactly. Just to bring it back to where we started with the coal miners in England. Working there was hard, it was life-threatening; people died in the mines. So you can imagine this must be terrible, but it was a quite closed system, to be honest, compared to what we have. That environment is fairly closed. It isn't predictable at the same size, but we are working in an environment that is completely open. It's turbulent, even. So we need to focus on the human aspect of things. We can't just treat things that machines does work.\n\nJESSICA: Thank you for coming to this episode of Greater Than Code.\n\nTROND: Yeah, happy to be here. Really fun. It was a fun discussion.\n\nREIN: So that about does it for this episode of Greater Than Code. Thank you so much for listening wherever you are. If you want to spend more time with this awesome community, if you donate even $1 to our Patreon, you can come to us on Slack and you can hang out with all of us and it is a lot of fun.Special Guest: Trond Hjorteland.","content_html":"01:20 - The Superpower of Sociotechnical System (STS) Design: Considering the Social AND the Technical. The social side matters.
\n\n09:14 - The Origins of Sociotechnical Systems
\n\n\n\n18:42 - Design From Above vs Self-Organization
\n\n29:39 - Systemic Change and Open Systems
\n\n37:47 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see.” – Trond
\n\nTrond: In physics we do our best to remove the people and close it as much as possible. In IT it's opposite; We work in a completely open system where the human part is essential.
\n\nRein: What we call human error is actually a human’s inability to cope with complexity. We need to get better at managing complexity; not controlling it.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nREIN: Welcome to Episode 242 of Greater Than Code. I’m here with my friend, Jessica Kerr.
\n\nJESSICA: Thanks, Rein and I'm excited because today we are here with Trond Hjorteland.
\n\nTrond is an IT architect aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no—that's no as in the country code for Norway, not no as in no science. Trond has many years of experience with large, complex, business critical systems as a developer and an architect on middleware and backend applications so he's super interested in service orientation, domain driven design—went like that one—event driven architectures and of course, sociotechnical systems, which is our topic today! These happen in industries across the world like telecom, media, TV, government.
\n\nTrond’s mantra is, “Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.” I concur.
\n\nTrond, welcome to Greater Than Code!
\n\nTROND: Thank you for having me. It's fun being here.
\n\nJESSICA: Trond, as a Northern European, I know our usual question about superpowers makes you nervous. So let me change it up a little bit: what is your superpower of sociotechnical system design?
\n\nTROND: Oh, that's a good one. I'm glad you turned it over because we are from the land of the Jante, as you may have heard of, where people are not supposed to be anything better than anybody else. So being a superhero, that's not something that we are accustomed to now, so to speak.
\n\nSo the topic there, sociotechnical system, what makes you a superhero by having that perspective? I think it's in the name, really. Do you actually join the social and the technical aspects of things, whatever you do?
\n\nBut my focus is mainly in organizations and in relation to a person, or a team cooperating, designing IT solutions, and stuff like that, that you have to consider both the social and the technical and I find that we have too much – I have definitely done that. Focused too much on the technical aspects and not ignoring the social aspects, but at least when we are designing stuff we frequently get too attached to the technical aspects. So I think we need that balance.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nTROND: So I guess, that is my superpower I get from that.
\n\nJESSICA: When we do software design, we think we're designing software, which we think is made of technical code and infrastructure, and that software is made by people and for people and imagine that. Social side matters.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, and I must say that since Agile in the early 2000s, the focus on the user has been increasing. I think that's better covered than it used to be, but I still think we miss out on we part that we create software and that is that humans actually create software.
\n\nWe often talk about the customer, for example. I guess, many of your listeners are creating such a system that actually the customers are using, like there’s an end user somewhere. But frequently, there's also internal users of that system that you create like backend users, or there's a wide range of others stakeholders as well and – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Internal users of customer facing systems?
\n\nTROND: For example, yes. Like back office, for example. I'm working for our fairly large telecom operation and of course, their main goal is getting and keeping the end users, paying customers, but it's also a lot of stuff going on in the backend, in the back office like supporting customer service support, there is delivery of equipment to the users, there's shipment, there is maintenance, all that stuff, there's assurance of it. So there's a lot of stuff going on in that domain that we rarely think of when we create their IT systems, I find at least.
\n\nJESSICA: But when we're making our software systems, we're building the company, we're building the next version of this company, and that includes how well can people in the back office do their jobs.
\n\nTROND: Exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: And us, like we're also creating the next version of software that we need to change and maintain and keep running and respond to problems in. I like to think about the developer interface.
\n\nTROND: Exactly, and that is actually, there’s an area where the wider sociotechnical term has popped up probably more frequently than before. It's actually that, because we think of the inter policies we need and organize the teams around for example, services are sometimes necessary and stuff like that.
\n\nJESSICA: Inter policies, you said.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, the inter policies offices go into this stuff. So we are looking into that stuff. We are getting knowledge on how to do that, but I find we still are not seeing the whole picture, though. Yes, that is important to get the teams right because you want them to not interact too much but enough so we want – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Oh yeah, I love it that the book says, “Collaboration is not the goal! Collaboration is expensive and it's a negative to need to do it, but sometimes you need to.”
\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly. So that'd be a backstory there. So the main system, I think and the idea is that you have a system consisting of parts and what sociotechnical systems focus a lot about is the social system. There is a social system and that social system, those parts are us as developers and those parts are stakeholders of course, our users and then you get into this idea of an open system. I think it was Bertanlanffy who coined that, or looked into that.
\n\nJESSICA: Bertanlanffy open systems.
\n\nTROND: Open system, yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Fair warning to readers, all of us have been reading this book, Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson and we may name drop a few systems thinking historical figures.
\n\nTROND: Yes, and Bertanlanffy is one of those early ones. I think he actually developed some of the idea before the war, but I think he wrote the book after—I'm not sure, 1950s, or something—on general system thinking. It's General Systems Theory and he was also looking into this open system thing and I think this is also something that for example, Russell Ackoff took to heart.
\n\nSo he had to find four type of systems. He said there was a mechanical system, like people would think of when they hear system, like it's a technical thing. Like a machine, for example, your car is a system. But then they also added, there was something more that's another type of system, which is animal system, which is basically us. We consist of parts, but we have a purpose that is different from us than a car that makes us different.
\n\nAnd then you take a lot of those parts and combine them, then you've got a social system. The interesting thing with the social system is that that system in of its own have a purpose, but also, the parts have a purpose. That's the thing which is different from the other thing. For an animal system, your parts don't have a purpose. Your heart doesn't really have a purpose; it's not giving a purpose. It doesn't have an end goal, so to speak that. There's nothing in – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: No, it has a purpose within the larger system.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: But it doesn't have self-actualization.
\n\nTROND: It's not purposeful. That's probably the word that I – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Your heart isn't sitting there thinking, going beat, beat, beat. It does that, but it's not thinking it.
\n\nTROND: No, exactly.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nTROND: So I think actually Ackoff and I think there was a book called On Purposeful Systems, which I recommend. It's really a dense book. The Jackson book, it's long, but it's quite verbose so it's readable. Like the On Purposeful Systems is designed to be short and concise so it's basically just a list of bullet points almost. It's just a really hard read. But they get into the difference between a purposeful system and a goal-seeking system. Your heart will be goal-seeking. It has something to achieve, but it doesn't have a purpose in a sense.
\n\nSo that's the thing, which is then you as a person and you as a part of a social system and that's where I think the interesting thing comes in and that's where we're sociotechnical system really takes this on board is that in a social system, you have a set of individuals and you also have technical aspects of those system as well so that's the sociotechnical thing.
\n\nJESSICA: Now you mentioned Ackoff said four kinds of systems.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nH: Mechanical, animal, social?
\n\nTROND: And then there’s ecological.
\n\nJESSICA: And then ecological, thanks.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. So the ecological one is that where every parts have a purpose like us, but the whole doesn't have a purpose on its own. Like the human kind is not purposeful and we should be probably. [laughs] For example, with climate change and all that, but we are not. Not necessarily.
\n\nREIN: This actually relates a little bit to the origins of sociotechnical systems because it came about as a way to improve workplace democracy and if you look at the history of management theory, if you look at Taylorism, which was the dominant theory at the time, the whole point of Taylorism is to take purposefulness away from the workers.
\n\nSo the manager decides on the tasks, the manager decides how the tasks are done—there's one right way to do the tasks—and the worker just does those actions. Basically turning the worker into a machine. So Taylorism was effectively a way to take a social system, affirm a company, and try to turn it into an animate system where the managers had purpose and the workers just fulfilled a purpose.
\n\nTROND: Exactly.
\n\nREIN: And sociotechnical system said, “What if we give the power of purposefulness back to the workers?” Let them choose the task, let them choose the way they do their tasks.
\n\nTROND: Exactly, and this is an interesting theme because at the same time, as Taylor was developing his ideas, there were other people having similar ideas, like sociotechnical, but we never heard of them a late like Mary Parker Follett, for example. She was living at the same time, writing stuff at the same time, but the industry wasn't interested in listening to her because it didn't fit their machine model. She was a contrary to that and this was the same thing that sociotechnical system designers, or researchers, to put it more correctly, also experienced, for example, in a post-war England, in the coal mines.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh yeah, tell us about the coal mines.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, because that's where the whole sociotechnical system theory was defined, or was first coined what was there. There was a set of researchers from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which actually came about like an offshoot of the Tavistock Clinic, which was working actually with people struggling from the war after the Second World War.
\n\nJESSICA: Was that in Norway?
\n\nTROND: No, that was exactly in England, that was in London. Tavistock is in London.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh!
\n\nTROND: Yeah. So it was an offshoot of that because there were researchers there that had the knowledge that there was something specific about the groups. There was somebody called Bion and there was a Kurt Lewin, which I think Jessica, you probably have heard of.
\n\nJESSICA: Is that Kurt Lewin?
\n\nTROND: Yes, that's the one. Absolutely.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. He was a psychologist.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. So he was for example, our main character of the sociotechnical movement in England in the post-war was Eric Trist and he was working closely with Lewin, or Lewin as you Americans call him.
\n\nThey were inspired by the human relations movement, if you like so they saw they had to look into how the people interact. So they observed the miners in England. There was a couple of mines where they had introduced some new technology called the longwall where they actually tried to industrialize the mining. They have gone from autonomous groups into more industrialized, like – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Taylorism?
\n\nTROND: Yes, they had gone all Taylorism, correct.
\n\nJESSICA: “Your purpose is to be a pair of hands that does this.”
\n\nTROND: Exactly, and then they had shifts. So one shift was doing one thing, then other shift was doing the second thing and that's how they were doing the other thing. So they were separating people. They had to have been working in groups before, then they were separated to industrialize like efficiently out of each part.
\n\nJESSICA: Or to grouplike tasks with each other so that you only have one set of people to do a single thing.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. So one group was preparing and blowing and breaking out the coal, somebody was pushing it out to the conveyors, and somebody else was moving into the instrument, or the machinery to the next place. This is what's the three partnership shifts were like.
\n\nWhat they noticed then is that they didn't get the efficiency that they expected from this and also, people were leaving. People really didn't like this way of working; there was a lot of absenteeism and there were a lot of crows and uproar and it didn't go well, this new technology which they had too high hopes for.
\n\nSo then Trist and a couple of others like Bamford observed something that happened in one of the mines that people actually, some of them self-organized and went back to the previous way of working in autonomous teams plus using this new technology. They self-organized in order to actually to be able to work in this alignment, but this was the first time that I saw this type of action that they actually created their own semi-autonomous teams as they called them.
\n\nJESSICA: So there was some technology that was introduced and when they tried to make it about the technology and get people to use it the way they thought it would be most efficient, it was not effective.
\n\nTROND: Not effective?
\n\nJESSICA: But yet the people working in teams were able to use the technology.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. Actually, so this is the interesting part is when you have complex systems then you can have self-organization happening there and these workers, they were so frustrated. They’re like, “Okay. Let's take matters in our own hands, let's create groups where we can actually work together.” So they created these autonomous groups and this was something that Eric Trist and Ken Bamford observed. So they saw that when they did that, the absenteeism and the quality of work-life increased a lot and also, productivity increased a lot.
\n\nThere were a few mines observed that did this and they compared to other mines that didn't and the numbers were quite convincing. So you should think “Oh, this would use them,” everybody would start using this approach. No, they didn't. Of course, management, the leadership didn't want this. They were afraid of losing the power so they worked against it.
\n\nSo just after a few research attempts, there wasn't any leverage there and actually, they increased the industrialization with a next level of invention was created that made it even worse so it grinded to a halt.
\n\nSociotechnical was a definer, but it didn't have the good fertile ground to grow. So that's when they came to my native land, to Norway.
\n\nJESSICA: Ah.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. So Fred Emery was one of those who worked with Trist and Bramforth a lot back then and also traced himself, actually came to Norway as almost like a governmental project. There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program, I think it was called, it was actually established by – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program. That is so not American.
\n\nTROND: [laughs] Exactly. So that probably only happen in Norway, I suppose and there were a lot of reasons for that. One of them is, especially as that we struggled with the industry after the war, because we were just invaded by Germany and was under rule so we had nothing to build.
\n\nSo they got support from America, for example, to rebuild after the war, but also, Norwegians are the specific type of persons, if you like. They don't like to be ruled over. So the high industrial stuff didn't go down well with the workers even worse than in England, but not in mines because we don't have any mines so just like creating nails, or like paper mills.
\n\nAlso, the same thing happened as I said, in England, that people were not happy with the way these things were going. But the problem is in Norway that this was covering all the mines, not just a few mines here and there. This was going all the way up to the – the workers unions were collaborating with the employers unions. So they were actually coming together.
\n\nThis project was established by these two in collaboration and actually, the government was also coming and so, there were three parts to this initiative. And then the Tavistock was called in to help them with this project, or the program to call it. So then it started off your experiments in Norway and then I went more – in England, they observed mostly, like the Tavistock, and in Norway, they actually started designing these type of systems, political systems, they're autonomous work groups and all that.
\n\nThey did live experiments and the like so there was action research as a way of – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, action research.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, where you actually do research on the ground. This was also from Kurt Lewin, I believe.
\n\nSo I know they did a lot of research there and got similar results as in England. But also, this went a bit further than Norway. This actually went into the law, how to do this. So like work participation, for example and there was also this work design thing that came out of it. It’s like workers have some demands that goes above just a livable wage. They want the type of job that meant something, where they were supposed to grow, they were supposed to learn on the job, they were supposed to – there were a lot of stuff that they wanted and that was added to actually the law. So this is part of Norwegian law today, what came out of that research.
\n\nJESSICA: You mentioned that in Norway, they started doing design and yet there's the implication that it's design of self-organizing teams. Is that conflict? Like, design from above versus self-organization.
\n\nTROND: Yes, it did and that is also something that I discovered in Norway so well-observed, Jessica. This is actually what happened in Norway. So the researchers saw that they were struggling to getting this accepted properly by the workers, then I saw okay, they have to get the workers involved. Then they started with this, what they call participative design. The workers were pulled in to design the work they worked on, or to do together with the researchers, but the researchers were still regarded as experts still. So there was a divide between the researches and the workers, but the workers weren't given a lot of freewill to design how they wanted this to work themselves.
\n\nOne of the latest experiments, I think the workers weren't getting the full freedom to design and I think it was the aluminum industry. I think they were creating a new factory and the workers weren’t part of designing how they should work in that factory, this new factory. They saw that they couldn't just come in and “This is how it works in the mines in England, this is how we're going to do it.” That didn't work in Norway.
\n\nREIN: And one of the things that they've found was that these systems were more adaptable than Taylorism. So there was one of these programs in textile mills in India that had been organized according to scientific management AKA Taylorism. And what they found, one of the problems was that if any perturbation happened, any unexpected event, they stopped working. They couldn't adapt and when they switched to these self-organizing teams, they became better at adaptation, but they also just got more production and higher quality. So it was just a win all around. You're not trading off here, it turns out.
\n\nJESSICA: You can say we need resilience because of incidents. But in fact, that resilience also gives you a lot of flexibility that you didn't know you needed.
\n\nTROND: Exactly. You are capable of taking in stuff that you couldn't foresee like anything that happens because the people on the ground who know this best and actually have all the information they need are actually able to adapt. Lots better then to have a structure like a wild process, I think.
\n\nREIN: One of the principles of resilience engineering is that accidents are normal work. Accidents happen as a result of normal work, which means that normal work has all of the same characteristics. Normal work requires adaptation. Normal work requires balancing trade-offs competing goals. That's all normal work. It just, we see it in incidents because incidents shine a light on what happened.
\n\nTROND: I think there was an American called Pasmore who coined this really well. He said, “STS design was intended tended to produce a win-win-win-win. Human beings were more committed, technology operated closer to the potential and the organization performed better overall while adapting more readily to changes in its environment.” This has pretty much coining what STS is all about.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I’m always on the lookout because they're rare for these solutions that are just strictly better in a particular space. Where you're not making trade-offs, where you get to have it all, that's almost unheard of.
\n\nJESSICA: It's almost unheard of and yet I feel like we could do a lot of more of it. Who was it who talks about dissolving the problem?
\n\nREIN: Ackoff.
\n\nTROND: That’s Ackoff, yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, that’s Ackoff in Idealized Design.
\n\nTROND: Where he said – [overtalk]
\n\nREIN: He said, “The best way to solve a problem is to redesign the system that contains it so that the problem no longer exists.”
\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: And in software, what are some examples of that that we have a lot? Like, the examples where we dissolve coordination problems by saying the same team is responsible for deployment?
\n\nREIN: I've seen problem architectures be dissolved by a change in the product. It turns out that a better way to do it for users also makes possible a better architecture and so you can stop solving that hard problem that was really expensive.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, right. So the example of item potency of complete order buttons: if you move the idea generation to the client, that problem just goes away.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, and I have to say another example is if you have two teams that work well together. [chuckles] You have to communicate more. Okay, but that doesn't help because that's not where our problem is. If you redesign the teams, for example, then if they – instead of having fun on the backend teams, if you redesign, you have no verticals, then you haven't solved the problem. You have resolved it. It is gone because they are together now in one thing.
\n\nSo I think there is a lot of examples of this, but it is a mindset because people tend to say, if there is something problem, they want to analyze it as it is and then figure out how to fix the parts and then – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, this is our obsession with solving problems!
\n\nTROND: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: Solving problems is not systems thinking.
\n\nTROND: No, it’s not. Exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: Solving problems is reactive. It feels productive. It can be heroic. Whereas, the much more subtle and often wider scope of removing the problem, which often falls into the social system. When you change the social system, you can resolve technical problems so that they don't exist. That's a lot more congressive and challenging and slower.
\n\nTROND: It is and that is probably where STS has struggled. It didn't struggle as much, but that is also here compared to the rest of the world. They said because you have to fight – there is a system already in place and that system is honed in on solving problems as you were saying.
\n\nJESSICA: That whole line management wants to solve the problem by telling them what workers want to do and it's more important that their solution work, then that a solution work.
\n\nTROND: Yes, exactly and also, because they are put in a system where that's normal. That is common sense to them. So I often come back to that [inaudible] quote is that I get [inaudible], or something like that is that because a person in a company, he’s just a small – In this large company, I'm just a small little tiny piece of it; there's no chance in anyhow that I can change it.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. So as developers, one reason that we focus on technical dilutions and technical design is because we have some control over that.
\n\nTROND: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: We don't feel control over the social system, which is because you can never control a social system; you can only influence it.
\n\nTROND: So what I try to do in an organization is that I try to find a, change agents around in the organization so I get a broader picture not only understanding it, but also record broader set of attacks, if you like it—I'm not just calling it attacks, but you get my gist—so you can create a more profound change not just a little bit here, a little bit though. Because when you change as society, if we solve problems, we focus on the parts and we focus on the parts, we are not going to fix the hole. That is something that Ackoff was very adamant about and he’s probably correct. You can optimize – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Wait. Who, what? I didn’t understand.
\n\nTROND: Ackoff.
\n\nJESSICA: Ackoff, that was that.
\n\nTROND: So if you optimize every part, you don't necessarily make the system better, but he said, “Thank God, you usually do. You don't make it worse.” [laughs]
\n\nREIN: Yeah. He uses the example of if you want to make a car, so you take the best engine and the best transmission, and you take all of the best parts and what do you have? You don't have a car. You don't have the best car. You don't even have a car because the parts don't fit together. It's entirely possible to make every part better and to make the system worse and you also sometimes need to make a part worse to make the system better.
\n\nTROND: And that is fascinating. I think that is absolutely fascinating that you have to do that. I have seen that just recently, for example, in our organization, we have one team that is really good at Agile. They have nailed it almost, this team. But the rest of the organization are not as high level and good at Agile and the organization is not thrilled to be Agile in a sense because it's an old project-oriented organization so it is industrialized in a sense. Then you have one team that want to do STS; they want to be an Agile super team. But when they don't fit with the rest, they actually make the rest worse.
\n\nSo actually, in order to make it the whole better, you can't have this local optimizations, you have to see the whole and then you figure out how to make the whole better based on the part, not the other one.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Because well, one that self-organizing Agile team can't do that properly without having an impact on the rest of the organization.
\n\nTROND: Exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: And when the rest of the organization moves much more slowly, you need a team in there that's slower. And I see this happen. I see Agile teams moving too fast that the business isn't ready to accept that many changes so quickly. So we need a slower – they don't think of it this way, but what they do is they add people. They add people and that slows everything down so you have a system that's twice as expensive in order to go slower. That's my theory.
\n\nTROND: The fascinating thing, though—and this is where the systems idea comes in—is that if you have this team that really honed this, that they have nailed the whole thing exactly, they’re moving as fast as they can and all that. But the rest of it, they’ll say it’s not, then you have to interact the rest of organization, for example.
\n\nSo they have been bottlenecked everywhere they look. So what they end up doing is that they pull in work, more work than they necessarily can pull through because they have to. Unless they just have to sit waiting. Nobody feels – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: And then you have nowhere to fucking progress.
\n\nTROND: Exactly. So then you make it worse – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Then you couldn’t get anything done.
\n\nTROND: Exactly! So even a well-working team would actually break in the end because of this.
\n\nREIN: And we’ve organized organizations around part maximization. Every way of organizing your business we know of is anti-systemic because they're all about part optimization. Ours is a list of parts and can you imagine going to a director and saying, “Listen, to make this company better, we need to reduce your scope. We need to reduce your budget. We need to reduce your staff.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. [laughs] That is a hard sell. It is almost impossible.
\n\nSo where I've seen it work—no, I haven't seen that many. But where I’ve seen that work, you have to have some systemic change coming all the way from the top, basically. Somebody has to come in and say, “Okay, this is going to be painful, but we have to change. The whole thing has to change,” and very few companies want to do that because that’s high risk. Why would you do that? So they shook along doing that minor problem-solving here and there and try to fix the things, but they are not getting the systemic change that they probably need.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why startups wind up eating the lunch of bigger companies; because startups aren't starting from a place that's wrong for what they're now doing.
\n\nTROND: Exactly. They are free to do it. They have all the freedom that we want the STS team to have. The autonomous sociotechnical systems teams, those are startups. So ideally, you’re consisting a lot of startups.
\n\nREIN: And this gets back to this idea of open systems and the idea of organizationally closed, but structurally open.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: It comes from [inaudible] and this idea is that an organization, which is the idea of the organization—IBM as an organization is the idea of IBM, it's not any particular people. IBM stays IBM, but it has to reproduce its structure and they can reproduce its structure in ways that change, build new structure, different structure, but IBM is still IBM.
\n\nBut organizations aren't static and actually, they have to reproduce themselves to adapt and one of the things that I think makes startups better here is that their ability to change their structure as they produce it, they have much more agility. Whereas, a larger organization with much more structure, it's hard to just take the structure and just move it all over here.
\n\nTROND: Exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: It’s all the other pieces of the system fit with the current system.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. You have to share every part in order to move.
\n\nJESSICA: Right.
\n\nREIN: And also, the identity of a startup is somewhat fluid. Startups can pivot. Can you imagine IBM switching to a car company, or something?
\n\nTROND: I was thinking exactly the same; you only see pivots in small organizations. Pivots are not normal in large organizations. That will be a no-go. Even if you come and suggested it, “I hear there's a lot of money in being an entrepreneur.” I wouldn't because that would risk everything I have for something that is hypothetical. I wouldn't do that.
\n\nREIN: Startups, with every part of them, their employees can turn over a 100%, they can get a new CEO, they can get new investors.
\n\nJESSICA: All at a much faster time scale.
\n\nTROND: Also, going back to Ackoff, he's saying that we need to go get out of the machine age. Like he said, we have been in the machine age since the Renaissance, we have to get out of that and this is what system thinking is. It’s a new age as they call it. Somebody calls it the information age, for example and it’s a similar things. But we need to start thinking differently; how to solve problems. The machine has to go, at least for social systems. The machine is still going to be there. We are going to work with machines. We're going to create machines. So machines – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: We use machines, but our systems are bigger than that.
\n\nTROND: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: Systems are interesting than any machine and when we try build systems as machines, we really limit ourselves.
\n\nTROND: So I think that is also one of the – I don't know if it's a specific principle for following STS that says that man shouldn't be an extension of the machine, he should be a part of machine. He should be using the machine. He should be like an extension of the machine.
\n\nJESSICA: Wait. That the man being an extension of machine, the machine should be an extension of man?
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Right. [inaudible] have a really good tool, you feel that?
\n\nTROND: Mm hm.
\n\nREIN: This actually shows up in joint cognitive systems, which shares a lot with sociotechnical systems, as this idea that there are some tools through which you perceive the world that augment you and there are other tools that represent the world. Some tools inside you and you use them to interact with the world, you interact with the world using them to augment your abilities, and there are other tools that you have just a box here that represents the world and you interact with the box and your understanding of the world is constrained by what the box gives you.
\n\nThese are two completely different forms of toolmaking and what Stafford Beer, I think it might say is that there are tools that augment your variety, that augment your ability to manage complexity, and there are tools that reduce complexity, there are tools that attenuate complexity.
\n\nJESSICA: Jean Yang was talking about this the other day with respect to developer tools. There are tools like Heroku that reduce complexity for you. You just deploy the thing, just deploy it and internally, Heroku is dealing with a lot of complexity in order to give you that abstraction. And then there are other tools, like Honeycomb, that expose complexity and help you deal with the complexity inherent in your system.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. Just to go back so I get this quote right is that the individual is treated as a complimentary to machine rather than an extension of it.
\n\nJESSICA: Wait, what is treating this complimentary to machine?
\n\nTROND: The individual.
\n\nJESSICA: The individual.
\n\nTROND: The person, yeah. Because that is what you see in machine shops and those are also what happened in England when they called mining work again, even more industrialized, people are just an extension of the machine.
\n\nJESSICA: We don't work like that.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. I feel like that sometimes, I must admit, that I'm part of the machine. That I'm just a cog in the machine and we are not well-equipped to be cogs in machines, I think. Though, we should be.
\n\nREIN: Joint cognitive systems call this the embodiment relation where the artifact is transparent and it's a part of the operator rather than the application so you can view the world through it but it doesn't restrict you. And then the other side is the hermeneutic relation. So hermeneutics is like biblical hermeneutics is about the interpretation of the Bible. So the hermeneutic relation is where the artifact interprets the world for you and then you view the artifact.
\n\nSo like for example, most of the tools we use to respond to incidents, logs are hermeneutic artifacts. They present their interpretation of the world and we interact with that interpretation. What I think of as making a distinction between old school metrics and observability, is observability is more of an embodiment relationship. Observability lets you ask whatever question you want; you're not restricted to what you specifically remember to log, or to count.
\n\nTROND: Exactly. And this is now you're getting into the area where I think actually STS – now we have talked about a lot about STS in the industrial context here, but I think it's not less, maybe even more relevant now because especially when we're moving into the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution where the machines have taken over more and more. Like, for example, AI, or machine learning, or whatever. Because then the machine has taken more and more control over our lives.
\n\nSo I think we need this more than even before because the machines before were simple in comparison and they were not designed by somebody in the same sense that for example, AI, or machine learning was actually developed. I wouldn't say AI because it's still an algorithm underneath, but it does have some learning in it and we don't know what the consequences of that is, as I said. So I think it's even more relevant now than it was before.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nTROND: [chuckles] I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or see, that is.
\n\nJESSICA: Or hear something about it. You want to define it to our listeners?
\n\nTROND: Somebody called it this hyperphysical systems.
\n\nJESSICA: Hyperphysical?
\n\nTROND: Yes, somebody called it hyperphysical systems. I'm not sure if you want to go too much into that, to be honest, but.
\n\nSo the Fourth Industrial Revolution is basically about the continuous automation of manufacturing and industrial practices using smart technology, machine-to-machine communication, internet of things, machine learning improves communication and self-monitoring and all that stuff. We see the hint of it, that something is coming and that is that different type of industry than what we currently are in.
\n\nI think the Industrial 4.0 was probably coined in Germany somewhere. So there's a definition that something is coming out of that that is going to put the humans even more on the sideline and I think for us working in I, we see some of this already. The general public, maybe don't at the same level.
\n\nREIN: So this reminds me of this other idea from cognitive systems that there are four stages, historical stages, in the development of work. There's mechanization, which replaces human muscle power with mechanical power and we think of that as starting with the original industrial revolution, but it's actually much older than that with agriculture, for example. Then there's automation, there's a centralization, and then there's computerization. Centralization has happened on a shorter time span and computerization has happened at a very short time span relative to mechanization.
\n\nSo one of the challenges is that we got really good at mechanization because we've been doing it since 500 BC. We're relatively less good at centering cognition in the work. The whole point of mechanization and automation was to take cognition out of the work and realizing you have to put it back in, it's becoming much more conspicuous that people have to think to do their work.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Because we're putting more and more of the work into the machine and yet in much software system, many software systems especially like customer facing systems, we need that software to not just be part of the machine, to not do the same thing constantly on a timescale of weeks and months. We need it to evolve, to participate in our cognition as we participate in the larger economy.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: And one of the ironies of this automation—this comes from Bainbridge’s 1983 paper—is that when you automate a task, you don't get rid of a task. You make a new task, which is managing the automation, and this task is quite different from the task you were doing before and you have no experience with it. You may not even have training with it. So automation doesn't get rid of work; automation mutates work into a new unexpected form.
\n\nJESSICA: Right. One of the ironies of automation is that now you have created that management at the automation and you think, “Oh, we have more automation. We can pay the workers less.” Wrong. You could pay the workers more. Now collectively, the automation plus the engineers who are managing it are able to do a lot more, but you didn't save money. You added a capability, but you did not save money.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and part of that is what you can automate are the things we know how to automate, which are the mechanical tasks and what's left when you automate all of the mechanical tasks are the ones that require thinking.
\n\nTROND: And that's where we're moving into now, probably that's what the Fourth Industrial Revolution is. We try and automate this stuff that probably shouldn't be automated. Maybe, I don’t know.
\n\nJESSICA: Or it shouldn’t be automated in a way that we can’t change.
\n\nTROND: No, exactly.
\n\nREIN: This is why I'm not buying stock in AI ops companies because I don't think we figured out how to automate decision-making yet.
\n\nJESSICA: I don't think we want to automate decision-making. We want to augment.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, probably. So we're back to that same idea that the STS said we should be complimentary to machine, not an extension of it.
\n\nJESSICA: Yes. That's probably a good place to wrap up?
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. There's actually a paper by the way, Ten Challenges in Making Automation A Team Player.
\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Or you can watch my talk on collaborative automation.
\n\nTROND: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Do you want to do reflections?
\n\nREIN: Sure.
\n\nJESSICA: I have a short reflection. One quote that I wrote down that you said, Trond in the middle of something was “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see,” and that speaks to, if you don't know you see it, you can't automate the seeing of it. Humans are really good at the everything else of what is going on. This is our human superpower compared to any software that we can design and that's why I am big on this embodiment relation. Don't love the word, but I do love tools that make it easier for me to make and implement decisions that give me superpowers and then allow me to combine that with my ability to take input from the social system and incorporate that.
\n\nTROND: I can give it a little bit of an anecdote. My background is not IT. I come from physics—astrophysics, to be specific—and what we were drilled in physics is that you should take the person out of the system. You should close the system as much as possible. Somebody said you have to take a human out of it if you want observe. Physics is you have no environment, you have no people, there's nothing in it so it's completely closed, but we work and here, it's complete opposite. I work in a completely open system where the human part is essential.
\n\nJESSICA: We are not subject to the second law of thermodynamics.
\n\nTROND: No, we are not. That is highly restricted for a closed system. We are not. So the idea of open system is something that I think we all need to take on board and we are the best one to deal with those open systems. We do it all the time, every day, just walking with a complex open system. I mean, everything.
\n\nJESSICA: Eating.
\n\nTROND: Eating, yeah.
\n\nREIN: And actually, one of the forms, or the ways that openness was thought of is informational openness. Literally about it.
\n\nJESSICA: That’s [inaudible] take in information.
\n\nTROND: Yeah. Entropy.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, exactly. And we are capable of controlling that variance, we are the masters of that. Humans, so let's take advantage of that. That's our superpower as humans.
\n\nREIN: Okay, I can go.
\n\nSo we've been talking a little bit about how the cognitive demands of work are changing and one of the things that's happening is that work is becoming higher tempo. Decisions have to be made more quickly and higher criticality. Computers are really good at making a million mistakes a second. So if you look at something like the Knight Capital incident; a small bug can lose your company half a billion dollars in an instant.
\n\nSo I think what we're seeing is that this complexity, if you combine that with the idea of requisite variety, the complexity of work is exploding and what we call human error is actually a human's inability to cope with complexity. I think if we want to get human error under control, what we have to get better at is managing complexity, not controlling it – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: And not by we and by we don’t mean you, the human get better at this! This system needs to support the humans in managing additional complexity.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. We need to realize that the nature of work has changed, that it presents these new challenges, and that we need to build systems that support people because work has never been this difficult.
\n\nJESSICA: Both, social and technical systems.
\n\nTROND: No, exactly. Just to bring it back to where we started with the coal miners in England. Working there was hard, it was life-threatening; people died in the mines. So you can imagine this must be terrible, but it was a quite closed system, to be honest, compared to what we have. That environment is fairly closed. It isn't predictable at the same size, but we are working in an environment that is completely open. It's turbulent, even. So we need to focus on the human aspect of things. We can't just treat things that machines does work.
\n\nJESSICA: Thank you for coming to this episode of Greater Than Code.
\n\nTROND: Yeah, happy to be here. Really fun. It was a fun discussion.
\n\nREIN: So that about does it for this episode of Greater Than Code. Thank you so much for listening wherever you are. If you want to spend more time with this awesome community, if you donate even $1 to our Patreon, you can come to us on Slack and you can hang out with all of us and it is a lot of fun.
Special Guest: Trond Hjorteland.
","summary":"Trond Hjorteland talks about the superpower of sociotechnical system (STS) design: considering the social AND the technical. The social side matters. He covers the origins of sociotechnical systems, design from above vs self-organization, systemic change and open systems, and the fourth industrial revolution.","date_published":"2021-07-21T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/42be40a6-f0d7-4cf2-8b2c-8ac49d428bc4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32674949,"duration_in_seconds":2905}]},{"id":"c426741a-ef73-4e14-9776-0345a09aa823","title":"241: Data Science Science with Adam Ross Nelson","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/data-science-science","content_text":"01:25 - Teaching, Learning, and Education\n\n06:16 - Becoming a Data Scientist\n\n\nOpportunities to Create New Knowledge \nData Science Science\n\n\n19:36 - Solving Bias in Data Science\n\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction\n\n\n23:36 - Recommendations for Aspiring Data Scientists\n\n\nHire a Career Coach\nCreating and Maintaining a Portfolio\n * Make a Rosetta Stone\n\n\nMake a Cheat Sheet\nWrite an Article on a Piece of Software You Dislike\n\n\n A Few Times, I’ve Broken Pandas\nKyle Kingsbury Posts\n\nContribute to Another Project\n\n\nPost On Project Contribution \n\n\nSpend $$$/Invest on Transition\nBet On Yourself\n\n\n45:36 - Impostor Syndrome\n\n\nImmunity Boosts\n\n\nCommunity\nKnow Your Baseline\n\n\nClance Impostor Phenomenon Test\nDr. Pauline Rose Clance\nThe Imposter Phenomenon: An Internal Barrier To Empowerment and Achievement by Pauline Rose Clance and Maureen Ann O'Toole\n\nDisseminate Knowledge\n\nConfidence Leads to Confidence\nDunning-Kruger Effect\nJohari Window \n\n\nReflections:\n\nMae: Checking out the metrics resources on Impostor Syndrome listed above.\n\nCasey: Writing about software in a positive, constructive tone.\n\nMando: Investing in yourself. from:sheaserrano bet on yourself \n\nAdam: Talking about career, data science, and programming in a non-technical way. Also, Twitter searches for book names!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nMANDO: Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode number 241. I'm Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my friend, Mae Beale.\n\nMANDO: Hi, there! And I am also here with Casey Watts.\n\nCASEY: Hi, I am Casey! And we're all here with Adam Ross Nelson, our guest today.\n\nWelcome, Adam.\n\nADAM: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here. \n\nCASEY: Since 2020, Adam is a consultant who provides research, data science, machine learning, and data governance services. Previously, he was the inaugural data scientist at The Common Application which provides undergraduate college application platforms for institutions around the world. He holds a PhD from The University of Wisconsin: Madison in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis. \n\nAdam is also formerly an attorney with a history of working in higher education, teaching all ages, and educational administration. He is passionate about connecting with other data professionals in-person and online. For more information and background look for his insights by connecting with Adam on LinkedIn, Medium, and other online platforms.\n\nWe are lucky we have him here today. So Adam, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nADAM: I spent so much time thinking about this question, I really wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't thought about my superpower in a serious way in a very long time and I was tempted to go whimsy with this, but I got input from my crowd and my tribe and where I landed was teaching, learning, and education. \n\nYou might look at my background with a PhD in education, leadership, and policy analysis, all of my work in education administration, higher education administration, and teaching and just conclude that was how I acquired the superpower. But I think that superpower goes back much further and much deeper. \n\nSo when I was a kid, I was badly dyslexic. Imagine going through life and you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D. Indistinguishable to me. Also, I had trouble with left and right. I didn't know if someone told me turn left here, I'd be lucky to go – I had a 50/50 chance of going in the right direction, basically. Lowercase P and Q were difficult. \n\nFor this podcast, the greater than sign, I died in the math unit, or I could have died in the math unit when we were learning greater than, or less than. Well, and then another one was capital E and the number 3, couldn't tell a difference. Capital E and number 3. I slowly developed mnemonics in order to learn these things. So for me, the greater than, less than pneumonic is, I don't know if you ever think about it, but think of the greater than, or less than sign as an alligator and it's hungry. So it's always going to eat the bigger number. [laughs] It’s always going to eat the bigger quantity. So once I figured that mnemonic out and a bunch of other mnemonics, I started doing a little bit better. \n\nMy high school principal told my parents that I would be lucky to graduate high school and there's all kinds. We can unpack that for days, but.\n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nADAM: Right? Like what kind of high school principal says that to anybody, which resonates with me now in hindsight, because everything we know about student learning, the two most influential factors on a student's ability to learn are two things. One, teacher effectiveness and number two, principal leadership. Scholarship always bears out. \n\nMAE: Whoa.\n\nADAM: Yeah. So the principal told my family that and also, my household growing up, I was an only child. We were a very poor household; low income was an understatement. So my disadvantages aside, learning and teaching myself was basically all I had. I was the kid who grew up in this neighborhood, I had some friends in the neighborhood, and I was always exploring adjacent areas of the neighborhoods. I was in a semi-rural area. So there were wooded areas, there were some streams, some rivers, some lakes and I was always the kid that found something new. I found a new trail, a new street, a new whatever and I would run back to my neighborhood and I'd be like, “Hey everybody, I just found something. Look what I found, follow me and I will show you also. I will show you the way and I'll show you how cool that is.”\n\nMAE: Aw.\n\nADAM: I love this thinking. [laughs]\n\nMAE: I love that! \n\nCASEY: Sharing. \n\nADAM: I'm glad because when I'm in the classroom, when I'm teaching – I do a lot of corporate training now, too. When I'm either teaching in a traditional university classroom, or in corporate setting, that is me reliving my childhood playtime. It's like, “Hey everybody, look at this cool thing that I have to show you and now I'm going to show it to you, also.”\n\nSo teaching, learning, and education is my superpower and in one way, that's manifested. When I finished school, I finished my PhD at 37. I wasn't 40 years old yet, if you count kindergarten had been in school for 23 years. Over half of my life, not half of my adult life, half of my entire life I was in school [chuckles] and now that I'm rounding 41—that was last week, I turned 41. Now that I'm rounding 41 –\n\nMAE: Happy birthday!\n\nADAM: Thank you so much. Now that I'm rounding 41, I'm finally a little more than half of my life not in school.\n\nMANDO: Congrats, man. That's an accomplishment. [laughs] \n\nSo I'm curious to know how you transitioned from that academic world into being a data scientist proper, like what got you to that point? What sets you down that path? Just that whole story. I think that'd be super interesting to talk about and dig into.\n\nADAM: Sure. I think context really matters; what was going on in the data science field at the time I finished the PhD. I finished that PhD in 2017. So in 2017, that was that the apex of – well, I don't know if it was, or maybe we're now at the apex. I don't know exactly where the apex was, or is, or will be, but there was a lot of excitement around data science as a field and as a career in about 3, or 4 years ago. \n\nMANDO: For sure. \n\nADAM: So when I was finishing the PhD, I had the opportunity to tech up in my PhD program and gain a lot of the skills that others might have gained via other paths through more traditional computer science degrees, economics degrees, or bootcamps, or both. And then I was also in a position where I was probably—and this is common for folks with a PhD—probably one of the handful of people in the world who were a subject matter expert in a particular topic, but also, I had the technical skills to be a data scientist.\n\nSo there was an organization, The Common Application from the introduction, that was looking for a data scientist who needed domain knowledge in the area that I had my PhD and that's what a PhD does for you is it gives you this really intense level of knowledge in a really small area [chuckles] and then the technical skills. \n\nThat's how I transitioned into being a data scientist. I think in general, that is the template for many folks who have become a data scientist. Especially if you go back 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 years ago, before formal data science training programs started popping up and even before, and then I think some of the earliest bootcamps for data science were about 10 years ago. At least the most widely popular ones were about 10 years ago to be clear. And then there's another view that that's just when we started calling it data science because the skills for – all of the technologies and analytical techniques we're using, not all of them, many of them have been around for decades. So that's important to keep in mind. \n\nSo I think to answer your question, I was in the right place at the right time, there was a little bit of luck involved, and I always try and hold myself from fully giving all the credit away to luck because that's something. Well, maybe we'll talk about it later when it comes to imposter syndrome, that's one of the symptoms, so to speak, of imposter syndrome is giving credit for your success away to luck while you credit the success of others to skill, or ability. \n\nBut let me talk about that template. So the template is many data scientists become a data scientists with this three-step process. One, you establish yourself as an expert in your current role and by establishing yourself as an expert, you're the top expert, or one of very, very few people who are very, very skilled in that area. Then you start tackling business problems with statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You might not be called a data scientist yet, but by this point, you're already operating as a data scientist and then eventually, you be the data scientist, you become the data scientist. If it is a career path for you, you'll potentially change roles into a role that's formerly called, specifically called data science. \n\nBut one of the articles I wrote recently on Medium talks about the seven paths to data scientist and one of the paths talks about a fellow who really doesn't consider himself a data scientist, but he is a data scientist, been a data scientist for years, but he's really happy with this organization and his role as it’s titled as an engineer and he's great. He's good to go. \n\nSo maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later, too. I think as we were chatting and planning, someone asked about pedigree a little bit and one of the points I like to make is there's no right, or wrong way to do it. There's no right, or wrong way to get there just once you get there, have fun with it.\n\nMAE: I love what you said, Adam, about the steps and they're very similar to what I would advise to any traditional coder and have advised is take all of your prior work experience before you become a programmer. It is absolutely relevant and some of the best ways to have a meaningful impact and mitigate one's own imposter syndrome is to get a job where you are programming and you already have some of that domain knowledge and expertise to be able to lend. \n\nSo you don't have to have been one of the rarefied few, but just having any familiarity with the discipline, or domain of the business you end up getting hired at, or applying to certainly is a way to get in the door a little easier and feel more comfortable once you're there, that you can contribute in lots of ways.\n\nADAM: And it gives you the ability to provide value that other folks who are on a different path, who are going into data science earlier—this is a great path, too don't let me discount that path—but those folks don't have the deep domain knowledge that someone who transitions into data science later in their career provides.\n\nMAE: Exactly. Yeah, and the amazing teams have people with all the different versions, right? \n\nADAM: Right.\n\nMAE: Like we don't want a team with only one. Yeah.\n\nADAM: That's another thing I like to say about data science is it's a team sport. It has to be a teams – it has to be done in tandem with others. \n\nCASEY: I just had a realization that everyone I know in data science, they tend to come from science backgrounds, or maybe a data science bootcamp. But I don't know anyone who moved from web development into data science and that's just so surprising to me. I wonder why.\n\nMAE: I crossed the border a little bit, I would say, I worked in the Center for Data Science at RTI in North Carolina and I did do some of the data science there as well as just web programming, but my undergrad is biochem. So I don't break your role. [laughs]\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] Yeah. I'm trying to think. I don't think I know any either. At the very least, they all come from a hard science, or mathematics background, which is interesting to me because that's definitely not my experience with web application developers, or just developers in general. There's plenty that come from comp side background, or an MIS background, or something like that, but there's also plenty who come from non-traditional backgrounds as well. Not just bootcamps, but just like, they were a history major and then picked up programming, or whatever and it doesn't seem to be as common, I think in data science. Not to say that you couldn't, but just for my own, or maybe our own experience, it's not quite as common. \n\nADAM: If there's anybody listening with the background that we're talking about, the other backgrounds, I would say, reach out probably to any of us and we'd love to workshop that with you.\n\nMAE: Yes! Thank you for saying that. Absolutely.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, the more stories we can amplify the better. We know y'all are out there; [chuckles] we just don't know you and we should.\n\nMAE: Adam, can you tell us some descriptor that is a hobnobbing thing that we would be able to say to a data scientist? Maybe you can tell us what P values are, or just some little talking point. Do you have any favorite go-tos?\n\nADAM: Well, I suppose if you're looking for dinner party casual conversation and you're looking for some back pocket question, you could ask a data scientist and you're not a data scientist. I would maybe ask a question like this, or a question that I could respond to easily as a data scientist might be something like, “Well, what types of predictions are you looking to make?” and then the data scientists could respond with, “Oh, it's such an interesting question. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before!” But the response might be something like, “Well, I'm trying to predict a classification. I'm trying to predict categories,” or “I'm trying to predict income,” or “I'm trying to predict whatever it is that –” I think that would be an interesting way to go.\n\nWhat's another one? \n\nCASEY: Oh, I've got one for anyone you know in neuroscience.\n\nADAM: Oh, yeah.\n\nMAE: Yay! \n\nCASEY: I was just reading a paper and there's this statistics approach I'm sure I did in undergrad stats, but I forgot it. Two-way ANOVA, analysis of variance, and actually, I don't think I know anyone in my lab that could explain it offhand real quickly really well because we just learn it enough to understand what it is and why we use it and then we have the computer do it. But it's an interesting word saying it and having someone say, “Yes, I know what that means enough. It’s a science, or neuroscience.”\n\nADAM: I would be interested in how neuroscience is used two-way ANOVA because I'm not a neuroscientist and two-way ANOVA is so useful in so many other contexts. \n\nCASEY: I'm afraid I can't help today. Maybe 10 years ago, I could have done that.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: It's just something that you don't work with and talk about a lot. It's definitely fallen out of my headspace. I looked up the other day, I couldn't remember another word from my neuroscience background. Cannula is when you have a permanent needle into a part of the brain, or maybe someone's vein, same thing. I used to do surgeries on rats and put cannulas and I was like, “What's that thing? What was that thing I did?” I have no idea! It's just like time passes and it fades away. I don't do that anymore. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nADAM: So sometimes folks will ask me why I'm a data scientist and I love that question by the way, because I'm a major proponent of knowing what your why is in general, or just having a why and knowing a why, knowing what your why is. Why do you do what you do? What makes you excited about your career, about your work, about your clients, about your coworkers?\n\nOne of the main reasons I am a data scientist is because it's an opportunity to create new knowledge and that's the scientific process, really. That's the main output of science is new knowledge and if you think about that, that's really powerful. This is now at the end of this scientific process, if you implement it correctly, we now know something about how the world works, about how people in the world work, or something about the world in general that we didn't know before. I get goosebumps. We're on podcast so you can't see the goosebumps that I'm getting. But when I talk about this, I actually get goosebumps. \n\nSo for me, being a data scientist and then there's also the debate is data science, science and I say, absolutely yes, especially when you are implementing your work with this spirit’ the spirit of creating new knowledge. One of the reasons I am very adamant about keeping this why in the forefront of my mind and proposing it as a why for others who maybe haven't found their why yet is because it's also a really powerful guardrail that prevents us from working on problems that we already have answers to, that have been analyzed and solved, or questions asked and asked and answered.\n\nI'm a major proponent of avoiding that type of work, unless you have a really good reason to replicate, or test replication, or you're looking for replication. That would be an exception, but in general, questions—analytical questions, research questions, and data science problems—that lead to new knowledge are the ones that excite me the most. \n\nAnd then this goes back to what I was talking about a moment ago, my superpower teaching and learning. One of the reasons I really enjoy teaching data science in the classroom, or statistics in the classroom, or at corporate training is because then I can empower others to create new knowledge. That feels really good to me when I can help others create new knowledge, or give others the skills and abilities to do that as well.\n\nMAE: I love that. Yeah. I do have one angle on that, but I hope this doesn't feel like putting you on the spot, but especially in the not revisiting a established—I'm going to do air quotes—facts and from undergrad, the scientific definition of fact has not yet been proven false. \n\nBut anyways, there is a growing awareness of bias inherent in data and we so often think of data as the epitome of objectivity. Because it's a bunch of numbers then therefore, we are not replicating, or imposing our thoughts, but there is the Schrodinger's cat, or whatever in place all the time about how those “facts” were established in the first place, where that data was called from? Like, the Portlandia episode where they ask where the chicken is from and they end up back at the farm.\n\n[laughter]\n\nThe data itself, there's just a lot in there. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that accordion.\n\nADAM: There’s a lot. That's a big question. I will say one of the things that keeps me up at night is this problem, especially when it comes to the potential for our work in data science, to perpetuate, exacerbate social inequity, social inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality. This keeps me up at night and I am, like most, or like everyone – well, no, I don't know if everybody is interested in solving that problem. I think a lot of data scientists are, I think a lot of researchers are; I think many are interested in solving that particular problem and I count myself among those. But I would be ahead of myself if I purported to say that I had a solution. \n\nI think in this format and in this context, one of the best things to do is to point folks towards others who have spent even more time really focusing on this and I think the go-to is Weapons of Math Destruction. Weapons of Math Destruction is a book. If you're on a bad connection, that's M-A-T-H. Weapons of Math Destruction and especially if you're just getting started on this concern, that's a good place to get started.\n\nMAE: Thank you. Thanks for speaking to that, Adam.\n\nCASEY: There's a piece of the question you asked me that I always think about is the data true and I like to believe most data is true in what it measured, but it's not measuring truth with a T-H.\n\nADAM: That’s true. \n\nMAE: Whoa.\n\nADAM: I think you could spend a lot of time thinking this through and noodling through this, but I would caution you on something you said it's true as to what you measured. Well, you have measurement error. We have entire – actually, I happen to have social statistics handbook handy. In any statistics handbook, or statistics textbook is going to have either an entire chapter, or a major portion of one of the introductory chapters on error, the types of error, and measurement error is one of them, perception error, all of the – and I'm on the spot to name all the errors. I wish I could rattle those off a little bit better.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nADAM: But if you're interested, this is an interesting topic, just Google data errors, or error types, or statistical errors and you will get a rabbit hole that will keep you occupied for a while.\n\nMAE: Love it. I will be in that rabbit hole later. [laughs]\n\nADAM: Yeah. I'm going to go back down that one, too myself. \n\nMANDO: So Adam, we have people who are listening right now who are interested in following one of your paths, or one of the paths to becoming a data scientist and maybe they have domain expertise in a particular area, maybe they don't. Maybe they're just starting out. Maybe they're coming from a bootcamp, or maybe they're from a non-traditional background and they're trying to switch careers. If you were sitting there talking to them one-on-one, what are some things that you would tell them, or what are some starting points for them? Like, where do you begin?\n\nADAM: Well, one, admittedly self-serving item I would mention is consider the option of hiring a career coach and that's one of the things that I do in my line of consulting work is I help folks who are towards the middle, or latter part of their career, and they're looking to enter into, or level up in data science. So a career coach can – and I've hired career coaches over the years. \n\nBack to, Mando, one of the questions you asked me earlier is how did you end up in data science? Well, part of that story, which I didn't talk to then is, well, I went into data science route when the faculty route didn't open up for me and I'm a huge fan. I had two career coaches helping me out with both, faculty and non-faculty work for a while. So having been the recipient and the beneficiary of some great career coaching, I have also recently become a career coach as well. \n\nProbably something more practical, though. Let me give some practical advice. A portfolio, a professional portfolio for a data scientist is probably one of the most essential and beneficial things you can do for yourself in terms of making that transition successfully and then also, maintaining a career. If you're interested in advancing your career in this way, maintaining a career trajectory that keeps you going so having and maintaining a portfolio.\n\nI'll go through four tips on portfolio that I give folks and these tips are specifically tips that can help you generate content for your portfolio, because I know one of the hardest things to do with the portfolio is, well, let me just do some fictional hypothetical project for my portfolio, so hard to do and also, can end up being sort of dry, stale, and it might not really connect with folks. These are four ways you can add to, or enhance your portfolio. I wouldn't call them entire projects; maybe they're mini projects and they're great additions to your portfolio. \n\nThe first one is: make a Rosetta Stone. This one is for folks who have learned one computer programming language, and now it's time for them to learn another computer programming language, or maybe they already know two computer programming languages. In fact, the Rosetta Stone idea for your portfolio doubles as a way to build on and expand your skills. \n\nSo here's what a Rosetta Stone is. You have a project; you've done it from start to finish. Let's say, you've done a project from start to finish in Python. Now port that entire project over to R and then in a portfolio platform—I usually recommend GitHub—commit that work as git commits as a Rosetta Stone side-by-side examples of Python and R code that produce the same results and the same output. \n\nI love this piece of advice because in doing this, you will learn so much about the language that you originally wrote the program in and you will learn a lot about the target language. You're going to learn about both languages and you're going to have a tangible artifact for your portfolio and you might even learn more about that project. You might encounter some new output in the new language, which is more accessible for that language, that you didn't encounter in the old language and now you're going to have a new insight about whatever your research project was. \n\nThe next piece of advice I have is make a cheat sheet and there's tongue in cheek opinion about cheat sheets. I think sometimes folks don't like to call them cheat sheets because the word cheat has negative connotations, but whatever you're going to call it, if it's a quick reference, or if it's a cheat sheet, a well-designed cheat sheet on any tool, platform, tool platform, language that you can think of is going to be a really nice addition to your portfolio. \n\nI recommend folks, what you do is you just find the things that you do the most frequently and you're constantly referencing at whatever website, make a cheat sheet for yourself, use it for a while, and then polish it up into a really nice presentable format. So for example, I have a cheat sheet on interpreting regression. I also have a cheat sheet that is a crosswalk from Stata, which is a statistical programming language, to Python. So actually there, I've put the two of them together. I've made this cheat sheet, which is also a Rosetta Stone. \n\nIf you're looking for those, you can find those on my GitHub, or my LinkedIn, I have cheat sheets on my LinkedIn profile as well and you can see examples. I do have on YouTube, a step-by-step instructional video on how to make a cheat sheet and they're actually really easy to do. So if you even if you consider yourself not graphically inclined, if you pick the right tools—and the tools that you would pick might not be your first choice just because they're not marketed that way—you can put together a really nice cheat sheet relatively easily. \n\nThe third tip is to write an article… about a piece of software that you dislike. So write an article about a piece of software that you dislike and this has to be done with, especially in the open source community, do this one carefully, possibly even contact the creators, and also, be sure not to blame anybody, or pass judgment. Just talk about how and why this particular project doesn't quite live up to your full aspiration, or your full expectation. \n\nI've done this a couple of times in a variety of ways. I didn't in the title specifically say, “I don't like this,” or “I don't like that,” but in at least one case, one of the articles I wrote, I was able to later submit as a cross-reference, or an additional reference on an issue in GitHub and this was specifically for Pandas. So there was a feature in Pandas that wasn't working the way I wanted it to work. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Pandas. \n\nADAM: Yeah, Pandas is great, right? So there's a feature in Pandas that wasn't working in quite the way that I wanted it to. I wrote an article about it. Actually, I framed the article, the article title is, “How I broke Pandas.” Actually, several versions of Pandas back, the issue was it was relatively easy to generate a Pandas data frame with duplicate column names. Having duplicate column names in a Pandas data frame obviously can cause problems in your code later because you basically have multiple keys for different columns. Now, there's a setting in Pandas that will guard against this and it's an optional setting—you have to toggle it on and off. This article, I like to say, helped improve Pandas. \n\nSo write an article about software you dislike and also, like I said, be diplomatic and in this case, I was diplomatic by framing the article title by saying, “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” and then –\n\nMANDO: This reminds me a lot of Kyle Kingsbury and his Jepsen tests that he used to do. He was aphyr on Twitter. He's not there anymore, but he would run all these tests against distributed databases and distributed locking systems and stuff like that and then write up these large-scale technical explanations of what broke and what didn't. They're super fascinating to read and the way that he approached them, Adam, it's a lot like you're saying, he pushed it with a lot of grace and what I think is super important, especially when you're talking about open source stuff, because this is what people, they're pouring their heart and soul and lives into. You don't have to be ugly about it. \n\nADAM: Oh, absolutely.\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] And then he ended up like, this is what he does now. He wrote this framework to do analysis of distributed systems and now companies hire him and that's his job now. \n\nI'm a big fan of the guy and I miss him being on Twitter and interacting with him and his technical expertise and also, just his own personality. Sorry, your topic, or your little cheat there reminded me of that. We'll put some links—thanks, Casey—and in the show notes about his posts so if people haven't come across this stuff yet, it's a fascinating read. It's super helpful even to this day.\n\nADAM: I'm thankful for the connection because now I have another example, when I talk to people about this, and it's incredible that you say built an entire career out of this. I had no idea that particular tip was so powerful.\n\nMAE: So cool.\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] So I think you said you have one more, Adam?\n\nADAM: The fourth one is: contribute to another project. One of the best examples of this is I wrote an article on how to enhance your portfolio and someone really took this fourth one to a whole new level. I'm sure others have as well, but one person—we’ll get links in, I can get some links in the show notes—what he did was he found a package in R that brings data for basically sample datasets for our programmers and citizens working and data scientists working with R. But he was a Python person. \n\nSo he suggested, “Hey, what about making this?” I remember he contacted me and he said, “I read your article about adding to my portfolio. I really think it might make sense to port this project over to Python,” and so, he was combining two of them. He was making a Rosetta Stone and he was contributing someone else's project. \n\nNow this data is available both in R and in Python and the author of this project has posted about it. He posted about it in May, early May, and it's constantly still a month and a half later getting comments, likes, and links. So he's really gotten some mileage out of this particular piece, this addition to his portfolio and the original author of the original software also has acknowledged it and it's really a success. It's really a success. So contribute to another project is my fourth tip. \n\nOh, one more idea on contributing to another project. Oh, I have an article on that lists several projects that are accepting contributions from intermediate and beginners. The point there is identify specific projects that are accepting beginner and immediate submissions on contributions, mostly via GitHub. But if you go to GitHub and if you're newer to GitHub, you can actually go to a project that you like, go to its Issues tab, and then most projects have tags associated with their issues that are identified as beginner friendly. That is an excellent place to go in order to get started on contributing to another project, which makes the world a better place because you're contributing to open source and you have an addition to your portfolio.\n\nMANDO: Oh, these are fantastic tips. Thank you, Adam.\n\nADAM: I'm glad you like them. Can I give another one? Another big tip? This one's less portfolio, more –\n\nMANDO: Yeah, lay it on us.\n\nMAE: Do! By all means. \n\nADAM: And I'd be interested, Mae, since you also made a similar career transition to me. I made an investment. I think I know what you might say on this one, but I spent money. I spent money on the transition. I hired consultants on Fiverr and Upwork to help me upgrade my social media presence. I hired the career coaches that I mentioned. Oh, actually the PhD program, that was not free. So I spent money on my transition and I would point that out to folks who are interested in making this transition, it's not a transition that is effortless and it's also not a transition that you can do, I think it's not one that you can do without also investing money.\n\nMAE: Yeah. [chuckles] Okay, I'm going to tell you my real answer on this.\n\nADAM: Okay.\n\nMAE: Or corollary. I had a pretty good gig at a state institution with a retirement, all of these things, and I up and left and went to code school. I had recently paid off a lot of debt, so I didn't have a lot of savings. I had no savings, let's just say that and the code school had offered this like loan program that fell through. So I'm in code school and they no longer are offering the ability to have this special code school loan. I put code school on my credit card and then while in code school, my 10-year-old car died and I had to get a new car.\n\nADAM: Ah.\n\nMAE: In that moment, I was struggling to get some fundamental object-oriented programming concepts that I'm like, “Holy cow, I've got a mortgage. I no longer have a car.” Now I'm in a real bind here, but I be leaving myself. I know I made these choices after a lot of considered thought and consultation. I, too had hired a career coach and I was like, “I've already made this call. I'm going to make the best of it. I'm just going to do what I can and see what happens.” \n\nI really have a test of faith on that original call to make those investments. I would not recommend doing it the way I did to anyone!\n\n[laughter]\n\nMAE: And I went from a pretty well-established career and salary into – a lot of people when they go into tech, it's a huge jump and I had the opposite experience. That investment continued to be required of me for several years. Even still, I choose to do things related to nonprofits and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot of faith and commitment and money often, in some form, can be helpful. There are a lot of, on the programming side, code schools that offer for you to pay a percentage once you get a salary, or other offsetting arrangements. \n\nSo if somebody is listening, who is considering programming, I have not seen those analogs in data science, but on the programming side, especially if you're from a group underrepresented in tech, there's a number of different things that are possible to pursue still.\n\nADAM: Here we are talking about some of the lesser acknowledged aspects of this transition.\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nADAM: Some of the harder to acknowledge.\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I really liked what you said, Mae about the need to believe in yourself and Adam, I think what you're saying is you have to be willing to bet on yourself. \n\nADAM: Yes. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: You have to be willing to bet on yourself and sometimes, in some forms, that's going to mean writing a check, or [chuckles] in Mae’s example, putting it on your credit card, but.\n\n[laughter]\n\nSometimes that's what it means and that's super scary. I'm not a 100% convinced that I have enough faith in my ability to run the dishwasher some days, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that today, or not. \n\nThis is going to be really silly and stupid, but one of my favorite cartoons is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. \n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nMANDO: It's a series on Cartoon Network, I think. No, Nickelodeon, I watched it with my kids when they were super little and it's still a thing that we rewatch right now, now that they're older. There's this one episode where this grandfatherly wizened uncle is confronted [chuckles] by someone who's trying to mug him [chuckles] and the uncle is this super hardcore general guy. He critics his mugging abilities and he corrects him and says, “If you stand up straight and you change this about the way that you approach it, you'll be much more intimidating and probably a more successful mugger,” and he's like, “But it doesn't seem that your heart is into the mugging.” [chuckles]\n\nSo he makes this guy a cup of tea and they talk about it and the guy's like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I'm lost. I'm all over the place. All I want to do is become a masseuse, but I just can't get my stuff together.” Something that the uncle said that really, really struck with me was he said, “While it's important and best for us to believe in ourselves, sometimes it can be a big blessing when someone else believes in you.”\n\nMAE: So beautiful.\n\nMANDO: “And sometimes, you need that and so, I get it. You can't always bet on yourself, or maybe you can bet on yourself, but sometimes you don't have that backup to actually follow through with it.” That's why community is so important. That's why having a group of people. Even if it's one person. Someone who can be like that backstop to be, “You don't believe in yourself today. Don't worry about it. I believe in you. It's okay. You can do it. You're going to do it.”\n\nADAM: Community is just massive. Absolutely massive. \n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nADAM: Having a good, strong community is so important. Also, I think I could add to what you're saying is about betting on yourself. I don't know if I love the analogy because it's not a casino bet. \n\nMANDO: Right. \n\nADAM: The odds are not in favor of the house here. If you have done the right consultation, spoken with friends and family, leveraged your community, and done an honest, objective, accurate assessment of your skills, abilities, and your ambition and your abilities, et cetera. It's a bet. It's a wager, but it's a calculated risk.\n\nMAE: Yes! That is how I have described it also. Yes, totally. I loved that story from Airbender and it ties in a few of our topics. One is one of the things Adam said originally, which is being deeply in touch with your why really helps. It also ties in the whole teaching thing and often, that is one of the primary roles is to offer faith and commitment to your pursuits. \n\nIf I had had different code school teachers, the stress of my entire livelihood being dependent on my understanding these concepts in week two of bootcamp that I was struggling with, and I had made a calculated bet and I thought I was going to be awesome, but I was not. It was like the classic Peanuts teacher is talking, “Wah wah woh wah wah.” \n\nI had to lean into my teachers, my school, my peers, believe in me. I believed in me before, even if I don't in this moment and I just have to let that stress move to the side so that I can reengage. That was really the only way I was able to do it was having a similar – well, I didn't try to mug anybody, [laughs] but I had some backup that really helped me make that through. \n\nMANDO: Yeah, and those credit card folks call like, it’s tricky.\n\nMAE: Yeah, and then I had to buy a car and those people were calling me and they just did an employment verification. They said, “You don't have a job!” I was like, “Oh my god. Well, you [inaudible] get my car back, but I have really good credit. How about you talk to your boss and call me back?” \n\nSo anyway, these things all tie into, if we have time to talk about something, I was hoping we would cover is this thing about imposter syndrome and believing in oneself, but also not believing in oneself simultaneously and how to navigate that. I don't know, Adam, if you have particular advice, or thoughts on that.\n\nADAM: I do have some advice and thoughts on that. Actually, just yesterday, I hosted a live webinar on this particular topic with another career coach named Sammy and she and I are very passionate about helping folks. When we work with clients, we work with folks intentionally to evaluate whether imposter syndrome might be part of the equation. Actually, in this webinar, we talked about three immunity boosts, or three ways to boost your immunity against imposter syndrome and in one way, or another, I think we've touched on all three with the exception of maybe one of them. \n\nSo if you're interested in that topic reached out to me as well. I have a replay available of that particular webinar and I could make the replay available on a one-on-one basis to folks as well, who really want to see that material, and the section –\n\nMANDO: [inaudible] that.\n\nADAM: Yeah, please reach out and LinkedIn. Easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or Twitter. Twitter actually works really well, too these days.\n\nMANDO: We’ll put both of those in the show notes for folks.\n\nADAM: Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. I look forward to potentially sharing that with folks who reach out. \n\nThe community was the second immunity boost that we shared and actually, Mando and Mae, both just got done talking extensively about community. And then the first immunity boost we shared was know your baseline. We called it “know your baseline” and I know from our planning that we would put in this program notes, a link to an online assessment that's named after the original scientist, or one of the two original scientists who really began documenting imposter syndrome back in the 70s and then they called it imposter phenomenon. \n\nOh, the history of this topic is just fascinating. Women scientists, North Carolina, first documented this and one of the two scientists is named Pauline Clance. So the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale, that'll be in the show notes. You can take the Imposter Phenomenon Scale and then objectively evaluate based on this is imposter syndrome a part of your experience, if it is what is the extent of that, and just knowing your baseline can be a really good way, I think to protect you from the effects of the experience. It's also, I think important to point out that imposter syndrome isn't regarded as a medical, or a clinical diagnosis. This is usually defined as a collection of thoughts and actions associated with career, or other academic pursuits. \n\nAnd then the third immunity boost is disseminate knowledge and I love the disseminate knowledge as an immune booster because what it does is it flips the script. A lot of times folks with imposter syndrome, we say to ourselves, “Gee, if I could get one more degree, I could probably then do this,” or “If I got one more certification,” or “I can apply for this job next year, I could apply for that permission next year because I will have completed whatever certification program,” or “If I read one more –”\n\nMANDO: One more year of experience, right?\n\nADAM: Yeah. One more year of experience, or one more book, or one more class on Udemy. Especially for mid and late career professionals and we talked about this earlier, Mae the bank of experience and domain knowledge that mid and late career professionals bring, I promise nobody else has had your experience. Everybody has a unique experience and everybody has something to offer that is new and unique, and that is valuable to others. So I say, instead of signing up for the seminar, host the seminar, teach the seminar.\n\n[laughter]\n\nADAM: Right? Again, there's nothing wrong with certifications. There's nothing wrong with Udemy classes, I have Udemy classes that you could should go take. There's nothing wrong with those, but in measure, in measure and then also, never, never, never, never forget that you already have skills and abilities that is probably worth sharing with the rest of the world. So I recommend doing that as a boost, as an immunity boost, against imposter syndrome.\n\nMANDO: Yes, yes, and yes!\n\n[chuckles]\n\nCASEY: Now, I took the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale test myself and I scored really well. It was super, super low for me. I'm an overconfident person at this point, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t. \n\n[laughter]\n\nI was super shy. I would not talk to people. I'd read a book in a corner. I was so introverted and it changed over time, I think by thinking about how confidence leads to confidence. \n\nMANDO: Yes.\n\nCASEY: The more confident you are, the more confident you act, you can be at the world and the more reason you have to be competent over time and that snowballed for me, thank goodness. It could happen for other people, too gradually, slowly over time the more you do confidence, the more you'll feel it and be it naturally. \n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nMANDO: I think it works the other direction, too and you have to be real careful about that. Like Adam, you were talking about flipping the script. If you have a negative talk script of just one more, just this one thing, I'm not good enough yet and I'm not you know. That can reinforce itself as well and you just never end up getting where you should be, or deserve to be, you know what I mean? \n\nIt's something that I struggle with. I've been doing this for a really, really long time and I still struggle with this stuff, it’s not easy. It's not easy to get past sometimes and some days are better than others and Casey, like you said, it has gotten better over time, but sometimes, you need those daily affirmations in the morning in the mirror [laughs] to get going, whatever works for you. But that idea, I love that idea, Casey of confidence bringing more confidence and reinforcing itself.\n\nMAE: And being mindful of Dunning-Kruger and careful of the inaccuracy of self-assessment. I like a lot of these ways in which making sure you're doing both, I think all the time as much as possible. Seeing the ways in which you are discounting yourself and seeing the ways in which you might be over crediting. \n\nADAM: Right. Like with a lot of good science, you want to take as many measurements as possible.\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nADAM: And then the majority vote of those measurements points to some sort of consensus. So the IP scale is one tool you can use and I think to your point, Mae it'd be a mistake to rely on it exclusively. You mentioned Dunning-Kruger, but there's also the Johari window.\n\nMAE: Oh, I don’t know. What’s that?\n\nADAM: Oh, the Johari window is great. So there's four quadrants and the upper left quadrant of the Johari window are things that you know about yourself and things that other people know about yourself. And then you also have a quadrant where things that you know about yourself, but nobody else knows. And then there's a quadrant where other people know things about you that you don't know. And then there's the complete blind spot where there are things about you that you don't know that other people don't know. And then of course, you have this interesting conversation with yourself. So that quadrant that I don't know about it and nobody else knows about it, does it really exist? Does the tree falling in the woods make a sound when nobody's there to hear it? \n\nYou can have a lot of fun with Johari window as well and I think it also definitely connects with what you were just saying a moment ago about accuracy of self-assessments, then it gets back to the measurement that we were talking about earlier, the measurement errors. So there's perceptual error, measurement error—shucks, I had it, here it is—sampling error, randomization, error, all kinds of error. I managed to pull that book out and then get some of those in front of me.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: There are some nice nicknames for a couple of the windows, Johari windows. The blind spot is one of those four quadrants and façade, I like to think about is another one. It's when you put on the front; people don't know something about you because you are façading it.\n\nMAE: Hmm.\n\nMANDO: So now we'll go ahead and transition into our reflection section. This is the part where our esteemed panelists and dear friends reflect on the episode and what they learned, what stuck with them, and we also get reflection from our guest, Adam as well, but Adam, you get to go last. \n\nADAM: Sounds good. \n\nMANDO: You can gauge from the rest of us. Who would like to go first?\n\nMAE: I can! I did not know that there was an evaluative measure about imposter phenomenon, or any of that history shared and I'm definitely going to check that out. I talk with and have talked and will talk with a lot of people about that topic, but just having some sort of metric available for some self-assessment, I think is amazing. So that is a really fun, new thing that I am taking away among many, many other fun things. How about you, Casey?\n\nCASEY: I like writing about software you dislike in a positive, constructive tone. That's something I look for when I'm interviewing people, too. I want to know when they get, get feedback, when they give feedback, will it be thoughtful, unkind, and deep and respectful of past decisions and all that. If you've already done that in an article in your portfolio somewhere, that's awesome. That's pretty powerful. \n\nMANDO: Oh, how fantastic is that? Yeah, I love that!\n\nCASEY: I don't think I've ever written an article like that. Maybe on a GitHub issue, or a pull request that's longer than it feels like it should be. \n\n[laughter]\n\nMaybe an article would be nice, next time I hit that.\n\nMANDO: Oh, I love that. That's great. \n\nI guess I’ll go next. The thing that really resonated with me, Adam was when you were talking about investing in yourself and being willing to write that check, if that's what it means, or swipe that credit card, Mae, or whatever. I'm sorry, I keep picking on you about that. \n\nMAE: It’s fine. [laughs] It’s pretty wild!\n\nMANDO: I love it. I love it, and it reminded me, I think I've talked about it before, but one of my favorite writers, definitely my favorite sports writer, is this guy named Shea Serrano. He used to write for Grantland and he writes for The Ringer and he's a novelist, too and his catchphrase—this is why I said it earlier in the episode—is “bet on yourself.” \n\nSometimes when I'm feeling maybe a little imposter syndrome-y, or a little like, “I don't know what I'm going to do,” I click on the Twitter search and I type “from:sheaserrano bet on yourself” and hit enter and I just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets of this guy that's just like, “Bet on yourself today.” “Bet on yourself” “Bet on yourself today, no one else is going to do it.” “No one's coming to save you, bet on yourself,” stuff like that and thank you, Adam for that reminder today. I needed that.\n\nADAM: You're welcome. I'm so happy that you've got that takeaway. Thank you so much for sharing the takeaway. \n\nI have, I think two reflections. One, what a breath of fresh air, the opportunity to talk about life, career, but career in data science, and programming in a non-technical way. I think the majority of our conversation was non-technical. \n\n[laughter]\n\nWe briefly went into some technicalities when we talked about how you can sometimes have duplicate heading names in a Pandas data frame. That was a little bit technical. Otherwise, we really just spoke about the humanistic aspects of this world. So thank you so much for that and I got a research tip! \n\nMando, what a brilliant idea. If you're ever looking for more background on a book, do a Twitter search for the book name and then anybody who's been speaking about that book –\n\nMANDO: Oh, yes!\n\nADAM: Yeah, right? You could extend that to a research tip. [overtalk]\n\nMANDO: That’s fantastic! Absolutely. Yeah. \n\nADAM: So today, I learned a new way to get additional background on any book. I'm just going to go to Twitter, Google, or not Google that, search the book title name, and I'm going to see what other people are saying about that book. And then I can check out their bios. I can see what else they're sharing. They might have insights that I might not have had and now I can benefit from that. Thank you. Thank you so much for the research tip.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, and I think it dovetails really well into what you were talking about earlier, Adam, about publishing data. Like building out this portfolio, writing your articles, getting it out there because someone's going to go to Google, or Twitter and type into the search bar a Pandas data frame, column, same name, you know what I mean and now they're going to hit “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” your article. \n\nBut it could be about anything. It could be about that stupid Docker thing that you fought with yesterday, or about the 8 hours I spent on Monday trying to make an HTTP post with no body and it just hung forever and I couldn't. 8 hours, it took me to figure out why it wasn't working and it's because I didn't have one line in and I didn't call request that set body. I just didn't do it. I've done this probably more than a million times in my career and I didn't do it and it cost me 8 hours of my life that I'm never getting back, but it happens. That's part of the job is that – [overtalk]\n\nMAE: Yeah, sure.\n\nMANDO: And you cry about it and you eat some gummy worms and then you pick yourself back up and you're good to go.\n\nADAM: Yeah, another common one that people are constantly writing about is reordering the columns in a Pandas data frame. There's like a hundred ways to do it and none of them are efficient. \n\nMANDO: [laughs] Mm hm.\n\nADAM: So I love [inaudible], of course.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, you hit the one that works for you, write a little something about it. It’s all right. \n\nADAM: Exactly, yeah.\n\nMANDO: All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on, loved having you on.Special Guest: Adam Ross Nelson.","content_html":"01:25 - Teaching, Learning, and Education
\n\n06:16 - Becoming a Data Scientist
\n\n19:36 - Solving Bias in Data Science
\n\n\n\n23:36 - Recommendations for Aspiring Data Scientists
\n\n45:36 - Impostor Syndrome
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMae: Checking out the metrics resources on Impostor Syndrome listed above.
\n\nCasey: Writing about software in a positive, constructive tone.
\n\nMando: Investing in yourself. from:sheaserrano bet on yourself
\n\nAdam: Talking about career, data science, and programming in a non-technical way. Also, Twitter searches for book names!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nMANDO: Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode number 241. I'm Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my friend, Mae Beale.
\n\nMANDO: Hi, there! And I am also here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I am Casey! And we're all here with Adam Ross Nelson, our guest today.
\n\nWelcome, Adam.
\n\nADAM: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here.
\n\nCASEY: Since 2020, Adam is a consultant who provides research, data science, machine learning, and data governance services. Previously, he was the inaugural data scientist at The Common Application which provides undergraduate college application platforms for institutions around the world. He holds a PhD from The University of Wisconsin: Madison in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis.
\n\nAdam is also formerly an attorney with a history of working in higher education, teaching all ages, and educational administration. He is passionate about connecting with other data professionals in-person and online. For more information and background look for his insights by connecting with Adam on LinkedIn, Medium, and other online platforms.
\n\nWe are lucky we have him here today. So Adam, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nADAM: I spent so much time thinking about this question, I really wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't thought about my superpower in a serious way in a very long time and I was tempted to go whimsy with this, but I got input from my crowd and my tribe and where I landed was teaching, learning, and education.
\n\nYou might look at my background with a PhD in education, leadership, and policy analysis, all of my work in education administration, higher education administration, and teaching and just conclude that was how I acquired the superpower. But I think that superpower goes back much further and much deeper.
\n\nSo when I was a kid, I was badly dyslexic. Imagine going through life and you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D. Indistinguishable to me. Also, I had trouble with left and right. I didn't know if someone told me turn left here, I'd be lucky to go – I had a 50/50 chance of going in the right direction, basically. Lowercase P and Q were difficult.
\n\nFor this podcast, the greater than sign, I died in the math unit, or I could have died in the math unit when we were learning greater than, or less than. Well, and then another one was capital E and the number 3, couldn't tell a difference. Capital E and number 3. I slowly developed mnemonics in order to learn these things. So for me, the greater than, less than pneumonic is, I don't know if you ever think about it, but think of the greater than, or less than sign as an alligator and it's hungry. So it's always going to eat the bigger number. [laughs] It’s always going to eat the bigger quantity. So once I figured that mnemonic out and a bunch of other mnemonics, I started doing a little bit better.
\n\nMy high school principal told my parents that I would be lucky to graduate high school and there's all kinds. We can unpack that for days, but.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nADAM: Right? Like what kind of high school principal says that to anybody, which resonates with me now in hindsight, because everything we know about student learning, the two most influential factors on a student's ability to learn are two things. One, teacher effectiveness and number two, principal leadership. Scholarship always bears out.
\n\nMAE: Whoa.
\n\nADAM: Yeah. So the principal told my family that and also, my household growing up, I was an only child. We were a very poor household; low income was an understatement. So my disadvantages aside, learning and teaching myself was basically all I had. I was the kid who grew up in this neighborhood, I had some friends in the neighborhood, and I was always exploring adjacent areas of the neighborhoods. I was in a semi-rural area. So there were wooded areas, there were some streams, some rivers, some lakes and I was always the kid that found something new. I found a new trail, a new street, a new whatever and I would run back to my neighborhood and I'd be like, “Hey everybody, I just found something. Look what I found, follow me and I will show you also. I will show you the way and I'll show you how cool that is.”
\n\nMAE: Aw.
\n\nADAM: I love this thinking. [laughs]
\n\nMAE: I love that!
\n\nCASEY: Sharing.
\n\nADAM: I'm glad because when I'm in the classroom, when I'm teaching – I do a lot of corporate training now, too. When I'm either teaching in a traditional university classroom, or in corporate setting, that is me reliving my childhood playtime. It's like, “Hey everybody, look at this cool thing that I have to show you and now I'm going to show it to you, also.”
\n\nSo teaching, learning, and education is my superpower and in one way, that's manifested. When I finished school, I finished my PhD at 37. I wasn't 40 years old yet, if you count kindergarten had been in school for 23 years. Over half of my life, not half of my adult life, half of my entire life I was in school [chuckles] and now that I'm rounding 41—that was last week, I turned 41. Now that I'm rounding 41 –
\n\nMAE: Happy birthday!
\n\nADAM: Thank you so much. Now that I'm rounding 41, I'm finally a little more than half of my life not in school.
\n\nMANDO: Congrats, man. That's an accomplishment. [laughs]
\n\nSo I'm curious to know how you transitioned from that academic world into being a data scientist proper, like what got you to that point? What sets you down that path? Just that whole story. I think that'd be super interesting to talk about and dig into.
\n\nADAM: Sure. I think context really matters; what was going on in the data science field at the time I finished the PhD. I finished that PhD in 2017. So in 2017, that was that the apex of – well, I don't know if it was, or maybe we're now at the apex. I don't know exactly where the apex was, or is, or will be, but there was a lot of excitement around data science as a field and as a career in about 3, or 4 years ago.
\n\nMANDO: For sure.
\n\nADAM: So when I was finishing the PhD, I had the opportunity to tech up in my PhD program and gain a lot of the skills that others might have gained via other paths through more traditional computer science degrees, economics degrees, or bootcamps, or both. And then I was also in a position where I was probably—and this is common for folks with a PhD—probably one of the handful of people in the world who were a subject matter expert in a particular topic, but also, I had the technical skills to be a data scientist.
\n\nSo there was an organization, The Common Application from the introduction, that was looking for a data scientist who needed domain knowledge in the area that I had my PhD and that's what a PhD does for you is it gives you this really intense level of knowledge in a really small area [chuckles] and then the technical skills.
\n\nThat's how I transitioned into being a data scientist. I think in general, that is the template for many folks who have become a data scientist. Especially if you go back 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 years ago, before formal data science training programs started popping up and even before, and then I think some of the earliest bootcamps for data science were about 10 years ago. At least the most widely popular ones were about 10 years ago to be clear. And then there's another view that that's just when we started calling it data science because the skills for – all of the technologies and analytical techniques we're using, not all of them, many of them have been around for decades. So that's important to keep in mind.
\n\nSo I think to answer your question, I was in the right place at the right time, there was a little bit of luck involved, and I always try and hold myself from fully giving all the credit away to luck because that's something. Well, maybe we'll talk about it later when it comes to imposter syndrome, that's one of the symptoms, so to speak, of imposter syndrome is giving credit for your success away to luck while you credit the success of others to skill, or ability.
\n\nBut let me talk about that template. So the template is many data scientists become a data scientists with this three-step process. One, you establish yourself as an expert in your current role and by establishing yourself as an expert, you're the top expert, or one of very, very few people who are very, very skilled in that area. Then you start tackling business problems with statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You might not be called a data scientist yet, but by this point, you're already operating as a data scientist and then eventually, you be the data scientist, you become the data scientist. If it is a career path for you, you'll potentially change roles into a role that's formerly called, specifically called data science.
\n\nBut one of the articles I wrote recently on Medium talks about the seven paths to data scientist and one of the paths talks about a fellow who really doesn't consider himself a data scientist, but he is a data scientist, been a data scientist for years, but he's really happy with this organization and his role as it’s titled as an engineer and he's great. He's good to go.
\n\nSo maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later, too. I think as we were chatting and planning, someone asked about pedigree a little bit and one of the points I like to make is there's no right, or wrong way to do it. There's no right, or wrong way to get there just once you get there, have fun with it.
\n\nMAE: I love what you said, Adam, about the steps and they're very similar to what I would advise to any traditional coder and have advised is take all of your prior work experience before you become a programmer. It is absolutely relevant and some of the best ways to have a meaningful impact and mitigate one's own imposter syndrome is to get a job where you are programming and you already have some of that domain knowledge and expertise to be able to lend.
\n\nSo you don't have to have been one of the rarefied few, but just having any familiarity with the discipline, or domain of the business you end up getting hired at, or applying to certainly is a way to get in the door a little easier and feel more comfortable once you're there, that you can contribute in lots of ways.
\n\nADAM: And it gives you the ability to provide value that other folks who are on a different path, who are going into data science earlier—this is a great path, too don't let me discount that path—but those folks don't have the deep domain knowledge that someone who transitions into data science later in their career provides.
\n\nMAE: Exactly. Yeah, and the amazing teams have people with all the different versions, right?
\n\nADAM: Right.
\n\nMAE: Like we don't want a team with only one. Yeah.
\n\nADAM: That's another thing I like to say about data science is it's a team sport. It has to be a teams – it has to be done in tandem with others.
\n\nCASEY: I just had a realization that everyone I know in data science, they tend to come from science backgrounds, or maybe a data science bootcamp. But I don't know anyone who moved from web development into data science and that's just so surprising to me. I wonder why.
\n\nMAE: I crossed the border a little bit, I would say, I worked in the Center for Data Science at RTI in North Carolina and I did do some of the data science there as well as just web programming, but my undergrad is biochem. So I don't break your role. [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] Yeah. I'm trying to think. I don't think I know any either. At the very least, they all come from a hard science, or mathematics background, which is interesting to me because that's definitely not my experience with web application developers, or just developers in general. There's plenty that come from comp side background, or an MIS background, or something like that, but there's also plenty who come from non-traditional backgrounds as well. Not just bootcamps, but just like, they were a history major and then picked up programming, or whatever and it doesn't seem to be as common, I think in data science. Not to say that you couldn't, but just for my own, or maybe our own experience, it's not quite as common.
\n\nADAM: If there's anybody listening with the background that we're talking about, the other backgrounds, I would say, reach out probably to any of us and we'd love to workshop that with you.
\n\nMAE: Yes! Thank you for saying that. Absolutely.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, the more stories we can amplify the better. We know y'all are out there; [chuckles] we just don't know you and we should.
\n\nMAE: Adam, can you tell us some descriptor that is a hobnobbing thing that we would be able to say to a data scientist? Maybe you can tell us what P values are, or just some little talking point. Do you have any favorite go-tos?
\n\nADAM: Well, I suppose if you're looking for dinner party casual conversation and you're looking for some back pocket question, you could ask a data scientist and you're not a data scientist. I would maybe ask a question like this, or a question that I could respond to easily as a data scientist might be something like, “Well, what types of predictions are you looking to make?” and then the data scientists could respond with, “Oh, it's such an interesting question. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before!” But the response might be something like, “Well, I'm trying to predict a classification. I'm trying to predict categories,” or “I'm trying to predict income,” or “I'm trying to predict whatever it is that –” I think that would be an interesting way to go.
\n\nWhat's another one?
\n\nCASEY: Oh, I've got one for anyone you know in neuroscience.
\n\nADAM: Oh, yeah.
\n\nMAE: Yay!
\n\nCASEY: I was just reading a paper and there's this statistics approach I'm sure I did in undergrad stats, but I forgot it. Two-way ANOVA, analysis of variance, and actually, I don't think I know anyone in my lab that could explain it offhand real quickly really well because we just learn it enough to understand what it is and why we use it and then we have the computer do it. But it's an interesting word saying it and having someone say, “Yes, I know what that means enough. It’s a science, or neuroscience.”
\n\nADAM: I would be interested in how neuroscience is used two-way ANOVA because I'm not a neuroscientist and two-way ANOVA is so useful in so many other contexts.
\n\nCASEY: I'm afraid I can't help today. Maybe 10 years ago, I could have done that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: It's just something that you don't work with and talk about a lot. It's definitely fallen out of my headspace. I looked up the other day, I couldn't remember another word from my neuroscience background. Cannula is when you have a permanent needle into a part of the brain, or maybe someone's vein, same thing. I used to do surgeries on rats and put cannulas and I was like, “What's that thing? What was that thing I did?” I have no idea! It's just like time passes and it fades away. I don't do that anymore.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nADAM: So sometimes folks will ask me why I'm a data scientist and I love that question by the way, because I'm a major proponent of knowing what your why is in general, or just having a why and knowing a why, knowing what your why is. Why do you do what you do? What makes you excited about your career, about your work, about your clients, about your coworkers?
\n\nOne of the main reasons I am a data scientist is because it's an opportunity to create new knowledge and that's the scientific process, really. That's the main output of science is new knowledge and if you think about that, that's really powerful. This is now at the end of this scientific process, if you implement it correctly, we now know something about how the world works, about how people in the world work, or something about the world in general that we didn't know before. I get goosebumps. We're on podcast so you can't see the goosebumps that I'm getting. But when I talk about this, I actually get goosebumps.
\n\nSo for me, being a data scientist and then there's also the debate is data science, science and I say, absolutely yes, especially when you are implementing your work with this spirit’ the spirit of creating new knowledge. One of the reasons I am very adamant about keeping this why in the forefront of my mind and proposing it as a why for others who maybe haven't found their why yet is because it's also a really powerful guardrail that prevents us from working on problems that we already have answers to, that have been analyzed and solved, or questions asked and asked and answered.
\n\nI'm a major proponent of avoiding that type of work, unless you have a really good reason to replicate, or test replication, or you're looking for replication. That would be an exception, but in general, questions—analytical questions, research questions, and data science problems—that lead to new knowledge are the ones that excite me the most.
\n\nAnd then this goes back to what I was talking about a moment ago, my superpower teaching and learning. One of the reasons I really enjoy teaching data science in the classroom, or statistics in the classroom, or at corporate training is because then I can empower others to create new knowledge. That feels really good to me when I can help others create new knowledge, or give others the skills and abilities to do that as well.
\n\nMAE: I love that. Yeah. I do have one angle on that, but I hope this doesn't feel like putting you on the spot, but especially in the not revisiting a established—I'm going to do air quotes—facts and from undergrad, the scientific definition of fact has not yet been proven false.
\n\nBut anyways, there is a growing awareness of bias inherent in data and we so often think of data as the epitome of objectivity. Because it's a bunch of numbers then therefore, we are not replicating, or imposing our thoughts, but there is the Schrodinger's cat, or whatever in place all the time about how those “facts” were established in the first place, where that data was called from? Like, the Portlandia episode where they ask where the chicken is from and they end up back at the farm.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThe data itself, there's just a lot in there. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that accordion.
\n\nADAM: There’s a lot. That's a big question. I will say one of the things that keeps me up at night is this problem, especially when it comes to the potential for our work in data science, to perpetuate, exacerbate social inequity, social inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality. This keeps me up at night and I am, like most, or like everyone – well, no, I don't know if everybody is interested in solving that problem. I think a lot of data scientists are, I think a lot of researchers are; I think many are interested in solving that particular problem and I count myself among those. But I would be ahead of myself if I purported to say that I had a solution.
\n\nI think in this format and in this context, one of the best things to do is to point folks towards others who have spent even more time really focusing on this and I think the go-to is Weapons of Math Destruction. Weapons of Math Destruction is a book. If you're on a bad connection, that's M-A-T-H. Weapons of Math Destruction and especially if you're just getting started on this concern, that's a good place to get started.
\n\nMAE: Thank you. Thanks for speaking to that, Adam.
\n\nCASEY: There's a piece of the question you asked me that I always think about is the data true and I like to believe most data is true in what it measured, but it's not measuring truth with a T-H.
\n\nADAM: That’s true.
\n\nMAE: Whoa.
\n\nADAM: I think you could spend a lot of time thinking this through and noodling through this, but I would caution you on something you said it's true as to what you measured. Well, you have measurement error. We have entire – actually, I happen to have social statistics handbook handy. In any statistics handbook, or statistics textbook is going to have either an entire chapter, or a major portion of one of the introductory chapters on error, the types of error, and measurement error is one of them, perception error, all of the – and I'm on the spot to name all the errors. I wish I could rattle those off a little bit better.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nADAM: But if you're interested, this is an interesting topic, just Google data errors, or error types, or statistical errors and you will get a rabbit hole that will keep you occupied for a while.
\n\nMAE: Love it. I will be in that rabbit hole later. [laughs]
\n\nADAM: Yeah. I'm going to go back down that one, too myself.
\n\nMANDO: So Adam, we have people who are listening right now who are interested in following one of your paths, or one of the paths to becoming a data scientist and maybe they have domain expertise in a particular area, maybe they don't. Maybe they're just starting out. Maybe they're coming from a bootcamp, or maybe they're from a non-traditional background and they're trying to switch careers. If you were sitting there talking to them one-on-one, what are some things that you would tell them, or what are some starting points for them? Like, where do you begin?
\n\nADAM: Well, one, admittedly self-serving item I would mention is consider the option of hiring a career coach and that's one of the things that I do in my line of consulting work is I help folks who are towards the middle, or latter part of their career, and they're looking to enter into, or level up in data science. So a career coach can – and I've hired career coaches over the years.
\n\nBack to, Mando, one of the questions you asked me earlier is how did you end up in data science? Well, part of that story, which I didn't talk to then is, well, I went into data science route when the faculty route didn't open up for me and I'm a huge fan. I had two career coaches helping me out with both, faculty and non-faculty work for a while. So having been the recipient and the beneficiary of some great career coaching, I have also recently become a career coach as well.
\n\nProbably something more practical, though. Let me give some practical advice. A portfolio, a professional portfolio for a data scientist is probably one of the most essential and beneficial things you can do for yourself in terms of making that transition successfully and then also, maintaining a career. If you're interested in advancing your career in this way, maintaining a career trajectory that keeps you going so having and maintaining a portfolio.
\n\nI'll go through four tips on portfolio that I give folks and these tips are specifically tips that can help you generate content for your portfolio, because I know one of the hardest things to do with the portfolio is, well, let me just do some fictional hypothetical project for my portfolio, so hard to do and also, can end up being sort of dry, stale, and it might not really connect with folks. These are four ways you can add to, or enhance your portfolio. I wouldn't call them entire projects; maybe they're mini projects and they're great additions to your portfolio.
\n\nThe first one is: make a Rosetta Stone. This one is for folks who have learned one computer programming language, and now it's time for them to learn another computer programming language, or maybe they already know two computer programming languages. In fact, the Rosetta Stone idea for your portfolio doubles as a way to build on and expand your skills.
\n\nSo here's what a Rosetta Stone is. You have a project; you've done it from start to finish. Let's say, you've done a project from start to finish in Python. Now port that entire project over to R and then in a portfolio platform—I usually recommend GitHub—commit that work as git commits as a Rosetta Stone side-by-side examples of Python and R code that produce the same results and the same output.
\n\nI love this piece of advice because in doing this, you will learn so much about the language that you originally wrote the program in and you will learn a lot about the target language. You're going to learn about both languages and you're going to have a tangible artifact for your portfolio and you might even learn more about that project. You might encounter some new output in the new language, which is more accessible for that language, that you didn't encounter in the old language and now you're going to have a new insight about whatever your research project was.
\n\nThe next piece of advice I have is make a cheat sheet and there's tongue in cheek opinion about cheat sheets. I think sometimes folks don't like to call them cheat sheets because the word cheat has negative connotations, but whatever you're going to call it, if it's a quick reference, or if it's a cheat sheet, a well-designed cheat sheet on any tool, platform, tool platform, language that you can think of is going to be a really nice addition to your portfolio.
\n\nI recommend folks, what you do is you just find the things that you do the most frequently and you're constantly referencing at whatever website, make a cheat sheet for yourself, use it for a while, and then polish it up into a really nice presentable format. So for example, I have a cheat sheet on interpreting regression. I also have a cheat sheet that is a crosswalk from Stata, which is a statistical programming language, to Python. So actually there, I've put the two of them together. I've made this cheat sheet, which is also a Rosetta Stone.
\n\nIf you're looking for those, you can find those on my GitHub, or my LinkedIn, I have cheat sheets on my LinkedIn profile as well and you can see examples. I do have on YouTube, a step-by-step instructional video on how to make a cheat sheet and they're actually really easy to do. So if you even if you consider yourself not graphically inclined, if you pick the right tools—and the tools that you would pick might not be your first choice just because they're not marketed that way—you can put together a really nice cheat sheet relatively easily.
\n\nThe third tip is to write an article… about a piece of software that you dislike. So write an article about a piece of software that you dislike and this has to be done with, especially in the open source community, do this one carefully, possibly even contact the creators, and also, be sure not to blame anybody, or pass judgment. Just talk about how and why this particular project doesn't quite live up to your full aspiration, or your full expectation.
\n\nI've done this a couple of times in a variety of ways. I didn't in the title specifically say, “I don't like this,” or “I don't like that,” but in at least one case, one of the articles I wrote, I was able to later submit as a cross-reference, or an additional reference on an issue in GitHub and this was specifically for Pandas. So there was a feature in Pandas that wasn't working the way I wanted it to work. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Pandas.
\n\nADAM: Yeah, Pandas is great, right? So there's a feature in Pandas that wasn't working in quite the way that I wanted it to. I wrote an article about it. Actually, I framed the article, the article title is, “How I broke Pandas.” Actually, several versions of Pandas back, the issue was it was relatively easy to generate a Pandas data frame with duplicate column names. Having duplicate column names in a Pandas data frame obviously can cause problems in your code later because you basically have multiple keys for different columns. Now, there's a setting in Pandas that will guard against this and it's an optional setting—you have to toggle it on and off. This article, I like to say, helped improve Pandas.
\n\nSo write an article about software you dislike and also, like I said, be diplomatic and in this case, I was diplomatic by framing the article title by saying, “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” and then –
\n\nMANDO: This reminds me a lot of Kyle Kingsbury and his Jepsen tests that he used to do. He was aphyr on Twitter. He's not there anymore, but he would run all these tests against distributed databases and distributed locking systems and stuff like that and then write up these large-scale technical explanations of what broke and what didn't. They're super fascinating to read and the way that he approached them, Adam, it's a lot like you're saying, he pushed it with a lot of grace and what I think is super important, especially when you're talking about open source stuff, because this is what people, they're pouring their heart and soul and lives into. You don't have to be ugly about it.
\n\nADAM: Oh, absolutely.
\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] And then he ended up like, this is what he does now. He wrote this framework to do analysis of distributed systems and now companies hire him and that's his job now.
\n\nI'm a big fan of the guy and I miss him being on Twitter and interacting with him and his technical expertise and also, just his own personality. Sorry, your topic, or your little cheat there reminded me of that. We'll put some links—thanks, Casey—and in the show notes about his posts so if people haven't come across this stuff yet, it's a fascinating read. It's super helpful even to this day.
\n\nADAM: I'm thankful for the connection because now I have another example, when I talk to people about this, and it's incredible that you say built an entire career out of this. I had no idea that particular tip was so powerful.
\n\nMAE: So cool.
\n\nMANDO: [chuckles] So I think you said you have one more, Adam?
\n\nADAM: The fourth one is: contribute to another project. One of the best examples of this is I wrote an article on how to enhance your portfolio and someone really took this fourth one to a whole new level. I'm sure others have as well, but one person—we’ll get links in, I can get some links in the show notes—what he did was he found a package in R that brings data for basically sample datasets for our programmers and citizens working and data scientists working with R. But he was a Python person.
\n\nSo he suggested, “Hey, what about making this?” I remember he contacted me and he said, “I read your article about adding to my portfolio. I really think it might make sense to port this project over to Python,” and so, he was combining two of them. He was making a Rosetta Stone and he was contributing someone else's project.
\n\nNow this data is available both in R and in Python and the author of this project has posted about it. He posted about it in May, early May, and it's constantly still a month and a half later getting comments, likes, and links. So he's really gotten some mileage out of this particular piece, this addition to his portfolio and the original author of the original software also has acknowledged it and it's really a success. It's really a success. So contribute to another project is my fourth tip.
\n\nOh, one more idea on contributing to another project. Oh, I have an article on that lists several projects that are accepting contributions from intermediate and beginners. The point there is identify specific projects that are accepting beginner and immediate submissions on contributions, mostly via GitHub. But if you go to GitHub and if you're newer to GitHub, you can actually go to a project that you like, go to its Issues tab, and then most projects have tags associated with their issues that are identified as beginner friendly. That is an excellent place to go in order to get started on contributing to another project, which makes the world a better place because you're contributing to open source and you have an addition to your portfolio.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, these are fantastic tips. Thank you, Adam.
\n\nADAM: I'm glad you like them. Can I give another one? Another big tip? This one's less portfolio, more –
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, lay it on us.
\n\nMAE: Do! By all means.
\n\nADAM: And I'd be interested, Mae, since you also made a similar career transition to me. I made an investment. I think I know what you might say on this one, but I spent money. I spent money on the transition. I hired consultants on Fiverr and Upwork to help me upgrade my social media presence. I hired the career coaches that I mentioned. Oh, actually the PhD program, that was not free. So I spent money on my transition and I would point that out to folks who are interested in making this transition, it's not a transition that is effortless and it's also not a transition that you can do, I think it's not one that you can do without also investing money.
\n\nMAE: Yeah. [chuckles] Okay, I'm going to tell you my real answer on this.
\n\nADAM: Okay.
\n\nMAE: Or corollary. I had a pretty good gig at a state institution with a retirement, all of these things, and I up and left and went to code school. I had recently paid off a lot of debt, so I didn't have a lot of savings. I had no savings, let's just say that and the code school had offered this like loan program that fell through. So I'm in code school and they no longer are offering the ability to have this special code school loan. I put code school on my credit card and then while in code school, my 10-year-old car died and I had to get a new car.
\n\nADAM: Ah.
\n\nMAE: In that moment, I was struggling to get some fundamental object-oriented programming concepts that I'm like, “Holy cow, I've got a mortgage. I no longer have a car.” Now I'm in a real bind here, but I be leaving myself. I know I made these choices after a lot of considered thought and consultation. I, too had hired a career coach and I was like, “I've already made this call. I'm going to make the best of it. I'm just going to do what I can and see what happens.”
\n\nI really have a test of faith on that original call to make those investments. I would not recommend doing it the way I did to anyone!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: And I went from a pretty well-established career and salary into – a lot of people when they go into tech, it's a huge jump and I had the opposite experience. That investment continued to be required of me for several years. Even still, I choose to do things related to nonprofits and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot of faith and commitment and money often, in some form, can be helpful. There are a lot of, on the programming side, code schools that offer for you to pay a percentage once you get a salary, or other offsetting arrangements.
\n\nSo if somebody is listening, who is considering programming, I have not seen those analogs in data science, but on the programming side, especially if you're from a group underrepresented in tech, there's a number of different things that are possible to pursue still.
\n\nADAM: Here we are talking about some of the lesser acknowledged aspects of this transition.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nADAM: Some of the harder to acknowledge.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I really liked what you said, Mae about the need to believe in yourself and Adam, I think what you're saying is you have to be willing to bet on yourself.
\n\nADAM: Yes.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: You have to be willing to bet on yourself and sometimes, in some forms, that's going to mean writing a check, or [chuckles] in Mae’s example, putting it on your credit card, but.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSometimes that's what it means and that's super scary. I'm not a 100% convinced that I have enough faith in my ability to run the dishwasher some days, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that today, or not.
\n\nThis is going to be really silly and stupid, but one of my favorite cartoons is called Avatar: The Last Airbender.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nMANDO: It's a series on Cartoon Network, I think. No, Nickelodeon, I watched it with my kids when they were super little and it's still a thing that we rewatch right now, now that they're older. There's this one episode where this grandfatherly wizened uncle is confronted [chuckles] by someone who's trying to mug him [chuckles] and the uncle is this super hardcore general guy. He critics his mugging abilities and he corrects him and says, “If you stand up straight and you change this about the way that you approach it, you'll be much more intimidating and probably a more successful mugger,” and he's like, “But it doesn't seem that your heart is into the mugging.” [chuckles]
\n\nSo he makes this guy a cup of tea and they talk about it and the guy's like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I'm lost. I'm all over the place. All I want to do is become a masseuse, but I just can't get my stuff together.” Something that the uncle said that really, really struck with me was he said, “While it's important and best for us to believe in ourselves, sometimes it can be a big blessing when someone else believes in you.”
\n\nMAE: So beautiful.
\n\nMANDO: “And sometimes, you need that and so, I get it. You can't always bet on yourself, or maybe you can bet on yourself, but sometimes you don't have that backup to actually follow through with it.” That's why community is so important. That's why having a group of people. Even if it's one person. Someone who can be like that backstop to be, “You don't believe in yourself today. Don't worry about it. I believe in you. It's okay. You can do it. You're going to do it.”
\n\nADAM: Community is just massive. Absolutely massive.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nADAM: Having a good, strong community is so important. Also, I think I could add to what you're saying is about betting on yourself. I don't know if I love the analogy because it's not a casino bet.
\n\nMANDO: Right.
\n\nADAM: The odds are not in favor of the house here. If you have done the right consultation, spoken with friends and family, leveraged your community, and done an honest, objective, accurate assessment of your skills, abilities, and your ambition and your abilities, et cetera. It's a bet. It's a wager, but it's a calculated risk.
\n\nMAE: Yes! That is how I have described it also. Yes, totally. I loved that story from Airbender and it ties in a few of our topics. One is one of the things Adam said originally, which is being deeply in touch with your why really helps. It also ties in the whole teaching thing and often, that is one of the primary roles is to offer faith and commitment to your pursuits.
\n\nIf I had had different code school teachers, the stress of my entire livelihood being dependent on my understanding these concepts in week two of bootcamp that I was struggling with, and I had made a calculated bet and I thought I was going to be awesome, but I was not. It was like the classic Peanuts teacher is talking, “Wah wah woh wah wah.”
\n\nI had to lean into my teachers, my school, my peers, believe in me. I believed in me before, even if I don't in this moment and I just have to let that stress move to the side so that I can reengage. That was really the only way I was able to do it was having a similar – well, I didn't try to mug anybody, [laughs] but I had some backup that really helped me make that through.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, and those credit card folks call like, it’s tricky.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, and then I had to buy a car and those people were calling me and they just did an employment verification. They said, “You don't have a job!” I was like, “Oh my god. Well, you [inaudible] get my car back, but I have really good credit. How about you talk to your boss and call me back?”
\n\nSo anyway, these things all tie into, if we have time to talk about something, I was hoping we would cover is this thing about imposter syndrome and believing in oneself, but also not believing in oneself simultaneously and how to navigate that. I don't know, Adam, if you have particular advice, or thoughts on that.
\n\nADAM: I do have some advice and thoughts on that. Actually, just yesterday, I hosted a live webinar on this particular topic with another career coach named Sammy and she and I are very passionate about helping folks. When we work with clients, we work with folks intentionally to evaluate whether imposter syndrome might be part of the equation. Actually, in this webinar, we talked about three immunity boosts, or three ways to boost your immunity against imposter syndrome and in one way, or another, I think we've touched on all three with the exception of maybe one of them.
\n\nSo if you're interested in that topic reached out to me as well. I have a replay available of that particular webinar and I could make the replay available on a one-on-one basis to folks as well, who really want to see that material, and the section –
\n\nMANDO: [inaudible] that.
\n\nADAM: Yeah, please reach out and LinkedIn. Easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or Twitter. Twitter actually works really well, too these days.
\n\nMANDO: We’ll put both of those in the show notes for folks.
\n\nADAM: Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. I look forward to potentially sharing that with folks who reach out.
\n\nThe community was the second immunity boost that we shared and actually, Mando and Mae, both just got done talking extensively about community. And then the first immunity boost we shared was know your baseline. We called it “know your baseline” and I know from our planning that we would put in this program notes, a link to an online assessment that's named after the original scientist, or one of the two original scientists who really began documenting imposter syndrome back in the 70s and then they called it imposter phenomenon.
\n\nOh, the history of this topic is just fascinating. Women scientists, North Carolina, first documented this and one of the two scientists is named Pauline Clance. So the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale, that'll be in the show notes. You can take the Imposter Phenomenon Scale and then objectively evaluate based on this is imposter syndrome a part of your experience, if it is what is the extent of that, and just knowing your baseline can be a really good way, I think to protect you from the effects of the experience. It's also, I think important to point out that imposter syndrome isn't regarded as a medical, or a clinical diagnosis. This is usually defined as a collection of thoughts and actions associated with career, or other academic pursuits.
\n\nAnd then the third immunity boost is disseminate knowledge and I love the disseminate knowledge as an immune booster because what it does is it flips the script. A lot of times folks with imposter syndrome, we say to ourselves, “Gee, if I could get one more degree, I could probably then do this,” or “If I got one more certification,” or “I can apply for this job next year, I could apply for that permission next year because I will have completed whatever certification program,” or “If I read one more –”
\n\nMANDO: One more year of experience, right?
\n\nADAM: Yeah. One more year of experience, or one more book, or one more class on Udemy. Especially for mid and late career professionals and we talked about this earlier, Mae the bank of experience and domain knowledge that mid and late career professionals bring, I promise nobody else has had your experience. Everybody has a unique experience and everybody has something to offer that is new and unique, and that is valuable to others. So I say, instead of signing up for the seminar, host the seminar, teach the seminar.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nADAM: Right? Again, there's nothing wrong with certifications. There's nothing wrong with Udemy classes, I have Udemy classes that you could should go take. There's nothing wrong with those, but in measure, in measure and then also, never, never, never, never forget that you already have skills and abilities that is probably worth sharing with the rest of the world. So I recommend doing that as a boost, as an immunity boost, against imposter syndrome.
\n\nMANDO: Yes, yes, and yes!
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Now, I took the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale test myself and I scored really well. It was super, super low for me. I'm an overconfident person at this point, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI was super shy. I would not talk to people. I'd read a book in a corner. I was so introverted and it changed over time, I think by thinking about how confidence leads to confidence.
\n\nMANDO: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: The more confident you are, the more confident you act, you can be at the world and the more reason you have to be competent over time and that snowballed for me, thank goodness. It could happen for other people, too gradually, slowly over time the more you do confidence, the more you'll feel it and be it naturally.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nMANDO: I think it works the other direction, too and you have to be real careful about that. Like Adam, you were talking about flipping the script. If you have a negative talk script of just one more, just this one thing, I'm not good enough yet and I'm not you know. That can reinforce itself as well and you just never end up getting where you should be, or deserve to be, you know what I mean?
\n\nIt's something that I struggle with. I've been doing this for a really, really long time and I still struggle with this stuff, it’s not easy. It's not easy to get past sometimes and some days are better than others and Casey, like you said, it has gotten better over time, but sometimes, you need those daily affirmations in the morning in the mirror [laughs] to get going, whatever works for you. But that idea, I love that idea, Casey of confidence bringing more confidence and reinforcing itself.
\n\nMAE: And being mindful of Dunning-Kruger and careful of the inaccuracy of self-assessment. I like a lot of these ways in which making sure you're doing both, I think all the time as much as possible. Seeing the ways in which you are discounting yourself and seeing the ways in which you might be over crediting.
\n\nADAM: Right. Like with a lot of good science, you want to take as many measurements as possible.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nADAM: And then the majority vote of those measurements points to some sort of consensus. So the IP scale is one tool you can use and I think to your point, Mae it'd be a mistake to rely on it exclusively. You mentioned Dunning-Kruger, but there's also the Johari window.
\n\nMAE: Oh, I don’t know. What’s that?
\n\nADAM: Oh, the Johari window is great. So there's four quadrants and the upper left quadrant of the Johari window are things that you know about yourself and things that other people know about yourself. And then you also have a quadrant where things that you know about yourself, but nobody else knows. And then there's a quadrant where other people know things about you that you don't know. And then there's the complete blind spot where there are things about you that you don't know that other people don't know. And then of course, you have this interesting conversation with yourself. So that quadrant that I don't know about it and nobody else knows about it, does it really exist? Does the tree falling in the woods make a sound when nobody's there to hear it?
\n\nYou can have a lot of fun with Johari window as well and I think it also definitely connects with what you were just saying a moment ago about accuracy of self-assessments, then it gets back to the measurement that we were talking about earlier, the measurement errors. So there's perceptual error, measurement error—shucks, I had it, here it is—sampling error, randomization, error, all kinds of error. I managed to pull that book out and then get some of those in front of me.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: There are some nice nicknames for a couple of the windows, Johari windows. The blind spot is one of those four quadrants and façade, I like to think about is another one. It's when you put on the front; people don't know something about you because you are façading it.
\n\nMAE: Hmm.
\n\nMANDO: So now we'll go ahead and transition into our reflection section. This is the part where our esteemed panelists and dear friends reflect on the episode and what they learned, what stuck with them, and we also get reflection from our guest, Adam as well, but Adam, you get to go last.
\n\nADAM: Sounds good.
\n\nMANDO: You can gauge from the rest of us. Who would like to go first?
\n\nMAE: I can! I did not know that there was an evaluative measure about imposter phenomenon, or any of that history shared and I'm definitely going to check that out. I talk with and have talked and will talk with a lot of people about that topic, but just having some sort of metric available for some self-assessment, I think is amazing. So that is a really fun, new thing that I am taking away among many, many other fun things. How about you, Casey?
\n\nCASEY: I like writing about software you dislike in a positive, constructive tone. That's something I look for when I'm interviewing people, too. I want to know when they get, get feedback, when they give feedback, will it be thoughtful, unkind, and deep and respectful of past decisions and all that. If you've already done that in an article in your portfolio somewhere, that's awesome. That's pretty powerful.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, how fantastic is that? Yeah, I love that!
\n\nCASEY: I don't think I've ever written an article like that. Maybe on a GitHub issue, or a pull request that's longer than it feels like it should be.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMaybe an article would be nice, next time I hit that.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, I love that. That's great.
\n\nI guess I’ll go next. The thing that really resonated with me, Adam was when you were talking about investing in yourself and being willing to write that check, if that's what it means, or swipe that credit card, Mae, or whatever. I'm sorry, I keep picking on you about that.
\n\nMAE: It’s fine. [laughs] It’s pretty wild!
\n\nMANDO: I love it. I love it, and it reminded me, I think I've talked about it before, but one of my favorite writers, definitely my favorite sports writer, is this guy named Shea Serrano. He used to write for Grantland and he writes for The Ringer and he's a novelist, too and his catchphrase—this is why I said it earlier in the episode—is “bet on yourself.”
\n\nSometimes when I'm feeling maybe a little imposter syndrome-y, or a little like, “I don't know what I'm going to do,” I click on the Twitter search and I type “from:sheaserrano bet on yourself” and hit enter and I just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets of this guy that's just like, “Bet on yourself today.” “Bet on yourself” “Bet on yourself today, no one else is going to do it.” “No one's coming to save you, bet on yourself,” stuff like that and thank you, Adam for that reminder today. I needed that.
\n\nADAM: You're welcome. I'm so happy that you've got that takeaway. Thank you so much for sharing the takeaway.
\n\nI have, I think two reflections. One, what a breath of fresh air, the opportunity to talk about life, career, but career in data science, and programming in a non-technical way. I think the majority of our conversation was non-technical.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWe briefly went into some technicalities when we talked about how you can sometimes have duplicate heading names in a Pandas data frame. That was a little bit technical. Otherwise, we really just spoke about the humanistic aspects of this world. So thank you so much for that and I got a research tip!
\n\nMando, what a brilliant idea. If you're ever looking for more background on a book, do a Twitter search for the book name and then anybody who's been speaking about that book –
\n\nMANDO: Oh, yes!
\n\nADAM: Yeah, right? You could extend that to a research tip. [overtalk]
\n\nMANDO: That’s fantastic! Absolutely. Yeah.
\n\nADAM: So today, I learned a new way to get additional background on any book. I'm just going to go to Twitter, Google, or not Google that, search the book title name, and I'm going to see what other people are saying about that book. And then I can check out their bios. I can see what else they're sharing. They might have insights that I might not have had and now I can benefit from that. Thank you. Thank you so much for the research tip.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, and I think it dovetails really well into what you were talking about earlier, Adam, about publishing data. Like building out this portfolio, writing your articles, getting it out there because someone's going to go to Google, or Twitter and type into the search bar a Pandas data frame, column, same name, you know what I mean and now they're going to hit “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” your article.
\n\nBut it could be about anything. It could be about that stupid Docker thing that you fought with yesterday, or about the 8 hours I spent on Monday trying to make an HTTP post with no body and it just hung forever and I couldn't. 8 hours, it took me to figure out why it wasn't working and it's because I didn't have one line in and I didn't call request that set body. I just didn't do it. I've done this probably more than a million times in my career and I didn't do it and it cost me 8 hours of my life that I'm never getting back, but it happens. That's part of the job is that – [overtalk]
\n\nMAE: Yeah, sure.
\n\nMANDO: And you cry about it and you eat some gummy worms and then you pick yourself back up and you're good to go.
\n\nADAM: Yeah, another common one that people are constantly writing about is reordering the columns in a Pandas data frame. There's like a hundred ways to do it and none of them are efficient.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Mm hm.
\n\nADAM: So I love [inaudible], of course.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, you hit the one that works for you, write a little something about it. It’s all right.
\n\nADAM: Exactly, yeah.
\n\nMANDO: All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on, loved having you on.
Special Guest: Adam Ross Nelson.
","summary":"Adam Ross Nelson talks about becoming a Data Scientist, recommendations for aspiring Data Scientists, four tips for creating and maintaining a solid portfolio, and three immunity boosts in dealing with Impostor Syndrome.","date_published":"2021-07-07T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c426741a-ef73-4e14-9776-0345a09aa823.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46733405,"duration_in_seconds":3726}]},{"id":"c2fb5d86-43d2-4c39-a86d-682eda945b81","title":"240: No Striving, No Hustling with Amelia Winger-Bearskin","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/no-striving-no-hustling","content_text":"02:11 - Wampum.Codes \n\n\nMIT Co-Creation Studio\nMozilla Fellowships \nCheck out some episodes!\n\n\nSuper-Group - Indigenous Tech, Indigenous Knowledge: Wampum.codes as a model for decolonization [Episode] \nWeirdness with MorningStar [Episode]\nComedy in the age of Quarantine: A conversation with comedy writer and performer Joey Clift [Episode]\nRock Hands with \"Roo\": a conversation with DeLesslin \"Roo\" George-Warren [Episode]\n\n\n\n08:13 - Amelia’s Superpower: Being invited to cool parties!\n\n\nno-funding.com\n\n\n11:26 - Storytelling & Performance\n\n\nThe U.S. Department of Arts and Culture\n\n\n20:16 - “Indigenous Antecedent Technology”\n\n\nDecentralized Economies\n\n\n24:16 - “Ethical Dependencies”\n\n\nIndigenous wisdom as a model for software design and development\nArticulating Values\nCommunity Accountability\nPolicing vs Accountability \n\n\n35:48 - Handling Disagreements and Giving Permission to Fail\n\n40:55 - Robert’s Rules of Order\n\n44:23 - “No Striving, No Hustling”\n\n47:33 - Facilitating Communication with Peers\n\n\nStorytelling Cont’d\nStudio Ghibli Storytelling\n\"Ma\" – Negative Space\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nCORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 240 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm very happy to be with you here today, and I'm also really happy to be here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.\n\nJAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm glad to be on the show with you, too, and I'm also here with my great friend, Jacob Stoebel. \n\nJACOB: Aw, hello, and I'm going to introduce our guest.\n\nAmelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, AV, and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics-based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.\n\nWelcome to the podcast.\n\nAMELIA: Thank you so much! I'm so excited to be here. You all are some of my favorite people, so [laughs] excited to chat on record. \n\nCORALINE: And today's going to be very technical; we’re going to ask you some very technical questions about XR, VR, AI, AR, AV and…\n\nJAMEY: That's a lot of letters.\n\nCORALINE: SP, everything.\n\nAMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, we were at a function. Coding. Yeah, let's crack it. [laughs]\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, just on a personal level, I'm so happy to have you here. You and I have talked before, we're both involved in ethical source, and I’m such an admirer of your work. I'm so happy to have this conversation in public with you today.\n\nAMELIA: Oh, back at you, Coraline. I love ethical source and I've been so excited to join your team of rebels, exciting thinkers, and dreamers. So I'm really excited to be here with you and in community with you. \n\nCORALINE: So Amelia, I first became aware of your work through your wampum.codes project that you did. Well, it's an ongoing project, but I guess, you started it with the Mozilla Fellowship. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it's really fascinating.\n\nAMELIA: Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. When I started my Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, it was actually pre-pandemic. So it was right, but not very much so it was only a couple of months. We got to go to London and meet each other and I got to hang out a little bit at MIT with the Co-Creation fellows. I'm the first full-time fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, which is a really cool studio, imagined and led by Kat Cizek, who's an incredible transmedia storyteller and inspiring human that I get to be in collaboration with there. \n\nSo for wampum.codes as an ethical framework for software development, we had imagined a lot of things and then the pandemic hit and I wasn't able to be as close to them as I was. I also moved from New York to San Francisco. Before I thought I was going to from New York to Boston pretty regularly on the train and then moved to California and that's when I decided to have the Co-Creation portion of wampum.codes exist as a podcast. \n\nSo rather than flying to different spaces and meeting with friends and technologists on reservations, who are indigenous across North America, I was like, “Okay, well, let's do this via Zoom call as a podcast” as many people moved to different online formats during the pandemic and that's how the wampum.codes podcast was born. As I want to do research because if you're going to create an ethical framework for software development, based on indigenous values of Co-Creation, you need to do it in co-creation with those people. [chuckles]\n\nI had initially planned to fly all of them to MIT and have this big conference and everything. But instead, I got to have weekly conversations with indigenous people, who are using technology in creative ways to make positive impact in their communities. And then we still did a big conference at MIT, but virtually and actually, a lot more people were able to participate in it that way. Big surprise, right? All of us who are internet natives are unsurprised that you have a lot of accessibility there. \n\nSo then that became the supergroup episode of wampum.codes where we had everyone who was going to be there physically at MIT and then I was able to distribute. Rather than using those funds to fly everyone to MIT, distribute those to all the different people who were on the podcast and just have weekly conversations with each of these people. \n\nI guess, the technology projects range and I welcome anyone to go to wampum is W-A-M-P-U-M, .codes, C-O-D-E-S. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can go on Buzzsprout, but it's able to be found on Spotify, or Apple, anywhere you find a podcast. We have RSS feeds there. \n\nIf you go through the episodes, it varies where each of the indigenous people are coming from. Like, there's an incredible actress on there, MorningStar Angeline, and she is an incredible advocate and activist for the Albuquerque drag scene, also does really incredible art installations and happenings, and works in VR. But she's also the voice of the local area population in Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games. [laughs] So it's really interesting that she crosses all of these different media. \n\nThen we have another person, Joey Clift, who's a comedian, who's an indigenous comedian and the first indigenous person to be on the—and I'm going to probably say this wrong, but the house comedy team of UCB in LA, I think they call it the house comedy team. The interesting way that he uses technology is he created the largest Facebook group of comedians ever and it's the comedians with cats, basically. [laughs] I just love that he has this and then he creates all this comedy through that Facebook group. \n\nSo that's an interesting way that comedy becomes its own scene through the social media network all based around cats. I think that's pretty amazing, that an indigenous person is grounded everybody in our deep love of animals. He does a lot of really great activist work. He's also a writer of a couple of different television shows right now and one of them is the first all-indigenous writers room Everett Hollywood. So he's doing really incredible things, but I love his use of technology in his cats group on Facebook. [laughs]\n\nAnd then you have Roo DeLesslin George-Warren, who's creating an app with children. He's part of Catawba nation and the app is around language preservation and language education of Catawba language. But it's the fun thing that we talk about on the episode is, there's some words that don't exist in Catawba language and it's because they're last truly immersed indigenous speaker of Catawba language passed away in the 80s. So anything that wasn't created up until the 80 didn't have an official name, but that doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's alive and it's an alive on the tongue of every child that's learning and every person that's living. \n\nBut what it does mean is those children get to name some of these things, they get to name what a cell phone is, they get to name all these fun things, and one of the children said, “We should name cell phones rock hands,” and he's like, “Oh really? That's great. Why is that the word for rock and the word for hands in Catawba? And he said, “Well, because it's made of rocks and minerals and we hold it in our hands,” and I thought that was really beautiful. \n\nSo those are the examples of how each of these different awesome technologists, indigenous leaders are using technology in creative ways. So from that, all those conversations really contribute to the framework that I helped to organize and turn into a workshop and writings around an ethical framework for software development. Those conversations are really key and important to it, because I need to learn how are people making change with technology, because that really will contribute to the guidelines that we hope people can bring out in the process of creating an ethical framework for software development and value-based dependencies. \n\nJAMEY: So we have one question for you that you may be expecting already, because we warn our guests about it, and that question is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nAMELIA: Oh, that's an excellent question and I'm cheating because I once was asked this question at Stephanie Dinkins’ AI dinner in New York and I just said the first thing that came to my head because I wasn't expecting it and the first time I said it, I said, “Wow, that's really stupid, Amelia. Why did you say that?” Well, it's because the first thing that came to my head, but then the longer I sit with it, the more I'm like, “I think it's true so I'm just going to say it,” again as if it's the first time which is, I think my superpower is being invited to cool parties. \n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: That's a great superpower. \n\nAMELIA: Yeah. how did I acquire it? I think you just have to have cool friends and then those friends invite you to cool parties. It's worked out for me so far because sometimes their parties are in Dharamsala hanging out with the Dalai Lama, sometimes their parties are doing some weird art show in New York, and sometimes their parties are awesome powwows that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I think that's the best way I want to live my life [laughs] so that's my superpower.\n\nCORALINE: I love that. \n\nJAMEY: I just wanted to say that I don't think that's a stupid superpower at all. I think it's a beautiful superpower.\n\nCORALINE: I'm kind of jealous of that superpower, honestly. I think the last party I had, the big important, exciting thing was red velvet cupcakes.\n\nAMELIA: Ooh, that’s awesome.\n\nCORALINE: Oh no, you have red velvet cupcakes on the one hand, the Dalai Lama on the other hand, that's a tough choice to make really. \n\nAMELIA: Yeah. Obviously, during quarantine I feel like I've definitely not had my superpower active in a while, so maybe I'm in like my cave of solitude. [laughs] Definitely. It's been a tough year for those of us who that's our only superpower, but I definitely been invited to a lot of Zoom parties, let me tell you. I've led a lot of Among Us things and I've been the one to organize a lot of Zoom [inaudible] outlook. \n\nWe all are Zoom fatigued, but I've been organizing what I hope could be something interesting. I started this thing called No-Funding.com as a virtual party where we could talk about, I don't know, it's supposed to be an artist support group where we talk about ways that we can support each other outside of gatekeeping and traditional funding avenues. \n\nBut honestly, it's like, if you didn't need any funding and you didn't want any funding and you just wanted to be punk rock and talk about our art and how we can help each other, that's a space. We do it and we ended up getting into some esoteric conversations. We talk a lot about ethics and the worlds that we want to build that have a community focus. But we also just kind of, we'll talk about creative ideas to feed our soul like, “Hey, why don't we write poems today?” and somebody in the group knows how to teach us how to write poem. Someone might know something about an artist and teaches us something. So it's definitely more an artist support group, but with the motto of not – our motto is no striving, no hustling. [laughs] So that's No-Funding.com, join us every week. [laughs]\n\nCORALINE: Well, one of the things that really interested me, or interests me about your work, Amelia, almost everything you've said in terms of the things you're doing have a very strong community focus. As someone who came up in a very white Western technology environment where most of what happens is developer tooling and most of it is going to the companies in San Francisco, I think it's really interesting that people who are outside of that bubble seem to have stronger, especially people in different parts of their world, or indigenous cultures that are often ignored, or excluded, but you're doing community work. I see a lot of those non-white Western—what I’m trying to say—that's kind of unique in a way, or it's different from how technology is usually thought of in the US especially. I don't know where to go with that. I am so sorry. I just think that's so fascinating and so different and that's something I'm going to learn about.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, and I think it's absolutely everything you said about technology is true and it also is true for the art world, too, which I came actually from a background of performance. \n\nMy mom, growing up, was a traditional storyteller for our tribe, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and being a storyteller is something like being a politician, a historian, a performance artist, an actor, a writer, an educator. It's this combination because you need to be given the stories from elders. They have to trust you so you have to be a politician, or a leader and you're really required to make sure that the stories that you tell are relevant and significant for your current generation. You're taking information from previous generations, you're preserving it, and sharing it with your current generation so that it will have positive impact on the generations to come, but it has to be relevant.\n\nSo you cannot tell it the same way that an elder gave it to you. It's the core requirements like, I'm giving you the story for you to make it new and relevant for your generation and each audience you meet with it has to be relevant. Our storytelling is embedded in multimedia. It's obviously, spoken word stories. It has music, it has patterns, it has art, it has pottery, it has bead work; all of these things reinforce the stories. \n\nWhen my mom would travel around, her superpower is being that leader, historian, educator. She has that voice that as soon as she says, “Hello, I would like to tell you a story today,” every person in the whole room sits down. You know what I mean? I don't know, that's her superpower is she can just, not even with a mic and she has a quiet voice. She can just be like, “Hello,” and everyone just sits down. She's like, “I'm going to tell you a story.” [chuckles] It's that incredible storyteller voice and then I would perform the songs and the music with her since she's not a musician, or a musical person at all, but she knows the songs and knows this is the story that has the song that goes live. So I would be the musical one and then I became an opera singer. At 15, I went to the Eastman Conservatory of Music at a young age and became a professional opera singer at a young age. \n\nSo I came from a performance background and then once my work became so weird in the sense of, I had so much coding involved, projections and video. I'm a nerd and I've been a self-taught coder since I was very young and since my work became more integrated with multimedia, people were like, “You're not really an opera person anymore, or a director of new opera. You're kind of a multimedia artist.” That title was somewhat thrust upon me and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I'm going to go get my Master's degree, my MFA in art.” \n\nOnce I went to school, they showed me my studio and then they lock you in there. They close the door and then you're supposed to live in your studio. I would pop my head out and like, “Hey everybody, what are we doing?” They're like, “Go away, like go back into your studio.” We're all in our studios heads down and then I said, “Oh, well, let's collaborate.” No one wants to collaborate with me. The only people in the entire, like above me, or below me, or my same year that want to collaborate with me were indigenous people. Interesting! [laughs] \n\nSo we all wanted to collaborate and start making things together and our professors were like, “We're not even going to consider that for your grades, or for your thesis, or for – that doesn't count, that doesn't even exist. If you made it with another person, it doesn't even exist,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole entire world doesn't work when it comes to the way that most media we consume isn't created that way. \n\nThe only exception really is more the solitary artist, which also doesn't always work that way either. When you go and see things in a museum and it has one person's name under it, there's a thousand names that are not mentioned. When we see a film, we see the director, but we see the thousands of names come over us with the credits. When we go to a play, we open that cast book and we see all of those names that are behind that object. \n\nSo it's really, the art world and the technology world overlap in that myth of the solitary genius, total myth that they perpetuate it. I definitely had a crisis, what I went into the art world and then again, as I've continued my journey throughout tech, where I'm like, “It's not true that one person has made these things,” [laughs] but we believe that. We believe that that's how things work and that was always a big shock to me and something that I've maybe found ways of integrating a more collective mindset into each of those spaces. \n\nI recently was meeting with this incredible group. The US Department of Art and Culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're not a real government agency, but they perform really incredible service to our collective dreaming, which is they build things, like the People's State of the Union, or they've created the honoring native land initiative, which is an incredible toolkit for people to do land acknowledgements. They've recently hired me to bring on a new page of this honoring native land initiative to think about how do you bring something from land acknowledgement to action so it's not just making a verbal statement, but you're making a commitment that can come with action. \n\nWhen I was meeting with them initially, they were like, “Well, you do categorize yourself as an artist, but this role is a lot about community building. So can you talk a little bit about that?” And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting because my whole life, I have felt like more of a community builder than an artist.” That's interesting that they assume that an artist isn't a community builder because it isn’t because there’s usually that separation. So I was very happy to find this role. \n\nOne of the fun things that you do at the beginning of working with this group is to work with them to define a title and I don't have one yet. I'm going to share with you some of my ideas, [laughs] let me know what you think of me. \n\nJAMEY: So let's workshop them right here on the show.\n\nAMELIA: Right. I’m looking for your opinions because the other people have these incredible titles, like one is the Chief Ray of Sunshine. That's one of her names, she's the Chief Ray of Sunshine. One person is the Director of People and Possibilities. Another one is Director of Decolonization and Honoring Native Land. I thought, I think that's the title. And then I've been throwing around a lot of different ones. \n\nSo one, I think was good as something around a land acknowledgement lab, because I want to make it a place where I can collaborate with lots of different people around how they can imagine, and give a framework and tools for people to imagine how you can change land acknowledgement thinking of this something that you say, something that you do, and something that has action. So that was what I've been thinking about. I don't know. What are some of the coolest titles you guys have heard? [laughs]\n\nCORALINE: Well, not exactly the same thing, but a friend of mine, Astrid Countee, who's also one of the panelists on our podcast. She is trained as an anthropologist and she got into tech. So she and I have been workshopping [chuckles] a title for her and we're coming up with sociologist engineer, anthropology engineer, things like that because the thing I like about that and the thing I like about what you're saying is that the impact that we have is a lot broader than the work that we do. We don't acknowledge the connections either and we tend to lionize the pure technical – I'm speaking as like the industry. We lionize that is the lone genius, like you were talking about, and I'd like to see us bring more of ourselves into how we describe the work we do, as opposed to just the, “Oh, I write code.” \n\nSo Amelia, one of the things that you and I talked about in our conversation of couple of months ago, you introduced me to an incredible term that I'd like you to share with us and talk about and that is antecedent technology.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I like to think a lot about the continuous line that we have for technology and the way that oftentimes, when we're learning about a new technology, people will use metaphors that are connected to the technologies in history, but frequently, it's from a Western perspective rather than seeing a continuous line from technologies that were invented in indigenous communities. \n\nOne of the reasons that I say it's important to look at indigenous antecedent technology is we don't want to colonize our future. We don't want take something and project it to the future with a limited understanding of how the world works. \n\nAn example of that is that we've had, for thousands of years, decentralized economies that use decentralized ledgers and had large data systems that were able to be incorporated into consensus building contracts that led to peaceful communities. Like for instance, Wampum with the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, or even Quipu, we had in South America, which was a Turing-complete data system 500 years before Alan Turing was born.\n\nI think the reason why it's important is not because of primacy, or saying that's because something happened first it's better. But if you are thinking of making giant leaps in the future with some of these new emerging technologies, you could say, “Well, we don't have any data in the past, so we're just going to have to wing it.” Or you could look at it as a line and a string that connects to our ancestral histories and say, “Well, actually we did have successful distributed economy, decentralized economies, right in the location where I'm standing now. We could study how they worked in collaboration with the environment in this environment and learn from there.” Or we could just throw that out and say, “Wow, this is the first time California is ever going to use a decentralized economy. Let's just wing it.” Or you could say, “Actually, there’s precedent here we can learn from that, from this very location, from this very land.”\n\nSomething that a lot of indigenous activists are talking about is understanding the connection and giving back agency to indigenous groups is not just racial justice, but it's also climate justice. So I think people who deeply want to make positive impact for our environment, or are looking at some of these possibilities for different types of economies in a less extractive format for your state, or for your nation, or for your continent, or your region, it is important to include indigenous knowledge in those discussions. \n\nSo that's what I mean when I talk about antecedent technology is like, are these innovations that you're building? Do they have deep roots, and do you have a mechanism of looking at them in historical context? Can that give you more data to make more successful models for how you might make innovation in the future?\n\nCORALINE: But Amelia, how can people do that and also solve every problem from first principles?\n\nAMELIA: I know, right? [laughs] And that's the funny thing is we see this is an issue in Silicon Valley already. Already, people are like, “Oh my gosh, they're reinventing buses,” or they're reinventing these things that already existed not a 100, or 200, or 300 years, or a 1,000 years ago, but people are reinventing something that happened a month ago, or a year ago. That is what we do. We pile slight innovations on top of each other in an extractive format to create competition and I think that it's a slowing down of that. It's like, what if it's not about reinvention, or just rebranding, or remarketing, but if our goals have of real long vision of lasting for seven generations, can we think then about innovation in a different way? \n\nJACOB: I've never heard the phase ethical dependencies. Could you educate me, if you care to?\n\nAMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, sure. I think about it like I love to use technological terminology to describe ethical, or creative practices and I love to use creative and ethical terminology to describe technological practices. I like to be a bridge between these two worlds because it's somewhere I sit in the middle of. \n\nSo when people aren't technical and they're like, “What is an ethical dependency?” Then I'll start talking to them about how certain computer programs can't run unless they have all of their check-dependencies and I explain that to them. And then when it's a technical group, I'll talk about when you go through your package.json and you're trying to communicate to someone who might be using your GitHub repo, you might have a bunch of different choices of things that you can connect them with in your package.json. Maybe it's just basic, “Hey, this is the version I'm using and make sure you use this node version.” As you go through it, the only ethical choice I've had, at least as a web developer, is this MIT open source, or is this CANoe, or what is the licensing for this is, or is it just closed source so it's for the company that I'm working for. \n\nThe reason why I wanted to make an ethical dependency for software is I wanted there to be more options and more choices there that you could say, not only do I have license, which really is just adjudicated through the legal process of international law of copyright. If someone violates the MIT license and close sources my open source project, maybe I can sue them. But if I'm a small developer, I probably don't have the resources to some people. But what if I don't even believe in that process? \n\nI'm somebody who truly believes in a horizontal organization that is a mutual aid network and we don't want to spend our funds on lawyers suing people. But we do want to have a way in which our community is held responsible to each other and maybe we have our own process of guidelines that this group adheres to and we want a resource where people can say, “Okay, what are the values behind your code that you imagine people should uphold?”\n\nAnd then my article that I wrote for the Mozilla blog, I mentioned an example, which is a cat shelter. Like, what if I made a really great website for my friend's cat shelter and then they reach out to me and say, “Hey, my other friend would really love to use your code. Is that totally fine?” “Yeah. It's open source. No problem.” “Okay, great, great, great,” and then I say, “Well, actually, I did a lot of work on this. I'm totally fine anyone using it for free, but I don't support kill shelters.” If it's a no-kill shelter, then totally cool with them using my code, but if there are not a no-kill shelter, I don't know if I wanted to spend all hours that I did making this and the time supporting it and everything else that I do. That's my values. Like, you can use my code for free, but not if you're using it to do something that I don't want to see in the world. \n\nI think we see that a lot in open source projects for research where researchers have done incredible systems for looking at the stars and star mapping, and then those same systems are used for military guided missiles and they're like, “Wait a minute. I use all those graduate students and we spent years and years and years building this incredible thing to look at stars and have this be an educational tool and now it's being used in a way that is absolutely not how we anticipated, or what we thought would exist in the world.” And there's not a mechanism because they didn't necessarily close source it; they're just using it as a guidance system. [chuckles] o it's like, how could you hold people accountable? \n\nI think the first step is to make explicit the values to begin with and a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, if you can't enforce this, then what is the point of doing this?” I think that's an interesting thing in our culture that we immediately go to policing before we can even think of the imagination of what is our value? Oh, you're not even allowed to think of what your values are, because if you can't police them, they don't matter. Well, that's actually a very strange skewed worldview to imagine that you can't hold values unless you can police them. Because in a world of post-policing, we have to have ways that we hold values, right? [laughs] We can't just throw out values. \n\nSo the first step is articulating and agreeing upon the values and creating an ethical dependency, and then through the process in wampum.codes, I talk about how accountability can work within a community and what you want accountability to look like. It shouldn't be the default that the only way you can hold someone accountable is to sue them, or is to police them through a court system, or international court system.\n\nThere should be a way in which you can hold people accountable that is more aligned with the values of your group. Maybe you can say, if you have found someone that has not followed these ethical guidelines, invite them to this town hall where we'd like to talk about it, or meet us every week at the Zoom link. There's lots of different ways you can put an accountability link in your package.json, which is, this is how I expect my community can hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold each other accountable. So we talk through that process. \n\nI don't think it should just be a default outsource thing to a government that you have no influence on the copyrighting law that exists. It’s like well, it's either open, or close. So that’s a bad – now I've lost my place, but feel free to ask me questions. [laughs] These guys have stopped running.\n\nJAMEY: I really like the distinction that you make between policing and accountability, which I think are words that have similar meanings, but very different vibes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how those two concepts like work different in practice.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you can imagine that it's – I always start from a point of imagining that it's the community, that we are all part of a community and that we care about the values and we care about each other. Like, you're starting from a point of imagining. Everyone's a good actor before you start imagining how someone is a bad actor. It's like saying, “I need to explain to you why this game is fun and what the rules are before I start.” If I start off being like, “Okay, everyone who's going to cheat at this game, this is what's going to happen to them.” Then people are like, “Well, wait, what game is this and what even are the rules?” \n\nSo just start from a point of like, “This is why the game is fun. This is why we want to participate in it. These are the rules of the game and the rules are part of how we have fun.” The rules are a part of how we engage with each other. The rules are part of the point of why we're even playing. It makes it fun, constraints are fun, and then you can start thinking about like, “Hey, and if you cheat at this game, these are the fun ways you can cheat at this game and these are the ways that are actually not fun and everyone in the group would rather you just not do that and if you do do that, then maybe we talk about what we do.” \n\nI think that's a more of a process of thinking about the ideas, the end, and the means exist within the community and are part of the community. I think a lot of activists organizations have been very involved in rethinking community accountability without policing and oftentimes, they're communities that either indigenous communities on reservations don't have policing in the same way that other spaces do and/or their places where policing does not benefit those communities. They're not actually defending the rights, or the needs of those communities. \n\nSo they've had to start thinking about like, “Well, we still have to think about what we do when we have something in our community that we don't want to have.” Like, if we have domestic violence, what do we do in a way that still protects and maintains our community, that we can still make sure we have help and needs? \n\nThat's an issue that I think a lot of reservations have looked at because it's like we don't have police, or police don't help us when they come and so, how do we figure out ways that we can support our communities and make sure that we can minimize domestic violence and they have lots of different initiatives all over Indian country that are really amazing. So I think that's a good example. \n\nJAMEY: I find it really refreshing, the attitude about the game, like these are the rules of the game before we talk about cheating, because I find myself feeling a way that's jaded that my brain does go to. But I know there's bad actors and I've dealt with bad actors and I stress about that. I think it's a stressful thing that it’s reasonable to stress about, but putting that value lower than the value of well, what's the ideal and how do we start with that, I think it really feels good.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I know as a young developer and probably all of you have had a very similar experience, but as a very young developer, you'll enter into a space and be like, “Oh, I have a question about this,” and then you just get a hammer on your head like, “This isn't the space where you ask questions! That's the space where you ask questions and you don't ask this question on Tuesday. You only ask them on a Wednesday!” and you're like, “Ah!” We've all had that experience, too, which isn't a very accessible way of someone wants to join your party and you're like, “Oh, you really aren’t to join on Wednesdays and not with that question.” and it’s like –\n\nSo I think it's important to make things accessible to someone who's a new, or an outsider and give them a way of being a good actor because otherwise, if they don't, then everyone new will be a bad actor without any option of otherwise and of course, there are bad actors. We've all grown up on the internet, [laughs] so I think we know.\n\nAnother thing that is interesting is I've been doing these workshops with development teams, at companies, startups, blockchain companies, or financial companies, or nonprofits, or academic departments, or groups of artists. It is always interesting that people are like, “Oh yeah, who should be here that can articulate our values for this exercise?” My answer is, “You,” and they're like, “Oh, well, no one gave me permission to do that.” “On behalf of who?” “I don’t know on behalf of who,” and I'm like, “Well, you get to do it on behalf of everyone.” You get to articulate it and then someone else gets articulated and then we get to talk about that. \n\nI'm always surprised that this is sometimes the first space that anyone's given them that permission, it's like, “Well, what do you think are the values?” They go, “Well, I think our values are X, Y, and Z,” and someone else can say, “Well, I think it's this other thing,” and they can say, “Oh, interesting.” And then the founders, or the directors can be there and be like, “Wow, I had no idea all these different opinions,” and then we'll say to them, “Well, what did you think it was?” They’re like, “I actually now, I realize I don't know. Now I'm liking these ideas,” or “I'm thinking about this differently.”\n\nSo it's square one is that articulation and everyone thinks that that's a given. They're like, “Oh, well, that'll be easy. That part will take 5 minutes.” But that is almost the entire time. [chuckles] Usually, it’s that beginning of like, “Okay, we are articulating our values.” Then once you articulate them, it's actually quite easy to just embed those into your source code and then think about accountability and all that. \n\nBut getting on that same page, it's often the first time that – and coders will say things like, “Well, I think the UX person was supposed to decide this.” The UX person said, “No, no, no, I don't think it was me. I think it was somebody else who was supposed to decide this!” I'm like, “Well, if actually no one on your development team thinks they're allowed to express this, then that's probably a problem because how are they supposed to design code that meets your values of your team if no one thinks they're allowed to articulate that?” \n\nJAMEY: Something I find striking about the story that you just told is that, I think we often feel disagreements are a really bad thing to have and you just told the story where having disagreements was a very good thing to be experiencing because it's like more ideas and more discussion. I wonder what your thoughts are on like, well, how can we get past that feeling of like, “Oh, well, if someone disagrees with me, that's a bad thing.”\n\nAMELIA: I think it's different for different people. I think all of us have probably worked on international teams. I work on an international team with a lot of German coworkers and they're not in any way afraid of disagree [chuckles] in the beginning of a meeting, but they are very hesitant to disagree later on. They have this great way of clashing in the beginning with lots of ideas. Like, “No, I don't think that!” \n\nThey're really, really clashing in the beginning, but then once we've all agreed to move forward with something, then they would be more hesitant later on to be like, “Hey, I don't think this is working out” because they're like, “No, we made a commitment, we're going to do this. We'll just keep doing what we decided.” \n\nIt's harder for them later on to like flag a problem and say, “I think we should go in a different direction,” because it's less part of their culture to do that. It's like, “Well, we all agreed. So if we all agreed and we're all together, then we all agree and we're all together. You don't later go on and decide something else on your own.”\n\nWhereas, I feel like in American culture, it's not as big of a deal for someone to raise the hand and be like, “I think we're going to go into a brick wall if we keep going this direction so we’ve got to veer to the left.” Everyone would be like, “Thank goodness.” But if you showed up at the brick wall, they'd be like, “Why didn't anyone –?” “Oh, we knew we were going to run a brick wall. Why didn't you say anything?” “Oh, we didn't want to disagree.” That wouldn't be appropriate in American culture, but they make jokes all the time in Germany that that's what happens sometimes because people agree and then they'll just keep going. [chuckles] So it's very interesting clash of culture. \n\nI think different cultures have different points at which they feel comfortable. That's just one example. You can imagine how all of us have so many different cultures when it feels okay to have disagreements and sometimes explaining that in the beginning could be helpful, too. \n\nBecause in some of these groups, you'll have people that are international that are speaking more in the beginning and I'll call that out, too and say, “I hear a lot of Europeans are disagreeing in the beginning. Oftentimes, Americans don't feel comfortable doing that, but this is a helpful way of making sure we have alignment and it's not seen as that you think someone's idea is not good, but it's a way of contributing, or adding.” Sometimes I throw that out because I know even based on different parts of the US that you're in, you might have different ways when you feel more comfortable sharing a descending of opinion. [chuckles]\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, how does that intersect with permission to be wrong?\n\nAMELIA: Oh, I like that permission to be wrong. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you –?\n\nCORALINE: I think it's tied to what we talk about a lot about psychological safety and safety to fail. Things don't always fail just for environmental reasons. \n\nAMELIA: Oh, yeah.\n\nCORALINE: Sometimes someone had an idea and it ends up that idea isn't workable, but we have such attachment to the idea that I think we oftentimes are likely to run into that wall because we don't want to admit that we didn't think of something, or we didn't see something coming, or we didn't think it through correctly and that’s a lot of pressure.\n\nAMELIA: Oh, totally. Absolutely, it is. I feel like I find that a lot when I was a professor and I still am a trainer. I work at Contenful as a technical trainer and I think as a teacher, you see that a lot with people. It's like that first moment where students have learned something and they want to apply it and sometimes, our first idea is great, but usually our first 20 ideas are terrible. [chuckles]\n\nSo it's like when you're first learning something, you don't always have the best ideas and what I usually have tried to do in my classrooms is give people just an enormous space to create a lot of bad ideas quickly. If it's in an art class, I might say, “Okay, I've taught you how to do this animation. I need you to make a 100 in the next hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Well, then make them really bad and really crude and just find out how to do volume,” and when you find out how to do volume, you get over a lot of the preciousness of the first bad idea that is usually really bad, but you're really precious about it because it's your first and that can push past that. \n\nSimilarly, in technical training classes, it might be the same where it's like, “Okay, all 50 of you have to do this impossible task in an hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Great. So let's start with, where should we start?” Often, where should we start is a bad idea. People are like, “We should start with writing down everything that we need to do!” It's like, “Well, if you only have an hour, that's probably going to be the hour of just writing it down, or you could start somewhere.” There's lots of different options. \n\nSo I think permission to fail, or permission for bad ideas sometimes can be overcome by that brute force of just being like, “Well, do the first 100 bad ideas, get it out of your system.” [laughs]\n\nJACOB: I was just thinking about how I've worked in an organization in the past that really wanted to have that very collaborative beyond the same page about values. There was one issue that came up a lot, which was that we had this culture where if anyone wanted to blow up the entire thing and make us all talk about it from ground zero, they could. I think that, whether on purpose, or not, was abused and what ended up happening was not really able to go anywhere. Effectively, what happened was the person who wanted to just keep bringing up their thing got their way because you know.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah.\n\nJACOB: When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about what's a way for one of the values of a group to be like, “We want to be able to have everyone's input, but we also want to move forward,” and I was just thinking about how we would do that.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is why so many mutual aid networks, or activist groups, or anarchist groups will use different formats like even Robert's Rules of Order, or they make their own versions of that where they say – and then I've seen in some artist groups, they'll have the 10 not commandments, but things on the wall where if a certain thing in a conversation is going there, they might point to it and say like, “Hey, is this number eight derailment? Are you derailing our consensus through number seven only being concerned with your own idea?” And then they will be like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's what you're doing here. Number seven and number eight and right now, so we're going to move past that.” Or with Robert's Rules, you might say like, “Yeah, your emotions on the table doesn't have a second. So we're tabling that.” \n\nI think that's why it's important to have some of those ground rules when you're in an activist organization and maybe we should take some of those activist language into the product space at companies as well to say, we can have formalized ways. It doesn't mean we're not listening to people. There's a balance between “You're never allowed to question our values,” or “Yeah, you can bring up your own pet project at any time and derail everyone else's process and project and progress.” \n\nSo I think there's definitely a balance there and people can always make addendums to that. People can say, “Hey, we're going to pause Robert’s Rules right now because it looks like we're getting kicked out of the space in 5 minutes so we're going to move to this section. Does everyone agree with that?” “Yes, we agree with tabling those rules that we already agreed to make a supplemental rule for this section.” \n\nI don't know how many of you have worked in an activist organization. Sounds like all of you see what I’m talking about. [laughs] Sometimes it's a lot of saying that and saying it really fast, but you get used to it. You get used to being like, “Oh my gosh, we only have 5 minutes. Okay, should we table this? Yes, or no? Do we have a second? Okay, we do. Great.”\n\nIt takes more verbiage, but it is a way that we can agree on the rules of play and that people feel safe being like, “No one seconded that idea. You have brought it up for the third time, you’re bringing it up again, no one's going to second it again. So it's okay, we get it. You still want that idea. That's okay. We're writing it down in the minutes, but how it goes. [chuckles] You're also welcome to start your own group and have that be a focus and that's always possible, too.” So not everything has to be done by, for, with, and with approval of the group and I think that's what's great, too. \n\nJAMEY: So Amelia, you were talking earlier in the show about your No Funding group. That's what it was called, right?\n\nAMELIA: Yeah.\n\nJAMEY: And the phrase that you said, I wrote it down was, “No striving, no hustling.” \n\nAMELIA: Yeah.\n\nJAMEY: I liked that so much that [chuckles] I wrote it down and I was hoping we could talk about that because I think that that's something that people really struggle with, too. Anxiety about productivity and monetizing hobbies is something I see a lot. I'm also in the tech space and the art space, and you see that a lot in comics like, how can I make this thing that I want to do into my career? Which like, there's something beautiful about that, but it's also really tough when you're doing that with everything in your life that should bring you joy. So this isn't really a question, but I was hoping you could talk about no striving, no hustling.\n\nAMELIA: Oh yeah, thank you so much, Jamey. So I'll read you the little statement that we made, just because it's funny, but we say, “No Funding: Be the crypto-anarchist digital artist collective you want to see in the world. The mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to support one another and what would we make?”\n\nAs part of the official announcement, I wrote a short story called Child's Play, where I imagine a world in which children seize control of the global economy with nothing more than a Minecraft server and their grandparents’ goodwill. [laughs]\n\n“No Funding is a public group. You can visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly online conversations where members present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily a BIPOC creative technologist group, but it's open to anyone who's ever needed a day job to make something cool that they believe in. Our motto is no-striving, no-hustling; No-Funding.com a creative collective.” \n\nSo that's our little statement. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: I love it. I love everything about it.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I've had a lot of fun because I don't know how you felt during the pandemic, but I feel adrift in a sea of information where I don't know where land is. I don't see a lighthouse. I can't tell if I'm 5 minutes from shore, or a 5 miles and having a check-in with people with this format that it's like, no striving, no hustling, you're not pitching your project for a group of adjudicators. \n\nThis is a group of people for people by people and I've been able to get more of a temperature on how people are feeling, what people are thinking. For me, it's helping that lighthouse of how far I am adrift. When I have my own notions of, I think this is going on and then I go to a No Funding meeting and I'm like, “Okay, I'm totally wrong. I can adjust myself to the shore.” So for me, it's been really helpful in that way.\n\nJAMEY: I think that there's two pieces of what you just described that have a similar result, but are different, which is trying to get funding because we live in capitalism and you need money to survive and to do things, which sucks and it's hard. And then on the other side, I think you have just this feeling about whether, or not you're being productive in that way. \n\nEven if an artist doesn't need to make money off of something to pay their bills, I think there's a feeling of like, but if I'm not making money, then it’s not valuable, or it's not real, or it's not as valuable as something else that someone else is working on. Actually, that is also capitalism that made that happen, but I think that's a little bit more solvable maybe. It's hard for us to just decide that we're going to have a community without that kind of global economy. But I think we could decide that we're not going to hold ourselves to that in the way that we do, but that's a tough step to take, I think and it sounds like you have a whole group of people that have all taken that step. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I think we're all very diverse and don't agree on a lot of things, but the one thing that we do agree on is that the definition of having a full and creative life is only available to someone who does never need to work. Even if there are people in our group that might be true for, we all agree that that's not true, that you can have a full creative life and do many different jobs at many different times in your life for many different reasons. \n\nThat is the one thing that we've committed to is like having a day job doesn't kick you out of the club of being a activist, a creative, a dreamer, a thinker, and a world that that exists is a world that is actually quite creatively stifling. It's very stifling and we see that it ends up just reproducing a lot of commonality and there's only a small demographic of people then who gets to participate in it and they have a very small narrow grasp on the world. \n\nI think we see that in a lot of our media that in order to participate in media, you have to be independently wealthy enough that you don't need to make any money from it and then those people tend to be a very small narrow demographic. And then you say, “Well, why don't we have all of our stories are told from this one perspective?” It's like, “Well, those are the only people that are allowed to do that work because it requires a full-time job where you don't make money.” Then of course, you 're going to get the same group of people [chuckles] that are going to tell the stories then.\n\nSo that's why we think about it of like, well, what could we make if we assume we have day jobs, if we assume we don't need money, what kind of projects can we make together, or how can we support each other and each other's projects all coming from a notion of there's not someone coming to save us and we're not looking to grab the attention of someone high up there. Rather, we're looking to our right and to our left of us and the people that are standing beside us and saying, “How do we move forward?”\n\nJAMEY: I find that incredibly inspiring and empowering and it's something similar that I think about in comics a lot where people who are new to comics are often trying to get in with people that are already names in comics and really talented people that of course, you want to work with those people, but those people are doing something different than you if you're just a beginner. \n\nI heard the advice when I was new, that's like, “Hey, don't reach out to me, reach out to people that are your peers, because me and my peers used to be like that and we all became successful together and what you need to do is make a group like that and then you become successful together.” I thought about that a ton since I heard it and I think I'm getting a similar vibe from what you're talking about that and I think it's beautiful.\n\nAMELIA: Well, thank you so much, Jamey. You literally described the exact impetus for me forming this is I get a lot of talks weekly at universities and I had so many students after my talks be like, “Can we grab coffee? I'd love to pick your brain.” I look at my schedule and unfortunately, just because I have a full-time startup job and I do lots of advocacy and activism on the side, I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be able to meet with you in like three months and that's not good.” \n\nI want to be able to give more time to these people who have really valid questions, but I also don't think that I hold anything that they need. Like, I don't think that I'm the person standing in the path for their progression and I need to give them a hand up. In fact, I think what I do need to do is to give them a space where they can communicate with their peers, like you said, and I say that to them. \n\nI say, “Look, I'm not brushing you off because you're not important. I'm taking myself out of this equation because I'm not important and you don't need me to tell you how to move forward, but you do need your peers and luckily, I've collected all of you from all of my talks into a group that meets weekly and you can all talk to each other, which is a much more valuable thing and I facilitate this. I've created this as a way of giving you a Zoom link that everyone can connect to each week, but you're going to connect with each other and you're going to meet hundreds of people around the world that are your peers, that will be your network, that will be the person to your left and to your right.” \n\nI always say to people, “If you look to your left and your right and you don't see anyone, that's because there's somebody behind you, you need to pull up that you need to give a hand to.”\n\nCORALINE: Oh, yeah. I've been doing a lot of that, thinking and talking about storytelling, and the value I place in storytelling and I'm also thinking about how can I give agency to other people to tell their stories? But one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about storytelling is for example, look at superheroes. Almost every white superhero is a lone actor. They don't have a community connection. They don’t have a family; they all died in a terrible accident. \n\nAMELIA: Origin story, yeah.\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's the kind of stories we tell and it’s what we’re telling people. You have to be the hero. You have to be the most famous. You have to be the most rich. \n\nI learned there's actually a name for different kinds of stories, there's a German word for it called bildungsroman, and I'm probably pronouncing that all wrong, but this is more what our stories used to be like. The entire story would be about the development of the hero and it's not the hero's journey like a Joseph Campbell thing, it's literally how they learn how to be who they are. We don't tell the stories, or the origin story that's highly dramatic and left behind as opposed to acknowledging that we're all flawed and that hopefully, we're all growing and that hopefully, we'll just be better people and that's enough.\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. My son, when he was a baby, he used to hate Disney movies because he would say [chuckles] they always have like the mom, or the dad always dies, something bad always happens to them in the beginning, and then the rest of the story is running from a trauma to find a perfect ending and this is like a 4-year-old telling me this. I'm like, “Yeah, that is the problem with the Western myth of the origin story,” and he was like, “But I want to just watch friends having fun together, telling each other jokes, going on a journey. I want it to look like my life. I want to see stories that look like my life,” and I'm like, “Yeah, well, you probably will find your stories in other spaces,” and he did. \n\nHe finds Minecraft, which is much more of a similar thing to his experience is we're collectively building our story through participating in a world on a server that we've negotiated the terms of and that's his fictional world and he still is that way. His generation is still that way. The Zoomers, I think tell stories in a more interactive and collective format and they're not as interested in media that comes from a single voice, which I think is cool, so. [chuckles]\n\nJAMEY: I read some discourse recently about Studio Ghibli movies and people were talking about Studio Ghibli movies don't really have conflict and I thought that was confusing because obviously, there's lots of conflict in many of them. There's lots of problems and they solve the problems. I think that the thing that people mean when they say that isn't that there's actually no conflict, it's that there's room in those stories for quiet moments of reflection and that makes people feel like it's not conflict because you're having that space to sit with it and think about it and then continue. I think that's what is so relaxing about them. People will feel like, “I'm relaxed and so, it's not stressful and it's not conflict,” but it's giving yourself space to, I don't know, I already said it what I was going to say, so. [laughs]\n\nAMELIA: That's really beautiful. I met this screenwriter once when I was in LA and I was really surprised by his point of view because he said a lot of people think that drama is violence, aggression, death, hardship, and he says the best drama that most people want to watch is a good person has to make a tough decision. I just loved that statement because it's true. That kind of drama, it doesn't have to just be this doom and gloom, or I'm taking in trauma and trauma there. \n\nAs soon as he just said that phrase to me, I was like, “Tell me more. What is the story?” I was like, “Tell me, I want to know the end of your story,” he's like, “No, no, no, that's every story I tell on TV. That is my story is like –” He's like, “This is why we love hospital dramas because it's like these doctors, they need to make a tough decision and it does have life, or death consequences, but they're saving lives, or the core concept is not about death and destruction and violence. The core concept is about them trying to save a life and make a tough decision and people love that.” \n\nSo the concept that people only like entertainment that has a lot of violence, or trauma and is like, okay, that's true and [laughs] actually people love to see a good person making a tough decision. So I always remember that when I think about storytelling.\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, I really appreciate your sharing with us your story today and I think it's very inspiring and I think it's also really wonderful that it seems to connect to other things. It's not just your story, it's a collective story, but you are a force for bringing those stories to life and I really appreciate that. Giving people the space to tell their stories and [inaudible] their stories.\n\nAMELIA: Oh, awesome. So thank you so much, Coraline and I see that Jamey thought of the name.\n\nJAMEY: The term I was looking for is Ma. I don't actually know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, even though it's only two letters, M-A, but it's a Japanese word for negative space. Negative space is so important in design, white space is important in code, and the idea of negative space being important in a story, I think is really valuable.\n\nAMELIA: That's really beautiful and I think as a collective, we always move slower and we move at the speed of the community and it changes the speed, or the way in which we tell stories, but it changes the value, I think in a positive way. Those of us who want to connect to our community can then see stories that reflect our own reality. So I think that's really beautiful. Maybe the Ma, or the space within community storytelling will be defined and have some terms someday. That'd be cool.\n\nJAMEY: Maybe the kids from your story at the very beginning who made up the rock hand word will come up with a word for it for us. [chuckles]\n\nAMELIA: Totally. Absolutely. \n\nCORALINE: Amelia, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show.\n\nAMELIA: Thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful conversation and a beautiful afternoon conversation for me. So thank you for making sunshine happen for the rest of my day.\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much. This was really great.Special Guest: Amelia Winger-Bearskin.","content_html":"02:11 - Wampum.Codes
\n\n08:13 - Amelia’s Superpower: Being invited to cool parties!
\n\n11:26 - Storytelling & Performance
\n\n\n\n20:16 - “Indigenous Antecedent Technology”
\n\n24:16 - “Ethical Dependencies”
\n\n35:48 - Handling Disagreements and Giving Permission to Fail
\n\n40:55 - Robert’s Rules of Order
\n\n44:23 - “No Striving, No Hustling”
\n\n47:33 - Facilitating Communication with Peers
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nCORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 240 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm very happy to be with you here today, and I'm also really happy to be here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.
\n\nJAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm glad to be on the show with you, too, and I'm also here with my great friend, Jacob Stoebel.
\n\nJACOB: Aw, hello, and I'm going to introduce our guest.
\n\nAmelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, AV, and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics-based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.
\n\nWelcome to the podcast.
\n\nAMELIA: Thank you so much! I'm so excited to be here. You all are some of my favorite people, so [laughs] excited to chat on record.
\n\nCORALINE: And today's going to be very technical; we’re going to ask you some very technical questions about XR, VR, AI, AR, AV and…
\n\nJAMEY: That's a lot of letters.
\n\nCORALINE: SP, everything.
\n\nAMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, we were at a function. Coding. Yeah, let's crack it. [laughs]
\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, just on a personal level, I'm so happy to have you here. You and I have talked before, we're both involved in ethical source, and I’m such an admirer of your work. I'm so happy to have this conversation in public with you today.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, back at you, Coraline. I love ethical source and I've been so excited to join your team of rebels, exciting thinkers, and dreamers. So I'm really excited to be here with you and in community with you.
\n\nCORALINE: So Amelia, I first became aware of your work through your wampum.codes project that you did. Well, it's an ongoing project, but I guess, you started it with the Mozilla Fellowship. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it's really fascinating.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. When I started my Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, it was actually pre-pandemic. So it was right, but not very much so it was only a couple of months. We got to go to London and meet each other and I got to hang out a little bit at MIT with the Co-Creation fellows. I'm the first full-time fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, which is a really cool studio, imagined and led by Kat Cizek, who's an incredible transmedia storyteller and inspiring human that I get to be in collaboration with there.
\n\nSo for wampum.codes as an ethical framework for software development, we had imagined a lot of things and then the pandemic hit and I wasn't able to be as close to them as I was. I also moved from New York to San Francisco. Before I thought I was going to from New York to Boston pretty regularly on the train and then moved to California and that's when I decided to have the Co-Creation portion of wampum.codes exist as a podcast.
\n\nSo rather than flying to different spaces and meeting with friends and technologists on reservations, who are indigenous across North America, I was like, “Okay, well, let's do this via Zoom call as a podcast” as many people moved to different online formats during the pandemic and that's how the wampum.codes podcast was born. As I want to do research because if you're going to create an ethical framework for software development, based on indigenous values of Co-Creation, you need to do it in co-creation with those people. [chuckles]
\n\nI had initially planned to fly all of them to MIT and have this big conference and everything. But instead, I got to have weekly conversations with indigenous people, who are using technology in creative ways to make positive impact in their communities. And then we still did a big conference at MIT, but virtually and actually, a lot more people were able to participate in it that way. Big surprise, right? All of us who are internet natives are unsurprised that you have a lot of accessibility there.
\n\nSo then that became the supergroup episode of wampum.codes where we had everyone who was going to be there physically at MIT and then I was able to distribute. Rather than using those funds to fly everyone to MIT, distribute those to all the different people who were on the podcast and just have weekly conversations with each of these people.
\n\nI guess, the technology projects range and I welcome anyone to go to wampum is W-A-M-P-U-M, .codes, C-O-D-E-S. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can go on Buzzsprout, but it's able to be found on Spotify, or Apple, anywhere you find a podcast. We have RSS feeds there.
\n\nIf you go through the episodes, it varies where each of the indigenous people are coming from. Like, there's an incredible actress on there, MorningStar Angeline, and she is an incredible advocate and activist for the Albuquerque drag scene, also does really incredible art installations and happenings, and works in VR. But she's also the voice of the local area population in Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games. [laughs] So it's really interesting that she crosses all of these different media.
\n\nThen we have another person, Joey Clift, who's a comedian, who's an indigenous comedian and the first indigenous person to be on the—and I'm going to probably say this wrong, but the house comedy team of UCB in LA, I think they call it the house comedy team. The interesting way that he uses technology is he created the largest Facebook group of comedians ever and it's the comedians with cats, basically. [laughs] I just love that he has this and then he creates all this comedy through that Facebook group.
\n\nSo that's an interesting way that comedy becomes its own scene through the social media network all based around cats. I think that's pretty amazing, that an indigenous person is grounded everybody in our deep love of animals. He does a lot of really great activist work. He's also a writer of a couple of different television shows right now and one of them is the first all-indigenous writers room Everett
And then you have Roo DeLesslin George-Warren, who's creating an app with children. He's part of Catawba nation and the app is around language preservation and language education of Catawba language. But it's the fun thing that we talk about on the episode is, there's some words that don't exist in Catawba language and it's because they're last truly immersed indigenous speaker of Catawba language passed away in the 80s. So anything that wasn't created up until the 80 didn't have an official name, but that doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's alive and it's an alive on the tongue of every child that's learning and every person that's living.
\n\nBut what it does mean is those children get to name some of these things, they get to name what a cell phone is, they get to name all these fun things, and one of the children said, “We should name cell phones rock hands,” and he's like, “Oh really? That's great. Why is that the word for rock and the word for hands in Catawba? And he said, “Well, because it's made of rocks and minerals and we hold it in our hands,” and I thought that was really beautiful.
\n\nSo those are the examples of how each of these different awesome technologists, indigenous leaders are using technology in creative ways. So from that, all those conversations really contribute to the framework that I helped to organize and turn into a workshop and writings around an ethical framework for software development. Those conversations are really key and important to it, because I need to learn how are people making change with technology, because that really will contribute to the guidelines that we hope people can bring out in the process of creating an ethical framework for software development and value-based dependencies.
\n\nJAMEY: So we have one question for you that you may be expecting already, because we warn our guests about it, and that question is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, that's an excellent question and I'm cheating because I once was asked this question at Stephanie Dinkins’ AI dinner in New York and I just said the first thing that came to my head because I wasn't expecting it and the first time I said it, I said, “Wow, that's really stupid, Amelia. Why did you say that?” Well, it's because the first thing that came to my head, but then the longer I sit with it, the more I'm like, “I think it's true so I'm just going to say it,” again as if it's the first time which is, I think my superpower is being invited to cool parties.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: That's a great superpower.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. how did I acquire it? I think you just have to have cool friends and then those friends invite you to cool parties. It's worked out for me so far because sometimes their parties are in Dharamsala hanging out with the Dalai Lama, sometimes their parties are doing some weird art show in New York, and sometimes their parties are awesome powwows that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I think that's the best way I want to live my life [laughs] so that's my superpower.
\n\nCORALINE: I love that.
\n\nJAMEY: I just wanted to say that I don't think that's a stupid superpower at all. I think it's a beautiful superpower.
\n\nCORALINE: I'm kind of jealous of that superpower, honestly. I think the last party I had, the big important, exciting thing was red velvet cupcakes.
\n\nAMELIA: Ooh, that’s awesome.
\n\nCORALINE: Oh no, you have red velvet cupcakes on the one hand, the Dalai Lama on the other hand, that's a tough choice to make really.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. Obviously, during quarantine I feel like I've definitely not had my superpower active in a while, so maybe I'm in like my cave of solitude. [laughs] Definitely. It's been a tough year for those of us who that's our only superpower, but I definitely been invited to a lot of Zoom parties, let me tell you. I've led a lot of Among Us things and I've been the one to organize a lot of Zoom [inaudible] outlook.
\n\nWe all are Zoom fatigued, but I've been organizing what I hope could be something interesting. I started this thing called No-Funding.com as a virtual party where we could talk about, I don't know, it's supposed to be an artist support group where we talk about ways that we can support each other outside of gatekeeping and traditional funding avenues.
\n\nBut honestly, it's like, if you didn't need any funding and you didn't want any funding and you just wanted to be punk rock and talk about our art and how we can help each other, that's a space. We do it and we ended up getting into some esoteric conversations. We talk a lot about ethics and the worlds that we want to build that have a community focus. But we also just kind of, we'll talk about creative ideas to feed our soul like, “Hey, why don't we write poems today?” and somebody in the group knows how to teach us how to write poem. Someone might know something about an artist and teaches us something. So it's definitely more an artist support group, but with the motto of not – our motto is no striving, no hustling. [laughs] So that's No-Funding.com, join us every week. [laughs]
\n\nCORALINE: Well, one of the things that really interested me, or interests me about your work, Amelia, almost everything you've said in terms of the things you're doing have a very strong community focus. As someone who came up in a very white Western technology environment where most of what happens is developer tooling and most of it is going to the companies in San Francisco, I think it's really interesting that people who are outside of that bubble seem to have stronger, especially people in different parts of their world, or indigenous cultures that are often ignored, or excluded, but you're doing community work. I see a lot of those non-white Western—what I’m trying to say—that's kind of unique in a way, or it's different from how technology is usually thought of in the US especially. I don't know where to go with that. I am so sorry. I just think that's so fascinating and so different and that's something I'm going to learn about.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, and I think it's absolutely everything you said about technology is true and it also is true for the art world, too, which I came actually from a background of performance.
\n\nMy mom, growing up, was a traditional storyteller for our tribe, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and being a storyteller is something like being a politician, a historian, a performance artist, an actor, a writer, an educator. It's this combination because you need to be given the stories from elders. They have to trust you so you have to be a politician, or a leader and you're really required to make sure that the stories that you tell are relevant and significant for your current generation. You're taking information from previous generations, you're preserving it, and sharing it with your current generation so that it will have positive impact on the generations to come, but it has to be relevant.
\n\nSo you cannot tell it the same way that an elder gave it to you. It's the core requirements like, I'm giving you the story for you to make it new and relevant for your generation and each audience you meet with it has to be relevant. Our storytelling is embedded in multimedia. It's obviously, spoken word stories. It has music, it has patterns, it has art, it has pottery, it has bead work; all of these things reinforce the stories.
\n\nWhen my mom would travel around, her superpower is being that leader, historian, educator. She has that voice that as soon as she says, “Hello, I would like to tell you a story today,” every person in the whole room sits down. You know what I mean? I don't know, that's her superpower is she can just, not even with a mic and she has a quiet voice. She can just be like, “Hello,” and everyone just sits down. She's like, “I'm going to tell you a story.” [chuckles] It's that incredible storyteller voice and then I would perform the songs and the music with her since she's not a musician, or a musical person at all, but she knows the songs and knows this is the story that has the song that goes live. So I would be the musical one and then I became an opera singer. At 15, I went to the Eastman Conservatory of Music at a young age and became a professional opera singer at a young age.
\n\nSo I came from a performance background and then once my work became so weird in the sense of, I had so much coding involved, projections and video. I'm a nerd and I've been a self-taught coder since I was very young and since my work became more integrated with multimedia, people were like, “You're not really an opera person anymore, or a director of new opera. You're kind of a multimedia artist.” That title was somewhat thrust upon me and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I'm going to go get my Master's degree, my MFA in art.”
\n\nOnce I went to school, they showed me my studio and then they lock you in there. They close the door and then you're supposed to live in your studio. I would pop my head out and like, “Hey everybody, what are we doing?” They're like, “Go away, like go back into your studio.” We're all in our studios heads down and then I said, “Oh, well, let's collaborate.” No one wants to collaborate with me. The only people in the entire, like above me, or below me, or my same year that want to collaborate with me were indigenous people. Interesting! [laughs]
\n\nSo we all wanted to collaborate and start making things together and our professors were like, “We're not even going to consider that for your grades, or for your thesis, or for – that doesn't count, that doesn't even exist. If you made it with another person, it doesn't even exist,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole entire world doesn't work when it comes to the way that most media we consume isn't created that way.
\n\nThe only exception really is more the solitary artist, which also doesn't always work that way either. When you go and see things in a museum and it has one person's name under it, there's a thousand names that are not mentioned. When we see a film, we see the director, but we see the thousands of names come over us with the credits. When we go to a play, we open that cast book and we see all of those names that are behind that object.
\n\nSo it's really, the art world and the technology world overlap in that myth of the solitary genius, total myth that they perpetuate it. I definitely had a crisis, what I went into the art world and then again, as I've continued my journey throughout tech, where I'm like, “It's not true that one person has made these things,” [laughs] but we believe that. We believe that that's how things work and that was always a big shock to me and something that I've maybe found ways of integrating a more collective mindset into each of those spaces.
\n\nI recently was meeting with this incredible group. The US Department of Art and Culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're not a real government agency, but they perform really incredible service to our collective dreaming, which is they build things, like the People's State of the Union, or they've created the honoring native land initiative, which is an incredible toolkit for people to do land acknowledgements. They've recently hired me to bring on a new page of this honoring native land initiative to think about how do you bring something from land acknowledgement to action so it's not just making a verbal statement, but you're making a commitment that can come with action.
\n\nWhen I was meeting with them initially, they were like, “Well, you do categorize yourself as an artist, but this role is a lot about community building. So can you talk a little bit about that?” And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting because my whole life, I have felt like more of a community builder than an artist.” That's interesting that they assume that an artist isn't a community builder because it isn’t because there’s usually that separation. So I was very happy to find this role.
\n\nOne of the fun things that you do at the beginning of working with this group is to work with them to define a title and I don't have one yet. I'm going to share with you some of my ideas, [laughs] let me know what you think of me.
\n\nJAMEY: So let's workshop them right here on the show.
\n\nAMELIA: Right. I’m looking for your opinions because the other people have these incredible titles, like one is the Chief Ray of Sunshine. That's one of her names, she's the Chief Ray of Sunshine. One person is the Director of People and Possibilities. Another one is Director of Decolonization and Honoring Native Land. I thought, I think that's the title. And then I've been throwing around a lot of different ones.
\n\nSo one, I think was good as something around a land acknowledgement lab, because I want to make it a place where I can collaborate with lots of different people around how they can imagine, and give a framework and tools for people to imagine how you can change land acknowledgement thinking of this something that you say, something that you do, and something that has action. So that was what I've been thinking about. I don't know. What are some of the coolest titles you guys have heard? [laughs]
\n\nCORALINE: Well, not exactly the same thing, but a friend of mine, Astrid Countee, who's also one of the panelists on our podcast. She is trained as an anthropologist and she got into tech. So she and I have been workshopping [chuckles] a title for her and we're coming up with sociologist engineer, anthropology engineer, things like that because the thing I like about that and the thing I like about what you're saying is that the impact that we have is a lot broader than the work that we do. We don't acknowledge the connections either and we tend to lionize the pure technical – I'm speaking as like the industry. We lionize that is the lone genius, like you were talking about, and I'd like to see us bring more of ourselves into how we describe the work we do, as opposed to just the, “Oh, I write code.”
\n\nSo Amelia, one of the things that you and I talked about in our conversation of couple of months ago, you introduced me to an incredible term that I'd like you to share with us and talk about and that is antecedent technology.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I like to think a lot about the continuous line that we have for technology and the way that oftentimes, when we're learning about a new technology, people will use metaphors that are connected to the technologies in history, but frequently, it's from a Western perspective rather than seeing a continuous line from technologies that were invented in indigenous communities.
\n\nOne of the reasons that I say it's important to look at indigenous antecedent technology is we don't want to colonize our future. We don't want take something and project it to the future with a limited understanding of how the world works.
\n\nAn example of that is that we've had, for thousands of years, decentralized economies that use decentralized ledgers and had large data systems that were able to be incorporated into consensus building contracts that led to peaceful communities. Like for instance, Wampum with the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, or even Quipu, we had in South America, which was a Turing-complete data system 500 years before Alan Turing was born.
\n\nI think the reason why it's important is not because of primacy, or saying that's because something happened first it's better. But if you are thinking of making giant leaps in the future with some of these new emerging technologies, you could say, “Well, we don't have any data in the past, so we're just going to have to wing it.” Or you could look at it as a line and a string that connects to our ancestral histories and say, “Well, actually we did have successful distributed economy, decentralized economies, right in the location where I'm standing now. We could study how they worked in collaboration with the environment in this environment and learn from there.” Or we could just throw that out and say, “Wow, this is the first time California is ever going to use a decentralized economy. Let's just wing it.” Or you could say, “Actually, there’s precedent here we can learn from that, from this very location, from this very land.”
\n\nSomething that a lot of indigenous activists are talking about is understanding the connection and giving back agency to indigenous groups is not just racial justice, but it's also climate justice. So I think people who deeply want to make positive impact for our environment, or are looking at some of these possibilities for different types of economies in a less extractive format for your state, or for your nation, or for your continent, or your region, it is important to include indigenous knowledge in those discussions.
\n\nSo that's what I mean when I talk about antecedent technology is like, are these innovations that you're building? Do they have deep roots, and do you have a mechanism of looking at them in historical context? Can that give you more data to make more successful models for how you might make innovation in the future?
\n\nCORALINE: But Amelia, how can people do that and also solve every problem from first principles?
\n\nAMELIA: I know, right? [laughs] And that's the funny thing is we see this is an issue in Silicon Valley already. Already, people are like, “Oh my gosh, they're reinventing buses,” or they're reinventing these things that already existed not a 100, or 200, or 300 years, or a 1,000 years ago, but people are reinventing something that happened a month ago, or a year ago. That is what we do. We pile slight innovations on top of each other in an extractive format to create competition and I think that it's a slowing down of that. It's like, what if it's not about reinvention, or just rebranding, or remarketing, but if our goals have of real long vision of lasting for seven generations, can we think then about innovation in a different way?
\n\nJACOB: I've never heard the phase ethical dependencies. Could you educate me, if you care to?
\n\nAMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, sure. I think about it like I love to use technological terminology to describe ethical, or creative practices and I love to use creative and ethical terminology to describe technological practices. I like to be a bridge between these two worlds because it's somewhere I sit in the middle of.
\n\nSo when people aren't technical and they're like, “What is an ethical dependency?” Then I'll start talking to them about how certain computer programs can't run unless they have all of their check-dependencies and I explain that to them. And then when it's a technical group, I'll talk about when you go through your package.json and you're trying to communicate to someone who might be using your GitHub repo, you might have a bunch of different choices of things that you can connect them with in your package.json. Maybe it's just basic, “Hey, this is the version I'm using and make sure you use this node version.” As you go through it, the only ethical choice I've had, at least as a web developer, is this MIT open source, or is this CANoe, or what is the licensing for this is, or is it just closed source so it's for the company that I'm working for.
\n\nThe reason why I wanted to make an ethical dependency for software is I wanted there to be more options and more choices there that you could say, not only do I have license, which really is just adjudicated through the legal process of international law of copyright. If someone violates the MIT license and close sources my open source project, maybe I can sue them. But if I'm a small developer, I probably don't have the resources to some people. But what if I don't even believe in that process?
\n\nI'm somebody who truly believes in a horizontal organization that is a mutual aid network and we don't want to spend our funds on lawyers suing people. But we do want to have a way in which our community is held responsible to each other and maybe we have our own process of guidelines that this group adheres to and we want a resource where people can say, “Okay, what are the values behind your code that you imagine people should uphold?”
\n\nAnd then my article that I wrote for the Mozilla blog, I mentioned an example, which is a cat shelter. Like, what if I made a really great website for my friend's cat shelter and then they reach out to me and say, “Hey, my other friend would really love to use your code. Is that totally fine?” “Yeah. It's open source. No problem.” “Okay, great, great, great,” and then I say, “Well, actually, I did a lot of work on this. I'm totally fine anyone using it for free, but I don't support kill shelters.” If it's a no-kill shelter, then totally cool with them using my code, but if there are not a no-kill shelter, I don't know if I wanted to spend all hours that I did making this and the time supporting it and everything else that I do. That's my values. Like, you can use my code for free, but not if you're using it to do something that I don't want to see in the world.
\n\nI think we see that a lot in open source projects for research where researchers have done incredible systems for looking at the stars and star mapping, and then those same systems are used for military guided missiles and they're like, “Wait a minute. I use all those graduate students and we spent years and years and years building this incredible thing to look at stars and have this be an educational tool and now it's being used in a way that is absolutely not how we anticipated, or what we thought would exist in the world.” And there's not a mechanism because they didn't necessarily close source it; they're just using it as a guidance system. [chuckles] o it's like, how could you hold people accountable?
\n\nI think the first step is to make explicit the values to begin with and a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, if you can't enforce this, then what is the point of doing this?” I think that's an interesting thing in our culture that we immediately go to policing before we can even think of the imagination of what is our value? Oh, you're not even allowed to think of what your values are, because if you can't police them, they don't matter. Well, that's actually a very strange skewed worldview to imagine that you can't hold values unless you can police them. Because in a world of post-policing, we have to have ways that we hold values, right? [laughs] We can't just throw out values.
\n\nSo the first step is articulating and agreeing upon the values and creating an ethical dependency, and then through the process in wampum.codes, I talk about how accountability can work within a community and what you want accountability to look like. It shouldn't be the default that the only way you can hold someone accountable is to sue them, or is to police them through a court system, or international court system.
\n\nThere should be a way in which you can hold people accountable that is more aligned with the values of your group. Maybe you can say, if you have found someone that has not followed these ethical guidelines, invite them to this town hall where we'd like to talk about it, or meet us every week at the Zoom link. There's lots of different ways you can put an accountability link in your package.json, which is, this is how I expect my community can hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold each other accountable. So we talk through that process.
\n\nI don't think it should just be a default outsource thing to a government that you have no influence on the copyrighting law that exists. It’s like well, it's either open, or close. So that’s a bad – now I've lost my place, but feel free to ask me questions. [laughs] These guys have stopped running.
\n\nJAMEY: I really like the distinction that you make between policing and accountability, which I think are words that have similar meanings, but very different vibes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how those two concepts like work different in practice.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you can imagine that it's – I always start from a point of imagining that it's the community, that we are all part of a community and that we care about the values and we care about each other. Like, you're starting from a point of imagining. Everyone's a good actor before you start imagining how someone is a bad actor. It's like saying, “I need to explain to you why this game is fun and what the rules are before I start.” If I start off being like, “Okay, everyone who's going to cheat at this game, this is what's going to happen to them.” Then people are like, “Well, wait, what game is this and what even are the rules?”
\n\nSo just start from a point of like, “This is why the game is fun. This is why we want to participate in it. These are the rules of the game and the rules are part of how we have fun.” The rules are a part of how we engage with each other. The rules are part of the point of why we're even playing. It makes it fun, constraints are fun, and then you can start thinking about like, “Hey, and if you cheat at this game, these are the fun ways you can cheat at this game and these are the ways that are actually not fun and everyone in the group would rather you just not do that and if you do do that, then maybe we talk about what we do.”
\n\nI think that's a more of a process of thinking about the ideas, the end, and the means exist within the community and are part of the community. I think a lot of activists organizations have been very involved in rethinking community accountability without policing and oftentimes, they're communities that either indigenous communities on reservations don't have policing in the same way that other spaces do and/or their places where policing does not benefit those communities. They're not actually defending the rights, or the needs of those communities.
\n\nSo they've had to start thinking about like, “Well, we still have to think about what we do when we have something in our community that we don't want to have.” Like, if we have domestic violence, what do we do in a way that still protects and maintains our community, that we can still make sure we have help and needs?
\n\nThat's an issue that I think a lot of reservations have looked at because it's like we don't have police, or police don't help us when they come and so, how do we figure out ways that we can support our communities and make sure that we can minimize domestic violence and they have lots of different initiatives all over Indian country that are really amazing. So I think that's a good example.
\n\nJAMEY: I find it really refreshing, the attitude about the game, like these are the rules of the game before we talk about cheating, because I find myself feeling a way that's jaded that my brain does go to. But I know there's bad actors and I've dealt with bad actors and I stress about that. I think it's a stressful thing that it’s reasonable to stress about, but putting that value lower than the value of well, what's the ideal and how do we start with that, I think it really feels good.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I know as a young developer and probably all of you have had a very similar experience, but as a very young developer, you'll enter into a space and be like, “Oh, I have a question about this,” and then you just get a hammer on your head like, “This isn't the space where you ask questions! That's the space where you ask questions and you don't ask this question on Tuesday. You only ask them on a Wednesday!” and you're like, “Ah!” We've all had that experience, too, which isn't a very accessible way of someone wants to join your party and you're like, “Oh, you really aren’t to join on Wednesdays and not with that question.” and it’s like –
\n\nSo I think it's important to make things accessible to someone who's a new, or an outsider and give them a way of being a good actor because otherwise, if they don't, then everyone new will be a bad actor without any option of otherwise and of course, there are bad actors. We've all grown up on the internet, [laughs] so I think we know.
\n\nAnother thing that is interesting is I've been doing these workshops with development teams, at companies, startups, blockchain companies, or financial companies, or nonprofits, or academic departments, or groups of artists. It is always interesting that people are like, “Oh yeah, who should be here that can articulate our values for this exercise?” My answer is, “You,” and they're like, “Oh, well, no one gave me permission to do that.” “On behalf of who?” “I don’t know on behalf of who,” and I'm like, “Well, you get to do it on behalf of everyone.” You get to articulate it and then someone else gets articulated and then we get to talk about that.
\n\nI'm always surprised that this is sometimes the first space that anyone's given them that permission, it's like, “Well, what do you think are the values?” They go, “Well, I think our values are X, Y, and Z,” and someone else can say, “Well, I think it's this other thing,” and they can say, “Oh, interesting.” And then the founders, or the directors can be there and be like, “Wow, I had no idea all these different opinions,” and then we'll say to them, “Well, what did you think it was?” They’re like, “I actually now, I realize I don't know. Now I'm liking these ideas,” or “I'm thinking about this differently.”
\n\nSo it's square one is that articulation and everyone thinks that that's a given. They're like, “Oh, well, that'll be easy. That part will take 5 minutes.” But that is almost the entire time. [chuckles] Usually, it’s that beginning of like, “Okay, we are articulating our values.” Then once you articulate them, it's actually quite easy to just embed those into your source code and then think about accountability and all that.
\n\nBut getting on that same page, it's often the first time that – and coders will say things like, “Well, I think the UX person was supposed to decide this.” The UX person said, “No, no, no, I don't think it was me. I think it was somebody else who was supposed to decide this!” I'm like, “Well, if actually no one on your development team thinks they're allowed to express this, then that's probably a problem because how are they supposed to design code that meets your values of your team if no one thinks they're allowed to articulate that?”
\n\nJAMEY: Something I find striking about the story that you just told is that, I think we often feel disagreements are a really bad thing to have and you just told the story where having disagreements was a very good thing to be experiencing because it's like more ideas and more discussion. I wonder what your thoughts are on like, well, how can we get past that feeling of like, “Oh, well, if someone disagrees with me, that's a bad thing.”
\n\nAMELIA: I think it's different for different people. I think all of us have probably worked on international teams. I work on an international team with a lot of German coworkers and they're not in any way afraid of disagree [chuckles] in the beginning of a meeting, but they are very hesitant to disagree later on. They have this great way of clashing in the beginning with lots of ideas. Like, “No, I don't think that!”
\n\nThey're really, really clashing in the beginning, but then once we've all agreed to move forward with something, then they would be more hesitant later on to be like, “Hey, I don't think this is working out” because they're like, “No, we made a commitment, we're going to do this. We'll just keep doing what we decided.”
\n\nIt's harder for them later on to like flag a problem and say, “I think we should go in a different direction,” because it's less part of their culture to do that. It's like, “Well, we all agreed. So if we all agreed and we're all together, then we all agree and we're all together. You don't later go on and decide something else on your own.”
\n\nWhereas, I feel like in American culture, it's not as big of a deal for someone to raise the hand and be like, “I think we're going to go into a brick wall if we keep going this direction so we’ve got to veer to the left.” Everyone would be like, “Thank goodness.” But if you showed up at the brick wall, they'd be like, “Why didn't anyone –?” “Oh, we knew we were going to run a brick wall. Why didn't you say anything?” “Oh, we didn't want to disagree.” That wouldn't be appropriate in American culture, but they make jokes all the time in Germany that that's what happens sometimes because people agree and then they'll just keep going. [chuckles] So it's very interesting clash of culture.
\n\nI think different cultures have different points at which they feel comfortable. That's just one example. You can imagine how all of us have so many different cultures when it feels okay to have disagreements and sometimes explaining that in the beginning could be helpful, too.
\n\nBecause in some of these groups, you'll have people that are international that are speaking more in the beginning and I'll call that out, too and say, “I hear a lot of Europeans are disagreeing in the beginning. Oftentimes, Americans don't feel comfortable doing that, but this is a helpful way of making sure we have alignment and it's not seen as that you think someone's idea is not good, but it's a way of contributing, or adding.” Sometimes I throw that out because I know even based on different parts of the US that you're in, you might have different ways when you feel more comfortable sharing a descending of opinion. [chuckles]
\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, how does that intersect with permission to be wrong?
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, I like that permission to be wrong. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you –?
\n\nCORALINE: I think it's tied to what we talk about a lot about psychological safety and safety to fail. Things don't always fail just for environmental reasons.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, yeah.
\n\nCORALINE: Sometimes someone had an idea and it ends up that idea isn't workable, but we have such attachment to the idea that I think we oftentimes are likely to run into that wall because we don't want to admit that we didn't think of something, or we didn't see something coming, or we didn't think it through correctly and that’s a lot of pressure.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, totally. Absolutely, it is. I feel like I find that a lot when I was a professor and I still am a trainer. I work at Contenful as a technical trainer and I think as a teacher, you see that a lot with people. It's like that first moment where students have learned something and they want to apply it and sometimes, our first idea is great, but usually our first 20 ideas are terrible. [chuckles]
\n\nSo it's like when you're first learning something, you don't always have the best ideas and what I usually have tried to do in my classrooms is give people just an enormous space to create a lot of bad ideas quickly. If it's in an art class, I might say, “Okay, I've taught you how to do this animation. I need you to make a 100 in the next hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Well, then make them really bad and really crude and just find out how to do volume,” and when you find out how to do volume, you get over a lot of the preciousness of the first bad idea that is usually really bad, but you're really precious about it because it's your first and that can push past that.
\n\nSimilarly, in technical training classes, it might be the same where it's like, “Okay, all 50 of you have to do this impossible task in an hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Great. So let's start with, where should we start?” Often, where should we start is a bad idea. People are like, “We should start with writing down everything that we need to do!” It's like, “Well, if you only have an hour, that's probably going to be the hour of just writing it down, or you could start somewhere.” There's lots of different options.
\n\nSo I think permission to fail, or permission for bad ideas sometimes can be overcome by that brute force of just being like, “Well, do the first 100 bad ideas, get it out of your system.” [laughs]
\n\nJACOB: I was just thinking about how I've worked in an organization in the past that really wanted to have that very collaborative beyond the same page about values. There was one issue that came up a lot, which was that we had this culture where if anyone wanted to blow up the entire thing and make us all talk about it from ground zero, they could. I think that, whether on purpose, or not, was abused and what ended up happening was not really able to go anywhere. Effectively, what happened was the person who wanted to just keep bringing up their thing got their way because you know.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah.
\n\nJACOB: When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about what's a way for one of the values of a group to be like, “We want to be able to have everyone's input, but we also want to move forward,” and I was just thinking about how we would do that.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is why so many mutual aid networks, or activist groups, or anarchist groups will use different formats like even Robert's Rules of Order, or they make their own versions of that where they say – and then I've seen in some artist groups, they'll have the 10 not commandments, but things on the wall where if a certain thing in a conversation is going there, they might point to it and say like, “Hey, is this number eight derailment? Are you derailing our consensus through number seven only being concerned with your own idea?” And then they will be like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's what you're doing here. Number seven and number eight and right now, so we're going to move past that.” Or with Robert's Rules, you might say like, “Yeah, your emotions on the table doesn't have a second. So we're tabling that.”
\n\nI think that's why it's important to have some of those ground rules when you're in an activist organization and maybe we should take some of those activist language into the product space at companies as well to say, we can have formalized ways. It doesn't mean we're not listening to people. There's a balance between “You're never allowed to question our values,” or “Yeah, you can bring up your own pet project at any time and derail everyone else's process and project and progress.”
\n\nSo I think there's definitely a balance there and people can always make addendums to that. People can say, “Hey, we're going to pause Robert’s Rules right now because it looks like we're getting kicked out of the space in 5 minutes so we're going to move to this section. Does everyone agree with that?” “Yes, we agree with tabling those rules that we already agreed to make a supplemental rule for this section.”
\n\nI don't know how many of you have worked in an activist organization. Sounds like all of you see what I’m talking about. [laughs] Sometimes it's a lot of saying that and saying it really fast, but you get used to it. You get used to being like, “Oh my gosh, we only have 5 minutes. Okay, should we table this? Yes, or no? Do we have a second? Okay, we do. Great.”
\n\nIt takes more verbiage, but it is a way that we can agree on the rules of play and that people feel safe being like, “No one seconded that idea. You have brought it up for the third time, you’re bringing it up again, no one's going to second it again. So it's okay, we get it. You still want that idea. That's okay. We're writing it down in the minutes, but how it goes. [chuckles] You're also welcome to start your own group and have that be a focus and that's always possible, too.” So not everything has to be done by, for, with, and with approval of the group and I think that's what's great, too.
\n\nJAMEY: So Amelia, you were talking earlier in the show about your No Funding group. That's what it was called, right?
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: And the phrase that you said, I wrote it down was, “No striving, no hustling.”
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: I liked that so much that [chuckles] I wrote it down and I was hoping we could talk about that because I think that that's something that people really struggle with, too. Anxiety about productivity and monetizing hobbies is something I see a lot. I'm also in the tech space and the art space, and you see that a lot in comics like, how can I make this thing that I want to do into my career? Which like, there's something beautiful about that, but it's also really tough when you're doing that with everything in your life that should bring you joy. So this isn't really a question, but I was hoping you could talk about no striving, no hustling.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh yeah, thank you so much, Jamey. So I'll read you the little statement that we made, just because it's funny, but we say, “No Funding: Be the crypto-anarchist digital artist collective you want to see in the world. The mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to support one another and what would we make?”
\n\nAs part of the official announcement, I wrote a short story called Child's Play, where I imagine a world in which children seize control of the global economy with nothing more than a Minecraft server and their grandparents’ goodwill. [laughs]
\n\n“No Funding is a public group. You can visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly online conversations where members present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily a BIPOC creative technologist group, but it's open to anyone who's ever needed a day job to make something cool that they believe in. Our motto is no-striving, no-hustling; No-Funding.com a creative collective.”
\n\nSo that's our little statement. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: I love it. I love everything about it.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. I've had a lot of fun because I don't know how you felt during the pandemic, but I feel adrift in a sea of information where I don't know where land is. I don't see a lighthouse. I can't tell if I'm 5 minutes from shore, or a 5 miles and having a check-in with people with this format that it's like, no striving, no hustling, you're not pitching your project for a group of adjudicators.
\n\nThis is a group of people for people by people and I've been able to get more of a temperature on how people are feeling, what people are thinking. For me, it's helping that lighthouse of how far I am adrift. When I have my own notions of, I think this is going on and then I go to a No Funding meeting and I'm like, “Okay, I'm totally wrong. I can adjust myself to the shore.” So for me, it's been really helpful in that way.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that there's two pieces of what you just described that have a similar result, but are different, which is trying to get funding because we live in capitalism and you need money to survive and to do things, which sucks and it's hard. And then on the other side, I think you have just this feeling about whether, or not you're being productive in that way.
\n\nEven if an artist doesn't need to make money off of something to pay their bills, I think there's a feeling of like, but if I'm not making money, then it’s not valuable, or it's not real, or it's not as valuable as something else that someone else is working on. Actually, that is also capitalism that made that happen, but I think that's a little bit more solvable maybe. It's hard for us to just decide that we're going to have a community without that kind of global economy. But I think we could decide that we're not going to hold ourselves to that in the way that we do, but that's a tough step to take, I think and it sounds like you have a whole group of people that have all taken that step.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I think we're all very diverse and don't agree on a lot of things, but the one thing that we do agree on is that the definition of having a full and creative life is only available to someone who does never need to work. Even if there are people in our group that might be true for, we all agree that that's not true, that you can have a full creative life and do many different jobs at many different times in your life for many different reasons.
\n\nThat is the one thing that we've committed to is like having a day job doesn't kick you out of the club of being a activist, a creative, a dreamer, a thinker, and a world that that exists is a world that is actually quite creatively stifling. It's very stifling and we see that it ends up just reproducing a lot of commonality and there's only a small demographic of people then who gets to participate in it and they have a very small narrow grasp on the world.
\n\nI think we see that in a lot of our media that in order to participate in media, you have to be independently wealthy enough that you don't need to make any money from it and then those people tend to be a very small narrow demographic. And then you say, “Well, why don't we have all of our stories are told from this one perspective?” It's like, “Well, those are the only people that are allowed to do that work because it requires a full-time job where you don't make money.” Then of course, you 're going to get the same group of people [chuckles] that are going to tell the stories then.
\n\nSo that's why we think about it of like, well, what could we make if we assume we have day jobs, if we assume we don't need money, what kind of projects can we make together, or how can we support each other and each other's projects all coming from a notion of there's not someone coming to save us and we're not looking to grab the attention of someone high up there. Rather, we're looking to our right and to our left of us and the people that are standing beside us and saying, “How do we move forward?”
\n\nJAMEY: I find that incredibly inspiring and empowering and it's something similar that I think about in comics a lot where people who are new to comics are often trying to get in with people that are already names in comics and really talented people that of course, you want to work with those people, but those people are doing something different than you if you're just a beginner.
\n\nI heard the advice when I was new, that's like, “Hey, don't reach out to me, reach out to people that are your peers, because me and my peers used to be like that and we all became successful together and what you need to do is make a group like that and then you become successful together.” I thought about that a ton since I heard it and I think I'm getting a similar vibe from what you're talking about that and I think it's beautiful.
\n\nAMELIA: Well, thank you so much, Jamey. You literally described the exact impetus for me forming this is I get a lot of talks weekly at universities and I had so many students after my talks be like, “Can we grab coffee? I'd love to pick your brain.” I look at my schedule and unfortunately, just because I have a full-time startup job and I do lots of advocacy and activism on the side, I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be able to meet with you in like three months and that's not good.”
\n\nI want to be able to give more time to these people who have really valid questions, but I also don't think that I hold anything that they need. Like, I don't think that I'm the person standing in the path for their progression and I need to give them a hand up. In fact, I think what I do need to do is to give them a space where they can communicate with their peers, like you said, and I say that to them.
\n\nI say, “Look, I'm not brushing you off because you're not important. I'm taking myself out of this equation because I'm not important and you don't need me to tell you how to move forward, but you do need your peers and luckily, I've collected all of you from all of my talks into a group that meets weekly and you can all talk to each other, which is a much more valuable thing and I facilitate this. I've created this as a way of giving you a Zoom link that everyone can connect to each week, but you're going to connect with each other and you're going to meet hundreds of people around the world that are your peers, that will be your network, that will be the person to your left and to your right.”
\n\nI always say to people, “If you look to your left and your right and you don't see anyone, that's because there's somebody behind you, you need to pull up that you need to give a hand to.”
\n\nCORALINE: Oh, yeah. I've been doing a lot of that, thinking and talking about storytelling, and the value I place in storytelling and I'm also thinking about how can I give agency to other people to tell their stories? But one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about storytelling is for example, look at superheroes. Almost every white superhero is a lone actor. They don't have a community connection. They don’t have a family; they all died in a terrible accident.
\n\nAMELIA: Origin story, yeah.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's the kind of stories we tell and it’s what we’re telling people. You have to be the hero. You have to be the most famous. You have to be the most rich.
\n\nI learned there's actually a name for different kinds of stories, there's a German word for it called bildungsroman, and I'm probably pronouncing that all wrong, but this is more what our stories used to be like. The entire story would be about the development of the hero and it's not the hero's journey like a Joseph Campbell thing, it's literally how they learn how to be who they are. We don't tell the stories, or the origin story that's highly dramatic and left behind as opposed to acknowledging that we're all flawed and that hopefully, we're all growing and that hopefully, we'll just be better people and that's enough.
\n\nAMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. My son, when he was a baby, he used to hate Disney movies because he would say [chuckles] they always have like the mom, or the dad always dies, something bad always happens to them in the beginning, and then the rest of the story is running from a trauma to find a perfect ending and this is like a 4-year-old telling me this. I'm like, “Yeah, that is the problem with the Western myth of the origin story,” and he was like, “But I want to just watch friends having fun together, telling each other jokes, going on a journey. I want it to look like my life. I want to see stories that look like my life,” and I'm like, “Yeah, well, you probably will find your stories in other spaces,” and he did.
\n\nHe finds Minecraft, which is much more of a similar thing to his experience is we're collectively building our story through participating in a world on a server that we've negotiated the terms of and that's his fictional world and he still is that way. His generation is still that way. The Zoomers, I think tell stories in a more interactive and collective format and they're not as interested in media that comes from a single voice, which I think is cool, so. [chuckles]
\n\nJAMEY: I read some discourse recently about Studio Ghibli movies and people were talking about Studio Ghibli movies don't really have conflict and I thought that was confusing because obviously, there's lots of conflict in many of them. There's lots of problems and they solve the problems. I think that the thing that people mean when they say that isn't that there's actually no conflict, it's that there's room in those stories for quiet moments of reflection and that makes people feel like it's not conflict because you're having that space to sit with it and think about it and then continue. I think that's what is so relaxing about them. People will feel like, “I'm relaxed and so, it's not stressful and it's not conflict,” but it's giving yourself space to, I don't know, I already said it what I was going to say, so. [laughs]
\n\nAMELIA: That's really beautiful. I met this screenwriter once when I was in LA and I was really surprised by his point of view because he said a lot of people think that drama is violence, aggression, death, hardship, and he says the best drama that most people want to watch is a good person has to make a tough decision. I just loved that statement because it's true. That kind of drama, it doesn't have to just be this doom and gloom, or I'm taking in trauma and trauma there.
\n\nAs soon as he just said that phrase to me, I was like, “Tell me more. What is the story?” I was like, “Tell me, I want to know the end of your story,” he's like, “No, no, no, that's every story I tell on TV. That is my story is like –” He's like, “This is why we love hospital dramas because it's like these doctors, they need to make a tough decision and it does have life, or death consequences, but they're saving lives, or the core concept is not about death and destruction and violence. The core concept is about them trying to save a life and make a tough decision and people love that.”
\n\nSo the concept that people only like entertainment that has a lot of violence, or trauma and is like, okay, that's true and [laughs] actually people love to see a good person making a tough decision. So I always remember that when I think about storytelling.
\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, I really appreciate your sharing with us your story today and I think it's very inspiring and I think it's also really wonderful that it seems to connect to other things. It's not just your story, it's a collective story, but you are a force for bringing those stories to life and I really appreciate that. Giving people the space to tell their stories and [inaudible] their stories.
\n\nAMELIA: Oh, awesome. So thank you so much, Coraline and I see that Jamey thought of the name.
\n\nJAMEY: The term I was looking for is Ma. I don't actually know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, even though it's only two letters, M-A, but it's a Japanese word for negative space. Negative space is so important in design, white space is important in code, and the idea of negative space being important in a story, I think is really valuable.
\n\nAMELIA: That's really beautiful and I think as a collective, we always move slower and we move at the speed of the community and it changes the speed, or the way in which we tell stories, but it changes the value, I think in a positive way. Those of us who want to connect to our community can then see stories that reflect our own reality. So I think that's really beautiful. Maybe the Ma, or the space within community storytelling will be defined and have some terms someday. That'd be cool.
\n\nJAMEY: Maybe the kids from your story at the very beginning who made up the rock hand word will come up with a word for it for us. [chuckles]
\n\nAMELIA: Totally. Absolutely.
\n\nCORALINE: Amelia, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show.
\n\nAMELIA: Thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful conversation and a beautiful afternoon conversation for me. So thank you for making sunshine happen for the rest of my day.
\n\nJAMEY: Thank you so much. This was really great.
Special Guest: Amelia Winger-Bearskin.
","summary":"Amelia Bearskin-Winger talks about her Wampum.Codes project, storytelling and performance, explains the terms: “Indigenous Antecedent Technology,” and “Ethical Dependencies,” and talks about “community accountability” as opposed to “policing.”","date_published":"2021-06-30T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c2fb5d86-43d2-4c39-a86d-682eda945b81.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":40919684,"duration_in_seconds":3651}]},{"id":"618b3fea-6374-48c1-bef7-9cb273276763","title":"239: Accessibility and Sexuality with Eli Holderness","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/accessibility-and-sexuality","content_text":"01:35 - Eli’s Superpower: Germinating Seeds & Gardening\n\n03:03 - Accessibility in Tech\n\n\nChronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)\nRemote Work\n\n\n09:16 - Having Conversations with Leadership/Management\n\n\nTrust & Honesty\nCommunication\nShame & Guilt; Managing Expectations\n\n\n18:26 - Team Culture and Support\n\n\nSetting Good Examples\nReducing Stigma\nRemoving Onus \n\n\n20:09 - Human Performance & Safety\n\n\nPeople are the source of your success\nPretending Out of Fear and Rejection\nContext-Switching\n\n\n29:09 - Being Who You Are – Sexuality in the Workplace\n\n\nBattling Thoughts of Deception\n“I am allowed to change at any time.”\nI Am Me by Virginia Satir\nDiscarding Things That No Longer Fit\nThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō\n\n\n37:33 - Sobriety & Drinking Culture \n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Your marginalizations are not problems to be managed. They’re just who you are.\n\nMandy: “I own me and therefore I can engineer me.” – Virginia Satir\n\nRein: “I own everything about me, My body including everything it does; My mind including all its thoughts and ideas; My eyes including the images of all they behold; My feelings whatever they may be… anger, joy, frustration, love, disappointment, excitement My Mouth and all the words that come out of it polite, sweet or rough, correct or incorrect; My Voice loud or soft. And all my actions, whether they be to others or to myself.” – Virginia Satir\n\nEli: How complicated and complex but beautiful it is to be a person. Make space.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 239. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs.\n\nREIN: Thanks, John! And I’m here with my friend and a very special co-host, Mandy Moore.\n\nMANDY: Thanks, Rein. Hi, everyone! Today, we’re here with Eli Holderness.\n\nEli has been in tech for 5 years since graduating in 2016 and has become disabled with CFS a few months into their career, which has really affected how they view the industry and what jobs they've been able to take. They're also genderqueer, bi, ADHD, and Jewish, and they're excited to talk about finally having a job where they can bring their whole self to work. They're quite an extrovert and have been blessed with a strong queer support network since university, and are keen to break down the barriers into tech that shut out other marginalized folk who aren't so lucky as Eli has been.\n\nWelcome to the show, Eli.\n\nELI: Hi! Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and really honored to be here for Mandy’s first in on the panel. \n\nI don't really have a thesis statement for what I want to talk about today, other than I guess, general topics around accessibility and tech, and an interesting aspect of that is things that have changed over the last year with the recent horribleness.\n\nMANDY: That sounds great. But first, we have to ask you the question we always ask everyone and that is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nELI: So my superpower is, if you give me a seed, like a plant seed, I can probably germinate it and it's a double-edged sword. Recently, I saw my parents. I was lucky enough to see my parents early in the year and my mom was making a tie out with Seville oranges and she said, “I've got all these Seville orange seeds. Do you want them?” And long story short, now I have a whole crop of orange seedlings on my windowsill because I just cannot stop myself. \n\nI'm not really sure how I acquired it. I think I might have inherited it from my grandmother who grows tomatoes and is a really keen gardener, but my bedroom is slowly being taken over by plants. It's kind of a problem.\n\nMANDY: I know the feeling. Ever since the pandemic, I ended up buying 2 plants and now I think I have 15 plants? Yeah, they just keep multiplying, but I'm enjoying having them around. So that's a great superpower to have because I’m either a hit, or miss when it comes to either plants thriving, or plants die.\n\nELI: I've had really bad luck with succulents actually, which is supposed to be the typical you couldn't kill it if you tried, but apparently, maybe I've just got reversed superpowers when it comes to part like it's opposite day every day with me. But no, some of my oranges are doing quite well, so maybe you're manage to keep them alive. That’ll be nice. \n\nSo one of the things I wanted to talk about is just experiences of accessibility and tech. I work 4-day weeks and I have done for a couple of years now. That's about what I can handle with my CFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. It basically means my body just sucks. My body is an extended practical joke that God is playing on me. And how various things I hope will change after the pandemic, or we will hopefully see some of the changes in our working patterns maybe persist in ways that they've been helpful to people for accessibility, like being able to work from home obviously is a huge one. \n\nBut I think there's also been maybe a change in attitudes to meetings, how we schedule our time, and deliberately blocking off time just to work in your calendar so that you're not interruptible and various like, how those things actually can be super necessary for some people, even though we're only now coming around to them as norms in the industry. \n\nI don't know if you folks have experiences of how your work has changed and if that's made your work easier, or more difficult.\n\nJOHN: My work actually didn't change much as far as the pandemic. My team has been remote for the last decade.\n\nELI: Oh, wow.\n\nJOHN: So it didn't change things for that. Although, the rest of the company outside of technology all went remote. So we've been using that opportunity to try and help the rest of the company get up to speed on things you can do to keep the team together while they're working remotely, because we've been building that expertise for a while. That was nice to be able to help other people, get up to speed on what that was when it all happened on such short notice for everyone. \n\nAnd I think I've heard so many people talk, much like you, about hoping that the remote work situation continues afterwards because we've all just had this huge example of work can get done just fine without an office so why are you insisting on an office? Yeah, I think a lot of people are really hoping that sticks.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. For me, I feel the same. I've always worked from home. It's funny, my daughter's going to be 12 so I always base the number of years I've worked from home on her age because it was literally when she was born. So it's been 12 years that I've done this. \n\nBut I will say that over the pandemic, a lot of other people are now coming around to knowing that working from home, while it is a privilege, it's not exactly easy. I've had to put a lot of boundaries in place with my clients and take a lot more self-care because I feel like the pandemic has been a very unique situation. For me, at least, it's not the same as it used to be working from home. Working from home, I had more schedule and regimen and stuff, but now, as I said, my daughter, she's doing remote schooling this year. So there's that, \n\nI also, for my mental health, need to work out every day and I just do that when I feel like right now is a good time where I should take a break. I need to get up and do that kind of thing. Back before I used to be like, “Okay, 3 o'clock is the time where I go and work out.” Now it's like, whenever I need a minute, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need a brief break, I go and do it. \n\nSo I've kind of had to put more boundaries in place and a lot of people are now a lot better about that. I'm not getting excessive pings on my phone, or text messages, “Where are you? Where are you?” I stress to my clients asynchronous like, “I'll be back. I promise, I promise you I will be back, but please don't call me saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ [laughs] because I need some time away from the screen.” \n\nI find myself much more productive when I sit down and do an hour, or two and then go do something, like the dishes, or the laundry, and then come back for an hour, or two, and then go prepare dinner, or do a doctor's appointment, and then come back for an hour, or two and break up my day in that way. \n\nSo I think that the pandemic has allowed us to be a lot more accessible in that way and a lot of companies are being much more like you don't have to have butts in chairs from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00, or whatever hours those are.\n\nELI: It's interesting for me because one of the things that I lost when we went to work from home because I've always been in an office until this past year, but I, with my ADHD, really benefit from externally imposed structure. I actually gave a talk at a conference back in March, Python web conference, about working from home with ADHD. \n\nHaving to be work from home and not have the structure of an office has really made me confront a lot of the ways that I was coasting based on that external structure and not really addressing maladaptive behaviors I had. So when we started working from home, I found myself just really procrastinating until I was able to put in place things like, “Okay, don't contact me at this time because I'm going to be head down on a piece of code,” and if I get distracted by something, somebody coming in with a support ticket that needs to be done, I will be thrown off kilter for the entire rest of the day and broke my flow, like break my hyper-focus. \n\nSo that was something where actually my chronic fatigue was less of a factor in my ability to work over this past year than my ADHD had been, which it flown under the radar for almost my entire life. But one of the things that's been really nice as well as that, the place that I'm at now at the moment, I can just say, “Oh, my brain is full of BS today. I'm not going to be very productive.” \n\nA huge part of being able to work as well as I do at the moment is having people who are willing to work with me in the ways that I need, which is really nice and letting me have a 4-day week, which is surprisingly uncommon. I have been turned down from a lot of job interviews and whatnot for needing a 4-day week and that's something I hope we see less off going forward as our industry accepts that a more flexible working pattern can still be useful, productive, and valuable.\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I agree. So how do you bring up conversations with people you work with, or your bosses, or management team? What do you say? How do you tell them what your individual needs are and what are their reactions?\n\nELI: So the place I'm working at the moment, Anvil, it's a really small team. There's 8 of us and it's pretty flat structure as well. While I have the two co-founders, Meredydd and Ian, they run things as it were, but it's not a traditional, I guess, management. I don't feel beholden to them in the same way that I would to like, they're not my boss exactly, but they do pay my salary, but they're not my bosses in that sense. So if I say to them, “Look, I'm not going to be able to get this thing done because I just can't focus today,” or multiple times I said, “Oh, my brain is full of BS. My brain is too full of sludge today. I'm going to take a nap.” I did that today. The trust is there for them to say, “Okay, go do that and you'll get your work done when you get your work done.” \n\nSo when I bring things up, like we have regular check-ins, or whatever, I might say, “Oh, I've been in a rut lately and I think I really need to change what I'm working on,” or how I'm working on it. This thing isn't working, that thing isn't working and whether, or not it's because of one of the weird ways that my brain, or my body is, they just handle it as if it were a need. There's no fuss just because it's a rising from a way that I am outside the norm, which I think is the ideal way to handle it because obviously, every person is unique and what we define as norms, or any vague clusterings of behaviors and traits that we see in people. It's just the most common way for a person to be, but everybody is going to differ from it in some way.\n\nI have had experiences in the past when the trust hasn't been there and I've said “Something's not working,” or “I'm struggling,” and a manager has just not, I guess, believed that I was being genuine, thought I was skiving, and that has been some of the worst experiences. I think that's where some of the dark side of inaccessibility and it's not just in tech. That could be in any workplace is when there isn't trust between you and the person that you serve, the person you're working for, the person who's representing your employer to you.\n\nWhen I say my views on accessibility have really shaped the way that I view the industry and what jobs I've taken, that's one of the key things that has to be there is my managers have to trust that I'm being honest about my abilities and my needs. And that's true for anyone, but I think it becomes particularly weighty when you're talking about things that arise from marginalizations. \n\nJOHN: And do you find that that's trust that you have to build up in relationship with those managers, or it has to be there from the beginning, because from the beginning, you're going to need some way to work with them and build some flexibility into your working relationship?\n\nELI: So the relationships I'm thinking of where that trust has been present, and they've been really fruitful and positive relationships, it has been there just from the start, or given on faith, as it were. As I say, I became disabled fairly early on, it was three months out of university—fantastic, right—and I had just had a new manager. There has just been a shakeup in the management chain and the manager who I was then placed with had never known me not being ill and I was dealing with suddenly being ill, not knowing what was happening to me, and so on. I think it would have been a very different experience had he trusted me that I was being honest and not just trying to skive and get away with being in a cushy software job without doing any work, which is very much how that situation did play out. \n\nI think if the trust isn't there from the start, it's going to be very hard to earn and I think that part of hiring somebody and expecting them to work with you, if you don't trust them to be able to do that and manage their needs, expectations, and abilities, you have no business hiring them, in my opinion. \n\nJOHN: It struck me like, as you were saying that, that if the person is coming to that situation as, “Oh, you've got to always keep an eye on people because they're always trying to get one over on you and find ways to not work very hard,” or whatever. That person is never going to have a fantastic relationship with their rapports and then once you add in the other marginalizations on top of that, it just goes down and he'll leave him faster.\n\nELI: And that's something that I think we've seen over the last year with reluctance, or resistance to moving to work from home, where if somebody who is managing has been very used to being able to walk around and see what's on everyone's screens and have this sense that they are keeping an eye on. They’re making sure nobody is secretly playing Minecraft for 8 hours a day, or whatever. But moving to work from home requires that trust and it reminds me of there's some advice I've had about having a long-distance romantic relationship where you've got to be really, really good at trust and communication. Those are two things that you should have in any serious relationship whether romantic, or not.\n\nI think that maybe working from home over the last year has exposed, in some relationships, but I think about work relationships where those things haven't been present. But it's not that working from home created them as that it exposed them and the companies, I think that are doing the best now at maintaining and building those relationships between co-workers in their management structure are ones that probably already had that and probably has set themselves up for success by just having a healthy environment to begin with. \n\nMANDY: So I have a tendency when I start with a new client—I'm an independent contractor; I work for several companies—my tendency is to always under promise and over deliver and then I do that and I'm really good at doing that. But then things inevitably come up, I get sick, and then I feel like I'm letting them down because it's like well, they expect the bar to be here and now it's down here. And then I'm disappointing them and they're like, “Well, where's the Mandy that we hired?” and it's like, well, you did hire that Mandy, but that Mandy is not here today.\n\nDo you have those feelings, first of all, and if you do, how do you deal with them?\n\nELI: Yeah, the guilt. Whenever I have to take a day off sick, my goodness and it has definitely been compounded by the experiences that I've had of not being trusted. If I say that I need to take a day off sick and people go, “Oh, well, couldn’t you come in anyway?” I've been very fortunate in the last couple of jobs that I've had where I've had really, really supportive relationships with managers that were full of trust. So I'm slowly starting to creep back from that a little bit. \n\nOne of the ways that I think I got to that point, though, or one of the things that really helped me was upfront managing expectations. So I take days off now when I get sick, as opposed to having overdone it with fatigue and it’s got to a point in my fatigue where I need to take days off just to rest by cutting back to 4 days a week.\n\nThat's one of the things where I say actually, I'm going to factor in that Eli isn't here today, that Eli won't be here one day a week. So don't hire me on that day and that was a choice I made because I wanted to stay in work, essentially. That was the only way I could consistently, in good faith, promise to be able to deliver a consistent amount of at the time being in the office. That's the big thing that I've done. \n\nI think there's a lot of shame that comes with having a chronic illness, not being at your best 100% as well. I think that in the tech industry, in particular, there’s this mentality of you’ve got to hustle. The rockstar developer and admitting that you can't be that. I even said the word admitting as if it was a failure, but stating that that's not possible for you can be seen as and can certainly feel like it being a failure and that's not fun, but at the same time for me, it's certainly true. I'm never going to be a rockstar developer putting in 70-hour weeks and cranking out loads of code. That's just not me. So tackling that head on and just admitting it and saying, “If this is a problem, then it's not going to work out.” \n\nI have had a lot of places that I have been pinged by recruiters and then I say, “I can do a 4-day week. These are the terms that I can work on,” and they don't want it and that's their call to make. I hope that that will change. I hope that will change soon as a result of the recognition that flexible working [chuckles] is good actually for parents, for people with disabilities, for all kinds of people. \n\nBut that's one of the big ways that I've managed those feelings and cut down on the situations where there's feelings of rise, but it's definitely it's something I massively relate to. I still do struggle to take time off and I'm really lucky at the moment to have. I had my checkup with Ian this week and one of the first things he said was, “When you're going to take some time off soon?” because I've been working a lot recently and that was really lovely. \n\nSo having supportive coworkers and they lead by example as well, they take time off just whatever, and it's great and it doesn't make us less productive, or I think it makes us healthier as a team and it certainly helps me navigate all the issues that I have surrounding it, which are myriad.\n\nJOHN: You touched on an interesting point right there at the end there about how not only is it useful for you to have obviously management buy-in with working and the flexibility that you need, but having the team culture of everybody around you, also them taking the time that they need and working on the flexes that they need to flex is an incredibly important part of supporting you in feeling like it's okay for you to do those things.\n\nELI: Yeah. It reminds me of, I guess, the push to put pronouns in your bio, or your screenname regardless of whether, or not you are somebody who people get your pronouns wrong. Because there's this phenomenon where strictly speaking, something is allowed, but if it's outside the norm, you still feel odd. You might feel ashamed of doing it. So even if you are allowed to take mental health days at your place of work, if nobody else does, you're still not allowed. Socially, you're not allowed almost. \n\nSo setting healthy norms opens doors for everybody, including those who need the doors open for them, as it were. Like me. [laughs] I don't always have the energy to advocate for myself because of the reasons that I need to advocate for myself. \n\nLeading by example on the part of the people that I work with and the people who have the clout organizationally, even though we have quite a flat structure at Anvil. That's one of the things my manager at my last place as well, was really, really fantastic about was setting good examples. Definitely reducing the stigma around taking care of yourself, removing the onus from the person who will have the hardest time advocating for themselves. \n\nREIN: Well, I think there's a pretty general statement here, which is that managers that don't trust their employees are bad managers.\n\nELI: I think it's very hard to be a good manager if you don't trust your employees. I'm thinking of, it's not in tech, but I did work a retail job and I think across that industry, that's just it. That’s not a thing; you're not trusted by your manager if you work in retail just as a default. The places where you are a unicorn land rare. \n\nI think I would agree with that general statement. I hesitate to make sweeping statements just in general because humans are so fast, complex, and complicated that there will almost always be a counterexample to whatever sweeping statement. \n\nBut I think trust has to be the basis of any healthy relationship. If you're working together towards some shared goal as a relationship is whether, or not that's to have fun hanging out, or to get some work done, you have to trust that you're both committed to that, I suppose and lacking that trust for why you hired that person, why they're working for you, I suppose.\n\nREIN: In human factors on safety science, there's an old view of human performance, which is that people are a problem to be managed. People make mistakes; they have to be trained, they have to be watched, they have to be supervised. They can't be trusted to make decisions. People are a problem to be managed. The way you get a safer workplace is by dealing with problem employees and making sure that they don't screw up. \n\nThe new view of human performance and safety is that people are the source of your success. \n\nELI: Thinking about humans as problems and eventually, by eliminating any aspect of humanity that causes problems, you're just going to end up with nothing. It reminds me of that bot that was trained to debug code basis and it just deleted the code base. It was like, “There's no bugs because there's no code!” And there'll be no problems with us no humans, but there’ll be no success either.\n\nREIN: So I think that managers who look at people like they’re a problem to be managed are the source of a lot of these issues.\n\nELI: Yeah, that definitely resonates with me in the sense that that's how I felt in my negative experiences, especially when it comes to managing my ability to work and viewing my marginalizations as problems to be managed instead of just ways that I am. \n\nREIN: Yeah. \n\nELI: Which is a difficult one to navigate with chronic fatigue. I didn't always have this disability and it has limited my life, but it's also, I think made me think very deeply about things that I wouldn't have otherwise. So in my case, I think there's been a silver lining and now it is a part of the way that I am and you can take it, or leave it, but it's a package deal with me working for you, or me being friends with you, or me being part of your D&D group and it has to be accepted and can't be managed away.\n\nI think that's been the case as well with my other marginalizations Mandy rattled rattling off the whole litany of various things that I am and I have definitely had instances. \n\nSo for example, with my Jewishness, where I have been expected not to bring it to work almost. Of course, in the UK, we don't actually have separation of church and state, we are actually a Christian country. Everyone does Christmas and you've got all the loads of the bank holidays and what not, Easter.\n\nWhenever I would make a remark that I did not fall into this norm, and actually I would be celebrating Passover instead of Easter and it was a slightly different time, it was viewed as like I was causing problems for being different almost even though it was just an aspect of the way that I am. So I think that's an attitude that definitely pervades and it's definitely harmful on more axes than just disability and ability to work.\n\nMANDY: I actually think that that’s an attitude that that needs to go. I've worked for people where I've totally been afraid to be my best self because I'm afraid they'll fire me. Like, I pretended to be a conservative for a very long time with a client and boy, was that stressful! [laughs] For me, a lot of it is fear and being rejected and then all of a sudden, I don't have a job and then all of a sudden, I can’t pay my bills and then it just spirals from there. So it leads to a lot of almost pretending to be someone that I'm not for fear of looking good, or looking a certain way, or being perceived as a certain person and it becomes really, really stressful.\n\nELI: The way that I handled being genderqueer is I just based on vibes whether, or not I'm going to come out and at what stage. So at my current place, on my first day, I was like, “By the way, I use they/them pronouns. I’m genderqueer,” and absolutely plain sailing. It was totally fine. A couple of jobs ago, I decided not to and let everyone just assume that I was a woman, which is how I present essentially, or that's what most people assume by looking at me. Part of the reason for that was that the CTO was a Trump supporter who, it was one of the people who had jokes for everybody in the office. He had little funny jabs that he would make. “Funny jabs” and his funny jab for me was that I drank instant coffee and it was not real coffee. I just thought if he is going to make fun of me every morning for not drinking real coffee, what kind of fun is he going to make of me for not having a real gender and I thought, you know what, safer probably just to not bring it up. It is stressful and I felt dishonest and I'm not sure if I were in the same situation now, I'd be looking for another job, but I'm not. [chuckles] \n\nBut being able to bring your whole self to work, I definitely tried before and been rebuffed and this is the first time that I think it's sticking with my current place, which is such a joy, honestly. I cannot overstate it and part of it is an intentional effort on the people creating and it's enshrining the culture to allow that. \n\nI think there's probably some truth to the idea that with norms the way that they are and with norms that don't allow you to be your whole self and that will punish you for being certain ways, it does require an active effort on people creating culture to go against that, which is a shame because if you're trying to get a business up and running, that might not be your highest priority, but as soon as you let it slip even a little bit, it's just going to spiral.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. You're right that it takes intentional effort that a culture like that does not happen by accident, or just falls into that. [laughs] One of the things I'm curious about is were are you able to suss out that aspect of the culture before you started this job, or did you get there and then realize that you'd locked into it?\n\nELI: One of the things that was funny about what I was interviewing for this job was that I'd actually met one of the founders. We met at a social event in Cambridge briefly and I think not caught his name, not followed up, but we met, talked briefly, really vibed. And then when I went to this interview for oh, it’s a developer advocate job, that sounds great. The company looks nice. The product is cool. And I went into the interview and I was like, “Oh, it's you!” Somebody that I’d met briefly, really got along with. \n\nOne of the things that Anvil did and that Meredydd and Ian did was, very deliberately, make sure that they were trying to be gender inclusive in their hiring from a very early stage. So even when I interviewed, there were four people and one of the core platform developers was a woman. I say was as if she's not with the company anymore; she is. [chuckles] \n\nVery early on in me working at Anvil, one of the things that one of them said to me was we were very conscious that if we got to a stage where it was 10 men and we're trying to hire our first woman, that woman being interviewed is not going to be inclined to take the job and be the only woman in the room with 10 guys. \n\nI guess, I got lucky in the sense that they found the woman candidate, Bridget, who was incredible and that they didn't happen to end up finding that the best candidate every single time was a guy. But they’re certainly intentional and it's something that we send her when we're trying to find new people as well because it's done us well so far! It's something that I have looked for in the past as well is when I’ve said, thinking about which jobs I'm able to take, trust with the managers and the ability to be myself, because it's so exhausting when you have to create and impersonate a whole other person.\n\nMANDY: There is a lot of context switching.\n\nELI: Oh, yes. I’m trying to remember who's out where. My fiancé is genderqueer as well and there was a time when we were each out at each other's jobs, but we weren't out at our own jobs. So we were each being read as a cisgender at our own jobs, but with a genderqueer partner and it was just so confusing. I barely got enough brain to handle my day job, [laughs] let alone being two, or three different people in different places.\n\nMANDY: Now, I'm curious about that, if I can ask. So I'm actually going through that right now. I’m bisexual and not a lot of people know that and it's like, “Do I need to make a grand announcement?”\n\nELI: I just like to pepper into conversation that I think Lucy Lou is really hot, or something. I don't know. It's a hard one. That's how I came out to my parents is that I was just loudly interested in women in front of them and never really said anything, but it's too much to my memory. I got very lucky with my parents as well because my younger brother is transgender as well. He actually came out before me and paved the way and so, when it came time to come out to them as genderqueer, I just gave him a phone call. I said, “By the way, I'm genderqueer. My friends are using they pronouns for me. You can, if you want,” and just left it. \n\nNo, that is a difficult thing. Coming out, it's hard at any stage because that I've always felt is that I fear I've deceived people, but actually it's not me. It's the norms and assumptions that are being made completely in good faith by people that's not necessarily the people are being malicious when they assume me to be a woman, or assume me to be straight, but that I have to inform them that they're wrong and that's scary. \n\nI don't like conflict and oh, there's a potential for conflict here because I have to tell them that they're wrong and nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody likes to have made an incorrect assumption. It's difficult every time and I think the way that I get through it these days is just by being obnoxiously confident of people. Just saying, “Oh, if you were taking it back. I'm sorry, get over it.” [laughs]\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I’ve just been slowly peppering it into the people I trust and it’s like I do feel that level of deceit. I’m like these people have known me as a straight woman for—I'm not going to disclose my age—this many years and now all of a sudden, she's not? Like, is this a phase, is this a – you have those people and then to me, people who have been queer, or bi, am I gay enough? Am I – you know? [laughs] So it’s like there’s this whole spectrum of I don’t know where I am, somebody please help me! [laughs]\n\nELI: Oh, that am I gay enough? I still have that. So I'm genderqueer and I've had top surgery. I wanted to have a flat chest and I was able to do that and sometimes, I still go, “But I'm not trans enough to have done that.” [laughs] The level to which you can absorb that kind of rhetoric, it's really quite impressive actually. Am I gay enough? Gay enough of what? Yeah, and the thing about is it a phase, “Everything's a phase, mum, show me the permanent state of the self, there's no such thing.”\n\nMANDY: One of my favorite affirmations is I am allowed to change at any time. I like to look at myself in the mirror and if I decide I'm with a woman and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work out and I want to go back to being with a man and I'm stringing. Again, I am allowed to change any time. I don't owe anybody that and I'm working on that. It's taken a lot of therapy for me to get to that stage, [chuckles] but all I owe is to myself.\n\nELI: I have a friend who had been going through a crisis of identity and basically to me, it seemed very clear that they were much, much happier in one label than the other and so, to me, that's what automated the decision. But obviously, it's not so clear when you're in the middle of it and one thing I said to them that I helped was, “Even if you turned around tomorrow and said, ‘Oh no, I'm actually this other thing.’ If you lose any friends for that and somebody says, ‘Oh, you are fraud. You were lying to me all this time.’ That wasn't your friend to start with. It will be okay.” You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide where and how and what label makes you comfortable and which behaviors in yourself you want to celebrate, or accentuate.\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I feel like that's very important to hear. As I've been navigating this, this past few years, I’ve realized I'm not alone. So I think some of the listeners out there, if you are going through new identity crisis, or I’m not going to call it an identity crisis, but if you're struggling with who you are, I think everybody is to one extent, or another. Even as a person, not just a gay person, or not just as a straight person, or not just as a political person, I think everyone out there is just struggling; who am I and right now, especially.\n\nELI: Yeah, that’s something that with this friend I was discussing is the idea of an objective truth about yourself and whether, or not that exists. Would I be a ciswoman if this thing of my past was different, or I'd had a different balance of hormones while I was in the womb, or any of those ways that people try to find causes, or pathologize, or rationalize the ways in which humans are complex, different, and unique. \n\nI think I found comfort and peace in the idea that there isn't necessarily an objective truth buried at the heart of me underneath layers of experience, or whatever. I am who I am at this moment; that is broadly continuous one moment to the next, but it might change. At some point, I will have found that I've crossed a boundary over time maybe. I used to identify as a woman and then I don't think anything about myself abruptly changed, but one day, I was like, “No, actually I'm not. Yeah, women are great, but I'm not one. I'm not one of them.” That's not dishonest and it's not disingenuous to change over time, or to find that your surroundings have changed around you and that you relate to them differently. \n\nSo for example, going back to the oh, what if the objective truth about myself, if I had grown up in a culture where being a woman looks different than it does now, or than it has in my life, I might have thought differently about my gender over time. But that doesn't mean that the way that I am is not real.\n\nREIN: This gives me the opportunity I've been looking for to name drop Virginia Satir. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nELI: Ooh.\n\nREIN: She wrote a poem that I really love called I Am Me and I'll just read a little bit of it. It says, “However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest and invent something new for that which I discarded.” And later it says, “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.”\n\nELI: As someone with a customized body, I love that. [laughs]\n\nMANDY: I love that.\n\nELI: I love that as a way to approach therapy as well. I'm somewhere for whom, I'm very lucky in the what is recommended as the basic bitch first line therapy here in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for me. And that is very much, I am objective looking at my thoughts and trying to encourage the ones that I agree with and discourage the ones I don't; engineering debug my brain.\n\nREIN: It might not surprise you that she was a family therapist.\n\nELI: I like that. More therapists should be poets, [chuckles] in my opinion. I've had therapists that have said some incredibly profound things. I like the idea of as well, the imagery of discarding things which no longer fit you whether that's labels, or behaviors, or friendship groups, or political alignments, or whatever in the same way that you would with clothes. \n\nThis is something where I've recently read Marie Kondo's incredible book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, and really loved the idea of everything you own which sparks joy and that you can look at something which no longer fits you and say, “Thank you for the role you've played in my life. It's over now,” and put it away and donate to charity, or whatever. I think applying that same method to non-physical aspects of our lives that we've outgrown that need to be put away, I think it certainly helped me to avoid the sense of shame, or guilt, or feeling disingenuous that comes with growing and changing as a person.\n\nMANDY: I feel the same applies to sobriety, which is also a thing that I struggle with. Like, drinking alcohol? It was fun while it lasted. We had some good times. We had some not so good times, but it no longer serves me so we're not going to do that anymore. [chuckles]\n\nELI: Yeah. That's another axis on which I want to circle back to accessibility and tech because here in the UK, we have a really strong drinking culture and from my understanding, it varies across the States and but here in the UK, it is very much we are getting drunk at house parties from our early teens. \n\nThe first place I worked had a very strong drinking culture. All of your work relationships were to be strengthened down the pub over a pint. Every work party was drink-y. I have a friend who is teetotal not due to, as far as I know, any religious, just a completely personal choice and actually that was one of the factors in them leaving that role at that company was because they were not allowed to be their whole self at work because being at work meant drinking to a certain extent, if you want it to be successful, popular, get the good projects and obviously, that locks so many people out. People who are sober for whatever reason. People who might not be drinking because they might be pregnant. People who just don't like to drink. [overtalk]\n\nMANDY: [inaudible] drinking.\n\nELI: Yeah. People for religious reasons, or health reasons. It's one that I think again, sing the praises of my current place, when we hang out COVID safe ways we dislike lunchtime picnics and stuff and we've got new parents at our company who we want to be able to include in social gatherings and make sure that it's not predicated on drinking and being out late to be able to socialize with your coworkers, if you choose that that's something that you want. I think it's probably another thing where you have to take an active stance on it. So it's not to just absorb paradigms from the greatest society that you're embedded in.\n\nMANDY: I'm not going to say I'm not nervous for running conferences on Zoom because conferences do have a very big drinking culture and that’s a socializing thing and I’m very nervous about how I'm going to navigate that. It just seems like it's everywhere, but I’ve come to the place where I’m just going to say no and I have some fancy mocktails I like so that's what I'll be doing. [chuckles]\n\nELI: Yeah. Something I really liked recently was—I do drink and I do like to drink—but I was at Python web conference and after the day it was done of talks and things, there was fun social event afterwards and it was all virtual because it's March and it was somebody making cocktails in their kitchen and showing us all of his fancy cocktail gear and the virgin ones, the non-alcoholic ones were given equal parity, like time and attention were paid to them. It was just presented as completely not noteworthy at all that somebody might not drink alcohol and I think that was a really nice way of framing it. It was just, here is the alcoholic question and here is non-alcoholic version and there's no value judgment being made about the two. I think that was also an active choice on behalf of the person doing that presentation and the people organizing the conference. \n\nBut so many different ways that not paying attention to these things can lock people out of the industry and contribute to that good old leaky pipeline that we all know and love. \n\nJOHN: When we come to the end of every show, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that struck us about the conversations, or the ideas that we're going to be thinking about later. \n\nFor me, something you said Eli, just recently was that your marginalizations are not problems to be managed rather they're just the way you are, they're just who you are is such a powerful statement about identity and how it should be thought about and treated that I really didn't like the phrasing of it is something that can be just repeated to drill it into everybody's head.\n\nMANDY: For me, I really liked the Virginia Satir poem that Rein shared, especially the last bit of “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” I think that is so relevant and such a good way for everyone to keep in mind. I really believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of change. No, let me say that again because I think you can be afraid of change, but it's going to be okay and you are allowed to be afraid of change and it can be overwhelming and it can be scary, but you can get through it and I’m going to get through it.\n\nThank you for allowing me to tell a little bit of my truth for the first time and in the tech world and on this podcast!\n\nJOHN: It's really great to have you on the show, finally. Your show.\n\nREIN: Yeah, you know in Lincoln, the welcome to your house scene? This is like the welcome to your podcast scene.\n\nMANDY: It’s not just my podcast. It’s all of ours.\n\nELI: Bugs Bunny meme. Oh, podcast.\n\nREIN: I thought I might close this out by reading another part of that poem. She says, “I own everything about me. My body including everything it does. My mind including all its thoughts and ideas. My eyes including the images of all they behold. My feelings, whatever they may be—anger, joy, frustration, disappointment, excitement. My mouth and all of the words that come out of it—rude, or polite, sweet, or rough, correct, or incorrect. My voice loud, or soft. And all of my actions, whether they be to others, or to myself.” \n\nMANDY: I love that. Thank you. \n\nEli, how about you?\n\nELI: I guess I'm just thinking about all the different ways that people can be and how complicated, complex, beautiful, different, and diverse it is to be a person, the same person over time even. If space isn't made for that, including, or not including things that we understand to be marginalizations in our current model, it harms people and the places that put effort into making space for people to be people in all the messy, complex, weird ways that they are. I've got to do better! That's well deserved.\n\nREIN: Yeah, it turns out that that's good business, but it's also the right thing to do. \n\nELI: Fully agreed, yeah.\n\nMANDY: Well, again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eli. It has been absolutely wonderful having you and I’m so glad it’s been you here to be on my first episode as a panelist of Greater Than Code and for listeners out there, I hope you like what you’ve heard and maybe you’ll see a little bit of me in the future. But if you would also like to talk to the rest of the panel, we do have a Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can join it for as little as a dollar and if you cannot support it, or you don’t want to support it, just get in contact with me and I will let you in anyway.\n\nThank you for much for listening and hopefully, I will talk to you very soon.Special Guest: Eli Holderness.","content_html":"01:35 - Eli’s Superpower: Germinating Seeds & Gardening
\n\n03:03 - Accessibility in Tech
\n\n09:16 - Having Conversations with Leadership/Management
\n\n18:26 - Team Culture and Support
\n\n20:09 - Human Performance & Safety
\n\n29:09 - Being Who You Are – Sexuality in the Workplace
\n\n37:33 - Sobriety & Drinking Culture
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Your marginalizations are not problems to be managed. They’re just who you are.
\n\nMandy: “I own me and therefore I can engineer me.” – Virginia Satir
\n\n\n\nEli: How complicated and complex but beautiful it is to be a person. Make space.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 239. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, John! And I’m here with my friend and a very special co-host, Mandy Moore.
\n\nMANDY: Thanks, Rein. Hi, everyone! Today, we’re here with Eli Holderness.
\n\nEli has been in tech for 5 years since graduating in 2016 and has become disabled with CFS a few months into their career, which has really affected how they view the industry and what jobs they've been able to take. They're also genderqueer, bi, ADHD, and Jewish, and they're excited to talk about finally having a job where they can bring their whole self to work. They're quite an extrovert and have been blessed with a strong queer support network since university, and are keen to break down the barriers into tech that shut out other marginalized folk who aren't so lucky as Eli has been.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Eli.
\n\nELI: Hi! Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and really honored to be here for Mandy’s first in on the panel.
\n\nI don't really have a thesis statement for what I want to talk about today, other than I guess, general topics around accessibility and tech, and an interesting aspect of that is things that have changed over the last year with the recent horribleness.
\n\nMANDY: That sounds great. But first, we have to ask you the question we always ask everyone and that is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nELI: So my superpower is, if you give me a seed, like a plant seed, I can probably germinate it and it's a double-edged sword. Recently, I saw my parents. I was lucky enough to see my parents early in the year and my mom was making a tie out with Seville oranges and she said, “I've got all these Seville orange seeds. Do you want them?” And long story short, now I have a whole crop of orange seedlings on my windowsill because I just cannot stop myself.
\n\nI'm not really sure how I acquired it. I think I might have inherited it from my grandmother who grows tomatoes and is a really keen gardener, but my bedroom is slowly being taken over by plants. It's kind of a problem.
\n\nMANDY: I know the feeling. Ever since the pandemic, I ended up buying 2 plants and now I think I have 15 plants? Yeah, they just keep multiplying, but I'm enjoying having them around. So that's a great superpower to have because I’m either a hit, or miss when it comes to either plants thriving, or plants die.
\n\nELI: I've had really bad luck with succulents actually, which is supposed to be the typical you couldn't kill it if you tried, but apparently, maybe I've just got reversed superpowers when it comes to part like it's opposite day every day with me. But no, some of my oranges are doing quite well, so maybe you're manage to keep them alive. That’ll be nice.
\n\nSo one of the things I wanted to talk about is just experiences of accessibility and tech. I work 4-day weeks and I have done for a couple of years now. That's about what I can handle with my CFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. It basically means my body just sucks. My body is an extended practical joke that God is playing on me. And how various things I hope will change after the pandemic, or we will hopefully see some of the changes in our working patterns maybe persist in ways that they've been helpful to people for accessibility, like being able to work from home obviously is a huge one.
\n\nBut I think there's also been maybe a change in attitudes to meetings, how we schedule our time, and deliberately blocking off time just to work in your calendar so that you're not interruptible and various like, how those things actually can be super necessary for some people, even though we're only now coming around to them as norms in the industry.
\n\nI don't know if you folks have experiences of how your work has changed and if that's made your work easier, or more difficult.
\n\nJOHN: My work actually didn't change much as far as the pandemic. My team has been remote for the last decade.
\n\nELI: Oh, wow.
\n\nJOHN: So it didn't change things for that. Although, the rest of the company outside of technology all went remote. So we've been using that opportunity to try and help the rest of the company get up to speed on things you can do to keep the team together while they're working remotely, because we've been building that expertise for a while. That was nice to be able to help other people, get up to speed on what that was when it all happened on such short notice for everyone.
\n\nAnd I think I've heard so many people talk, much like you, about hoping that the remote work situation continues afterwards because we've all just had this huge example of work can get done just fine without an office so why are you insisting on an office? Yeah, I think a lot of people are really hoping that sticks.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. For me, I feel the same. I've always worked from home. It's funny, my daughter's going to be 12 so I always base the number of years I've worked from home on her age because it was literally when she was born. So it's been 12 years that I've done this.
\n\nBut I will say that over the pandemic, a lot of other people are now coming around to knowing that working from home, while it is a privilege, it's not exactly easy. I've had to put a lot of boundaries in place with my clients and take a lot more self-care because I feel like the pandemic has been a very unique situation. For me, at least, it's not the same as it used to be working from home. Working from home, I had more schedule and regimen and stuff, but now, as I said, my daughter, she's doing remote schooling this year. So there's that,
\n\nI also, for my mental health, need to work out every day and I just do that when I feel like right now is a good time where I should take a break. I need to get up and do that kind of thing. Back before I used to be like, “Okay, 3 o'clock is the time where I go and work out.” Now it's like, whenever I need a minute, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need a brief break, I go and do it.
\n\nSo I've kind of had to put more boundaries in place and a lot of people are now a lot better about that. I'm not getting excessive pings on my phone, or text messages, “Where are you? Where are you?” I stress to my clients asynchronous like, “I'll be back. I promise, I promise you I will be back, but please don't call me saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ [laughs] because I need some time away from the screen.”
\n\nI find myself much more productive when I sit down and do an hour, or two and then go do something, like the dishes, or the laundry, and then come back for an hour, or two, and then go prepare dinner, or do a doctor's appointment, and then come back for an hour, or two and break up my day in that way.
\n\nSo I think that the pandemic has allowed us to be a lot more accessible in that way and a lot of companies are being much more like you don't have to have butts in chairs from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00, or whatever hours those are.
\n\nELI: It's interesting for me because one of the things that I lost when we went to work from home because I've always been in an office until this past year, but I, with my ADHD, really benefit from externally imposed structure. I actually gave a talk at a conference back in March, Python web conference, about working from home with ADHD.
\n\nHaving to be work from home and not have the structure of an office has really made me confront a lot of the ways that I was coasting based on that external structure and not really addressing maladaptive behaviors I had. So when we started working from home, I found myself just really procrastinating until I was able to put in place things like, “Okay, don't contact me at this time because I'm going to be head down on a piece of code,” and if I get distracted by something, somebody coming in with a support ticket that needs to be done, I will be thrown off kilter for the entire rest of the day and broke my flow, like break my hyper-focus.
\n\nSo that was something where actually my chronic fatigue was less of a factor in my ability to work over this past year than my ADHD had been, which it flown under the radar for almost my entire life. But one of the things that's been really nice as well as that, the place that I'm at now at the moment, I can just say, “Oh, my brain is full of BS today. I'm not going to be very productive.”
\n\nA huge part of being able to work as well as I do at the moment is having people who are willing to work with me in the ways that I need, which is really nice and letting me have a 4-day week, which is surprisingly uncommon. I have been turned down from a lot of job interviews and whatnot for needing a 4-day week and that's something I hope we see less off going forward as our industry accepts that a more flexible working pattern can still be useful, productive, and valuable.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I agree. So how do you bring up conversations with people you work with, or your bosses, or management team? What do you say? How do you tell them what your individual needs are and what are their reactions?
\n\nELI: So the place I'm working at the moment, Anvil, it's a really small team. There's 8 of us and it's pretty flat structure as well. While I have the two co-founders, Meredydd and Ian, they run things as it were, but it's not a traditional, I guess, management. I don't feel beholden to them in the same way that I would to like, they're not my boss exactly, but they do pay my salary, but they're not my bosses in that sense. So if I say to them, “Look, I'm not going to be able to get this thing done because I just can't focus today,” or multiple times I said, “Oh, my brain is full of BS. My brain is too full of sludge today. I'm going to take a nap.” I did that today. The trust is there for them to say, “Okay, go do that and you'll get your work done when you get your work done.”
\n\nSo when I bring things up, like we have regular check-ins, or whatever, I might say, “Oh, I've been in a rut lately and I think I really need to change what I'm working on,” or how I'm working on it. This thing isn't working, that thing isn't working and whether, or not it's because of one of the weird ways that my brain, or my body is, they just handle it as if it were a need. There's no fuss just because it's a rising from a way that I am outside the norm, which I think is the ideal way to handle it because obviously, every person is unique and what we define as norms, or any vague clusterings of behaviors and traits that we see in people. It's just the most common way for a person to be, but everybody is going to differ from it in some way.
\n\nI have had experiences in the past when the trust hasn't been there and I've said “Something's not working,” or “I'm struggling,” and a manager has just not, I guess, believed that I was being genuine, thought I was skiving, and that has been some of the worst experiences. I think that's where some of the dark side of inaccessibility and it's not just in tech. That could be in any workplace is when there isn't trust between you and the person that you serve, the person you're working for, the person who's representing your employer to you.
\n\nWhen I say my views on accessibility have really shaped the way that I view the industry and what jobs I've taken, that's one of the key things that has to be there is my managers have to trust that I'm being honest about my abilities and my needs. And that's true for anyone, but I think it becomes particularly weighty when you're talking about things that arise from marginalizations.
\n\nJOHN: And do you find that that's trust that you have to build up in relationship with those managers, or it has to be there from the beginning, because from the beginning, you're going to need some way to work with them and build some flexibility into your working relationship?
\n\nELI: So the relationships I'm thinking of where that trust has been present, and they've been really fruitful and positive relationships, it has been there just from the start, or given on faith, as it were. As I say, I became disabled fairly early on, it was three months out of university—fantastic, right—and I had just had a new manager. There has just been a shakeup in the management chain and the manager who I was then placed with had never known me not being ill and I was dealing with suddenly being ill, not knowing what was happening to me, and so on. I think it would have been a very different experience had he trusted me that I was being honest and not just trying to skive and get away with being in a cushy software job without doing any work, which is very much how that situation did play out.
\n\nI think if the trust isn't there from the start, it's going to be very hard to earn and I think that part of hiring somebody and expecting them to work with you, if you don't trust them to be able to do that and manage their needs, expectations, and abilities, you have no business hiring them, in my opinion.
\n\nJOHN: It struck me like, as you were saying that, that if the person is coming to that situation as, “Oh, you've got to always keep an eye on people because they're always trying to get one over on you and find ways to not work very hard,” or whatever. That person is never going to have a fantastic relationship with their rapports and then once you add in the other marginalizations on top of that, it just goes down and he'll leave him faster.
\n\nELI: And that's something that I think we've seen over the last year with reluctance, or resistance to moving to work from home, where if somebody who is managing has been very used to being able to walk around and see what's on everyone's screens and have this sense that they are keeping an eye on. They’re making sure nobody is secretly playing Minecraft for 8 hours a day, or whatever. But moving to work from home requires that trust and it reminds me of there's some advice I've had about having a long-distance romantic relationship where you've got to be really, really good at trust and communication. Those are two things that you should have in any serious relationship whether romantic, or not.
\n\nI think that maybe working from home over the last year has exposed, in some relationships, but I think about work relationships where those things haven't been present. But it's not that working from home created them as that it exposed them and the companies, I think that are doing the best now at maintaining and building those relationships between co-workers in their management structure are ones that probably already had that and probably has set themselves up for success by just having a healthy environment to begin with.
\n\nMANDY: So I have a tendency when I start with a new client—I'm an independent contractor; I work for several companies—my tendency is to always under promise and over deliver and then I do that and I'm really good at doing that. But then things inevitably come up, I get sick, and then I feel like I'm letting them down because it's like well, they expect the bar to be here and now it's down here. And then I'm disappointing them and they're like, “Well, where's the Mandy that we hired?” and it's like, well, you did hire that Mandy, but that Mandy is not here today.
\n\nDo you have those feelings, first of all, and if you do, how do you deal with them?
\n\nELI: Yeah, the guilt. Whenever I have to take a day off sick, my goodness and it has definitely been compounded by the experiences that I've had of not being trusted. If I say that I need to take a day off sick and people go, “Oh, well, couldn’t you come in anyway?” I've been very fortunate in the last couple of jobs that I've had where I've had really, really supportive relationships with managers that were full of trust. So I'm slowly starting to creep back from that a little bit.
\n\nOne of the ways that I think I got to that point, though, or one of the things that really helped me was upfront managing expectations. So I take days off now when I get sick, as opposed to having overdone it with fatigue and it’s got to a point in my fatigue where I need to take days off just to rest by cutting back to 4 days a week.
\n\nThat's one of the things where I say actually, I'm going to factor in that Eli isn't here today, that Eli won't be here one day a week. So don't hire me on that day and that was a choice I made because I wanted to stay in work, essentially. That was the only way I could consistently, in good faith, promise to be able to deliver a consistent amount of at the time being in the office. That's the big thing that I've done.
\n\nI think there's a lot of shame that comes with having a chronic illness, not being at your best 100% as well. I think that in the tech industry, in particular, there’s this mentality of you’ve got to hustle. The rockstar developer and admitting that you can't be that. I even said the word admitting as if it was a failure, but stating that that's not possible for you can be seen as and can certainly feel like it being a failure and that's not fun, but at the same time for me, it's certainly true. I'm never going to be a rockstar developer putting in 70-hour weeks and cranking out loads of code. That's just not me. So tackling that head on and just admitting it and saying, “If this is a problem, then it's not going to work out.”
\n\nI have had a lot of places that I have been pinged by recruiters and then I say, “I can do a 4-day week. These are the terms that I can work on,” and they don't want it and that's their call to make. I hope that that will change. I hope that will change soon as a result of the recognition that flexible working [chuckles] is good actually for parents, for people with disabilities, for all kinds of people.
\n\nBut that's one of the big ways that I've managed those feelings and cut down on the situations where there's feelings of rise, but it's definitely it's something I massively relate to. I still do struggle to take time off and I'm really lucky at the moment to have. I had my checkup with Ian this week and one of the first things he said was, “When you're going to take some time off soon?” because I've been working a lot recently and that was really lovely.
\n\nSo having supportive coworkers and they lead by example as well, they take time off just whatever, and it's great and it doesn't make us less productive, or I think it makes us healthier as a team and it certainly helps me navigate all the issues that I have surrounding it, which are myriad.
\n\nJOHN: You touched on an interesting point right there at the end there about how not only is it useful for you to have obviously management buy-in with working and the flexibility that you need, but having the team culture of everybody around you, also them taking the time that they need and working on the flexes that they need to flex is an incredibly important part of supporting you in feeling like it's okay for you to do those things.
\n\nELI: Yeah. It reminds me of, I guess, the push to put pronouns in your bio, or your screenname regardless of whether, or not you are somebody who people get your pronouns wrong. Because there's this phenomenon where strictly speaking, something is allowed, but if it's outside the norm, you still feel odd. You might feel ashamed of doing it. So even if you are allowed to take mental health days at your place of work, if nobody else does, you're still not allowed. Socially, you're not allowed almost.
\n\nSo setting healthy norms opens doors for everybody, including those who need the doors open for them, as it were. Like me. [laughs] I don't always have the energy to advocate for myself because of the reasons that I need to advocate for myself.
\n\nLeading by example on the part of the people that I work with and the people who have the clout organizationally, even though we have quite a flat structure at Anvil. That's one of the things my manager at my last place as well, was really, really fantastic about was setting good examples. Definitely reducing the stigma around taking care of yourself, removing the onus from the person who will have the hardest time advocating for themselves.
\n\nREIN: Well, I think there's a pretty general statement here, which is that managers that don't trust their employees are bad managers.
\n\nELI: I think it's very hard to be a good manager if you don't trust your employees. I'm thinking of, it's not in tech, but I did work a retail job and I think across that industry, that's just it. That’s not a thing; you're not trusted by your manager if you work in retail just as a default. The places where you are a unicorn land rare.
\n\nI think I would agree with that general statement. I hesitate to make sweeping statements just in general because humans are so fast, complex, and complicated that there will almost always be a counterexample to whatever sweeping statement.
\n\nBut I think trust has to be the basis of any healthy relationship. If you're working together towards some shared goal as a relationship is whether, or not that's to have fun hanging out, or to get some work done, you have to trust that you're both committed to that, I suppose and lacking that trust for why you hired that person, why they're working for you, I suppose.
\n\nREIN: In human factors on safety science, there's an old view of human performance, which is that people are a problem to be managed. People make mistakes; they have to be trained, they have to be watched, they have to be supervised. They can't be trusted to make decisions. People are a problem to be managed. The way you get a safer workplace is by dealing with problem employees and making sure that they don't screw up.
\n\nThe new view of human performance and safety is that people are the source of your success.
\n\nELI: Thinking about humans as problems and eventually, by eliminating any aspect of humanity that causes problems, you're just going to end up with nothing. It reminds me of that bot that was trained to debug code basis and it just deleted the code base. It was like, “There's no bugs because there's no code!” And there'll be no problems with us no humans, but there’ll be no success either.
\n\nREIN: So I think that managers who look at people like they’re a problem to be managed are the source of a lot of these issues.
\n\nELI: Yeah, that definitely resonates with me in the sense that that's how I felt in my negative experiences, especially when it comes to managing my ability to work and viewing my marginalizations as problems to be managed instead of just ways that I am.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nELI: Which is a difficult one to navigate with chronic fatigue. I didn't always have this disability and it has limited my life, but it's also, I think made me think very deeply about things that I wouldn't have otherwise. So in my case, I think there's been a silver lining and now it is a part of the way that I am and you can take it, or leave it, but it's a package deal with me working for you, or me being friends with you, or me being part of your D&D group and it has to be accepted and can't be managed away.
\n\nI think that's been the case as well with my other marginalizations Mandy rattled rattling off the whole litany of various things that I am and I have definitely had instances.
\n\nSo for example, with my Jewishness, where I have been expected not to bring it to work almost. Of course, in the UK, we don't actually have separation of church and state, we are actually a Christian country. Everyone does Christmas and you've got all the loads of the bank holidays and what not, Easter.
\n\nWhenever I would make a remark that I did not fall into this norm, and actually I would be celebrating Passover instead of Easter and it was a slightly different time, it was viewed as like I was causing problems for being different almost even though it was just an aspect of the way that I am. So I think that's an attitude that definitely pervades and it's definitely harmful on more axes than just disability and ability to work.
\n\nMANDY: I actually think that that’s an attitude that that needs to go. I've worked for people where I've totally been afraid to be my best self because I'm afraid they'll fire me. Like, I pretended to be a conservative for a very long time with a client and boy, was that stressful! [laughs] For me, a lot of it is fear and being rejected and then all of a sudden, I don't have a job and then all of a sudden, I can’t pay my bills and then it just spirals from there. So it leads to a lot of almost pretending to be someone that I'm not for fear of looking good, or looking a certain way, or being perceived as a certain person and it becomes really, really stressful.
\n\nELI: The way that I handled being genderqueer is I just based on vibes whether, or not I'm going to come out and at what stage. So at my current place, on my first day, I was like, “By the way, I use they/them pronouns. I’m genderqueer,” and absolutely plain sailing. It was totally fine. A couple of jobs ago, I decided not to and let everyone just assume that I was a woman, which is how I present essentially, or that's what most people assume by looking at me. Part of the reason for that was that the CTO was a Trump supporter who, it was one of the people who had jokes for everybody in the office. He had little funny jabs that he would make. “Funny jabs” and his funny jab for me was that I drank instant coffee and it was not real coffee. I just thought if he is going to make fun of me every morning for not drinking real coffee, what kind of fun is he going to make of me for not having a real gender and I thought, you know what, safer probably just to not bring it up. It is stressful and I felt dishonest and I'm not sure if I were in the same situation now, I'd be looking for another job, but I'm not. [chuckles]
\n\nBut being able to bring your whole self to work, I definitely tried before and been rebuffed and this is the first time that I think it's sticking with my current place, which is such a joy, honestly. I cannot overstate it and part of it is an intentional effort on the people creating and it's enshrining the culture to allow that.
\n\nI think there's probably some truth to the idea that with norms the way that they are and with norms that don't allow you to be your whole self and that will punish you for being certain ways, it does require an active effort on people creating culture to go against that, which is a shame because if you're trying to get a business up and running, that might not be your highest priority, but as soon as you let it slip even a little bit, it's just going to spiral.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. You're right that it takes intentional effort that a culture like that does not happen by accident, or just falls into that. [laughs] One of the things I'm curious about is were are you able to suss out that aspect of the culture before you started this job, or did you get there and then realize that you'd locked into it?
\n\nELI: One of the things that was funny about what I was interviewing for this job was that I'd actually met one of the founders. We met at a social event in Cambridge briefly and I think not caught his name, not followed up, but we met, talked briefly, really vibed. And then when I went to this interview for oh, it’s a developer advocate job, that sounds great. The company looks nice. The product is cool. And I went into the interview and I was like, “Oh, it's you!” Somebody that I’d met briefly, really got along with.
\n\nOne of the things that Anvil did and that Meredydd and Ian did was, very deliberately, make sure that they were trying to be gender inclusive in their hiring from a very early stage. So even when I interviewed, there were four people and one of the core platform developers was a woman. I say was as if she's not with the company anymore; she is. [chuckles]
\n\nVery early on in me working at Anvil, one of the things that one of them said to me was we were very conscious that if we got to a stage where it was 10 men and we're trying to hire our first woman, that woman being interviewed is not going to be inclined to take the job and be the only woman in the room with 10 guys.
\n\nI guess, I got lucky in the sense that they found the woman candidate, Bridget, who was incredible and that they didn't happen to end up finding that the best candidate every single time was a guy. But they’re certainly intentional and it's something that we send her when we're trying to find new people as well because it's done us well so far! It's something that I have looked for in the past as well is when I’ve said, thinking about which jobs I'm able to take, trust with the managers and the ability to be myself, because it's so exhausting when you have to create and impersonate a whole other person.
\n\nMANDY: There is a lot of context switching.
\n\nELI: Oh, yes. I’m trying to remember who's out where. My fiancé is genderqueer as well and there was a time when we were each out at each other's jobs, but we weren't out at our own jobs. So we were each being read as a cisgender at our own jobs, but with a genderqueer partner and it was just so confusing. I barely got enough brain to handle my day job, [laughs] let alone being two, or three different people in different places.
\n\nMANDY: Now, I'm curious about that, if I can ask. So I'm actually going through that right now. I’m bisexual and not a lot of people know that and it's like, “Do I need to make a grand announcement?”
\n\nELI: I just like to pepper into conversation that I think Lucy Lou is really hot, or something. I don't know. It's a hard one. That's how I came out to my parents is that I was just loudly interested in women in front of them and never really said anything, but it's too much to my memory. I got very lucky with my parents as well because my younger brother is transgender as well. He actually came out before me and paved the way and so, when it came time to come out to them as genderqueer, I just gave him a phone call. I said, “By the way, I'm genderqueer. My friends are using they pronouns for me. You can, if you want,” and just left it.
\n\nNo, that is a difficult thing. Coming out, it's hard at any stage because that I've always felt is that I fear I've deceived people, but actually it's not me. It's the norms and assumptions that are being made completely in good faith by people that's not necessarily the people are being malicious when they assume me to be a woman, or assume me to be straight, but that I have to inform them that they're wrong and that's scary.
\n\nI don't like conflict and oh, there's a potential for conflict here because I have to tell them that they're wrong and nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody likes to have made an incorrect assumption. It's difficult every time and I think the way that I get through it these days is just by being obnoxiously confident of people. Just saying, “Oh, if you were taking it back. I'm sorry, get over it.” [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: Yeah, I’ve just been slowly peppering it into the people I trust and it’s like I do feel that level of deceit. I’m like these people have known me as a straight woman for—I'm not going to disclose my age—this many years and now all of a sudden, she's not? Like, is this a phase, is this a – you have those people and then to me, people who have been queer, or bi, am I gay enough? Am I – you know? [laughs] So it’s like there’s this whole spectrum of I don’t know where I am, somebody please help me! [laughs]
\n\nELI: Oh, that am I gay enough? I still have that. So I'm genderqueer and I've had top surgery. I wanted to have a flat chest and I was able to do that and sometimes, I still go, “But I'm not trans enough to have done that.” [laughs] The level to which you can absorb that kind of rhetoric, it's really quite impressive actually. Am I gay enough? Gay enough of what? Yeah, and the thing about is it a phase, “Everything's a phase, mum, show me the permanent state of the self, there's no such thing.”
\n\nMANDY: One of my favorite affirmations is I am allowed to change at any time. I like to look at myself in the mirror and if I decide I'm with a woman and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work out and I want to go back to being with a man and I'm stringing. Again, I am allowed to change any time. I don't owe anybody that and I'm working on that. It's taken a lot of therapy for me to get to that stage, [chuckles] but all I owe is to myself.
\n\nELI: I have a friend who had been going through a crisis of identity and basically to me, it seemed very clear that they were much, much happier in one label than the other and so, to me, that's what automated the decision. But obviously, it's not so clear when you're in the middle of it and one thing I said to them that I helped was, “Even if you turned around tomorrow and said, ‘Oh no, I'm actually this other thing.’ If you lose any friends for that and somebody says, ‘Oh, you are fraud. You were lying to me all this time.’ That wasn't your friend to start with. It will be okay.” You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide where and how and what label makes you comfortable and which behaviors in yourself you want to celebrate, or accentuate.
\n\nMANDY: Yeah. I feel like that's very important to hear. As I've been navigating this, this past few years, I’ve realized I'm not alone. So I think some of the listeners out there, if you are going through new identity crisis, or I’m not going to call it an identity crisis, but if you're struggling with who you are, I think everybody is to one extent, or another. Even as a person, not just a gay person, or not just as a straight person, or not just as a political person, I think everyone out there is just struggling; who am I and right now, especially.
\n\nELI: Yeah, that’s something that with this friend I was discussing is the idea of an objective truth about yourself and whether, or not that exists. Would I be a ciswoman if this thing of my past was different, or I'd had a different balance of hormones while I was in the womb, or any of those ways that people try to find causes, or pathologize, or rationalize the ways in which humans are complex, different, and unique.
\n\nI think I found comfort and peace in the idea that there isn't necessarily an objective truth buried at the heart of me underneath layers of experience, or whatever. I am who I am at this moment; that is broadly continuous one moment to the next, but it might change. At some point, I will have found that I've crossed a boundary over time maybe. I used to identify as a woman and then I don't think anything about myself abruptly changed, but one day, I was like, “No, actually I'm not. Yeah, women are great, but I'm not one. I'm not one of them.” That's not dishonest and it's not disingenuous to change over time, or to find that your surroundings have changed around you and that you relate to them differently.
\n\nSo for example, going back to the oh, what if the objective truth about myself, if I had grown up in a culture where being a woman looks different than it does now, or than it has in my life, I might have thought differently about my gender over time. But that doesn't mean that the way that I am is not real.
\n\nREIN: This gives me the opportunity I've been looking for to name drop Virginia Satir.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nELI: Ooh.
\n\nREIN: She wrote a poem that I really love called I Am Me and I'll just read a little bit of it. It says, “However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest and invent something new for that which I discarded.” And later it says, “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.”
\n\nELI: As someone with a customized body, I love that. [laughs]
\n\nMANDY: I love that.
\n\nELI: I love that as a way to approach therapy as well. I'm somewhere for whom, I'm very lucky in the what is recommended as the basic bitch first line therapy here in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for me. And that is very much, I am objective looking at my thoughts and trying to encourage the ones that I agree with and discourage the ones I don't; engineering debug my brain.
\n\nREIN: It might not surprise you that she was a family therapist.
\n\nELI: I like that. More therapists should be poets, [chuckles] in my opinion. I've had therapists that have said some incredibly profound things. I like the idea of as well, the imagery of discarding things which no longer fit you whether that's labels, or behaviors, or friendship groups, or political alignments, or whatever in the same way that you would with clothes.
\n\nThis is something where I've recently read Marie Kondo's incredible book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, and really loved the idea of everything you own which sparks joy and that you can look at something which no longer fits you and say, “Thank you for the role you've played in my life. It's over now,” and put it away and donate to charity, or whatever. I think applying that same method to non-physical aspects of our lives that we've outgrown that need to be put away, I think it certainly helped me to avoid the sense of shame, or guilt, or feeling disingenuous that comes with growing and changing as a person.
\n\nMANDY: I feel the same applies to sobriety, which is also a thing that I struggle with. Like, drinking alcohol? It was fun while it lasted. We had some good times. We had some not so good times, but it no longer serves me so we're not going to do that anymore. [chuckles]
\n\nELI: Yeah. That's another axis on which I want to circle back to accessibility and tech because here in the UK, we have a really strong drinking culture and from my understanding, it varies across the States and but here in the UK, it is very much we are getting drunk at house parties from our early teens.
\n\nThe first place I worked had a very strong drinking culture. All of your work relationships were to be strengthened down the pub over a pint. Every work party was drink-y. I have a friend who is teetotal not due to, as far as I know, any religious, just a completely personal choice and actually that was one of the factors in them leaving that role at that company was because they were not allowed to be their whole self at work because being at work meant drinking to a certain extent, if you want it to be successful, popular, get the good projects and obviously, that locks so many people out. People who are sober for whatever reason. People who might not be drinking because they might be pregnant. People who just don't like to drink. [overtalk]
\n\nMANDY: [inaudible] drinking.
\n\nELI: Yeah. People for religious reasons, or health reasons. It's one that I think again, sing the praises of my current place, when we hang out COVID safe ways we dislike lunchtime picnics and stuff and we've got new parents at our company who we want to be able to include in social gatherings and make sure that it's not predicated on drinking and being out late to be able to socialize with your coworkers, if you choose that that's something that you want. I think it's probably another thing where you have to take an active stance on it. So it's not to just absorb paradigms from the greatest society that you're embedded in.
\n\nMANDY: I'm not going to say I'm not nervous for running conferences on Zoom because conferences do have a very big drinking culture and that’s a socializing thing and I’m very nervous about how I'm going to navigate that. It just seems like it's everywhere, but I’ve come to the place where I’m just going to say no and I have some fancy mocktails I like so that's what I'll be doing. [chuckles]
\n\nELI: Yeah. Something I really liked recently was—I do drink and I do like to drink—but I was at Python web conference and after the day it was done of talks and things, there was fun social event afterwards and it was all virtual because it's March and it was somebody making cocktails in their kitchen and showing us all of his fancy cocktail gear and the virgin ones, the non-alcoholic ones were given equal parity, like time and attention were paid to them. It was just presented as completely not noteworthy at all that somebody might not drink alcohol and I think that was a really nice way of framing it. It was just, here is the alcoholic question and here is non-alcoholic version and there's no value judgment being made about the two. I think that was also an active choice on behalf of the person doing that presentation and the people organizing the conference.
\n\nBut so many different ways that not paying attention to these things can lock people out of the industry and contribute to that good old leaky pipeline that we all know and love.
\n\nJOHN: When we come to the end of every show, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that struck us about the conversations, or the ideas that we're going to be thinking about later.
\n\nFor me, something you said Eli, just recently was that your marginalizations are not problems to be managed rather they're just the way you are, they're just who you are is such a powerful statement about identity and how it should be thought about and treated that I really didn't like the phrasing of it is something that can be just repeated to drill it into everybody's head.
\n\nMANDY: For me, I really liked the Virginia Satir poem that Rein shared, especially the last bit of “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” I think that is so relevant and such a good way for everyone to keep in mind. I really believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of change. No, let me say that again because I think you can be afraid of change, but it's going to be okay and you are allowed to be afraid of change and it can be overwhelming and it can be scary, but you can get through it and I’m going to get through it.
\n\nThank you for allowing me to tell a little bit of my truth for the first time and in the tech world and on this podcast!
\n\nJOHN: It's really great to have you on the show, finally. Your show.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, you know in Lincoln, the welcome to your house scene? This is like the welcome to your podcast scene.
\n\nMANDY: It’s not just my podcast. It’s all of ours.
\n\nELI: Bugs Bunny meme. Oh, podcast.
\n\nREIN: I thought I might close this out by reading another part of that poem. She says, “I own everything about me. My body including everything it does. My mind including all its thoughts and ideas. My eyes including the images of all they behold. My feelings, whatever they may be—anger, joy, frustration, disappointment, excitement. My mouth and all of the words that come out of it—rude, or polite, sweet, or rough, correct, or incorrect. My voice loud, or soft. And all of my actions, whether they be to others, or to myself.”
\n\nMANDY: I love that. Thank you.
\n\nEli, how about you?
\n\nELI: I guess I'm just thinking about all the different ways that people can be and how complicated, complex, beautiful, different, and diverse it is to be a person, the same person over time even. If space isn't made for that, including, or not including things that we understand to be marginalizations in our current model, it harms people and the places that put effort into making space for people to be people in all the messy, complex, weird ways that they are. I've got to do better! That's well deserved.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, it turns out that that's good business, but it's also the right thing to do.
\n\nELI: Fully agreed, yeah.
\n\nMANDY: Well, again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eli. It has been absolutely wonderful having you and I’m so glad it’s been you here to be on my first episode as a panelist of Greater Than Code and for listeners out there, I hope you like what you’ve heard and maybe you’ll see a little bit of me in the future. But if you would also like to talk to the rest of the panel, we do have a Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can join it for as little as a dollar and if you cannot support it, or you don’t want to support it, just get in contact with me and I will let you in anyway.
\n\nThank you for much for listening and hopefully, I will talk to you very soon.
Special Guest: Eli Holderness.
","summary":"Eli Holderness talks about accessibility and expressing your sexuality in tech: having conversations with leadership and management, team culture and support, and that it’s okay and not disingenuous to discard facets of yourself you no longer are or that no longer serve you.","date_published":"2021-06-23T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/618b3fea-6374-48c1-bef7-9cb273276763.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45073560,"duration_in_seconds":2738}]},{"id":"4b84c3ed-e80f-403f-937e-8caea4b69743","title":"238: Contributing to Humanity and Mutual Aid – Solidarity, Not Charity","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/contributing-to-humanity-and-mutual-aid","content_text":"01:00 - Mae’s Superpower: Being Able to Relate to Other People and Finding Ways to Support Them\n\n03:42 - Contributing to Humanity (Specifically American Culture)\n\n\nTitle Track Michigan\n\n\nClimate Change\nClean, Accessible Water\nHate & Divisiveness; Understanding Racial Justice\n\n\n\n07:01 - Somatics and The Effects of Yoga, Meditation, and Self-Awareness\n\n\nFlow\nKripalu \nPubMed\nCognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)\n\n\nDebugging Your Brain by Casey Watts\n\n\n\n12:20 - Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity\n\n\nWeCamp \nRuby For Good\nHarm Reduction\nEncampments\n“We keep us safe.”\nRainbow Gatherings\nBurning Man\nBig Big Table Community Cafe\n\n\n33:17 - Giving vs Accepting Help; Extending and Accepting Love, Empathy, and Forgiveness\n\n\nCollective Liberation\nThe Parable of Polygons\nListening: What could be of use?\n99 Bottles of OOP – Sandi Metz\n\n\n48:25 - The Mental Health Challenges of Being a Programmer\n\n\nCelebrating Small Wins; “Microjoys!”\n\n\nReflections:\n\nCasey: The word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Also: help and be helped!\n\nJamey: Valuing yourself and the way that helps the communities you are a part of.\n\nMae: Engaging with users using the things you're building is a reward and a way to give yourself “microjoy!”\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 238 of Greater Than Code. I am your host, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. \n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here today with our guest, Mae Beale.\n\nMae spent 20 years in and out of nonprofit-land, with jaunts into biochemistry and women's studies degreeing, full-time pool playing, high school chemistry and physics teaching, higher ed senior administrating, and more. She went to code school in 2014 (at 37 years old) to gain the technical skills needed to build the tools she wished she'd had in all the years prior. \n\nSo glad to have you, Mae.\n\nMAE: Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Jamey. Same for me. \n\nJAMEY: So you may be ready for the first question that we're going to ask you, which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nMAE: Yeah, thank you. I think that my superpower is being able to relate to other people and find ways to support them. How did I get good at that? Well, I've dealt with a lot of pretty complicated people in my life that you have to do extra thinking to figure out. So I think I got my start with that and I've done lots of different things in life and met lots of different people and felt lots of different feelings and thought lots of different thoughts. So I think that's mostly it: living. \n\nJAMEY: I was going to say that I know from knowing you that you've done lots of things, but even our listeners who don't know you probably already know that just after listening to your bio, so.\n\n[laughter]\n\nMAE: Yeah, and there's plenty more that didn't make it in there. That's something that is fun and a joke is no matter how long people know me, there's always still something that they didn't know and so, that's fun for me. I like to surprise other people and I love being surprised by people. So it's like a little game I have with all my fun facts.\n\nJAMEY: I love that.\n\nCASEY: I've got a question: what's on your mind lately.\n\nMAE: What is on my mind lately? So many things, I don't even know where to start. One is where and how can I contribute to the future of humanity [chuckles] and American culture in particular and in the circles that I'm in, drawing it down even more. So I think about that a lot. I think about my house a lot. I just bought a house and I'm going to do each room with a color theme so it'll end up being, you walked through the rainbow. Pretty excited for that, lots of things there. And I think a lot about how to empower others and be a more and more effective communicator. I think about that a lot. Probably those are the top ones and maybe Dominion. I play that every day. So I think about that a little bit.\n\nCASEY: [chuckles] Love that game.\n\nJAMEY: Me too.\n\nCASEY: This is great. All three are really interesting. I want to start on your first one. What opportunities do you see lately, or what have you done recently, or what do you hope to do to help the world help American culture help make an impact? What are you working on?\n\nMAE: From where I sit, it seems like the most important things that any of us can attune to about even a portion of is the environment and whatever's going on with our ability as humans to respond to climate change and water, like clean, accessible water for people, and hate and divisiveness. Those three things I think are our biggest challenges. So I try to do things that end up in those spheres, if not in things that ideally have some mix of those rather than having them be silos. \n\nOne of my jobs is working with Title Track Michigan, and they are a relatively new nonprofit that brings creative practice to complex problems and is specifically focused on water protection, racial equity, and youth empowerment. Once all the uprising started in 2020, we created an Understanding Racial Justice course for white people in Northern Michigan and so, I've been helping to facilitate those courses and taking as many opportunities to rethink my orientation to all those topics as well.\n\nCASEY: That's so cool. You found a group that does all of those things in one.\n\nMAE: Amazing, right?\n\nCASEY: Wow. Title Track Michigan, huh?\n\nMAE: Yeah. I found them because my life radically changed a few years ago. A lot of things changed at once like, not just a lot, all of the things. So I went on this walkabout just trying to find ways to be of service in the world without expectation, watch who I met, and where I ended up. I ended up in Michigan and getting introduced to these people who then were creating a new nonprofit Title Track. \n\nAnother thing I do is I have a consultancy that I have a flagship enterprise product for nonprofit, small business administration. That is a little bit of a Trojan horse for change management and organizational development and sustainable longevity planning for organizations. \n\nSo the fact that I ended up there with them at that time and way more cool synchronicities happened. That's how I met them. So it just feels right and great to have landed in that space and then to have 2020 be what it became, we were already formed and positioned to try to be of help.\n\nJAMEY: This is an abstract question.\n\nMAE: Okay.\n\nJAMEY: But what does it feel like to feel like you're doing the right thing in that way like, the right place to be? I got the sense from you telling this story that things just came together in the right way at the right time and that's a beautiful thing when it happens and you said it feels right. What does that feel like?\n\nMAE: Mm thanks, Jamey. Well, my first thought is another thing that Title Track does in that Understanding Racial Justice course and a lot of circles I've ended up in have a focus on somatic and so, body centered awareness and engagement. So I used to always think my answer was going to be emotional when people ask me, “How do I feel?” and now I hear and think of my body first so that's cool. I'll answer a couple of ways, if that's okay.\n\nWhen for me synchronicities happen and I feel most alive, or of use, which is important to me, my heart literally feels bigger and almost breathing like I can feel air. I don't know how to explain that. I definitely will be smiling more, my back is straighter, and I usually have a lot more to say. All of a sudden, I'll have a lot to say. Other times, I have nothing to say! \n\nFor how I might've answered that question previously would be closer to having a lot of things to say, like I'm a lot more creative, making connections, getting excited, and wanting to create new things together with other people. \n\nHow about you two?\n\nCASEY: Just hearing you describe that, I have thought back on times I felt really proud and engaged and I noticed my posture improved, too. That's so interesting. I've had a nerve injury for 2 years. My hands go tingly sometimes. So I'm working on my back and noticing posture all the time. Interesting how my mood like that could affect the posture. I believe it, too.\n\nJAMEY: I'm not sure that I would have called out posture specifically in that way, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think what I would say is I feel lighter.\n\nMAE: Yeah!\n\nJAMEY: So to feel less bogged down, I can see in what way that's related to posture. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Totally. Yeah.\n\nCASEY: We all have a lot to say on this, I love it.\n\n[chuckles] \n\nThis reminds me of the Flow State. So when your skills match a need and it's challenging the appropriate amount, you're in a great concentration state, but if your skills aren't enough, or if the need isn't important enough—either one—feels a little way less good, not good.\n\nJAMEY: Totally.\n\nMAE: I lived at a yoga retreat center for a little while in Massachusetts called Kripalu—it's the largest yoga retreat center in North America. I had never done yoga and I was like, “Oh, cool. I'll just go live there [laughs] and see.” Anyway, I was there for three months and they have a part of their organization dedicated to optimal human performance. They have a partnership with Tanglewood and some other places around there to see if yoga and meditation can induce more Flow State, more of the time for top performing musicians, and just to be able to have more “scientific evidence” about how physiologically we can do things to get ourselves closer to those states more often. Pretty cool work. \n\nJAMEY: Yeah. That's really interesting.\n\nCASEY: I was just doing some research on the effects of different types of yoga and meditation on anxiety. I was trying to read some of the primary sources. I like to go to PubMed first—that's my go-to. Some people do Google Scholar. It's interesting, the framing sounded in a couple of papers like, “Well, it's not as good as CBT,” and my takeaway was, “Well, it helps an amount, huh? Great, good.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nSo people who can't get access to CBT should consider that and that's true anyway. Science has shown this thing we knew was helpful anyway, is helpful in an empirical sense and that’s great.\n\nMAE: Totally. Casey, for anybody who might not know what CBT is, would you be willing to…?\n\nCASEY: Thank you. CBT here is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most common and effective forms of talk therapy you would do with a therapist. It focuses on what some maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns are and helps you change them. \n\nMAE: And that's coming from a psych major, right, Casey?\n\nCASEY: That's right. I talk all about that in my book, Debugging Your Brain. It's funny, but you're flipping the script here. Usually we do this to our guests.\n\nMAE: [laughter] Great!\n\nCASEY: Love it. \n\nJAMEY: There's another project, Mae that I know that you've worked on that. I'm a little bit surprised that you haven't brought up yet, but I'm going to bring it up, which is your Mutual Aid program. \n\nMAE: Thank you.\n\nJAMEY: I think that when you are talking about doing something to make an impact on the world, like that was the first thing I thought of since I know you're involved with that and I would love to hear you talk about it.\n\nMAE: Yes. Thank you. Thanks for bringing that up and I did want to talk about that and I was looking forward to hearing what you have to say about that topic as well. \n\nSo when the pandemic started, you may have seen these, or become involved, but there was a whole bunch of spreadsheets starting like Google Sheets of people who had some needs and people who wanted to offer some things. Google spreadsheets are really easy first pass for people with low tech skills and no budget to just come together. But I started being invited to all these different spreadsheets from around the country that include people's name, address, phone number, CashApp name, their exact vulnerabilities and identities, and current struggles in a spreadsheet that's downloadable. \n\nIt really freaked me out and I started coding that day about how can we start to do something to make these people not have to have their identity so exposed and through like WeCamp networks, Ruby for Good networks, and different Slacks I'm in of varying programmers, I started saying, “Does anybody else want to get involved?” and several people did. \n\nSo we have built a platform to support mutual aid groups and what we did immediately was find some groups to figure out what their needs were instead of just what we might imagine. They were doing a lot of, we call it dispatch moderated setups where people fill out a form and then volunteers read the forms and then match people and do all the communication manually, but not having peer-to-peer things go on. \n\nThe system was originally designed to support that dispatch moderated set up and once people started to go back to work in the fall and there weren't as many people able to devote as much time to volunteer, and as varying groups, especially ones that hadn't been around as long, realized they would probably need a lot more training in social work, ask things just to be more effective and figure out how to route people correctly within their community to services that might be able to help them a little more. \n\nSince the fall, we've to coding peer-to-peer solution. We have several different mutual aid groups around the country and right now, most closely working with groups in Michigan and New York state, just because that's where our networks are. Getting to launch some peer-to-peer stuff, but mutual aid itself has become a buzzword and like, what is that anyway? [chuckles] \n\nSo that topic I love talking about. There's like a mutual aid saying, “Solidarity, not charity.” The whole thing is we're all in it together and we're not going to rely on different structures, or institutions that were set up most often in ways that institutionalized various forms of oppression. Just empowering people to connect with each other, have stronger networks, and build more resiliency is what's up with it, but mutual aid has been around for over a 100 years, at least as a term and a thing, but it generally, almost always springs from communities that have been disenfranchised. \n\nSo when the pandemic started and a lot of new groups formed, not everybody had already checked what's already happening and a lot of different people, especially in communities of color, were surprised by like, they didn't hear that term, that's just what they do. There's been a big—along with everything else—learning of how those structures already were in place and how we can continue to grow them, and support each other as we navigate this world we're in.\n\nJamey, I was going to ask you about your involvement with mutual aid, too and if you had anything to add to that definition.\n\nJAMEY: I was going to say that I really liked what you said about finding new ways around things that have been institutionalized. Because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about mutual aid is the way that people can help each other realize what kind of help is available and what kind of help they even might need. \n\nA story that I really like to tell that and I think about a lot is I have a friend who's involved in mutual aid in Buffalo, where I'm from and he does repair work and just is very handy in that way. So he does a lot of mutual aid repair for people and he told me that the way that this started for him is that there was a request in our mutual aid Facebook group where someone was saying, “I really need $200, or something like this because my window is broken and I need to buy a space heater because it's been getting really cold. So I need this money to buy a heater and all of this stuff.” My friend came in and was like, “Okay, but what if I just fixed your window?” It had not occurred to this person that she could ask for that.\n\nMAE: Oh, boy.\n\nJAMEY: She was coming up with all these solutions around it. So this idea of like coming together as a community and saying, ‘Yeah, I can help you, but can we help a little bit closer to the source than what you even just asked for?” I think is really powerful.\n\nMAE: Yes. I love that, Jamey. Yeah, it's the closer we can be in community with each other, the easier those asks are. Something that you said about figuring out your own needs, there is a thing and it's related a little bit to some of the other topics we've talked about where there's like the white savior thing. People want to do something for people who they think are less – they have less than them. There's a power dynamic there and mutual aid—mutual, that's the main part.\n\nSo you really aren't doing mutual aid if you're not accepting help. All of us have things that we could be supportive with and things to offer. I love also having that not – there's a lot of mutual aid that is about just giving money and/or like reparation stuff. But I love when money isn't part of the equation and quantification of value isn't part of the equation. It's just like, “I have something to give and I could use something and this is how we're going to stay in community and in network and lower those barriers to have offers and asks be even easier in the future.”\n\nJAMEY: For sure. I think it's about meeting people where they are, too, because I agree about some programs are focused on money, and some people have money and can put that into the community and that's great. But maybe they don't have time to show up and do these things and other people might think like, “Well, how can I help because I don't have money,” but they have time, or they have skills. I think that everyone bringing in and saying, “This is what I have to offer with what's going on in my life right now,” and maybe it's money, or maybe it's time, or maybe it's something else that I didn't even think of that they're going to offer. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Totally. When you were saying that, I just got a chill thinking if really every single person just that question you just said, “How can I help?” If we all did one thing, this is how to effect broad change.\n\nCASEY: How can people find the mutual aid groups near them? If they just search mutual aid, that probably gets a bunch, but they don't all say it, right? \n\nMAE: Yeah. It's a really great point. There have been some different efforts to link together mutual aid networks and there's a map, but not every network is on it because not every network even knows about it. [chuckles] So because mutual aid is so grassroots, it's not –\n\nCASEY: Right.\n\nMAE: A number of them have form 501(c)(3) is just to not be doing illegal financial transaction stuff that is problematic by having all this money go through their personal Venmo, or something. But that is what a lot of people have done. So mostly there's the Google option and the term mutual aid is getting used more and more, but there are some other phrases. I'm forgetting it right now. What's the name when they hand out medical supplies? Harm reduction, there's a bunch of harm reduction efforts. Also, in cities where there are a lot of homeless shelters, there's things around encampments and like becoming community with those folks to advocate.\n\nAnother piece, major piece of mutual aid that I forgot to name is it inherently has a political engagement component in it. So one of the reasons why it is this solidarity thing is you're seeing all the humans as inherently equally valuable and that you're identifying the structural things that led to people having a different experience, or a different privilege, or a different outcome to what's going down for them. So then by identifying those together, you try to change the system to not create the problem. \n\nWhereas, to go back to that phrase charity, a lot of charities—which are awesome, I'm not trying to knock those—but a lot of them have more of a it's your fault, or shortcoming, or need that has put you where you are. Mutual aid is the way in which this is all rigged and on purpose, or not on purpose, or just the impact of the structures is how you ended up where you are so let's rejigger.\n\nJAMEY: A phrase that comes up a lot, in the protest community specifically, is, “We keep us safe and we say that at protests about security, medics and things, and wearing masks—I've seen people start to use that phrase. But I think that that's a phrase that really speaks to like what mutual aid is about, too. It's about we are doing something together for ourselves as a community, and we're not looking for something from the outside that comes in a hierarchical structure. We're just making this decision as a group of people to take care of ourselves and our neighbors and I think that's what I really love about it. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And back to what you were saying, Casey, the how can people find those things? There's also just, “Hey, I've got some extra seeds,” or put a cabinet in your yard with some food in it and say free food. You don't have to associate with a “mutual aid group” to do mutual aid. It's like, that's just a blanket term, basically that offers a little bit of a cue about what those people might be up to. But it's really, in whatever way you are sharing and developing relationships with your fellow community members. This is mutual aid.\n\nJAMEY: I thought of another example of that.\n\nMAE: Yay! \n\nJAMEY: We have this in Buffalo, but I think it's a thing that we're seeing other places, too. Separate from our mutual aid network, we have a Facebook Buy Nothing group.\n\nMAE: yes.\n\nJAMEY: And people will post like, “Oh, I have this, I'm going to get rid of it. Someone come pick it up.” “Oh, I was going to donate these spoons from my kitchen. Someone can have them.” When you said seeds, that's the kind of thing you'll see on Buy Nothing and I think that's been a revolution in anything even separately from it, because I do think that money plays a part in a lot of mutual aid stuff, because folks need money for things. But in Buy Nothing, it's pointedly without money and I think that that's a very fun and cool dynamic, too.\n\nMAE: Totally. Yes. I have a couple of things I would love to say them. One is that the bringing up Facebook has started to support mutual aid. But also, I don't know if y'all have seen The Social Dilemma and just become aware of all of this tracking that's going down. \n\nThere's something that is another motivator for us on the mutual aid repo is this is open source code that anybody who wants to use it can stand up their own instance and if you partner with us, connect with us, we will help you if you need us to. But it's intentionally not a multitenant app so that people have small datasets that they own and there isn't like this aggregate thing going on about local data. It’s basically a small tech for the win, which is also pretty mutual aid-y. \n\nOur group, like the programmers who are most involved, meet a couple times a week and know about what's going on in each other's lives. We are mutual aid for each other, too. The energy of what, how, who we are, and what we're doing is getting put into the thing that we're building that hopefully has that same effect. So there's this nice spiral thing going on in there that I'm proud of. I think there's a lot about what we referenced earlier, institutionalization of oppression, that has to be like, there are ways to create other options and they take cultivation of and building new structures. Stuff like this as an example of that and an experiment in it. \n\nAnother one that it reminded me of is when I was younger, I used to go to rainbow gatherings. I don't know if y'all know about these. It's a super hippie thing and there's regional gatherings, but there's a national gathering at a national forest every year. All these people just show up and then they build earthen stoves. There's a bunch of people who do not participate in main society; they just go to these different gatherings and travel around as a… \n\nThere's plenty more to talk about rainbow tribe and even the usage of that word tribe and what goes down. I'm not going to try to touch into that, but something I love about it is there's a whole exchange row where people just sit out with things and there's no money. You're not allowed to use money. \n\nI think I was 18 when I went to my first one and I was just like, “What? This is amazing.” Like, just to imagine my life not through a currency, or that evaluated exchange, it was so inspiring to me. It still is and so, some of what you said, Jamey, reminded me of that.\n\nJAMEY: I relate a lot to that, too. Burning Man events are also no money allowed.\n\nMAE: Ah.\n\nJAMEY: When I first entered that space, that was one of the things that really spoke to me about it too. In fact, it's also no barter allowed in Burning Man. It's a purely gifting economy where if you give someone something, a lot of times they become inspired to gift you something back right there and there's an exchange that happens. But culturally, the point of it is that there's not supposed to be any expectation of exchange when you gift something to somebody.\n\nMAE: Do you know about that restaurant in San Francisco that is free, but you pay for the person behind you if you want?\n\nJAMEY: I don't know about one in San Francisco specifically, but we have a program like that similar in Buffalo. It's called Big – I'm going to look it up so I can link it up.\n\nMAE: How about you, Casey? I’m getting excited so I keep saying things.\n\nCASEY: I’m reflecting on the award mutual aid a lot through all this. I like this idea that mutual aid as it is in action and that mutual aid groups do mutual aid, but individuals can, too. \n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: That's a pretty powerful theme. It makes the term more approachable, especially since it's a jargon word lately. It's just grassroots-y helping each other out, however that looks.\n\nMAE: Totally.\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking a lot about what communities I'm a part of, too, that naturally have that phenomenon. It's like, I'm queer, I’m in a lot of queer groups. I’m in interest groups like musician groups and they help each other do stuff. They carpool to the practice or anything like that that’s this. There's also a formal ones like D.C. Ward 6 has mutual aid groups that are named that. That's its own thing. And then even my Facebook friends, I just post like, “I have a crackpot, who wants it?” \n\nMAE: Totally!\n\nCASEY: But before today, I might not have used the word mutual aid to describe any of that because I'm not part of a formal approved mutual aid group, which is not the point of that term.\n\nMAE: [laughs] Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Just people helping people.\n\nMAE: When I was thinking about getting into tech, I, as a pretty outspoken woman who will address injustice directly if I see it, when I see it in myself and others, I wasn't sure if that was going to be a place for me. I had had some not awesome experiences with tech people before I was in tech. So I reached out to a bunch of people who were already in the biz and they spent hours talking to me about their experiences, answering all of my questions, and offering to help me. \n\nAs I took the leap and went to code school and participated in a meetups and just, everywhere is mutual aid in programming, everybody is helping each other. “I have a question,” “I'm wondering about this.” This podcast is mutual aid, in my opinion. \n\nIt's been really inspiring for me to be a programmer because I feel a part of a worldwide network of people who try to, especially with mixing in the open source piece, build things and offer what they can. It's awesome.\n\nCASEY: I have a challenge for people listening to this podcast. This week, I'd like you to help someone and accept help from someone, both in the spirit of mutual aid.\n\nMAE: Yes!\n\nCASEY: I'm not surprised; accepting help might be the harder half for a lot of people.\n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nJAMEY: I think that's true. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: One way I've said it before is that that is your gift to the giver. The giver doesn't get to be a giver [chuckles] unless you accept the gift from them and that people can, including myself at times, tend to over-give and that is its own challenge. So if you need to stay in the giving frame, [chuckles] you can be like, “All right, well, I'm providing this opportunity to the other person.”\n\n[chuckles]\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I've playfully pushed on an idea to people. I'm trying to help them and they say, “No, no, no. I can't accept your help because I would be indebted,” and I'm like, “You would deprive me of this good feeling I would get from helping you? Really?” \n\n[laughter]\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Thinking of it a little bit, I'm not like – [overtalk]\n\nJAMEY: [inaudible].\n\nCASEY: Right. I'm just thinking that way a little bit, flipping it, helps some people accept the help then.\n\nMAE: Yeah. \n\nJAMEY: I think that people have so much harder of a time of extending love and empathy, and forgiveness, and all of these nice things that we might really value extending to other people, but not to ourselves. \n\nMAE: Yo, that's for real, Jamey and still on this theme, the seeing each other as equals as in community. My Mom used to say this great phrase, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” She was raised Catholic so it's got that in there, but I love that of this could definitely be me. \n\nThere's a cool Buddhist practice that I learned from Pema Chödrön about you extend release of suffering to others and then you widen the circle to include yourself in it, but you don't start there. So similar to how you're saying, Jamey, that that is a challenge for a lot of people, it's just built into that practice where when you can't give yourself a break, [chuckles] imagining others in that situation and then trying to include yourself is an angle on it.\n\nJAMEY: I like that. I think also related to Casey's example of his joke. It's thinking about how what you do affects other people, I think sometimes we're better at that and if you're treating yourself bad, especially if you're in one of these tight mutual communities. If you're treating yourself bad, that's affecting the people around you, too. They don't want to see you being treated bad and they don't want to see you being miserable and they want the best for you. When you're preventing yourself from having the best, that's affecting the whole community, too.\n\nMAE: Yo!\n\nJAMEY: I hadn’t really thought about it like that until right now. So thank you, Casey, for your joke.\n\nCASEY: Powerful thought. Yeah. Like the group, your people, your team, they need you to be your best. So if you want to help your team, sometimes the best way is to help yourself. It's not selfish. It's the opposite of selfish.\n\nMAE: Exactly. Another thing I've heard a bunch of the different activist groups, some phrasing that people have started to use is collective liberation and no one's free till we're all free and if we are suffering, the other people are suffering and vice versa. So figuring out how to not be so cut off from ourselves, or others, or that suffering and seeing them as intertwined, I think is one of the ways to unlock the lack of empathy that a lot of people experience.\n\nCASEY: There's a really cool visualization I like that that reminds me of. It's called the Parable of the Polygons and you can drag around triangles and squares. You can see how segregation ends up happening, if you have certain criteria set up in the heuristics of how they move. Or if some people want to be around diverse people, it ends up not happening, or it ends up recovering and getting more integrated and mixed. It's so powerful because you can manipulate the diagrams. There's a whole series of diagrams. Look it up, it's the Parable of the Polygons.\n\nMAE: Cool! That is awesome.\n\nCASEY: So I want to be around people who aren't like me and that helps. It helps with this phenomenon and the more people do that, the better.\n\nMAE: Yeah, and having grown up in a small city, that's pretty homogenous on multiple levels. When I went to college and learned that people thought differently, my world was this very rigidly defined, this is how things are. [chuckles] My biker dad, that's still his way, his lens. When you start to experience people who are not like yourself, you let that challenge your assumptions, then you end up transformed by that. \n\nI was a double major in college—biochemistry and women's studies—and I remember being in an organic chemistry class and the professor said, “Well, if that's too hard for you, you can go take a sociology class.” I raised my hand and was like, “My sociology classes challenge me on every single thing I think about the world. Your class requires me to provide rote memorization, which I'm awesome at luckily and that's how I ended up in your class.” But that is not harder. That's that story.\n\nCASEY: The last episode that I recorded was with Andrea Goulet. One of the things that kept coming up was the old-timey programming interview questions were all about math.\n\nMAE: Yes.\n\nCASEY: Which isn't necessarily what programming is about. That reminds me here of rote memorization in that class versus complex systems thinking in sociology.\n\nMAE: Totally! \nCASEY: With these two choices, I might choose a sociology person to do architecture work in my software than the rote memorization person.\n\nMAE: Totally, definitely, every time. Yeah, and that's a different lens that I have coming in to the industry from having been an administrator for so many years is our perception as programmers about what's going to be helpful is very different than someone whose day job is to do repetitive work like very, very, very simple apps. \n\nWhen I was in code school, I really wanted us to figure out how to make even our homework assignments be available for nonprofits and that's how my whole system in business ended up getting spun up. Oh, it was before that. My job before that, when I interviewed, I said, “Well, how long do you need someone here for? How long would you need me to commit?” and he said, “A year,” and I said, “All right, well, I'm not sure I'm the best candidate for you because I'm going to go to grad school and get a degree and be a consultant as businesses and nonprofits.” And then I was at that job for 8 and a half years before I went to code school. [laughs]\n\nBut the thing about what could be of use just requires so much humility from programmers to defer to the actual employees and the workers about their experience and what could help them. Because so often, we think that we're the ones with the awesome idea and we can just change their lives and disrupt the thing. A lot of the best ideas come from the people themselves. \n\nI went to a project management training in Puerto Rico and it was a very rarefied environment of people who could pay for people to get PMP training, or whatever. The people that were in my cohort were factory project planners and not a single one of them knew anyone who worked in the factory. Like, they didn't get to know them as part of that project and they didn't have anyone in their sphere and my parents were paper mill workers. So when I'm sitting there and listening to these people talk about the worker and their lack of wherewithal, I guess, there'll be a gracious way to say it right now, I was just appalled. I try to take that into any time we are building software in a way that honors all people.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My favorite leaders are the ones that listen to their employees and the users. I am happy with my roles in leadership positions, but the thing that makes me happy with myself is listening and if I ever lose that, I don't trust myself to be a good leader, or manager. \n\nMAE: Totally.\n\nCASEY: I could. I know it's easy when you get promoted to stop listing as much. It's the incentive structure of the system. I wouldn't blame myself if I lost it, but knowing I value it and don't want to lose it helps me hold on to my propensity to listen.\n\nMAE: Yes, Casey! Totally that.\n\nCASEY: Sometimes people have asked me, “What makes you think you'd be good at leading this?” That is literally my answer is like, “Well, I won't forget to listen.” \n\nMAE: Yeah. \n\nJAMEY: I think that it's weird the way that people create this hierarchy of good ideas and better ideas and which idea is better and put that kind of value judgment on it. When really, when you're dealing with software and trying to create something that works for the people that are using it. It's not about whether your idea is good or bad, it's about whether it's the right one for that group of people. \n\nMy background, my first tech industry job was in agriculture and so, all of our customers were farmers and people that worked at farms, To admit I don't know what it's like to work on a farm in that way, it's not a value judgment about whether you're smart, or good at programming, which people act like it is. It's just a true fact about whether, or not you've ever had that experience.\n\n[laughter]\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I run workshops where we think about all the pros and cons to different ideas and when we need it, we pull out a matrix. We get a spreadsheet that has columns and rows, and rows are the ideas. A lot of decisions are made with one column, naturally like, “What's the best?” You just say like, “1 to 10, this one's the best.” \n\nBut when we break it out, we have lots of columns, lots of variables like, oh, this one's easier to build, this one's higher impact. And when we break it out even further, we can weight those columns then do the matrix math and people like that, actually. Even people who are math averse. They can fill in the numbers in each of the cells and then they trust the spreadsheet to do the thing. That gets us on the same page. \n\nIt depends on the context, which columns matter, which factors are important and that can completely change the situation. Even if you all agree on this one's harder than that one, the outcome could be completely different. The columns, or the context in my matrix model.\n\nJAMEY: We’re reading at work 99 Bottles of Object-Oriented Programming, which Mae knows because we work together, which we haven't said yet on the show. But we're doing a book club. Your description of the matrix columns and what is relevant reminded me of the thesis of that book because it's like, there are tradeoffs. It's not that one tradeoff is necessarily more valuable than another tradeoff, it's just like what makes sense for this context that you're using and building it in, then you have to think about it in a nuanced way if you want to come up with a nuanced answer.\n\nMAE: I am so grateful to and inspired by Sandi Metz. Her ability to distill these concepts into common sense terms is so genius and moving, welcoming, accessible. So grateful, so really glad you brought that up, Jamey. \n\nOne of the things that really stuck out from various talks of hers that I've been to is even if you aren't changing that code, that code does not need to change. That's bad code, but it works. That's great code, [chuckles] like working code, and splitting some of the bikeshedding that we do on code quality with business impact is a teeter-totter that I really appreciate.\n\nJAMEY: I like the way it puts value on everyone and what they're working on. Because my big takeaway from starting to read this book has been that I tend to write fairly simple code because that's what I find easy to do. [chuckles] I always felt well, other people write more complicated code than me because they know more about X, Y, and Z than me and I don't know enough about it to write something that elegant, or that complex, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. \n\nI had placed this value judgment on other people's code over mine and to read about code that's dissecting the value judgments we put on it and determining hey, just because maybe it's not always the best thing to overengineer something Maybe it doesn't have to be because you don't feel smart enough to overengineer it. Maybe it can just be because that's not the right choice. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Cool.\n\nJAMEY: I thought that was really valuable to think about.\n\nMAE: Love that, Jamey. \n\nJAMEY: Boost people's confidence, I hope because I think a lot of people need their confidence boosted. [chuckles] \n\nMAE: Yo, I had no idea what I was getting into as far as the mental health challenge of being a programmer. To maintain one's self-respect, especially as an adult who was successful in her career prior to then be like, there is a whole thing about the adult learner. But to have your entire day be dealing with things that are either broken, or don't exist yet, that's your whole day. Nothing works ever basically and the moment it does, you move on to the things that aren't, or don't exist. \n\nSo it's so critical to try to remember and/or learn how to celebrate those small wins that then somehow feel like insulting that you're celebrating this is just some simple things. [laughs] And then it's like, why are we making a big fanfare? But those microjoys—I've never heard that phrase as opposed to microaggression, or something. Microjoys, if we could give each other those, it could go a long because the validation is a very different experience than I have seen, or heard about, or experienced in any other industry. It's a real challenge.\n\nJAMEY: Not only is everything broken, or doesn't exist. But once it's working, you never hear about it again until it's broken again. [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Yeah. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: That’s so true and it's such an anti-pattern. At USCIS, you would have every developer, who was interested, see an interview—we’re working on an interview app—watch the user use the app every month at least, if not more and they loved those. They saw the context, they saw the thing they just built be used. That's positive feedback that everyone deserves, in my opinion and it's just a cultural idea that engineers don't get to see users, but they should. They do at some companies and yours can, too.\n\nMAE: Yes, Casey! We are working on that at True Link financial as well. Figuring out how to work that more in so that we all feel part of the same team more and we're not like the IT crowd and in the basement and all we have to say is, “Hello, have you tried turning it on and off again?” [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: Casey, I love that because even as you were telling that story, I was like, “Yeah, it's useful to see how people use it because that'll help you make better decisions,” and blah, blah, blah, which I feel strongly about. And then what you actually said at the end was, “and you get satisfaction out of being able to see people using your thing.” I hadn't even thought of that dynamic of it.\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It’s both, happier and more effective. That's the thing I say a lot. These user interviews make you happier doing your job and make you more effective at doing them both. How can you not?\n\nMAE: Yeah.\n\nJAMEY: What’s not to like?\n\n[laughter]\n\nIt's true, though about knowing that people use your app. I started in consulting and a lot of the things I worked on felt a little soul crushing and not because I thought that they were bad, or unethical in any way, but just like, who is this for? Like, who cares about this? \n\nOne of my most joyful experiences was one of the other products that wasn't quite like that, that I worked on when I was in consulting was an app called Scorebuilders and it was for physical therapy students have a specific standardized test they have to take and so, it's study prep for this specific test. There's like two, or three and we had different programs for them. \n\nAnd then I, a few years after that was, in physical therapy myself, because I have back problems and they have interns from college helping them in the physical therapy office that I went to and they were talking about studying for their test, or whatever. I was like, “Oh, that's funny. I haven't thought about that in a while. Do you use Scorebuilders to study in?” They were like, “Oh yeah. We all use it. That's what you use if you're in this program,” and I was like, “Oh, I built that,” and they were like, “What?!” They were calling all of the other people from the next room to be like, “Guess what?” and I'm like, “This is literally the best thing that's ever happened.” [laughs]\n\nMAE: Yay!\n\nCASEY: Yeah! That's such a good story in the end, but it's such a bad story. You never got to meet anyone like that earlier, really?\n\nJAMEY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: That's common, that’s everywhere, but that's a shame. You can change that. [overtalk]\n\nJAMEY: I just realized since it was consulting and not like, I didn't work for Scorebuilders. \n\nCASEY: Oh, I’m sure. It's even more hard. \n\nJAMEY: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I'm so glad you got that.\n\nJAMEY: Thank you. It happened like 5 years ago and I still think about it all the time. [laughs]\n\nWell, we've been having a great discussion, but we've pretty much reached the point in the show where it's time to do reflections and that's when everyone will say something that really stood out to them about our conversation, maybe a call-to-action, something that they want to think more about. \n\nSo, Casey, do you want to start?\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I said this earlier, but this is my big takeaway is the word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Especially since it is, by definition, grassroots-y. There is no formal stamp of approval on a mutual aid group that formalizes it. That's pretty powerful. \n\nI'll be thinking about what communities I'm part of that do that through that lens this week and I challenge listeners to help and be helped sometime this week, both.\n\nJAMEY: I think one thing that I'm going to really try and keep in mind is what we were talking about, valuing yourself and the way that that helps the community. I really liked Mae’s story about including yourself after other people and using that way to frame it in your mind. Because I think that that will make it easier and thinking about like, this is something I struggle with all the time. I think a lot of us do. So I think that I really want to take that one into my life. Next time I realize I'm treating myself unfairly, I want to think, “Well, how is this affecting the other people around me who probably don't want to see me to do that?” [chuckles]\n\nMAE: Thanks, Jamey. Yeah. I have so many answers of reflections! The one I know I'm going to use immediately is this most recent one of engaging with users using the things you're building as a reward and a way to be able to get microjoy. I'm definitely going to use that word now more, microjoys, but I agree with both of what you said, too.\n\nJAMEY: Well, Mae thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us. This was really great and I think people will really appreciate it. \n\nMAE: Yay. I loved it! Thank you both so much. What a treat!\n\nCASEY: I feel like we could keep talking for hours. \n\nJAMEY: I know. \n\n[laughter]\n\nThis is how I feel after a lot of my episodes.\n\n[laughter]\n\nWhich is always good, I guess, but.Special Guest: Mae Beale.","content_html":"01:00 - Mae’s Superpower: Being Able to Relate to Other People and Finding Ways to Support Them
\n\n03:42 - Contributing to Humanity (Specifically American Culture)
\n\n07:01 - Somatics and The Effects of Yoga, Meditation, and Self-Awareness
\n\n12:20 - Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity
\n\n33:17 - Giving vs Accepting Help; Extending and Accepting Love, Empathy, and Forgiveness
\n\n48:25 - The Mental Health Challenges of Being a Programmer
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey: The word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Also: help and be helped!
\n\nJamey: Valuing yourself and the way that helps the communities you are a part of.
\n\nMae: Engaging with users using the things you're building is a reward and a way to give yourself “microjoy!”
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 238 of Greater Than Code. I am your host, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here today with our guest, Mae Beale.
\n\nMae spent 20 years in and out of nonprofit-land, with jaunts into biochemistry and women's studies degreeing, full-time pool playing, high school chemistry and physics teaching, higher ed senior administrating, and more. She went to code school in 2014 (at 37 years old) to gain the technical skills needed to build the tools she wished she'd had in all the years prior.
\n\nSo glad to have you, Mae.
\n\nMAE: Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Jamey. Same for me.
\n\nJAMEY: So you may be ready for the first question that we're going to ask you, which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMAE: Yeah, thank you. I think that my superpower is being able to relate to other people and find ways to support them. How did I get good at that? Well, I've dealt with a lot of pretty complicated people in my life that you have to do extra thinking to figure out. So I think I got my start with that and I've done lots of different things in life and met lots of different people and felt lots of different feelings and thought lots of different thoughts. So I think that's mostly it: living.
\n\nJAMEY: I was going to say that I know from knowing you that you've done lots of things, but even our listeners who don't know you probably already know that just after listening to your bio, so.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: Yeah, and there's plenty more that didn't make it in there. That's something that is fun and a joke is no matter how long people know me, there's always still something that they didn't know and so, that's fun for me. I like to surprise other people and I love being surprised by people. So it's like a little game I have with all my fun facts.
\n\nJAMEY: I love that.
\n\nCASEY: I've got a question: what's on your mind lately.
\n\nMAE: What is on my mind lately? So many things, I don't even know where to start. One is where and how can I contribute to the future of humanity [chuckles] and American culture in particular and in the circles that I'm in, drawing it down even more. So I think about that a lot. I think about my house a lot. I just bought a house and I'm going to do each room with a color theme so it'll end up being, you walked through the rainbow. Pretty excited for that, lots of things there. And I think a lot about how to empower others and be a more and more effective communicator. I think about that a lot. Probably those are the top ones and maybe Dominion. I play that every day. So I think about that a little bit.
\n\nCASEY: [chuckles] Love that game.
\n\nJAMEY: Me too.
\n\nCASEY: This is great. All three are really interesting. I want to start on your first one. What opportunities do you see lately, or what have you done recently, or what do you hope to do to help the world help American culture help make an impact? What are you working on?
\n\nMAE: From where I sit, it seems like the most important things that any of us can attune to about even a portion of is the environment and whatever's going on with our ability as humans to respond to climate change and water, like clean, accessible water for people, and hate and divisiveness. Those three things I think are our biggest challenges. So I try to do things that end up in those spheres, if not in things that ideally have some mix of those rather than having them be silos.
\n\nOne of my jobs is working with Title Track Michigan, and they are a relatively new nonprofit that brings creative practice to complex problems and is specifically focused on water protection, racial equity, and youth empowerment. Once all the uprising started in 2020, we created an Understanding Racial Justice course for white people in Northern Michigan and so, I've been helping to facilitate those courses and taking as many opportunities to rethink my orientation to all those topics as well.
\n\nCASEY: That's so cool. You found a group that does all of those things in one.
\n\nMAE: Amazing, right?
\n\nCASEY: Wow. Title Track Michigan, huh?
\n\nMAE: Yeah. I found them because my life radically changed a few years ago. A lot of things changed at once like, not just a lot, all of the things. So I went on this walkabout just trying to find ways to be of service in the world without expectation, watch who I met, and where I ended up. I ended up in Michigan and getting introduced to these people who then were creating a new nonprofit Title Track.
\n\nAnother thing I do is I have a consultancy that I have a flagship enterprise product for nonprofit, small business administration. That is a little bit of a Trojan horse for change management and organizational development and sustainable longevity planning for organizations.
\n\nSo the fact that I ended up there with them at that time and way more cool synchronicities happened. That's how I met them. So it just feels right and great to have landed in that space and then to have 2020 be what it became, we were already formed and positioned to try to be of help.
\n\nJAMEY: This is an abstract question.
\n\nMAE: Okay.
\n\nJAMEY: But what does it feel like to feel like you're doing the right thing in that way like, the right place to be? I got the sense from you telling this story that things just came together in the right way at the right time and that's a beautiful thing when it happens and you said it feels right. What does that feel like?
\n\nMAE: Mm thanks, Jamey. Well, my first thought is another thing that Title Track does in that Understanding Racial Justice course and a lot of circles I've ended up in have a focus on somatic and so, body centered awareness and engagement. So I used to always think my answer was going to be emotional when people ask me, “How do I feel?” and now I hear and think of my body first so that's cool. I'll answer a couple of ways, if that's okay.
\n\nWhen for me synchronicities happen and I feel most alive, or of use, which is important to me, my heart literally feels bigger and almost breathing like I can feel air. I don't know how to explain that. I definitely will be smiling more, my back is straighter, and I usually have a lot more to say. All of a sudden, I'll have a lot to say. Other times, I have nothing to say!
\n\nFor how I might've answered that question previously would be closer to having a lot of things to say, like I'm a lot more creative, making connections, getting excited, and wanting to create new things together with other people.
\n\nHow about you two?
\n\nCASEY: Just hearing you describe that, I have thought back on times I felt really proud and engaged and I noticed my posture improved, too. That's so interesting. I've had a nerve injury for 2 years. My hands go tingly sometimes. So I'm working on my back and noticing posture all the time. Interesting how my mood like that could affect the posture. I believe it, too.
\n\nJAMEY: I'm not sure that I would have called out posture specifically in that way, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think what I would say is I feel lighter.
\n\nMAE: Yeah!
\n\nJAMEY: So to feel less bogged down, I can see in what way that's related to posture. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Totally. Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: We all have a lot to say on this, I love it.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nThis reminds me of the Flow State. So when your skills match a need and it's challenging the appropriate amount, you're in a great concentration state, but if your skills aren't enough, or if the need isn't important enough—either one—feels a little way less good, not good.
\n\nJAMEY: Totally.
\n\nMAE: I lived at a yoga retreat center for a little while in Massachusetts called Kripalu—it's the largest yoga retreat center in North America. I had never done yoga and I was like, “Oh, cool. I'll just go live there [laughs] and see.” Anyway, I was there for three months and they have a part of their organization dedicated to optimal human performance. They have a partnership with Tanglewood and some other places around there to see if yoga and meditation can induce more Flow State, more of the time for top performing musicians, and just to be able to have more “scientific evidence” about how physiologically we can do things to get ourselves closer to those states more often. Pretty cool work.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. That's really interesting.
\n\nCASEY: I was just doing some research on the effects of different types of yoga and meditation on anxiety. I was trying to read some of the primary sources. I like to go to PubMed first—that's my go-to. Some people do Google Scholar. It's interesting, the framing sounded in a couple of papers like, “Well, it's not as good as CBT,” and my takeaway was, “Well, it helps an amount, huh? Great, good.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo people who can't get access to CBT should consider that and that's true anyway. Science has shown this thing we knew was helpful anyway, is helpful in an empirical sense and that’s great.
\n\nMAE: Totally. Casey, for anybody who might not know what CBT is, would you be willing to…?
\n\nCASEY: Thank you. CBT here is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most common and effective forms of talk therapy you would do with a therapist. It focuses on what some maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns are and helps you change them.
\n\nMAE: And that's coming from a psych major, right, Casey?
\n\nCASEY: That's right. I talk all about that in my book, Debugging Your Brain. It's funny, but you're flipping the script here. Usually we do this to our guests.
\n\nMAE: [laughter] Great!
\n\nCASEY: Love it.
\n\nJAMEY: There's another project, Mae that I know that you've worked on that. I'm a little bit surprised that you haven't brought up yet, but I'm going to bring it up, which is your Mutual Aid program.
\n\nMAE: Thank you.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that when you are talking about doing something to make an impact on the world, like that was the first thing I thought of since I know you're involved with that and I would love to hear you talk about it.
\n\nMAE: Yes. Thank you. Thanks for bringing that up and I did want to talk about that and I was looking forward to hearing what you have to say about that topic as well.
\n\nSo when the pandemic started, you may have seen these, or become involved, but there was a whole bunch of spreadsheets starting like Google Sheets of people who had some needs and people who wanted to offer some things. Google spreadsheets are really easy first pass for people with low tech skills and no budget to just come together. But I started being invited to all these different spreadsheets from around the country that include people's name, address, phone number, CashApp name, their exact vulnerabilities and identities, and current struggles in a spreadsheet that's downloadable.
\n\nIt really freaked me out and I started coding that day about how can we start to do something to make these people not have to have their identity so exposed and through like WeCamp networks, Ruby for Good networks, and different Slacks I'm in of varying programmers, I started saying, “Does anybody else want to get involved?” and several people did.
\n\nSo we have built a platform to support mutual aid groups and what we did immediately was find some groups to figure out what their needs were instead of just what we might imagine. They were doing a lot of, we call it dispatch moderated setups where people fill out a form and then volunteers read the forms and then match people and do all the communication manually, but not having peer-to-peer things go on.
\n\nThe system was originally designed to support that dispatch moderated set up and once people started to go back to work in the fall and there weren't as many people able to devote as much time to volunteer, and as varying groups, especially ones that hadn't been around as long, realized they would probably need a lot more training in social work, ask things just to be more effective and figure out how to route people correctly within their community to services that might be able to help them a little more.
\n\nSince the fall, we've to coding peer-to-peer solution. We have several different mutual aid groups around the country and right now, most closely working with groups in Michigan and New York state, just because that's where our networks are. Getting to launch some peer-to-peer stuff, but mutual aid itself has become a buzzword and like, what is that anyway? [chuckles]
\n\nSo that topic I love talking about. There's like a mutual aid saying, “Solidarity, not charity.” The whole thing is we're all in it together and we're not going to rely on different structures, or institutions that were set up most often in ways that institutionalized various forms of oppression. Just empowering people to connect with each other, have stronger networks, and build more resiliency is what's up with it, but mutual aid has been around for over a 100 years, at least as a term and a thing, but it generally, almost always springs from communities that have been disenfranchised.
\n\nSo when the pandemic started and a lot of new groups formed, not everybody had already checked what's already happening and a lot of different people, especially in communities of color, were surprised by like, they didn't hear that term, that's just what they do. There's been a big—along with everything else—learning of how those structures already were in place and how we can continue to grow them, and support each other as we navigate this world we're in.
\n\nJamey, I was going to ask you about your involvement with mutual aid, too and if you had anything to add to that definition.
\n\nJAMEY: I was going to say that I really liked what you said about finding new ways around things that have been institutionalized. Because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about mutual aid is the way that people can help each other realize what kind of help is available and what kind of help they even might need.
\n\nA story that I really like to tell that and I think about a lot is I have a friend who's involved in mutual aid in Buffalo, where I'm from and he does repair work and just is very handy in that way. So he does a lot of mutual aid repair for people and he told me that the way that this started for him is that there was a request in our mutual aid Facebook group where someone was saying, “I really need $200, or something like this because my window is broken and I need to buy a space heater because it's been getting really cold. So I need this money to buy a heater and all of this stuff.” My friend came in and was like, “Okay, but what if I just fixed your window?” It had not occurred to this person that she could ask for that.
\n\nMAE: Oh, boy.
\n\nJAMEY: She was coming up with all these solutions around it. So this idea of like coming together as a community and saying, ‘Yeah, I can help you, but can we help a little bit closer to the source than what you even just asked for?” I think is really powerful.
\n\nMAE: Yes. I love that, Jamey. Yeah, it's the closer we can be in community with each other, the easier those asks are. Something that you said about figuring out your own needs, there is a thing and it's related a little bit to some of the other topics we've talked about where there's like the white savior thing. People want to do something for people who they think are less – they have less than them. There's a power dynamic there and mutual aid—mutual, that's the main part.
\n\nSo you really aren't doing mutual aid if you're not accepting help. All of us have things that we could be supportive with and things to offer. I love also having that not – there's a lot of mutual aid that is about just giving money and/or like reparation stuff. But I love when money isn't part of the equation and quantification of value isn't part of the equation. It's just like, “I have something to give and I could use something and this is how we're going to stay in community and in network and lower those barriers to have offers and asks be even easier in the future.”
\n\nJAMEY: For sure. I think it's about meeting people where they are, too, because I agree about some programs are focused on money, and some people have money and can put that into the community and that's great. But maybe they don't have time to show up and do these things and other people might think like, “Well, how can I help because I don't have money,” but they have time, or they have skills. I think that everyone bringing in and saying, “This is what I have to offer with what's going on in my life right now,” and maybe it's money, or maybe it's time, or maybe it's something else that I didn't even think of that they're going to offer. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Totally. When you were saying that, I just got a chill thinking if really every single person just that question you just said, “How can I help?” If we all did one thing, this is how to effect broad change.
\n\nCASEY: How can people find the mutual aid groups near them? If they just search mutual aid, that probably gets a bunch, but they don't all say it, right?
\n\nMAE: Yeah. It's a really great point. There have been some different efforts to link together mutual aid networks and there's a map, but not every network is on it because not every network even knows about it. [chuckles] So because mutual aid is so grassroots, it's not –
\n\nCASEY: Right.
\n\nMAE: A number of them have form 501(c)(3) is just to not be doing illegal financial transaction stuff that is problematic by having all this money go through their personal Venmo, or something. But that is what a lot of people have done. So mostly there's the Google option and the term mutual aid is getting used more and more, but there are some other phrases. I'm forgetting it right now. What's the name when they hand out medical supplies? Harm reduction, there's a bunch of harm reduction efforts. Also, in cities where there are a lot of homeless shelters, there's things around encampments and like becoming community with those folks to advocate.
\n\nAnother piece, major piece of mutual aid that I forgot to name is it inherently has a political engagement component in it. So one of the reasons why it is this solidarity thing is you're seeing all the humans as inherently equally valuable and that you're identifying the structural things that led to people having a different experience, or a different privilege, or a different outcome to what's going down for them. So then by identifying those together, you try to change the system to not create the problem.
\n\nWhereas, to go back to that phrase charity, a lot of charities—which are awesome, I'm not trying to knock those—but a lot of them have more of a it's your fault, or shortcoming, or need that has put you where you are. Mutual aid is the way in which this is all rigged and on purpose, or not on purpose, or just the impact of the structures is how you ended up where you are so let's rejigger.
\n\nJAMEY: A phrase that comes up a lot, in the protest community specifically, is, “We keep us safe and we say that at protests about security, medics and things, and wearing masks—I've seen people start to use that phrase. But I think that that's a phrase that really speaks to like what mutual aid is about, too. It's about we are doing something together for ourselves as a community, and we're not looking for something from the outside that comes in a hierarchical structure. We're just making this decision as a group of people to take care of ourselves and our neighbors and I think that's what I really love about it. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And back to what you were saying, Casey, the how can people find those things? There's also just, “Hey, I've got some extra seeds,” or put a cabinet in your yard with some food in it and say free food. You don't have to associate with a “mutual aid group” to do mutual aid. It's like, that's just a blanket term, basically that offers a little bit of a cue about what those people might be up to. But it's really, in whatever way you are sharing and developing relationships with your fellow community members. This is mutual aid.
\n\nJAMEY: I thought of another example of that.
\n\nMAE: Yay!
\n\nJAMEY: We have this in Buffalo, but I think it's a thing that we're seeing other places, too. Separate from our mutual aid network, we have a Facebook Buy Nothing group.
\n\nMAE: yes.
\n\nJAMEY: And people will post like, “Oh, I have this, I'm going to get rid of it. Someone come pick it up.” “Oh, I was going to donate these spoons from my kitchen. Someone can have them.” When you said seeds, that's the kind of thing you'll see on Buy Nothing and I think that's been a revolution in anything even separately from it, because I do think that money plays a part in a lot of mutual aid stuff, because folks need money for things. But in Buy Nothing, it's pointedly without money and I think that that's a very fun and cool dynamic, too.
\n\nMAE: Totally. Yes. I have a couple of things I would love to say them. One is that the bringing up Facebook has started to support mutual aid. But also, I don't know if y'all have seen The Social Dilemma and just become aware of all of this tracking that's going down.
\n\nThere's something that is another motivator for us on the mutual aid repo is this is open source code that anybody who wants to use it can stand up their own instance and if you partner with us, connect with us, we will help you if you need us to. But it's intentionally not a multitenant app so that people have small datasets that they own and there isn't like this aggregate thing going on about local data. It’s basically a small tech for the win, which is also pretty mutual aid-y.
\n\nOur group, like the programmers who are most involved, meet a couple times a week and know about what's going on in each other's lives. We are mutual aid for each other, too. The energy of what, how, who we are, and what we're doing is getting put into the thing that we're building that hopefully has that same effect. So there's this nice spiral thing going on in there that I'm proud of. I think there's a lot about what we referenced earlier, institutionalization of oppression, that has to be like, there are ways to create other options and they take cultivation of and building new structures. Stuff like this as an example of that and an experiment in it.
\n\nAnother one that it reminded me of is when I was younger, I used to go to rainbow gatherings. I don't know if y'all know about these. It's a super hippie thing and there's regional gatherings, but there's a national gathering at a national forest every year. All these people just show up and then they build earthen stoves. There's a bunch of people who do not participate in main society; they just go to these different gatherings and travel around as a…
\n\nThere's plenty more to talk about rainbow tribe and even the usage of that word tribe and what goes down. I'm not going to try to touch into that, but something I love about it is there's a whole exchange row where people just sit out with things and there's no money. You're not allowed to use money.
\n\nI think I was 18 when I went to my first one and I was just like, “What? This is amazing.” Like, just to imagine my life not through a currency, or that evaluated exchange, it was so inspiring to me. It still is and so, some of what you said, Jamey, reminded me of that.
\n\nJAMEY: I relate a lot to that, too. Burning Man events are also no money allowed.
\n\nMAE: Ah.
\n\nJAMEY: When I first entered that space, that was one of the things that really spoke to me about it too. In fact, it's also no barter allowed in Burning Man. It's a purely gifting economy where if you give someone something, a lot of times they become inspired to gift you something back right there and there's an exchange that happens. But culturally, the point of it is that there's not supposed to be any expectation of exchange when you gift something to somebody.
\n\nMAE: Do you know about that restaurant in San Francisco that is free, but you pay for the person behind you if you want?
\n\nJAMEY: I don't know about one in San Francisco specifically, but we have a program like that similar in Buffalo. It's called Big – I'm going to look it up so I can link it up.
\n\nMAE: How about you, Casey? I’m getting excited so I keep saying things.
\n\nCASEY: I’m reflecting on the award mutual aid a lot through all this. I like this idea that mutual aid as it is in action and that mutual aid groups do mutual aid, but individuals can, too.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That's a pretty powerful theme. It makes the term more approachable, especially since it's a jargon word lately. It's just grassroots-y helping each other out, however that looks.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nCASEY: I'm thinking a lot about what communities I'm a part of, too, that naturally have that phenomenon. It's like, I'm queer, I’m in a lot of queer groups. I’m in interest groups like musician groups and they help each other do stuff. They carpool to the practice or anything like that that’s this. There's also a formal ones like D.C. Ward 6 has mutual aid groups that are named that. That's its own thing. And then even my Facebook friends, I just post like, “I have a crackpot, who wants it?”
\n\nMAE: Totally!
\n\nCASEY: But before today, I might not have used the word mutual aid to describe any of that because I'm not part of a formal approved mutual aid group, which is not the point of that term.
\n\nMAE: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Just people helping people.
\n\nMAE: When I was thinking about getting into tech, I, as a pretty outspoken woman who will address injustice directly if I see it, when I see it in myself and others, I wasn't sure if that was going to be a place for me. I had had some not awesome experiences with tech people before I was in tech. So I reached out to a bunch of people who were already in the biz and they spent hours talking to me about their experiences, answering all of my questions, and offering to help me.
\n\nAs I took the leap and went to code school and participated in a meetups and just, everywhere is mutual aid in programming, everybody is helping each other. “I have a question,” “I'm wondering about this.” This podcast is mutual aid, in my opinion.
\n\nIt's been really inspiring for me to be a programmer because I feel a part of a worldwide network of people who try to, especially with mixing in the open source piece, build things and offer what they can. It's awesome.
\n\nCASEY: I have a challenge for people listening to this podcast. This week, I'd like you to help someone and accept help from someone, both in the spirit of mutual aid.
\n\nMAE: Yes!
\n\nCASEY: I'm not surprised; accepting help might be the harder half for a lot of people.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that's true. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: One way I've said it before is that that is your gift to the giver. The giver doesn't get to be a giver [chuckles] unless you accept the gift from them and that people can, including myself at times, tend to over-give and that is its own challenge. So if you need to stay in the giving frame, [chuckles] you can be like, “All right, well, I'm providing this opportunity to the other person.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I've playfully pushed on an idea to people. I'm trying to help them and they say, “No, no, no. I can't accept your help because I would be indebted,” and I'm like, “You would deprive me of this good feeling I would get from helping you? Really?”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Thinking of it a little bit, I'm not like – [overtalk]
\n\nJAMEY: [inaudible].
\n\nCASEY: Right. I'm just thinking that way a little bit, flipping it, helps some people accept the help then.
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that people have so much harder of a time of extending love and empathy, and forgiveness, and all of these nice things that we might really value extending to other people, but not to ourselves.
\n\nMAE: Yo, that's for real, Jamey and still on this theme, the seeing each other as equals as in community. My Mom used to say this great phrase, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” She was raised Catholic so it's got that in there, but I love that of this could definitely be me.
\n\nThere's a cool Buddhist practice that I learned from Pema Chödrön about you extend release of suffering to others and then you widen the circle to include yourself in it, but you don't start there. So similar to how you're saying, Jamey, that that is a challenge for a lot of people, it's just built into that practice where when you can't give yourself a break, [chuckles] imagining others in that situation and then trying to include yourself is an angle on it.
\n\nJAMEY: I like that. I think also related to Casey's example of his joke. It's thinking about how what you do affects other people, I think sometimes we're better at that and if you're treating yourself bad, especially if you're in one of these tight mutual communities. If you're treating yourself bad, that's affecting the people around you, too. They don't want to see you being treated bad and they don't want to see you being miserable and they want the best for you. When you're preventing yourself from having the best, that's affecting the whole community, too.
\n\nMAE: Yo!
\n\nJAMEY: I hadn’t really thought about it like that until right now. So thank you, Casey, for your joke.
\n\nCASEY: Powerful thought. Yeah. Like the group, your people, your team, they need you to be your best. So if you want to help your team, sometimes the best way is to help yourself. It's not selfish. It's the opposite of selfish.
\n\nMAE: Exactly. Another thing I've heard a bunch of the different activist groups, some phrasing that people have started to use is collective liberation and no one's free till we're all free and if we are suffering, the other people are suffering and vice versa. So figuring out how to not be so cut off from ourselves, or others, or that suffering and seeing them as intertwined, I think is one of the ways to unlock the lack of empathy that a lot of people experience.
\n\nCASEY: There's a really cool visualization I like that that reminds me of. It's called the Parable of the Polygons and you can drag around triangles and squares. You can see how segregation ends up happening, if you have certain criteria set up in the heuristics of how they move. Or if some people want to be around diverse people, it ends up not happening, or it ends up recovering and getting more integrated and mixed. It's so powerful because you can manipulate the diagrams. There's a whole series of diagrams. Look it up, it's the Parable of the Polygons.
\n\nMAE: Cool! That is awesome.
\n\nCASEY: So I want to be around people who aren't like me and that helps. It helps with this phenomenon and the more people do that, the better.
\n\nMAE: Yeah, and having grown up in a small city, that's pretty homogenous on multiple levels. When I went to college and learned that people thought differently, my world was this very rigidly defined, this is how things are. [chuckles] My biker dad, that's still his way, his lens. When you start to experience people who are not like yourself, you let that challenge your assumptions, then you end up transformed by that.
\n\nI was a double major in college—biochemistry and women's studies—and I remember being in an organic chemistry class and the professor said, “Well, if that's too hard for you, you can go take a sociology class.” I raised my hand and was like, “My sociology classes challenge me on every single thing I think about the world. Your class requires me to provide rote memorization, which I'm awesome at luckily and that's how I ended up in your class.” But that is not harder. That's that story.
\n\nCASEY: The last episode that I recorded was with Andrea Goulet. One of the things that kept coming up was the old-timey programming interview questions were all about math.
\n\nMAE: Yes.
\n\nCASEY: Which isn't necessarily what programming is about. That reminds me here of rote memorization in that class versus complex systems thinking in sociology.
\n\nMAE: Totally!
\nCASEY: With these two choices, I might choose a sociology person to do architecture work in my software than the rote memorization person.
MAE: Totally, definitely, every time. Yeah, and that's a different lens that I have coming in to the industry from having been an administrator for so many years is our perception as programmers about what's going to be helpful is very different than someone whose day job is to do repetitive work like very, very, very simple apps.
\n\nWhen I was in code school, I really wanted us to figure out how to make even our homework assignments be available for nonprofits and that's how my whole system in business ended up getting spun up. Oh, it was before that. My job before that, when I interviewed, I said, “Well, how long do you need someone here for? How long would you need me to commit?” and he said, “A year,” and I said, “All right, well, I'm not sure I'm the best candidate for you because I'm going to go to grad school and get a degree and be a consultant as businesses and nonprofits.” And then I was at that job for 8 and a half years before I went to code school. [laughs]
\n\nBut the thing about what could be of use just requires so much humility from programmers to defer to the actual employees and the workers about their experience and what could help them. Because so often, we think that we're the ones with the awesome idea and we can just change their lives and disrupt the thing. A lot of the best ideas come from the people themselves.
\n\nI went to a project management training in Puerto Rico and it was a very rarefied environment of people who could pay for people to get PMP training, or whatever. The people that were in my cohort were factory project planners and not a single one of them knew anyone who worked in the factory. Like, they didn't get to know them as part of that project and they didn't have anyone in their sphere and my parents were paper mill workers. So when I'm sitting there and listening to these people talk about the worker and their lack of wherewithal, I guess, there'll be a gracious way to say it right now, I was just appalled. I try to take that into any time we are building software in a way that honors all people.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. My favorite leaders are the ones that listen to their employees and the users. I am happy with my roles in leadership positions, but the thing that makes me happy with myself is listening and if I ever lose that, I don't trust myself to be a good leader, or manager.
\n\nMAE: Totally.
\n\nCASEY: I could. I know it's easy when you get promoted to stop listing as much. It's the incentive structure of the system. I wouldn't blame myself if I lost it, but knowing I value it and don't want to lose it helps me hold on to my propensity to listen.
\n\nMAE: Yes, Casey! Totally that.
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes people have asked me, “What makes you think you'd be good at leading this?” That is literally my answer is like, “Well, I won't forget to listen.”
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that it's weird the way that people create this hierarchy of good ideas and better ideas and which idea is better and put that kind of value judgment on it. When really, when you're dealing with software and trying to create something that works for the people that are using it. It's not about whether your idea is good or bad, it's about whether it's the right one for that group of people.
\n\nMy background, my first tech industry job was in agriculture and so, all of our customers were farmers and people that worked at farms, To admit I don't know what it's like to work on a farm in that way, it's not a value judgment about whether you're smart, or good at programming, which people act like it is. It's just a true fact about whether, or not you've ever had that experience.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCASEY: Sometimes I run workshops where we think about all the pros and cons to different ideas and when we need it, we pull out a matrix. We get a spreadsheet that has columns and rows, and rows are the ideas. A lot of decisions are made with one column, naturally like, “What's the best?” You just say like, “1 to 10, this one's the best.”
\n\nBut when we break it out, we have lots of columns, lots of variables like, oh, this one's easier to build, this one's higher impact. And when we break it out even further, we can weight those columns then do the matrix math and people like that, actually. Even people who are math averse. They can fill in the numbers in each of the cells and then they trust the spreadsheet to do the thing. That gets us on the same page.
\n\nIt depends on the context, which columns matter, which factors are important and that can completely change the situation. Even if you all agree on this one's harder than that one, the outcome could be completely different. The columns, or the context in my matrix model.
\n\nJAMEY: We’re reading at work 99 Bottles of Object-Oriented Programming, which Mae knows because we work together, which we haven't said yet on the show. But we're doing a book club. Your description of the matrix columns and what is relevant reminded me of the thesis of that book because it's like, there are tradeoffs. It's not that one tradeoff is necessarily more valuable than another tradeoff, it's just like what makes sense for this context that you're using and building it in, then you have to think about it in a nuanced way if you want to come up with a nuanced answer.
\n\nMAE: I am so grateful to and inspired by Sandi Metz. Her ability to distill these concepts into common sense terms is so genius and moving, welcoming, accessible. So grateful, so really glad you brought that up, Jamey.
\n\nOne of the things that really stuck out from various talks of hers that I've been to is even if you aren't changing that code, that code does not need to change. That's bad code, but it works. That's great code, [chuckles] like working code, and splitting some of the bikeshedding that we do on code quality with business impact is a teeter-totter that I really appreciate.
\n\nJAMEY: I like the way it puts value on everyone and what they're working on. Because my big takeaway from starting to read this book has been that I tend to write fairly simple code because that's what I find easy to do. [chuckles] I always felt well, other people write more complicated code than me because they know more about X, Y, and Z than me and I don't know enough about it to write something that elegant, or that complex, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
\n\nI had placed this value judgment on other people's code over mine and to read about code that's dissecting the value judgments we put on it and determining hey, just because maybe it's not always the best thing to overengineer something Maybe it doesn't have to be because you don't feel smart enough to overengineer it. Maybe it can just be because that's not the right choice. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Cool.
\n\nJAMEY: I thought that was really valuable to think about.
\n\nMAE: Love that, Jamey.
\n\nJAMEY: Boost people's confidence, I hope because I think a lot of people need their confidence boosted. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Yo, I had no idea what I was getting into as far as the mental health challenge of being a programmer. To maintain one's self-respect, especially as an adult who was successful in her career prior to then be like, there is a whole thing about the adult learner. But to have your entire day be dealing with things that are either broken, or don't exist yet, that's your whole day. Nothing works ever basically and the moment it does, you move on to the things that aren't, or don't exist.
\n\nSo it's so critical to try to remember and/or learn how to celebrate those small wins that then somehow feel like insulting that you're celebrating this is just some simple things. [laughs] And then it's like, why are we making a big fanfare? But those microjoys—I've never heard that phrase as opposed to microaggression, or something. Microjoys, if we could give each other those, it could go a long because the validation is a very different experience than I have seen, or heard about, or experienced in any other industry. It's a real challenge.
\n\nJAMEY: Not only is everything broken, or doesn't exist. But once it's working, you never hear about it again until it's broken again. [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Yeah. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: That’s so true and it's such an anti-pattern. At USCIS, you would have every developer, who was interested, see an interview—we’re working on an interview app—watch the user use the app every month at least, if not more and they loved those. They saw the context, they saw the thing they just built be used. That's positive feedback that everyone deserves, in my opinion and it's just a cultural idea that engineers don't get to see users, but they should. They do at some companies and yours can, too.
\n\nMAE: Yes, Casey! We are working on that at True Link financial as well. Figuring out how to work that more in so that we all feel part of the same team more and we're not like the IT crowd and in the basement and all we have to say is, “Hello, have you tried turning it on and off again?” [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: Casey, I love that because even as you were telling that story, I was like, “Yeah, it's useful to see how people use it because that'll help you make better decisions,” and blah, blah, blah, which I feel strongly about. And then what you actually said at the end was, “and you get satisfaction out of being able to see people using your thing.” I hadn't even thought of that dynamic of it.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. It’s both, happier and more effective. That's the thing I say a lot. These user interviews make you happier doing your job and make you more effective at doing them both. How can you not?
\n\nMAE: Yeah.
\n\nJAMEY: What’s not to like?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's true, though about knowing that people use your app. I started in consulting and a lot of the things I worked on felt a little soul crushing and not because I thought that they were bad, or unethical in any way, but just like, who is this for? Like, who cares about this?
\n\nOne of my most joyful experiences was one of the other products that wasn't quite like that, that I worked on when I was in consulting was an app called Scorebuilders and it was for physical therapy students have a specific standardized test they have to take and so, it's study prep for this specific test. There's like two, or three and we had different programs for them.
\n\nAnd then I, a few years after that was, in physical therapy myself, because I have back problems and they have interns from college helping them in the physical therapy office that I went to and they were talking about studying for their test, or whatever. I was like, “Oh, that's funny. I haven't thought about that in a while. Do you use Scorebuilders to study in?” They were like, “Oh yeah. We all use it. That's what you use if you're in this program,” and I was like, “Oh, I built that,” and they were like, “What?!” They were calling all of the other people from the next room to be like, “Guess what?” and I'm like, “This is literally the best thing that's ever happened.” [laughs]
\n\nMAE: Yay!
\n\nCASEY: Yeah! That's such a good story in the end, but it's such a bad story. You never got to meet anyone like that earlier, really?
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That's common, that’s everywhere, but that's a shame. You can change that. [overtalk]
\n\nJAMEY: I just realized since it was consulting and not like, I didn't work for Scorebuilders.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, I’m sure. It's even more hard.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I'm so glad you got that.
\n\nJAMEY: Thank you. It happened like 5 years ago and I still think about it all the time. [laughs]
\n\nWell, we've been having a great discussion, but we've pretty much reached the point in the show where it's time to do reflections and that's when everyone will say something that really stood out to them about our conversation, maybe a call-to-action, something that they want to think more about.
\n\nSo, Casey, do you want to start?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I said this earlier, but this is my big takeaway is the word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Especially since it is, by definition, grassroots-y. There is no formal stamp of approval on a mutual aid group that formalizes it. That's pretty powerful.
\n\nI'll be thinking about what communities I'm part of that do that through that lens this week and I challenge listeners to help and be helped sometime this week, both.
\n\nJAMEY: I think one thing that I'm going to really try and keep in mind is what we were talking about, valuing yourself and the way that that helps the community. I really liked Mae’s story about including yourself after other people and using that way to frame it in your mind. Because I think that that will make it easier and thinking about like, this is something I struggle with all the time. I think a lot of us do. So I think that I really want to take that one into my life. Next time I realize I'm treating myself unfairly, I want to think, “Well, how is this affecting the other people around me who probably don't want to see me to do that?” [chuckles]
\n\nMAE: Thanks, Jamey. Yeah. I have so many answers of reflections! The one I know I'm going to use immediately is this most recent one of engaging with users using the things you're building as a reward and a way to be able to get microjoy. I'm definitely going to use that word now more, microjoys, but I agree with both of what you said, too.
\n\nJAMEY: Well, Mae thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us. This was really great and I think people will really appreciate it.
\n\nMAE: Yay. I loved it! Thank you both so much. What a treat!
\n\nCASEY: I feel like we could keep talking for hours.
\n\nJAMEY: I know.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThis is how I feel after a lot of my episodes.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhich is always good, I guess, but.
Special Guest: Mae Beale.
","summary":"Mae Beale talks extensively about mutual aid and its goal of providing solidarity; not charity, somatics and the effects of yoga, meditation, and self-awareness, giving vs accepting help, and not only extending love, empathy, and forgiveness to others, but also to most importantly yourself.","date_published":"2021-06-09T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/4b84c3ed-e80f-403f-937e-8caea4b69743.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38936706,"duration_in_seconds":3396}]},{"id":"5733805a-42e9-41b2-a95f-6e7e2a03d6a5","title":"237: Empathy is Critical with Andrea Goulet","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/empathy-is-critical","content_text":"01:13 - Andrea’s Superpower: Distilling Complexity\n\n\nApproaching Copywriting in a Programmatic Way\nWord-land vs Abstract-land\n\n\n09:00 - “Technical” vs “Non-Technical”\n\n\nThis or That Thinking\n\n\n16:20 - Empathy is Critical\n\n\nCommunication Artifacts\nAudience/User Impact\nProgrammer Aptitude Test (PAT)\n\n\n33:00 - Reforming Hiring Practices and Systems\n\n\nCore Values\nExercism.io\nRetrospectives\n\n\n39:28 - Performance Reviews\n\n\nContinuous Feedback\nBrave New Work by Aaron Dignan \nTeam of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World\nContinuous Improvement & Marginal Gains\n\n\n\n“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~ Arthur Ashe\n\n\nEmpathy In Tech\nCorgibytes\n\nReflections:\n\nMando: Empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives.\n\nJess: Help happens when you have empathy for individuals who aren’t the great majority of people using the software.\n\nCasey: The best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get their feedback. Do it during an interview!\n\nAndrea: Diving deeper than code is valuable!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 237. I'm Jessica Kerr and I'm happy to be here today with my friend, Mando Escamilla!\n\nMANDO: Hey, Jess. Thanks. I am happy to be here with my friend, Casey Watts.\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey and we're all here with Andrea Goulet. \n\nAndrea is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. \n\nShe is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. \n\nAndrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist.\n\nWelcome, Andrea.\n\nANDREA: Hi, welcome! Nice to be here.\n\nCASEY: We always like to start with a question, which I think you’re prepared for, that is what is your superpower, Andrea, and how did you acquire it?\n\nANDREA: Yeah! First of all, I just love that y'all ask this. I think it's just such a nice way to get to know different people. \n\nI was thinking about this because you sent it a little bit ago and I was thinking maybe empathy, given the work I do. But I don't actually think that's it. I feel like I'm constantly trying to learn more about empathy, but I do think that what my superpower is, is distilling complexity. \n\nSo I went back and looked at what the thread is of all the recommendations I've got on LinkedIn and things like that. It's not something that I would necessarily say that I noticed, but it's something that other people have noticed about me. The idea of taking a really abstract and big, gnarly, complex topic, and being able to distill it down to its essence and then communicate either what the importance is, or what the impact is to other people. I think that's why I've gravitated towards big, gnarly things like legacy code. [chuckles] Because what motivates me is impact and how do we have the work that we do make as big of an impact as possible?\n\nSo the way I got into software was really a twisty and windy road. I started out as a copywriter and I think that's where the distilling complexity comes down because I would sit with clients and learn all about their businesses. And then I would write typically, a website, or some kind of marketing material and they would say, “You said what was in my head and I couldn't say it.”\n\nJESSICA: Wow. \n\nANDREA: And when I got into software, I had a friend of mine from high school, Scott, who's my co-founder at Corgibytes, he came up to me because I had been writing about my writing and he said, “You're not a writer, you're actually a programmer because the way that your brain works, you’re thinking in terms of inputs and manipulating data and outputs, and that's exactly what a programmer does.”\n\nSo then, he wanted to fix legacy code for a living. I didn't even know what that was at that point, thought it was a good thing and I found that my ability to both walk in and understand not just the syntax of what's going on, but the business challenges and how everything links together. With that, you can create a sense of cohesion on a team and getting different people to work together and different people to see each other's points of view, because when you're able to distill a perspective over here and say, “Okay, well, this is what this person's trying to say,” and still, this over here. “Okay, I think this is what this person's trying to say.” \n\nI feel like a lot of times I am kind of like a translator, but it's taken me a long time. I've been in software 12 years now and I still have massive imposter syndrome like, I don't belong because I'm not the fastest person on the keyboard. I really struggle with working memory. My visualization is really a struggle, but I do really great in an ensemble. When I started ensemble programming—sometimes it's referred to as mob programming—I was like, “I can do this. Oh my gosh, this makes sense and I belong.” \n\nI think just over the years, little things like hearing the joke – I was at a conference, Jess, I think this may have been ETE when you and I connected, but I heard a joke and it was, I think Phil Carlton had first said it and it was like, “There's only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things,” and then somebody else said, “Off-by-1 errors.” I remember I was like, “Y'all think naming things is hard?” Like, help me understand how that's hard because that’s –\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible]? Oh my gosh, that's hard.\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and to me, it just comes so naturally. I think that's kind of the thing is figuring out where is your trait, where's your skillset. I remember when I first started doing open source contributions, I haven't done those in a long time, but just going in and modifying the language on help messages and turning them from passive to active voice. They got accepted, it was on some high-profile projects, and it was like, I didn't really feel like I was even doing much and I still feel like, “Is that even a big deal?” But I think that's kind of the definition of a superpower a little bit is that –\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, it’s easy for you. [laughs] \n\nANDREA: You don't recognize that it's hard for other people. Yeah, and so it's neat now that it's like I'm starting to come into my own and leaning into that, and then helping other people see that the way that I approach naming things, the way I approach copywriting is actually in a very programmatic way. It's leaning on frameworks. It's leaning on patterns that I use over time. \n\nI know, Casey, you and I have talked last week about like when I first go to a conference like using open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions and these little kind of communication hacks that I've developed over the years. So now putting those together in a framework to help other people remember that when we're coding, we're not coding for a computer, we're coding through a computer for other people. The computer is just like a code is just a tool. It's a powerful tool. But a lot of times –\n\nCASEY: I have a question for you, Andrea. \n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: About that, I find myself switching gears between word land and abstract land. So if I'm coding and I'm not thinking of words, the naming is hard, but sometimes I can switch gears in a different head space. It's like a different me and then I'm naming things really well. Especially if I'm looking at someone else's code, I don't have to be an abstract land; they did that part already. Do you find yourself switching between the two? \n\nANDREA: Oh, all the time. Yeah, and especially, too, when you're writing prose. There's two different kind of aspects of your brain. There's the creative conceptual side and then there's the analytical rational side and everybody has both. So it does require you to come out of the abstract side in that and then move into more of the analytical space, which is why I love pairing. \n\nI love coding as a group because then that way, it's like the mental model is shared and so, I can stay in my world of naming things really well, or I don't know that we need to be that precise if we try to – like, when I was in one group and they were trying to have a timing thing and it was like down to the millisecond and I was like, “Y'all, we don't need to be that precise. We just need to have this check once every 10 minutes,” and that saved like 6 hours of work. Just being able to say that thing and be the checkpoint.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Someone has to be super down in the details of what to type next and it helps to have someone else thinking about it at the broader perspective of why are we doing this?\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and that's me, typically and I love that role, but it's very different than I think what goes through people's minds when they envision a software developer.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, maybe they envisioned the things that software developers do that other people don't. Typing curly braces. \n\nANDREA: Yeah. \n\nMANDO: I still think of that when I'm doing it. When I think of myself as a software developer, I think of myself as the person who hasn't gotten up from their desk in 5 hours and just hunched over, just blazing fast hacking on something that probably is kind of dumb. \n\n[laughter]\n\nBut when I don't spend my day like that, I don't really feel exactly like I've been doing my job and it's something that I struggle with because I know that's not the job in its totality by any means and it doesn't mean that I'm not getting good work done. \n\nJESSICA: Not even close to most of the job.\n\nMANDO: Not even close to most of the job, you're exactly right.\n\nJESSICA: Like you said, if you're sitting there for 5 hours by yourself, hunched over your computer, you're probably hacking on something dumb.\n\nMANDO: Right.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJESSICA: We had gotten off on a tangent somewhere without someone to be like, “Why are we doing this again?”\n\nMANDO: Exactly, exactly. Yeah.\n\nANDREA: Well, and I think that that has been a personal challenge of mine as well. I know there was a really flashbulb moment for me. Scott and I have been running our business together for a couple of years. We had gotten on our first podcast and he was telling our origin story and he used the phrase, “Andrea, she's the non-technical founder.” When I heard it, I was like, “How dare you? I have for 2 years been sitting right next to you,” and then he said, “Well, that's the term you use to describe yourself all the time. We had been in a sales meeting right before I recorded that podcast and that's literally the words you use to introduce yourself. So once you start calling yourself technical, I'll follow suit.”\n\nJESSICA: Wow.\n\nANDREA: It really made me think and I think some of it is because whenever I go to conferences, I don't look like other people who code especially 12 years ago. I don't talk like the people who are typically stereotypical developers and the first question I would get asked, probably 25 to 40% of the time from people I met were, “Hi! Are you technical, or non-technical?” \n\nJESSICA: Really?\n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: Ugh.\n\nJESSICA: Huh.\n\nANDREA: And that would be the first thing out of the gate. At the time, I didn't have the kind of mental awareness to go, “I'm at a technical conference. I think you can assume I'm technical.” The fact is I was scared to call myself technical and over the years, I'm just like, “What does that mean to be technical and why do we define people by you are either technical, or you have nothing?” Non-technical, you have zero technical skills, you don't belong.\n\nJESSICA: So after you had that conversation with Scott, did you switch to calling yourself technical? Did you change your language?\n\nANDREA: It has been a journey. I became very conscious of not using non-technical. I'll sometimes then say like, “I struggle with syntax and I'm really, really good at these things.” When I phrase things that way, or “I have engineers who are so much better and have much deeper expertise in Docker and Kubernetes than I do. I'm really good at explaining the big picture and why this happens.” \n\nSo it becomes, I think what we do in software is that because we're so used to thinking in binaries, because that's the way we need to make our code work—true/false, if/else, yes/no—and that pattern naturally extends itself into human relationships, too. Because I know that every single person who asked me that question in no way was trying to be rude, or shut me out. I know that the intention behind it was kind and trying to be inclusive. But from my perspective, when half the people walk up to you and go, “Do you belong here?” Then it's like, “I don't know. Do I belong here?”\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.\n\nANDREA: So that's an example of how, if you're at a conference saying, “What brings you here?” That's very open-ended and then it gives everybody the chance to say what brings them here and there's no predefined, “Do you fit in this bucket, or that bucket? Are you part of us, or are you part of them?”\n\nJESSICA: It's open to surprise.\n\nANDREA: Mm hm and I think that's something that I am really good at. That's my superpower is let's see the complexity and then let's see the patterns and let's figure out how we can all get good work done together. But you can't see the complexity unless you take a step back.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, and yet Scott noticed that when you are thinking that way, you are thinking like a programmer. Because while software starts by getting us used to thinking in binaries—I should say programming.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. \n\nJESSICA: It’s just thinking of binaries, as soon as you get up to software and software systems, you have to think in complexity.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. \n\nMANDO: And like you were saying, Andrea, I find myself nowadays better recognizing when I'm falling into that trap when I'm not talking about work stuff. When I find myself saying, “Well, it's this, or it's this.” It's like, “Is it really this, or this?” \n\nJESSICA: Are these the only options? \n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Do I have to eat Thai food, or pizza tonight, or could I just eat ice cream, or a salad, or…?\n\n[laughs]\n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: You know what I mean? It's a silly example, but I don't know, there's something about doing this for a while that I find that kind of this, or that thinking wiring itself into my brain.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Well, and I think that that's normal and that's human. We operate on heuristics. There's the whole neurons that fire together wire together and if you're spending the majority of your time in this thought pattern, adopting something else can be a challenge. \n\nSo to me, it's like trying to describe how the way I navigate the world in being able to name things well and being able to talk to new people, connect dots, see patterns that I rely on frameworks just as much as I do when I code and trying to figure out what are those things. What are those things?\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, because you don't have to import that top level file from the framework in order to use it. So it's not explicit that you're using it.\n\nANDREA: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that's been my challenge is that as Scott is like, “Well, help me understand.” I'm like, “I, uh. I don't know. I do this.” That was where I nailed on empathy as really critical and it's been fascinating because when I first started about 5 years writing and talking about empathy in software, the first thing I noticed were all the patterns. \n\nI was like, “A really well-written commit message, that's empathy.” That is taking the time to document your rationale so that it's easier for somebody behind you. Refactoring a method so that it's easy to read, deleting the dead code so that it's less burdensome, even logging. Looking at logging in C versus Ruby, it's night and day. \n\nJESSICA: Help messages.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. There's a little moment.\n\nMANDO: Non-happy path decisions in code. Guardrails. All that stuff.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So I started thinking in terms of communication artifacts. All of these little things that we're producing are just artifacts of our thinking and you can't produce a communication artifact unless you are considering a perspective. What I noticed, of the perspective, is that a lot of software developers had been trained to take was that of the compiler. I want to make the compiler happy. I want to make the code work. \n\nThat's a very specific practice of perspective taking that is useful if you're imagining okay, we don't have to get rid of that and we need to add the recognition that the perspectives taking needs to go the compiler into who will be interacting with what you're creating and that is on both the other side of the UI, if there is one, or working on the code that you've written maybe six months from now and that can be your future self.\n\nAnd then also, who will be impacted by the work that you create, because not everybody who is impacted by the decisions that you make will be directly interacting with and when I'm writing content, or that is the framework is getting to know the audiences really well, doing good qualitative research. So that's kind of the difference between the open-ended versus closed-ended questions. \n\nThen being able to perspective change and then along the way, there are little communication hacks, but just thinking about every single thing that you produce—and no, I have not come across a communication artifact, or a thing that is produced while coding that is not somehow rooted in empathy.\n\nJESSICA: Because it's communication and you can't communicate – [overtalk]\n\nANDREA: It’s all communication.\n\nJESSICA: At all without knowing what is going to be received and how that will be interpreted.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Similar to test-driven development, where we're framing things in terms of unit tests and just thinking about the test before we write the code. In the same way, we're thinking about the perspective of other people—we can still think of the compiler—and anchoring our decisions on how it will impact other people.\n\nJESSICA: It's making the compiler happy. That's just table stakes. That's absolute minimum.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Well, it's been fascinating because this part of this project. So I'm writing a book now, which is super exciting and by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. But one of the things that, because I'm curious, I'm like, “Why? How did we get here? How did we get here where, by all objective measures, I should have been able to go into computer science without a problem and feel like –?”\n\nJESSICA: Think of yourself as technical without a problem.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Why do I still struggle and why did we extract empathy out of this? So looking at the history of it has been fascinating because as the computer science industry grew, there was a moment in the mid-60s. \n\nThere was a test, like a survey, that went out to just under 1,400 people called the Canon Perry vocational test for computer programmers. It was vocational satisfaction, I think. But it was measuring the satisfaction of programmers and they were trying assess what does a satisfied programmer look like. \n\nThere were many, many problems with the methodology of this, including the people who they didn't define who a programmer was, the people self-defined. So it's like, if you felt like you were programmer, then you were a programmer, but there was no objective. Like, this is what a programmer is prior to selecting the audience, the survey respondents and then when they evaluated the results, they only used professional men. They didn't include any professional women in their comparison study. \n\nSo the women in the study, there are illustrations and the women are not presented as professionals, they are presented as sex objects in a research paper. The scientific programmers, they're the ones who get the girl and she's all swooning. The business programmers are very clearly stated as less than and they're shy. The girl is like, “I don't want you.”\n\nJESSICA: That have like comics, or something?\n\nANDREA: It was comics, yeah. They had like comic illustrations in there. Okay, it's a survey, what's the big deal? Well, from 1955 through the mid-90s, there was an aptitude test from IBM called the Programmer Aptitude Test, the PAT. In there, Walter McNamara from IBM, who created it, went out, had empathy, and was like, “Okay, let's talk to our customers, what does a good programmer look like,” and determined that logical reasoning was the number one attribute. Okay, sounds good. \n\nBut then he said, “Well, if logical reasoning is the most important attitude, then we need to create a timed 1-hour math test.” What's interesting to me is that in that, there is a logical fallacy in and of itself, called a non-sequitur, [chuckles] where it's like all humans are mammals, bingo a mammal. Therefore, bingo is a human. That's an example of a non-sequitur.\n\nThat's what happened where it was determined logical reasoning is important to computer science and programming. All mathematics is logical reasoning. Therefore, mathematics is the only way to measure the capability that somebody has for logical reasoning. That, saying, “Okay, we don't care about communication skills. We don't care about empathy. We don't care about any of that. Just are you good at math?” \n\nAnd then the PAT’s study—I've been diving into the bowels of the ACM and looking at primary resource documents for the past several months—and there was an internal memo where Charles McNamara referred to the Canon Perry study in 1967 and said, “The PAT was given to 700,000 people last year and next year, we should incorporate these findings into the PAT,” and the PAT became the de facto way to get into computer science.\n\nSo these are decisions that were made long before me and so, what you end up getting then – and then also in 1968, there was what's called, there was a NATO conference on software engineering and they said, “We really need to bring rigor into computer science. We need to make this very rigorous.” Again, there were no men at this conference. It was about standards and Grace Hopper wasn't even invited, even though she was like – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: There were no women in the conference. \n\nANDREA: There were no women. \n\nJESSICA: No non-men.\n\nANDREA: No non-men, yes. So you start to see stereotypes getting built and one of the stereotypes became, if you look like this and you are good at math, then you are good at programming. I'm very good at logical reasoning, but I struggle to do a time capsule. I have ADHD and that is something that's very, very, very challenging for me. So that coupled with and then you get advertising where it's marketed, too.\n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nANDREA: So we need to undo all of this. We can recognize, okay, we can refactor all of this, but it takes recognizing the complexity and how did it all come to be and then changing it one thing at a time.\n\nCASEY: A lot of what you've just been talking about makes me think about Dungeons and Dragons and Skyrim for a little nerdy segue. \n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: You have skill trees. You could be a really, really good warrior, very good at math, very good at wielding your sword, and then if you measure how good you are at combat by how big your fireball spell can be, how many you can shoot, how accurate you are, you're missing that whole skill tree of ability, of power that you have.\n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: What I find so fascinating is when I was going through the computer science program that I never finished and this was like a million years ago. When I was in college, there was a very specific logical reasoning class that you had to take as part of the CS program at UT. But it wasn't a math class, it was a philosophy class and I think that's pretty common that logistics studies fall under schools of philosophy, not the schools of mathematics. So it was really interesting to me that these dudes just completely missed the mark, right? [laughs]\n\nANDREA: It is the definition of irony and not Alanis Morrissette kind of way, right?\n\n[chuckles]\n\nI think that's the thing it's like – and this isn't to say the Walter McNamara was a bad person like, we all make mistakes. But to me, again, this is about impact and if one, or two people can have the ability to create a test that impacts millions of people across generations to help them feel whether, or not they belong in even contributing to building software. \n\nBecause I always felt like I was a user of software—I was always a superuser—but for some reason, I felt like the other side of the interface, the command line, it was like Oz. It was like that's where the wizards live and I'm not allowed there. It's like, how do we just tear down that curtain and say, “Y'all, there is no – no, this was all built on like false assumptions”? How do we have a retrospective and say, “When we can look at a variety of different perspectives, then we get such stronger products.” We get such stronger code. We minimize technical debt in addition to hopefully, staving off biases that get built into the software. \n\nI think it's very similar of human systems, very similar to software systems. It's like, how can we roll back? If we make a mistake and it impacts human systems, how can we fix that as fast as possible, rather than just letting things persist?\n\nJESSICA: When you're talking about who can be a good software developer, when you're talking about who is technical, who is valuable, you don't want rigor in that! \n\nANDREA: Right! \nJESSICA: That's not appropriate. \n\nANDREA: Yeah. \n\nJESSICA: You want open questions.\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and that is exactly what happened, was people conflate rigor and data with accuracy. There's a bias towards if it's got numbers behind it, it must be real, but you can manipulate data just as much as you can manipulate other things. \n\nSo the PAT then said, “Okay, well, if you can't pass the PAT, then we'll create all of these other types of tests, so you could be a console operator, or you could be a data analyst.” What's fascinating is when you go back, the thing that was at the very bottom of the Cannon Perry survey, in terms of valuable development activities, was software maintenance.\n\nJESSICA: And that's everything now. \n\nANDREA: Yeah! \nJESSICA: Back then, they didn't have a lot of software. \n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nJESSICA: They didn’t have open source libraries. If they needed something, they wrote it.\n\nANDREA: But the stereotypes persist. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah. \n\nMANDO: 100%.\n\nANDREA: The first evidence I found, again, was in 1967. There was a study of 12 people, all of whom were trainees at a company, which that would be a wild – they hadn’t even – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: So this is like even less than interviewing your grad students.\n\nANDREA: Well, yeah. \n\nJESSICA: Or your undergrads for your graduate research paper, yes.\n\nANDREA: They measured how quickly someone could solve a problem and they ranked them, and then they made the claim that you can save 25 times—this is the first myth of the 25x developer. Well, it got published in the ACM and then IBM picked it up and then McKinsey picked it up, and then it’s just, you get the myth of the full-stack unicorn who's going to come in and save everything! \n\nWhat's interesting is all of these things go back and I think they were formed out of good intention in terms of understanding our world and we understand now, exactly like you said, Jess. That's not the right way to go about it because then people who are really needed on software teams don't feel like they belong and it's like, “Well, do you belong?”\n\nJESSICA: That's an outsized impact for such a tiny study.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So that gets me thinking, what kinds of things am I doing that might have an outside impact?\n\nJESSICA: And can we make that impact positive?\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and when we find out that it wasn't, can we learn from our mistakes? I think one of the things, too, is taking the idea of as people are coding. It's like, “Well, who's actually going to read this?” That's something I hear a lot. \n\nI used to feel that way about all tags. I’m like, “Who actually reads all tags?” But then my friend, Taylor, was in a car accident and lost his vision. and he was like, “I absolutely need all tags,” and I’ll tell you, that changed everything for me. Because it went from this abstract, “I have to check this box. I have to type something in, and describe this photo” to “I care about my friend Taylor and how can I make this experience as best for him as possible?”\n\nThat is empathy because in order to have empathy, you have to connect with a single individual. Empathy is – and actually, when you do form empathy for a group, you get polarization. So empathy cuts both ways. It can be both very positive, but also very – [overtalk]\n\nCASEY: [inaudible] on the individual goes a long way. So for our discussion here, I can share an individual I've been talking to about this kind of problem. I have a friend who's a woman trying to get her first software developer role and she has to study how to hack the coding interview for a lot of the places where she wants to work, which is literally studying algorithms that you probably won't use in the job. \n\nI had an interview a few years ago that was the Google style algorithms interview for a frontend role. Frontend developers don't write algorithms, generally. Not unless you're working on the core of the framework maybe. It was completely irrelevant. I rejected them. I think they rejected me back, too probably.\n\n[laughter]\n\nBut I wouldn't work there because of the hiring process. But my friend, who is a woman in tech trying to get in, doesn't have that kind of leeway to project. She wants to get her first job whoever it is – [overtalk]\n\nMANDO: She wants a job, yeah.\n\nCASEY: That is willing to use the bias system like that and to hack that system to study it specifically how to get around it, which isn't really helping anyone. \n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: So how can we help reform the system so she doesn't have to do that kind of thing and so, people like her don't have to, to get into tech? I don't know, my boycotting that one company is a very small impact; how do we get a company's hiring practices to change is a hard problem.\n\nANDREA: It is a very hard problem. I can share what we are doing in Corgibytes to try to make a difference. \n\nI think the first thing is that in our hiring process, we have core values mapped to them and these are offshoots of our main core values, one of which is communication is just as important as code. So we have that every single applicant will get a response and that seems so like, duh, but the number of people who are here who are just ghosted, submit an application and it goes out into the ether. That is, in my opinion, disrespectful. \n\nWe have an asynchronous screening interview, so it’s an application and it's take your time, fill it out, and it's questions like, “What's an article you found interesting and why?” and “What do you love about modernizing legacy code?” Some people need that time to think and just to formulate an answer and so, taking some of that pressure off, and then at the end of our – we have all of our questions mapped to our core values. \n\nI'm still trying to figure out how we can get away from more the dreaded technical interviews, but we don't use the whiteboard, but we also have a core value of anything that someone does for us, in terms of whether they show up for an interview, they will walk away with just as much benefit. They will have an artifact of learning something, or spec work is I think, immoral to some of these core things. \n\nSo we use Exercism for us, so Katrina Owens, as a way of like, “Okay, show us a language that you're like really familiar with.” And then because with what we do, you just get tossed into if it’s like, “Okay, let's pick Scala.” It's like you've never tried functional programming before, but then just, it's more of seeing the mindset. Because I think it's challenging because we tried getting rid of them all together and we did have some challenges when it came to then client upper-level goals and doing the job. \n\nSo it's a balance, I think and then at the end of our interviews doing retrospectives telling the candidate, “Here's what you did really well in this interview, here's where it didn't quite land for me,” because I think interviewing is hard and like you said, Casey, especially now post-COVID, I think more and more people have the power to leave jobs. So I think the power, especially in software development, for people who have had at least their first position, they have a lot more power to walk out the door than they did before. \n\nSo as an employer and as somebody who's creating these, that's what I'm doing and then if we get feedback and the whole idea with empathy is you're never going to be able to be perfect. Because you don't have the data for the perspective of every single person, but being open and listening and when you do make mistakes, owning up to them, and fixing them as fast as possible. If we all did that, we can make a lot of progress on a lot of fronts really fast.\n\nCASEY: I'm so glad your company has those good hiring practices. You're really thinking about it, how to do it in a supportive, ethical, and equitable way. I wonder, we probably don't have the answer here today, but how can we get more companies to do that? \n\nI think you sharing here might help several companies, if their leadership are listening. and that's awesome. Spreading the message, talking about it more—that's one thing. Glad we're doing that.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. The place that I work at, we’re about to start interviewing some folks and I really like the idea of having a retrospective with the candidate after maybe a couple of days, or whenever after the interview and taking the time, taking the 30 minutes or whatever, to sit down and say, “If I'm going to take time to reach out to them anyway and say, ‘You're moving on to the next round,’ or ‘We have an offer for you, or not,’ then I should be willing to sit down with them and explain why.’”\n\nANDREA: Well, I think the benefit goes both ways, actually. We do it right in our interviews. So we actually say the last 15 minutes, we're going to set aside on perspectives. \n\nMANDO: Oh wow, okay.\n\nANDREA: So we do and that's something that we prep for ahead of time. We get feedback of what went well [chuckles] and what we can do better and what we can change. \n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nANDREA: Because otherwise, as an employer, it's like, I have no idea. I'm just kind of going off into the ether, but then I can hear from other people's perspectives and it's like, okay and then we can change things. But that's an example of, we think of employer versus employee and it's like that's another dichotomy. It's like no, we're all trying to get good work done.\n\nJESSICA: Andrea, how do you do performance reviews?\n\nANDREA: We're still trying to crack that, but there's definitely a lot of positive psychology involved and what we are trying to foster is the idea of continuous performance, or continuous feedback is what we call it. So we definitely don't do any kind of forced ranking and that's a branch of things that have contributed to challenges. We have one-on-ones, we check in with people, but a lot of it, I think is asking people what they want to be doing, genuinely. As a small company, we're like 25 people. I think it's easier in a small company, but part of it is – and we were constantly doing this with ourselves, too. My business partner was like, “I really want to try to be the CEO. I've always wanted to be the CEO.” So I stepped back actually during COVID. \n\nWe focus on being a really responsive team and so, then that way, it's less about the roles. It's less about rigidity. There's a really great book in terms of operations called Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. It has a lot of operational principles around this. Team of Teams is another really good one. But just thinking through like, what's the work that needs to be done, how can we organize around it, and then thinking of it in terms of more of responsibilities instead of roles. \n\nJESSICA: I want to think of it as a relationship. It's like, I'm not judging you as a developer, instead we’re evaluating the relationship of you in this position, in this role at this company. \n\nANDREA: Yeah. \n\nJESSICA: How is that serving the company? How is that serving you?\n\nANDREA: Yes, and I think that's a big piece of it is – and also, recognizing the context is really important and trying to be as flexible as possible, but then also recognizing constraints. So there have been times where it's like, “This isn't working,” but trying to use radical candor as much as you can, that's something we've been working on. But trying to give feedback as early and as often as possible and making that a cultural norm as to the, “Oh, I get the 360 feedback at the end, twice a year,” like that. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah, I'm sorry, if you can't tell me anything within two weeks, don't bother.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. But one example is like we've fostered this and as a leader, I want people who are going to tell me where I'm stepping in it and where I'm messing up. So I kind of use – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, at least that retrospective at the end of the interview says that. \n\nANDREA: Mm hm, but even with my staff, it’s like – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible] be able to say, “Hey, you didn’t send me a Google Calendar invite,” and they'd be like, “Oh my gosh, we should totally be doing that.” Did anybody tell them that? No!\n\nANDREA: Yeah, totally. So I don't claim to have the answers, but these are just little experiments that we're trying and I think we really lean on the idea of continuous improvement and marginal gains. \n\nArthur Ash had a really great quote, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” I think that's the thing, the whole point of the empathy during development framework is that if you're a developer working on the backend writing a nice commit message, or giving quality feedback on a pull request, instead of just a “Thumbs up, looks good to me.” \n\nThat's a small act of empathy that you can start doing right away. You don't need to run it by anybody, really, hopefully. If you do, that's a problem [chuckles] your manager and we've seen that. But there are small ways that you can be empowered and leaning into those small moments, doing it again and again, and then creating opportunities to listen. Because empathy, I think the other thing is that people tend to think that it's a psychic ability. You're either data, or your Deanna Troi.\n\nCASEY: Jamil Zaki, right?\n\nANDREA: Yeah, the Roddenberry effect. Jamil Zaki, out in Stanford, coined that. I think that's the thing; I've always been told I'm an empath, but I don't think it's telepathy. I think it's just I've gotten really good at spotting patterns and facial recognitions as opposed to Sky. He can just glance and go, “Oh, you're missing a semicolon here.” That is the same skill, it's just in a different context. \n\nCASEY: I love that parallel. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: Recognizing small things in facial expressions is like noticing missing semicolons.\n\nM: Mm hm. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: That's so powerful. That’s so vivid for me.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Going back, that made what something that you said earlier, Andrea really click for me, which is that so many people who are professional software developers have this very well-developed sense of empathy for the compiler. [laughs]\n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nMANDO: Right, so it's not that they're not empathetic. \n\nANDREA: Yes!\n\nMANDO: They have learned over their career to be extremely empathetic, it's just for their computer. In the same way, you can learn to be empathetic towards your other teams, towards your DevOps group, towards the salespeople, towards anybody.\n\nANDREA: The flip side of your non-technical is you're not good with people because Scott got this all the time. He's like, “You're good with machines, but you're not good with people.” When he told me that, I was like, “I've known you since we were 11, you're incredibly kind. I don't understand.” \n\nSo in some ways, my early journey here, I didn't come with all the baggage and so, there is this, like, this industry is weird. [laughs] How can we unpack some of this stuff? Because I don't know, this feels a little odd. That's an example and I think it's exactly that it's cultural conditioning and it's from this, “You're good with math, but we don't want you to be good with people.” If you're good with people, that's actually a liability. That was one of the things that came out of the testing of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s.\n\nMANDO: I can't wait till this book of yours comes out because I'm so curious to read the basis of all these myths that we have unconsciously been perpetuating for years and I don't know why, but there is this myth, there are these myths. Like, if you're technical, you're not good with people and you're not – you know what I mean? It’s like, I can't wait to read it.\n\nANDREA: You can go to empathyintech.com. You can sign up for the newsletter and we don't email very often. But Casey actually helps me run a Discord channel, too, or Discord server. So there's folks where we're having these conversations and it doesn't matter what your role is at all.\n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nANDREA: Just let's start talking to each other.\n\nJESSICA: Andrea, that's beautiful. Thank you. That makes this a great time to move to reflections. At the end of each episode, we each get to do a reflection of something that stood out to us and you get to go last. \n\nANDREA: Awesome. \n\nMANDO: I can go first. I've got one. The idea that empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives is one that is something that I'm going to take away from this episode. \n\nI spent a lot of my career as a software developer and spent another good chunk of my career as someone who worked in operations and DevOps and admin kind of stuff. There's this historic and perpetual tug of war between the two and a lot of my career as a systems administrator was spent sitting down and trying to explain to software engineers why they couldn't do this, or why this GraphQL query was causing the database to explode for 4 hours every night and we couldn't live like that anymore. Stuff like that. \n\nTo my shame, often, I would default to [laughs] this idea that these software engineers are just idiots and that wasn't the case at all. Well, probably [laughs] not the case at all. Almost always it wasn't the case at all. Anyway, but the truth of the situation is probably much closer to the idea that their perspective was tied specifically to the compiler and to the feature that they're trying to implement for their product manager, for customer X, or whatever. And they didn't have either the resources, or the experience, or the expertise, or whatever that was required to add on the perspective of the backend systems that they were interacting with. \n\nSo maybe in the future, a better way to address these kinds of situations would be to talk about things in terms of perspective and not idiocy, I guess, is the…\n\nANDREA: Yeah, a really powerful question there is what's your biggest pain point and how can I help you alleviate it? It's a really great way to learn what somebody's perspective is to get on the same page. \n\nMANDO: Yeah, like a lot.\n\nJESSICA: Nice. I noticed the part about how a lot of the help happens when you have empathy for the individuals who aren't on a happy path, who aren't the great majority of the people using the software, or the requests that come through your software. It's like that parable, there's a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray and the shepherd is going to leave the ninety-nine—who are fine, they're on the happy path, they're good—and go help the one. Because some other day, it's going to be another sheep that's off the happy path and that one's going to need help and that's about it.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Today you, tomorrow me, right? That's how all this works.\n\nCASEY: The thing I'd been picking up is about feedback. Like, the best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get feedback, to get their perspective somehow. I've done retros at the ends of meetings, all the meetings at work I ever do. I even do them at the end of a Pomodoro session. A 25-minute timer in the middle of a pairing day, I'll do them every Pomodoro. “Anything to check in on? No? Good. Okay.” As long as we do. But I've never thought to do it during the interview process. That is surprising to me. \n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nCASEY: I don't know if I can get away with it everywhere. The government might not like it if I did that to their formal process. \n\n[laughter]\n\nMaybe I can get away with, but it's something I'll think about trying. I would like feedback and they would like feedback—win-win.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I've never done it either and it makes perfect sense. I have a portion, unfortunately, in my interviews where I say right at the beginning, “This is what's going to happen in the interview,” and I spend 5 minutes going through and explaining, we're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about that, or just normal signposting for the interview. It never once has occurred to me to at the end, say, “Okay, this is what we did. Why don't you give me some feedback on that and I give you some feedback about you?” That makes sense.\n\nANDREA: Awesome. For me, I have been wanting to come on your show for a really long time. I was telling Casey. [chuckles] \n\nJESSICA: Ah!\n\nANDREA: I was like, “I love the mission of expanding the idea of what coding is.” So I just feel very honored because for the longest time, I was like, “I wonder if I'm going to be cool enough one day to –” [laughs]\n\nJESSICA: Ah! We should have invited you a long time ago.\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So there's a little bit of fangirling going on and I really appreciate the opportunity to just dive a little bit deep, reflect, and think. As somebody who doesn't mold, it's nice to get validation sometimes that the way I'm thinking is valuable to some people. So it gives me motivation to keep going.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. It's nice when you spend a lot of energy, trying to care about what other people care about, to know that other people also care about this thing that you care about. \n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nJESSICA: Thank you so much for joining us.\n\nANDREA: Thank you for having me!\n\nMANDO: Thank you. \n\nANDREA: The fastest way to reach out to me and make sure that I see it is actually to go to corgibytes.com. Corgi like the dog, bytes, B-Y-T-E-S, .com and send an email on the webform because then that way, it'll get pushed up to me. But I struggle with email a lot right now and I'm on Twitter sporadically and I'm also on –\n\nMANDO: That’s good. The best way to do that.\n\nANDREA: I am a longform writer. I'm actually really excited that I have a 100,000 words to explain myself. I do not operate well in the 140-character kind of world, but I'm on there and also, on LinkedIn. \n\nAnd then the book website is empathyintech.com and there's a link to the Discord channel and some deeper articles that I've written about exactly what empathy in tech is and what empathy driven development is. I'm writing it with my friend, Carmen Shirkey Collins, who is another copywriter who is now in tech over at Cisco, and it's been a joy to be on a journey with her because she's super smart and has great background in perspective, too.\n\nJESSICA: And if you want to work on meaningful, impactful legacy code in ensembles, check out Corgibytes.\n\nANDREA: Yeah.\n\nJESSICA: And if you want to talk to all of us, you can join our Greater Than Code Slack by donating anything at all to our Greater Than Code Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. Thank you, everyone and see you next time!Special Guest: Andrea Goulet.","content_html":"01:13 - Andrea’s Superpower: Distilling Complexity
\n\n09:00 - “Technical” vs “Non-Technical”
\n\n16:20 - Empathy is Critical
\n\n33:00 - Reforming Hiring Practices and Systems
\n\n39:28 - Performance Reviews
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~ Arthur Ashe
\n
Reflections:
\n\nMando: Empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives.
\n\nJess: Help happens when you have empathy for individuals who aren’t the great majority of people using the software.
\n\nCasey: The best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get their feedback. Do it during an interview!
\n\nAndrea: Diving deeper than code is valuable!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 237. I'm Jessica Kerr and I'm happy to be here today with my friend, Mando Escamilla!
\n\nMANDO: Hey, Jess. Thanks. I am happy to be here with my friend, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey and we're all here with Andrea Goulet.
\n\nAndrea is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others.
\n\nShe is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create.
\n\nAndrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist.
\n\nWelcome, Andrea.
\n\nANDREA: Hi, welcome! Nice to be here.
\n\nCASEY: We always like to start with a question, which I think you’re prepared for, that is what is your superpower, Andrea, and how did you acquire it?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah! First of all, I just love that y'all ask this. I think it's just such a nice way to get to know different people.
\n\nI was thinking about this because you sent it a little bit ago and I was thinking maybe empathy, given the work I do. But I don't actually think that's it. I feel like I'm constantly trying to learn more about empathy, but I do think that what my superpower is, is distilling complexity.
\n\nSo I went back and looked at what the thread is of all the recommendations I've got on LinkedIn and things like that. It's not something that I would necessarily say that I noticed, but it's something that other people have noticed about me. The idea of taking a really abstract and big, gnarly, complex topic, and being able to distill it down to its essence and then communicate either what the importance is, or what the impact is to other people. I think that's why I've gravitated towards big, gnarly things like legacy code. [chuckles] Because what motivates me is impact and how do we have the work that we do make as big of an impact as possible?
\n\nSo the way I got into software was really a twisty and windy road. I started out as a copywriter and I think that's where the distilling complexity comes down because I would sit with clients and learn all about their businesses. And then I would write typically, a website, or some kind of marketing material and they would say, “You said what was in my head and I couldn't say it.”
\n\nJESSICA: Wow.
\n\nANDREA: And when I got into software, I had a friend of mine from high school, Scott, who's my co-founder at Corgibytes, he came up to me because I had been writing about my writing and he said, “You're not a writer, you're actually a programmer because the way that your brain works, you’re thinking in terms of inputs and manipulating data and outputs, and that's exactly what a programmer does.”
\n\nSo then, he wanted to fix legacy code for a living. I didn't even know what that was at that point, thought it was a good thing and I found that my ability to both walk in and understand not just the syntax of what's going on, but the business challenges and how everything links together. With that, you can create a sense of cohesion on a team and getting different people to work together and different people to see each other's points of view, because when you're able to distill a perspective over here and say, “Okay, well, this is what this person's trying to say,” and still, this over here. “Okay, I think this is what this person's trying to say.”
\n\nI feel like a lot of times I am kind of like a translator, but it's taken me a long time. I've been in software 12 years now and I still have massive imposter syndrome like, I don't belong because I'm not the fastest person on the keyboard. I really struggle with working memory. My visualization is really a struggle, but I do really great in an ensemble. When I started ensemble programming—sometimes it's referred to as mob programming—I was like, “I can do this. Oh my gosh, this makes sense and I belong.”
\n\nI think just over the years, little things like hearing the joke – I was at a conference, Jess, I think this may have been ETE when you and I connected, but I heard a joke and it was, I think Phil Carlton had first said it and it was like, “There's only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things,” and then somebody else said, “Off-by-1 errors.” I remember I was like, “Y'all think naming things is hard?” Like, help me understand how that's hard because that’s –
\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible]? Oh my gosh, that's hard.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and to me, it just comes so naturally. I think that's kind of the thing is figuring out where is your trait, where's your skillset. I remember when I first started doing open source contributions, I haven't done those in a long time, but just going in and modifying the language on help messages and turning them from passive to active voice. They got accepted, it was on some high-profile projects, and it was like, I didn't really feel like I was even doing much and I still feel like, “Is that even a big deal?” But I think that's kind of the definition of a superpower a little bit is that –
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, it’s easy for you. [laughs]
\n\nANDREA: You don't recognize that it's hard for other people. Yeah, and so it's neat now that it's like I'm starting to come into my own and leaning into that, and then helping other people see that the way that I approach naming things, the way I approach copywriting is actually in a very programmatic way. It's leaning on frameworks. It's leaning on patterns that I use over time.
\n\nI know, Casey, you and I have talked last week about like when I first go to a conference like using open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions and these little kind of communication hacks that I've developed over the years. So now putting those together in a framework to help other people remember that when we're coding, we're not coding for a computer, we're coding through a computer for other people. The computer is just like a code is just a tool. It's a powerful tool. But a lot of times –
\n\nCASEY: I have a question for you, Andrea.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: About that, I find myself switching gears between word land and abstract land. So if I'm coding and I'm not thinking of words, the naming is hard, but sometimes I can switch gears in a different head space. It's like a different me and then I'm naming things really well. Especially if I'm looking at someone else's code, I don't have to be an abstract land; they did that part already. Do you find yourself switching between the two?
\n\nANDREA: Oh, all the time. Yeah, and especially, too, when you're writing prose. There's two different kind of aspects of your brain. There's the creative conceptual side and then there's the analytical rational side and everybody has both. So it does require you to come out of the abstract side in that and then move into more of the analytical space, which is why I love pairing.
\n\nI love coding as a group because then that way, it's like the mental model is shared and so, I can stay in my world of naming things really well, or I don't know that we need to be that precise if we try to – like, when I was in one group and they were trying to have a timing thing and it was like down to the millisecond and I was like, “Y'all, we don't need to be that precise. We just need to have this check once every 10 minutes,” and that saved like 6 hours of work. Just being able to say that thing and be the checkpoint.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Someone has to be super down in the details of what to type next and it helps to have someone else thinking about it at the broader perspective of why are we doing this?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and that's me, typically and I love that role, but it's very different than I think what goes through people's minds when they envision a software developer.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, maybe they envisioned the things that software developers do that other people don't. Typing curly braces.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: I still think of that when I'm doing it. When I think of myself as a software developer, I think of myself as the person who hasn't gotten up from their desk in 5 hours and just hunched over, just blazing fast hacking on something that probably is kind of dumb.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut when I don't spend my day like that, I don't really feel exactly like I've been doing my job and it's something that I struggle with because I know that's not the job in its totality by any means and it doesn't mean that I'm not getting good work done.
\n\nJESSICA: Not even close to most of the job.
\n\nMANDO: Not even close to most of the job, you're exactly right.
\n\nJESSICA: Like you said, if you're sitting there for 5 hours by yourself, hunched over your computer, you're probably hacking on something dumb.
\n\nMANDO: Right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: We had gotten off on a tangent somewhere without someone to be like, “Why are we doing this again?”
\n\nMANDO: Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: Well, and I think that that has been a personal challenge of mine as well. I know there was a really flashbulb moment for me. Scott and I have been running our business together for a couple of years. We had gotten on our first podcast and he was telling our origin story and he used the phrase, “Andrea, she's the non-technical founder.” When I heard it, I was like, “How dare you? I have for 2 years been sitting right next to you,” and then he said, “Well, that's the term you use to describe yourself all the time. We had been in a sales meeting right before I recorded that podcast and that's literally the words you use to introduce yourself. So once you start calling yourself technical, I'll follow suit.”
\n\nJESSICA: Wow.
\n\nANDREA: It really made me think and I think some of it is because whenever I go to conferences, I don't look like other people who code especially 12 years ago. I don't talk like the people who are typically stereotypical developers and the first question I would get asked, probably 25 to 40% of the time from people I met were, “Hi! Are you technical, or non-technical?”
\n\nJESSICA: Really?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Ugh.
\n\nJESSICA: Huh.
\n\nANDREA: And that would be the first thing out of the gate. At the time, I didn't have the kind of mental awareness to go, “I'm at a technical conference. I think you can assume I'm technical.” The fact is I was scared to call myself technical and over the years, I'm just like, “What does that mean to be technical and why do we define people by you are either technical, or you have nothing?” Non-technical, you have zero technical skills, you don't belong.
\n\nJESSICA: So after you had that conversation with Scott, did you switch to calling yourself technical? Did you change your language?
\n\nANDREA: It has been a journey. I became very conscious of not using non-technical. I'll sometimes then say like, “I struggle with syntax and I'm really, really good at these things.” When I phrase things that way, or “I have engineers who are so much better and have much deeper expertise in Docker and Kubernetes than I do. I'm really good at explaining the big picture and why this happens.”
\n\nSo it becomes, I think what we do in software is that because we're so used to thinking in binaries, because that's the way we need to make our code work—true/false, if/else, yes/no—and that pattern naturally extends itself into human relationships, too. Because I know that every single person who asked me that question in no way was trying to be rude, or shut me out. I know that the intention behind it was kind and trying to be inclusive. But from my perspective, when half the people walk up to you and go, “Do you belong here?” Then it's like, “I don't know. Do I belong here?”
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: So that's an example of how, if you're at a conference saying, “What brings you here?” That's very open-ended and then it gives everybody the chance to say what brings them here and there's no predefined, “Do you fit in this bucket, or that bucket? Are you part of us, or are you part of them?”
\n\nJESSICA: It's open to surprise.
\n\nANDREA: Mm hm and I think that's something that I am really good at. That's my superpower is let's see the complexity and then let's see the patterns and let's figure out how we can all get good work done together. But you can't see the complexity unless you take a step back.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, and yet Scott noticed that when you are thinking that way, you are thinking like a programmer. Because while software starts by getting us used to thinking in binaries—I should say programming.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: It’s just thinking of binaries, as soon as you get up to software and software systems, you have to think in complexity.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: And like you were saying, Andrea, I find myself nowadays better recognizing when I'm falling into that trap when I'm not talking about work stuff. When I find myself saying, “Well, it's this, or it's this.” It's like, “Is it really this, or this?”
\n\nJESSICA: Are these the only options?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Do I have to eat Thai food, or pizza tonight, or could I just eat ice cream, or a salad, or…?
\n\n[laughs]
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: You know what I mean? It's a silly example, but I don't know, there's something about doing this for a while that I find that kind of this, or that thinking wiring itself into my brain.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Well, and I think that that's normal and that's human. We operate on heuristics. There's the whole neurons that fire together wire together and if you're spending the majority of your time in this thought pattern, adopting something else can be a challenge.
\n\nSo to me, it's like trying to describe how the way I navigate the world in being able to name things well and being able to talk to new people, connect dots, see patterns that I rely on frameworks just as much as I do when I code and trying to figure out what are those things. What are those things?
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, because you don't have to import that top level file from the framework in order to use it. So it's not explicit that you're using it.
\n\nANDREA: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that's been my challenge is that as Scott is like, “Well, help me understand.” I'm like, “I, uh. I don't know. I do this.” That was where I nailed on empathy as really critical and it's been fascinating because when I first started about 5 years writing and talking about empathy in software, the first thing I noticed were all the patterns.
\n\nI was like, “A really well-written commit message, that's empathy.” That is taking the time to document your rationale so that it's easier for somebody behind you. Refactoring a method so that it's easy to read, deleting the dead code so that it's less burdensome, even logging. Looking at logging in C versus Ruby, it's night and day.
\n\nJESSICA: Help messages.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. There's a little moment.
\n\nMANDO: Non-happy path decisions in code. Guardrails. All that stuff.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So I started thinking in terms of communication artifacts. All of these little things that we're producing are just artifacts of our thinking and you can't produce a communication artifact unless you are considering a perspective. What I noticed, of the perspective, is that a lot of software developers had been trained to take was that of the compiler. I want to make the compiler happy. I want to make the code work.
\n\nThat's a very specific practice of perspective taking that is useful if you're imagining okay, we don't have to get rid of that and we need to add the recognition that the perspectives taking needs to go the compiler into who will be interacting with what you're creating and that is on both the other side of the UI, if there is one, or working on the code that you've written maybe six months from now and that can be your future self.
\n\nAnd then also, who will be impacted by the work that you create, because not everybody who is impacted by the decisions that you make will be directly interacting with and when I'm writing content, or that is the framework is getting to know the audiences really well, doing good qualitative research. So that's kind of the difference between the open-ended versus closed-ended questions.
\n\nThen being able to perspective change and then along the way, there are little communication hacks, but just thinking about every single thing that you produce—and no, I have not come across a communication artifact, or a thing that is produced while coding that is not somehow rooted in empathy.
\n\nJESSICA: Because it's communication and you can't communicate – [overtalk]
\n\nANDREA: It’s all communication.
\n\nJESSICA: At all without knowing what is going to be received and how that will be interpreted.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Similar to test-driven development, where we're framing things in terms of unit tests and just thinking about the test before we write the code. In the same way, we're thinking about the perspective of other people—we can still think of the compiler—and anchoring our decisions on how it will impact other people.
\n\nJESSICA: It's making the compiler happy. That's just table stakes. That's absolute minimum.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Well, it's been fascinating because this part of this project. So I'm writing a book now, which is super exciting and by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. But one of the things that, because I'm curious, I'm like, “Why? How did we get here? How did we get here where, by all objective measures, I should have been able to go into computer science without a problem and feel like –?”
\n\nJESSICA: Think of yourself as technical without a problem.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. Why do I still struggle and why did we extract empathy out of this? So looking at the history of it has been fascinating because as the computer science industry grew, there was a moment in the mid-60s.
\n\nThere was a test, like a survey, that went out to just under 1,400 people called the Canon Perry vocational test for computer programmers. It was vocational satisfaction, I think. But it was measuring the satisfaction of programmers and they were trying assess what does a satisfied programmer look like.
\n\nThere were many, many problems with the methodology of this, including the people who they didn't define who a programmer was, the people self-defined. So it's like, if you felt like you were programmer, then you were a programmer, but there was no objective. Like, this is what a programmer is prior to selecting the audience, the survey respondents and then when they evaluated the results, they only used professional men. They didn't include any professional women in their comparison study.
\n\nSo the women in the study, there are illustrations and the women are not presented as professionals, they are presented as sex objects in a research paper. The scientific programmers, they're the ones who get the girl and she's all swooning. The business programmers are very clearly stated as less than and they're shy. The girl is like, “I don't want you.”
\n\nJESSICA: That have like comics, or something?
\n\nANDREA: It was comics, yeah. They had like comic illustrations in there. Okay, it's a survey, what's the big deal? Well, from 1955 through the mid-90s, there was an aptitude test from IBM called the Programmer Aptitude Test, the PAT. In there, Walter McNamara from IBM, who created it, went out, had empathy, and was like, “Okay, let's talk to our customers, what does a good programmer look like,” and determined that logical reasoning was the number one attribute. Okay, sounds good.
\n\nBut then he said, “Well, if logical reasoning is the most important attitude, then we need to create a timed 1-hour math test.” What's interesting to me is that in that, there is a logical fallacy in and of itself, called a non-sequitur, [chuckles] where it's like all humans are mammals, bingo a mammal. Therefore, bingo is a human. That's an example of a non-sequitur.
\n\nThat's what happened where it was determined logical reasoning is important to computer science and programming. All mathematics is logical reasoning. Therefore, mathematics is the only way to measure the capability that somebody has for logical reasoning. That, saying, “Okay, we don't care about communication skills. We don't care about empathy. We don't care about any of that. Just are you good at math?”
\n\nAnd then the PAT’s study—I've been diving into the bowels of the ACM and looking at primary resource documents for the past several months—and there was an internal memo where Charles McNamara referred to the Canon Perry study in 1967 and said, “The PAT was given to 700,000 people last year and next year, we should incorporate these findings into the PAT,” and the PAT became the de facto way to get into computer science.
\n\nSo these are decisions that were made long before me and so, what you end up getting then – and then also in 1968, there was what's called, there was a NATO conference on software engineering and they said, “We really need to bring rigor into computer science. We need to make this very rigorous.” Again, there were no men at this conference. It was about standards and Grace Hopper wasn't even invited, even though she was like – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: There were no women in the conference.
\n\nANDREA: There were no women.
\n\nJESSICA: No non-men.
\n\nANDREA: No non-men, yes. So you start to see stereotypes getting built and one of the stereotypes became, if you look like this and you are good at math, then you are good at programming. I'm very good at logical reasoning, but I struggle to do a time capsule. I have ADHD and that is something that's very, very, very challenging for me. So that coupled with and then you get advertising where it's marketed, too.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: So we need to undo all of this. We can recognize, okay, we can refactor all of this, but it takes recognizing the complexity and how did it all come to be and then changing it one thing at a time.
\n\nCASEY: A lot of what you've just been talking about makes me think about Dungeons and Dragons and Skyrim for a little nerdy segue.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: You have skill trees. You could be a really, really good warrior, very good at math, very good at wielding your sword, and then if you measure how good you are at combat by how big your fireball spell can be, how many you can shoot, how accurate you are, you're missing that whole skill tree of ability, of power that you have.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: What I find so fascinating is when I was going through the computer science program that I never finished and this was like a million years ago. When I was in college, there was a very specific logical reasoning class that you had to take as part of the CS program at UT. But it wasn't a math class, it was a philosophy class and I think that's pretty common that logistics studies fall under schools of philosophy, not the schools of mathematics. So it was really interesting to me that these dudes just completely missed the mark, right? [laughs]
\n\nANDREA: It is the definition of irony and not Alanis Morrissette kind of way, right?
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nI think that's the thing it's like – and this isn't to say the Walter McNamara was a bad person like, we all make mistakes. But to me, again, this is about impact and if one, or two people can have the ability to create a test that impacts millions of people across generations to help them feel whether, or not they belong in even contributing to building software.
\n\nBecause I always felt like I was a user of software—I was always a superuser—but for some reason, I felt like the other side of the interface, the command line, it was like Oz. It was like that's where the wizards live and I'm not allowed there. It's like, how do we just tear down that curtain and say, “Y'all, there is no – no, this was all built on like false assumptions”? How do we have a retrospective and say, “When we can look at a variety of different perspectives, then we get such stronger products.” We get such stronger code. We minimize technical debt in addition to hopefully, staving off biases that get built into the software.
\n\nI think it's very similar of human systems, very similar to software systems. It's like, how can we roll back? If we make a mistake and it impacts human systems, how can we fix that as fast as possible, rather than just letting things persist?
\n\nJESSICA: When you're talking about who can be a good software developer, when you're talking about who is technical, who is valuable, you don't want rigor in that!
\n\nANDREA: Right!
\nJESSICA: That's not appropriate.
ANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: You want open questions.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and that is exactly what happened, was people conflate rigor and data with accuracy. There's a bias towards if it's got numbers behind it, it must be real, but you can manipulate data just as much as you can manipulate other things.
\n\nSo the PAT then said, “Okay, well, if you can't pass the PAT, then we'll create all of these other types of tests, so you could be a console operator, or you could be a data analyst.” What's fascinating is when you go back, the thing that was at the very bottom of the Cannon Perry survey, in terms of valuable development activities, was software maintenance.
\n\nJESSICA: And that's everything now.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah!
\nJESSICA: Back then, they didn't have a lot of software.
MANDO: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: They didn’t have open source libraries. If they needed something, they wrote it.
\n\nANDREA: But the stereotypes persist.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: 100%.
\n\nANDREA: The first evidence I found, again, was in 1967. There was a study of 12 people, all of whom were trainees at a company, which that would be a wild – they hadn’t even – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: So this is like even less than interviewing your grad students.
\n\nANDREA: Well, yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Or your undergrads for your graduate research paper, yes.
\n\nANDREA: They measured how quickly someone could solve a problem and they ranked them, and then they made the claim that you can save 25 times—this is the first myth of the 25x developer. Well, it got published in the ACM and then IBM picked it up and then McKinsey picked it up, and then it’s just, you get the myth of the full-stack unicorn who's going to come in and save everything!
\n\nWhat's interesting is all of these things go back and I think they were formed out of good intention in terms of understanding our world and we understand now, exactly like you said, Jess. That's not the right way to go about it because then people who are really needed on software teams don't feel like they belong and it's like, “Well, do you belong?”
\n\nJESSICA: That's an outsized impact for such a tiny study.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So that gets me thinking, what kinds of things am I doing that might have an outside impact?
\n\nJESSICA: And can we make that impact positive?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, and when we find out that it wasn't, can we learn from our mistakes? I think one of the things, too, is taking the idea of as people are coding. It's like, “Well, who's actually going to read this?” That's something I hear a lot.
\n\nI used to feel that way about all tags. I’m like, “Who actually reads all tags?” But then my friend, Taylor, was in a car accident and lost his vision. and he was like, “I absolutely need all tags,” and I’ll tell you, that changed everything for me. Because it went from this abstract, “I have to check this box. I have to type something in, and describe this photo” to “I care about my friend Taylor and how can I make this experience as best for him as possible?”
\n\nThat is empathy because in order to have empathy, you have to connect with a single individual. Empathy is – and actually, when you do form empathy for a group, you get polarization. So empathy cuts both ways. It can be both very positive, but also very – [overtalk]
\n\nCASEY: [inaudible] on the individual goes a long way. So for our discussion here, I can share an individual I've been talking to about this kind of problem. I have a friend who's a woman trying to get her first software developer role and she has to study how to hack the coding interview for a lot of the places where she wants to work, which is literally studying algorithms that you probably won't use in the job.
\n\nI had an interview a few years ago that was the Google style algorithms interview for a frontend role. Frontend developers don't write algorithms, generally. Not unless you're working on the core of the framework maybe. It was completely irrelevant. I rejected them. I think they rejected me back, too probably.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I wouldn't work there because of the hiring process. But my friend, who is a woman in tech trying to get in, doesn't have that kind of leeway to project. She wants to get her first job whoever it is – [overtalk]
\n\nMANDO: She wants a job, yeah.
\n\nCASEY: That is willing to use the bias system like that and to hack that system to study it specifically how to get around it, which isn't really helping anyone.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: So how can we help reform the system so she doesn't have to do that kind of thing and so, people like her don't have to, to get into tech? I don't know, my boycotting that one company is a very small impact; how do we get a company's hiring practices to change is a hard problem.
\n\nANDREA: It is a very hard problem. I can share what we are doing in Corgibytes to try to make a difference.
\n\nI think the first thing is that in our hiring process, we have core values mapped to them and these are offshoots of our main core values, one of which is communication is just as important as code. So we have that every single applicant will get a response and that seems so like, duh, but the number of people who are here who are just ghosted, submit an application and it goes out into the ether. That is, in my opinion, disrespectful.
\n\nWe have an asynchronous screening interview, so it’s an application and it's take your time, fill it out, and it's questions like, “What's an article you found interesting and why?” and “What do you love about modernizing legacy code?” Some people need that time to think and just to formulate an answer and so, taking some of that pressure off, and then at the end of our – we have all of our questions mapped to our core values.
\n\nI'm still trying to figure out how we can get away from more the dreaded technical interviews, but we don't use the whiteboard, but we also have a core value of anything that someone does for us, in terms of whether they show up for an interview, they will walk away with just as much benefit. They will have an artifact of learning something, or spec work is I think, immoral to some of these core things.
\n\nSo we use Exercism for us, so Katrina Owens, as a way of like, “Okay, show us a language that you're like really familiar with.” And then because with what we do, you just get tossed into if it’s like, “Okay, let's pick Scala.” It's like you've never tried functional programming before, but then just, it's more of seeing the mindset. Because I think it's challenging because we tried getting rid of them all together and we did have some challenges when it came to then client upper-level goals and doing the job.
\n\nSo it's a balance, I think and then at the end of our interviews doing retrospectives telling the candidate, “Here's what you did really well in this interview, here's where it didn't quite land for me,” because I think interviewing is hard and like you said, Casey, especially now post-COVID, I think more and more people have the power to leave jobs. So I think the power, especially in software development, for people who have had at least their first position, they have a lot more power to walk out the door than they did before.
\n\nSo as an employer and as somebody who's creating these, that's what I'm doing and then if we get feedback and the whole idea with empathy is you're never going to be able to be perfect. Because you don't have the data for the perspective of every single person, but being open and listening and when you do make mistakes, owning up to them, and fixing them as fast as possible. If we all did that, we can make a lot of progress on a lot of fronts really fast.
\n\nCASEY: I'm so glad your company has those good hiring practices. You're really thinking about it, how to do it in a supportive, ethical, and equitable way. I wonder, we probably don't have the answer here today, but how can we get more companies to do that?
\n\nI think you sharing here might help several companies, if their leadership are listening. and that's awesome. Spreading the message, talking about it more—that's one thing. Glad we're doing that.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. The place that I work at, we’re about to start interviewing some folks and I really like the idea of having a retrospective with the candidate after maybe a couple of days, or whenever after the interview and taking the time, taking the 30 minutes or whatever, to sit down and say, “If I'm going to take time to reach out to them anyway and say, ‘You're moving on to the next round,’ or ‘We have an offer for you, or not,’ then I should be willing to sit down with them and explain why.’”
\n\nANDREA: Well, I think the benefit goes both ways, actually. We do it right in our interviews. So we actually say the last 15 minutes, we're going to set aside on perspectives.
\n\nMANDO: Oh wow, okay.
\n\nANDREA: So we do and that's something that we prep for ahead of time. We get feedback of what went well [chuckles] and what we can do better and what we can change.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: Because otherwise, as an employer, it's like, I have no idea. I'm just kind of going off into the ether, but then I can hear from other people's perspectives and it's like, okay and then we can change things. But that's an example of, we think of employer versus employee and it's like that's another dichotomy. It's like no, we're all trying to get good work done.
\n\nJESSICA: Andrea, how do you do performance reviews?
\n\nANDREA: We're still trying to crack that, but there's definitely a lot of positive psychology involved and what we are trying to foster is the idea of continuous performance, or continuous feedback is what we call it. So we definitely don't do any kind of forced ranking and that's a branch of things that have contributed to challenges. We have one-on-ones, we check in with people, but a lot of it, I think is asking people what they want to be doing, genuinely. As a small company, we're like 25 people. I think it's easier in a small company, but part of it is – and we were constantly doing this with ourselves, too. My business partner was like, “I really want to try to be the CEO. I've always wanted to be the CEO.” So I stepped back actually during COVID.
\n\nWe focus on being a really responsive team and so, then that way, it's less about the roles. It's less about rigidity. There's a really great book in terms of operations called Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. It has a lot of operational principles around this. Team of Teams is another really good one. But just thinking through like, what's the work that needs to be done, how can we organize around it, and then thinking of it in terms of more of responsibilities instead of roles.
\n\nJESSICA: I want to think of it as a relationship. It's like, I'm not judging you as a developer, instead we’re evaluating the relationship of you in this position, in this role at this company.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: How is that serving the company? How is that serving you?
\n\nANDREA: Yes, and I think that's a big piece of it is – and also, recognizing the context is really important and trying to be as flexible as possible, but then also recognizing constraints. So there have been times where it's like, “This isn't working,” but trying to use radical candor as much as you can, that's something we've been working on. But trying to give feedback as early and as often as possible and making that a cultural norm as to the, “Oh, I get the 360 feedback at the end, twice a year,” like that.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, I'm sorry, if you can't tell me anything within two weeks, don't bother.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. But one example is like we've fostered this and as a leader, I want people who are going to tell me where I'm stepping in it and where I'm messing up. So I kind of use – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, at least that retrospective at the end of the interview says that.
\n\nANDREA: Mm hm, but even with my staff, it’s like – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible] be able to say, “Hey, you didn’t send me a Google Calendar invite,” and they'd be like, “Oh my gosh, we should totally be doing that.” Did anybody tell them that? No!
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, totally. So I don't claim to have the answers, but these are just little experiments that we're trying and I think we really lean on the idea of continuous improvement and marginal gains.
\n\nArthur Ash had a really great quote, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” I think that's the thing, the whole point of the empathy during development framework is that if you're a developer working on the backend writing a nice commit message, or giving quality feedback on a pull request, instead of just a “Thumbs up, looks good to me.”
\n\nThat's a small act of empathy that you can start doing right away. You don't need to run it by anybody, really, hopefully. If you do, that's a problem [chuckles] your manager and we've seen that. But there are small ways that you can be empowered and leaning into those small moments, doing it again and again, and then creating opportunities to listen. Because empathy, I think the other thing is that people tend to think that it's a psychic ability. You're either data, or your Deanna Troi.
\n\nCASEY: Jamil Zaki, right?
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, the Roddenberry effect. Jamil Zaki, out in Stanford, coined that. I think that's the thing; I've always been told I'm an empath, but I don't think it's telepathy. I think it's just I've gotten really good at spotting patterns and facial recognitions as opposed to Sky. He can just glance and go, “Oh, you're missing a semicolon here.” That is the same skill, it's just in a different context.
\n\nCASEY: I love that parallel.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: Recognizing small things in facial expressions is like noticing missing semicolons.
\n\nM: Mm hm. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: That's so powerful. That’s so vivid for me.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Going back, that made what something that you said earlier, Andrea really click for me, which is that so many people who are professional software developers have this very well-developed sense of empathy for the compiler. [laughs]
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Right, so it's not that they're not empathetic.
\n\nANDREA: Yes!
\n\nMANDO: They have learned over their career to be extremely empathetic, it's just for their computer. In the same way, you can learn to be empathetic towards your other teams, towards your DevOps group, towards the salespeople, towards anybody.
\n\nANDREA: The flip side of your non-technical is you're not good with people because Scott got this all the time. He's like, “You're good with machines, but you're not good with people.” When he told me that, I was like, “I've known you since we were 11, you're incredibly kind. I don't understand.”
\n\nSo in some ways, my early journey here, I didn't come with all the baggage and so, there is this, like, this industry is weird. [laughs] How can we unpack some of this stuff? Because I don't know, this feels a little odd. That's an example and I think it's exactly that it's cultural conditioning and it's from this, “You're good with math, but we don't want you to be good with people.” If you're good with people, that's actually a liability. That was one of the things that came out of the testing of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s.
\n\nMANDO: I can't wait till this book of yours comes out because I'm so curious to read the basis of all these myths that we have unconsciously been perpetuating for years and I don't know why, but there is this myth, there are these myths. Like, if you're technical, you're not good with people and you're not – you know what I mean? It’s like, I can't wait to read it.
\n\nANDREA: You can go to empathyintech.com. You can sign up for the newsletter and we don't email very often. But Casey actually helps me run a Discord channel, too, or Discord server. So there's folks where we're having these conversations and it doesn't matter what your role is at all.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nANDREA: Just let's start talking to each other.
\n\nJESSICA: Andrea, that's beautiful. Thank you. That makes this a great time to move to reflections. At the end of each episode, we each get to do a reflection of something that stood out to us and you get to go last.
\n\nANDREA: Awesome.
\n\nMANDO: I can go first. I've got one. The idea that empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives is one that is something that I'm going to take away from this episode.
\n\nI spent a lot of my career as a software developer and spent another good chunk of my career as someone who worked in operations and DevOps and admin kind of stuff. There's this historic and perpetual tug of war between the two and a lot of my career as a systems administrator was spent sitting down and trying to explain to software engineers why they couldn't do this, or why this GraphQL query was causing the database to explode for 4 hours every night and we couldn't live like that anymore. Stuff like that.
\n\nTo my shame, often, I would default to [laughs] this idea that these software engineers are just idiots and that wasn't the case at all. Well, probably [laughs] not the case at all. Almost always it wasn't the case at all. Anyway, but the truth of the situation is probably much closer to the idea that their perspective was tied specifically to the compiler and to the feature that they're trying to implement for their product manager, for customer X, or whatever. And they didn't have either the resources, or the experience, or the expertise, or whatever that was required to add on the perspective of the backend systems that they were interacting with.
\n\nSo maybe in the future, a better way to address these kinds of situations would be to talk about things in terms of perspective and not idiocy, I guess, is the…
\n\nANDREA: Yeah, a really powerful question there is what's your biggest pain point and how can I help you alleviate it? It's a really great way to learn what somebody's perspective is to get on the same page.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, like a lot.
\n\nJESSICA: Nice. I noticed the part about how a lot of the help happens when you have empathy for the individuals who aren't on a happy path, who aren't the great majority of the people using the software, or the requests that come through your software. It's like that parable, there's a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray and the shepherd is going to leave the ninety-nine—who are fine, they're on the happy path, they're good—and go help the one. Because some other day, it's going to be another sheep that's off the happy path and that one's going to need help and that's about it.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Today you, tomorrow me, right? That's how all this works.
\n\nCASEY: The thing I'd been picking up is about feedback. Like, the best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get feedback, to get their perspective somehow. I've done retros at the ends of meetings, all the meetings at work I ever do. I even do them at the end of a Pomodoro session. A 25-minute timer in the middle of a pairing day, I'll do them every Pomodoro. “Anything to check in on? No? Good. Okay.” As long as we do. But I've never thought to do it during the interview process. That is surprising to me.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: I don't know if I can get away with it everywhere. The government might not like it if I did that to their formal process.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMaybe I can get away with, but it's something I'll think about trying. I would like feedback and they would like feedback—win-win.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I've never done it either and it makes perfect sense. I have a portion, unfortunately, in my interviews where I say right at the beginning, “This is what's going to happen in the interview,” and I spend 5 minutes going through and explaining, we're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about that, or just normal signposting for the interview. It never once has occurred to me to at the end, say, “Okay, this is what we did. Why don't you give me some feedback on that and I give you some feedback about you?” That makes sense.
\n\nANDREA: Awesome. For me, I have been wanting to come on your show for a really long time. I was telling Casey. [chuckles]
\n\nJESSICA: Ah!
\n\nANDREA: I was like, “I love the mission of expanding the idea of what coding is.” So I just feel very honored because for the longest time, I was like, “I wonder if I'm going to be cool enough one day to –” [laughs]
\n\nJESSICA: Ah! We should have invited you a long time ago.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah. So there's a little bit of fangirling going on and I really appreciate the opportunity to just dive a little bit deep, reflect, and think. As somebody who doesn't mold, it's nice to get validation sometimes that the way I'm thinking is valuable to some people. So it gives me motivation to keep going.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. It's nice when you spend a lot of energy, trying to care about what other people care about, to know that other people also care about this thing that you care about.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Thank you so much for joining us.
\n\nANDREA: Thank you for having me!
\n\nMANDO: Thank you.
\n\nANDREA: The fastest way to reach out to me and make sure that I see it is actually to go to corgibytes.com. Corgi like the dog, bytes, B-Y-T-E-S, .com and send an email on the webform because then that way, it'll get pushed up to me. But I struggle with email a lot right now and I'm on Twitter sporadically and I'm also on –
\n\nMANDO: That’s good. The best way to do that.
\n\nANDREA: I am a longform writer. I'm actually really excited that I have a 100,000 words to explain myself. I do not operate well in the 140-character kind of world, but I'm on there and also, on LinkedIn.
\n\nAnd then the book website is empathyintech.com and there's a link to the Discord channel and some deeper articles that I've written about exactly what empathy in tech is and what empathy driven development is. I'm writing it with my friend, Carmen Shirkey Collins, who is another copywriter who is now in tech over at Cisco, and it's been a joy to be on a journey with her because she's super smart and has great background in perspective, too.
\n\nJESSICA: And if you want to work on meaningful, impactful legacy code in ensembles, check out Corgibytes.
\n\nANDREA: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: And if you want to talk to all of us, you can join our Greater Than Code Slack by donating anything at all to our Greater Than Code Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. Thank you, everyone and see you next time!
Special Guest: Andrea Goulet.
","summary":"Andrea Goulet, who is known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, talks about distilling complexity, being “technical” vs “non-technical”, and how empathy is critical in thinking about reforming hiring practices and giving performance reviews where continuous improvement is the goal.","date_published":"2021-06-02T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/5733805a-42e9-41b2-a95f-6e7e2a03d6a5.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37511726,"duration_in_seconds":3310}]},{"id":"55e2ff2e-3af1-46b5-a0a1-58ecfaa9246c","title":"236: Connecting Arts and Technology – The Power of Print with Marlena Compton","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/connecting-arts-and-technology","content_text":"01:07 - Marlena’s Superpower: Bringing the Arts to Tech\n\n\nComing Into Tech as a Creative\n\n\n04:42 - Parallels Between Art and Computer Science/Software Engineering\n\n\nSystem Architecture\nSpatial Thinking & Representation\nMind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky \nMetaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson \n\n\n09:33 - Sketchnoting and Zines\n\n\nThe Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde \n\n\n14:19 - DIY Publishing and Physicality – The Power of Print\n\n\nThe Pamphlet Wars\n\n\n20:33 - Zines at Work & Zines in Professional Settings\n\n\nSlowing Down Our Thought Processes\nUsing Diagrams to Ask Questions & For Exploration\nGraphic Facilitators\n\n\n31:11 - Target Audiences, Codeswitching, & People Are Not Robots\n\n37:58 - How We View, Study, and Treat Liberal Arts – (Not Well!)\n\n\nFormulating Thoughts In A Way That’s Available For Consumption\n\n\n43:01 - Using Diagrams and Images\n\n\nUML (Unified Modeling Language)\nCollaborative Whiteboarding Software and Shared Visual Language (Drawing Together)\n\n\n50:41 - Handwriting Advice: Decolonize Your Mind!\n\n\nSLOW DOWN\nWrite Larger\nPractice\nHow to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell \n\n\n59:45 - The “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Conference\n\n\nPatreon\nPodcast\nNewsletter\n\n\nReflections:\n\nDamien: Decolonize your mind.\n\nJamey: Zine fairs at work and valuing yourself by taking up space.\n\nRein: Creativity is good for individuals to explore, but when we share it with people it’s a way we can become closer.\n\nMarlena: Connecting arts and technology.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJAMEY: Hello, everyone and welcome to Episode 236 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jamey. And I’m another one of your hosts and I’m here with my friend, Damien Burke\n\nDAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here in addition to with the host, our guest today, Marlena Compton.\n\nMarlena Compton is a tech community organizer, designer, and collaboration artist who has worked in the tech industry for 18 years. She grows tech communities and organizes conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena has worked for companies like IBM and Atlassian. This has left her with a life-long appreciation for quality code, empathy, and working together as a team. When she isn’t working, Marlena enjoys lettering, calligraphy, and walking her dog.\n\nWelcome to the show, Marlena.\n\nMARLENA: Hi, thank you so much.\n\nDAMIEN: So I know you're prepared for this. Same thing we do for all of our guests, we're going to start with the first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, so my superpower is bringing the arts to tech and that is teaching people the value of creative arts—such as writing, sketching, music, and more—and how this relates to the tech industry, helping creative types feel more at home in tech, and helping folks who are mostly in the science track in school learn why they need the creative arts for critical thinking and thinking through problems. \n\nSo it's like, you have to give people a space to do this learning from a peer perspective versus top-down perspective. This includes building community for folks to explore these things. \n\nJAMEY: So you came to tech from art previously, is that right?\n\nMARLENA: I have a wild academic background of interdisciplinary studies, which will not get you a job for anything but like, renting a car.\n\n[laughter]\n\nOr whatever and also, later I did computer science, but while I was getting my liberal arts degree, I did a lot of art history, a lot of painting, and a lot of theater.\n\nJAMEY: I wonder if you could speak to coming into the tech industry as someone who is already an artist and considers themselves an artist, like, how that translated for you. Like, what skills from being an artist, do you think were helpful to you as you were starting in tech?\n\nMARLENA: Sure. So I think that if you know that you're an artistic type, like I knew how important arts were for me. But I think for children often they get a lot of pressure to find something that will get them a job and it's not like this isn't for good reason, it's like we’ve got to be able to pay our bills. On the other hand, when you're a creative type, it's such a core part of your personality. You can't really separate it from anything and if you try to just tamp it down, it's going to come out somehow. \n\nSo I was this college graduate and I was having a really hard time getting a job and figuring out what I wanted to do that would make enough money to support me. Computer science was literally the last thing I tried and I seem to do okay at it so I kept doing it. [laughs] And that's how I got into it. \n\nI wish that we had bootcamps when I started learning computer science, but there weren't any and so, all I could do was go back to community college. So I went to community college. I had to take every single math class over again. Calculus, I had to take three times, but I stuck with it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept taking the classes and eventually, it worked. So [laughs] that's how I got into the tech industry and it's like, it's totally okay to do this just to make money. That's why I did it.\n\nDAMIEN: So then coming in with this art background, which seems really broad and you didn't talk about anything specific, what insights and connections were you able to make between art and computer science, and art and software engineering?\n\nMARLENA: Sure. So for me, building software is a creative process. In fact, this is something I've believed for a very long time, because as soon as I got out with my newly-minted CS degree and I knew that I needed to create, draw, write, and do all of those things. Eventually, I started looking around for okay, what in computer science is kind of more visual place and it used to be people would think of diagramming software, HoloVizio, Rational Rose, which is that is quite a throwback. Who here –? \n\nDAMIEN: UML.\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] That UML, yes! I would look at these things, like system architect, where it's like the idea was that you could literally draw out pieces and then it would make your code, which was [laughs] I think an epic fail if you look at it from, did it actually ever write successful code? I have never –\n\nREIN: There's another option, which was the expense of architects draw the boxes and then the chief engineer put the code in the boxes.\n\nMARLENA: Well, but see, you need a brain in there and this is all about the brain. \n\n[laughter]\n\nMARLENA: Yeah. I think one transformation that my thinking had to go through so, I had to go from this computer science perspective of find a way to chop up all your thoughts into little, discreet, logical pieces so that you can make classes, objects, and things like that and instead look at the brain as an organ in your body. We take more of a holistic perspective where it is your brain is connected to your thoughts is connected to like your internal axes, GPS system, and mapping system and how all of that comes together to problem solve.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I love it. Without bodies, we couldn't think about things\n\nMARLENA: Indeed. This past year, I've spent a lot of time specifically investigating this connection. One of the things I did was read Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and the premise of her book is that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. That is how you orient yourself in the world and how you perceive a space around you and yourself in that space is what allows you to organize ideas, take perspectives that are based in imagination, and things like that.\n\nREIN: Yeah, and this ties into Wyckoff's work on basic metaphors because basic metaphors are how we structure our thought, but they're all about the world. So thinking about the metaphor of containment, you have a thing, it has an inside and an outside, there may be a portal that gets you from the inside to the outside. So this is how houses work, right? This is how we think about houses. This is also how we think about relationships. It's how we think about code. \n\nAnd then there's you combine that basic metaphor with the metaphor of traveling; starting at a place, traveling along a path, ending up at another place. You put those two metaphors together, you can have complex thoughts about achieving goals. But these are all metaphors based on, like you're saying, our perception of living in a world that has 3D space.\n\nYes, and maps are such a big part of that. So when I was reading through this particular book, she goes into things like maps, how we map ideas, and things like that and there is quite a bit of science behind it. And even for metaphor, she writes that metaphor is what happens when our thoughts overflow our brains and we need to put them out into the world.\n\nDAMIEN: So putting these thoughts, these ideas back out into the world and into some sort of spatial representation, is that how you view the tech notetaking, or diagramming sort of thing?\n\nMARLENA: Absolutely. So I guess, for listeners, I want to back up a little bit because I think something that Damien knows about me and also Jamey and Rein from looking at the biography is that I'm very into sketch notes. Just to bring us out of the depth [laughs] a little bit, I can tell you about why I turned to sketchnoting and why I started doing it. It was because I was trying to learn JavaScript and yes, Damien, I know how you feel about JavaScript, some of us like it. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: I don't want to show my cards too much here, but I will say the fact that you had difficulty with it is telling.\n\nMARLENA: Well, but I also had difficulty learning C, Java, Erlang.\n\nDAMIEN: So how did [inaudible]?\n\nMARLENA: Well, so I went to CascadiaJS and this was my first – well, it wasn't my first, but it was the language conference and I was just learning JavaScript and I didn't understand half of it. It just went over my head. So to try and create some memory of that, or try to figure it out, I started drawing. I had seen sketch notes on the web. They were experiencing a bump in popularity at the time. I think my Mike Rohde’s book had just come out and it helped. \n\nThat was what introduced me to this whole world and eventually, we're talking about when thoughts overflow and you turn to metaphor, this is exactly what was happening for me was Barbara Tyversky refers to these pictures we draw as glyphs. They can be more complicated than language and that is why when we're really trying to figure something out, we're not going to be writing an essay, maybe sometimes, but for the most part, we'll start diagramming.\n\nJAMEY: I also wanted to talk about zines while you were on. I was thinking about zines when you were talking about this because I feel like there's a few different mediums of art that I do and some of them are more intentional than others. To me, zines are about like, “I'm thinking this and it needs to exist in physical space and then it will be done and I can stop thinking about it,” because it exists. \n\nMARLENA: I love that so much and it's exactly what zines are there for. So zines are DIY publishing and zines are the publishing that happens for topics that, I think it happens a lot for people who are underrepresented in some way. Because you're not going to have access to a publisher and it's going to be harder for you to get any official book out. But then sometimes it's also just, maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want your zine to be a more informal publication. \n\nI love zines how kind of – they are all so super niche like, you can put anything. Define the word zine, ha! [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: It's so hard. People will argue about this in the zine community for like days and days. Hard to define the word.\n\nMARLENA: And that's actually part of the power of zines because it means it can be whatever you want, which means whatever you want to create is okay. I think that's really what we're trying to get down into here is having different ways of expressing and problem solving be okay and accepted.\n\nREIN: Just something to point out that containment is a metaphor we use for categories. So we're talking about what is inside the zine category?\n\nDAMIEN: I want to go back to the well, Marlena, you said zines were do-it-yourself publishing, DIY publishing, but blogs are also do-it-yourself publishing. So zines have a physicality to them and feels like that's an important aspect. Can you talk about that, or why that is?\n\nMARLENA: Well, there are also digital zines, so yeah. [laughs] But.\n\nDAMIEN: Maybe five containerization and categories.\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] Well, if we wanted to talk a little bit about physical zines, that even is interesting and Jamey, maybe you have a few thoughts about this that you can share, too because there are just so many different ways to format a zine.\n\nJAMEY: Well, I know that digital zines are a thing and I've read some digital zines that I've very much enjoyed. To me, the physicality of zines is a big part of them and a lot of what's appealing about them for me. I think that part of the reason for that is that, as you were getting at, people can write whatever they want, people who might not have a chance to write in other formats and most importantly about that, you can't censor a zine. It's impossible because someone makes it themselves and then they give it to whoever they want to have. It's a very personal experience and there's no middleman who can like tell you what you can, or can't say. \n\nSo I think that having that physical piece of paper that you then hand directly to someone is what makes that possible and not putting it on the internet is also what makes that possible. Like, you have this thing, nobody can edit what's in it. It's all up to you. Nobody can search for it on a search engine. If you don't want someone to see it, then you don't give them one and it's just a holdover from what a lot of media was more like before the internet and I appreciate that about them. [chuckles]\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. To me, it sounds so much like the Federalist Papers, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense.\n\nJAMEY: Oh, those were zines for sure.\n\nDAMIEN: I wrote this thing, [inaudible] about, I'm hazing him out of here, read this. [chuckles] Those are zines, okay.\n\nJAMEY: And political zines are a huge subsection of pamphlets and all sorts of political ideology.\n\nREIN: And that's where printing started was with the publishing of zines, that's my argument.\n\nMARLENA: This is the power of print. It's the power of print and that power, it's something that you don't necessarily get with the internet. Zines are an archive as well and I don't think we can just say – \n\nSo when I did the first Let’s Sketch Tech! conference, I had an editor from Chronicle Books come and she talked about publishing. When I was talking to her about doing this talk, what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was she said, “Books aren't going away. Books are never going away because we are so connected to our hands and our eyes.” Books are always going to be there. Printed, words printed, pamphlets, zines, I think they're going to outlast computers. [chuckles] Think about how long a CD, or magnetic tape is going to last for versus the oldest book in the world.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.\n\nREIN: And by the way, if you don't think that printing was about zines, go Google the pamphlet wars. We think it's about publishing the Bible, but the vast majority of stuff that was printed was pamphlets. Zines!\n\nDAMIEN: And we can look at things that have survived through a history and it's really truly about paper from Shakespeare's works to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is how things have survived.\n\nMARLENA: And on another aspect of this is the fact that we are human, we have human eyes and those eyes have limits as to how much they can look at a screen. Looking at paper and also, the physical manipulation of that paper, I think is a very important aspect of zines. So my favorite scene ever, which is sadly lost to me, was this very small print zine and it was the kind that is printed literally on one piece of paper and this folded up. But it had the most magnificent centerfolds where you open it up and this is awesome picture of Prince and the person even taped a purple feather in the centerfold part of it and it's like, that's an experience you're only going to get from this kind of printed physical medium.\n\nDAMIEN: So yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here, communicating ideas through physical mediums.\n\nJAMEY: And I think that because zines are so DIY and low tech that people do really interesting things with paper to express what they're going for. Like, I've been doing zines for a long time with friends. \n\nBut my first one that I ever did by myself, I had this black and white photo of a house that had Christmas lights on it and I was trying to be like, “How am I going to express this feeling that I have about this picture that I want to express in this media?” I'm like, “I'm going to go to Kinko's and make copies of this for 5 cents and how is it going to look the way I want?” So I ended up manually using a green highlighter to highlight over all of the Christmas lights in every single copy of the zine so that everyone would see the green Christmas lights that I wanted them to feel what I was feeling about. \n\nI think that's a pretty simple example because it's not extremely a lot of work to put highlighter in your zine either. But I think that people have to think about that and how they want to convey something and then people have done a lot of really interesting things like taping feathers into their books.\n\nMARLENA: Yeah. This is a way of slowing down our thought process, which I don't think we talk about enough because right now, in our culture, it's all about being faster, being lull 10x and making a zine is a great way to reflect on things that you've learned. \n\nSo I would really like to take a minute to just talk about zines at work and zines in a professional setting because I've noticed that one thing people think as soon as I start talking about zines is why do I need this in my job? Why do we need this in tech? I think that zines are a great way to help people on teams surface the unspoken knowledge that lives in the team, or it's also a way to play with something that you're trying to learn and share with other people. I’d like to hear Jamey, do you have thoughts about this? \n\nJAMEY: I have a thought, but I'm not sure how directly related it is to what you just said and I feel self-conscious about it. [chuckles] But I like to teach people to make zines who aren't familiar with zines, or haven't made them before and the thing that I try to teach people that I think zines can teach you is that you can just do this. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take a specific skill that you can't just learn. \n\nSo they're accessible in that way, but I think it's also a bigger lesson about what you can do if you want to do something and that's how I feel about tech. If you want to learn to code, it's not magic, you can learn how to do it. If you want to do a zine, you can learn how to do it. To me, those thoughts go together. I feel like that wasn't exactly what you just asked, I’m sorry.\n\nDAMIEN: I liked it, though. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nMARLENA: It does tie into the fact that it's important to help people feel at home at work. Well, you're not at home at work, but to feel as though they are in the right place at work and this type of making zines and allowing people to surface what they know about your system, about what you're building, about ideas that your team is tinkering with. This kind of format gives people the space to surface what they're thinking even if they're not the most vocal person.\n\nDAMIEN: So one of this really ties into what I was thinking. When you said zines at work and there's a couple of great tech zines which I love and I think should be in a lot of offices. But the idea of actually creating one at work, something happened in my chest when I thought about that idea and it's because it's a very informal medium and tends to be informal and whimsical and you just kind of do it.\n\nI realize how much that is counter to so much of how tech teams and tech industry runs where it's very formal. You can't just ship code, you’ve got to get a pull request and reviewed by the senior engineer and it's got to fit our coding standards and run in ordering time, or less. [laughter] That can be very, I'll say challenging. \n\nJAMEY: I think that's also exactly why it’s easy and fun to learn about tech from zines because it feels so much more approachable than a formal tutorial and you're saying like, “Oh, will this be too hard, or what will I learn?” There's all of this baggage that comes along with it where it's like, “Oh, the zine is like cute and whimsical and I'm going to read it and it's going to be interesting,” and then like, “Whoa, I just learned about sorting from it.” \n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Just because you’re writing software, or doing computer science doesn't mean we have to be serious. [laughter] Probably needs to be shouldn't be.\n\nREIN: It also makes me think about a shift that I would really like to see in the way diagrams and things like this are used, which is that when you're asked to produce an architecture diagram, you're generally asked to produce something authoritative. It has to be the best current understanding of what the organization has decided to do and that doesn't leave any space for exploration, or for using diagrams to ask questions. I think that's bad because naturally, on a team, or in an organization, everyone has their own models. Everyone has their own local perspective on what's happening. If there's no opportunity to surface, “Hey, here's how I think this works. Can I compare that with how you think this works?” You can't maintain common ground.\n\nI don't think producing a lot of words is a great way to do that. I think that's very inefficient. I also think that having an hour meeting with twenty people where you all talk about it is also inefficient. So I'm wondering if diagrams can be useful here. Relatively, it’s a little bit quicker to draw some boxes and connect them with arrows than it is to write a 1-page report. I'm wondering if we could promote more people putting out these low fidelity diagrams that are, “Here's what's in my head,” and sharing them, if that would help us maintain common ground.\n\nMARLENA: Absolutely, and I love the way that you brought up this situation where everyone is – because I think we've all been in these meetings where it's like, there are some technical hurdle, decisions have to be made, technology needs to be chosen, libraries needed – that type of thing. What I experienced was it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise. \n\nREIN: Yeah, like if you have twenty people in a meeting, at most three of them are paying attention and about half of them are going to be underrepresented in the meeting for a variety of reasons, if not more.\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, and well, I'm just going to say yes. For underrepresented people, this happens a lot. So one of the things that I like to promote is taking apart the traditional jam everyone into a room, let the conversation naturally happen. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that works too well and honestly, I think that a zine format, or even if it's just like take a piece of paper, let people diagram what they think is interesting, then trade, then your team is having a zine fair. [laughs]\n\nREIN: Or if you do that to prepare for the meeting and then the meeting is going over them.\n\nMARLENA: Sure. Yeah, and maybe the discussion is like a facilitated discussion. I did a lot of Agile team stuff, including I had to go down the route of learning how to facilitate just because I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my team. So I started looking at different ways to how do you have a discussion when it's like, there are two, or three people who always talk, nobody else says anything, but everyone has thoughts. It's really interesting what happens when you start trying to change how a group is having discussions.\n\nREIN: It also seems like it's super valuable for the person doing the facilitation because they have to synthesize what's happening in real-time and then they come away with the meeting, with the synthesis in their brains. Part of which they've been able to put into the diagrams, the drawings, and whatever, but only a part of it. So it seems like if you have some external consultant come in and draw diagrams for your team, that external consultant then leaves with a bunch of the knowledge you were trying to impart to everyone else.\n\nMARLENA: I don't know if that's necessarily true. In the world of graphic recording, those folks go to all kinds of meetings and I think it's true that they are going to come away with a different set of thoughts in their head, but they're also not going to have the context of your team.\n\nREIN: Yeah.\n\nMARLENA: And that's a pretty big part of it. \n\nBut I know Ashton Rodenhiser, she's a graphic facilitator who does this and she'll go into meetings like the one we're describing, and while people are talking, she's drawing things out. It's really interesting what happens when people see their discussion being drawn by a third party. I've seen this happen at some conferences; it's really great way to change the way you have discussion.\n\nREIN: Yeah. So for example, we do incident analysis, we do interviews with the people who are there, and we review slot transcripts. What we find is that the people who are doing the interviews, conducting the analysis, facilitating the reviews, they become experts in the systems.\n\nMARLENA: Ah yes, because so much – it reminds me of how teaching somebody to do something, you teach it to yourself. So they are having to internalize all of this discussion and reflect it back to the team, which means of course, they're learning along with the rest of the team.\n\nREIN: Yeah. So I think my point was not don't hire consultants to do this, it was keeping them around after you do.\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] Wouldn't it be amazing if having a graphic recorder, or a graphic facilitator was just a thing that we all had in our meetings?\n\nREIN: Yeah, or even something that was democratized so that more people got the benefits of – I think doing that work has a lot of benefits to the person who's doing it.\n\nJAMEY: This is making me think a lot about the way that you engaged with something, or the way that you express it, depending on who your target audience is. Like, if I'm taking notes for myself in my own notebook, my target audience is just myself and I write things that won't make sense to anybody else. If I'm writing like a document for work, the target audience is my team, I'm writing in a way that reflects that it's going to be read and understood by my team instead of me. \n\nI think that a lot of what we're talking about here with zines, diagrams, and things like this is kind of an interesting hybrid. When I write a zine, I'm doing it for me, it's benefiting me, but not in the same way as notes in my notebook where I don't want anyone else to ever look at it. So it's like, how do I write something that's benefiting me, but also has an audience of other people that I'm hoping will get something out of it? I think that's a bit of a unique format in some ways.\n\nDAMIEN: That's interesting because everything I hear from novelists and screenwriters, it's always “Write the book, write the movie that you want.” You're the audience and if you love it, not everybody's going to love it, [chuckles] but there are other people who will, chances are other people will love it. If you write something for everybody to love, nobody is going to like it.\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, I think so, too and you never know who else is going to be thinking the same way you are and sometimes, it's that people don't have a way to speak up and share how they're feeling in a similar way. So I actually love that zines allow – I think it is important to be making something that is from your perspective and then share that. That's a way to see who else has that perspective.\n\nDAMIEN: But I also understand this need to, well, I'll say code switch. This need to code switch for different audiences. [chuckles] Rein brought up UML. \n\nI learned UML in college back in the long-ago times and I hated it. It was an interesting thing to learn, but an awful thing to do because all of my UML diagrams had to be complete, authoritative, and correct because I was doing them for my professor and I was a TA. I thought, “Well, if I had large amount of diagrams describing large systems, looking at them could be very informative and useful.” But no one in the world is going to write those things because this is way too much work unless I'm allowed to be informal, general, not authoritative, or complete and so, I'm realizing these tensions that I've been going on in my mind for decades.\n\nMARLENA: Well, and there's programs. Using those programs was so clunky, like adding a square, adding a label, adding a class, and pretty soon, if you were trying to diagram a large system, there was not a great way to change your perspective and go from macro down to micro and zoom out again. Whereas, this is, I think what is so great about the human brain. We can do that and we can do that when we're drawing with our hands.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. There were promises of automated UML diagrams that you get from type systems and static analysis and I think I saw some early versions of this and they created correct UML diagrams that were almost readable. But going from correct and almost readable to something that's informative and enlightening, that's an art and we don't have computers that can do that.\n\nMARLENA: Right. Like, humans are not computers. Computers are not human. [laughs] When is it not Turing complete?\n\n[laughter]\n\nI think that initially people really wanted to be robots when they were sitting down at the computer and I think we're going through a period right now where we're rethinking that.\n\nREIN: Well, in part it was management that wanted people to be robots.\n\nDAMIEN: Which reaches back to the industrial revolution.\n\nMARLENA: And still does. What I love is that having this conversation about how we work and how to build software, it brings up all of these things, including this type of management wanting people to be robots, but we're not. \n\nWhat's interesting to me and what I think is that if we could shift our perspective from let's make everyone a machine, we're all robots sitting, typing out the stuff for people. If we could shift to thinking about building software is a creative process, people are going to need sleep. If you want them to solve your problems, they're going to need different ways to express themselves and share ideas with each other.\n\nREIN: It's really important to uncover facts about work and human performance like, even if you have rules, policies, and procedures, humans still have to interpret them and resolve trade-offs to get them done. You can have two rules that are mutually exclusive and now a human has to resolve that conflict.\n\nAlso, that we think that the old paradigm that Damien was talking about, this Taylor’s paradigm, is that manager decide how the work is to be done and then workers do what they're told. But workers, to do this, have to think about high level organizational goals that are much more abstract than what the people designing the work thought they would have to think about. I think if you can uncover – this is all creative problem solving and it's a part of the day-to-day work.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that command-and-control structure was always a fantasy, less so in some places than other places, but always, always a fantasy.\n\nREIN: Even the military is reevaluating what C2 means in the face of overwhelming evidence that humans don't work that way.\n\nDAMIEN: It's nice to pretend, though. Makes things so much simpler.\n\nMARLENA: What's interesting about this changing paradigm in how we view this management and control piece is how this is manifesting in the world of academia, especially in the world of liberal arts, because liberal arts colleges are not doing well. [laughs] In fact, Mills College here in the Bay Area is not going to be taking freshmen next year and they're going to close. \n\nBut I think there's a theme of education in here, too in how people learn these skills, because we've been talking about zines. You do not have to have a degree to know how to make a zine and that's awesome! [laughter] \n\nAlong with these other skills and I know that there are a lot of people in tech, who they went through computer science program, or even a bootcamp and maybe they did some science before, maybe not, but they're still going to these creative skills and it may be, I think a lot of folks in the US and in tech, it's like you weren't in a position to be able to study art, or to get that much exposure, because it was about survival. Survival for your whole family and there's just not the time to try and explore this stuff. \n\nI would love to see more space in tech for people to explore all of the creative arts and see how does it help you express yourself at work. The most concrete example I have of this is writing up a software bug. So I used to be a tester and I could always tell who had writing skills and who didn't based on how they would write up a bug. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: No, and I can definitely feel that. I work on a team of one for several projects. So sometimes, I have to write a user story, or a bug and I have a very strict format for writing bugs. It's basically, it’s write on a Cucumber and yet I will take minutes and minutes and minutes to properly wordsmith that bug report for me [laughs] so that Tuesday –\n\nMARLENA: As you should! Doing a good job!\n\nDAMIEN: So that Tuesday, when I read that I know right away what it means and what it says. Whereas, I can write something quickly that might be accurate, but would be difficult for me to understand, or I can write something quickly that could be in complete assuming that I found the bug. I'm the one who put the bug in there; I know everything there is to know and still come back to this, no clue. I don't even know what the bug is. I actually have to throw away a feature this week because I had no clue what I meant when I wrote it.\n\nMARLENA: I used to actually give a talk about this, how to write up bugs, because it was such an issue and if you don't train developers and other folks who are looking at an app to write them, then it ends up, the testers are the only ones who can write it up and that's not okay. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: And when you talk about a talk, how to write a bugs, there's some obvious mechanical things. How do you reproduce this? What did you expect to happen? Who's doing it? That sort of things and these are very clear and obvious, but then there's the actual communicating via words issue. [chuckles] How can you write those things down in a way that's easy for the next person to understand? I spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. It's hard. It's an art, I guess.\n\nREIN: I want to turn this into an even more general point about the importance of the discipline of formulating your thoughts in a way that's available for consumption. So as an example, I used to write notes in a shorthand way where if I thought I knew something, I wouldn't include it because I already knew that I don't need to take a note about it and what I've found is that I couldn't explain stuff. I couldn't integrate the new knowledge with the old knowledge when it came time for me to answer a question. \n\nThe approach I've been taking more recently is formulating my thoughts in a way that if I had to write a blogpost about that topic, I can copy and paste things from my notes, ready to go, and just drop them in. That's the thing I do for myself, but what I've found is that I actually understand stuff now.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I've had the same experience writing things that I thought I understood. This is the rubber duck story. You think you understand something so you try to explain to somebody else and go, “Oh, that's what it was.” \n\nBut since we have Marlena here right now, [chuckles] I want to talk about using diagrams and images in that process for a person who doesn't work that way usually.\n\nMARLENA: Indeed. Well, one of the things that I think we hint at in the world of tech—this is interesting because we've all been bashing the UML and all that stuff, but it did give us a set of symbols for visual representation of programming type things. Like, you make the rectangle for your class and then you put your properties in the top and the methods in the bottom, or something like that. \n\nSomething that I've noticed in the sketchnoting world is that sketchnoting 101 is how to draw at all. How to feel confident enough to put your pen on the paper and draw a line, draw a box, draw a circle, make them into objects, whatever. But once you're past that introductory, when 101 level of sketchnoting and you've done a few, the next level up is to start creating your own language of visual representation, which I think people kind of do, whether they intentionally do it, or not. \n\nI kind of find myself doing it. The way that I contain categories of information in a sketch note, I've kind of come to a particular way that I do it. That type of thing is because we don't talk about creativity and representation; we don't take the time to do these things. They're not really a practice. Everyone kind of just does their own and I've been on teams that, or I've tried to be on teams that had a fairly mature way of having a wiki, you're going to talk to each other, Agile teams. Still, we might have a wiki, but it's not like we were always drawing together. \n\nI'm interested in have you all had experiences on your teams of drawing together, collaborating on one drawing at the same time?\n\nREIN: Yeah. We use a collaborative whiteboarding software to do various things and one of them is drawing boxes that represent systems and architectures. One of the exercises we sometimes do is we say, “You get this part of the board, you get this part of the board, you get this part of the board. I want you each to diagram how you think the system works now and then in 15 minutes, we're going to look at them together.”\n\nMARLENA: Yes. That type of thing, I think it's so important and I wish that more folks did it on their teams. Have y'all found that you have any visual representation that has started repeating itself, like say certain part of a system you usually draw in a certain way?\n\nREIN: Yeah. We've definitely developed a language, or a discourse over time and some shorthand, or mnemonics for certain things. We’ve not standardized, I think is the wrong word, but we've moved closer together in a more organic way.\n\nDAMIEN: Which is how language develops.\n\nMARLENA: Indeed, indeed. But this way of having this shared visual language together is going to give you a shorthand with each other. Like, when you have a map, you have a legend, and I think that it's important Rein, like you mentioned, not necessarily having standards, but having some common ways of drawing certain things together. That type of drawing together is very powerful for developing your collective way of visualizing a system and thinking about it.\n\nREIN: And another thing I want to highlight here is that if you ask four people to diagram and architecture and you get four different diagrams, that doesn't mean that one of them is right and three of them are wrong. What that usually means is that you have four different perspectives.\n\nMARLENA: Yes. We all have our internal way of mapping things and it is not a right, or wrong, a good, or bad. It's just, every person has a different map, a way of mapping objects in the world, that is brain science stuff.\n\nDAMIEN: I get the opportunity to reference my favorite, what I discovered just now, today, I’ll just go with today's zine, Principia Discordia.\n\nJAMEY: Oh my god, that’s my favorite!\n\nDAMIEN: Marvelous work of art. They say in Principia Discordia that the world is chaos. It's chaos out there and we look at it through a window and we draw lines in the window and call that order. [chuckles] So people draw different lines and those are the diagrams you’re going to get. \n\nJAMEY: That’s so beautiful.\n\nREIN: I have to interject that John Haugeland, who's a philosopher, said something very similar, which is that the act of dividing the universe into systems with components and interactions is how we understand the universe. It's not something that's out those boxes. Aren't something that are out there in the universe. They're in here in our heads and they're necessary for us to even perceive and understand the universe.\n\nDAMIEN: Which gives us a whole new meaning to the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But [laughs] we don't have to go that far down the road.\n\nMARLENA: Well, even if we think about color and perceiving color, everyone's going to have a different theme that they see. It's going to like –\n\nREIN: Yeah, and there's philosophically no way to know if red for me means the same thing as red for you.\n\nMARLENA: Mm hm.\n\nDAMIEN: So applying that same standard to our technical systems. Some senior architects somewhere might draw a diagram and goes, “This is the truth of what we have built, or what we should be building and that there is no external representation of truth.” “Oh, look, the map is not the territory! We can go through this all day.”\n\n[laughter]\n\nREIN: And the interesting thing for me is that this is something that there are Eastern philosophies that have figured out long before Western philosophy did. So while Descartes was doing his stuff, you had the Jainism principle of Anakandavada, which is the manifoldness of the universe. There's no one right truth; there are many interlocking and overlapping truths.\n\nJAMEY: How does this relate to a GitHub [inaudible]? [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: [overtalk] It means your diagramming is direct. \n\nREIN: It certainly says something about distributed systems and in distributed systems, we call this the consensus problem.\n\n[laughter]\n\nDAMIEN: I love the fact that Git was built to be this completely distributed, no single authority source control system and now we have GitHub.\n\nMARLENA: Indeed.\n\nREIN: I want to know how I, as someone who has terrible handwriting, can feel comfortable doing sketching.\n\nMARLENA: Sure! I just did a whole meet up about that. It's not just you, I think that it's 75% of engineers and we emphasize typing. So what I tell people about handwriting, the very, very basics, is slow down. Not what you want to hear, I know, but it makes a huge difference. \n\nSo this past winter, my pandemic new skill that I learned is calligraphy, and in calligraphy, they tell you over and over and over to slow down. So that's tip number one is to slow down and then number two is try writing larger. Whatever it is you're writing, play with the size of it. Larger and slower generally gives you a way to look at what you're writing and which pieces like, there are probably some letters that you dislike more than others when you are writing and you can take those letters that you really dislike. Maybe it's just a matter of reviewing like, how are you forming the letter? If it's all of them, it'll take you longer, but. [laughs] \n\nJAMEY: When I was a kid learning cursive for the first time, I really hated to do the capital H in cursive. I think it's like an ugly letter and I think it's hard to write and it was hard to learn. My last name starts with H so I had to do it a lot. I just designed a new capital H and that's what I've been using in cursive since I was like a little kid [laughs] and nobody notices because nobody goes like, “That's not how I learned cursive in class,” if they can read it.\n\nThat's how I feel that language, too and we're talking about the way language evolves. People will be like, “That's not a real word,” and I'm like, “Well, if you understood what I meant, then it's a word.” \n\nDAMIEN: Perfectly fine with it. \n\nJAMEY: And that's kind of how I was just thinking about handwriting too like, what is there right, or wrong if you can read what I'm expressing to you? [chuckles]\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. If you look at the lowercase g in various glyph sets, you have to actually pay attention and go, “This lowercase g is not the same symbol as this lowercase g.” [laughs] You have to totally call your attention to that. They are vastly, vastly, different things.\n\nMARLENA: The letters that look the same, though are capital T, I, and F.\n\nDAMIEN: You don't put crossbars on your eye?\n\nMARLENA: Well, I'm thinking in terms of like, for calligraphy, when I got into the intermediate class, I had to come up with my own alphabet, typography, design my own alphabet. Those letters were so similar, they just gave me fits trying to make them all different.\n\nBut I think it's important for people to practice their handwriting. I know that we all just scribble on the pad for charging, or whatever. You just scribble with your fingernail and it doesn't look like anything. But keeping that connection to your handwriting is also an important way of valuing yourself and this space that you take up in the world. I think it's really good if you can get to a place where you can accept your own handwriting and feel comfortable with it. \n\nSince I am into stuff like calligraphy and lettering, it's definitely part of my identity, the way that I write things out by hand. It's physically connected to you, to your brain, and so, things like that, we want to say everything is typing in tech, but there is a value for your confidence, for your brain, and for how you process information to be able to write something by hand and feel confident enough to share that with somebody else.\n\nJAMEY: That was really beautiful, actually. But I was going to ask, how do you think your handwriting relates to your voice? Because when you were saying that about feeling comfortable with your handwriting and how it's like a self-confidence thing, it made me think of the way that people also feel and interact with their voice. Like, you always hear people, “Oh, I hate listening to a recording of myself. I hate listening to my voice.”\n\nMARLENA: Well, there's that whole field of handwriting analysis, just like there's that whole field of body language and that includes what someone's voice sounds like. It is attached to your personality and how you're thinking and how you're working with ideas. \n\n[laughs] So it's not like I'm judging someone when I look at their—sometimes I am, I'm lying. Sometimes I am judging people when I look at their handwriting. I mostly don't. Honestly, I think we've lost so much education about handwriting in schools, what I dislike about that is, we were talking about the power of print earlier. Well, if you feel uncomfortable writing your name, if you feel uncomfortable writing down what you believe and sharing it, that's the type of censorship, isn't it? So I think handwriting is important for that type of thing, but I think it is connected to your personality.\n\nJAMEY: It says something about you and when you put something out into the world that says something about you in that way, it's kind of a vulnerable experience.\n\nMARLENA: It is, and you're showing people how you value yourself. I think that's partly why a lot of times in tech, we've minimized the role of handwriting so much that nobody feels comfortable sharing their handwriting. Well, it's not nobody, that's a big generalization, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable sharing their handwriting and that is a loss. That is a loss for everyone.\n\nDAMIEN: I love what you said, in part because I didn't want to hear it, when Rein asked, “How do you improve your handwriting?” You said, “Write slower and write bigger,” and I knew right away that that was correct because that's the only thing that has worked when I was trying to improve my handwriting. But I gave up on that because I didn't want to; I don't want to write slower and bigger because of what you said—taking up space. \n\nIf you look at my handwriting historically, it's been not taken up – very little space, very little time. I don't want anybody to have to wait for me to finish writing. I don't want to use this whole page. I don't want to think my writing is so, so important that it's all big on the page, but allowing myself to take up space and time is how I get to better handwriting. So that was just such a beautiful way of putting it.\n\nMARLENA: Well, I read this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and it's a wonderful book where the book blows me away and it's hard to talk about it because she has packed so much into it. But it's thinking about how we make ourselves go so fast and it's about the attention economy. How we are trying to speed ourselves up so much and I think that handwriting is part of this. If we are going to take back our own lives, that includes being able to slow down enough to write your name in a way that feels good to you and share it. \n\nI like what you wrote in the chat, Damien, but I'd like to hear you say it.\n\nDAMIEN: I wrote it in the chat so I wouldn't say it. [laughs] “Decolonize your mind.” It was a message to myself, decolonize your mind. The idea that you don't get to do nothing, you don't get to take up space and time. Yeah, and so that's just, it's all these things are so tightly connected.\n\nMARLENA: So I think y'all are ready for me to tell you the story of how I came up with a first Let’s Sketch Tech conference and this conference happened maybe 2017, 2018. I always forget the exact year, but it was post Trump getting elected. \n\nNow the Women's March, right after Trump got elected and sworn into office, was a major point in time and wake up call for me. I've always tried to learn about politics, intersectionalism, and things like that, but this March showed me the power of making something with your own hands and showing that and sharing it to someone else. I wanted everyone to feel like, even in this era of Trump, we still have the power to make something meaningful and share that with our own hands. \n\nSo that was when I decided to start emphasizing more and learning more about the connection between art and tech. I'd been doing sketch notes and it sort of struck me that there was not much of a community out there that handled this topic, which I thought was just kind of strange. \n\nWhen I looked at sketchnoting itself, it seemed like more was happening in the world of design. Well, what about engineers? I've had to draw out things so many times to learn them, to teach somebody else, to understand what's happening and so, that's when I put together this Let’s Sketch Tech conference. I wanted people to be able to retain the power to make something with their own hands, because that can never be taken away from you, whether you have internet connection, or not. But even if you do have the internet connection, combining these together is just so powerful. \n\nSo that is why I started this conference and this community and it's pretty deep. I don't bring it up all the time because it's kind of a lot, but yeah, and we had a great time.\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing that story and everything else you've shared with us. \n\nHow do we feel about going into reflections? I think I'm going to be reflecting on in the broad sense, it's what I didn't want to say earlier until Marlena called me out, decolonize your mind. But in a smaller sense, it's how much of my view of the tech industry, my work in there, and the environment there should be formal, structured, strict, authoritarian. \n\nI had all these ideas that are still, unbeknownst to me, having a huge influence about how we can work. The idea of a zine fest at work seems so outrageous to me because it doesn't fit into those ideas and so, I'll be reflecting on well, where else am I seeing this stuff and how has it prevented me from doing something so very effective? [laughs]\n\nI said, zine fest. I used to think I was too young to mispronounce zine, but whatever. [laughs]\n\nWho’s next?\n\nJAMEY: I can go next. So my two favorite things, I think that got said, one of them was also about like the zine fair at work. I host zine fairs in my hometown and the idea of like, well, if you both draw something and then you trade, you're having a zine fair. I absolutely love that. And then my other favorite thing was about the talk closer to the end about valuing yourself and the way and taking up space and all of those things. \n\nI feel actually like I want to mush those two things together because talking about valuing yourself, like really resonated with me the way that I do zines in my regular life, not in tech. But I think that inside of tech is a place where there are people that I really want to see value themselves more. It's a system that has a tendency to shut people down and keep talented people and I want to imbue that kind of confidence into a lot of engineers, especially newer engineers. \n\nSo I think that I really like this idea of a zine fest at work, and maybe that can, in addition to helping teach us about our systems and stuff, help us encourage each other to take that time to value ourselves.\n\nREIN: I think what struck me about this conversation the most is that creativity is good for people, personally, individuals to explore our creativity. But when we share it with other people, that's a way that we can become closer.\n\nI think that for the work to happen—because to some extent, I tried to apply these ideas at work—people have to build and maintain common ground with each other. I think that encouraging people to be creative and to share that creativity—you typically wouldn't ask a junior engineer to draw an architecture diagram, but I think you should.\n\nMARLENA: I hope that after listening to this, people definitely ask their newer folks on their team to draw a diagram, then we’ll share and trade with them.\n\nI think what I've learned from this conversation is, well, I think that it validated, more than anything, the ideas that I'm trying to spread about connecting arts and technology. It was wonderful to hear each of you talking about the struggles and challenges that you have at work in bringing this together because it is a different way of thinking. But I feel so positive whenever I talk about this and seeing people be able to recognize themselves and seeing some doors and windows open about how they can incorporate the arts a little bit more into their tech lives is the reason why I do this and it's been such a privilege to share this with all of you and your listeners. So thanks for having me.\n\nDAMIEN: It's been a privilege to have you. The idea that we can start out with like, “Let's draw pictures as engineers,” and ended up with, “Oh my God, how do I become fully human?” [laughs] It's really amazing.\n\nJAMEY: Yeah, this was really great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. \n\nMARLENA: It was a lot of fun.\n\nDAMIEN: Marlena, why don't you give your Patreon and your podcast?\n\nMARLENA: Sure. Well, I started the Patreon because it was an easier way for folks to sign up for the meetups that happened in Let's Sketch Tech. We do a monthly meetup and I'm starting to plan the conference for this year. There's a free newsletter, but if this podcast is giving you life, if you're getting oxygen from this conversation, I highly suggest checking out the Let’s Sketch Tech Patreon, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to my podcast, Make it a Pear! I talk a lot about creative process in tech.\n\nDAMIEN: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us.Special Guest: Marlena Compton.","content_html":"01:07 - Marlena’s Superpower: Bringing the Arts to Tech
\n\n04:42 - Parallels Between Art and Computer Science/Software Engineering
\n\n09:33 - Sketchnoting and Zines
\n\n\n\n14:19 - DIY Publishing and Physicality – The Power of Print
\n\n\n\n20:33 - Zines at Work & Zines in Professional Settings
\n\n31:11 - Target Audiences, Codeswitching, & People Are Not Robots
\n\n37:58 - How We View, Study, and Treat Liberal Arts – (Not Well!)
\n\n43:01 - Using Diagrams and Images
\n\n50:41 - Handwriting Advice: Decolonize Your Mind!
\n\n59:45 - The “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Conference
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: Decolonize your mind.
\n\nJamey: Zine fairs at work and valuing yourself by taking up space.
\n\nRein: Creativity is good for individuals to explore, but when we share it with people it’s a way we can become closer.
\n\nMarlena: Connecting arts and technology.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJAMEY: Hello, everyone and welcome to Episode 236 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jamey. And I’m another one of your hosts and I’m here with my friend, Damien Burke
\n\nDAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here in addition to with the host, our guest today, Marlena Compton.
\n\nMarlena Compton is a tech community organizer, designer, and collaboration artist who has worked in the tech industry for 18 years. She grows tech communities and organizes conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena has worked for companies like IBM and Atlassian. This has left her with a life-long appreciation for quality code, empathy, and working together as a team. When she isn’t working, Marlena enjoys lettering, calligraphy, and walking her dog.
\n\nWelcome to the show, Marlena.
\n\nMARLENA: Hi, thank you so much.
\n\nDAMIEN: So I know you're prepared for this. Same thing we do for all of our guests, we're going to start with the first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, so my superpower is bringing the arts to tech and that is teaching people the value of creative arts—such as writing, sketching, music, and more—and how this relates to the tech industry, helping creative types feel more at home in tech, and helping folks who are mostly in the science track in school learn why they need the creative arts for critical thinking and thinking through problems.
\n\nSo it's like, you have to give people a space to do this learning from a peer perspective versus top-down perspective. This includes building community for folks to explore these things.
\n\nJAMEY: So you came to tech from art previously, is that right?
\n\nMARLENA: I have a wild academic background of interdisciplinary studies, which will not get you a job for anything but like, renting a car.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOr whatever and also, later I did computer science, but while I was getting my liberal arts degree, I did a lot of art history, a lot of painting, and a lot of theater.
\n\nJAMEY: I wonder if you could speak to coming into the tech industry as someone who is already an artist and considers themselves an artist, like, how that translated for you. Like, what skills from being an artist, do you think were helpful to you as you were starting in tech?
\n\nMARLENA: Sure. So I think that if you know that you're an artistic type, like I knew how important arts were for me. But I think for children often they get a lot of pressure to find something that will get them a job and it's not like this isn't for good reason, it's like we’ve got to be able to pay our bills. On the other hand, when you're a creative type, it's such a core part of your personality. You can't really separate it from anything and if you try to just tamp it down, it's going to come out somehow.
\n\nSo I was this college graduate and I was having a really hard time getting a job and figuring out what I wanted to do that would make enough money to support me. Computer science was literally the last thing I tried and I seem to do okay at it so I kept doing it. [laughs] And that's how I got into it.
\n\nI wish that we had bootcamps when I started learning computer science, but there weren't any and so, all I could do was go back to community college. So I went to community college. I had to take every single math class over again. Calculus, I had to take three times, but I stuck with it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept taking the classes and eventually, it worked. So [laughs] that's how I got into the tech industry and it's like, it's totally okay to do this just to make money. That's why I did it.
\n\nDAMIEN: So then coming in with this art background, which seems really broad and you didn't talk about anything specific, what insights and connections were you able to make between art and computer science, and art and software engineering?
\n\nMARLENA: Sure. So for me, building software is a creative process. In fact, this is something I've believed for a very long time, because as soon as I got out with my newly-minted CS degree and I knew that I needed to create, draw, write, and do all of those things. Eventually, I started looking around for okay, what in computer science is kind of more visual place and it used to be people would think of diagramming software, HoloVizio, Rational Rose, which is that is quite a throwback. Who here –?
\n\nDAMIEN: UML.
\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] That UML, yes! I would look at these things, like system architect, where it's like the idea was that you could literally draw out pieces and then it would make your code, which was [laughs] I think an epic fail if you look at it from, did it actually ever write successful code? I have never –
\n\nREIN: There's another option, which was the expense of architects draw the boxes and then the chief engineer put the code in the boxes.
\n\nMARLENA: Well, but see, you need a brain in there and this is all about the brain.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nMARLENA: Yeah. I think one transformation that my thinking had to go through so, I had to go from this computer science perspective of find a way to chop up all your thoughts into little, discreet, logical pieces so that you can make classes, objects, and things like that and instead look at the brain as an organ in your body. We take more of a holistic perspective where it is your brain is connected to your thoughts is connected to like your internal axes, GPS system, and mapping system and how all of that comes together to problem solve.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I love it. Without bodies, we couldn't think about things
\n\nMARLENA: Indeed. This past year, I've spent a lot of time specifically investigating this connection. One of the things I did was read Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and the premise of her book is that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. That is how you orient yourself in the world and how you perceive a space around you and yourself in that space is what allows you to organize ideas, take perspectives that are based in imagination, and things like that.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and this ties into Wyckoff's work on basic metaphors because basic metaphors are how we structure our thought, but they're all about the world. So thinking about the metaphor of containment, you have a thing, it has an inside and an outside, there may be a portal that gets you from the inside to the outside. So this is how houses work, right? This is how we think about houses. This is also how we think about relationships. It's how we think about code.
\n\nAnd then there's you combine that basic metaphor with the metaphor of traveling; starting at a place, traveling along a path, ending up at another place. You put those two metaphors together, you can have complex thoughts about achieving goals. But these are all metaphors based on, like you're saying, our perception of living in a world that has 3D space.
\n\nYes, and maps are such a big part of that. So when I was reading through this particular book, she goes into things like maps, how we map ideas, and things like that and there is quite a bit of science behind it. And even for metaphor, she writes that metaphor is what happens when our thoughts overflow our brains and we need to put them out into the world.
\n\nDAMIEN: So putting these thoughts, these ideas back out into the world and into some sort of spatial representation, is that how you view the tech notetaking, or diagramming sort of thing?
\n\nMARLENA: Absolutely. So I guess, for listeners, I want to back up a little bit because I think something that Damien knows about me and also Jamey and Rein from looking at the biography is that I'm very into sketch notes. Just to bring us out of the depth [laughs] a little bit, I can tell you about why I turned to sketchnoting and why I started doing it. It was because I was trying to learn JavaScript and yes, Damien, I know how you feel about JavaScript, some of us like it. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: I don't want to show my cards too much here, but I will say the fact that you had difficulty with it is telling.
\n\nMARLENA: Well, but I also had difficulty learning C, Java, Erlang.
\n\nDAMIEN: So how did [inaudible]?
\n\nMARLENA: Well, so I went to CascadiaJS and this was my first – well, it wasn't my first, but it was the language conference and I was just learning JavaScript and I didn't understand half of it. It just went over my head. So to try and create some memory of that, or try to figure it out, I started drawing. I had seen sketch notes on the web. They were experiencing a bump in popularity at the time. I think my Mike Rohde’s book had just come out and it helped.
\n\nThat was what introduced me to this whole world and eventually, we're talking about when thoughts overflow and you turn to metaphor, this is exactly what was happening for me was Barbara Tyversky refers to these pictures we draw as glyphs. They can be more complicated than language and that is why when we're really trying to figure something out, we're not going to be writing an essay, maybe sometimes, but for the most part, we'll start diagramming.
\n\nJAMEY: I also wanted to talk about zines while you were on. I was thinking about zines when you were talking about this because I feel like there's a few different mediums of art that I do and some of them are more intentional than others. To me, zines are about like, “I'm thinking this and it needs to exist in physical space and then it will be done and I can stop thinking about it,” because it exists.
\n\nMARLENA: I love that so much and it's exactly what zines are there for. So zines are DIY publishing and zines are the publishing that happens for topics that, I think it happens a lot for people who are underrepresented in some way. Because you're not going to have access to a publisher and it's going to be harder for you to get any official book out. But then sometimes it's also just, maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want your zine to be a more informal publication.
\n\nI love zines how kind of – they are all so super niche like, you can put anything. Define the word zine, ha! [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: It's so hard. People will argue about this in the zine community for like days and days. Hard to define the word.
\n\nMARLENA: And that's actually part of the power of zines because it means it can be whatever you want, which means whatever you want to create is okay. I think that's really what we're trying to get down into here is having different ways of expressing and problem solving be okay and accepted.
\n\nREIN: Just something to point out that containment is a metaphor we use for categories. So we're talking about what is inside the zine category?
\n\nDAMIEN: I want to go back to the well, Marlena, you said zines were do-it-yourself publishing, DIY publishing, but blogs are also do-it-yourself publishing. So zines have a physicality to them and feels like that's an important aspect. Can you talk about that, or why that is?
\n\nMARLENA: Well, there are also digital zines, so yeah. [laughs] But.
\n\nDAMIEN: Maybe five containerization and categories.
\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] Well, if we wanted to talk a little bit about physical zines, that even is interesting and Jamey, maybe you have a few thoughts about this that you can share, too because there are just so many different ways to format a zine.
\n\nJAMEY: Well, I know that digital zines are a thing and I've read some digital zines that I've very much enjoyed. To me, the physicality of zines is a big part of them and a lot of what's appealing about them for me. I think that part of the reason for that is that, as you were getting at, people can write whatever they want, people who might not have a chance to write in other formats and most importantly about that, you can't censor a zine. It's impossible because someone makes it themselves and then they give it to whoever they want to have. It's a very personal experience and there's no middleman who can like tell you what you can, or can't say.
\n\nSo I think that having that physical piece of paper that you then hand directly to someone is what makes that possible and not putting it on the internet is also what makes that possible. Like, you have this thing, nobody can edit what's in it. It's all up to you. Nobody can search for it on a search engine. If you don't want someone to see it, then you don't give them one and it's just a holdover from what a lot of media was more like before the internet and I appreciate that about them. [chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. To me, it sounds so much like the Federalist Papers, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
\n\nJAMEY: Oh, those were zines for sure.
\n\nDAMIEN: I wrote this thing, [inaudible] about, I'm hazing him out of here, read this. [chuckles] Those are zines, okay.
\n\nJAMEY: And political zines are a huge subsection of pamphlets and all sorts of political ideology.
\n\nREIN: And that's where printing started was with the publishing of zines, that's my argument.
\n\nMARLENA: This is the power of print. It's the power of print and that power, it's something that you don't necessarily get with the internet. Zines are an archive as well and I don't think we can just say –
\n\nSo when I did the first Let’s Sketch Tech! conference, I had an editor from Chronicle Books come and she talked about publishing. When I was talking to her about doing this talk, what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was she said, “Books aren't going away. Books are never going away because we are so connected to our hands and our eyes.” Books are always going to be there. Printed, words printed, pamphlets, zines, I think they're going to outlast computers. [chuckles] Think about how long a CD, or magnetic tape is going to last for versus the oldest book in the world.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah.
\n\nREIN: And by the way, if you don't think that printing was about zines, go Google the pamphlet wars. We think it's about publishing the Bible, but the vast majority of stuff that was printed was pamphlets. Zines!
\n\nDAMIEN: And we can look at things that have survived through a history and it's really truly about paper from Shakespeare's works to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is how things have survived.
\n\nMARLENA: And on another aspect of this is the fact that we are human, we have human eyes and those eyes have limits as to how much they can look at a screen. Looking at paper and also, the physical manipulation of that paper, I think is a very important aspect of zines. So my favorite scene ever, which is sadly lost to me, was this very small print zine and it was the kind that is printed literally on one piece of paper and this folded up. But it had the most magnificent centerfolds where you open it up and this is awesome picture of Prince and the person even taped a purple feather in the centerfold part of it and it's like, that's an experience you're only going to get from this kind of printed physical medium.
\n\nDAMIEN: So yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here, communicating ideas through physical mediums.
\n\nJAMEY: And I think that because zines are so DIY and low tech that people do really interesting things with paper to express what they're going for. Like, I've been doing zines for a long time with friends.
\n\nBut my first one that I ever did by myself, I had this black and white photo of a house that had Christmas lights on it and I was trying to be like, “How am I going to express this feeling that I have about this picture that I want to express in this media?” I'm like, “I'm going to go to Kinko's and make copies of this for 5 cents and how is it going to look the way I want?” So I ended up manually using a green highlighter to highlight over all of the Christmas lights in every single copy of the zine so that everyone would see the green Christmas lights that I wanted them to feel what I was feeling about.
\n\nI think that's a pretty simple example because it's not extremely a lot of work to put highlighter in your zine either. But I think that people have to think about that and how they want to convey something and then people have done a lot of really interesting things like taping feathers into their books.
\n\nMARLENA: Yeah. This is a way of slowing down our thought process, which I don't think we talk about enough because right now, in our culture, it's all about being faster, being lull 10x and making a zine is a great way to reflect on things that you've learned.
\n\nSo I would really like to take a minute to just talk about zines at work and zines in a professional setting because I've noticed that one thing people think as soon as I start talking about zines is why do I need this in my job? Why do we need this in tech? I think that zines are a great way to help people on teams surface the unspoken knowledge that lives in the team, or it's also a way to play with something that you're trying to learn and share with other people. I’d like to hear Jamey, do you have thoughts about this?
\n\nJAMEY: I have a thought, but I'm not sure how directly related it is to what you just said and I feel self-conscious about it. [chuckles] But I like to teach people to make zines who aren't familiar with zines, or haven't made them before and the thing that I try to teach people that I think zines can teach you is that you can just do this. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take a specific skill that you can't just learn.
\n\nSo they're accessible in that way, but I think it's also a bigger lesson about what you can do if you want to do something and that's how I feel about tech. If you want to learn to code, it's not magic, you can learn how to do it. If you want to do a zine, you can learn how to do it. To me, those thoughts go together. I feel like that wasn't exactly what you just asked, I’m sorry.
\n\nDAMIEN: I liked it, though.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nMARLENA: It does tie into the fact that it's important to help people feel at home at work. Well, you're not at home at work, but to feel as though they are in the right place at work and this type of making zines and allowing people to surface what they know about your system, about what you're building, about ideas that your team is tinkering with. This kind of format gives people the space to surface what they're thinking even if they're not the most vocal person.
\n\nDAMIEN: So one of this really ties into what I was thinking. When you said zines at work and there's a couple of great tech zines which I love and I think should be in a lot of offices. But the idea of actually creating one at work, something happened in my chest when I thought about that idea and it's because it's a very informal medium and tends to be informal and whimsical and you just kind of do it.
\n\nI realize how much that is counter to so much of how tech teams and tech industry runs where it's very formal. You can't just ship code, you’ve got to get a pull request and reviewed by the senior engineer and it's got to fit our coding standards and run in ordering time, or less. [laughter] That can be very, I'll say challenging.
\n\nJAMEY: I think that's also exactly why it’s easy and fun to learn about tech from zines because it feels so much more approachable than a formal tutorial and you're saying like, “Oh, will this be too hard, or what will I learn?” There's all of this baggage that comes along with it where it's like, “Oh, the zine is like cute and whimsical and I'm going to read it and it's going to be interesting,” and then like, “Whoa, I just learned about sorting from it.”
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Just because you’re writing software, or doing computer science doesn't mean we have to be serious. [laughter] Probably needs to be shouldn't be.
\n\nREIN: It also makes me think about a shift that I would really like to see in the way diagrams and things like this are used, which is that when you're asked to produce an architecture diagram, you're generally asked to produce something authoritative. It has to be the best current understanding of what the organization has decided to do and that doesn't leave any space for exploration, or for using diagrams to ask questions. I think that's bad because naturally, on a team, or in an organization, everyone has their own models. Everyone has their own local perspective on what's happening. If there's no opportunity to surface, “Hey, here's how I think this works. Can I compare that with how you think this works?” You can't maintain common ground.
\n\nI don't think producing a lot of words is a great way to do that. I think that's very inefficient. I also think that having an hour meeting with twenty people where you all talk about it is also inefficient. So I'm wondering if diagrams can be useful here. Relatively, it’s a little bit quicker to draw some boxes and connect them with arrows than it is to write a 1-page report. I'm wondering if we could promote more people putting out these low fidelity diagrams that are, “Here's what's in my head,” and sharing them, if that would help us maintain common ground.
\n\nMARLENA: Absolutely, and I love the way that you brought up this situation where everyone is – because I think we've all been in these meetings where it's like, there are some technical hurdle, decisions have to be made, technology needs to be chosen, libraries needed – that type of thing. What I experienced was it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, like if you have twenty people in a meeting, at most three of them are paying attention and about half of them are going to be underrepresented in the meeting for a variety of reasons, if not more.
\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, and well, I'm just going to say yes. For underrepresented people, this happens a lot. So one of the things that I like to promote is taking apart the traditional jam everyone into a room, let the conversation naturally happen. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that works too well and honestly, I think that a zine format, or even if it's just like take a piece of paper, let people diagram what they think is interesting, then trade, then your team is having a zine fair. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: Or if you do that to prepare for the meeting and then the meeting is going over them.
\n\nMARLENA: Sure. Yeah, and maybe the discussion is like a facilitated discussion. I did a lot of Agile team stuff, including I had to go down the route of learning how to facilitate just because I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my team. So I started looking at different ways to how do you have a discussion when it's like, there are two, or three people who always talk, nobody else says anything, but everyone has thoughts. It's really interesting what happens when you start trying to change how a group is having discussions.
\n\nREIN: It also seems like it's super valuable for the person doing the facilitation because they have to synthesize what's happening in real-time and then they come away with the meeting, with the synthesis in their brains. Part of which they've been able to put into the diagrams, the drawings, and whatever, but only a part of it. So it seems like if you have some external consultant come in and draw diagrams for your team, that external consultant then leaves with a bunch of the knowledge you were trying to impart to everyone else.
\n\nMARLENA: I don't know if that's necessarily true. In the world of graphic recording, those folks go to all kinds of meetings and I think it's true that they are going to come away with a different set of thoughts in their head, but they're also not going to have the context of your team.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMARLENA: And that's a pretty big part of it.
\n\nBut I know Ashton Rodenhiser, she's a graphic facilitator who does this and she'll go into meetings like the one we're describing, and while people are talking, she's drawing things out. It's really interesting what happens when people see their discussion being drawn by a third party. I've seen this happen at some conferences; it's really great way to change the way you have discussion.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. So for example, we do incident analysis, we do interviews with the people who are there, and we review slot transcripts. What we find is that the people who are doing the interviews, conducting the analysis, facilitating the reviews, they become experts in the systems.
\n\nMARLENA: Ah yes, because so much – it reminds me of how teaching somebody to do something, you teach it to yourself. So they are having to internalize all of this discussion and reflect it back to the team, which means of course, they're learning along with the rest of the team.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. So I think my point was not don't hire consultants to do this, it was keeping them around after you do.
\n\nMARLENA: [laughs] Wouldn't it be amazing if having a graphic recorder, or a graphic facilitator was just a thing that we all had in our meetings?
\n\nREIN: Yeah, or even something that was democratized so that more people got the benefits of – I think doing that work has a lot of benefits to the person who's doing it.
\n\nJAMEY: This is making me think a lot about the way that you engaged with something, or the way that you express it, depending on who your target audience is. Like, if I'm taking notes for myself in my own notebook, my target audience is just myself and I write things that won't make sense to anybody else. If I'm writing like a document for work, the target audience is my team, I'm writing in a way that reflects that it's going to be read and understood by my team instead of me.
\n\nI think that a lot of what we're talking about here with zines, diagrams, and things like this is kind of an interesting hybrid. When I write a zine, I'm doing it for me, it's benefiting me, but not in the same way as notes in my notebook where I don't want anyone else to ever look at it. So it's like, how do I write something that's benefiting me, but also has an audience of other people that I'm hoping will get something out of it? I think that's a bit of a unique format in some ways.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's interesting because everything I hear from novelists and screenwriters, it's always “Write the book, write the movie that you want.” You're the audience and if you love it, not everybody's going to love it, [chuckles] but there are other people who will, chances are other people will love it. If you write something for everybody to love, nobody is going to like it.
\n\nMARLENA: Yeah, I think so, too and you never know who else is going to be thinking the same way you are and sometimes, it's that people don't have a way to speak up and share how they're feeling in a similar way. So I actually love that zines allow – I think it is important to be making something that is from your perspective and then share that. That's a way to see who else has that perspective.
\n\nDAMIEN: But I also understand this need to, well, I'll say code switch. This need to code switch for different audiences. [chuckles] Rein brought up UML.
\n\nI learned UML in college back in the long-ago times and I hated it. It was an interesting thing to learn, but an awful thing to do because all of my UML diagrams had to be complete, authoritative, and correct because I was doing them for my professor and I was a TA. I thought, “Well, if I had large amount of diagrams describing large systems, looking at them could be very informative and useful.” But no one in the world is going to write those things because this is way too much work unless I'm allowed to be informal, general, not authoritative, or complete and so, I'm realizing these tensions that I've been going on in my mind for decades.
\n\nMARLENA: Well, and there's programs. Using those programs was so clunky, like adding a square, adding a label, adding a class, and pretty soon, if you were trying to diagram a large system, there was not a great way to change your perspective and go from macro down to micro and zoom out again. Whereas, this is, I think what is so great about the human brain. We can do that and we can do that when we're drawing with our hands.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. There were promises of automated UML diagrams that you get from type systems and static analysis and I think I saw some early versions of this and they created correct UML diagrams that were almost readable. But going from correct and almost readable to something that's informative and enlightening, that's an art and we don't have computers that can do that.
\n\nMARLENA: Right. Like, humans are not computers. Computers are not human. [laughs] When is it not Turing complete?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI think that initially people really wanted to be robots when they were sitting down at the computer and I think we're going through a period right now where we're rethinking that.
\n\nREIN: Well, in part it was management that wanted people to be robots.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which reaches back to the industrial revolution.
\n\nMARLENA: And still does. What I love is that having this conversation about how we work and how to build software, it brings up all of these things, including this type of management wanting people to be robots, but we're not.
\n\nWhat's interesting to me and what I think is that if we could shift our perspective from let's make everyone a machine, we're all robots sitting, typing out the stuff for people. If we could shift to thinking about building software is a creative process, people are going to need sleep. If you want them to solve your problems, they're going to need different ways to express themselves and share ideas with each other.
\n\nREIN: It's really important to uncover facts about work and human performance like, even if you have rules, policies, and procedures, humans still have to interpret them and resolve trade-offs to get them done. You can have two rules that are mutually exclusive and now a human has to resolve that conflict.
\n\nAlso, that we think that the old paradigm that Damien was talking about, this Taylor’s paradigm, is that manager decide how the work is to be done and then workers do what they're told. But workers, to do this, have to think about high level organizational goals that are much more abstract than what the people designing the work thought they would have to think about. I think if you can uncover – this is all creative problem solving and it's a part of the day-to-day work.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that command-and-control structure was always a fantasy, less so in some places than other places, but always, always a fantasy.
\n\nREIN: Even the military is reevaluating what C2 means in the face of overwhelming evidence that humans don't work that way.
\n\nDAMIEN: It's nice to pretend, though. Makes things so much simpler.
\n\nMARLENA: What's interesting about this changing paradigm in how we view this management and control piece is how this is manifesting in the world of academia, especially in the world of liberal arts, because liberal arts colleges are not doing well. [laughs] In fact, Mills College here in the Bay Area is not going to be taking freshmen next year and they're going to close.
\n\nBut I think there's a theme of education in here, too in how people learn these skills, because we've been talking about zines. You do not have to have a degree to know how to make a zine and that's awesome! [laughter]
\n\nAlong with these other skills and I know that there are a lot of people in tech, who they went through computer science program, or even a bootcamp and maybe they did some science before, maybe not, but they're still going to these creative skills and it may be, I think a lot of folks in the US and in tech, it's like you weren't in a position to be able to study art, or to get that much exposure, because it was about survival. Survival for your whole family and there's just not the time to try and explore this stuff.
\n\nI would love to see more space in tech for people to explore all of the creative arts and see how does it help you express yourself at work. The most concrete example I have of this is writing up a software bug. So I used to be a tester and I could always tell who had writing skills and who didn't based on how they would write up a bug. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: No, and I can definitely feel that. I work on a team of one for several projects. So sometimes, I have to write a user story, or a bug and I have a very strict format for writing bugs. It's basically, it’s write on a Cucumber and yet I will take minutes and minutes and minutes to properly wordsmith that bug report for me [laughs] so that Tuesday –
\n\nMARLENA: As you should! Doing a good job!
\n\nDAMIEN: So that Tuesday, when I read that I know right away what it means and what it says. Whereas, I can write something quickly that might be accurate, but would be difficult for me to understand, or I can write something quickly that could be in complete assuming that I found the bug. I'm the one who put the bug in there; I know everything there is to know and still come back to this, no clue. I don't even know what the bug is. I actually have to throw away a feature this week because I had no clue what I meant when I wrote it.
\n\nMARLENA: I used to actually give a talk about this, how to write up bugs, because it was such an issue and if you don't train developers and other folks who are looking at an app to write them, then it ends up, the testers are the only ones who can write it up and that's not okay. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: And when you talk about a talk, how to write a bugs, there's some obvious mechanical things. How do you reproduce this? What did you expect to happen? Who's doing it? That sort of things and these are very clear and obvious, but then there's the actual communicating via words issue. [chuckles] How can you write those things down in a way that's easy for the next person to understand? I spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. It's hard. It's an art, I guess.
\n\nREIN: I want to turn this into an even more general point about the importance of the discipline of formulating your thoughts in a way that's available for consumption. So as an example, I used to write notes in a shorthand way where if I thought I knew something, I wouldn't include it because I already knew that I don't need to take a note about it and what I've found is that I couldn't explain stuff. I couldn't integrate the new knowledge with the old knowledge when it came time for me to answer a question.
\n\nThe approach I've been taking more recently is formulating my thoughts in a way that if I had to write a blogpost about that topic, I can copy and paste things from my notes, ready to go, and just drop them in. That's the thing I do for myself, but what I've found is that I actually understand stuff now.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I've had the same experience writing things that I thought I understood. This is the rubber duck story. You think you understand something so you try to explain to somebody else and go, “Oh, that's what it was.”
\n\nBut since we have Marlena here right now, [chuckles] I want to talk about using diagrams and images in that process for a person who doesn't work that way usually.
\n\nMARLENA: Indeed. Well, one of the things that I think we hint at in the world of tech—this is interesting because we've all been bashing the UML and all that stuff, but it did give us a set of symbols for visual representation of programming type things. Like, you make the rectangle for your class and then you put your properties in the top and the methods in the bottom, or something like that.
\n\nSomething that I've noticed in the sketchnoting world is that sketchnoting 101 is how to draw at all. How to feel confident enough to put your pen on the paper and draw a line, draw a box, draw a circle, make them into objects, whatever. But once you're past that introductory, when 101 level of sketchnoting and you've done a few, the next level up is to start creating your own language of visual representation, which I think people kind of do, whether they intentionally do it, or not.
\n\nI kind of find myself doing it. The way that I contain categories of information in a sketch note, I've kind of come to a particular way that I do it. That type of thing is because we don't talk about creativity and representation; we don't take the time to do these things. They're not really a practice. Everyone kind of just does their own and I've been on teams that, or I've tried to be on teams that had a fairly mature way of having a wiki, you're going to talk to each other, Agile teams. Still, we might have a wiki, but it's not like we were always drawing together.
\n\nI'm interested in have you all had experiences on your teams of drawing together, collaborating on one drawing at the same time?
\n\nREIN: Yeah. We use a collaborative whiteboarding software to do various things and one of them is drawing boxes that represent systems and architectures. One of the exercises we sometimes do is we say, “You get this part of the board, you get this part of the board, you get this part of the board. I want you each to diagram how you think the system works now and then in 15 minutes, we're going to look at them together.”
\n\nMARLENA: Yes. That type of thing, I think it's so important and I wish that more folks did it on their teams. Have y'all found that you have any visual representation that has started repeating itself, like say certain part of a system you usually draw in a certain way?
\n\nREIN: Yeah. We've definitely developed a language, or a discourse over time and some shorthand, or mnemonics for certain things. We’ve not standardized, I think is the wrong word, but we've moved closer together in a more organic way.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which is how language develops.
\n\nMARLENA: Indeed, indeed. But this way of having this shared visual language together is going to give you a shorthand with each other. Like, when you have a map, you have a legend, and I think that it's important Rein, like you mentioned, not necessarily having standards, but having some common ways of drawing certain things together. That type of drawing together is very powerful for developing your collective way of visualizing a system and thinking about it.
\n\nREIN: And another thing I want to highlight here is that if you ask four people to diagram and architecture and you get four different diagrams, that doesn't mean that one of them is right and three of them are wrong. What that usually means is that you have four different perspectives.
\n\nMARLENA: Yes. We all have our internal way of mapping things and it is not a right, or wrong, a good, or bad. It's just, every person has a different map, a way of mapping objects in the world, that is brain science stuff.
\n\nDAMIEN: I get the opportunity to reference my favorite, what I discovered just now, today, I’ll just go with today's zine, Principia Discordia.
\n\nJAMEY: Oh my god, that’s my favorite!
\n\nDAMIEN: Marvelous work of art. They say in Principia Discordia that the world is chaos. It's chaos out there and we look at it through a window and we draw lines in the window and call that order. [chuckles] So people draw different lines and those are the diagrams you’re going to get.
\n\nJAMEY: That’s so beautiful.
\n\nREIN: I have to interject that John Haugeland, who's a philosopher, said something very similar, which is that the act of dividing the universe into systems with components and interactions is how we understand the universe. It's not something that's out those boxes. Aren't something that are out there in the universe. They're in here in our heads and they're necessary for us to even perceive and understand the universe.
\n\nDAMIEN: Which gives us a whole new meaning to the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But [laughs] we don't have to go that far down the road.
\n\nMARLENA: Well, even if we think about color and perceiving color, everyone's going to have a different theme that they see. It's going to like –
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and there's philosophically no way to know if red for me means the same thing as red for you.
\n\nMARLENA: Mm hm.
\n\nDAMIEN: So applying that same standard to our technical systems. Some senior architects somewhere might draw a diagram and goes, “This is the truth of what we have built, or what we should be building and that there is no external representation of truth.” “Oh, look, the map is not the territory! We can go through this all day.”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nREIN: And the interesting thing for me is that this is something that there are Eastern philosophies that have figured out long before Western philosophy did. So while Descartes was doing his stuff, you had the Jainism principle of Anakandavada, which is the manifoldness of the universe. There's no one right truth; there are many interlocking and overlapping truths.
\n\nJAMEY: How does this relate to a GitHub [inaudible]? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: [overtalk] It means your diagramming is direct.
\n\nREIN: It certainly says something about distributed systems and in distributed systems, we call this the consensus problem.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAMIEN: I love the fact that Git was built to be this completely distributed, no single authority source control system and now we have GitHub.
\n\nMARLENA: Indeed.
\n\nREIN: I want to know how I, as someone who has terrible handwriting, can feel comfortable doing sketching.
\n\nMARLENA: Sure! I just did a whole meet up about that. It's not just you, I think that it's 75% of engineers and we emphasize typing. So what I tell people about handwriting, the very, very basics, is slow down. Not what you want to hear, I know, but it makes a huge difference.
\n\nSo this past winter, my pandemic new skill that I learned is calligraphy, and in calligraphy, they tell you over and over and over to slow down. So that's tip number one is to slow down and then number two is try writing larger. Whatever it is you're writing, play with the size of it. Larger and slower generally gives you a way to look at what you're writing and which pieces like, there are probably some letters that you dislike more than others when you are writing and you can take those letters that you really dislike. Maybe it's just a matter of reviewing like, how are you forming the letter? If it's all of them, it'll take you longer, but. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: When I was a kid learning cursive for the first time, I really hated to do the capital H in cursive. I think it's like an ugly letter and I think it's hard to write and it was hard to learn. My last name starts with H so I had to do it a lot. I just designed a new capital H and that's what I've been using in cursive since I was like a little kid [laughs] and nobody notices because nobody goes like, “That's not how I learned cursive in class,” if they can read it.
\n\nThat's how I feel that language, too and we're talking about the way language evolves. People will be like, “That's not a real word,” and I'm like, “Well, if you understood what I meant, then it's a word.”
\n\nDAMIEN: Perfectly fine with it.
\n\nJAMEY: And that's kind of how I was just thinking about handwriting too like, what is there right, or wrong if you can read what I'm expressing to you? [chuckles]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. If you look at the lowercase g in various glyph sets, you have to actually pay attention and go, “This lowercase g is not the same symbol as this lowercase g.” [laughs] You have to totally call your attention to that. They are vastly, vastly, different things.
\n\nMARLENA: The letters that look the same, though are capital T, I, and F.
\n\nDAMIEN: You don't put crossbars on your eye?
\n\nMARLENA: Well, I'm thinking in terms of like, for calligraphy, when I got into the intermediate class, I had to come up with my own alphabet, typography, design my own alphabet. Those letters were so similar, they just gave me fits trying to make them all different.
\n\nBut I think it's important for people to practice their handwriting. I know that we all just scribble on the pad for charging, or whatever. You just scribble with your fingernail and it doesn't look like anything. But keeping that connection to your handwriting is also an important way of valuing yourself and this space that you take up in the world. I think it's really good if you can get to a place where you can accept your own handwriting and feel comfortable with it.
\n\nSince I am into stuff like calligraphy and lettering, it's definitely part of my identity, the way that I write things out by hand. It's physically connected to you, to your brain, and so, things like that, we want to say everything is typing in tech, but there is a value for your confidence, for your brain, and for how you process information to be able to write something by hand and feel confident enough to share that with somebody else.
\n\nJAMEY: That was really beautiful, actually. But I was going to ask, how do you think your handwriting relates to your voice? Because when you were saying that about feeling comfortable with your handwriting and how it's like a self-confidence thing, it made me think of the way that people also feel and interact with their voice. Like, you always hear people, “Oh, I hate listening to a recording of myself. I hate listening to my voice.”
\n\nMARLENA: Well, there's that whole field of handwriting analysis, just like there's that whole field of body language and that includes what someone's voice sounds like. It is attached to your personality and how you're thinking and how you're working with ideas.
\n\n[laughs] So it's not like I'm judging someone when I look at their—sometimes I am, I'm lying. Sometimes I am judging people when I look at their handwriting. I mostly don't. Honestly, I think we've lost so much education about handwriting in schools, what I dislike about that is, we were talking about the power of print earlier. Well, if you feel uncomfortable writing your name, if you feel uncomfortable writing down what you believe and sharing it, that's the type of censorship, isn't it? So I think handwriting is important for that type of thing, but I think it is connected to your personality.
\n\nJAMEY: It says something about you and when you put something out into the world that says something about you in that way, it's kind of a vulnerable experience.
\n\nMARLENA: It is, and you're showing people how you value yourself. I think that's partly why a lot of times in tech, we've minimized the role of handwriting so much that nobody feels comfortable sharing their handwriting. Well, it's not nobody, that's a big generalization, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable sharing their handwriting and that is a loss. That is a loss for everyone.
\n\nDAMIEN: I love what you said, in part because I didn't want to hear it, when Rein asked, “How do you improve your handwriting?” You said, “Write slower and write bigger,” and I knew right away that that was correct because that's the only thing that has worked when I was trying to improve my handwriting. But I gave up on that because I didn't want to; I don't want to write slower and bigger because of what you said—taking up space.
\n\nIf you look at my handwriting historically, it's been not taken up – very little space, very little time. I don't want anybody to have to wait for me to finish writing. I don't want to use this whole page. I don't want to think my writing is so, so important that it's all big on the page, but allowing myself to take up space and time is how I get to better handwriting. So that was just such a beautiful way of putting it.
\n\nMARLENA: Well, I read this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and it's a wonderful book where the book blows me away and it's hard to talk about it because she has packed so much into it. But it's thinking about how we make ourselves go so fast and it's about the attention economy. How we are trying to speed ourselves up so much and I think that handwriting is part of this. If we are going to take back our own lives, that includes being able to slow down enough to write your name in a way that feels good to you and share it.
\n\nI like what you wrote in the chat, Damien, but I'd like to hear you say it.
\n\nDAMIEN: I wrote it in the chat so I wouldn't say it. [laughs] “Decolonize your mind.” It was a message to myself, decolonize your mind. The idea that you don't get to do nothing, you don't get to take up space and time. Yeah, and so that's just, it's all these things are so tightly connected.
\n\nMARLENA: So I think y'all are ready for me to tell you the story of how I came up with a first Let’s Sketch Tech conference and this conference happened maybe 2017, 2018. I always forget the exact year, but it was post Trump getting elected.
\n\nNow the Women's March, right after Trump got elected and sworn into office, was a major point in time and wake up call for me. I've always tried to learn about politics, intersectionalism, and things like that, but this March showed me the power of making something with your own hands and showing that and sharing it to someone else. I wanted everyone to feel like, even in this era of Trump, we still have the power to make something meaningful and share that with our own hands.
\n\nSo that was when I decided to start emphasizing more and learning more about the connection between art and tech. I'd been doing sketch notes and it sort of struck me that there was not much of a community out there that handled this topic, which I thought was just kind of strange.
\n\nWhen I looked at sketchnoting itself, it seemed like more was happening in the world of design. Well, what about engineers? I've had to draw out things so many times to learn them, to teach somebody else, to understand what's happening and so, that's when I put together this Let’s Sketch Tech conference. I wanted people to be able to retain the power to make something with their own hands, because that can never be taken away from you, whether you have internet connection, or not. But even if you do have the internet connection, combining these together is just so powerful.
\n\nSo that is why I started this conference and this community and it's pretty deep. I don't bring it up all the time because it's kind of a lot, but yeah, and we had a great time.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing that story and everything else you've shared with us.
\n\nHow do we feel about going into reflections? I think I'm going to be reflecting on in the broad sense, it's what I didn't want to say earlier until Marlena called me out, decolonize your mind. But in a smaller sense, it's how much of my view of the tech industry, my work in there, and the environment there should be formal, structured, strict, authoritarian.
\n\nI had all these ideas that are still, unbeknownst to me, having a huge influence about how we can work. The idea of a zine fest at work seems so outrageous to me because it doesn't fit into those ideas and so, I'll be reflecting on well, where else am I seeing this stuff and how has it prevented me from doing something so very effective? [laughs]
\n\nI said, zine fest. I used to think I was too young to mispronounce zine, but whatever. [laughs]
\n\nWho’s next?
\n\nJAMEY: I can go next. So my two favorite things, I think that got said, one of them was also about like the zine fair at work. I host zine fairs in my hometown and the idea of like, well, if you both draw something and then you trade, you're having a zine fair. I absolutely love that. And then my other favorite thing was about the talk closer to the end about valuing yourself and the way and taking up space and all of those things.
\n\nI feel actually like I want to mush those two things together because talking about valuing yourself, like really resonated with me the way that I do zines in my regular life, not in tech. But I think that inside of tech is a place where there are people that I really want to see value themselves more. It's a system that has a tendency to shut people down and keep talented people and I want to imbue that kind of confidence into a lot of engineers, especially newer engineers.
\n\nSo I think that I really like this idea of a zine fest at work, and maybe that can, in addition to helping teach us about our systems and stuff, help us encourage each other to take that time to value ourselves.
\n\nREIN: I think what struck me about this conversation the most is that creativity is good for people, personally, individuals to explore our creativity. But when we share it with other people, that's a way that we can become closer.
\n\nI think that for the work to happen—because to some extent, I tried to apply these ideas at work—people have to build and maintain common ground with each other. I think that encouraging people to be creative and to share that creativity—you typically wouldn't ask a junior engineer to draw an architecture diagram, but I think you should.
\n\nMARLENA: I hope that after listening to this, people definitely ask their newer folks on their team to draw a diagram, then we’ll share and trade with them.
\n\nI think what I've learned from this conversation is, well, I think that it validated, more than anything, the ideas that I'm trying to spread about connecting arts and technology. It was wonderful to hear each of you talking about the struggles and challenges that you have at work in bringing this together because it is a different way of thinking. But I feel so positive whenever I talk about this and seeing people be able to recognize themselves and seeing some doors and windows open about how they can incorporate the arts a little bit more into their tech lives is the reason why I do this and it's been such a privilege to share this with all of you and your listeners. So thanks for having me.
\n\nDAMIEN: It's been a privilege to have you. The idea that we can start out with like, “Let's draw pictures as engineers,” and ended up with, “Oh my God, how do I become fully human?” [laughs] It's really amazing.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah, this was really great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this.
\n\nMARLENA: It was a lot of fun.
\n\nDAMIEN: Marlena, why don't you give your Patreon and your podcast?
\n\nMARLENA: Sure. Well, I started the Patreon because it was an easier way for folks to sign up for the meetups that happened in Let's Sketch Tech. We do a monthly meetup and I'm starting to plan the conference for this year. There's a free newsletter, but if this podcast is giving you life, if you're getting oxygen from this conversation, I highly suggest checking out the Let’s Sketch Tech Patreon, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to my podcast, Make it a Pear! I talk a lot about creative process in tech.
\n\nDAMIEN: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us.
Special Guest: Marlena Compton.
","summary":"Organizer of conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena Compton joins the show to talk about the intersection of art and technology. She stresses “The Power of Print”, and talks about the beauty of zines, sketchnoting, and handwriting.","date_published":"2021-05-26T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/55e2ff2e-3af1-46b5-a0a1-58ecfaa9246c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44510058,"duration_in_seconds":4121}]},{"id":"32c1f0af-0266-4951-9e4c-271ef70cf287","title":"235: RailsConf Scholars: 2021 Remote Edition","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/railsconf-scholars-2021-remote-edition","content_text":"The RailsConf Scholarship Program\n\n03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night!\n\n04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners\n\n04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing\n\n05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt\n\n\nAsking Questions and Being Vulnerable\nCall-Out Bad Behavior\n\n\n12:34 - Team Psychological Safety\n\n17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys\n\n\nAda Developers Academy\nThe Turing School\n\n\n27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others\n\n\nThe Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. \n\nLeah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought?\n\nMando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect.\n\nSteffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️\n\nTram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out.\n\nLending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons \n\nTranscript:\n\nJOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla.\n\nMANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah?\n\nLEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. \n\nIn my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla.\n\nMANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please?\n\nTRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. \n\nOutside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. \n\nAnd then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. \n\nSTEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. \n\nAnd besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here.\n\nJOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. \n\nSo this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. \n\nOne of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. \n\nWe always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first?\n\nTRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest.\n\nLEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. \n\nI think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles]\n\nSTEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles]\n\nJOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. \n\nWell, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. \n\nIt's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] \n\nSo it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.”\n\nMANDO: Yeah.\n\nJOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well.\n\nMANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.”\n\nTRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah.\n\nLEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. \n\nWe were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? \n\nSo it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. \n\nBut my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place.\n\nJOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team?\n\nMANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline.\n\nI think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. \n\nLEAH: I love that.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome.\n\nJOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team?\n\nLEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. \n\nWe have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of.\n\nMANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing.\n\nLEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk]\n\nMANDO: Of course, yeah.\n\nLEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles]\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. \n\nSo I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles]\n\nJOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right?\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well.\n\nMANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. \n\nThat's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.”\n\nTRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. \n\nBut since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. \n\nOne thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. \n\nBut what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people.\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. \n\nI think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program.\n\nLeah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree?\n\nLEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. \n\nI ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. \n\nI found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. \n\nSo I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs]\n\nMANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. \n\n[chuckles]\n\nSo you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs.\n\nLEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. \n\nLEAH: Totally.\n\nMANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears.\n\nLEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. \n\nTRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. \n\nSo it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. \n\nLEAH: Totally.\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? \n\nIt takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind.\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. \n\nBut if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. \n\nI keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. \n\nThat's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?”\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. \n\nThere is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that?\n\nMANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated.\n\nJOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. \n\nFirst Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. \n\nI think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head.\n\nLEAH: Well, thanks, John. \n\nYeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger.\n\nMANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. \n\n[laughter]\n\nLEAH: Sorry.\n\nMANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay.\n\nIt's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” \n\nI need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie.\n\nSTEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. \n\nI think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community.\n\nTRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. \n\nSo I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up.\n\nAlso, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it.\n\nJOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. \n\nOne of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. \n\nI'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. \n\nAll right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. \n\nLEAH: Thank you.\n\nMANDO: It was fantastic.\n\nSTEPHANIE: Thank you!\n\nTRAM: Thanks, ya’ll.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.","content_html":"The RailsConf Scholarship Program
\n\n03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night!
\n\n04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners
\n\n04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing
\n\n05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt
\n\n12:34 - Team Psychological Safety
\n\n17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys
\n\n\n\n27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Finding new ways to be of service to other people.
\n\nLeah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought?
\n\nMando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect.
\n\nSteffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️
\n\nTram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out.
\n\nLending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla.
\n\nMANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah?
\n\nLEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter.
\n\nIn my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla.
\n\nMANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please?
\n\nTRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud.
\n\nOutside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits.
\n\nAnd then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you.
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects.
\n\nAnd besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here.
\n\nJOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone.
\n\nSo this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online.
\n\nOne of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference.
\n\nWe always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first?
\n\nTRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest.
\n\nLEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated.
\n\nI think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles]
\n\nSTEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you.
\n\nWell, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying.
\n\nIt's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs]
\n\nSo it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.”
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nJOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well.
\n\nMANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.”
\n\nTRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah.
\n\nLEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through.
\n\nWe were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than?
\n\nSo it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever.
\n\nBut my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place.
\n\nJOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team?
\n\nMANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline.
\n\nI think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that.
\n\nLEAH: I love that.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome.
\n\nJOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team?
\n\nLEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team.
\n\nWe have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing.
\n\nLEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk]
\n\nMANDO: Of course, yeah.
\n\nLEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles]
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication.
\n\nSo I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right?
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well.
\n\nMANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing.
\n\nThat's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.”
\n\nTRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.
\n\nBut since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college.
\n\nOne thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education.
\n\nBut what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class.
\n\nI think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program.
\n\nLeah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree?
\n\nLEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine.
\n\nI ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things.
\n\nI found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver.
\n\nSo I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs]
\n\nMANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nSo you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs.
\n\nLEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch.
\n\nLEAH: Totally.
\n\nMANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears.
\n\nLEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing.
\n\nTRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there.
\n\nSo it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey.
\n\nLEAH: Totally.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else?
\n\nIt takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind.
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing.
\n\nBut if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger.
\n\nI keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be.
\n\nThat's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?”
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete.
\n\nThere is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that?
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated.
\n\nJOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things.
\n\nFirst Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that.
\n\nI think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head.
\n\nLEAH: Well, thanks, John.
\n\nYeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLEAH: Sorry.
\n\nMANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay.
\n\nIt's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.”
\n\nI need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie.
\n\nSTEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it.
\n\nI think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community.
\n\nTRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are.
\n\nSo I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up.
\n\nAlso, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it.
\n\nJOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege.
\n\nOne of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good.
\n\nI'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept.
\n\nAll right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone.
\n\nLEAH: Thank you.
\n\nMANDO: It was fantastic.
\n\nSTEPHANIE: Thank you!
\n\nTRAM: Thanks, ya’ll.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.
","summary":"Special guests, Stefanni Brasil, Leah Miller, and Tram Bui talk about the RailsConf Scholars Program. The Opportunity Scholarship is a chance to jump in to learn more about Ruby on Rails specifically and software development in general.","date_published":"2021-05-19T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/32c1f0af-0266-4951-9e4c-271ef70cf287.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":27438781,"duration_in_seconds":2538}]},{"id":"270674e6-63e7-455f-a662-70f7cf223e5e","title":"234: Civil Society and Community Relationships with Michael Garfield","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/civil-society-and-community-relationships","content_text":"02:13 - Michael’s Superpower: Being Able to Creatively Digest and Reconstruct Categories\n\n\nIntegral Theory\nCreative Deconstruction – Michael Schwartz\nCreating Truly Novel Categories – Recognizing Novelty as Novelty\n\n\n09:39 - Recognizing Economic Value of Talents & Abilities\n\n\nInvisible Labor\nEcosystem Services\nBiodiversity; The Diversity Bonus by Scott Page\n\n\n18:49 - The Edge of Chaos; Chaos Theory\n\n\n“Life exists at the edge of chaos.”\n\n\n23:23 - Reproducibility Crisis and Context-Dependent Insight\n\n28:49 - What constitutes a scientific experiment?\n\n\nMissed Externalities\nScholarly articles for Michelle Girvan \"reservoir computing\"\nNon-conformity\n\n\n38:03 - The Return of Civil Society and Community Relationships; Scale Theory\n\n\nLegitimation Crisis by Juergen Habermas\nScale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West\n\n\n49:28 - Fractal Geometry\n\nMore amazing resources from Michael to check out:\n\n\nMichael Garfield: Improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation \nMichael Garfield: We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks By Realizing We Are Networks \n\n\nReflections:\n\nJacob: Some of the best ideas, tv shows, music, etc. are the kinds of things that there’s not going to be an established container.\n\nRein: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” ~ Heinz von Foerster\n\nJessica: Externality. Recognize that there’s going to be surprises and find them.\n\nMichael: Adaptability is efficiency aggregated over a longer timescale.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 234 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, Rein Henrichs.\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m here with my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr.\n\nJESSICA: Thanks, Rein and today, I’m excited to introduce our guest, Michael Garfield.\n\nHe’s an artist and philosopher and he helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to thrive. He hosts and produces two podcasts, The Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast. Yay, complexity!\n\nMichael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers—a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary “mind-jazz” performances in the form of essay, avant-guitar music, and painting! You can find him on Bandcamp, it’s pretty cool. \n\nRefusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice.\n\nMichael, welcome to Greater Than Code!\n\nMICHAEL: Thanks! I’m glad to be here and I hope that I provide a refreshingly different guest experience for listeners being not a coder in any kind of traditional sense.\n\nJESSICA: Yet you’re definitely involved in technology.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and I think the epistemic framing of programming and algorithms is something that can be applied with no understanding of programming languages as they are currently widely understood. It’s just like design is coding, design of the built environment, so.\n\nJESSICA: And coding is a design.\n\nMICHAEL: Indeed.\n\nJESSICA: Okay, before we go anywhere else, I did not prepare you for this, but we have one question that we ask all of our guests. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nMICHAEL: I would like believe that I have a superpower in being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories so as to drive new associations between them for people and I feel like I developed that studying integral theory in grad school. \n\nI did some work under Sean Esbjörn-Hargens at John F. Kennedy University looking at the work of and work adjacent to Ken Wilber, who was trying to come up with a metatheoretical framework to integrate all different domains of human knowledge. All different types of inquiry into a single framework that doesn't attempt to reduce any one of them to any other and then in that process, I learned what one of my professors, Michael Schwartz, called creative deconstruction. So showing how art can be science and science can be art and that these aren't ontologically fixed categories that exist external to us. Looking at the relationship between science as a practice and spiritual inquiry as a practice and that kind of thing. So it's an irreverent attitude toward the categories that we've constructed that takes in a way a cynical and pragmatic approach to the way that we define things in our world. You know.\n\nREIN: Kant was wrong. [laughs]\n\nMICHAEL: It's good to get out of the rut. Obviously, you’ve got to be careful because all of these ideas have histories and so you have to decide whether it's worth trying to redefine something for people in order to open up new possibilities in the way that these ideas can be understood and manipulated. It's not, for example, an easy task to try and get people to change their idea about what religion is. [laughs]\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. More than redefined. It's almost like undefined.\n\nMICHAEL: Hm. Like Paul Tillich, for example. Theologian Paul Tillich said that religion is ultimate concern. So someone can have a religion of money, or a religion of sex, but if you get into these, if you try to interpose that in a debate on intelligent design versus evolutionary theory, you'll get attacked by both sides. \n\nJESSICA: [chuckles] That’s cosmology. \n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Which is hard to [inaudible] of money, or sex.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, but people do it anyhow.\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. So deconstructing categories and seeing in-between things that fits through your walking through walls, what categories are you deconstructing and seeing between lately?\n\nMICHAEL: Well, I don't know, lately I've been paying more attention to the not so much tilting after the windmills of this metamorphic attitude towards categories, but looking at the way that when the opportunity comes to create a truly novel category, what are the forces in play that prevent that, that prevent recognizing novelty as novelty that I just –\n\nJESSICA: Do you have any examples?\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, well, I just saw a really excellent talk by UC Berkeley Professor Doug Guilbeault, I think is how you say his name. I am happy to link his work to you all in the chat here so that you can share it. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah, we’ll link that in the show notes.\n\nMICHAEL: He studies category formation and he was explaining how most of the research that's been done on convergent categorization is done on established categories. But what happens when you discover something truly new? What his research shows is that basically the larger the population, the more likely it is that these categories will converge on something that's an existing category and he compared it to island versus mainland population biogeography. \n\nSo there's a known dynamic in evolutionary science where genetic drift, which is just this random component of the change in allele frequencies in a population, the larger the population, the less likely it is that a genetic mutation that is otherwise neutral is going to actually percolate out into the population. On an island, you might get these otherwise neutral mutations that actually take root and saturate an entire community, but on the mainland, they get lost in the noise. \n\nYou can look at this in terms of how easy it is for an innovative, artistic, or musical act to actually find any purchase. Like Spotify bought the data analysis company, The Echo Nest, back in 2015 and they ran this study on where emergent musical talent comes from. It comes from places like Australia, the UK, and Iceland, because the networks are small enough. This is a finding that's repeated endlessly through studies of how to create a viral meme that basically, or another way –\n\nJESSICA: You mean a small enough pool to take hold?\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. That basically big science and large social networks online and these other attempts, anywhere we look at this economies of scale, growing a given system, what happens is—and we were talking about this a little before we got on the call—as a system scales, it becomes less innovative. There's less energy is allocated to –\n\nJESSICA: In America?\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Bureaucratic overhead, latencies in the network that prevent the large networks from adapting, with the same agility to novel challenges. There's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about this, but it basically amounts to, if you want to, you can't do it from the conservative core of an organization. You can't do it from the board of directors. \n\nJESSICA: Oh.\n\nMICHAEL: You have to go out onto – like why did they call it fringe physics? It's like, it is because it's on the fringe and so there's a kind of –\n\nJESSICA: So this would be like if you have like one remarkably lowercase agile team inside your enterprise, one team is innovating and development practices. They're going to get mushed out. Whereas, if you have one team innovating like that in a small company, it might spread and it might become dominant. \n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. I think it's certainly the case that this speaks to something I've been wondering about it in a broader sense, which is how do we recognize the economic value of talents and abilities that are like, how do we recognize a singular individual for their incompressible knowledge and expertise when they don't go through established systems of accreditation like getting a PhD? Because the academic system is such that basically, if you have an innovative contribution, but you don't have the credentials that are required to participate in the community of peer review, then people can't even – your contribution is just invisible. The same is true for how long it took, if you look at economic models, it took so long for economic models to even begin to start addressing the invisible labor of women in at home like domestic labor, or what we're now calling ecosystem services. \n\nSo there's this question of – I should add that I'm ambivalent about this question because I'm afraid that answering it in an effective way, how do we make all of these things economically visible would just accelerate the rate at which the capitalist machine is capable of co-opting and exploiting all of these. [chuckles]\n\nREIN: Yeah. You also have this Scott Seeing Like a State thing where in order to be able to even perceive that that stuff is going on, it has to become standardized and you can't dissect the bird to observe its song, right?\n\nMICHAEL: Totally. So obviously, it took almost no time at all for consumer culture to commodify the psychedelic experience and start using to co-opt this psychedelic aesthetic and start using it in advertising campaigns for Levi's Jeans and Campbell Soup and that kind of thing. So it’s this question of a moving frontier that as soon as you have the language to talk about it, it's not the ineffable anymore.\n\nREIN: Yeah.\n\nMICHAEL: There's a value to the ineffable and there's a value to – it's related to this question of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by large pharmaceutical companies like, their ethnobotanical knowledge. How do you make the potential value of biodiversity, something that can be manufactured into medicine at scale, without destroying the rainforest and the people who live in it? \n\nEverywhere I look, I see this question. So for me, lately, it's been less about how do we creatively deconstruct the categories we have so much as it is, what is the utility of not knowing how to categorize something at all and then how do we fix the skewed incentive structures in society so as to value that which we currently do not know how to value.\n\nJESSICA: Because you don’t have a category for it.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Like right now, maybe one of the best examples, even though this is the worst example in another way, is that a large fraction of the human genome has been patented by Monsanto, even though it has no known current biomedical utility. This is what Lewis Hyde in his book, Common as Air, called “the third enclosure” of the common. \n\nSo you have the enclosure of the land that everyone used to be able to hunt on and then you have the enclosure of intellectual property in terms of patents for known utilities, known applications, and then over the last few decades, you're starting to see large companies buy their way into and defend patents for the things that actually don't – it's speculative. They're just gambling on the idea that eventually we'll have some use for this and that it's worth lawyering up to defend that potential future use. But it's akin to recognizing that we need to fund translational work. We need to fund synthesis. We need to fund blue sky interdisciplinary research for which we don't have an expected return on investment here because there's –\n\nJESSICA: It's one of those things that it’s going to help; you're going to get tremendous benefits out of it, but you can't say which ones.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. It's a shift perhaps akin to the move that I'm seeing conservation biology make right now from “let's preserve this charismatic species” to “let's do everything we can to restore biodiversity” rather than that biodiversity itself is generative and should be valued in its own regard so diverse research teams, diverse workplace teams. We know that there is what University of Michigan Professor Scott Page calls the diversity bonus and you don't need to know and in fact, you cannot know what the bonus is upfront. \n\nJESSICA: Yeah. You can't draw the line of causality forward to the benefit because the point of diversity is that you get benefits you never thought of.\n\nMICHAEL: Exactly. Again, this gets into this question of as a science communications staffer in a position where I'm constantly in this weird dissonant enters zone between the elite researchers at the Santa Fe Institute where I work and the community of complex systems enthusiasts that have grown up around this organization. It's a complete mismatch in scale between this org that has basically insulated itself so as to preserve the island of innovation that is required for really groundbreaking research, but then also, they have this reputation that far outstrips their ability to actually respond to people that are one step further out on the fringe from them. \n\nSo I find myself asking, historically SFI was founded by Los Alamos National Laboratory physicists mostly that were disenchanted with the idea that they were going to have to research science, that their science was limited to that which could be basically argued as a national defense initiative and they just wanted to think about the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. So what is to SFI as SFI as to Los Alamos? \n\nEven in really radical organizations, there's a point at which they've matured and there are questions that are beyond the horizon of that which a particular community is willing to indulge. I find, in general, I'm really fascinated by questions about the nonlinearity of time, or about weird ontology. I'm currently talking to about a dozen other academics and para-academics about how to try and – I'm working, or helping to organize a working group of people that can apply rigorous academic approaches to asking questions that are completely taboo inside of academia. \n\nQuestions that challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions of maternity, such as there being a distinction between self and other, or the idea that there are things that are fundamentally inaccessible to quantitative research. These kinds of things like, how do we make space for that kind of inquiry when there's absolutely no way to argue it in terms of you should fund this? And that's not just for money, that's also for attention because the demands on the time and attention of academics are so intense that even if they have interest in this stuff, they don't have the freedom to pursue it in their careers. That's just one of many areas where I find that this kind of line of inquiry manifesting right now.\n\nREIN: Reminds me a lot of this model of the edge of chaos that came from Packard and Langton back in the late 70s. Came out of chaos theory, this idea that there's this liminal transitionary zone between stability and chaos and that this is the boiling zone where self-organization happens and innovation happens. But also, that this zone is itself not static; it gets pushed around by other forces.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and that's where life is and that was Langton's point, that life exists at the edge of chaos that it's right there at the phase transition boundary between what is it that separates a stone from a raging bonfire, or there’s the Goldilocks Zone kind of question. Yeah, totally.\n\nREIN: And these places that were at the edge of chaos that were innovative can ossify, they can move into the zone of stability. It's not so much that they move it's that, I don't know, maybe it's both. Where the frontier is, is constantly in motion.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and to that point again, I tend to think about these things in a topographical, or geographical sense, where the island is growing, we're sitting on a volcano, and there's lots you can do with that metaphor. Obviously, it doesn't make sense. You can't build your house inside the volcano, right? [laughs] But you want to be close enough to be able to watch and describe as new land erupts, but at a safe distance. Where is that sweet spot where you have rigor and you have support, but you're not trapped within a bureaucracy, or an ossified set of institutional conventions? \n\nJESSICA: Or if the island is going up, if the earth is moving the island up until the coastline keeps expanding outward, and you built your house right on the beach. As in you’ve got into React when it was the new hotness and you learned all about it and you became the expert and then you had this great house on the beach, and now you have a great house in the middle of town because the frontier, the hotness has moved on as our massive technology has increased and the island raises up. I mean, you can't both identify as being on the edge and identify with any single category of knowledge.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. It's tricky. I saw Nora Bateson talking about this on Twitter recently. She's someone who I love for her subversiveness. Her father, Gregory Bateson, was a major player in the articulation of cybernetics and she's awesome in that sense of, I don't know, the minister's daughter kind of a way of being extremely well-versed in complex systems thinking and yet also aware that there's a subtle reductionism that comes in that misses –\n\nJESSICA: Misses from?\n\nMICHAEL: Well, that comes at like we think about systems thinking as it's not reductionist because it's not trying to explain biology in terms of the interactions of atoms. It acknowledges that there's genuine emergence that happens at each of these levels and yet, to articulate that, one of the things that happens is everything has to be squashed into numbers and so it’s like this issue of how do you quantify something. \n\nJESSICA: It's not real, if you can't measure it in numbers.\n\nMICHAEL: Right and that belies this bias towards thinking that because you can't quantify something now means it can't be quantified.\n\nJESSICA: You can’t predict which way the flame is going to go in the fire. That doesn't mean the fire doesn't burn. [chuckles]\n\nMICHAEL: Right. So she's interesting because she talks about warm data as this terrain, or this experience where we don't know how to talk about it yet, but that's actually what makes it so juicy and meaningful and instructive and –\n\nJESSICA: As opposed to taking it out of context. Leave it in context, even though we don't know how to do some magical analysis on it there.\n\nMICHAEL: Right, and I think this starts to generate some meaningful insights into the problem of the reproducibility crisis. Just as an example, I think science is generally moving towards context dependent insight and away from – even at the Santa Fe Institute, nobody's looking for a single unifying theory of everything anymore. It's far more illuminating, useful, and rigorous to look at how different models are practical given different applications. \n\nI remember in college there's half a dozen major different ways to define a biological species and I was supposed to get up in front of a class and argue for one over the other five. I was like, “This is preposterous.” \n\nConcretely, pun kind of intended, Biosphere 2, which was this project that I know the folks here at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe at the Institute of Ecotechnics, who were responsible for creating this unbelievable historic effort to miniaturize the entire biosphere inside of a building. They had a coral reef and a rainforest and a Savannah and a cloud desert, like the Atacama, and there was one other, I forget. \n\nBut it was intended as a kind of open-ended ecological experiment that was supposed to iterate a 100 times, or 50 times over a 100 years. They didn't know what they were looking for; they just wanted to gather data and then continue these 2-year enclosures where a team of people were living inside this building and trying to reproduce the entire earth biosphere in miniature. \n\nSo that first enclosure is remembered historically as a failure because they miscalculated the rate at which they would be producing carbon dioxide and they ended up having to open the building and let in fresh air and import resource.\n\nJESSICA: So they learned something?\n\nMICHAEL: Right, they learned something. But that project was funded by Ed Bass, who in 1994, I think called in hostile corporate takeover expert, Steve Bannon to force to go in there with a federal team and basically issue a restraining order on these people and forcibly evict them from the experiment that they had created. Because it was seen as an embarrassment, because they had been spun in this way in international media as being uncredentialed artists, rather than scientists who really should not have the keys to this thing. \n\nIt was one of these instances where people regard this as a scientific failure and yet when you look at the way so much of science is being practiced now, be it in the domains of complex systems, or in machine learning, what they were doing was easily like 20 or 30 years ahead of its time. \n\nJESSICA: Well, no wonder they didn’t appreciate it.\n\nMICHAEL: [chuckles] Exactly. So it's like, they went in not knowing what they were going to get out of it, but there was this tragic mismatch between the logic of Ed Bass’ billionaire family about what it means to have a return on an investment and the logic of ecological engineering where you're just poking at a system to see what will happen and you don't even know where to set the controls yet. So anyway.\n\nJESSICA: And it got too big. You talked about the media, it got too widely disseminated and became embarrassed because it wasn't on an island. It wasn't in a place where the genetic drift can become normal.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. It was suddenly subject to the constraints imposed upon it in terms of the way that people were being taught science in public school in the 1980s that this is what the scientific method is. You start with a hypothesis and it's like what if your –\n\nJESSICA: Which are not standards that are relevant to that situation.\n\nMICHAEL: Exactly. And honestly, the same thing applies to other computational forms of science. It took a long time for the techniques pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute to be regarded as legitimate. I'm thinking of cellular automata, agent-based modeling, and computer simulation generally. \n\nSteven Wolfram did a huge service, in some sense, to the normalization of those things in publishing A New Kind of Science, that massive book in whatever it was, 2004, or something where he said, “Look, we can run algorithmic experiments,” and that's different from the science that you're familiar with, but it's also setting aside for a moment, the attribution failure that that book is and acknowledging who actually pioneered A New Kind of Science. [chuckles]\n\nJESSICA: At least it got some information out.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. At least it managed to shift the goalpost in terms of what the expectations are; what constitutes a scientific experiment in the first place. \n\nJESSICA: So it shifted categories.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So I think about, for example, a research that was done on plant growth in a basement. I forget who it was that did this. I think I heard this from, it was either Doug Rushkoff, or Charles Eisenstein that was talking about this, where you got two completely different results and they couldn't figure out what was going on. And then they realized that it was at different moments in the lunar cycle and that it didn't matter if you put your plant experiment in a basement and lit everything with artificial bulbs and all this stuff. Rather than sunlight, rather than clean air, if you could control for everything, but that there's always a context outside of your context. \n\nSo this notion that no matter how cleverly you try to frame your model, that when it comes time to actually experiment on these things in the real world, that there's always going to be some extra analogy you've missed and that this has real serious and grave implications in terms of our economic models, because there will always be someone that's falling through the cracks. \n\nHow do we actually account for all of the stakeholders in conversations about the ecological cost of dropping a new factory over here, for example? It's only recently that people, anywhere in the modern world, are starting to think about granting ecosystems legal protections as entities befitting of personhood and this kind of thing. \n\nJESSICA: Haven’t we copyrighted those yet? \n\nMICHAEL: [laughs] So all of that, there's plenty of places to go from there, I'm sure.\n\nREIN: Well, this does remind me of one of the things that Stafford Beer tried was he said, “Ponds are viable systems, they’re ecologies, they're adaptive, they're self-sustaining. Instead of trying to model how a pond works, what if we just hook the inputs of the business process into the pond and then hook the adaptions made by the pond as the output back into the business process and use the pond as the controlling system without trying to understand what makes a pond good at adapting?” That is so outside of the box and it blows my mind that he was doing this, well, I guess it was the 60s, or whatever, but this goes well beyond black boxing, right?\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So there's kind of a related insight that I saw Michelle Girvan gave at Santa Fe Institute community lecture a few years ago on reservoir computing, which maybe most of your audience is familiar with, but just for the sake of it, this is joining a machine learning system to a source of analog chaos, basically. So putting a computer on a bucket of water and then just kicking the bucket, every once in a while, to generate waves so that you're feeding chaos into the output of the machine learning algorithm to prevent overfitting. Again, and again, and again, you see this value where this is apparently the evolutionary value of play and possibly also, of dreaming. \n\nThere's a lot of good research on both of these areas right now that learning systems are all basically hill climbing algorithms that need to be periodically disrupted from climbing the wrong local optimum. So in reservoir computing, by adding a source of natural chaos to their weather prediction algorithms, they were able to double the horizon at which they were able to forecast meteorological events past the mathematic limit that had been proven and established for this. That is like, we live in a noisy world.\n\nJESSICA: Oh, yeah. Just because it’s provably impossible doesn't mean we can't do something that's effectively the same thing, that's close enough.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Actually, in that example, I think that there's a strong argument for the value of that which we can't understand. [laughs] It's like it's actually important. So much has been written about the value of Slack, of dreaming, of taking a long walk, of daydreaming, letting your mind wander to scientific discovery. \n\nSo this is where great innovations come from is like, “I'm going to sleep on it,” or “I'm going to go on vacation.” Just getting stuck on an idea, getting fixated on a problem, we actually tend to foreclose on the possibility of answering that problem entirely. Actually, there's a good reason to – I think this is why Silicon Valley has recognized the instrumental value of microdosing, incidentally. [laughs] That this is that you actually want to inject a little noise into your algorithm and knock yourself off the false peak that you've stranded yourself on.\n\nJESSICA: Because if you aim for predictability and consistency, if you insist on reasonableness, you'll miss everything interesting.\n\nMICHAEL: Or another good way to put it is what is it, reasonable women don't make history. [laughs] There is actually a place for the –\n\nJESSICA: You don’t change the system by maximally conforming.\n\nMICHAEL: Right.\n\nJESSICA: If there is a place for…\n\nMICHAEL: It’s just, there is a place for non-conformity and it's a thing where it's like, I really hope and I have some optimism that what we'll see, by the time my daughter is old enough to join the workforce, is that we'll see a move in this direction where non-conformity has been integrated somehow into our understanding of how to run a business that we actively seek out people that are capable of doing this. \n\nFor the same reason that we saw over the 20th century, we saw a movement from one size fits all manufacturing to design your own Nike shoes. There's this much more bespoke approach. \n\nJESSICA: Oh, I love those.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like we know that if we can tailor our systems so that they can adapt across multiple different scales, that they're not exploiting economies of scale that ultimately slash the redundancy that allows an organization to adapt to risk. That if we can find a way to actually generate a kind of a fractal structure in the governance of organizations in the way that we have reflexes. The body already does this, you don't have to sit there and think about everything you do and if you did, you’d die right away.\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Yeah.\n\nREIN: Yeah.\n\nMICHAEL: If you had to pass every single twitch all the way up the chain to your frontal cortex \n\nJESSICA: If we had to put breathe on the list. [laughs]\n\nMICHAEL: Right. If you had to sit there and approve every single heartbeat, you'd be so dead. [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: Oh my gosh, yeah. That's an energy allocation and it all needs to go through you so that you can have control.\n\nREIN: I just wanted to mention, that reminded me of a thing that Klaus Krippendorff, who's a cybernetics guy, said that there is virtue in the act of delegating one's agency to trustworthy systems. We're talking, but I don't need to care about how the packets get from my machine to yours and I don't want to care about that, but there's a trade-off here where people find that when they surrender their agency, that this can be oppressive. So how do we find this trade-off?\n\nMICHAEL: So just to anchor it again in something that I find really helpful. Thinking about the way that convenience draws people into these compacts, with the market and with the state. You look over the last several hundred years, or thousand years in the West and you see more and more of what used to be taken for granted as the extent in terms of the functions that are performed by the extended family, or by the neighborhood, life in a city, by your church congregations, or whatever. All of that stuff has been out boarded to commercial interests and to federal level oversight, because it's just more efficient to do it that way at the timescales that matter, that are visible to those systems.\n\nYet, what COVID has shown us is that we actually need neighborhoods that suddenly, it doesn't – my wife and I, it was easy to make the decision to move across country to a place where we didn't know anybody to take a good job. But then suddenly when you're just alone in your house all the time and you've got nobody to help you raise your kids, that seems extremely dumb. \n\nSo there's that question of just as I feel like modern science is coming back around to acknowledging that a lot of what was captured in old wives’ tales and in traditional indigenous knowledge, ecological knowledge systems that were regarded by the enlightenment as just rumor, or…\n\nJESSICA: Superstition.\n\nMICHAEL: Superstition, that it turns out that these things actually had, that they had merit, they were evolved. \n\nJESSICA: There was [inaudible] enough.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Again, it wasn't rendered in the language that allowed it to be the subject of quantitative research until very recently and then, suddenly it was and suddenly, we had to circle back around. Science is basically in this position where they have to sort of canonize Galileo, they're like, “Ah, crap. We burned all these witches, but it turns out they were right.” \n\nThere's that piece of it. So I think relatedly, one of the things that we're seeing in economist samples and Wendy Carlin have written about this is the return of the civil society, the return of mutual aid networks, and of gift economies, and of the extended family, and of buildings that are built around in courtyards rather than this Jeffersonian everyone on their own plot of land approach. That we're starting to realize that we had completely emptied out the topsoil basically of all of these community relationships in order to standardize things for a mass big agricultural approach, that on the short scale actually does generate greater yield. \n\nIt's easier to have conversations with people who agree with you than it is – in a way, it's inexpedient to try and cross the aisle and have a conversation with someone with whom you deeply and profoundly disagree. But the more polarized we become as a civilization, the more unstable we become as a civilization. So over this larger timescale, we actually have to find ways to incentivize talking to people with whom you disagree, or we're screwed. We're kicking legs out from under the table. \n\nREIN: At this point, I have to name drop Habermas because he had this idea that there were two fundamental cognitive interests that humans have to direct their attempts to acquire knowledge. One is a technical interest in achieving goals through prediction and control and the other is a practical interest in ensuring mutual understanding. \n\nHis analysis was that advanced capitalist societies, the technical interest dominates at the expense of the practical interest and that knowledge produced by empirical, scientific, analytic sciences becomes the prototype of all knowledge. I think that's what you're talking about here that we've lost touch with this other form of knowledge. It's not seen as valuable and the scientific method, the analytical approaches have come to dominate.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, precisely. [laughs] Again, I think in general, we've become impoverished in our imagination because again, the expectations, there's a shifting baseline. So what people expect to pull out of the ocean now is a fish that you might catch off just a commercial, or a recreational fishing expedition. It's a quarter of the size of the same species of fish you might've caught 50, 70 years ago and when people pull up this thing and they're like, “Oh, look at –” and they feel proud of themselves.\n\nI feel like that's what's going on with us in terms of our we no longer even recognize, or didn't until very recently recognize that we had been unwittingly colluding in the erosion of some very essential levels of organization and human society and that we had basically sold our souls to market efficiency and efficient state level governance. \n\nNow it's a huge mess to try and understand. You look at Occupy Wall Street and stuff like that and it just seems like such an enormous pain in the ass to try and process things in that way. But it's because we're having to relearn how to govern neighborhoods and govern small communities and make business decisions at the scale of a bioregion rather than a nation.\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. It's a scale thing. I love the phrase topsoil of community relationships, because when you talk about the purposive knowledge that whatever you call it, Rein, that is goal seeking. It's like the one tall tree that is like, “I am the tallest tree,” and it keeps growing taller and taller and taller, and it doesn't see that it's falling over because there's no trees next to it to protect it from the wind. It's that weaving together between all the trees and the different knowledge and the different people, our soul is there. Our resilience is there.\n\nREIN: Michael, you keep talking about scale. Are you talking about scale theory?\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Scaling laws, like Geoffrey West's stuff, Luis Bettencourt is another researcher at the University of Chicago who does really excellent work in urban scaling. I just saw a talk from him this morning that was really quite interesting about there being a sweet spot where a city can exist between how thinly it's distributed infrastructurally over a given area versus how congested it is. Because population and infrastructure scale differently, they scale at different rates than you get –\n\nREIN: If I remember my West correctly, just because I suspect that not all of our listeners are familiar with scale theory, there's this idea that there are certain things that grow super linearly as things scale and certain things that grow sub linearly. So for example, the larger a city gets, you get a 15% more restaurants, but you also get 15% more flu, but you also get 15% less traffic.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So anything that depends on infrastructures scales sub linearly. A city of 2 million people has 185% the number of gas stations, but anything that scales anything having to do with the number of interactions between people scales super linearly. You get 115% of the – rather you get, what is it, 230%? Something like that. Anyway, it's 150%, it's 85% up versus 115% up. So patents, but also crime and also, just the general pace of life scale at 115% per capita. So like, disease transmission. \n\nSo you get into these weird cases—and this links back to what we were talking about earlier—where people move into the city, because it's per unit. In a given day, you have so much more choice, you have so much more opportunity than you would in your agrarian Chinese community and that's why Shenzhen is basically two generations old. 20 million people and none of them have grandparents living in Shenzhen because they're all attracted to this thing. But at scale, what that means is that everyone is converging on the same answer. Everyone's moving into Shenzhen and away from their farming community. \n\nSo you end up – in a way, it's not that that world is any more innovative. It's just, again, easier to capture that innovation and therefore, measure it. But then back to what we were saying about convergent categories and biogeography, it's like if somebody comes up with a brilliant idea in the farm, you're not necessarily going to see it. But if somebody comes up with the same brilliant idea in the city, you might also not see it for different reasons. So anyway, I'm in kind of a ramble, but.\n\nJESSICA: The optimal scale for innovation is not the individual and it's not 22 million, it's in between.\n\nMICHAEL: Well, I feel like at the level of a city, you're no longer talking about individuals almost in a way. At that point, you're talking about firms. A city is like a rainforest in which the fauna are companies. Whereas, a neighborhood as an ecosystem in which the fauna, or individual people and so, to equate one with the other is a potential point of confusion. \n\nMaybe an easier way to think about this would be multicellular life. My brain is capable of making all kinds of innovations that any cell, or organ in my body could not make on its own. There's a difference there. [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible]. \n\nMICHAEL: Right. It's easier, however, for a cell to mutate if it doesn't live inside of me. Because if it does, it's the cancer – [overtalk]\n\nJESSICA: The immune system will come attack it.\n\nMICHAEL: Right. My body will come and regulate that.\n\nJESSICA: Like, “You’re different, you are right out.”\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's not about innovation as some sort of whole category, again, it's about different kinds of innovation that are made that are emergent at different levels of organization. It's just the question of what kinds of innovation are made possible when you have something like the large Hadron Collider versus when you've got five people in a room around a pizza. You want to find the appropriate scale for the entity, for the system that's the actual level of granularity at which you're trying to look at the stuff, so.\n\nREIN: Can I try to put a few things together here in potentially a new way and see if it's anything? So we talked about the edge of chaos earlier and we're talking about scale theory now, and in both, there's this idea of fractal geometry. This idea that a coastline gets larger, the smaller your ruler is. \n\nIn scale theory, there's this idea of space filling that you have to fill the space with things like capillaries, or roads and so on. But in the human lung, for example, if you unfurled all of the surface area, you'd fill up like a football field, I think. So maybe there's this idea that there's complexity that's possible, that’s made possible by the fractal shape of this liminal region that the edge of chaos.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. It's certainly, I think as basically what it is in maximizing surface area, like you do within a lung, then you're maximizing exposure. So if the scientific community were operating on the insights that it has generated in a deliberate way, then you would try to find a way to actually incorporate the fringe physics community. \n\nThere's got to be a way to use that as the reservoir of chaos, rather than trying to shut that chaos out of your hill climbing algorithm and then at that point, it's just like, where's the threshold? How much can you invite before it becomes a distraction from getting anything done? When it's too noisy to be coherent.\n\nArguably, what the internet has done for humankind has thrown it in completely the opposite direction where we've optimized entirely for surface area instead of for coherence. So now we have like, no two people seem to be able to agree on reality anymore. That's not useful either. \n\nREIN: Maybe there's also a connectivity thing here where if I want to get from one side of the city to the other, there are 50 different routes. But if I want to get from one city to another, there's a highway that does it. \n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, totally. So it's just a matter of rather than thinking about what allows for the most efficient decisions, in some sense, at one given timescale, it's how can we design hierarchical information, aggregation structures so as to create a wise balance between the demands on efficiency that are held at and maintained at different scales. \n\nSFI researcher, Jessica Flack talks about this in her work on collective computation and primate hierarchies where it’s a weird, awkward thing, but basically, there is an evolutionary argument for police, that it turns out that having a police system is preventing violence. This is mathematically demonstrable, but you also have to make sure that there's enough agency at the individual level, in the system that the police aren't in charge of everything going on. It's not just complex, it's complicated. \n\n[laughs] We've thrown out a ton of stuff on this call. I don't know, maybe this is just whetting people's appetite for something a little bit more focused and concise. \n\nJESSICA: This episode is going to have some extensive show notes.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. [chuckles] \n\nJESSICA: It's definitely time to move into reflections. \n\nJACOB: You were talking, at the very beginning, about Spotify. Like how, when unknown ideas are able to find their tribe and germinate. I was reading about how Netflix does business and it's very common for them to make some new content and then see how it goes for 30 days and then just kill it. Because they say, “Well, this isn't taking off. We're not going to make more of it,” and a lot of people can get really upset with that. There's definitely been some really great things out on Netflix that I'm like, for one on the one hand, “Why are you canceling this? I really wanted more,” and it seems like there's a lot of the people that do, too. \n\nWhat that's making me think about as well for one thing, I think it seems like Netflix from my experience, is not actually marketing some of their best stuff. You would never know it’s there, just in the way of people to find more unknown things. \n\nBut also, I'm thinking about how just generally speaking some of the best ideas, TV shows, music, whatever are the kinds of things that there's not going to be an established container, group of people, that you can say, “We want to find white men ages 25 to 35 and we're going to dump it on their home screen because if anyone's going to like it, it's them and if they do, then we keep it and if they don't move, we don't.” I feel like the best things are we don't actually know who those groups are going to be and it's going to have a weird constellation of people that I couldn't actually classify. So I was just thinking about how that's an interesting challenge. \n\nJESSICA: Sweet. Rein, you have a thing?\n\nREIN: Yeah. I have another thing. I was just reminded of von Foerster, who was one of the founders of Second-order cybernetics. He has an ethical imperative, which is act always so as to increase the number of choices. I think about this actually a lot in my day-to-day work about maximizing the option value that I carry with me as I'm doing my work, like deferring certain decisions and so on. But I think it also makes sense in our discussion as well.\n\nJESSICA: True. Mine is about externalities. We talked about how, whatever you do, whatever your business does, whatever your technology does, there's always going to be effects on the world on the context and the context of the context that you couldn't predict. That doesn't mean don't do anything. It doesn't mean look for those. Recognize that there's going to be surprises and try to find them. It reminds me of sometimes, I think in interviewing, we’re like, “There are cognitive biases so in order to be fair, we must not use human judgment!” \n\n[laughter] \n\nWhich is not helpful. I mean, yes, there are cognitive biases so look for them and try to compensate. Don't try to use only something predictable, like an algorithm. That's not helpful. That's it.\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Just to speak to a little bit of what each of you have said, I think for me, one of the key takeaways here is that if you're optimizing for future opportunity, if you're trying to—and I think I saw MIT defined intelligence in this way, that AI could be measured in terms of its ability to – AGI rather could be measured in terms of its ability to increase the number of games steps available to it, or options available to it in the next step of an unfolding puzzle, or whatever. Superhuman AGI is going to break out of any kind of jail we try to put it in just because it's doing better at this.\n\nBut the thing is that that's useless if we take it in terms of one spaciotemporal scale. Evolutionary dynamics have found a way to do this in a rainforest that optimizes biodiversity and the richness of feeding relationships in a food web without this short-sighted quarterly return maximizing type of approach. \n\nSo the question is are you trying to create more opportunities for yourself right now? Are you trying to create more opportunities for your kids, or are you trying to transcend the rivalrous dynamics? You've set yourself up for intergenerational warfare if you pick only one of those. The tension between feed yourself versus feed your kids is resolved in a number of different ways in different species that have different – yeah. It is exactly, Rein in the chat you said, it reminds you of the trade-off between efficiency and adaptability and it's like, arguably, adaptability is efficiency aggregated when you're looking at it over a longer timescale, because you don't want to have to rebuild civilization from scratch. \n\nSo [chuckles] I think it's just important to add the dimension of time and to consider that this is something that's going on at multiple different levels of organization at the same time and that's a hugely important to how we actually think about these topics.\n\nJESSICA: Thinking of scales of time, you’ve thought about these interesting topics for an hour, or so now and I hope you'll continue thinking about them over weeks and consult the show notes. Michael, how can people find out more about you?\n\nMICHAEL: I'm on Twitter and Instagram if people prefer diving in social media first, I don't recommend it. I would prefer you go to patreon.com/michaelgarfield and find future fossils podcasts there. I have a lot of other stuff I do, the music and the art and everything feeds into everything else. So because I'm a parent and because I don't want all of my income coming from my day job, I guess Patreon is where I suggest people go first. [laughs]\n\nThank you.\n\nJESSICA: Thank you. And of course, to support the podcast, you can also go to patrion.com/greaterthancode. If you donate even a dollar, you can join our Slack channel and join the conversation. It'll be fun.Special Guest: Michael Garfield.","content_html":"02:13 - Michael’s Superpower: Being Able to Creatively Digest and Reconstruct Categories
\n\n09:39 - Recognizing Economic Value of Talents & Abilities
\n\n18:49 - The Edge of Chaos; Chaos Theory
\n\n23:23 - Reproducibility Crisis and Context-Dependent Insight
\n\n28:49 - What constitutes a scientific experiment?
\n\n38:03 - The Return of Civil Society and Community Relationships; Scale Theory
\n\n49:28 - Fractal Geometry
\n\nMore amazing resources from Michael to check out:
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Some of the best ideas, tv shows, music, etc. are the kinds of things that there’s not going to be an established container.
\n\nRein: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” ~ Heinz von Foerster
\n\nJessica: Externality. Recognize that there’s going to be surprises and find them.
\n\nMichael: Adaptability is efficiency aggregated over a longer timescale.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 234 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m here with my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr.
\n\nJESSICA: Thanks, Rein and today, I’m excited to introduce our guest, Michael Garfield.
\n\nHe’s an artist and philosopher and he helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to thrive. He hosts and produces two podcasts, The Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast. Yay, complexity!
\n\nMichael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers—a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary “mind-jazz” performances in the form of essay, avant-guitar music, and painting! You can find him on Bandcamp, it’s pretty cool.
\n\nRefusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice.
\n\nMichael, welcome to Greater Than Code!
\n\nMICHAEL: Thanks! I’m glad to be here and I hope that I provide a refreshingly different guest experience for listeners being not a coder in any kind of traditional sense.
\n\nJESSICA: Yet you’re definitely involved in technology.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and I think the epistemic framing of programming and algorithms is something that can be applied with no understanding of programming languages as they are currently widely understood. It’s just like design is coding, design of the built environment, so.
\n\nJESSICA: And coding is a design.
\n\nMICHAEL: Indeed.
\n\nJESSICA: Okay, before we go anywhere else, I did not prepare you for this, but we have one question that we ask all of our guests. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMICHAEL: I would like believe that I have a superpower in being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories so as to drive new associations between them for people and I feel like I developed that studying integral theory in grad school.
\n\nI did some work under Sean Esbjörn-Hargens at John F. Kennedy University looking at the work of and work adjacent to Ken Wilber, who was trying to come up with a metatheoretical framework to integrate all different domains of human knowledge. All different types of inquiry into a single framework that doesn't attempt to reduce any one of them to any other and then in that process, I learned what one of my professors, Michael Schwartz, called creative deconstruction. So showing how art can be science and science can be art and that these aren't ontologically fixed categories that exist external to us. Looking at the relationship between science as a practice and spiritual inquiry as a practice and that kind of thing. So it's an irreverent attitude toward the categories that we've constructed that takes in a way a cynical and pragmatic approach to the way that we define things in our world. You know.
\n\nREIN: Kant was wrong. [laughs]
\n\nMICHAEL: It's good to get out of the rut. Obviously, you’ve got to be careful because all of these ideas have histories and so you have to decide whether it's worth trying to redefine something for people in order to open up new possibilities in the way that these ideas can be understood and manipulated. It's not, for example, an easy task to try and get people to change their idea about what religion is. [laughs]
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. More than redefined. It's almost like undefined.
\n\nMICHAEL: Hm. Like Paul Tillich, for example. Theologian Paul Tillich said that religion is ultimate concern. So someone can have a religion of money, or a religion of sex, but if you get into these, if you try to interpose that in a debate on intelligent design versus evolutionary theory, you'll get attacked by both sides.
\n\nJESSICA: [chuckles] That’s cosmology.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Which is hard to [inaudible] of money, or sex.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, but people do it anyhow.
\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. So deconstructing categories and seeing in-between things that fits through your walking through walls, what categories are you deconstructing and seeing between lately?
\n\nMICHAEL: Well, I don't know, lately I've been paying more attention to the not so much tilting after the windmills of this metamorphic attitude towards categories, but looking at the way that when the opportunity comes to create a truly novel category, what are the forces in play that prevent that, that prevent recognizing novelty as novelty that I just –
\n\nJESSICA: Do you have any examples?
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, well, I just saw a really excellent talk by UC Berkeley Professor Doug Guilbeault, I think is how you say his name. I am happy to link his work to you all in the chat here so that you can share it.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, we’ll link that in the show notes.
\n\nMICHAEL: He studies category formation and he was explaining how most of the research that's been done on convergent categorization is done on established categories. But what happens when you discover something truly new? What his research shows is that basically the larger the population, the more likely it is that these categories will converge on something that's an existing category and he compared it to island versus mainland population biogeography.
\n\nSo there's a known dynamic in evolutionary science where genetic drift, which is just this random component of the change in allele frequencies in a population, the larger the population, the less likely it is that a genetic mutation that is otherwise neutral is going to actually percolate out into the population. On an island, you might get these otherwise neutral mutations that actually take root and saturate an entire community, but on the mainland, they get lost in the noise.
\n\nYou can look at this in terms of how easy it is for an innovative, artistic, or musical act to actually find any purchase. Like Spotify bought the data analysis company, The Echo Nest, back in 2015 and they ran this study on where emergent musical talent comes from. It comes from places like Australia, the UK, and Iceland, because the networks are small enough. This is a finding that's repeated endlessly through studies of how to create a viral meme that basically, or another way –
\n\nJESSICA: You mean a small enough pool to take hold?
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. That basically big science and large social networks online and these other attempts, anywhere we look at this economies of scale, growing a given system, what happens is—and we were talking about this a little before we got on the call—as a system scales, it becomes less innovative. There's less energy is allocated to –
\n\nJESSICA: In America?
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Bureaucratic overhead, latencies in the network that prevent the large networks from adapting, with the same agility to novel challenges. There's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about this, but it basically amounts to, if you want to, you can't do it from the conservative core of an organization. You can't do it from the board of directors.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh.
\n\nMICHAEL: You have to go out onto – like why did they call it fringe physics? It's like, it is because it's on the fringe and so there's a kind of –
\n\nJESSICA: So this would be like if you have like one remarkably lowercase agile team inside your enterprise, one team is innovating and development practices. They're going to get mushed out. Whereas, if you have one team innovating like that in a small company, it might spread and it might become dominant.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. I think it's certainly the case that this speaks to something I've been wondering about it in a broader sense, which is how do we recognize the economic value of talents and abilities that are like, how do we recognize a singular individual for their incompressible knowledge and expertise when they don't go through established systems of accreditation like getting a PhD? Because the academic system is such that basically, if you have an innovative contribution, but you don't have the credentials that are required to participate in the community of peer review, then people can't even – your contribution is just invisible. The same is true for how long it took, if you look at economic models, it took so long for economic models to even begin to start addressing the invisible labor of women in at home like domestic labor, or what we're now calling ecosystem services.
\n\nSo there's this question of – I should add that I'm ambivalent about this question because I'm afraid that answering it in an effective way, how do we make all of these things economically visible would just accelerate the rate at which the capitalist machine is capable of co-opting and exploiting all of these. [chuckles]
\n\nREIN: Yeah. You also have this Scott Seeing Like a State thing where in order to be able to even perceive that that stuff is going on, it has to become standardized and you can't dissect the bird to observe its song, right?
\n\nMICHAEL: Totally. So obviously, it took almost no time at all for consumer culture to commodify the psychedelic experience and start using to co-opt this psychedelic aesthetic and start using it in advertising campaigns for Levi's Jeans and Campbell Soup and that kind of thing. So it’s this question of a moving frontier that as soon as you have the language to talk about it, it's not the ineffable anymore.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMICHAEL: There's a value to the ineffable and there's a value to – it's related to this question of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by large pharmaceutical companies like, their ethnobotanical knowledge. How do you make the potential value of biodiversity, something that can be manufactured into medicine at scale, without destroying the rainforest and the people who live in it?
\n\nEverywhere I look, I see this question. So for me, lately, it's been less about how do we creatively deconstruct the categories we have so much as it is, what is the utility of not knowing how to categorize something at all and then how do we fix the skewed incentive structures in society so as to value that which we currently do not know how to value.
\n\nJESSICA: Because you don’t have a category for it.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Like right now, maybe one of the best examples, even though this is the worst example in another way, is that a large fraction of the human genome has been patented by Monsanto, even though it has no known current biomedical utility. This is what Lewis Hyde in his book, Common as Air, called “the third enclosure” of the common.
\n\nSo you have the enclosure of the land that everyone used to be able to hunt on and then you have the enclosure of intellectual property in terms of patents for known utilities, known applications, and then over the last few decades, you're starting to see large companies buy their way into and defend patents for the things that actually don't – it's speculative. They're just gambling on the idea that eventually we'll have some use for this and that it's worth lawyering up to defend that potential future use. But it's akin to recognizing that we need to fund translational work. We need to fund synthesis. We need to fund blue sky interdisciplinary research for which we don't have an expected return on investment here because there's –
\n\nJESSICA: It's one of those things that it’s going to help; you're going to get tremendous benefits out of it, but you can't say which ones.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. It's a shift perhaps akin to the move that I'm seeing conservation biology make right now from “let's preserve this charismatic species” to “let's do everything we can to restore biodiversity” rather than that biodiversity itself is generative and should be valued in its own regard so diverse research teams, diverse workplace teams. We know that there is what University of Michigan Professor Scott Page calls the diversity bonus and you don't need to know and in fact, you cannot know what the bonus is upfront.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. You can't draw the line of causality forward to the benefit because the point of diversity is that you get benefits you never thought of.
\n\nMICHAEL: Exactly. Again, this gets into this question of as a science communications staffer in a position where I'm constantly in this weird dissonant enters zone between the elite researchers at the Santa Fe Institute where I work and the community of complex systems enthusiasts that have grown up around this organization. It's a complete mismatch in scale between this org that has basically insulated itself so as to preserve the island of innovation that is required for really groundbreaking research, but then also, they have this reputation that far outstrips their ability to actually respond to people that are one step further out on the fringe from them.
\n\nSo I find myself asking, historically SFI was founded by Los Alamos National Laboratory physicists mostly that were disenchanted with the idea that they were going to have to research science, that their science was limited to that which could be basically argued as a national defense initiative and they just wanted to think about the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. So what is to SFI as SFI as to Los Alamos?
\n\nEven in really radical organizations, there's a point at which they've matured and there are questions that are beyond the horizon of that which a particular community is willing to indulge. I find, in general, I'm really fascinated by questions about the nonlinearity of time, or about weird ontology. I'm currently talking to about a dozen other academics and para-academics about how to try and – I'm working, or helping to organize a working group of people that can apply rigorous academic approaches to asking questions that are completely taboo inside of academia.
\n\nQuestions that challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions of maternity, such as there being a distinction between self and other, or the idea that there are things that are fundamentally inaccessible to quantitative research. These kinds of things like, how do we make space for that kind of inquiry when there's absolutely no way to argue it in terms of you should fund this? And that's not just for money, that's also for attention because the demands on the time and attention of academics are so intense that even if they have interest in this stuff, they don't have the freedom to pursue it in their careers. That's just one of many areas where I find that this kind of line of inquiry manifesting right now.
\n\nREIN: Reminds me a lot of this model of the edge of chaos that came from Packard and Langton back in the late 70s. Came out of chaos theory, this idea that there's this liminal transitionary zone between stability and chaos and that this is the boiling zone where self-organization happens and innovation happens. But also, that this zone is itself not static; it gets pushed around by other forces.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and that's where life is and that was Langton's point, that life exists at the edge of chaos that it's right there at the phase transition boundary between what is it that separates a stone from a raging bonfire, or there’s the Goldilocks Zone kind of question. Yeah, totally.
\n\nREIN: And these places that were at the edge of chaos that were innovative can ossify, they can move into the zone of stability. It's not so much that they move it's that, I don't know, maybe it's both. Where the frontier is, is constantly in motion.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, and to that point again, I tend to think about these things in a topographical, or geographical sense, where the island is growing, we're sitting on a volcano, and there's lots you can do with that metaphor. Obviously, it doesn't make sense. You can't build your house inside the volcano, right? [laughs] But you want to be close enough to be able to watch and describe as new land erupts, but at a safe distance. Where is that sweet spot where you have rigor and you have support, but you're not trapped within a bureaucracy, or an ossified set of institutional conventions?
\n\nJESSICA: Or if the island is going up, if the earth is moving the island up until the coastline keeps expanding outward, and you built your house right on the beach. As in you’ve got into React when it was the new hotness and you learned all about it and you became the expert and then you had this great house on the beach, and now you have a great house in the middle of town because the frontier, the hotness has moved on as our massive technology has increased and the island raises up. I mean, you can't both identify as being on the edge and identify with any single category of knowledge.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. It's tricky. I saw Nora Bateson talking about this on Twitter recently. She's someone who I love for her subversiveness. Her father, Gregory Bateson, was a major player in the articulation of cybernetics and she's awesome in that sense of, I don't know, the minister's daughter kind of a way of being extremely well-versed in complex systems thinking and yet also aware that there's a subtle reductionism that comes in that misses –
\n\nJESSICA: Misses from?
\n\nMICHAEL: Well, that comes at like we think about systems thinking as it's not reductionist because it's not trying to explain biology in terms of the interactions of atoms. It acknowledges that there's genuine emergence that happens at each of these levels and yet, to articulate that, one of the things that happens is everything has to be squashed into numbers and so it’s like this issue of how do you quantify something.
\n\nJESSICA: It's not real, if you can't measure it in numbers.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right and that belies this bias towards thinking that because you can't quantify something now means it can't be quantified.
\n\nJESSICA: You can’t predict which way the flame is going to go in the fire. That doesn't mean the fire doesn't burn. [chuckles]
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. So she's interesting because she talks about warm data as this terrain, or this experience where we don't know how to talk about it yet, but that's actually what makes it so juicy and meaningful and instructive and –
\n\nJESSICA: As opposed to taking it out of context. Leave it in context, even though we don't know how to do some magical analysis on it there.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right, and I think this starts to generate some meaningful insights into the problem of the reproducibility crisis. Just as an example, I think science is generally moving towards context dependent insight and away from – even at the Santa Fe Institute, nobody's looking for a single unifying theory of everything anymore. It's far more illuminating, useful, and rigorous to look at how different models are practical given different applications.
\n\nI remember in college there's half a dozen major different ways to define a biological species and I was supposed to get up in front of a class and argue for one over the other five. I was like, “This is preposterous.”
\n\nConcretely, pun kind of intended, Biosphere 2, which was this project that I know the folks here at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe at the Institute of Ecotechnics, who were responsible for creating this unbelievable historic effort to miniaturize the entire biosphere inside of a building. They had a coral reef and a rainforest and a Savannah and a cloud desert, like the Atacama, and there was one other, I forget.
\n\nBut it was intended as a kind of open-ended ecological experiment that was supposed to iterate a 100 times, or 50 times over a 100 years. They didn't know what they were looking for; they just wanted to gather data and then continue these 2-year enclosures where a team of people were living inside this building and trying to reproduce the entire earth biosphere in miniature.
\n\nSo that first enclosure is remembered historically as a failure because they miscalculated the rate at which they would be producing carbon dioxide and they ended up having to open the building and let in fresh air and import resource.
\n\nJESSICA: So they learned something?
\n\nMICHAEL: Right, they learned something. But that project was funded by Ed Bass, who in 1994, I think called in hostile corporate takeover expert, Steve Bannon to force to go in there with a federal team and basically issue a restraining order on these people and forcibly evict them from the experiment that they had created. Because it was seen as an embarrassment, because they had been spun in this way in international media as being uncredentialed artists, rather than scientists who really should not have the keys to this thing.
\n\nIt was one of these instances where people regard this as a scientific failure and yet when you look at the way so much of science is being practiced now, be it in the domains of complex systems, or in machine learning, what they were doing was easily like 20 or 30 years ahead of its time.
\n\nJESSICA: Well, no wonder they didn’t appreciate it.
\n\nMICHAEL: [chuckles] Exactly. So it's like, they went in not knowing what they were going to get out of it, but there was this tragic mismatch between the logic of Ed Bass’ billionaire family about what it means to have a return on an investment and the logic of ecological engineering where you're just poking at a system to see what will happen and you don't even know where to set the controls yet. So anyway.
\n\nJESSICA: And it got too big. You talked about the media, it got too widely disseminated and became embarrassed because it wasn't on an island. It wasn't in a place where the genetic drift can become normal.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. It was suddenly subject to the constraints imposed upon it in terms of the way that people were being taught science in public school in the 1980s that this is what the scientific method is. You start with a hypothesis and it's like what if your –
\n\nJESSICA: Which are not standards that are relevant to that situation.
\n\nMICHAEL: Exactly. And honestly, the same thing applies to other computational forms of science. It took a long time for the techniques pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute to be regarded as legitimate. I'm thinking of cellular automata, agent-based modeling, and computer simulation generally.
\n\nSteven Wolfram did a huge service, in some sense, to the normalization of those things in publishing A New Kind of Science, that massive book in whatever it was, 2004, or something where he said, “Look, we can run algorithmic experiments,” and that's different from the science that you're familiar with, but it's also setting aside for a moment, the attribution failure that that book is and acknowledging who actually pioneered A New Kind of Science. [chuckles]
\n\nJESSICA: At least it got some information out.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. At least it managed to shift the goalpost in terms of what the expectations are; what constitutes a scientific experiment in the first place.
\n\nJESSICA: So it shifted categories.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So I think about, for example, a research that was done on plant growth in a basement. I forget who it was that did this. I think I heard this from, it was either Doug Rushkoff, or Charles Eisenstein that was talking about this, where you got two completely different results and they couldn't figure out what was going on. And then they realized that it was at different moments in the lunar cycle and that it didn't matter if you put your plant experiment in a basement and lit everything with artificial bulbs and all this stuff. Rather than sunlight, rather than clean air, if you could control for everything, but that there's always a context outside of your context.
\n\nSo this notion that no matter how cleverly you try to frame your model, that when it comes time to actually experiment on these things in the real world, that there's always going to be some extra analogy you've missed and that this has real serious and grave implications in terms of our economic models, because there will always be someone that's falling through the cracks.
\n\nHow do we actually account for all of the stakeholders in conversations about the ecological cost of dropping a new factory over here, for example? It's only recently that people, anywhere in the modern world, are starting to think about granting ecosystems legal protections as entities befitting of personhood and this kind of thing.
\n\nJESSICA: Haven’t we copyrighted those yet?
\n\nMICHAEL: [laughs] So all of that, there's plenty of places to go from there, I'm sure.
\n\nREIN: Well, this does remind me of one of the things that Stafford Beer tried was he said, “Ponds are viable systems, they’re ecologies, they're adaptive, they're self-sustaining. Instead of trying to model how a pond works, what if we just hook the inputs of the business process into the pond and then hook the adaptions made by the pond as the output back into the business process and use the pond as the controlling system without trying to understand what makes a pond good at adapting?” That is so outside of the box and it blows my mind that he was doing this, well, I guess it was the 60s, or whatever, but this goes well beyond black boxing, right?
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So there's kind of a related insight that I saw Michelle Girvan gave at Santa Fe Institute community lecture a few years ago on reservoir computing, which maybe most of your audience is familiar with, but just for the sake of it, this is joining a machine learning system to a source of analog chaos, basically. So putting a computer on a bucket of water and then just kicking the bucket, every once in a while, to generate waves so that you're feeding chaos into the output of the machine learning algorithm to prevent overfitting. Again, and again, and again, you see this value where this is apparently the evolutionary value of play and possibly also, of dreaming.
\n\nThere's a lot of good research on both of these areas right now that learning systems are all basically hill climbing algorithms that need to be periodically disrupted from climbing the wrong local optimum. So in reservoir computing, by adding a source of natural chaos to their weather prediction algorithms, they were able to double the horizon at which they were able to forecast meteorological events past the mathematic limit that had been proven and established for this. That is like, we live in a noisy world.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, yeah. Just because it’s provably impossible doesn't mean we can't do something that's effectively the same thing, that's close enough.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Actually, in that example, I think that there's a strong argument for the value of that which we can't understand. [laughs] It's like it's actually important. So much has been written about the value of Slack, of dreaming, of taking a long walk, of daydreaming, letting your mind wander to scientific discovery.
\n\nSo this is where great innovations come from is like, “I'm going to sleep on it,” or “I'm going to go on vacation.” Just getting stuck on an idea, getting fixated on a problem, we actually tend to foreclose on the possibility of answering that problem entirely. Actually, there's a good reason to – I think this is why Silicon Valley has recognized the instrumental value of microdosing, incidentally. [laughs] That this is that you actually want to inject a little noise into your algorithm and knock yourself off the false peak that you've stranded yourself on.
\n\nJESSICA: Because if you aim for predictability and consistency, if you insist on reasonableness, you'll miss everything interesting.
\n\nMICHAEL: Or another good way to put it is what is it, reasonable women don't make history. [laughs] There is actually a place for the –
\n\nJESSICA: You don’t change the system by maximally conforming.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right.
\n\nJESSICA: If there is a place for…
\n\nMICHAEL: It’s just, there is a place for non-conformity and it's a thing where it's like, I really hope and I have some optimism that what we'll see, by the time my daughter is old enough to join the workforce, is that we'll see a move in this direction where non-conformity has been integrated somehow into our understanding of how to run a business that we actively seek out people that are capable of doing this.
\n\nFor the same reason that we saw over the 20th century, we saw a movement from one size fits all manufacturing to design your own Nike shoes. There's this much more bespoke approach.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, I love those.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like we know that if we can tailor our systems so that they can adapt across multiple different scales, that they're not exploiting economies of scale that ultimately slash the redundancy that allows an organization to adapt to risk. That if we can find a way to actually generate a kind of a fractal structure in the governance of organizations in the way that we have reflexes. The body already does this, you don't have to sit there and think about everything you do and if you did, you’d die right away.
\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMICHAEL: If you had to pass every single twitch all the way up the chain to your frontal cortex
\n\nJESSICA: If we had to put breathe on the list. [laughs]
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. If you had to sit there and approve every single heartbeat, you'd be so dead. [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: Oh my gosh, yeah. That's an energy allocation and it all needs to go through you so that you can have control.
\n\nREIN: I just wanted to mention, that reminded me of a thing that Klaus Krippendorff, who's a cybernetics guy, said that there is virtue in the act of delegating one's agency to trustworthy systems. We're talking, but I don't need to care about how the packets get from my machine to yours and I don't want to care about that, but there's a trade-off here where people find that when they surrender their agency, that this can be oppressive. So how do we find this trade-off?
\n\nMICHAEL: So just to anchor it again in something that I find really helpful. Thinking about the way that convenience draws people into these compacts, with the market and with the state. You look over the last several hundred years, or thousand years in the West and you see more and more of what used to be taken for granted as the extent in terms of the functions that are performed by the extended family, or by the neighborhood, life in a city, by your church congregations, or whatever. All of that stuff has been out boarded to commercial interests and to federal level oversight, because it's just more efficient to do it that way at the timescales that matter, that are visible to those systems.
\n\nYet, what COVID has shown us is that we actually need neighborhoods that suddenly, it doesn't – my wife and I, it was easy to make the decision to move across country to a place where we didn't know anybody to take a good job. But then suddenly when you're just alone in your house all the time and you've got nobody to help you raise your kids, that seems extremely dumb.
\n\nSo there's that question of just as I feel like modern science is coming back around to acknowledging that a lot of what was captured in old wives’ tales and in traditional indigenous knowledge, ecological knowledge systems that were regarded by the enlightenment as just rumor, or…
\n\nJESSICA: Superstition.
\n\nMICHAEL: Superstition, that it turns out that these things actually had, that they had merit, they were evolved.
\n\nJESSICA: There was [inaudible] enough.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. Again, it wasn't rendered in the language that allowed it to be the subject of quantitative research until very recently and then, suddenly it was and suddenly, we had to circle back around. Science is basically in this position where they have to sort of canonize Galileo, they're like, “Ah, crap. We burned all these witches, but it turns out they were right.”
\n\nThere's that piece of it. So I think relatedly, one of the things that we're seeing in economist samples and Wendy Carlin have written about this is the return of the civil society, the return of mutual aid networks, and of gift economies, and of the extended family, and of buildings that are built around in courtyards rather than this Jeffersonian everyone on their own plot of land approach. That we're starting to realize that we had completely emptied out the topsoil basically of all of these community relationships in order to standardize things for a mass big agricultural approach, that on the short scale actually does generate greater yield.
\n\nIt's easier to have conversations with people who agree with you than it is – in a way, it's inexpedient to try and cross the aisle and have a conversation with someone with whom you deeply and profoundly disagree. But the more polarized we become as a civilization, the more unstable we become as a civilization. So over this larger timescale, we actually have to find ways to incentivize talking to people with whom you disagree, or we're screwed. We're kicking legs out from under the table.
\n\nREIN: At this point, I have to name drop Habermas because he had this idea that there were two fundamental cognitive interests that humans have to direct their attempts to acquire knowledge. One is a technical interest in achieving goals through prediction and control and the other is a practical interest in ensuring mutual understanding.
\n\nHis analysis was that advanced capitalist societies, the technical interest dominates at the expense of the practical interest and that knowledge produced by empirical, scientific, analytic sciences becomes the prototype of all knowledge. I think that's what you're talking about here that we've lost touch with this other form of knowledge. It's not seen as valuable and the scientific method, the analytical approaches have come to dominate.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, precisely. [laughs] Again, I think in general, we've become impoverished in our imagination because again, the expectations, there's a shifting baseline. So what people expect to pull out of the ocean now is a fish that you might catch off just a commercial, or a recreational fishing expedition. It's a quarter of the size of the same species of fish you might've caught 50, 70 years ago and when people pull up this thing and they're like, “Oh, look at –” and they feel proud of themselves.
\n\nI feel like that's what's going on with us in terms of our we no longer even recognize, or didn't until very recently recognize that we had been unwittingly colluding in the erosion of some very essential levels of organization and human society and that we had basically sold our souls to market efficiency and efficient state level governance.
\n\nNow it's a huge mess to try and understand. You look at Occupy Wall Street and stuff like that and it just seems like such an enormous pain in the ass to try and process things in that way. But it's because we're having to relearn how to govern neighborhoods and govern small communities and make business decisions at the scale of a bioregion rather than a nation.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. It's a scale thing. I love the phrase topsoil of community relationships, because when you talk about the purposive knowledge that whatever you call it, Rein, that is goal seeking. It's like the one tall tree that is like, “I am the tallest tree,” and it keeps growing taller and taller and taller, and it doesn't see that it's falling over because there's no trees next to it to protect it from the wind. It's that weaving together between all the trees and the different knowledge and the different people, our soul is there. Our resilience is there.
\n\nREIN: Michael, you keep talking about scale. Are you talking about scale theory?
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Scaling laws, like Geoffrey West's stuff, Luis Bettencourt is another researcher at the University of Chicago who does really excellent work in urban scaling. I just saw a talk from him this morning that was really quite interesting about there being a sweet spot where a city can exist between how thinly it's distributed infrastructurally over a given area versus how congested it is. Because population and infrastructure scale differently, they scale at different rates than you get –
\n\nREIN: If I remember my West correctly, just because I suspect that not all of our listeners are familiar with scale theory, there's this idea that there are certain things that grow super linearly as things scale and certain things that grow sub linearly. So for example, the larger a city gets, you get a 15% more restaurants, but you also get 15% more flu, but you also get 15% less traffic.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So anything that depends on infrastructures scales sub linearly. A city of 2 million people has 185% the number of gas stations, but anything that scales anything having to do with the number of interactions between people scales super linearly. You get 115% of the – rather you get, what is it, 230%? Something like that. Anyway, it's 150%, it's 85% up versus 115% up. So patents, but also crime and also, just the general pace of life scale at 115% per capita. So like, disease transmission.
\n\nSo you get into these weird cases—and this links back to what we were talking about earlier—where people move into the city, because it's per unit. In a given day, you have so much more choice, you have so much more opportunity than you would in your agrarian Chinese community and that's why Shenzhen is basically two generations old. 20 million people and none of them have grandparents living in Shenzhen because they're all attracted to this thing. But at scale, what that means is that everyone is converging on the same answer. Everyone's moving into Shenzhen and away from their farming community.
\n\nSo you end up – in a way, it's not that that world is any more innovative. It's just, again, easier to capture that innovation and therefore, measure it. But then back to what we were saying about convergent categories and biogeography, it's like if somebody comes up with a brilliant idea in the farm, you're not necessarily going to see it. But if somebody comes up with the same brilliant idea in the city, you might also not see it for different reasons. So anyway, I'm in kind of a ramble, but.
\n\nJESSICA: The optimal scale for innovation is not the individual and it's not 22 million, it's in between.
\n\nMICHAEL: Well, I feel like at the level of a city, you're no longer talking about individuals almost in a way. At that point, you're talking about firms. A city is like a rainforest in which the fauna are companies. Whereas, a neighborhood as an ecosystem in which the fauna, or individual people and so, to equate one with the other is a potential point of confusion.
\n\nMaybe an easier way to think about this would be multicellular life. My brain is capable of making all kinds of innovations that any cell, or organ in my body could not make on its own. There's a difference there. [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: [inaudible].
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. It's easier, however, for a cell to mutate if it doesn't live inside of me. Because if it does, it's the cancer – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: The immune system will come attack it.
\n\nMICHAEL: Right. My body will come and regulate that.
\n\nJESSICA: Like, “You’re different, you are right out.”
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. So it's not about innovation as some sort of whole category, again, it's about different kinds of innovation that are made that are emergent at different levels of organization. It's just the question of what kinds of innovation are made possible when you have something like the large Hadron Collider versus when you've got five people in a room around a pizza. You want to find the appropriate scale for the entity, for the system that's the actual level of granularity at which you're trying to look at the stuff, so.
\n\nREIN: Can I try to put a few things together here in potentially a new way and see if it's anything? So we talked about the edge of chaos earlier and we're talking about scale theory now, and in both, there's this idea of fractal geometry. This idea that a coastline gets larger, the smaller your ruler is.
\n\nIn scale theory, there's this idea of space filling that you have to fill the space with things like capillaries, or roads and so on. But in the human lung, for example, if you unfurled all of the surface area, you'd fill up like a football field, I think. So maybe there's this idea that there's complexity that's possible, that’s made possible by the fractal shape of this liminal region that the edge of chaos.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. It's certainly, I think as basically what it is in maximizing surface area, like you do within a lung, then you're maximizing exposure. So if the scientific community were operating on the insights that it has generated in a deliberate way, then you would try to find a way to actually incorporate the fringe physics community.
\n\nThere's got to be a way to use that as the reservoir of chaos, rather than trying to shut that chaos out of your hill climbing algorithm and then at that point, it's just like, where's the threshold? How much can you invite before it becomes a distraction from getting anything done? When it's too noisy to be coherent.
\n\nArguably, what the internet has done for humankind has thrown it in completely the opposite direction where we've optimized entirely for surface area instead of for coherence. So now we have like, no two people seem to be able to agree on reality anymore. That's not useful either.
\n\nREIN: Maybe there's also a connectivity thing here where if I want to get from one side of the city to the other, there are 50 different routes. But if I want to get from one city to another, there's a highway that does it.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah, totally. So it's just a matter of rather than thinking about what allows for the most efficient decisions, in some sense, at one given timescale, it's how can we design hierarchical information, aggregation structures so as to create a wise balance between the demands on efficiency that are held at and maintained at different scales.
\n\nSFI researcher, Jessica Flack talks about this in her work on collective computation and primate hierarchies where it’s a weird, awkward thing, but basically, there is an evolutionary argument for police, that it turns out that having a police system is preventing violence. This is mathematically demonstrable, but you also have to make sure that there's enough agency at the individual level, in the system that the police aren't in charge of everything going on. It's not just complex, it's complicated.
\n\n[laughs] We've thrown out a ton of stuff on this call. I don't know, maybe this is just whetting people's appetite for something a little bit more focused and concise.
\n\nJESSICA: This episode is going to have some extensive show notes.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. [chuckles]
\n\nJESSICA: It's definitely time to move into reflections.
\n\nJACOB: You were talking, at the very beginning, about Spotify. Like how, when unknown ideas are able to find their tribe and germinate. I was reading about how Netflix does business and it's very common for them to make some new content and then see how it goes for 30 days and then just kill it. Because they say, “Well, this isn't taking off. We're not going to make more of it,” and a lot of people can get really upset with that. There's definitely been some really great things out on Netflix that I'm like, for one on the one hand, “Why are you canceling this? I really wanted more,” and it seems like there's a lot of the people that do, too.
\n\nWhat that's making me think about as well for one thing, I think it seems like Netflix from my experience, is not actually marketing some of their best stuff. You would never know it’s there, just in the way of people to find more unknown things.
\n\nBut also, I'm thinking about how just generally speaking some of the best ideas, TV shows, music, whatever are the kinds of things that there's not going to be an established container, group of people, that you can say, “We want to find white men ages 25 to 35 and we're going to dump it on their home screen because if anyone's going to like it, it's them and if they do, then we keep it and if they don't move, we don't.” I feel like the best things are we don't actually know who those groups are going to be and it's going to have a weird constellation of people that I couldn't actually classify. So I was just thinking about how that's an interesting challenge.
\n\nJESSICA: Sweet. Rein, you have a thing?
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I have another thing. I was just reminded of von Foerster, who was one of the founders of Second-order cybernetics. He has an ethical imperative, which is act always so as to increase the number of choices. I think about this actually a lot in my day-to-day work about maximizing the option value that I carry with me as I'm doing my work, like deferring certain decisions and so on. But I think it also makes sense in our discussion as well.
\n\nJESSICA: True. Mine is about externalities. We talked about how, whatever you do, whatever your business does, whatever your technology does, there's always going to be effects on the world on the context and the context of the context that you couldn't predict. That doesn't mean don't do anything. It doesn't mean look for those. Recognize that there's going to be surprises and try to find them. It reminds me of sometimes, I think in interviewing, we’re like, “There are cognitive biases so in order to be fair, we must not use human judgment!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhich is not helpful. I mean, yes, there are cognitive biases so look for them and try to compensate. Don't try to use only something predictable, like an algorithm. That's not helpful. That's it.
\n\nMICHAEL: Yeah. Just to speak to a little bit of what each of you have said, I think for me, one of the key takeaways here is that if you're optimizing for future opportunity, if you're trying to—and I think I saw MIT defined intelligence in this way, that AI could be measured in terms of its ability to – AGI rather could be measured in terms of its ability to increase the number of games steps available to it, or options available to it in the next step of an unfolding puzzle, or whatever. Superhuman AGI is going to break out of any kind of jail we try to put it in just because it's doing better at this.
\n\nBut the thing is that that's useless if we take it in terms of one spaciotemporal scale. Evolutionary dynamics have found a way to do this in a rainforest that optimizes biodiversity and the richness of feeding relationships in a food web without this short-sighted quarterly return maximizing type of approach.
\n\nSo the question is are you trying to create more opportunities for yourself right now? Are you trying to create more opportunities for your kids, or are you trying to transcend the rivalrous dynamics? You've set yourself up for intergenerational warfare if you pick only one of those. The tension between feed yourself versus feed your kids is resolved in a number of different ways in different species that have different – yeah. It is exactly, Rein in the chat you said, it reminds you of the trade-off between efficiency and adaptability and it's like, arguably, adaptability is efficiency aggregated when you're looking at it over a longer timescale, because you don't want to have to rebuild civilization from scratch.
\n\nSo [chuckles] I think it's just important to add the dimension of time and to consider that this is something that's going on at multiple different levels of organization at the same time and that's a hugely important to how we actually think about these topics.
\n\nJESSICA: Thinking of scales of time, you’ve thought about these interesting topics for an hour, or so now and I hope you'll continue thinking about them over weeks and consult the show notes. Michael, how can people find out more about you?
\n\nMICHAEL: I'm on Twitter and Instagram if people prefer diving in social media first, I don't recommend it. I would prefer you go to patreon.com/michaelgarfield and find future fossils podcasts there. I have a lot of other stuff I do, the music and the art and everything feeds into everything else. So because I'm a parent and because I don't want all of my income coming from my day job, I guess Patreon is where I suggest people go first. [laughs]
\n\nThank you.
\n\nJESSICA: Thank you. And of course, to support the podcast, you can also go to patrion.com/greaterthancode. If you donate even a dollar, you can join our Slack channel and join the conversation. It'll be fun.
Special Guest: Michael Garfield.
","summary":"Artist and philosopher, Michael Garfield, talks about being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories, recognizing economic value of talents & abilities, and civil society and community relationships.","date_published":"2021-05-12T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/270674e6-63e7-455f-a662-70f7cf223e5e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42723837,"duration_in_seconds":3670}]},{"id":"9327c242-8176-4eb0-a76e-4bc72b7a0793","title":"233: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Matter with Jess Szmajda","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-matter","content_text":"01:22 - Jess’s Superpower: Playing ANY Instrument\n\n\nMusic & Technology\nCultural Expoloration\n\n\n06:03 - Language Community Ethos (MINASWAN)\n\n\nHuman-Centered Design\nThe Joy of Programming Meetup\nSapir-Whorf Hypothesis\n\n\n13:24 - Inclusive Language: Language Matters\n\n\nValheim\n\n\n17:19 - Active Listening and Expressing Point-of-View, and Using Loudness\n\n\nVocally For\nVocally Against\nQuiet For \nQuiet Against\n\n\n21:51 - Shining Light on Marginalized People & Voices\n\n\nBULQ\nMetacognition: Asking ourselves, “What are we not thinking about?”\nLeadership\nChanging Mental Patterns; Take a Different Path\n\n\n31:30 - Benefits of Having Diverse Teams (Resources) & Risks of Homogeneity \n\n\nDiversity wins: How inclusion matters\nWhy diversity matters\nThe Chevy Nova That Wouldn't Go\nGoogle Photos labeled black people 'gorillas'\nFrom transparent staircases to faraway restrooms, why these benign design details can be a nuisance for some women\n\n\n37:29 - Storytelling\n\n\nRepresentation Matters\nNormalization\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJess: We are feeling beings that rationalize.\n\nDamien: How technology impacts culture.\n\nCasey: Taking loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don’t always talk about it. Who is more open to it or not?\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\n**Transcript::\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 233 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I’m joined here with Casey Watts.\n\nCASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And I’m here with our guest today, Jess Szmajda.\n\nJess is currently a senior leader at AWS in the EC2 Networking organization. Previously, she was the first female CTO of a major media organization, Axios, and before that, the co-founder and CTO at Optoro, which helps top tier retailers nationwide handle their returned and excess goods.\n\nJess got her start in tech in the 90s writing Perl to configure Solaris machines. Over the years, she’s contributed to Open Source and organized a number of communities. These days, focusing on the DC Tech Slack and the DC-based Joy of Programming Meetup.\n\nOutside of the tech world, Jess is a singer-songwriter, an improviser, a gamer, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a Mom to the most wonderful, Minecraft-obsessed 6-year-old imaginable.\n\nWelcome Jess.\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jess.\n\nJESS: Thank you! It's nice to be here. \n\nDAMIEN: So I know someone has prepped you with our first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nJESS: My superpower is that I can play any instrument you hand me and I –\n\nDAMIEN: Oh.\n\nJESS: [laughs] I acquired it by being a giant nerd. [laughs] I went to a special music high school here in the DC area called Suitland High School and I played all kinds of different instruments. I was the principal bassoonist of the DC Youth Orchestra for a while. Music's always been a lifelong love of mine and it's been a mission to find every strange instrument I can find to figure out how it works. So it's challenge [chuckles] to find something that I can't play. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, I'm so tempted and of course, the first thing I would have gone with is the double reed bassoon and oboe, but that's too easy.\n\nJESS: That’s right.\n\nDAMIEN: Banjo, of course, you’ve got steel drum.\n\nJESS: Steel drum and plate, yeah.\n\nDAMIEN: Cajon.\n\nJESS: Cajon. Oh, I have heard of it.\n\nDAMIEN: Aha!\n\nJESS: I haven't actually touched one. I'll figure it out. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: It's particularly easy. \n\nJESS: Nice. [laughs] \n\nCASEY: I don't know very many people who play more than just an instrument, or two. I think it might be like you and I are the two that come to mind for me, honestly. \n\n[laughter]\n\nI have an instrument in every color, by the way. That's the way I collect them. \n\n[laughter]\n\nJESS: Nice.\n\nCASEY: I’ve got a white accordion. How do you feel like this breadth of instrument ability has affected your life in other ways? \n\nJESS: I don't know. That's an interesting question. How has it affected my life in other ways? I mean, there's the obvious tie into music and technology. There's such an incredible confluence of musicians who are engineers and vice versa. \n\nI was actually talking to someone at the office earlier about that and she was theorizing it's because all of the patterns and rhythms that we think about and how that ties into a regular patterns and systems that we think about as engineers and I think it's a really interesting way to think about it, for sure. \n\nI do think that there's a certain element of cross-culturalism that you get from learning other cultures instruments. Certainly, the berimbau, the Brazilian martial art? [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Capoeira?\n\nJESS: Capoeira, yeah. The capoeira, the berimbau instrument that has the long string and you have the little – I think you learn a lot about what led to developing an instrument so relatively simple, but creating such an incredible art form in the culture where people just wanted to dance and share their heritage with each other and picked up whatever they could find that would make interesting and fun sounds and created an entire culture around that. \n\nSo for me, it's as much cultural exploration and understanding as it is anything. I think it's wonderful.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. That's really amazing. I had a tiny insight on this recently. I saw an amazing video about a Jimmy Hendrix song with the basic premise being, what key is this song in? It's a really difficult question because—and I'm going to go a little bit music nerd here—the tonic is e, but the chord progressions and the melodic signature doesn't really fit that. Amazing 20-minute video, but the end conclusion is that using Western art music tonality to describe blues music, American blues music, it's a different tonality. So it doesn't really make sense to say what major key is this in, or what minor key is this in.\n\nJESS: Yeah, totally. \n\nMy partner and I, this morning, we were watching a video about Coltrane's classic—my favorite thing is interpretation in the 60s—and how he's basically playing between these major and minor tonalities constantly. It's not necessarily tonal from the Western sense, but it’s certainly beautiful and I think it's certainly approachable and understandable to any ear regardless of how you decompose it. Anyway, giant music nerd, sorry. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, but it ties so closely to what you were talking about as an instrument being cultural. The guitar, the five-string guitar, is tuned for American music, which is a slightly different tonality from Western European music. So when you think about “Okay, well, that's very slightly different. Now, what is it like in Africa, in Australia, in Asia?” Then it gets all, it's got to be very, very different.\n\nJESS: Oh, yeah. I saw this guy in Turkey, he's modified a guitar to add quarter tones to it because a lot of Turkish music uses quarter tones and so, it's just like the fretboard is wild. It has all of these extra frets on it and he plays it. It's absolutely incredible, but it's wild. It's amazing.\n\nDAMIEN: So I want to tie this into different cultures, frameworks, and technology. How about that?\n\nJESS: Yeah, you bet, let's do it. [laughs] \n\nCASEY: Good segue.\n\nJESS: So actually, that's something that's been on my mind is this Ruby community diaspora in a way. I know Greater Than Code has a lot of Ruby folks on it and I'm not sure about the latest incarnation, but definitely a lot of Ruby roots. I think that we've seen this incredible mixing of culture in the Ruby community that I haven't seen in other places that drives this – well, I think [inaudible], it's a really fantastic way to sum it up like, math is nice and so we are nice. \n\nAs much as that might be a justification to be nice, be nice anyway, but it's still this ethos of we are nice to each other, we care, and that is baked into the community and my journeys and other language communities, I think haven't shared that perspective that it is good to be nice in general and some of them even are, I think are focused on it's good to fight. [laughs]\n\nSo I've been really curious about this movement, Rubius’s movement into other language areas, like Go, Rust, and Alexa, et cetera, et cetera, how much of that carries forward and what really can we do to drive that?\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. So my question is how does a technological community, what is it about the community? What is about the technology? Why is it different? You and I both wrote Pearl in the 90s and so, that is a very different community. I look at Ruby and I write mostly Ruby now and I go, “Why is it different? What's different about it?”\n\nJESS: Yeah, no, it's a good question. A lot of the early conversation that I remember in the Ruby community was—and just contextually, I've been using Ruby since 2006, or so, so that era. A lot of the early conversation I remember was about develop the language to optimize for developer happiness. I think that's a really unique take and I haven't heard of that in any other place. So I'm wondering how much that might've been the beginnings of this. I don't know.\n\nDAMIEN: Something came up in a Twitter conversation, I saw a while back where they compared Ruby and Pearl, I'm pretty sure it was Pearl and well, one of the defining features of Pearl was that there's more than one way to do it and Ruby has that same ethos. Literally, in the standard lib, there’s a lot of aliases and synonyms. It's like, you can call pop, or drop and I can't keep it straight. [chuckles]\n\nBut anyway, then I thought to myself, “Well, in Pearl, that's an absolute disaster.” I pull up a profile and I'm like, “I don't know what this is because I don't know what's going on.” Whereas, in Ruby, I've loved it so much and so, what's the difference and the difference pointed out to me was that in Ruby, it was for expressiveness. Things have different names so that they can properly express, or better express the intention and in Pearl, that wasn't the case.\n\nJESS: Yeah, no, totally. I think actually looking at Ruby and Python, I think were both heavily influenced by Pearl and I think Python definitely took the path of well, all of this nonsense is just nonsense. Let's just have one way to do it. [laughs]\n\nHaving worked with some Python developers, I think that perspective on there is one correct path really drives that community in a lot of ways. I think some people find that releasing really simplifying for them because they're like, “I got it. I know the answer.” Like it's a math problem almost. \n\nAs a Rubyist going into the Python community, I was like, “Oh, I'm so stifled.” [laughs] Where is my expressiveness?! I want to write inject, or oh, I can't even think of the opposite of inject. Collect. [laughs] Those are two different words for me. I want to be able to write both, depending on what I'm doing so.\n\nIt's also interesting, like I see a lot more DSL development in Ruby than I see in any other language and maybe Alexa also. But I think that also comes from the same perspective of there is not one right way to do it. There's the best way for this problem and there's the best way for this kind of communication you're trying to drive. \n\nIt's interesting, as I'm talking myself into a corner here a bit, Ruby almost emphasizes the communication of code more than the solving of the problem and I think that might actually help drive this community where we care about the other humans we're working with, because we're always thinking about how we communicate with them in a way.\n\nCASEY: I think about the term human-centered design a lot lately and that's becoming more and more popular term, a way to describe this thing. Ruby totally did that. Ruby looked at how can we make this easy for humans to use and work with and I think that's beautiful. \n\nI keep thinking about a paper I read a long time ago that a professor made-up programming language and varied features of it like, white space matters, or not, and a whole bunch of those and measured which ones were easier for new people to learn and which ones were harder for new people to learn. As a teacher, I want to use whatever is easy for the students to learn so they can get their feet wet, so they can start learning and building and doing things and get excited about it, not get hung up on the syntax. \n\nSo human-centered design baked into Ruby is, I think partly why the community is so human-centered. I think you're exactly right.\n\nJESS: Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a large part of why the Joy of Programming Meetup, I think has been really fun is we get to learn from how different language communities build things. I think it was founded on that kind of thinking is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis for better, or worse theorizes language shapes thought and I think that that is to some degree, at least true in how we think about writing code and solving problems. \n\nSo the kinds of solutions that you see from different language communities, I think very incredibly. I don't know, even just as simple as from like J2EE, which is the ivory tower of purity in XML [laughs] to obviously, I don't want to pick on Rails, but Rails is an open system. [laughs] An interpretive dance, perhaps. I think it's really interesting, the web frameworks even I see in Haskell almost feel like I'm solving a math problem more than I'm creating an API, or delivering content into somebody.\n\nSo it's hard for me to separate, is this a community of thought of people who are attracted to a certain way of solving problems? Is this driven by the structure and format of the language? I don't know. \n\nDAMIEN: I know you mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and their research has been shown to be problematic.\n\nJESS: Yeah, for sure.\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] But I will say that the hypothesis is that language shapes thought and I would say that the correct state – correct [chuckles] a better description for me is that language is thoughts and so, the language you use is the sort of things you're thinking about. So if you say inject when you mean collect, those are different things, you're going to get different things out of them. This is why we use get annotate instead of get playing.\n\nJESS: For sure. Exactly. So at AWS, this is big drive and I'm not speaking for AWS on this, I'm just speaking for me. But I'm noticing this drive for inclusive language and I think it's really beautiful. \n\nConnecting that drive, frankly, in the broader tech community to everything that's been going on in this last year in how we interact with each other as humans from different backgrounds, et cetera. It's like, what kinds of dominant culture paradigms have we baked into our code beyond even the very obviously problematic statements, but just the way that we think about, I don't know. Part of me is like, “Well, is object-oriented design driven by certain cultural expectations that we have, or functional?” I don't know. What paradigms would we get if we'd have had a different dominant culture developing technology? I don't know. It's fascinating.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and [inaudible] is an excellent example of that. It's a punishment. This is wrong. I did a whole talk several years ago about specifications versus tests. I don't want you to write tests for your code; tests are something you do afterwards to see if something is suitable. Write a specification and then if the code and specifications don't match, well, one of them needs to change. [laughs]\n\nJESS: That's right. I love that. That's also kind of like the Pact Contract Testing space. It's like, I like this framework because it allows a consumer of an API to say, “This is what I expect you to do,” and then the API almost has to comply. Whenever I've talked about Pact, I think with a lot of developers, they're like, “Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense at all.” I'm like, “Well, no.” In a way, it's like the API’s prerogative to deliver what the customer expects and to be always right. The customer is right here, in this case and I think it's a really great way to look at this differently.\n\nCASEY: That should totally be the tagline for Pact: the consumer is always right. \n\nJESS: I love it. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Another way language shapes things, I noticed lately is Valheim is a super popular game where you're a Viking and building houses. There's a command you can type called “imacheater” that lets you spawn in equipment and building materials. On all the forums online, people are harassing each other for doing their own creative mode for spawning stuff in because of that language, I suspect. So in a recent patch, they changed it from imacheater to devtools, or something like that and the forums have rebranded. There's a new moderator is posting things and the culture is completely changing because the devs changed that one word in the changelog and it's just so cool to see language matters.\n\nJESS: That's amazing. That's so cool. Actually, I'm totally hooked on Valheim also along with probably everybody else. I have my own little server with some friends. Anyway, we noticed on the Valheim server that there was somebody who sort of redid the loading screen and they really hypersexualized the female character in the painting and actually got a surprising amount of feedback like saying, “Please don't do that. We love Valheim because it's not clearly gendered, or particularly one way, or the other,” and the artist actually took that feedback to heart and put together a much better version of the thing where the woman was very well armored and looked ready for battle and it was really cool. \n\nI've been thinking about the whole tech community and there's so many connections to the gamer community as well. Ever since Gamergate, I think we've been putting a really hard light on this whole world. It's just so heartwarming and incredible to know that like this Viking destroying trolls game has people who actually care enough to say, “No, let's pay attention to what that woman's wearing. Make sure she wears something that's actually reasonable.” That's cool. We've come a long way. I mean, not perfect, but it's a long way. \n\nCASEY: Yeah, a long way. I always think about progress in terms of people in four groups. There's like people who are vocally for something like they would speak up in this case, people who are vocally against it, and then quiet people who are for, or against it. We can see the vocal people who are supporting this now and I love to think about how many people are moving in that direction who are quiet; we can't see. That's the big cultural shift under the covers.\n\nJESS: Yeah. That's a big question. That makes me think about when I was at Optoro, we were trying to understand our employee engagement and so, we used this tool, Culture Amp, which I imagine a lot of people have seen. We did a survey and we got all this data and it's like, “Hey, everybody's really engaged. Maybe there's a couple of minor things we can fix.” \n\nBut then we were talking to some of our Black employees—those of you who can't see me, I'm white—and there was just a lot of like, “Wow, this doesn't represent us.” Like, “What are you doing? We actually aren't don't feel like this is a really great representation.” We're like, “Well, the data says everything's fine.”\n\nSo what we actually did, the next survey we ran, we included demographic data in the dataset and then we were able to distribute the data across racial demographics and we saw, oh no, our Black employees are pretty much all pissed off. [laughs] We've done a really bad job of including them for a lot of reasons. For example, we had a warehouse and most of our Black employees worked in the warehouse and it turns out that we had a very corporate-based culture and we didn't pay enough attention and we didn't really engage everybody. The fact that they were basically all in the warehouse is kind of also a problem, too. \n\nSo there was a lot of really great eye-opening things that we got to see by paying attention to that and looking not just at our Black employees, but all our different demographics. We learned a lot and I think we had a real humbling moment and got to listen, but it's really this quiet – either people who don't use their voice, or can't use their voice, or maybe don't know how to use their voice in a lot of different ways. These people, I think make such an incredible impact on the true feeling of a place, of a community, of a company and really sitting down and listening to those people, I think can be really hard in any position. \n\nSo I was really happy we were able to do that, but I think you're totally right, Casey, that it's not just moving the vocal people to really change the Overton window, I suppose on what's acceptable in a community. But it's fundamentally, how do you change the people who you aren't hearing from? How do you frankly even know?\n\nCASEY: Yeah, it's a big question. There's no easy answer. There's a lot of approaches. I'm glad people are talking about that in the meta sense, that's huge. We want to do this as a community, but there's work to be done and then even once people are comfortable expressing their point of view, there are then further tiers we're going to have to go through like that other people around them understand. They're actively listening and they internalize it. And then beyond that, actually acting on it. \n\nI've had experiences at work where I'm usually very confident, I'll say my point of view regardless of the context. I like being outspoken like that and represent quieter people, but often leadership and other people around me don't understand, or even if they do, they don't incorporate that into the plan and then everybody is still very frustrated, maybe even more so in a way, because a light is shining on this problem. And that's the same for marginalized voices. If they can just be heard, that's great, but we have to go farther than that, too. \n\nJESS: I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that I struggle with sometimes. I love people. I'm very extroverted. I'm very gregarious, [laughs] as I imagine you can tell, and I like to engage with people and I try to listen, but I find that sometimes I have a big personality and that can be tough, [laughs] I think sometimes. So I super value people you Casey, for example, who I think are much better listeners [laughs] and are willing to represent that. So that's huge. \n\nI also, though on the flip side, I know that I can use that loudness to help represent at least one aspect of marginalized people. I'm trans and I'm super loud about that and I'm very happy to make all kinds of noise and say, “Don't forget about trans rights!” [laughs] Frankly, I think it's kind of a wedge into I'm one kind of marginalized community, I represent one kind of marginalized community, but there's a lot more and let's talk about that, too. Not to toot my horn, but like I think those of us who are allowed to have a responsibility to use our loudness in a way that I think supports people and also, to listen when we can.\n\nDAMIEN: Can we explore a bit into the into the metal problem of hearing from marginalized voices? I'm an engineer at heart, first and foremost, and so, how do we solve this meta problem? You gave a good example with the survey separated by demographics knowing that racial and gender demographics, or well, finding out that [chuckles] racial and gender demographics were important factors than you think, but how do we solve this on a broader issue? I don't know.\n\nJESS: No, that's a great question. I think we have so much calcified thinking that at every organization and every place in the world, there's so much like, “Well, this is the way we've done things,” and frankly, it's not even, “This is the way we've done things.” It's just, “This is the way it works and this is what we do,” and just thinking outside the box, I think it's hard. Finding these areas that we are being blind to in the first place, I think it takes a certain amount of just metacognition and patience and self-reflection, and that's very difficult to do, I think for any human. \n\nBut driving that shows like this, for example, making sure that people care and think about these kinds of problems and maybe take a second. You as a listener, I'm going to challenge you for a second, take a minute at the end of this podcast and think about what am I not thinking about? I don't know, it's a really freaking hard question, but maybe you might find something. \n\nBut it's politicians, it's media, it's our leaders in every aspect making sure that we shine a light on something that is different, something that is marginalized, I think is incredibly valuable. That's a first step. But then playing that through everything else we do, that's hard. I think it falls on leaders in every realm that we have like, community leaders, conference organizers, people who lead major open source projects. Making sure that people say, “I believe that Black Lives Matter.” “I believe that we should stand against violence against the Asian community.” Those, I think are powerful statements and saying, “Hey, have we heard from somebody that doesn't look like us lately, who doesn't come from our same socioeconomic educational background?” It's tough. \n\nI had food, but I grew up relatively poor, and I think even that is such a huge difference of experience and background to a lot of people that I end up working with and I've been able to talk about like, “How are we setting prices?” Well, who are we actually thinking about? We're not thinking about ourselves here. We're thinking about a different market. Let's make sure we talk to those people. Let's make sure we talk to our customers and make sure that this actually works for them. \n\nI was really proud. At Optoro, we built a new brand called BULQ where we took – so 2 seconds on Optoro. We took returns and excess goods from major retailers and helped them get more value out of it and a a lot of the time, we built great classification systems to say, “Oh, well this is a belt and I know how to price belts because I can look on eBay and Amazon and determine, et cetera.” But a lot of the times we couldn't build these kinds of models, like auto parts, for example, were notoriously difficult for us. So we could say, “Oh, this is an auto part. But I don’t know, carburetor, manifold? Who knows?” [laughs] \n\nSo we were able to classify them as auto parts and then we put them into these cases, maybe like 3-foot square large boxes, and then we were able to sell those in lots to basically individual people who had time to learn what they were and then could resell them. \n\nThe story that I love to tell here is they're a laid-off auto factory worker, knows a ton about auto parts, and can probably scrounge up enough money to afford this $200 to $300 box, brings it to their house, knows exactly what these parts are and knows exactly what the value is and then can resell them for like 3x to 5x on what this person bought them for. \n\nI was so proud to be able to have created this kind of entrepreneurial opportunity for people that we would otherwise often forget about because so much of tech, I think is focused on us. So, it's an interesting thing kind of being at AWS, which is very much a tech for tech company. I love it, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I think these opportunities to listen to the rest of the world, we miss out on.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. You challenged us to ask ourselves the question, what are we not thinking about and that level of metacognition sounds impossible. It might be impossible. It's close to impossible, if it's not. So I can't help to think the only way to really get that knowledge, that insight is to get people who are different from me, who have different backgrounds, who have different life experiences. \n\nYou got a great example of someone who knows a lot about car parts, bring them in, they have years of experience in car parts and they can do this stuff that you can't do. But then also, along every axis, if you look around. If you look around the leadership and go, “Oh, there's nobody in leadership here who has this type of experience,” that knowledge, that insight and people like that are not going to be served because it's impossible for them. They don't even know. They can't know.\n\nJESS: Could not agree more and it is leadership. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. So many times I've seen, having been a leader, ultimately, you end up in a room with other leaders and you end up making decisions. And if you don't have other voices in there, if you don't have diverse voices, you don't get that benefit. Even if you've gone to the trouble of paying attention to diverse voices beforehand, there's always some data, some argument that comes up and it's like, “Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.” Yeah, I cannot agree enough. \n\nThis is the other flip side of that is that as a business leader, I have to think about prioritizing the outcomes of the business, it is a fact of my position and I like to think that I work in a lot more data to what that means than other business leaders perhaps. Like, impact on the community. [laughs] Impact on the people. \n\nBut a lot of times, we'll be having these discussions about who to hire and maybe we'll have done a really great job—and this isn't specific to any particular company that I'm talking about, but I know that this kind of thing happens. Maybe we've done a really great job of getting a diverse pipeline and having talked to a bunch of different kinds of candidates, but when it comes down to it, we're trying to make often the lowest risk decision on who to hire and so often, we are too risk averse to somebody whose background doesn't quite line up to what we're expecting, or to what we think we need. \n\nI like to think that I push hiring communities in conversations like that and say like, “Look, let's think beyond what's risky here and factor in more of these aspects to the conversation of getting diverse voices.” But too often, it's very easy, I think for leaders to think, “Well, we’re just going to hire the known quantity,” and I think that is again, on the meta, a major thing that we need to fix. There's so much more to being an effective leader than having the standard pedigree.\n\nDAMIEN: Well, there's also, like you mentioned, the risk aversion to not want to hire somebody who's not like all the other people, but then what are the huge risks of having only people who are alike in certain aspects?\n\nJESS: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. I think there's tons of examples. If we Google right now, we'd find like companies have made really dumb mistakes because they didn't have somebody in the room who could be like, “That?” The first one that comes to mind is the Chevy Nova, they tried to sell that in Spanish speaking countries, [laughter] “doesn't go,” “not going anywhere.” [laughs] I mean, like that could have been avoided, right? [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Nova.\n\nJESS: Nova. That might be a trivializing one, but there's been a lot worse and that's a major business risk and I think those arguments carry some weight. I love that so many organizations are prioritizing hiring more diverse leaders, especially, but this is deep pattern that we've gotten into. \n\nSo that actually comes to mind when you're thinking about how to change your mental patterns. I'm an improviser, I'm all about trying to change my mental patterns all the time so I can try to be creative. Obviously, there's plenty of silly improv games that you get into, but something that's simple, I think that anybody can do is go for a walk and take a different path. Just turn a different way than how you used to. \n\nWe, humans love to get into patterns, especially engineers, which I find to be highly ironic. Engineers are all about creating change, but don't like change themselves typically. [laughs] But do something a little different, turn left instead of right today, look up instead of down. Those, I think subtle physical changes really do influence our mental states and I think that can actually lead us to thinking in new ways.\n\nCASEY: I love it. That's very actionable. I've been doing a lot of walks and hikes and I actually try to go to a different hiking location each time because of that. I think about that idea all the time, take a different path, and it is great. Every time I do it, I feel amazing. I don’t know, more flexible, I think differently. Yeah, try it, listeners. I dare you.\n\nJESS: I love it.\n\nCASEY: I'm sure there are papers written showing that having diverse teams have very measured effects, a whole bunch of them, more than I know more, than I've read. Well, I guess first of all, I don't know that the data has been collected in a single spot I can point people to and that would be pretty powerful. But then secondly, even if we had that, I'm not sure that's enough to change minds at companies in any widespread way. It might just help some people, who already care, say their message very clearly. \n\nDo you know of anything like that Jess, or Damien, either of you? What's the one resource you would send to someone who wants to be equipped with diversity and inclusion data?\n\nJESS: Yeah. This study McKinsey did a while ago that, I think gets a lot of traction here where they demonstrated the companies have better total performance with more diverse groups of people and went into some depth with data. I think it's a fantastic study. It's definitely one that I reference often. I've used it to change minds among people who were like, “Wow, what's it really matter?” No, I’ve got data. [laughs] \n\nI know. I can see Casey here on video and Casey's mouth just went open [laughs] It's like, “Yes, no, it's, that's real.” No shade on the people I've worked with, I love them, but like, this is such a thing. There are cynics in corporate leadership who want to focus on profit and sometimes, you have to make a cynical argument in business and a cynical argument can come down to data and this data says, “No, look, if we get more people in here who look different from us, we're going to make more money and that's good for you and your bottom line.” So sometimes you have to walk the argument back to that, even if it feels gross and it does, it's like, “No, this actually matters to your bottom line.”\n\nDAMIEN: That's a great argument and it's a positive argument. In my view of corporations, I feel like the larger they get, the more you have an agency problem where people aren't looking to take risks to get the positive benefits, they're going to do things to avoid backlash and negative things. So I think larger company, more middle management, more people you’re answerable to, especially on the short-term, the more people are better motivated by fear. \n\nSo for that, I want to pull out like, what are the risks of homogeneity? You mentioned the Nova. You mentioned like, oh, there was – [laughs] I pull this out far too often. There was an AI image classifier that classified Black people as gorillas. There was a store. Oh goodness, I think it was an Apple store. Beautiful, beautiful architecture, glass everywhere, including the stairs. These are all the harms that come from homogeneity. [laughs] What was the expensive fixing those stairs? It couldn't have been cheap.\n\nJESS: Oh my gosh. [chuckles] I don't even wear skirts that often. [laughs]\n\nDAMIEN: And I know that's a problem because when I heard that story, I was multiple paragraphs in before I realized the problem. I wear skirts less than you, I'm sure.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJESS: For sure. Oh, that's amazing. \n\nYeah, I think those stories are really important for us to be able to tell and to share with each other because diversity matters. I think it's easy to say that and especially among people who care, people who prioritize it. We almost take it as like a, “Well, of course,” but I think there is still, getting back to that quiet group of people who don't say what they actually think, there's a lot of people who are on the fence, or maybe frankly disagree. It's like, “Well, you can disagree and I respect your disagreement, but here's the data, here's the results, here's the impact. Let's talk about that. Do you have a better way to handle this? Because I don't.”\n\nDAMIEN: So I think the risk is especially acute in tech companies and in tech for tech companies where things are far more homogeneous. Next week on how to pronounce these words. [laughs] So what can we do? Is there anything special that we can do in those sort of environments?\n\nJESS: Yeah. Well, besides have the conversation, which I think is something we can all do. Not to fangirl too much about Amazon, but I really do like the company and I'm really enjoying my experience. A lot of it comes down to how we've expressed our leadership principles. We say this is our culture and our values and we actually apply it constantly like, if you ever come to talk to an Amazon person, I'm going to tell you about how I've disagreed and committed and what I'm doing to think big and how I'm customer obsessed. I'm going to talk about those things directly.\n\nTo this, we say one of our leadership principles is that leaders are right a lot and that feels weird, right? Leaders are right a lot? “Oh, I just happen to know everything.” No, that's not what that means. We actually go into it in more depth and it's like leaders look to disconfirm their beliefs and seek diverse perspectives and we bake that right into one of our core cultural values. I think that that is absolutely critical to our ability to serve the broader tech community effectively. \n\nThe fact that we hold leaders to being right through having gone through a crucible of finding out how they're wrong, I think is magical and I think that's actually something that a lot more companies could think to do. It's like, you as a tech person and you think, “Oh, I'm going to go sell this great new widget to all of my tech buddies.” Okay. You might be right. But how could you make that bigger? How could you make that better? Like go, try to find out how you're wrong. That should be something we value everywhere. It's like, “No, I'm probably wrong. I want to be right.” So the way to get right is to find out every way I'm wrong and that means talk to everybody you can and find out.\n\nCASEY: From our conversation here, I'm picking up a couple of tools we have to help persuade people to get them to be louder, or more proactive at least. Data is one. Telling stories from other companies is another one. And then here, I'm picking up get your own stories that you can really tell from your point of view and that's maybe the strongest of the three, really. The change is you, too. I love that idea.\n\nJESS: Yeah. We had a internal conference this week, the networking summit, and there was a great session last night from somebody talking about what customers love and what customers hate about our products. He was just telling story after story about customers saying, “Oh, I'm so frustrated with this.” “I would love to change that.” \n\nThose stories, I think have so much more weight in our minds. Humans are evolved to tell the stories to each other. So if we have stories to tell, I think those are so much – they connect at a deeper level almost and they help us think about not just that top of brain logical, almost engineering, binary yes, no, but it's more this deeper heart level. “I understand the story that led to this position. I understand the human that feels this way.” \n\nPersonally, I think no matter how logical we think we are; [chuckles] we’re still walking bags of meat [laughs] and there's a lot to be said to respect that and to connect with that. So yeah, storytelling is huge.\n\nDAMIEN: You brought up, earlier in our conversation, about how things might be different with a different cultural paradigm. This is an enormous example of this. White Western culture overvalues logic and objectivity. It's a by-product of the culture and there's a conflation between objectivity and rationality and rightness. \n\nWeirdly enough, in my experience, that makes people less able to be rational and objective. It's quite amazing, ironic, and tragic. But if you follow the science, you follow the logic, you follow the rationality; what you'll discover is that humans are not naturally logical, rational beings. We are not rational beings that feel; we are feeling beings that rationalize. \n\nFrom the beginning from the birth of humans as a species, stories and communication have been how we navigate the world, how we see the world, how our beliefs and behaviors change and you can see that throughout all of history and it's the narratives that change everything. So that's something that is super important to have, to know and especially if you want to be effective. \n\nHaving grown up in this culture, though, it amuses me to no end how little I use that knowledge. [laughs] I argue with logic and facts and wonder why don't people don't understand when I have all the logic and facts that tell me that that's not going to change what they do. [laughs]\n\nJESS: Oh, yeah. Honestly, I think our political climate right now is representative of that because it's like, I don't know, I feel like it's so logical and factual, my political perspectives, and then I'll talk to somebody else and they feel the exact same way. Having been in media, I've seen like a lot of what we end up believing is how we sold it to ourselves and the stories that we've told around it and what we've paid attention to. We've listened to it. It's so easy to develop this cognitive filter on the stories that don't line up to your expectations. I don't know. This is, I think an area that engineers really overlook time and time again, is the power of media and the power of the stories that we tell. \n\nBeing a trans person, I didn't come out until I was in my late 30s because the stories, I grew up with of trans people were stories of serial killers, rapists, murderers, and people who were at the very edges of society and like, I'm like, “Well, I'm not that. I can't be trans.” [laughs] It wasn't until we had these news stories of love, or hate. Caitlyn Jenner, I think set a new story on the world and a lot of things changed around then where we were able to see ourselves in a light that wasn't just pain and I think that we've seen a lot more trans people come out because they're able to see themselves in these happier stories and better stories. \n\nSo we need more stories like that. Like Pose, I think is amazing and great stories of standing up in a hard place and owning your power, even under all this adversity, I think it's incredible. Those set of stories, I think are just so incredible for everybody and we just need so much more. I could rant for a while. [laughs]\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I'm totally on board with this as a queer man, I wasn't comfortable for a lot of my life being that because of the representation. I'm not into drag, but that's not a requirement.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nA friend of mine just shared a list of children's books that are incidentally queer and I just think that's so cool. The phrase, even. They're just regular storybooks, not about being queer as a topic, but just people doing normal stuff that happened to have including queer characters. \n\nJESS: I love that.\n\nCASEY: The world is changing.\n\nJESS: Yes, and I think we have a responsibility to be a part of that storytelling. Let's tell stories and it doesn't have to be a big deal that the person you’re talking about is a female engineer. No, she just happens to be an engineer. Let's tell stories where he has a husband. Who cares? He has a husband, it's great. It's not the focus of the story. It's just a part of the whole, the melior that we're in. That's really important. \n\nSo, I think a lot of normalizing – a lot of acceptance comes through normalization and honestly, it's so complicated because there's this tendency to whitewash when you go into this normalizing place. It's like, “Oh, I don't see skin tone.” No, I think that's not the way to do it. I think it's like there are differences in us, in our backgrounds, in our cultures, in our experiences, and that is incredible and that is wonderful, and it's not the story, but it's a part of the story and that's an important part.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, as a Black man, I've definitely seen this. I like to say Black Panther was the best thing that happened to African-Americans in the history of cinema. Get Out is another example. It's very much about the Black experience, but it's not the old story of what being Black in America is like and so, it's very different.\n\nJESS: Definitely. Yeah.\n\nCASEY: We're getting near the end of time we have today, let's shift gears into what we normally do at the end, our reflections. What's something that you're going to take away from this conversation? Jess, or Damien, who wants to go first?\n\nJESS: I'll start because I already wrote it down here. Damien, you said, “We are feeling beings that rationalize.” That is going to stick with me. That was profound. I love that and it's so obvious, I think but I'd never thought to think of it that way, or to say it that way. So I’ve got to think about that one for a while, but that's, I think really going to stick with me. Thank you.\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you, Jess. That's quite an honor. I can drag out like probably a half dozen off the top of my head, or a dozen probably store of scientific studies that show that. [laughs] I never get enough of them mostly because I've been rationalizing more.\n\nAnyway, my reflection is really on how technology impacts culture, both within the technologists and how that relates to storytelling, communication, and language. All those things are creating culture and all those things exist in technology, in between technologists, and that's how we can make our culture. It's something that I want it to be, or more like something I want it to be. So thank you.\n\nJESS: That's awesome.\n\nCASEY: I think my takeaway is I'm noticing that I said I'm very loud and outspoken about a lot of stuff, and I care a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially when I’m groups of people talking about it, I talk about that all the time. But can I and how can I take that loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don't always talk about it? Who can I approach and how can I tell who is more open to it or not? That's always a big open question for me. I guess, I'll be thinking about that especially this week.\n\nJESS: Well, this was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.\n\nDAMIEN: This was great, Jess. Thank you so much for joining us.\n\nJESS: Yeah, it was delightful.\n\nDAMIEN: I suppose this might be a good time to plug our Slack community, which is available to all Patreon for the podcast and also, all of our guests. So Jess, if you want to join us there and we can nerd out some more. I’ll keep throwing you instruments to try and stump you.\n\nJESS: Yes! Bring it on! [laughs]Special Guest: Jess Szmajda.","content_html":"01:22 - Jess’s Superpower: Playing ANY Instrument
\n\n06:03 - Language Community Ethos (MINASWAN)
\n\n13:24 - Inclusive Language: Language Matters
\n\n17:19 - Active Listening and Expressing Point-of-View, and Using Loudness
\n\n21:51 - Shining Light on Marginalized People & Voices
\n\n31:30 - Benefits of Having Diverse Teams (Resources) & Risks of Homogeneity
\n\n37:29 - Storytelling
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJess: We are feeling beings that rationalize.
\n\nDamien: How technology impacts culture.
\n\nCasey: Taking loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don’t always talk about it. Who is more open to it or not?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\n**Transcript::
\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 233 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I’m joined here with Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And I’m here with our guest today, Jess Szmajda.
\n\nJess is currently a senior leader at AWS in the EC2 Networking organization. Previously, she was the first female CTO of a major media organization, Axios, and before that, the co-founder and CTO at Optoro, which helps top tier retailers nationwide handle their returned and excess goods.
\n\nJess got her start in tech in the 90s writing Perl to configure Solaris machines. Over the years, she’s contributed to Open Source and organized a number of communities. These days, focusing on the DC Tech Slack and the DC-based Joy of Programming Meetup.
\n\nOutside of the tech world, Jess is a singer-songwriter, an improviser, a gamer, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a Mom to the most wonderful, Minecraft-obsessed 6-year-old imaginable.
\n\nWelcome Jess.
\n\nDAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jess.
\n\nJESS: Thank you! It's nice to be here.
\n\nDAMIEN: So I know someone has prepped you with our first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nJESS: My superpower is that I can play any instrument you hand me and I –
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh.
\n\nJESS: [laughs] I acquired it by being a giant nerd. [laughs] I went to a special music high school here in the DC area called Suitland High School and I played all kinds of different instruments. I was the principal bassoonist of the DC Youth Orchestra for a while. Music's always been a lifelong love of mine and it's been a mission to find every strange instrument I can find to figure out how it works. So it's challenge [chuckles] to find something that I can't play. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Oh, I'm so tempted and of course, the first thing I would have gone with is the double reed bassoon and oboe, but that's too easy.
\n\nJESS: That’s right.
\n\nDAMIEN: Banjo, of course, you’ve got steel drum.
\n\nJESS: Steel drum and plate, yeah.
\n\nDAMIEN: Cajon.
\n\nJESS: Cajon. Oh, I have heard of it.
\n\nDAMIEN: Aha!
\n\nJESS: I haven't actually touched one. I'll figure it out. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: It's particularly easy.
\n\nJESS: Nice. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: I don't know very many people who play more than just an instrument, or two. I think it might be like you and I are the two that come to mind for me, honestly.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI have an instrument in every color, by the way. That's the way I collect them.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESS: Nice.
\n\nCASEY: I’ve got a white accordion. How do you feel like this breadth of instrument ability has affected your life in other ways?
\n\nJESS: I don't know. That's an interesting question. How has it affected my life in other ways? I mean, there's the obvious tie into music and technology. There's such an incredible confluence of musicians who are engineers and vice versa.
\n\nI was actually talking to someone at the office earlier about that and she was theorizing it's because all of the patterns and rhythms that we think about and how that ties into a regular patterns and systems that we think about as engineers and I think it's a really interesting way to think about it, for sure.
\n\nI do think that there's a certain element of cross-culturalism that you get from learning other cultures instruments. Certainly, the berimbau, the Brazilian martial art? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Capoeira?
\n\nJESS: Capoeira, yeah. The capoeira, the berimbau instrument that has the long string and you have the little – I think you learn a lot about what led to developing an instrument so relatively simple, but creating such an incredible art form in the culture where people just wanted to dance and share their heritage with each other and picked up whatever they could find that would make interesting and fun sounds and created an entire culture around that.
\n\nSo for me, it's as much cultural exploration and understanding as it is anything. I think it's wonderful.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. That's really amazing. I had a tiny insight on this recently. I saw an amazing video about a Jimmy Hendrix song with the basic premise being, what key is this song in? It's a really difficult question because—and I'm going to go a little bit music nerd here—the tonic is e, but the chord progressions and the melodic signature doesn't really fit that. Amazing 20-minute video, but the end conclusion is that using Western art music tonality to describe blues music, American blues music, it's a different tonality. So it doesn't really make sense to say what major key is this in, or what minor key is this in.
\n\nJESS: Yeah, totally.
\n\nMy partner and I, this morning, we were watching a video about Coltrane's classic—my favorite thing is interpretation in the 60s—and how he's basically playing between these major and minor tonalities constantly. It's not necessarily tonal from the Western sense, but it’s certainly beautiful and I think it's certainly approachable and understandable to any ear regardless of how you decompose it. Anyway, giant music nerd, sorry. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, but it ties so closely to what you were talking about as an instrument being cultural. The guitar, the five-string guitar, is tuned for American music, which is a slightly different tonality from Western European music. So when you think about “Okay, well, that's very slightly different. Now, what is it like in Africa, in Australia, in Asia?” Then it gets all, it's got to be very, very different.
\n\nJESS: Oh, yeah. I saw this guy in Turkey, he's modified a guitar to add quarter tones to it because a lot of Turkish music uses quarter tones and so, it's just like the fretboard is wild. It has all of these extra frets on it and he plays it. It's absolutely incredible, but it's wild. It's amazing.
\n\nDAMIEN: So I want to tie this into different cultures, frameworks, and technology. How about that?
\n\nJESS: Yeah, you bet, let's do it. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Good segue.
\n\nJESS: So actually, that's something that's been on my mind is this Ruby community diaspora in a way. I know Greater Than Code has a lot of Ruby folks on it and I'm not sure about the latest incarnation, but definitely a lot of Ruby roots. I think that we've seen this incredible mixing of culture in the Ruby community that I haven't seen in other places that drives this – well, I think [inaudible], it's a really fantastic way to sum it up like, math is nice and so we are nice.
\n\nAs much as that might be a justification to be nice, be nice anyway, but it's still this ethos of we are nice to each other, we care, and that is baked into the community and my journeys and other language communities, I think haven't shared that perspective that it is good to be nice in general and some of them even are, I think are focused on it's good to fight. [laughs]
\n\nSo I've been really curious about this movement, Rubius’s movement into other language areas, like Go, Rust, and Alexa, et cetera, et cetera, how much of that carries forward and what really can we do to drive that?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. So my question is how does a technological community, what is it about the community? What is about the technology? Why is it different? You and I both wrote Pearl in the 90s and so, that is a very different community. I look at Ruby and I write mostly Ruby now and I go, “Why is it different? What's different about it?”
\n\nJESS: Yeah, no, it's a good question. A lot of the early conversation that I remember in the Ruby community was—and just contextually, I've been using Ruby since 2006, or so, so that era. A lot of the early conversation I remember was about develop the language to optimize for developer happiness. I think that's a really unique take and I haven't heard of that in any other place. So I'm wondering how much that might've been the beginnings of this. I don't know.
\n\nDAMIEN: Something came up in a Twitter conversation, I saw a while back where they compared Ruby and Pearl, I'm pretty sure it was Pearl and well, one of the defining features of Pearl was that there's more than one way to do it and Ruby has that same ethos. Literally, in the standard lib, there’s a lot of aliases and synonyms. It's like, you can call pop, or drop and I can't keep it straight. [chuckles]
\n\nBut anyway, then I thought to myself, “Well, in Pearl, that's an absolute disaster.” I pull up a profile and I'm like, “I don't know what this is because I don't know what's going on.” Whereas, in Ruby, I've loved it so much and so, what's the difference and the difference pointed out to me was that in Ruby, it was for expressiveness. Things have different names so that they can properly express, or better express the intention and in Pearl, that wasn't the case.
\n\nJESS: Yeah, no, totally. I think actually looking at Ruby and Python, I think were both heavily influenced by Pearl and I think Python definitely took the path of well, all of this nonsense is just nonsense. Let's just have one way to do it. [laughs]
\n\nHaving worked with some Python developers, I think that perspective on there is one correct path really drives that community in a lot of ways. I think some people find that releasing really simplifying for them because they're like, “I got it. I know the answer.” Like it's a math problem almost.
\n\nAs a Rubyist going into the Python community, I was like, “Oh, I'm so stifled.” [laughs] Where is my expressiveness?! I want to write inject, or oh, I can't even think of the opposite of inject. Collect. [laughs] Those are two different words for me. I want to be able to write both, depending on what I'm doing so.
\n\nIt's also interesting, like I see a lot more DSL development in Ruby than I see in any other language and maybe Alexa also. But I think that also comes from the same perspective of there is not one right way to do it. There's the best way for this problem and there's the best way for this kind of communication you're trying to drive.
\n\nIt's interesting, as I'm talking myself into a corner here a bit, Ruby almost emphasizes the communication of code more than the solving of the problem and I think that might actually help drive this community where we care about the other humans we're working with, because we're always thinking about how we communicate with them in a way.
\n\nCASEY: I think about the term human-centered design a lot lately and that's becoming more and more popular term, a way to describe this thing. Ruby totally did that. Ruby looked at how can we make this easy for humans to use and work with and I think that's beautiful.
\n\nI keep thinking about a paper I read a long time ago that a professor made-up programming language and varied features of it like, white space matters, or not, and a whole bunch of those and measured which ones were easier for new people to learn and which ones were harder for new people to learn. As a teacher, I want to use whatever is easy for the students to learn so they can get their feet wet, so they can start learning and building and doing things and get excited about it, not get hung up on the syntax.
\n\nSo human-centered design baked into Ruby is, I think partly why the community is so human-centered. I think you're exactly right.
\n\nJESS: Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a large part of why the Joy of Programming Meetup, I think has been really fun is we get to learn from how different language communities build things. I think it was founded on that kind of thinking is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis for better, or worse theorizes language shapes thought and I think that that is to some degree, at least true in how we think about writing code and solving problems.
\n\nSo the kinds of solutions that you see from different language communities, I think very incredibly. I don't know, even just as simple as from like J2EE, which is the ivory tower of purity in XML [laughs] to obviously, I don't want to pick on Rails, but Rails is an open system. [laughs] An interpretive dance, perhaps. I think it's really interesting, the web frameworks even I see in Haskell almost feel like I'm solving a math problem more than I'm creating an API, or delivering content into somebody.
\n\nSo it's hard for me to separate, is this a community of thought of people who are attracted to a certain way of solving problems? Is this driven by the structure and format of the language? I don't know.
\n\nDAMIEN: I know you mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and their research has been shown to be problematic.
\n\nJESS: Yeah, for sure.
\n\nDAMIEN: [laughs] But I will say that the hypothesis is that language shapes thought and I would say that the correct state – correct [chuckles] a better description for me is that language is thoughts and so, the language you use is the sort of things you're thinking about. So if you say inject when you mean collect, those are different things, you're going to get different things out of them. This is why we use get annotate instead of get playing.
\n\nJESS: For sure. Exactly. So at AWS, this is big drive and I'm not speaking for AWS on this, I'm just speaking for me. But I'm noticing this drive for inclusive language and I think it's really beautiful.
\n\nConnecting that drive, frankly, in the broader tech community to everything that's been going on in this last year in how we interact with each other as humans from different backgrounds, et cetera. It's like, what kinds of dominant culture paradigms have we baked into our code beyond even the very obviously problematic statements, but just the way that we think about, I don't know. Part of me is like, “Well, is object-oriented design driven by certain cultural expectations that we have, or functional?” I don't know. What paradigms would we get if we'd have had a different dominant culture developing technology? I don't know. It's fascinating.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, and [inaudible] is an excellent example of that. It's a punishment. This is wrong. I did a whole talk several years ago about specifications versus tests. I don't want you to write tests for your code; tests are something you do afterwards to see if something is suitable. Write a specification and then if the code and specifications don't match, well, one of them needs to change. [laughs]
\n\nJESS: That's right. I love that. That's also kind of like the Pact Contract Testing space. It's like, I like this framework because it allows a consumer of an API to say, “This is what I expect you to do,” and then the API almost has to comply. Whenever I've talked about Pact, I think with a lot of developers, they're like, “Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense at all.” I'm like, “Well, no.” In a way, it's like the API’s prerogative to deliver what the customer expects and to be always right. The customer is right here, in this case and I think it's a really great way to look at this differently.
\n\nCASEY: That should totally be the tagline for Pact: the consumer is always right.
\n\nJESS: I love it. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Another way language shapes things, I noticed lately is Valheim is a super popular game where you're a Viking and building houses. There's a command you can type called “imacheater” that lets you spawn in equipment and building materials. On all the forums online, people are harassing each other for doing their own creative mode for spawning stuff in because of that language, I suspect. So in a recent patch, they changed it from imacheater to devtools, or something like that and the forums have rebranded. There's a new moderator is posting things and the culture is completely changing because the devs changed that one word in the changelog and it's just so cool to see language matters.
\n\nJESS: That's amazing. That's so cool. Actually, I'm totally hooked on Valheim also along with probably everybody else. I have my own little server with some friends. Anyway, we noticed on the Valheim server that there was somebody who sort of redid the loading screen and they really hypersexualized the female character in the painting and actually got a surprising amount of feedback like saying, “Please don't do that. We love Valheim because it's not clearly gendered, or particularly one way, or the other,” and the artist actually took that feedback to heart and put together a much better version of the thing where the woman was very well armored and looked ready for battle and it was really cool.
\n\nI've been thinking about the whole tech community and there's so many connections to the gamer community as well. Ever since Gamergate, I think we've been putting a really hard light on this whole world. It's just so heartwarming and incredible to know that like this Viking destroying trolls game has people who actually care enough to say, “No, let's pay attention to what that woman's wearing. Make sure she wears something that's actually reasonable.” That's cool. We've come a long way. I mean, not perfect, but it's a long way.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, a long way. I always think about progress in terms of people in four groups. There's like people who are vocally for something like they would speak up in this case, people who are vocally against it, and then quiet people who are for, or against it. We can see the vocal people who are supporting this now and I love to think about how many people are moving in that direction who are quiet; we can't see. That's the big cultural shift under the covers.
\n\nJESS: Yeah. That's a big question. That makes me think about when I was at Optoro, we were trying to understand our employee engagement and so, we used this tool, Culture Amp, which I imagine a lot of people have seen. We did a survey and we got all this data and it's like, “Hey, everybody's really engaged. Maybe there's a couple of minor things we can fix.”
\n\nBut then we were talking to some of our Black employees—those of you who can't see me, I'm white—and there was just a lot of like, “Wow, this doesn't represent us.” Like, “What are you doing? We actually aren't don't feel like this is a really great representation.” We're like, “Well, the data says everything's fine.”
\n\nSo what we actually did, the next survey we ran, we included demographic data in the dataset and then we were able to distribute the data across racial demographics and we saw, oh no, our Black employees are pretty much all pissed off. [laughs] We've done a really bad job of including them for a lot of reasons. For example, we had a warehouse and most of our Black employees worked in the warehouse and it turns out that we had a very corporate-based culture and we didn't pay enough attention and we didn't really engage everybody. The fact that they were basically all in the warehouse is kind of also a problem, too.
\n\nSo there was a lot of really great eye-opening things that we got to see by paying attention to that and looking not just at our Black employees, but all our different demographics. We learned a lot and I think we had a real humbling moment and got to listen, but it's really this quiet – either people who don't use their voice, or can't use their voice, or maybe don't know how to use their voice in a lot of different ways. These people, I think make such an incredible impact on the true feeling of a place, of a community, of a company and really sitting down and listening to those people, I think can be really hard in any position.
\n\nSo I was really happy we were able to do that, but I think you're totally right, Casey, that it's not just moving the vocal people to really change the Overton window, I suppose on what's acceptable in a community. But it's fundamentally, how do you change the people who you aren't hearing from? How do you frankly even know?
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, it's a big question. There's no easy answer. There's a lot of approaches. I'm glad people are talking about that in the meta sense, that's huge. We want to do this as a community, but there's work to be done and then even once people are comfortable expressing their point of view, there are then further tiers we're going to have to go through like that other people around them understand. They're actively listening and they internalize it. And then beyond that, actually acting on it.
\n\nI've had experiences at work where I'm usually very confident, I'll say my point of view regardless of the context. I like being outspoken like that and represent quieter people, but often leadership and other people around me don't understand, or even if they do, they don't incorporate that into the plan and then everybody is still very frustrated, maybe even more so in a way, because a light is shining on this problem. And that's the same for marginalized voices. If they can just be heard, that's great, but we have to go farther than that, too.
\n\nJESS: I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that I struggle with sometimes. I love people. I'm very extroverted. I'm very gregarious, [laughs] as I imagine you can tell, and I like to engage with people and I try to listen, but I find that sometimes I have a big personality and that can be tough, [laughs] I think sometimes. So I super value people you Casey, for example, who I think are much better listeners [laughs] and are willing to represent that. So that's huge.
\n\nI also, though on the flip side, I know that I can use that loudness to help represent at least one aspect of marginalized people. I'm trans and I'm super loud about that and I'm very happy to make all kinds of noise and say, “Don't forget about trans rights!” [laughs] Frankly, I think it's kind of a wedge into I'm one kind of marginalized community, I represent one kind of marginalized community, but there's a lot more and let's talk about that, too. Not to toot my horn, but like I think those of us who are allowed to have a responsibility to use our loudness in a way that I think supports people and also, to listen when we can.
\n\nDAMIEN: Can we explore a bit into the into the metal problem of hearing from marginalized voices? I'm an engineer at heart, first and foremost, and so, how do we solve this meta problem? You gave a good example with the survey separated by demographics knowing that racial and gender demographics, or well, finding out that [chuckles] racial and gender demographics were important factors than you think, but how do we solve this on a broader issue? I don't know.
\n\nJESS: No, that's a great question. I think we have so much calcified thinking that at every organization and every place in the world, there's so much like, “Well, this is the way we've done things,” and frankly, it's not even, “This is the way we've done things.” It's just, “This is the way it works and this is what we do,” and just thinking outside the box, I think it's hard. Finding these areas that we are being blind to in the first place, I think it takes a certain amount of just metacognition and patience and self-reflection, and that's very difficult to do, I think for any human.
\n\nBut driving that shows like this, for example, making sure that people care and think about these kinds of problems and maybe take a second. You as a listener, I'm going to challenge you for a second, take a minute at the end of this podcast and think about what am I not thinking about? I don't know, it's a really freaking hard question, but maybe you might find something.
\n\nBut it's politicians, it's media, it's our leaders in every aspect making sure that we shine a light on something that is different, something that is marginalized, I think is incredibly valuable. That's a first step. But then playing that through everything else we do, that's hard. I think it falls on leaders in every realm that we have like, community leaders, conference organizers, people who lead major open source projects. Making sure that people say, “I believe that Black Lives Matter.” “I believe that we should stand against violence against the Asian community.” Those, I think are powerful statements and saying, “Hey, have we heard from somebody that doesn't look like us lately, who doesn't come from our same socioeconomic educational background?” It's tough.
\n\nI had food, but I grew up relatively poor, and I think even that is such a huge difference of experience and background to a lot of people that I end up working with and I've been able to talk about like, “How are we setting prices?” Well, who are we actually thinking about? We're not thinking about ourselves here. We're thinking about a different market. Let's make sure we talk to those people. Let's make sure we talk to our customers and make sure that this actually works for them.
\n\nI was really proud. At Optoro, we built a new brand called BULQ where we took – so 2 seconds on Optoro. We took returns and excess goods from major retailers and helped them get more value out of it and a a lot of the time, we built great classification systems to say, “Oh, well this is a belt and I know how to price belts because I can look on eBay and Amazon and determine, et cetera.” But a lot of the times we couldn't build these kinds of models, like auto parts, for example, were notoriously difficult for us. So we could say, “Oh, this is an auto part. But I don’t know, carburetor, manifold? Who knows?” [laughs]
\n\nSo we were able to classify them as auto parts and then we put them into these cases, maybe like 3-foot square large boxes, and then we were able to sell those in lots to basically individual people who had time to learn what they were and then could resell them.
\n\nThe story that I love to tell here is they're a laid-off auto factory worker, knows a ton about auto parts, and can probably scrounge up enough money to afford this $200 to $300 box, brings it to their house, knows exactly what these parts are and knows exactly what the value is and then can resell them for like 3x to 5x on what this person bought them for.
\n\nI was so proud to be able to have created this kind of entrepreneurial opportunity for people that we would otherwise often forget about because so much of tech, I think is focused on us. So, it's an interesting thing kind of being at AWS, which is very much a tech for tech company. I love it, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I think these opportunities to listen to the rest of the world, we miss out on.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. You challenged us to ask ourselves the question, what are we not thinking about and that level of metacognition sounds impossible. It might be impossible. It's close to impossible, if it's not. So I can't help to think the only way to really get that knowledge, that insight is to get people who are different from me, who have different backgrounds, who have different life experiences.
\n\nYou got a great example of someone who knows a lot about car parts, bring them in, they have years of experience in car parts and they can do this stuff that you can't do. But then also, along every axis, if you look around. If you look around the leadership and go, “Oh, there's nobody in leadership here who has this type of experience,” that knowledge, that insight and people like that are not going to be served because it's impossible for them. They don't even know. They can't know.
\n\nJESS: Could not agree more and it is leadership. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. So many times I've seen, having been a leader, ultimately, you end up in a room with other leaders and you end up making decisions. And if you don't have other voices in there, if you don't have diverse voices, you don't get that benefit. Even if you've gone to the trouble of paying attention to diverse voices beforehand, there's always some data, some argument that comes up and it's like, “Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.” Yeah, I cannot agree enough.
\n\nThis is the other flip side of that is that as a business leader, I have to think about prioritizing the outcomes of the business, it is a fact of my position and I like to think that I work in a lot more data to what that means than other business leaders perhaps. Like, impact on the community. [laughs] Impact on the people.
\n\nBut a lot of times, we'll be having these discussions about who to hire and maybe we'll have done a really great job—and this isn't specific to any particular company that I'm talking about, but I know that this kind of thing happens. Maybe we've done a really great job of getting a diverse pipeline and having talked to a bunch of different kinds of candidates, but when it comes down to it, we're trying to make often the lowest risk decision on who to hire and so often, we are too risk averse to somebody whose background doesn't quite line up to what we're expecting, or to what we think we need.
\n\nI like to think that I push hiring communities in conversations like that and say like, “Look, let's think beyond what's risky here and factor in more of these aspects to the conversation of getting diverse voices.” But too often, it's very easy, I think for leaders to think, “Well, we’re just going to hire the known quantity,” and I think that is again, on the meta, a major thing that we need to fix. There's so much more to being an effective leader than having the standard pedigree.
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, there's also, like you mentioned, the risk aversion to not want to hire somebody who's not like all the other people, but then what are the huge risks of having only people who are alike in certain aspects?
\n\nJESS: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. I think there's tons of examples. If we Google right now, we'd find like companies have made really dumb mistakes because they didn't have somebody in the room who could be like, “That?” The first one that comes to mind is the Chevy Nova, they tried to sell that in Spanish speaking countries, [laughter] “doesn't go,” “not going anywhere.” [laughs] I mean, like that could have been avoided, right? [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Nova.
\n\nJESS: Nova. That might be a trivializing one, but there's been a lot worse and that's a major business risk and I think those arguments carry some weight. I love that so many organizations are prioritizing hiring more diverse leaders, especially, but this is deep pattern that we've gotten into.
\n\nSo that actually comes to mind when you're thinking about how to change your mental patterns. I'm an improviser, I'm all about trying to change my mental patterns all the time so I can try to be creative. Obviously, there's plenty of silly improv games that you get into, but something that's simple, I think that anybody can do is go for a walk and take a different path. Just turn a different way than how you used to.
\n\nWe, humans love to get into patterns, especially engineers, which I find to be highly ironic. Engineers are all about creating change, but don't like change themselves typically. [laughs] But do something a little different, turn left instead of right today, look up instead of down. Those, I think subtle physical changes really do influence our mental states and I think that can actually lead us to thinking in new ways.
\n\nCASEY: I love it. That's very actionable. I've been doing a lot of walks and hikes and I actually try to go to a different hiking location each time because of that. I think about that idea all the time, take a different path, and it is great. Every time I do it, I feel amazing. I don’t know, more flexible, I think differently. Yeah, try it, listeners. I dare you.
\n\nJESS: I love it.
\n\nCASEY: I'm sure there are papers written showing that having diverse teams have very measured effects, a whole bunch of them, more than I know more, than I've read. Well, I guess first of all, I don't know that the data has been collected in a single spot I can point people to and that would be pretty powerful. But then secondly, even if we had that, I'm not sure that's enough to change minds at companies in any widespread way. It might just help some people, who already care, say their message very clearly.
\n\nDo you know of anything like that Jess, or Damien, either of you? What's the one resource you would send to someone who wants to be equipped with diversity and inclusion data?
\n\nJESS: Yeah. This study McKinsey did a while ago that, I think gets a lot of traction here where they demonstrated the companies have better total performance with more diverse groups of people and went into some depth with data. I think it's a fantastic study. It's definitely one that I reference often. I've used it to change minds among people who were like, “Wow, what's it really matter?” No, I’ve got data. [laughs]
\n\nI know. I can see Casey here on video and Casey's mouth just went open [laughs] It's like, “Yes, no, it's, that's real.” No shade on the people I've worked with, I love them, but like, this is such a thing. There are cynics in corporate leadership who want to focus on profit and sometimes, you have to make a cynical argument in business and a cynical argument can come down to data and this data says, “No, look, if we get more people in here who look different from us, we're going to make more money and that's good for you and your bottom line.” So sometimes you have to walk the argument back to that, even if it feels gross and it does, it's like, “No, this actually matters to your bottom line.”
\n\nDAMIEN: That's a great argument and it's a positive argument. In my view of corporations, I feel like the larger they get, the more you have an agency problem where people aren't looking to take risks to get the positive benefits, they're going to do things to avoid backlash and negative things. So I think larger company, more middle management, more people you’re answerable to, especially on the short-term, the more people are better motivated by fear.
\n\nSo for that, I want to pull out like, what are the risks of homogeneity? You mentioned the Nova. You mentioned like, oh, there was – [laughs] I pull this out far too often. There was an AI image classifier that classified Black people as gorillas. There was a store. Oh goodness, I think it was an Apple store. Beautiful, beautiful architecture, glass everywhere, including the stairs. These are all the harms that come from homogeneity. [laughs] What was the expensive fixing those stairs? It couldn't have been cheap.
\n\nJESS: Oh my gosh. [chuckles] I don't even wear skirts that often. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: And I know that's a problem because when I heard that story, I was multiple paragraphs in before I realized the problem. I wear skirts less than you, I'm sure.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESS: For sure. Oh, that's amazing.
\n\nYeah, I think those stories are really important for us to be able to tell and to share with each other because diversity matters. I think it's easy to say that and especially among people who care, people who prioritize it. We almost take it as like a, “Well, of course,” but I think there is still, getting back to that quiet group of people who don't say what they actually think, there's a lot of people who are on the fence, or maybe frankly disagree. It's like, “Well, you can disagree and I respect your disagreement, but here's the data, here's the results, here's the impact. Let's talk about that. Do you have a better way to handle this? Because I don't.”
\n\nDAMIEN: So I think the risk is especially acute in tech companies and in tech for tech companies where things are far more homogeneous. Next week on how to pronounce these words. [laughs] So what can we do? Is there anything special that we can do in those sort of environments?
\n\nJESS: Yeah. Well, besides have the conversation, which I think is something we can all do. Not to fangirl too much about Amazon, but I really do like the company and I'm really enjoying my experience. A lot of it comes down to how we've expressed our leadership principles. We say this is our culture and our values and we actually apply it constantly like, if you ever come to talk to an Amazon person, I'm going to tell you about how I've disagreed and committed and what I'm doing to think big and how I'm customer obsessed. I'm going to talk about those things directly.
\n\nTo this, we say one of our leadership principles is that leaders are right a lot and that feels weird, right? Leaders are right a lot? “Oh, I just happen to know everything.” No, that's not what that means. We actually go into it in more depth and it's like leaders look to disconfirm their beliefs and seek diverse perspectives and we bake that right into one of our core cultural values. I think that that is absolutely critical to our ability to serve the broader tech community effectively.
\n\nThe fact that we hold leaders to being right through having gone through a crucible of finding out how they're wrong, I think is magical and I think that's actually something that a lot more companies could think to do. It's like, you as a tech person and you think, “Oh, I'm going to go sell this great new widget to all of my tech buddies.” Okay. You might be right. But how could you make that bigger? How could you make that better? Like go, try to find out how you're wrong. That should be something we value everywhere. It's like, “No, I'm probably wrong. I want to be right.” So the way to get right is to find out every way I'm wrong and that means talk to everybody you can and find out.
\n\nCASEY: From our conversation here, I'm picking up a couple of tools we have to help persuade people to get them to be louder, or more proactive at least. Data is one. Telling stories from other companies is another one. And then here, I'm picking up get your own stories that you can really tell from your point of view and that's maybe the strongest of the three, really. The change is you, too. I love that idea.
\n\nJESS: Yeah. We had a internal conference this week, the networking summit, and there was a great session last night from somebody talking about what customers love and what customers hate about our products. He was just telling story after story about customers saying, “Oh, I'm so frustrated with this.” “I would love to change that.”
\n\nThose stories, I think have so much more weight in our minds. Humans are evolved to tell the stories to each other. So if we have stories to tell, I think those are so much – they connect at a deeper level almost and they help us think about not just that top of brain logical, almost engineering, binary yes, no, but it's more this deeper heart level. “I understand the story that led to this position. I understand the human that feels this way.”
\n\nPersonally, I think no matter how logical we think we are; [chuckles] we’re still walking bags of meat [laughs] and there's a lot to be said to respect that and to connect with that. So yeah, storytelling is huge.
\n\nDAMIEN: You brought up, earlier in our conversation, about how things might be different with a different cultural paradigm. This is an enormous example of this. White Western culture overvalues logic and objectivity. It's a by-product of the culture and there's a conflation between objectivity and rationality and rightness.
\n\nWeirdly enough, in my experience, that makes people less able to be rational and objective. It's quite amazing, ironic, and tragic. But if you follow the science, you follow the logic, you follow the rationality; what you'll discover is that humans are not naturally logical, rational beings. We are not rational beings that feel; we are feeling beings that rationalize.
\n\nFrom the beginning from the birth of humans as a species, stories and communication have been how we navigate the world, how we see the world, how our beliefs and behaviors change and you can see that throughout all of history and it's the narratives that change everything. So that's something that is super important to have, to know and especially if you want to be effective.
\n\nHaving grown up in this culture, though, it amuses me to no end how little I use that knowledge. [laughs] I argue with logic and facts and wonder why don't people don't understand when I have all the logic and facts that tell me that that's not going to change what they do. [laughs]
\n\nJESS: Oh, yeah. Honestly, I think our political climate right now is representative of that because it's like, I don't know, I feel like it's so logical and factual, my political perspectives, and then I'll talk to somebody else and they feel the exact same way. Having been in media, I've seen like a lot of what we end up believing is how we sold it to ourselves and the stories that we've told around it and what we've paid attention to. We've listened to it. It's so easy to develop this cognitive filter on the stories that don't line up to your expectations. I don't know. This is, I think an area that engineers really overlook time and time again, is the power of media and the power of the stories that we tell.
\n\nBeing a trans person, I didn't come out until I was in my late 30s because the stories, I grew up with of trans people were stories of serial killers, rapists, murderers, and people who were at the very edges of society and like, I'm like, “Well, I'm not that. I can't be trans.” [laughs] It wasn't until we had these news stories of love, or hate. Caitlyn Jenner, I think set a new story on the world and a lot of things changed around then where we were able to see ourselves in a light that wasn't just pain and I think that we've seen a lot more trans people come out because they're able to see themselves in these happier stories and better stories.
\n\nSo we need more stories like that. Like Pose, I think is amazing and great stories of standing up in a hard place and owning your power, even under all this adversity, I think it's incredible. Those set of stories, I think are just so incredible for everybody and we just need so much more. I could rant for a while. [laughs]
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. I'm totally on board with this as a queer man, I wasn't comfortable for a lot of my life being that because of the representation. I'm not into drag, but that's not a requirement.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nA friend of mine just shared a list of children's books that are incidentally queer and I just think that's so cool. The phrase, even. They're just regular storybooks, not about being queer as a topic, but just people doing normal stuff that happened to have including queer characters.
\n\nJESS: I love that.
\n\nCASEY: The world is changing.
\n\nJESS: Yes, and I think we have a responsibility to be a part of that storytelling. Let's tell stories and it doesn't have to be a big deal that the person you’re talking about is a female engineer. No, she just happens to be an engineer. Let's tell stories where he has a husband. Who cares? He has a husband, it's great. It's not the focus of the story. It's just a part of the whole, the melior that we're in. That's really important.
\n\nSo, I think a lot of normalizing – a lot of acceptance comes through normalization and honestly, it's so complicated because there's this tendency to whitewash when you go into this normalizing place. It's like, “Oh, I don't see skin tone.” No, I think that's not the way to do it. I think it's like there are differences in us, in our backgrounds, in our cultures, in our experiences, and that is incredible and that is wonderful, and it's not the story, but it's a part of the story and that's an important part.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, as a Black man, I've definitely seen this. I like to say Black Panther was the best thing that happened to African-Americans in the history of cinema. Get Out is another example. It's very much about the Black experience, but it's not the old story of what being Black in America is like and so, it's very different.
\n\nJESS: Definitely. Yeah.
\n\nCASEY: We're getting near the end of time we have today, let's shift gears into what we normally do at the end, our reflections. What's something that you're going to take away from this conversation? Jess, or Damien, who wants to go first?
\n\nJESS: I'll start because I already wrote it down here. Damien, you said, “We are feeling beings that rationalize.” That is going to stick with me. That was profound. I love that and it's so obvious, I think but I'd never thought to think of it that way, or to say it that way. So I’ve got to think about that one for a while, but that's, I think really going to stick with me. Thank you.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thank you, Jess. That's quite an honor. I can drag out like probably a half dozen off the top of my head, or a dozen probably store of scientific studies that show that. [laughs] I never get enough of them mostly because I've been rationalizing more.
\n\nAnyway, my reflection is really on how technology impacts culture, both within the technologists and how that relates to storytelling, communication, and language. All those things are creating culture and all those things exist in technology, in between technologists, and that's how we can make our culture. It's something that I want it to be, or more like something I want it to be. So thank you.
\n\nJESS: That's awesome.
\n\nCASEY: I think my takeaway is I'm noticing that I said I'm very loud and outspoken about a lot of stuff, and I care a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially when I’m groups of people talking about it, I talk about that all the time. But can I and how can I take that loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don't always talk about it? Who can I approach and how can I tell who is more open to it or not? That's always a big open question for me. I guess, I'll be thinking about that especially this week.
\n\nJESS: Well, this was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
\n\nDAMIEN: This was great, Jess. Thank you so much for joining us.
\n\nJESS: Yeah, it was delightful.
\n\nDAMIEN: I suppose this might be a good time to plug our Slack community, which is available to all Patreon for the podcast and also, all of our guests. So Jess, if you want to join us there and we can nerd out some more. I’ll keep throwing you instruments to try and stump you.
\n\nJESS: Yes! Bring it on! [laughs]
Special Guest: Jess Szmajda.
","summary":"Jess Szmajda talks about the importance of using inclusive language, active listening, and metacognition: asking ourselves, “What are we not thinking about?” when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion.","date_published":"2021-05-05T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9327c242-8176-4eb0-a76e-4bc72b7a0793.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35448102,"duration_in_seconds":2844}]},{"id":"0edb6156-e1af-4700-b2fd-4f1a0c7f0244","title":"232: Outside The Charmed Circle with Tamsin Davis-Langley","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/outside-the-charmed-circle","content_text":"01:17 - Tamsin’s Superpower: Recognizing Songs Within Seconds\n\n05:08 - Outside the Charmed Circle (Tamsin’s book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality)\n\n\nThe Pagan Community\n“Necessarily Brief”\n\n\n09:09 - Consent in the Mentor/Mentee Relationship (Master/Apprentice)\n\n\nThe Universal Attribution Fallacy\nAccess\nPower Dynamics\nConflicts of Interest\nThe Word “Politics” - how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one\n\n\n16:57 - Using Certain Phrases (i.e. “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture”) and Divisiveness\n\n\nObfuscation\nWe Hate You Now: The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes \nSocial Contracts\n\n\n23:46 - What Is A Person? Individuality & Personhood\n\n\nPlato & Aristotle\nWomen, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff\nHegemonic Norms, Privilege & Power\n\n\n30:01 - “Fringe Communities”; Subcultures and Intersection\n\n\nHow Buildings Learn: Edge Cities\nThe Queer Community\n\n\nUsing the Word “Queer”\nGatekeeping\n\nFear of Powerlessness\nThe Relationship Between Radicals and Reactionaries\n“Outside The Charmed Circle”\n\n\nGayle S. Rubin: Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality \n\n\n\n44:30 - Individual Experiences Are Not Universally Applicable\n\n\nGetting People to Care About Other People\nTeaching Empathy\nLess Hubris, Gatekeeping, and Self-Reinforcing Superiority\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you.\n\nRein: What are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? Helping.\n\nHelping by Edgar H. Schein\n\nTamsin: The dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren’t that dissimilar from one group to another.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 232 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jamey. That is a lot of episodes. I’m here with our guest, Tamsin Davis-Langley who is a white, queer, nonbinary trans femme from a multiethnic family who grew up poor. They spent most of their adult work life as the tech-savvy person in a non-technical office, and are now pursuing a career in digital communications. \n\nTheir academic path began in liberal arts, detoured through computer science, and ended with a degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Their work explores the ways subcultural communities intersect with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. They've written about how the problems of abuse and predation in subcultures are linked to the power dynamics inherent in those groups. Under their nom de plume, Misha Magdalene, they're the author of Outside the Charmed Circle, a book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality.\n\nTamsin, welcome to the show.\n\nTAMSIN: Thank you so much! It’s a delight to be here.\n\nREIN: So you know what we’re going to ask you.\n\n[laughter]\n\nWhat is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nTAMSIN: My superpower is that I can, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, listen to the radio and identify the song that's playing within 5 seconds, or so if it was recorded within a specific window of time and basically falls under the very broad umbrella of Western pop music. \n\nThis happened because I was bitten by a radioactive record store employee back in the 80s and since then, I've been able to go, “Oh yeah, that's Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. It's on Who's Next released 1972. Produced by Glen's Johns,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is a delightful party trick for getting people to suddenly realize they want to talk to someone else at the party.\n\nJAMEY: I was about to ask – [overtalk]\n\nREIN: How do you remember all of that? \n\nTAMSIN: How do I remember all of that? I have no idea. I literally could not tell you what I had for dinner last night and I'm in the midst of training sessions for a position that I'm pursuing in digital communications and half the time I'm going, “What was the command to do the things so that I can function?” But I can literally tell you the brand of bass guitar that Paul McCartney played in The Beatles, or the kind of keyboard that Kate Bush used when she was recording her albums in the late 70s and early 80s was a Hohner, a violin-shaped bass, and a Fairlight synthesizer, respectively.\n\n[chuckles]\n\nJAMEY: I can relate to this because I often think about how many other things I could know if I freed up all of the space in my brain where I kept the names of all the Pokémon.\n\nTAMSIN: Right, right. I want to defrag my own brain and just throw out huge chunks of permanent storage, but no.\n\nJAMEY: Do you use your superpower for good, or for evil?\n\nTAMSIN: In finest, strong, bad tradition, I try to use my powers only for good, or for awesome. I have actually used it to further my career. I did work for a little while at a Musicland, back when those existed, and later at a Tower Records, back when those existed. \n\nFor younger listeners, those were both brick and mortar stores where you could go in and buy music on physical media and occasionally, accessories that were associated with bands, or musicians that you liked and people would walk in and say things like, “I'm trying to find a CD by this band and I don't know the name of the band, or the name of the song, or any of the lyrics, but it's got this bit in it that goes “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh” and I went, “Bad to the Bone, George Thurogood & the Delaware Destroyers. Here's their Best Of. Thank you.” So that's the extent to which my superpower operates for good, or for awesome.\n\nREIN: That reminds me, there was a librarian who worked at The London Library, which has about a million books, for 40 years and could do a very similar thing where they knew what book someone was looking for better than that person did.\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. That kind of talent always delights me when I find it out in the wild where I'm like, “Yeah, I was looking for this book. It kind of was about this thing and I remember it had sort of a teal cover. Oh, here you go.” Yeah, it's kind of an amazing and wonderful thing to see, but then I do it and I feel really self-conscious, so. [laughs]\n\nREIN: So, speaking of books, graceful segue.\n\nTAMSIN: Yes. Speaking of books.\n\nREIN: Tell us a little bit about the book that you wrote.\n\nTAMSIN: I can, yes. So when I was finishing up my degree at the University of Washington in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to apply the concepts and the tools that I was learning in my degree program to my actual day-to-day life. It's all well and good when you're in the ivory tower of academia to talk about intersectionality and hegemonic norms of sexuality, or gender, but how does that actually play out in your work life, or in your family dynamic? Or if you are a person who practices some form of spirituality, how does that play out in your spiritual communities, or really, in any subcultural communities that you're a part of? \n\nAs it happens, one of the subcultural communities that I'm part of is what's generally referred to as “the pagan community,” I'm going to throw a lot of quotes around that because pagan is not a commonly agreed upon term and we could get into a great argument about how much of a community it is. \n\nBut all of that to the side, one day I was sitting there probably having coffee at the coffee shop on campus and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you took this intersectional feminist lens and turned it on the pagan community?” I thought about it a moment and then I think I literally said, “Oh no,” out loud because I realized that was a book and 2 and a half years later, 3 years later, it was published by Llewellyn worldwide as Outside the Charmed Circle. \n\nIt's a book about how gender and sexuality are expressed, explored, repressed denied, or whatever other ways engaged within the subculture of modern pagan polytheist, or magical “practice.” It's a book I had a lot of fun writing, which is really strange to hear myself say out loud because there were moments when I absolutely wanted to bang my head on the keyboard, or just fold the laptop up and smack myself in the face with it like the monks in Monty Python.\n\nBut it's a book that I really enjoyed writing because I got to spend long hours researching and talking about a bunch of my favorite stuff: gender, sexuality, embodiment, philosophy, Van Halen and their impact on Western culture and I say that, and people are like, “Oh, that's really funny,” and I'm like, “No, no, I'm being really serious.”\n\nAs far as the question that just came up in the chat here: is there something I cut from the book that I wish I could have put in? One of the things that I said in the very last chapter is that the book I wrote is necessarily brief. Each chapter in that book could have been its own book. There's a chapter on embodiment. A chapter on gender and theory – I believe the chapter is actually called Gender and Theory in Practice. There's a chapter, or a couple of chapters on consent and how consent works in these communities.\n\nThere's so much more that can be said about these topics. There's so much more that I could have said about any of these topics. But 300 pages, I felt like I'd run on quite long enough. \n\nConsent in the mentor-mentee relationship also just came up in chat. That's actually a topic that I touch on in the book and it's something I have really strong feelings about. Especially in the pagan and polytheists communities, there's often a lot of stress on the teacher-student relationship, sort of master-apprentice, if you want to get all scythe about it and well, there's a lot of unspoken disagreement about what the appropriate dynamic between those two parties should be. \n\nThere are people who will cheerfully say, “Oh, well, teachers and students should always have this kind of relationship and should never have that kind of relationship.” Yeah, and by that kind of relationship, we're usually talking about a sexual and/or romantic relationship. And then there are people who are perfectly happy to say, “Well, that's true in most cases, but this situation is different,” and often what they mean is, “my situation is different.” \n\nSo when I was writing the book, I had the less than enviable of saying, “Dear sweet summer child, no, your situation isn't different. It's not any different. It is never any different. Teachers and students just shouldn't have those kinds of relationships while they are ensconced in that power dynamic of teacher-student, or mentor-mentee.” \n\nREIN: Of course, thinking that your own situation is different is quite common. Common enough that we have a name for it and that is the universal attribution fallacy. \n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. Not to be super political, but it goes back to the phenomenon that you see quite often in modern sociopolitical discourse where people will say, “X is always immoral and wrong, except when I do it,” and X could be getting an abortion, being in a same-sex relationship, any number of things. “Well, that's always bad and wrong, but my circumstances are different.”\n\nJAMEY: One thing I think is interesting about what you're talking about with teachers and students is that the concept of a teacher-student relationship is nebulous in a lot of ways. Like, how would you draw the line here between this is an actual teacher and student relationship and therefore, inappropriate as opposed to “I have this relationship with someone and I'm learning something from them,” which I learn from all people all the time, including my partner and other people? Where is the line between “This is a great person in my life that I'm learning” from versus “I'm in this hierarchical relationship with them”?\n\nTAMSIN: The short answer would be access—access to knowledge, access, to experience, access to opportunity. \n\nIf you are a teacher and I am coming to you saying, “I want to learn this thing,” and your response is not “Okay, sure, I can take you on as a student and teach you this thing,” but instead, “I can take you on and teach you this thing if X, Y, or Z,” that becomes a really sketchy kind of dynamic where if I want whatever it is that you have the ability to give me the knowledge, the opportunity, the access, I am essentially being required to behave in ways that I might not otherwise.\n\nREIN: It seems like there are maybe two important things here. One is power dynamics—which always exist; they never don't exist—and the other is more narrowly conflicts of interest.\n\nTAMSIN: Right, and one of the things that I ran into, with talking modern practitioners of pagan and polytheistic spirituality, is that a lot of people want to talk about power, very few people are comfortable talking about power dynamics. In part, because in my experience, a lot of people don't want to see themselves as being people who have power to impact others in a negative way. Will they, or nil they? \n\nThere becomes this attitude of deniability where it's like, “Well, I can't possibly be in an oppressive position. I can't possibly be an abuser because I'm coming to this from just as much a place of powerlessness as the next person,” and that's not always true, of course.\n\nREIN: I think sometimes talking about groups in that way is vulnerable to that counterargument and I try to talk about the dynamics as being every relationship between two people has an element of power.\n\nTAMSIN: Absolutely, and one of the arguments I often get into with people is about the word politics because people, especially in our current social climate, tend to think that politics means a turf war between these two groups, or parties. \n\nMy response is that politics is just the word to describe how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one. Politics is how we talk about the policies. There's the whole word police meaning city, politics, policy. It's a thing. Politics is how we arrange policies and laws and agreements so that we can all basically move forward doing the same kind of thing. Yes, from the chat: “framing politics between two groups is very American.” It really is. \n\nSo I have often been criticized for bringing politics into spirituality and I'm going, “We're sitting around talking about power all day long, pretending that politics isn't a part of that is a way of getting out of having to be accountable for the politics that's actually going on.” That maneuver is as present in any subculture you care to name as it is in the pagan community. I mean, that's certainly not unique to witches, Druids, modern polytheists, and whomever.\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. Everything we've been talking about in the pagan has made me think of the tech community, too. My question earlier about mentorship, I was thinking that and when you were talking about “Don't bring politics into” – such a common thing that we talk about in tech, also.\n\nTAMSIN: Oh yeah. Why do you have to bring politics into this? Why do you have to bring identity politics, or diversity politics into this argument? We work in tech; this is a meritocracy and the sound of a thousand palms slapping into a thousand foreheads echoes across the land.\n\nJAMEY: I know you said it to illustrate that point, the phrase, identity politics, I just have such a visceral physical reaction to. [laughs]\n\nTAMSIN: Oh, it's great. Isn't it? It's like, there are certain phrases that in modern discourse have become so completely alienated from their original context that they're almost devoid of meaning. Identity politics is one. Cancel, or cancellation, or – [overtalk]\n\nJAMEY: Cancel culture. I just saw a whole conversation about this today because Andrew Cuomo said it in his press conference. It was a whole thing.\n\nTAMSIN: Oh God.\n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: I’m sorry for bringing up Andrew Cuomo. I take it back. [laughs]\n\nTAMSIN: Verbal equivalent of keyboard smash right now. \n\n[laughter]\n\nYeah, I feel like when people start throwing terms like that around, this is all an attempt at obfuscation. It's an attempt at getting away from having to talk about what's actually going on and, in many cases, what's actually going on is that somebody, or somebodies are doing some shady things that they don't necessarily want to be held accountable for. \n\nREIN: People say, “Keep politics out of X.” That statement is incomplete and what they really mean is “Keep politics that don't matter to me out of X.”\n\nTAMSIN: Right. “Keep politics that I don't have to think about.”\n\nREIN: “Things that don't impact me in any way, I don’t care about those.”\n\nTAMSIN: Exactly. Yeah. But if politics suddenly means that I can't get the right chip for the motherboard to run the gaming machine that I really want to set up, suddenly politics is real important. That's the point where I start getting that glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare at somebody and going, “So politics and power dynamics matters when it's something that impacts you personally. Is that what you're saying?” \n\nMaybe from there, we could, I don't know, extrapolate that other people who, and this is a galaxy brain moment here, actually exists, have the same relationships [chuckles] to the things that matter to them. Like, I don't know, housing, or healthcare, or to be a little dark, I guess, not being hatecrimed to death.\n\nREIN: This is the one of my favorite tweets: “I don't know how to convince you to care about other people writ large.” \n\nTAMSIN: Yeah, exactly. We talk a lot lately about how divisive things are and how divided the country is. There's a Medium article that I read recently with the delightfully bracing title of, “We hate you now.” It was an article about the potential going forward into a post-COVID-19 world where all of the people who've been wearing masks when they have to go outside, washing their hands, staying home unless absolutely necessary and who've, essentially, felt that they've been held captive in their own homes for over a year now are looking at the people who've been going to weddings, pool parties, restaurants, barbecues, and two weeks later, half of the attendees are sick, or dead and having, what I would say, are some pretty justifiable feelings of “We were doing all the right things and you selfish, entitled fill in your profanity of choice, have been doing exactly all the wrong things that have perpetuated this situation, such that we're still in lockdown and still in lockdown. We kind of hate you now and there's a real possibility of that we're always going to hate you.”\n\nTo me, that's the divide I'm seeing in our culture going forward. Things like that. Then again, I am speaking as someone who shares custody of my daughter with my ex who lives in California and what that means, operationally, is that I have not seen my daughter in-person since March 8th of 2020 and so, I'm a little head up under the collar. Wow, that just kind of went off into a really dark place. [laughs]\n\nREIN: No, this is good stuff. Very normal for us. This is why I don't have an issue going on record as saying that ethical systems based on naive individualism are bankrupt. \n\nTAMSIN: Absolutely. One of the things that came out of my degree program with—and I will point out that I did go to a state university in the notoriously liberal state of Washington. But one of the things that I came out of my degree program with was a healthy and deeply ingrained respect for the concept of the social contract and for social contract theory as a venue of study, especially when you're looking at power dynamics in groups. \n\nWhat I found is that explaining the social contract to people is really easy if they actually want to understand it and utterly impossible, if they're opposed, because if they're opposed, what's really going on isn't that they don't understand. They get it perfectly; they just don't want to agree. I can say the social contract is that you don't punch me, I don't shoot you; we maintain a basic air of non-violence and go on about our day. That's a contract. You don't hurt me. I don't hurt you. We move on. It's as simple as that, or as complicated as, “Hey, look, we have a civilization.” That is a marvelous quote in the chat: “No, thank you. I'd rather pretend I invent the entire universe every time I make an Apple pie.”\n\nREIN: This gets all the way like the turtles go all the way down to what does it mean to be a person and what is the person to relationship to society? \n\nTAMSIN: And if we are going to dive that deep into philosophy, I'm going to need some whiskey at least. [chuckles] I'm kidding. \n\nBut as far as what is a person, philosophers have been trying to work that one out for quite literally thousands of years, at this point. When I was writing Outside the Charmed Circle, I wound up necessarily having to go back and read some amounts of Plato and Aristotle because they are, in many ways, part of the groundwork of Western philosophy and as well, part of the groundwork for Western notions of spirituality and magical practice. As you know, pagans are polytheists, or magicians. \n\nOne of the things that I was horrified to discover and shouldn't have been really—I should have expected this—was that Plato and Aristotle didn't think too highly of women. There are these marvelous quotes that I included in the book and by marvelous, I mean tragic, frankly referring to the distinction between men, and women and other animals. That was text I saw on my screen and looked at and went, blink, blink, blink, What?”\n\nREIN: This reminds me of George Lakoff's book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, so titled because there is a language with a category that includes those things in the same category.\n\nTAMSIN: Wow. That's great. That's neat.\n\nREIN: I think I can respect women being in the same category as dangerous things, to be fair.\n\nTAMSIN: I think depending on how we're defining dangerous, anybody of any gender can be dangerous, but I have to admire the hustle of putting that as your title, that's pretty great. But the question of who counts as a person? What is a person? If you look at some of the classical Greek philosophers—Aristotle, Plato—they would say a person is a human male individual who fulfills these criteria and anyone who doesn't fulfill those criteria isn't really fully a person.\n\nREIN: The human male citizen.\n\nTAMSIN: Right.\n\nREIN: Which is also how the US defined it. \n\nTAMSIN: Shocking. Yeah, and then if you look at these philosophers as laying the groundwork for how Western culture defines, or describes personhood individuality, the next big cultural movements come along was of course, Christianity. I'm not here to bash on Christianity, but I will note that if you look at Christian philosophy around identity and individuality, especially if you're looking at gendered identities, a lot of that would be drawn from the work of Paul who wrote most of the epistles in the last two thirds of what's called the New Testament, the Christian Bible. \n\nPaul had some less than awesome views about women and they're pretty much in a direct line of descent from Plato and Aristotle. You look at the things Paul was saying and it's like, oh, okay so he's basically just importing Greek philosophical misogyny into this new religion, which made a lot of sense because at that point in time, Greek philosophy was, I've called it the groundwork for Western philosophy and the Greeks were considered the de facto mainstream philosophers of that era, and everyone was rolling around speaking Greek, even the Romans. \n\nSo this notion of individuality and of personhood being something that we specifically define by how you match an established hegemonic norm and by hegemonic, I mean a norm that is imposed by a power above you and it's this established hierarchy. \n\nWhen I was learning about hegemonic norms in my degree program, someone in the class asked, “Okay, so hegemonic norm, how does that apply to us in modern Western American 21st century culture?” It's like, well, it's real easy. Who has the privilege? Who has the power? \n\nIf you're white, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're Black, or Brown, or Asian, or what have you. If you are a cisgender person, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're trans or non-binary. If you are a cis male, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you are a non-cis male, and so on. That's hegemonic power, that's hegemony in action and a lot of those hegemonic norms come directly down from the classical Greeks through the norms established by Christianity. \n\nI spend a lot of time talking about this in a book which is at least extensively about witchcraft, paganism, and magic because they're hobby horses that are really important to me and they seemed to tie in. So I was like, “Yeah, let's do this. Let's just throw it all in there.”\n\nREIN: So you have these fringe communities and fringe only relative to the dominant normative culture, right? \n\nTAMSIN: Right. \n\nREIN: But then they start to intersect on the edges of that hegemonic, cultural conglomeration, whatever you want to call it. It reminds me of – so this is an analogy that I'm going to see if it lands so let me know. \n\nThere's a book called How Buildings Learn and, in that book, one of the things that he talks about is what are called edge cities, where historically cities have been built around a port, or railroad, or some other thing. But what's happening in modern cities, there's a lot of the action is happening at the edges of the city where the highways intersect and so on. There's also a lot more possibility to build out there because the city center has been made pretty rigid by the buildings are large and they're probably not going anywhere, the codes, the building and zoning codes are very rigid, and so on. So actually, a lot of the most vital growth that happened in modern studies is happening at the edges. \n\nI wonder if it's like that as well in these fringe communities and if that term has baggage that you want me to avoid, let me know. \n\nTAMSIN: Oh no, I'm fine with the term. I think there's a lot of traction there. One of the hobby horses that I drag out and bang on a regular basis is the notion that subcultural communities reiterate and reinforce a lot of the same core assumptions as the over culture in which they are ensconced.\n\nThere is this attitude of, “Well, we're different from outsiders. We're smarter, we're better, we're more spiritual. We're more accepting. We're more,” whatever the virtue, or the value that they want to see themselves as having is. But they frequently don't stop to realize that, in many ways, they are just reenacting a lot of the same attitudes that the mainstream culture, of which they are a subculture, is enacting all over the place.\n\nI think when you look at the fringes of subcultures, the places where they start to rub up against other cultures, or other subcultures, where they start to intersect and get some new ideas and some new, interesting stuff going on that can be really valid, valuable, and healthy for the community as a whole. I also think that that is a place where there can be a lot of tension and a lot of fear. \n\nI've seen that in the pagan community, where there are a lot of people who I think would position themselves very much at the center of the little circle of pagan community and they look at someone like, for instance, me, who's kind of out on this fringe edge here, rubbing up against the queer community, or the trans community, or whatever other communities that I'm part of. \n\nThey may see this idea, or that idea and go, Well, that's not how we do things. That's not us. That's like some of your weird queer trans stuff,” and I'm going, “No, but wait. It's really cool and it informs what we do over here in this really useful way. And why are you walking away? Come back.” And then occasionally, it's like, “Oh, you were walking away to get a torch and a pitchfork. No, no, no, don't come back.” \n\n[chuckles]\n\nJAMEY: When you were talking about that with the fringe communities, I was thinking about the queer community as well, even before you brought it up, because I think that what Rein was saying about exciting things happening in that space is definitely true. But I also think that you have a problem in the community sometimes like, people who are younger, or more newly out and don't know as much about queer history trying to roll things back. That's why we have this argument about why younger people, who think that the word “queer” is not okay for anyone to use, coming in and saying, “Oh, we can't do this,” and older people saying, “There has been a lot of discourse, progress, and things that have happened over the course of history that you need to know about before you can have an informed opinion on it. [laughs] \n\nTAMSIN: You need to scroll back up in the chat before you start talking. \n\n[laughter]\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. You need to scroll back up like a bunch of years in the chat. [laughs]\n\nTAMSIN: Right. Yes. That is a huge issue in the queer community and it's one that – I'm 47 years old and I have found myself in conversations with people who are 19, 20 who wants to tell me, “Oh, well, you shouldn't use the word queer because queer is a slur,” and I'm going, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, red flag, hold on. Queer has been used as a slur, absolutely yes. But in the 80s and 90s, there was an awful lot of work done to reclaim that word. I know, I was there.” And today, now the primary driver behind the notion that queer is a slur is trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It's transphobes who are like, ‘Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. Queer gives too much leeway for all of these trans people to sneak into this community. So uh oh, we can't be having with that.” \n\nSo I find myself basically having to strike the compromise of okay, I'm never going to tell you that you have to call yourself queer, but you don't get to tell all of us queers out here that that's not our word and if that means you don't want to come sit at our table, or come to our parties, that's okay, too. \n\nThe problem of gatekeeping in the queer community, as in every subcultural community, is real and it's real bad. The extent to which some quorum within a community wants to enforce little boundaries inside the larger community. So it's like I have my little walled garden in the queer community, and you can come in if you perform gender, or sexuality, or identity in these specific ways that I am dictating. It's too much headache.\n\nIt's funny how I talk about these problems in the queer community, or in the trans community, or in the pagan community and I have friends who work in the tech world and they're going, “Huh, this all sounds eerily familiar.” \n\nJAMEY: It's almost as if people act the same,\n\nTAMSIN: No matter where you go. [chuckles] Yeah, it is. \n\nThese are not problems unique to any one subcultural community. They are human problems and I'm often tempted to say that the solution is to stop dealing with people, but I like people and I like doing things with people. One of the reasons I'm so mad about this stupid pandemic is that I miss people, hanging out with people in-person and being able to drink coffee with them. \n\nBut I think that a lot of these problems of gatekeeping, these enforcement of boundaries, these power dynamic issues that we have all fundamentally come back to, at least in many of the cases I've seen, issues around power and the fear of powerlessness, the fear of being disenfranchised, or of losing what you see as power, or opportunity, or access, or privilege that you're entitled to.\n\nI mean, that's certainly what seems to be one of the things that's at the core of these ridiculous ideas like white genocide. White people are being crowded out and we're being outbred by all of these other people of color and white people have to band together and blah, blah, blah! All of this garbage is all rooted in fear and under that ignorance. Much wiser and more experienced minds than mine have written at great length about those issues and how best to combat them. I have a lot of hope in that regard, but at the same time, I look at the news app on my phone every morning and that hope dies a little. So it's kind of a tidal thing; it rises and falls.\n\nREIN: The relationship between radicals and action areas, I think where it's a relationship to a particular preferred state of affairs and whether you think you need to go forwards, or backwards to get there. \n\nREIN: Right. We used to call that the difference between a liberal and a conservative view, but those words have been so battered and worked out of utility that you can't even bring them up anymore. But it, again, goes back to that idea of you have the circle that is the community and the people at the center, who are perhaps most emblematic of its baseline core ideas and ideals, and then the people out on the fringes of things, who are bringing in new information and new ideas, or sending their ideas out to other communities and sharing with them. \n\nI think that can all be really healthy and part of a wholesome ecosystem of subcultural engagement and interaction. I also think that when people get scared, they start doing things that are really not in their best interest. They start making really bad choices and that way lies dissent, dissension, and conflict. \n\nBut a lot of that is why I titled the book I wrote Outside the Charmed Circle because it comes from an essay by a cultural theorist named Gayle Rubin. This is an essay that she wrote called “Thinking Sex” and in this essay, she posited that you can look at ideas like sexuality and if you picture it as two circles, one inside the other divided up like a dark board, pie wedged shapes. The inner circle, the charmed circle is the stuff that society basically all approves of: heterosexuality, monogamy, sex for the purposes of procreation, and so on and so forth. And then outside the charm circle are what Gayle Rubin called the outer limits. Those are the things which society doesn't approve so non-monogamy, having sex for reasons other than procreation, because it's fun, or to make money, or whatever reasons. \n\nEach of the things in the term circle has its counterpart in the outer limits, its counterpart outside the charmed circle. Ah, see what I did there? So things like homosexuality, or bisexuality, or asexuality, or demisexuality, or, or, or—these are all outside the term circle because they are fundamentally alien to the hegemonic norms of culture and I just realized I'm throwing a lot of this jargon around, wow. \n\nREIN: I think it is interesting as a metaphor here because it implies both, at the periphery and also, a sparseness, or lack of structure. \n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. I think that there's value to be found both, at the core and on the edges, on the fringe. [laughs]\n\nREIN: What’s [inaudible] is that some of these groups on the edges seem to be reproducing structures that are found in the core. \n\nTAMSIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. The structures that you find at the core of a group are really comfortable. They're really comforting if they're built for you. To pick one, for example, the structure of being cisgender is really comfortable. You’re cis if you were born and you were assigned a gender at birth and you grew up and you're like, “Yeah, that's me. That fits me like a glove because it's tailored to who I am. I don't have any objections to this.” \n\nBut if you take that same glove and put it on someone else, it's going to be too big, too small, it fits in the wrong ways, it's no, this is wrong. These structures of being cisgender don't fit for someone like say, me. That's not to say being cisgender is wrong. It's perfectly fine and that's okay. Just not for me.\n\nJAMEY: This is certainly coming back to what you were saying earlier about “Oh, I care about these issues that affect me,” and we have to extrapolate that they affect other people because you'll see people are like, “Oh, but this is so comfortable. Why wouldn't you want this great comfortable thing?” And I can't extrapolate that other people are having a different experience.\n\nTAMSIN: One of the real problems that we as human beings have is not understanding that our individual experiences are not universally applicable. It's like handing someone a strawberry ice cream cone and they taste it and they're like, “Oh, thanks. Not for me,” and you're like, “Well, what's wrong with it? It's delicious. It's a strawberry ice cream cone,” and they're like, “I don't like strawberry ice cream.” Like, “Well, how can you not? I like strawberry ice cream.” “Yeah, but I don't taste this strawberry ice cream with your tongue. Your taste buds. Mine are wired differently.” That's just a random example pulled out of the air; I actually like strawberry ice cream fine. Not my favorite, but it's fine. \n\nBut individual experience isn't universally applicable and to come back to that question of how do we define the individual person as against a larger culture, or community? I think past a certain point of defining an individual, or a person as a self-aware consciousness, I really don't want to try and define personhood at all. \n\nIf I can acknowledge that someone is sapient and sentient, that's good enough for me and if at some point down the road, we get to a place of developing actual artificial intelligence, like Turing capable AI. If it tells me it's sentient and sapient, I am more than happy to sit down and have a coffee with it and I think that's as much as I want to get into well, how do we define a person? Because once you go any further than that, inevitably it winds up with oppression, slavery, and genocide. Again, pretty grim. [laughs]\n\nJAMEY: No, it’s good.\n\nREIN: Again, how do we get people to care about other people?\n\nTAMSIN: Oh, if I had the answer to that, I could write another book. It would be a bestseller and I would never have to try and get another job. \n\nI think that the answer, and I am totally cribbing from my partner here—who is an amazing human being and a developer at a local software company up here. My partner would probably suggest that the answer is you teach empathy and you start teaching empathy by going back to you have this relationship to this issue, or this thing that happened. It made you feel a certain way. How do you think that issue impacted that person? \n\nExperiences aren't universal, but the condition of experiencing things is universal. So I'm not going to have the same experience that someone else has with any given issue, but I can acknowledge that they are having an experience and that their experience is as meaningful to them and their lives as mine is to me and my life. Once you've done that, you started the building blocks of developing empathy, which leads to compassion, which leads to, “Oh, maybe we should get kids out of those cages on the border, maybe we should find a way to feed people, and restore the power grid in Texas so elderly people aren't literally freezing to death in their homes in the 21st century in America.” \n\nREIN: I think there's a Swedish word for the realization that everyone on this street that you're walking down has just as rich, deep, and complex an inner mental life as you do and I think we need more of that.\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah, we do. We do. Now I totally want to go and look up that Swedish word, but that acknowledgement that everyone around us is actually a person. They have an interior life, they have hopes and dreams of their own, and their hopes and dreams don't have to be relevant to me. \n\nOne of the things that I think those of us who are ensconced in subcultures sometimes struggle with is – well, it's the inverse of another problem so let me, let me try and rephrase this. Those of us who are in subcultural communities—whether it's the tech community, or the queer community, or the trans community, or the pagan community, or what have you—we all struggle with these feelings of our interests and our passions being incomprehensible to people who aren't part of our communities. \n\nI am not a developer. I am not even really much of a coder, but I know enough about coding from having been in a CS program for a hot minute to be able to grasp what's cool about really elegant code, what's really cool about this thing that my partner comes to me and she's like, “Oh, I did this thing and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I'm like, “I understood about one word in three, but it was barely enough to hang on with my fingernails,” and that is really cool and awesome. \n\nBut that's not a conversation that she could have with, for instance, my Mom. My mother, who is a brilliant woman and has a degree in nursing and is a medical professional and does all these things, my Mom would do just glaze over a little and go, “Okay, cool. I'm glad that the good thing happened for you,” but it does reinforce this idea that these things we're into are relatively esoteric. \n\nSo it in turn reinforces this seclusion of our little subcultural communities into their enclaves and we become this little technocratic priesthood, but that can turn into another problem, which is not only are we weird and different, but we're better. The taking of pride in the cool, awesome thing that we understand and love can turn into, “If you don't understand the cool, awesome thing we're into what's wrong with you?” \n\nOh, well, pfft users. I've heard that exact sentiment expressed by people in the software industry and it always baffles me because I'm like, “You realize that you are making tools for people to use, right?” The people that you're going “Pfft users” about are literally the reason you have a job because otherwise, all of the tippy-tappy you do with the keyboard is an intellectual exercise. Great, you created this incredibly elegant piece of software that no one is going to use. At that point, you may as well just be building a matchstick cathedral in your backyard and then lighting it on fire. \n\nWhat I would really like to see from all of our communities is a little less hubris and a lot less gatekeeping and a substantial amount less of a self-reinforcing sense of superiority about people who aren't inside our particular charmed circle. What I want to see is our subcultural communities, having pride in who we are and what we do, and the cool things that we make, or the cool things that we do, or the cool lives that we lead, or whatever it is that is part of our community without turning that into, “And that's why we're so much better than the normies, the mundanes, the muggles—to use Voldemort's word. That's why we're better than people who don't do this cool stuff that we do.” \n\nBecause I feel like that need to be better than the people who make us feel kind of weird and like we don't belong is again, just reiterating the same power structures that got us into this problem in the first place. The over culture thinks it's better than these weird freaky fringe communities because they're nerdy, or they're awkward, or they're cringy and the fringe communities in return think they're better than the basic, boring, mundane, mainstream, normie culture and nobody gets to have any fun. \n\nI would much rather have a mainstream culture that respects and appreciates the awesome things that fringe communities bring to the table, the innovations that they provide, the new ways of thinking and approaching problems and have subcultural communities that understand that they are ensconced in an over culture, which is the reason that they can exist and that's how I'm going to solve world peace.\n\nJAMEY: So we’re coming up to the part of our show where we like to let everyone give a reflection about what we've talked about for the past hour, or so. This is something that is going to be on your mind, or a call-to-action, or just something that stuck out for you. I'm going to go first. \n\nWhat's something that stuck out for me was the conversation that we had actually a couple of times about conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you and how that's so hard for people. Because I think that you see this, even on a microlevel within these subcultures, and I think that suggests to me that it's such a natural human thing to do and I think that I get that because it does feel good to have things in common with other people and to celebrate the things that we have in common.\n\nI guess, I'm thinking about this specifically in the trans community where they're like, “It feels great to be able to be like, ‘We have this thing in common and I feel so good about that,’” but there are still a lot of different kinds of people in the trans community and this is how you end up with people saying, “Oh, the universal trans experience is loving being a girl when you take your estrogen,” and I'm like, “That's definitely not.” [laughs] \n\nYou could probably keep making that thing that you're saying smaller until it's true for everyone in your little group that it's true for. But we have this desire to categorize ourselves in that way and I think that the reason I'm talking about this and saying this is, I think that it's really good to keep in mind the ways that all of us probably also do this on smaller levels. So I guess, my call-to-action is I'm going to try and think about catching myself if I'm doing this.\n\nREIN: Well, I'm going to attempt to stay in my lane here with my reflection. I was thinking about one of the first things that came up, which is mentor-mentee relationships, and I was thinking about what you said about empathy. \n\nOne of the things that – I’ve changed a little bit, even in the last few years in terms of how I think about empathy, which is, I think empathy is good, but I don't think it's very actionable because empathy is an internal thing that happens in individual people's heads. No one else has access to it. What Russell Ackoff says is that systems are not the sum of their components, they're the product of their interactions. \n\nSo what I started to think about was what are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? What I've started to focus on is the interaction called helping. Edgar Schein wrote a book called Helping and it's a study of the social process, or phenomenon where people help each other. How does it happen? Why does it happen? \n\nOne of the things he noticed that that was pretty interesting is that helping is mostly notable when it doesn't happen and there's an expectation that it should have. So you think here are things like that's not helpful and what I think that we should try to do is focus more on positive affirmations when it does happen. \n\nSo that's why when I do retrospectives with teams, we leave that with appreciations. I want to make helping remarkable. I want people to talk about helping and get better at it as practice. I guess, that's my solution to how do you get people to care about each other? It's how do you build empathy and I think it's by the practice of helping.\n\nTAMSIN: I like that a lot. That's really good. One of the thoughts that has recurred over the course of this conversation for me is that the dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren't that dissimilar from one group to another, whatever their special interest happens to be. \n\nThat was the thing I didn't understand growing up. It was a thing I certainly didn't understand through much of my adult life and now, crawling into my late 40s, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around this concept, that in a lot of ways, these groups are really all the same. That's because well, as we've alluded earlier, they're all made up of people and people all tend to be kind of the same in terms of the patterns that they enact, the approaches that they take, the things that they fundamentally want. \n\nAgain, not universal experiences, but we all have the shared commonality of having these experiences. We all have the shared feature of wanting things and wanting to be understood. Wanting empathy, or compassion, even if we are ourselves not terribly good at giving it. That's certainly something that's been true with me. \n\nEven within the course of this conversation, I brought up the Medium article about the pandemic and how it's really easy to want to be furious with the people who are, in a very real way, responsible for the fact that I haven't seen my daughter in over a year. \n\nAt the same time, at least some of those people were acting in ways that I don't have to think are rational or correct, but they had some reason they did the things they did and if I can understand why they act the way they do and I want to spend the effort and the energy to meet them where they are, perhaps I can find ways to work with them to be different, to be what I would consider better. More in line with a social contract that means that we don't have 600,000 people dead by the summer, but that is work that's on me to do, because I can't ask somebody, who's already living in a state of fear, to suddenly magically have cool, calm rationality descend upon them. \n\nREIN: The last thing I'll mention for folks who are listening, who are on software development teams and so on, is that a team is literally definitionally a group of people who help each other. \n\nTAMSIN: Yes, yes, it is.\n\nJAMEY: This was really great. Thank you so much. \n\nTAMSIN: Thank you. I had a wonderful time. This was a blast.\n\nJAMEY: And I should say that anyone who wants to have further conversations like this with us, we have a Slack community and we're all there, all of our guests are there, and lots of other really interesting people. You can join our Slack community if you back us on Patreon, patreon.com/greaterthancode, even like a dollar.\n\nREIN: These episodes are successful because we co-create them with our guests. We're helping each other make cool episodes. So thank you for helping us to make a cool episode.\n\nTAMSIN: It has genuinely been my pleasure. It’s been a delight. Thank you so much for having me.Special Guest: Tamsin Davis-Langley.","content_html":"01:17 - Tamsin’s Superpower: Recognizing Songs Within Seconds
\n\n05:08 - Outside the Charmed Circle (Tamsin’s book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality)
\n\n09:09 - Consent in the Mentor/Mentee Relationship (Master/Apprentice)
\n\n16:57 - Using Certain Phrases (i.e. “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture”) and Divisiveness
\n\n23:46 - What Is A Person? Individuality & Personhood
\n\n30:01 - “Fringe Communities”; Subcultures and Intersection
\n\n44:30 - Individual Experiences Are Not Universally Applicable
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you.
\n\nRein: What are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? Helping.
\n\n\n\nTamsin: The dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren’t that dissimilar from one group to another.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 232 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jamey. That is a lot of episodes. I’m here with our guest, Tamsin Davis-Langley who is a white, queer, nonbinary trans femme from a multiethnic family who grew up poor. They spent most of their adult work life as the tech-savvy person in a non-technical office, and are now pursuing a career in digital communications.
\n\nTheir academic path began in liberal arts, detoured through computer science, and ended with a degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Their work explores the ways subcultural communities intersect with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. They've written about how the problems of abuse and predation in subcultures are linked to the power dynamics inherent in those groups. Under their nom de plume, Misha Magdalene, they're the author of Outside the Charmed Circle, a book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality.
\n\nTamsin, welcome to the show.
\n\nTAMSIN: Thank you so much! It’s a delight to be here.
\n\nREIN: So you know what we’re going to ask you.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nWhat is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nTAMSIN: My superpower is that I can, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, listen to the radio and identify the song that's playing within 5 seconds, or so if it was recorded within a specific window of time and basically falls under the very broad umbrella of Western pop music.
\n\nThis happened because I was bitten by a radioactive record store employee back in the 80s and since then, I've been able to go, “Oh yeah, that's Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. It's on Who's Next released 1972. Produced by Glen's Johns,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is a delightful party trick for getting people to suddenly realize they want to talk to someone else at the party.
\n\nJAMEY: I was about to ask – [overtalk]
\n\nREIN: How do you remember all of that?
\n\nTAMSIN: How do I remember all of that? I have no idea. I literally could not tell you what I had for dinner last night and I'm in the midst of training sessions for a position that I'm pursuing in digital communications and half the time I'm going, “What was the command to do the things so that I can function?” But I can literally tell you the brand of bass guitar that Paul McCartney played in The Beatles, or the kind of keyboard that Kate Bush used when she was recording her albums in the late 70s and early 80s was a Hohner, a violin-shaped bass, and a Fairlight synthesizer, respectively.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nJAMEY: I can relate to this because I often think about how many other things I could know if I freed up all of the space in my brain where I kept the names of all the Pokémon.
\n\nTAMSIN: Right, right. I want to defrag my own brain and just throw out huge chunks of permanent storage, but no.
\n\nJAMEY: Do you use your superpower for good, or for evil?
\n\nTAMSIN: In finest, strong, bad tradition, I try to use my powers only for good, or for awesome. I have actually used it to further my career. I did work for a little while at a Musicland, back when those existed, and later at a Tower Records, back when those existed.
\n\nFor younger listeners, those were both brick and mortar stores where you could go in and buy music on physical media and occasionally, accessories that were associated with bands, or musicians that you liked and people would walk in and say things like, “I'm trying to find a CD by this band and I don't know the name of the band, or the name of the song, or any of the lyrics, but it's got this bit in it that goes “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh” and I went, “Bad to the Bone, George Thurogood & the Delaware Destroyers. Here's their Best Of. Thank you.” So that's the extent to which my superpower operates for good, or for awesome.
\n\nREIN: That reminds me, there was a librarian who worked at The London Library, which has about a million books, for 40 years and could do a very similar thing where they knew what book someone was looking for better than that person did.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. That kind of talent always delights me when I find it out in the wild where I'm like, “Yeah, I was looking for this book. It kind of was about this thing and I remember it had sort of a teal cover. Oh, here you go.” Yeah, it's kind of an amazing and wonderful thing to see, but then I do it and I feel really self-conscious, so. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: So, speaking of books, graceful segue.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yes. Speaking of books.
\n\nREIN: Tell us a little bit about the book that you wrote.
\n\nTAMSIN: I can, yes. So when I was finishing up my degree at the University of Washington in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to apply the concepts and the tools that I was learning in my degree program to my actual day-to-day life. It's all well and good when you're in the ivory tower of academia to talk about intersectionality and hegemonic norms of sexuality, or gender, but how does that actually play out in your work life, or in your family dynamic? Or if you are a person who practices some form of spirituality, how does that play out in your spiritual communities, or really, in any subcultural communities that you're a part of?
\n\nAs it happens, one of the subcultural communities that I'm part of is what's generally referred to as “the pagan community,” I'm going to throw a lot of quotes around that because pagan is not a commonly agreed upon term and we could get into a great argument about how much of a community it is.
\n\nBut all of that to the side, one day I was sitting there probably having coffee at the coffee shop on campus and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you took this intersectional feminist lens and turned it on the pagan community?” I thought about it a moment and then I think I literally said, “Oh no,” out loud because I realized that was a book and 2 and a half years later, 3 years later, it was published by Llewellyn worldwide as Outside the Charmed Circle.
\n\nIt's a book about how gender and sexuality are expressed, explored, repressed denied, or whatever other ways engaged within the subculture of modern pagan polytheist, or magical “practice.” It's a book I had a lot of fun writing, which is really strange to hear myself say out loud because there were moments when I absolutely wanted to bang my head on the keyboard, or just fold the laptop up and smack myself in the face with it like the monks in Monty Python.
\n\nBut it's a book that I really enjoyed writing because I got to spend long hours researching and talking about a bunch of my favorite stuff: gender, sexuality, embodiment, philosophy, Van Halen and their impact on Western culture and I say that, and people are like, “Oh, that's really funny,” and I'm like, “No, no, I'm being really serious.”
\n\nAs far as the question that just came up in the chat here: is there something I cut from the book that I wish I could have put in? One of the things that I said in the very last chapter is that the book I wrote is necessarily brief. Each chapter in that book could have been its own book. There's a chapter on embodiment. A chapter on gender and theory – I believe the chapter is actually called Gender and Theory in Practice. There's a chapter, or a couple of chapters on consent and how consent works in these communities.
\n\nThere's so much more that can be said about these topics. There's so much more that I could have said about any of these topics. But 300 pages, I felt like I'd run on quite long enough.
\n\nConsent in the mentor-mentee relationship also just came up in chat. That's actually a topic that I touch on in the book and it's something I have really strong feelings about. Especially in the pagan and polytheists communities, there's often a lot of stress on the teacher-student relationship, sort of master-apprentice, if you want to get all scythe about it and well, there's a lot of unspoken disagreement about what the appropriate dynamic between those two parties should be.
\n\nThere are people who will cheerfully say, “Oh, well, teachers and students should always have this kind of relationship and should never have that kind of relationship.” Yeah, and by that kind of relationship, we're usually talking about a sexual and/or romantic relationship. And then there are people who are perfectly happy to say, “Well, that's true in most cases, but this situation is different,” and often what they mean is, “my situation is different.”
\n\nSo when I was writing the book, I had the less than enviable of saying, “Dear sweet summer child, no, your situation isn't different. It's not any different. It is never any different. Teachers and students just shouldn't have those kinds of relationships while they are ensconced in that power dynamic of teacher-student, or mentor-mentee.”
\n\nREIN: Of course, thinking that your own situation is different is quite common. Common enough that we have a name for it and that is the universal attribution fallacy.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. Not to be super political, but it goes back to the phenomenon that you see quite often in modern sociopolitical discourse where people will say, “X is always immoral and wrong, except when I do it,” and X could be getting an abortion, being in a same-sex relationship, any number of things. “Well, that's always bad and wrong, but my circumstances are different.”
\n\nJAMEY: One thing I think is interesting about what you're talking about with teachers and students is that the concept of a teacher-student relationship is nebulous in a lot of ways. Like, how would you draw the line here between this is an actual teacher and student relationship and therefore, inappropriate as opposed to “I have this relationship with someone and I'm learning something from them,” which I learn from all people all the time, including my partner and other people? Where is the line between “This is a great person in my life that I'm learning” from versus “I'm in this hierarchical relationship with them”?
\n\nTAMSIN: The short answer would be access—access to knowledge, access, to experience, access to opportunity.
\n\nIf you are a teacher and I am coming to you saying, “I want to learn this thing,” and your response is not “Okay, sure, I can take you on as a student and teach you this thing,” but instead, “I can take you on and teach you this thing if X, Y, or Z,” that becomes a really sketchy kind of dynamic where if I want whatever it is that you have the ability to give me the knowledge, the opportunity, the access, I am essentially being required to behave in ways that I might not otherwise.
\n\nREIN: It seems like there are maybe two important things here. One is power dynamics—which always exist; they never don't exist—and the other is more narrowly conflicts of interest.
\n\nTAMSIN: Right, and one of the things that I ran into, with talking modern practitioners of pagan and polytheistic spirituality, is that a lot of people want to talk about power, very few people are comfortable talking about power dynamics. In part, because in my experience, a lot of people don't want to see themselves as being people who have power to impact others in a negative way. Will they, or nil they?
\n\nThere becomes this attitude of deniability where it's like, “Well, I can't possibly be in an oppressive position. I can't possibly be an abuser because I'm coming to this from just as much a place of powerlessness as the next person,” and that's not always true, of course.
\n\nREIN: I think sometimes talking about groups in that way is vulnerable to that counterargument and I try to talk about the dynamics as being every relationship between two people has an element of power.
\n\nTAMSIN: Absolutely, and one of the arguments I often get into with people is about the word politics because people, especially in our current social climate, tend to think that politics means a turf war between these two groups, or parties.
\n\nMy response is that politics is just the word to describe how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one. Politics is how we talk about the policies. There's the whole word police meaning city, politics, policy. It's a thing. Politics is how we arrange policies and laws and agreements so that we can all basically move forward doing the same kind of thing. Yes, from the chat: “framing politics between two groups is very American.” It really is.
\n\nSo I have often been criticized for bringing politics into spirituality and I'm going, “We're sitting around talking about power all day long, pretending that politics isn't a part of that is a way of getting out of having to be accountable for the politics that's actually going on.” That maneuver is as present in any subculture you care to name as it is in the pagan community. I mean, that's certainly not unique to witches, Druids, modern polytheists, and whomever.
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. Everything we've been talking about in the pagan has made me think of the tech community, too. My question earlier about mentorship, I was thinking that and when you were talking about “Don't bring politics into” – such a common thing that we talk about in tech, also.
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh yeah. Why do you have to bring politics into this? Why do you have to bring identity politics, or diversity politics into this argument? We work in tech; this is a meritocracy and the sound of a thousand palms slapping into a thousand foreheads echoes across the land.
\n\nJAMEY: I know you said it to illustrate that point, the phrase, identity politics, I just have such a visceral physical reaction to. [laughs]
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh, it's great. Isn't it? It's like, there are certain phrases that in modern discourse have become so completely alienated from their original context that they're almost devoid of meaning. Identity politics is one. Cancel, or cancellation, or – [overtalk]
\n\nJAMEY: Cancel culture. I just saw a whole conversation about this today because Andrew Cuomo said it in his press conference. It was a whole thing.
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh God.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: I’m sorry for bringing up Andrew Cuomo. I take it back. [laughs]
\n\nTAMSIN: Verbal equivalent of keyboard smash right now.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, I feel like when people start throwing terms like that around, this is all an attempt at obfuscation. It's an attempt at getting away from having to talk about what's actually going on and, in many cases, what's actually going on is that somebody, or somebodies are doing some shady things that they don't necessarily want to be held accountable for.
\n\nREIN: People say, “Keep politics out of X.” That statement is incomplete and what they really mean is “Keep politics that don't matter to me out of X.”
\n\nTAMSIN: Right. “Keep politics that I don't have to think about.”
\n\nREIN: “Things that don't impact me in any way, I don’t care about those.”
\n\nTAMSIN: Exactly. Yeah. But if politics suddenly means that I can't get the right chip for the motherboard to run the gaming machine that I really want to set up, suddenly politics is real important. That's the point where I start getting that glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare at somebody and going, “So politics and power dynamics matters when it's something that impacts you personally. Is that what you're saying?”
\n\nMaybe from there, we could, I don't know, extrapolate that other people who, and this is a galaxy brain moment here, actually exists, have the same relationships [chuckles] to the things that matter to them. Like, I don't know, housing, or healthcare, or to be a little dark, I guess, not being hatecrimed to death.
\n\nREIN: This is the one of my favorite tweets: “I don't know how to convince you to care about other people writ large.”
\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah, exactly. We talk a lot lately about how divisive things are and how divided the country is. There's a Medium article that I read recently with the delightfully bracing title of, “We hate you now.” It was an article about the potential going forward into a post-COVID-19 world where all of the people who've been wearing masks when they have to go outside, washing their hands, staying home unless absolutely necessary and who've, essentially, felt that they've been held captive in their own homes for over a year now are looking at the people who've been going to weddings, pool parties, restaurants, barbecues, and two weeks later, half of the attendees are sick, or dead and having, what I would say, are some pretty justifiable feelings of “We were doing all the right things and you selfish, entitled fill in your profanity of choice, have been doing exactly all the wrong things that have perpetuated this situation, such that we're still in lockdown and still in lockdown. We kind of hate you now and there's a real possibility of that we're always going to hate you.”
\n\nTo me, that's the divide I'm seeing in our culture going forward. Things like that. Then again, I am speaking as someone who shares custody of my daughter with my ex who lives in California and what that means, operationally, is that I have not seen my daughter in-person since March 8th of 2020 and so, I'm a little head up under the collar. Wow, that just kind of went off into a really dark place. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: No, this is good stuff. Very normal for us. This is why I don't have an issue going on record as saying that ethical systems based on naive individualism are bankrupt.
\n\nTAMSIN: Absolutely. One of the things that came out of my degree program with—and I will point out that I did go to a state university in the notoriously liberal state of Washington. But one of the things that I came out of my degree program with was a healthy and deeply ingrained respect for the concept of the social contract and for social contract theory as a venue of study, especially when you're looking at power dynamics in groups.
\n\nWhat I found is that explaining the social contract to people is really easy if they actually want to understand it and utterly impossible, if they're opposed, because if they're opposed, what's really going on isn't that they don't understand. They get it perfectly; they just don't want to agree. I can say the social contract is that you don't punch me, I don't shoot you; we maintain a basic air of non-violence and go on about our day. That's a contract. You don't hurt me. I don't hurt you. We move on. It's as simple as that, or as complicated as, “Hey, look, we have a civilization.” That is a marvelous quote in the chat: “No, thank you. I'd rather pretend I invent the entire universe every time I make an Apple pie.”
\n\nREIN: This gets all the way like the turtles go all the way down to what does it mean to be a person and what is the person to relationship to society?
\n\nTAMSIN: And if we are going to dive that deep into philosophy, I'm going to need some whiskey at least. [chuckles] I'm kidding.
\n\nBut as far as what is a person, philosophers have been trying to work that one out for quite literally thousands of years, at this point. When I was writing Outside the Charmed Circle, I wound up necessarily having to go back and read some amounts of Plato and Aristotle because they are, in many ways, part of the groundwork of Western philosophy and as well, part of the groundwork for Western notions of spirituality and magical practice. As you know, pagans are polytheists, or magicians.
\n\nOne of the things that I was horrified to discover and shouldn't have been really—I should have expected this—was that Plato and Aristotle didn't think too highly of women. There are these marvelous quotes that I included in the book and by marvelous, I mean tragic, frankly referring to the distinction between men, and women and other animals. That was text I saw on my screen and looked at and went, blink, blink, blink, What?”
\n\nREIN: This reminds me of George Lakoff's book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, so titled because there is a language with a category that includes those things in the same category.
\n\nTAMSIN: Wow. That's great. That's neat.
\n\nREIN: I think I can respect women being in the same category as dangerous things, to be fair.
\n\nTAMSIN: I think depending on how we're defining dangerous, anybody of any gender can be dangerous, but I have to admire the hustle of putting that as your title, that's pretty great. But the question of who counts as a person? What is a person? If you look at some of the classical Greek philosophers—Aristotle, Plato—they would say a person is a human male individual who fulfills these criteria and anyone who doesn't fulfill those criteria isn't really fully a person.
\n\nREIN: The human male citizen.
\n\nTAMSIN: Right.
\n\nREIN: Which is also how the US defined it.
\n\nTAMSIN: Shocking. Yeah, and then if you look at these philosophers as laying the groundwork for how Western culture defines, or describes personhood individuality, the next big cultural movements come along was of course, Christianity. I'm not here to bash on Christianity, but I will note that if you look at Christian philosophy around identity and individuality, especially if you're looking at gendered identities, a lot of that would be drawn from the work of Paul who wrote most of the epistles in the last two thirds of what's called the New Testament, the Christian Bible.
\n\nPaul had some less than awesome views about women and they're pretty much in a direct line of descent from Plato and Aristotle. You look at the things Paul was saying and it's like, oh, okay so he's basically just importing Greek philosophical misogyny into this new religion, which made a lot of sense because at that point in time, Greek philosophy was, I've called it the groundwork for Western philosophy and the Greeks were considered the de facto mainstream philosophers of that era, and everyone was rolling around speaking Greek, even the Romans.
\n\nSo this notion of individuality and of personhood being something that we specifically define by how you match an established hegemonic norm and by hegemonic, I mean a norm that is imposed by a power above you and it's this established hierarchy.
\n\nWhen I was learning about hegemonic norms in my degree program, someone in the class asked, “Okay, so hegemonic norm, how does that apply to us in modern Western American 21st century culture?” It's like, well, it's real easy. Who has the privilege? Who has the power?
\n\nIf you're white, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're Black, or Brown, or Asian, or what have you. If you are a cisgender person, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're trans or non-binary. If you are a cis male, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you are a non-cis male, and so on. That's hegemonic power, that's hegemony in action and a lot of those hegemonic norms come directly down from the classical Greeks through the norms established by Christianity.
\n\nI spend a lot of time talking about this in a book which is at least extensively about witchcraft, paganism, and magic because they're hobby horses that are really important to me and they seemed to tie in. So I was like, “Yeah, let's do this. Let's just throw it all in there.”
\n\nREIN: So you have these fringe communities and fringe only relative to the dominant normative culture, right?
\n\nTAMSIN: Right.
\n\nREIN: But then they start to intersect on the edges of that hegemonic, cultural conglomeration, whatever you want to call it. It reminds me of – so this is an analogy that I'm going to see if it lands so let me know.
\n\nThere's a book called How Buildings Learn and, in that book, one of the things that he talks about is what are called edge cities, where historically cities have been built around a port, or railroad, or some other thing. But what's happening in modern cities, there's a lot of the action is happening at the edges of the city where the highways intersect and so on. There's also a lot more possibility to build out there because the city center has been made pretty rigid by the buildings are large and they're probably not going anywhere, the codes, the building and zoning codes are very rigid, and so on. So actually, a lot of the most vital growth that happened in modern studies is happening at the edges.
\n\nI wonder if it's like that as well in these fringe communities and if that term has baggage that you want me to avoid, let me know.
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh no, I'm fine with the term. I think there's a lot of traction there. One of the hobby horses that I drag out and bang on a regular basis is the notion that subcultural communities reiterate and reinforce a lot of the same core assumptions as the over culture in which they are ensconced.
\n\nThere is this attitude of, “Well, we're different from outsiders. We're smarter, we're better, we're more spiritual. We're more accepting. We're more,” whatever the virtue, or the value that they want to see themselves as having is. But they frequently don't stop to realize that, in many ways, they are just reenacting a lot of the same attitudes that the mainstream culture, of which they are a subculture, is enacting all over the place.
\n\nI think when you look at the fringes of subcultures, the places where they start to rub up against other cultures, or other subcultures, where they start to intersect and get some new ideas and some new, interesting stuff going on that can be really valid, valuable, and healthy for the community as a whole. I also think that that is a place where there can be a lot of tension and a lot of fear.
\n\nI've seen that in the pagan community, where there are a lot of people who I think would position themselves very much at the center of the little circle of pagan community and they look at someone like, for instance, me, who's kind of out on this fringe edge here, rubbing up against the queer community, or the trans community, or whatever other communities that I'm part of.
\n\nThey may see this idea, or that idea and go, Well, that's not how we do things. That's not us. That's like some of your weird queer trans stuff,” and I'm going, “No, but wait. It's really cool and it informs what we do over here in this really useful way. And why are you walking away? Come back.” And then occasionally, it's like, “Oh, you were walking away to get a torch and a pitchfork. No, no, no, don't come back.”
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nJAMEY: When you were talking about that with the fringe communities, I was thinking about the queer community as well, even before you brought it up, because I think that what Rein was saying about exciting things happening in that space is definitely true. But I also think that you have a problem in the community sometimes like, people who are younger, or more newly out and don't know as much about queer history trying to roll things back. That's why we have this argument about why younger people, who think that the word “queer” is not okay for anyone to use, coming in and saying, “Oh, we can't do this,” and older people saying, “There has been a lot of discourse, progress, and things that have happened over the course of history that you need to know about before you can have an informed opinion on it. [laughs]
\n\nTAMSIN: You need to scroll back up in the chat before you start talking.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJAMEY: Yeah. You need to scroll back up like a bunch of years in the chat. [laughs]
\n\nTAMSIN: Right. Yes. That is a huge issue in the queer community and it's one that – I'm 47 years old and I have found myself in conversations with people who are 19, 20 who wants to tell me, “Oh, well, you shouldn't use the word queer because queer is a slur,” and I'm going, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, red flag, hold on. Queer has been used as a slur, absolutely yes. But in the 80s and 90s, there was an awful lot of work done to reclaim that word. I know, I was there.” And today, now the primary driver behind the notion that queer is a slur is trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It's transphobes who are like, ‘Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. Queer gives too much leeway for all of these trans people to sneak into this community. So uh oh, we can't be having with that.”
\n\nSo I find myself basically having to strike the compromise of okay, I'm never going to tell you that you have to call yourself queer, but you don't get to tell all of us queers out here that that's not our word and if that means you don't want to come sit at our table, or come to our parties, that's okay, too.
\n\nThe problem of gatekeeping in the queer community, as in every subcultural community, is real and it's real bad. The extent to which some quorum within a community wants to enforce little boundaries inside the larger community. So it's like I have my little walled garden in the queer community, and you can come in if you perform gender, or sexuality, or identity in these specific ways that I am dictating. It's too much headache.
\n\nIt's funny how I talk about these problems in the queer community, or in the trans community, or in the pagan community and I have friends who work in the tech world and they're going, “Huh, this all sounds eerily familiar.”
\n\nJAMEY: It's almost as if people act the same,
\n\nTAMSIN: No matter where you go. [chuckles] Yeah, it is.
\n\nThese are not problems unique to any one subcultural community. They are human problems and I'm often tempted to say that the solution is to stop dealing with people, but I like people and I like doing things with people. One of the reasons I'm so mad about this stupid pandemic is that I miss people, hanging out with people in-person and being able to drink coffee with them.
\n\nBut I think that a lot of these problems of gatekeeping, these enforcement of boundaries, these power dynamic issues that we have all fundamentally come back to, at least in many of the cases I've seen, issues around power and the fear of powerlessness, the fear of being disenfranchised, or of losing what you see as power, or opportunity, or access, or privilege that you're entitled to.
\n\nI mean, that's certainly what seems to be one of the things that's at the core of these ridiculous ideas like white genocide. White people are being crowded out and we're being outbred by all of these other people of color and white people have to band together and blah, blah, blah! All of this garbage is all rooted in fear and under that ignorance. Much wiser and more experienced minds than mine have written at great length about those issues and how best to combat them. I have a lot of hope in that regard, but at the same time, I look at the news app on my phone every morning and that hope dies a little. So it's kind of a tidal thing; it rises and falls.
\n\nREIN: The relationship between radicals and action areas, I think where it's a relationship to a particular preferred state of affairs and whether you think you need to go forwards, or backwards to get there.
\n\nREIN: Right. We used to call that the difference between a liberal and a conservative view, but those words have been so battered and worked out of utility that you can't even bring them up anymore. But it, again, goes back to that idea of you have the circle that is the community and the people at the center, who are perhaps most emblematic of its baseline core ideas and ideals, and then the people out on the fringes of things, who are bringing in new information and new ideas, or sending their ideas out to other communities and sharing with them.
\n\nI think that can all be really healthy and part of a wholesome ecosystem of subcultural engagement and interaction. I also think that when people get scared, they start doing things that are really not in their best interest. They start making really bad choices and that way lies dissent, dissension, and conflict.
\n\nBut a lot of that is why I titled the book I wrote Outside the Charmed Circle because it comes from an essay by a cultural theorist named Gayle Rubin. This is an essay that she wrote called “Thinking Sex” and in this essay, she posited that you can look at ideas like sexuality and if you picture it as two circles, one inside the other divided up like a dark board, pie wedged shapes. The inner circle, the charmed circle is the stuff that society basically all approves of: heterosexuality, monogamy, sex for the purposes of procreation, and so on and so forth. And then outside the charm circle are what Gayle Rubin called the outer limits. Those are the things which society doesn't approve so non-monogamy, having sex for reasons other than procreation, because it's fun, or to make money, or whatever reasons.
\n\nEach of the things in the term circle has its counterpart in the outer limits, its counterpart outside the charmed circle. Ah, see what I did there? So things like homosexuality, or bisexuality, or asexuality, or demisexuality, or, or, or—these are all outside the term circle because they are fundamentally alien to the hegemonic norms of culture and I just realized I'm throwing a lot of this jargon around, wow.
\n\nREIN: I think it is interesting as a metaphor here because it implies both, at the periphery and also, a sparseness, or lack of structure.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah. I think that there's value to be found both, at the core and on the edges, on the fringe. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: What’s [inaudible] is that some of these groups on the edges seem to be reproducing structures that are found in the core.
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. The structures that you find at the core of a group are really comfortable. They're really comforting if they're built for you. To pick one, for example, the structure of being cisgender is really comfortable. You’re cis if you were born and you were assigned a gender at birth and you grew up and you're like, “Yeah, that's me. That fits me like a glove because it's tailored to who I am. I don't have any objections to this.”
\n\nBut if you take that same glove and put it on someone else, it's going to be too big, too small, it fits in the wrong ways, it's no, this is wrong. These structures of being cisgender don't fit for someone like say, me. That's not to say being cisgender is wrong. It's perfectly fine and that's okay. Just not for me.
\n\nJAMEY: This is certainly coming back to what you were saying earlier about “Oh, I care about these issues that affect me,” and we have to extrapolate that they affect other people because you'll see people are like, “Oh, but this is so comfortable. Why wouldn't you want this great comfortable thing?” And I can't extrapolate that other people are having a different experience.
\n\nTAMSIN: One of the real problems that we as human beings have is not understanding that our individual experiences are not universally applicable. It's like handing someone a strawberry ice cream cone and they taste it and they're like, “Oh, thanks. Not for me,” and you're like, “Well, what's wrong with it? It's delicious. It's a strawberry ice cream cone,” and they're like, “I don't like strawberry ice cream.” Like, “Well, how can you not? I like strawberry ice cream.” “Yeah, but I don't taste this strawberry ice cream with your tongue. Your taste buds. Mine are wired differently.” That's just a random example pulled out of the air; I actually like strawberry ice cream fine. Not my favorite, but it's fine.
\n\nBut individual experience isn't universally applicable and to come back to that question of how do we define the individual person as against a larger culture, or community? I think past a certain point of defining an individual, or a person as a self-aware consciousness, I really don't want to try and define personhood at all.
\n\nIf I can acknowledge that someone is sapient and sentient, that's good enough for me and if at some point down the road, we get to a place of developing actual artificial intelligence, like Turing capable AI. If it tells me it's sentient and sapient, I am more than happy to sit down and have a coffee with it and I think that's as much as I want to get into well, how do we define a person? Because once you go any further than that, inevitably it winds up with oppression, slavery, and genocide. Again, pretty grim. [laughs]
\n\nJAMEY: No, it’s good.
\n\nREIN: Again, how do we get people to care about other people?
\n\nTAMSIN: Oh, if I had the answer to that, I could write another book. It would be a bestseller and I would never have to try and get another job.
\n\nI think that the answer, and I am totally cribbing from my partner here—who is an amazing human being and a developer at a local software company up here. My partner would probably suggest that the answer is you teach empathy and you start teaching empathy by going back to you have this relationship to this issue, or this thing that happened. It made you feel a certain way. How do you think that issue impacted that person?
\n\nExperiences aren't universal, but the condition of experiencing things is universal. So I'm not going to have the same experience that someone else has with any given issue, but I can acknowledge that they are having an experience and that their experience is as meaningful to them and their lives as mine is to me and my life. Once you've done that, you started the building blocks of developing empathy, which leads to compassion, which leads to, “Oh, maybe we should get kids out of those cages on the border, maybe we should find a way to feed people, and restore the power grid in Texas so elderly people aren't literally freezing to death in their homes in the 21st century in America.”
\n\nREIN: I think there's a Swedish word for the realization that everyone on this street that you're walking down has just as rich, deep, and complex an inner mental life as you do and I think we need more of that.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yeah, we do. We do. Now I totally want to go and look up that Swedish word, but that acknowledgement that everyone around us is actually a person. They have an interior life, they have hopes and dreams of their own, and their hopes and dreams don't have to be relevant to me.
\n\nOne of the things that I think those of us who are ensconced in subcultures sometimes struggle with is – well, it's the inverse of another problem so let me, let me try and rephrase this. Those of us who are in subcultural communities—whether it's the tech community, or the queer community, or the trans community, or the pagan community, or what have you—we all struggle with these feelings of our interests and our passions being incomprehensible to people who aren't part of our communities.
\n\nI am not a developer. I am not even really much of a coder, but I know enough about coding from having been in a CS program for a hot minute to be able to grasp what's cool about really elegant code, what's really cool about this thing that my partner comes to me and she's like, “Oh, I did this thing and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I'm like, “I understood about one word in three, but it was barely enough to hang on with my fingernails,” and that is really cool and awesome.
\n\nBut that's not a conversation that she could have with, for instance, my Mom. My mother, who is a brilliant woman and has a degree in nursing and is a medical professional and does all these things, my Mom would do just glaze over a little and go, “Okay, cool. I'm glad that the good thing happened for you,” but it does reinforce this idea that these things we're into are relatively esoteric.
\n\nSo it in turn reinforces this seclusion of our little subcultural communities into their enclaves and we become this little technocratic priesthood, but that can turn into another problem, which is not only are we weird and different, but we're better. The taking of pride in the cool, awesome thing that we understand and love can turn into, “If you don't understand the cool, awesome thing we're into what's wrong with you?”
\n\nOh, well, pfft users. I've heard that exact sentiment expressed by people in the software industry and it always baffles me because I'm like, “You realize that you are making tools for people to use, right?” The people that you're going “Pfft users” about are literally the reason you have a job because otherwise, all of the tippy-tappy you do with the keyboard is an intellectual exercise. Great, you created this incredibly elegant piece of software that no one is going to use. At that point, you may as well just be building a matchstick cathedral in your backyard and then lighting it on fire.
\n\nWhat I would really like to see from all of our communities is a little less hubris and a lot less gatekeeping and a substantial amount less of a self-reinforcing sense of superiority about people who aren't inside our particular charmed circle. What I want to see is our subcultural communities, having pride in who we are and what we do, and the cool things that we make, or the cool things that we do, or the cool lives that we lead, or whatever it is that is part of our community without turning that into, “And that's why we're so much better than the normies, the mundanes, the muggles—to use Voldemort's word. That's why we're better than people who don't do this cool stuff that we do.”
\n\nBecause I feel like that need to be better than the people who make us feel kind of weird and like we don't belong is again, just reiterating the same power structures that got us into this problem in the first place. The over culture thinks it's better than these weird freaky fringe communities because they're nerdy, or they're awkward, or they're cringy and the fringe communities in return think they're better than the basic, boring, mundane, mainstream, normie culture and nobody gets to have any fun.
\n\nI would much rather have a mainstream culture that respects and appreciates the awesome things that fringe communities bring to the table, the innovations that they provide, the new ways of thinking and approaching problems and have subcultural communities that understand that they are ensconced in an over culture, which is the reason that they can exist and that's how I'm going to solve world peace.
\n\nJAMEY: So we’re coming up to the part of our show where we like to let everyone give a reflection about what we've talked about for the past hour, or so. This is something that is going to be on your mind, or a call-to-action, or just something that stuck out for you. I'm going to go first.
\n\nWhat's something that stuck out for me was the conversation that we had actually a couple of times about conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you and how that's so hard for people. Because I think that you see this, even on a microlevel within these subcultures, and I think that suggests to me that it's such a natural human thing to do and I think that I get that because it does feel good to have things in common with other people and to celebrate the things that we have in common.
\n\nI guess, I'm thinking about this specifically in the trans community where they're like, “It feels great to be able to be like, ‘We have this thing in common and I feel so good about that,’” but there are still a lot of different kinds of people in the trans community and this is how you end up with people saying, “Oh, the universal trans experience is loving being a girl when you take your estrogen,” and I'm like, “That's definitely not.” [laughs]
\n\nYou could probably keep making that thing that you're saying smaller until it's true for everyone in your little group that it's true for. But we have this desire to categorize ourselves in that way and I think that the reason I'm talking about this and saying this is, I think that it's really good to keep in mind the ways that all of us probably also do this on smaller levels. So I guess, my call-to-action is I'm going to try and think about catching myself if I'm doing this.
\n\nREIN: Well, I'm going to attempt to stay in my lane here with my reflection. I was thinking about one of the first things that came up, which is mentor-mentee relationships, and I was thinking about what you said about empathy.
\n\nOne of the things that – I’ve changed a little bit, even in the last few years in terms of how I think about empathy, which is, I think empathy is good, but I don't think it's very actionable because empathy is an internal thing that happens in individual people's heads. No one else has access to it. What Russell Ackoff says is that systems are not the sum of their components, they're the product of their interactions.
\n\nSo what I started to think about was what are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? What I've started to focus on is the interaction called helping. Edgar Schein wrote a book called Helping and it's a study of the social process, or phenomenon where people help each other. How does it happen? Why does it happen?
\n\nOne of the things he noticed that that was pretty interesting is that helping is mostly notable when it doesn't happen and there's an expectation that it should have. So you think here are things like that's not helpful and what I think that we should try to do is focus more on positive affirmations when it does happen.
\n\nSo that's why when I do retrospectives with teams, we leave that with appreciations. I want to make helping remarkable. I want people to talk about helping and get better at it as practice. I guess, that's my solution to how do you get people to care about each other? It's how do you build empathy and I think it's by the practice of helping.
\n\nTAMSIN: I like that a lot. That's really good. One of the thoughts that has recurred over the course of this conversation for me is that the dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren't that dissimilar from one group to another, whatever their special interest happens to be.
\n\nThat was the thing I didn't understand growing up. It was a thing I certainly didn't understand through much of my adult life and now, crawling into my late 40s, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around this concept, that in a lot of ways, these groups are really all the same. That's because well, as we've alluded earlier, they're all made up of people and people all tend to be kind of the same in terms of the patterns that they enact, the approaches that they take, the things that they fundamentally want.
\n\nAgain, not universal experiences, but we all have the shared commonality of having these experiences. We all have the shared feature of wanting things and wanting to be understood. Wanting empathy, or compassion, even if we are ourselves not terribly good at giving it. That's certainly something that's been true with me.
\n\nEven within the course of this conversation, I brought up the Medium article about the pandemic and how it's really easy to want to be furious with the people who are, in a very real way, responsible for the fact that I haven't seen my daughter in over a year.
\n\nAt the same time, at least some of those people were acting in ways that I don't have to think are rational or correct, but they had some reason they did the things they did and if I can understand why they act the way they do and I want to spend the effort and the energy to meet them where they are, perhaps I can find ways to work with them to be different, to be what I would consider better. More in line with a social contract that means that we don't have 600,000 people dead by the summer, but that is work that's on me to do, because I can't ask somebody, who's already living in a state of fear, to suddenly magically have cool, calm rationality descend upon them.
\n\nREIN: The last thing I'll mention for folks who are listening, who are on software development teams and so on, is that a team is literally definitionally a group of people who help each other.
\n\nTAMSIN: Yes, yes, it is.
\n\nJAMEY: This was really great. Thank you so much.
\n\nTAMSIN: Thank you. I had a wonderful time. This was a blast.
\n\nJAMEY: And I should say that anyone who wants to have further conversations like this with us, we have a Slack community and we're all there, all of our guests are there, and lots of other really interesting people. You can join our Slack community if you back us on Patreon, patreon.com/greaterthancode, even like a dollar.
\n\nREIN: These episodes are successful because we co-create them with our guests. We're helping each other make cool episodes. So thank you for helping us to make a cool episode.
\n\nTAMSIN: It has genuinely been my pleasure. It’s been a delight. Thank you so much for having me.
Special Guest: Tamsin Davis-Langley.
","summary":"Tamsin Davis-Langley talks about who is a person? A loaded question, we know. After touching on the concepts of hegemonic norms and privilege and power, Tamsin ideates on “fringe communities,” subcultures, and intersections, using the Queer community as an example. We end on the brilliant idea that individual experiences are not universally applicable and have a few key takeaways from the conversation.","date_published":"2021-04-28T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0edb6156-e1af-4700-b2fd-4f1a0c7f0244.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45575970,"duration_in_seconds":3845}]},{"id":"5d665540-be2f-4f11-aa59-5a3132cdc84f","title":"231: Deserted Island Safety and Expectations with Austin Parker","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/deserted-island-safety-and-expectations","content_text":"01:04 - Austin’s Superpower: Pain Tolerance\n\n02:06 - Deserted Island DevOps (Running an Online/Virtual Conference in Animal Crossing or Other Mediums)\n\n\nDeserted Island DevOps 2020 on YouTube\nSoftware Circus\nThe Great Cloud Native Bakeoff \nMaking Real-Time Audience/Human Connection\nStreaming\nWatch Parties\nAustin Parker: Virtual Events Suck. \n\n\n24:09 - Failure; Making it Safe to Fail\n\n\nTechnical Failure\nPsychological Failure\nUnderpromise, Overdeliver\n\n\n32:51 - Safety and Setting Expectations (The Problem with More is Better)\n\n\nOKRs\nOpen Source Principles\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The creativity of new ways to experience a conference.\n\nCoraline: The importance of moderation.\n\nAustin: How to communicate feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to people you’re working with.\n\nJacob: Find a conference that has been thoughtful about interaction when not in person and go.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nCORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 231 of Greater Than Code podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke and I’m joined by my friend, John Sawers.\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m here with Jacob Stoebel.\n\nJACOB: Thanks. John! It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, Austin Parker.\n\nAustin makes problems with computers and sometimes solves them. He’s an open-source maintainer, observability nerd, DevOps junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring Hacker News threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing.\n\nSuch a nice pleasure to have you on the show.\n\nAUSTIN: It's fantastic to be here.\n\nJACOB: We can start the show like we always do by asking you a question. What's your superpower and how did you develop it?\n\nAUSTIN: Right now, my superpower is I'm 50% through a COVID-19 vaccine and I developed it by staying indoors for the past year, but more hilariously I guess, I developed a strong resistance to burns by working as a gas station cook for quite a while, back in my younger days. So I ran the fryer and you get really good at ignoring hot oil spattering on you. So I'd like to think that that level of pain tolerance is what helped me get through a lot of DevOps stuff and getting used to computers.\n\n[laughter] \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. I hate Kubernetes and it's hot oil splashing. They should do something about that. It's open source. I guess, I could open my PR, but .\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. Well, they say PR is welcome, but that's the open-source maintainers. Bless your heart, right?\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, exactly. So Austin, I want to know more about this DevOps conference that you ran in Animal Crossing.\n\nAUSTIN: So let's start at the beginning, let's take everyone back to just about a year ago now where we were all kind of settling in for our wonderful pandemic that has been extremely not wonderful for most people, but I think everyone was coming to grips with how long it would take at first. \n\nMy day job, I work as in developer relations. I'm a marketer, effectively. But I remember a lot of people were talking, the marketing team and certainly, the entire events space like, “Oh, what's this going to do about the summer events, what's this going to do about the fall events?” and I'm sitting here like, “Hey, I think this is going to last a little longer than till June.” \n\nSo the conversation kind of pivots as everything gets progressively worse and people are starting to come to grips like, “Well, can we do a virtual event?” I don't think anyone at the time really had a good idea of what a virtual event would be. We all know video conferencing certainly is something that we've come to rely on in our day-to-day lives over the past year. Even if you weren't already in tech, or weren't already working remotely, Zoom is – it’s been Q-tip. It's been Kleenex. It's a no matter what you're using, you're Zooming someone. So they have that going for them, I guess.\n\nPeople, I think there was a lot of possibility and not a lot of real, strong ideas about what does this actually mean? So I wanted to try something different. I was joking around on Twitter and I had just gotten a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I was staging with screenshots with like, “Oh look, this is funny. It's like a conference booth.” It's like ha, ha, we're all giving out t-shirts and laughing.\n\nAnd the code people picked up on and they were like, “Oh, that's funny. I bet you could actually do a conference in Animal Crossing and stream it out” because you can actually have people like join you, come over to your island and stand around. I was like, “Well, actually, you could just composite that video from the output of the game over some slides and what's the difference?” Someone's talking, someone's clicking through slides, and it spiraled from a joke. I put up a page, a landing page on April 1st, which is the best time to announce anything thing. Because if people don't go for it, you can always be like, “Ha, ha, April fools. Got you!”\n\n[laughter]\n\nBut I put up a landing page and we had a 100 people register for more information that first day, I messaged them on Slack, and I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to do it now; a 100 people one day. That's great.” \n\nCORALINE: Yeah. \n\nAUSTIN: So long story short, over the next 30 days, we basically put together, myself and then my co-organizer, Katie @thekatertot on Twitter, or Katie Farmer, a virtual conference inside of Animal Crossing. It's called Deserted Island DevOps. You can go watch it on YouTube, the one from last year. We're doing another one this year on April 30th. It's just a one-day live stream. If you're watching it, you're just watching it on Twitch. We have a Discord that you can talk and do the hallway track stuff and ask questions and network.\n\nBut the gimmick is basically, everyone's presenting has a Switch and they are in Animal Crossing. They're on this island, they're dressing up their little Animal Crossing character and we overlay their slides with the video coming out of the Switch so they can emote and react and it's cute experience to watch. \n\nBut I think it's also interesting because what I saw, last year at least, is that it solves a lot of the problems, I think most virtual conferences don't quite nail, which is, I think a good event is something that takes you out of your day-to-day. It takes you out of where you are and put you somewhere else. Now, if you go into KubeCon, or re:Invent, or even devopdays, if you're doing this physically like, you're not at your office, you're not at home, you're somewhere else talking to people, literally, you have changed the physical location you're in. But most virtual events, it still boils down to, “Hey, I'm watching a Zoom effectively and I'm talking to people in Slack.” If I wanted to do that, I could just do my actual job. \n\nSo I think one of the things that people appreciated about Deserted Island and continue to is the idea that this is produced differently. There's a couple other people that are doing stuff like this. I think Software Circus out of the UK, they've done a lot of themed events, themed virtual events like this, where the presenters are wearing costumes. Or there was The Great Kubernetes Bake-Off, I want to say where it’s a cloud kitchen theme so everyone has their chefs’ hats. \n\nI think having that concept also gives presenters a lot of mileage in terms of hey, you can theme what you're talking about. Here is an analogy in a box, here is a world that you can put your talk in and you have an idea that everyone can use those shared experiences, that shared language to develop your talk and give people an anchor for it, which I think is one of the good ways you help people learn. If you give them something they know about and then you tie your concept into that concept, then they're going to get more out of it. \n\nThe other thing is that it's a great way to be expressive. In Animal Crossing, you are who you are, you are whoever your avatar is. So you don't get any of the – I hate being on camera a lot. It gets exhausting because you feel like you're performing for the camera. It’s not the same, but in this, nobody's seeing your actual face; they're hearing your voice and then you can dress your Animal Crossing your avatar whatever. So you can be creative. You can be who you are without having that weird performance pressure of a bunch of people that you can't see staring at your face\n\nJOHN: This is an important topic these days because there's still everything's online and will be for a while and I think so many people are still learning how to do online events and those skills are going to need to keep happening over the next coming years. I think because you can do now online events, which are more accessible to more people all over the world, you don't have to be the sort of person who can fly places in order to attend certain events. Having them online is a great accessibility option. So finding new modalities for making that interesting and not just sitting on Zoom all day, I think is a worthy endeavor.\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and it's super challenging. I don't want to sound like I'm like dragging people's work because I know CNCF has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. I know of the entire devopsdays community has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. This is super hard to do. It's not easy. It requires a lot of intentionality; a lot of planning and I think we will all get better at it over time. \n\nThe future is not necessarily going to be like the past, I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where we just kind of flip a switch and it's all like, “Oh, we're back to how we were before March of 2020,” I think. So there's still going to be a desire for virtual events and there's still going to be a desire for figuring out ways to be more inclusive and to bring people in, especially because of climate change and everything like that. At some point, we have to come to a reckoning about the actual cost of a global travel-based society but that's maybe a slightly different topic. I don't know.\n\nCORALINE: I actually think a good side effect of all this is a focus on accessibility and like you said, a lot of people aren't people to travel. It's expensive. I know conferences, typically in-person conferences, used to spend quite a bit of money with programs to bring in marginalized folks who maybe couldn't afford the travel. \n\nBut one thing I do miss is getting that audience reaction. Especially as a storyteller, I tend to tell a lot of stories in my talk and I like to be able to see, is the audience with me, is the audience getting what I'm saying? I can tune my presentation in real-time based on audience reactions and I really miss that. I really missed that aspect of it, that feedback aspect of it, because at the end of people are like, “Oh, great talk.” I'm like, “Yeah, but did it get to you?”\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, did you connect with it?\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's so hard. \n\nAUSTIN: It's challenging, especially because so many of – on the production side, there's a bias, I think in virtual events to prerecord, due to a lot of factors and this is not a diss on prerecording. I personally hate it. I basically have stopped doing any event that's like, “Oh, we want you to prerecord.” I'm just like, “Eh, I'd rather not” because that’s the style, that's the way I talk. I agree with this idea of storytelling like, you're not just reading slides. If I just want someone to read slides, I could just hand them a book. \n\nBut what's weird to me is one of the things that I think that we did, that I haven't seen anyone else really do, is there's already a way that people do this. If you watch Twitch, if you watch twitch.tv, or live streams like the kids do these days, there is a real-time chat and people are reacting in real-time. It's a little bit delayed. It's a couple seconds delayed, but I don't know why you haven't seen other virtual event platforms take that idea and really try to have even just a button like a clap button, or a sparkle fingers button, or something to kind of let people know that there's people out there watching you and that they're reacting positively and maybe not negatively, but they're reacting. That they are cognizant of what you're saying. \n\nIt's really surprising to me that we haven't seen more like that and I would love if some of these event platforms thought about that. How do you make that actual, immediate real-time, or near real-time audience connection with the speaker?\n\nCORALINE: The Twitch thing is really interesting. Back in October, I started streaming in addition to everything else I do in my life—I'm a musician—and I started streaming, recording, and music production and I have a weekly show. You're right, the audience interaction is great and I incorporate that into my show. I'll stop what I'm doing after I finish laying down one track and I'll ask the people in chat, “What instrument should I pick up next?” Or, “What sound would you like to hear there?” Things like that. It does make that more interactive and it brings some of that human connection back and I think you're right. That's what's missing from a lot of these online conferences is that connection. \n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and I actually think you've hit on it right there with streaming. There's been a big question – I don't know how much you follow the CNCF, KubeCon EU talk acceptance drama that kind of popped off a week, or so ago. But the short version is obviously, KubeCon is a very prominent conference in the Cloud Native world and it gets a lot of submissions and because it gets a lot of submissions, a lot of talks get dropped, a lot of things get cut. That's every event; there's always more submissions than there are slots for people to speak, but it turned into a bit of a blow up on Twitter and they actually wrote a blog post that's very explicitly described again hey, this is how we pick these talks. There's a lot of factors that go into it. \n\nThe thing that occurred to me and I've seen some people talk about, especially people that have been in the industry for a while is, what really is the benefit of a conference at all? When you have things like Twitch and you can build an audience for yourself and it's easier than it's ever been to get a platform. Some people in the world have used that for good ends and some people in the world have used that for ill ends, but regardless, I could go out and just say, “I'm not doing talks and I'm not doing conferences anymore. I'm just going to stream. I'm going to produce things and put them on YouTube.” \n\nThe only reason you would be at a conference at that point is as like okay, this is a quality filter. These are some people saying, or suggesting that these talks, or these individuals have a higher value to the community because we got a bunch of people, smart people to look at it and say like, “Yeah, we think this one's better than that one.” \n\nBut I really wonder if all of this with COVID, with the pandemic, with the change in events is going to inspire a different model going forward, where there's less of a centralization factor of you haven’t made it until you've done a KubeCon keynote, or you haven't made it until you've done the devopsdays circuit, or you haven't made it until you've written a book, or whatever. If you’ve got something to say, go say it and I think maybe that's a better way because that also is more accessible. You don't have to necessarily – there's less gatekeepers and a lot of times, gatekeepers and experts are useful because they help cut through all the chaff. \n\nBut on the flip side, it can be harmful, too because everyone has biases and even the best process is never going to weed out bias and most of the time, you don't want it to weed out bias. You want it to be biased for good things, not bad things. I don't know. I feel like there's a conversation that needs to happen about this that hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet. I'm interested to see where it goes.\n\nJACOB: One thing that sounds interesting about this Animal Crossing conferences, you talked about it was a different modality altogether and I'm just curious if did this conference include, or at least was it like there was a side-effect of conference goers just playing the game with each other?\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, actually that was one of my really interesting learnings from it was that when you have a community started, just the best thing to do is just let them go do stuff. We had a bunch of people form impromptu watch parties where they would open up their island and invite people are watching to come and be in the same game space as them as viewers and run around together while watching the stream. So they would tweet out pictures like you would do at an actual conference, where it's like, “Oh, hanging out with the besties,” and then tweet out a picture, a screenshot of their island with people sitting. Some people went really into this; they built little watch party rooms where everyone had chairs and a little movie projector set up. Some people had coffee machines and a little snack plates, or whatever in the game. \n\nIt was really interesting to me how, when you kind of let people be creative about it and you let people try to build what they want inside this modality, this world, this bigger world, I guess, of being at a virtual conference, that they'll do stuff with it because it's fun and because it gets you engaged. Again, it's not just watching another Zoom. It's not just chatting on Slack. It's, you're doing something and the really good thing about that is if you are doing something, if you do make it a unique experience, people will actually take the time for it. \n\nOne thing that I think gets lost in a lot of these virtual events right now is that it's not something you're blocking off time for. You're saying like, “Okay, I've got maybe two, or three talks I really want to watch. So I'm going to block off 45 minutes in my calendar here and there and I'm going to watch this different screen for a minute.” \n\nBut with this, what we saw was people had blocked the entire day off. It was a 6-hour, maybe 5 hours total and people were there the entire time. We had 8,000, 9,000 people watching basically consistently from the beginning to the end and about 15,000 people total watched it over the course of the day. So nearly 50% of that were people that were there the whole time roughly.\n\nI think by giving people that space to make time for themselves and to say like, “I'm going to treat this like an actual thing and not just something I'm going to pop back into.” That meant they could do the networking. They could do the chatting. They could react in Twitch and they could do the little clap emojis and the sparkle emojis. They could have those hallway track conversations and network and bond and get that social jazz you get by talking to people that have this similar problems, or have overcome challenges and are like, “Oh, this is how I solved X and Y problem in Kubernetes,” or even, “Oh yeah, this is a strategy I learned for dealing with managers that don't understand me, or making sure that we – how do I communicate this technical concept to the business?” It wasn't just, “I want to talk about really cool IP tables configs.” It really was like, “Hey, we're all people trying to solve these problems,” and that was, I think, wonderful to see and something that I'm really hoping that we can nail again this year.\n\nJACOB: I think the wonderful thing about conferences is that, as someone who has a good deal of social anxiety, or shyness, is the in-person experience is an excuse to sort of – well, it was like it prevented me from having the excuse of like, “Oh, I could just watch it on – is this something I can just watch it on YouTube?” I was able to like, convince myself, like, “No, you actually have to go there and you have to sit next to someone you don't know and introduce yourself.” \n\nI feel like conferences that I could get the exact same experience just watching the video anyway, I lose that side effect, which is, I think the more valuable thing is that there's an experience that I would miss out on if I wasn't there. \n\nSo it made me think about what Caroline is saying about that immediacy of being a speaker and I guess, what I’m wondering is maybe the secret is if you can't reproduce the immediacy of people being in the same room together, and I'm not certain that's true, or not whatever it is, maybe the trick is how do you use technology to your advantage rather than thinking about it as a barrier to get around?\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. I'm not going to say I have all the answers, certainly. The thing that I really hope, because I wrote a big thing about it on my blog and I feel like there's a progression of events, virtual events that have happened where people are experimenting and trying new things. I would like to think they're trying to get to that point. How do you use the technology we have to enhance connections rather than viewing it as just like, “Oh, this is a thing we’ve got to do until we can get everyone back on a plane”?\n\nCORALINE: And really, that's the best thing about technology is when you find an unexpected use for it. When you find something outside the use case that it's designed for and you get that feeling of delight, I think that's when tech is at its best.\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. I think that was one of the things. The two big things about Deserted Island is the idea that this is a deliberately delightful and cute and comfortable place. It is the softest game you can imagine. There are no harsh edges. There is no failure state. I don't think there's a 90-degree angle in that entire game, but it also gives you enormous constraints because it's a very crafted world and so, working around and through those constraints, but also having sort of the delight of overcoming them and figuring out like, “Oh, this is this really soft round space that I can do stuff in, but I have these walls. I have these barriers set up that I have to work around.” I mean, that's why I'm in technology; it’s because it's endless source of challenges and it's an endless source of like, “Oh, here's a hill I can overcome.”\n\nI was never super popular, or fast, or anything. I sucked at sports. I still suck at sports. The one time I went skiing, I tore my ACL in 15 minutes. I'm just not a coordinated guy, but in technology, there's always a new hill to summit. There's always something new to learn. There's always a new challenge that presents itself. That, to me, is that's why I stick with it. I could do other things, but here's something that's always going to challenge me and it's always going to give me something new to do. \n\nThat, I think is worth celebrating in itself and if we can find a way to blend all these things together, blend all the different ideas about events and the delight and constraints and challenges of technology and dah, dah, dah, dah, and throw that together in a Twitch stream. Cool, rad, let's do that. I think that was a lot of the inspiration. It was just like, “Hey, this might blow up in my face. This might fail terribly, but it's better to try it and see what happens.” Every day when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh my God, it's never going to be as big of a success. Everyone's going to hate me,” whatever, I come back to that like, “Well, better to try and just like fall on my face than it is to wonder what might've been if I hadn't tried.”\n\nCORALINE: That reminds me of safety and something that we talk about at least in workplaces is making more places safe to fail and I think at the event level, the fear of failure has got to be a lot more on a different level. So were you prepared to fail and how did you prepare to fail?\n\nAUSTIN: It’s a great question. To be super honest, I'm not sure I was prepared to fail by the time it actually – so there's two types of failure. There was the technical failure and that was something that I did have plans for. There's a lot of technical failure that can happen during a live event production; my computer could have crashed, my internet could have gone down, a presenter's internet could have died. In preparation for that, there was a playbook effectively of okay, if this goes wrong, then do this. If this goes wrong, do that. \n\nNow, in doing so, I actually discovered a lot of other things that I didn't think could go wrong that did go wrong. One example was, we had very strong moderation in the chat because it's the internet, it's a public thing. There's no registration. Anyone could come into the Twitch chat and say whatever. So I was pretty biased towards okay, now let's crank up the moderation filters and make sure that people aren't going to just come in and say some mean things. \n\nOne thing I didn't think to ask any of the presenters is like, “Hey, do you have something that's interactive outside of this?” One of them did, they had an interactive presentation where people went to Slido, or something and could that had its own chat input, text input. \n\nAny large enough Twitch stream, you had some trolls that had come in and started typing some slurs and other non-code of conduct things. So it's like, “Oh, crud,” and switch that scene off really quick and try to make sure, coordinate in chat like, “Hey, are you aware of what's going on with the speaker?” In real-time while they were continuing to present. We managed to deal with that and then cut out the offensive language in the video on demand version. So it's not there and it didn't disrupt things. there was a blip of like, “Ah,” and then we dealt.\n\nI think beyond that, though, the actual psychological failure because my expectations were pretty low in terms of like, “Oh, what is a success?” Because we didn't spend a lot of money on it. I didn't have any sponsors. I think I had an email list with 1,500 people on it and I was like, “Well, 50 roughly, you have some sort of webinar, or whatever, you get 50% of the sign-ups and that's a good one.” A 100 people sign up and 50 people show up. Great, you're doing fantastic. So my expectations were like, “Oh, here's my bar, 1,500.” If we hit that, if we hit anything close to that, we're doing great and then we hit 8,000. \n\nSo the problem coming back to this a year later is oh, now the expectations are so much higher and we've taken sponsorship. We have sponsors now; we have a sponsor money in order to fund things like scholarships. One of the problems last year was you had to have a Switch to participate. This year we've come, I've gone around and said, “Hey, if you want to sponsor this and pay for someone that doesn't have access to a Switch, or Animal Crossing, or whatever, you can sponsor us by buying that person the equipment thingy to join this because not everyone can afford that.”\n\nObviously, it's some level of exclusionary, like not everyone has internet, but within the group of people, the class people are giving talks to this, I figured that's about what we can do. Especially since you don't need a good camera, you just need a microphone. But because they're sponsors now, because there were so many people last year. It's like, “How do I set myself up for the chance that this is a failure psychologically?” And that, I don't have a great answer to. Therapy, I guess, is the answer to that. I talked to my therapist about this stuff. But it is. I think the psychological effects are actually much harder to plan around and much like in a workplace, psychological safety is significantly harder than technical safety. \n\nSo my advice is to be very open and honest and transparent with the people that you're organizing with and to talk about it. I think this is the problem with most things is we don't talk about failure enough and we don't talk about how does it feel to fail? How do you get back up after you failed? By keeping all that inside, that leads to a lot of negative stress outcomes and stuff and you just feel like crud. So normalize talking about failure.\n\nJOHN: Were there any specific structures, or just communications that you set up with your organizing team around that to get everyone on the same page about thinking through failure and how it feels and how you're going to react to it, anything like that? \n\nAUSTIN: So that's also a really great question. It's an area that I could do better at. The organizing team is very small and informal for this like, it's mostly just me and Katie, and I've wound up doing quite a bit of it just for a variety of reasons that are really important. But we've had a lot of conversations about, I think that level of nervousness and that level of stress that you can have. A lot of it is both of us talking ourselves down right and being nobody – and some of it also just being very straightforward with people, with external people. \n\nWhen I did this last year, literally the expectations were very, very low and when people applied to speak, it's like, “Well, you know what you're getting into.” I didn't pretend this was anything other than what it is. This year as well, when I'm going and I'm talking about it, or I'm putting together sponsorship perspectives, or whatever, I'm saying, “Look, here's what happened last year. I can't guarantee you the same level of thing, but I'm also not asking a ton from you.”\n\nSo I think one lesson from this is preemptive de-escalation. It's better, or maybe a better way to say this is under promise/overdeliver. The perspectives is very clear. It's like, “Look, this is historically what we had. Here's what I'm asking from you and here's what you're getting for it.” I've seen what a lot of conferences charge for sponsorships, I'm asking you for much less and maybe compared to those, you're not getting as much. You're getting a 30-second ad a couple of times over the day, you're getting your logo, you're getting some shoutouts and that's it. You're not getting leads. You're not getting an attendee list because there is none. That's one nice thing, I think about doing stuff like this is you don't have to be super aggro about stuff because it's like well, this doesn't exist. There's no registration so I can't tell you who's attending. \n\nBut by lowering the stakes a little bit, people are still willing to throw you a couple grand, or whatever on a community conference, because one, that's a rounding error in most places’ event budgets. Two, even if you only get a 1,000 people and you expected 8,000, the video's going to be there. It's a long-term asset. Those videos are going to be on YouTube forever and they're going to be something that people go back and watch so, under promise. And the third thing really is and this actually makes it worse, not better, but this is probably the longest I've talked about this to anyone, this podcast right here. \n\nMost of the promotion for this has come from people that attended last year and spoke last year that are going around and talking it up and being like, “Oh no, this was the best thing I did in 2020. You should definitely put this on your calendar.” That actually makes it worse because that's all of your internet friends are like, “Oh my God, this was so great,” and you're just sitting here like, “Wow, I hope I don't let all these people down,” but that's life. I'm not going to tell people, “Hey, don't talk good about this because I'm worried that it's going to fail.” Let those external expectations try to lift you up a little. If everyone knew what it was last year and if you can deliver that again at least, then you're probably going to be doing all right.\n\nJOHN: There's two threads I wanted to pull on with that. First of all, you talked about having multiple different people, different constituencies like there's you as the organizing team, there's you and the speakers, there's you and the attendees, there's you in the sponsors. There's all these different groups and there's different levels of safety with each of them that. A different type of relationship with each of those and they each have a different level of communication and setting expectations. \n\nAnd then I think the other thing that really jumped out was the setting of expectations. I think that's such a key to managing an emotional reaction to something because so often those negative reactions come from missed expectations and that proactive communication about where things can land and what's possible and what's likely is a great way of keeping everyone on the same page.\n\nAUSTIN: Absolutely. So I want to actually start on that second one about expectations because I think this is something that catches me a lot and probably catches a lot of other people that are – wherever you are in your career, really, but there's both a tyranny of low expectations and a tyranny of high expectations. We tend to focus on one, or the other, but the hardest thing in the world is actually figuring out what that band is in the middle between your expectations are too low and your expectations are too high. \n\nI think the tech industry is absolute hot garbage just stem to stern. There's a ton of practices we have in the industry that I think because we're so afraid because the way capitalism works, the way funding works, the way everything works, every incentive is tuned towards preventing you from ever setting expectations too low.\n\nSo if you look at OKRs, the concept of OKRs, the idea is the objective and key result and you should always set those as something you'll never hit; you should never set your key result too low. I think the Google-y way to think about this as if you achieve 70% of OKR, then that's good. That's what you should expect. To me, that's terrible. I hate that with every fiber of my being because you're giving me an objective that I'm always going to fail. \n\nThat's how I perceive it and I get why we do this because it's always bad to be too low and I think a lot of this is cultural. It's the success win whatever business culture that's infested technology, where we would much rather set a very high bar for ourselves and then not meet it rather than set a low bar and clear it because if you set a low bar and you clear it, then that means you weren't pushing yourself. Because of the way that all of the money works an d how monetized we make all of our labor, if you aren't doing enough, you might as well not have done anything at all. \n\nSo the thinking is better to have that high bar and then miss it. But that's extremely, I think just dismantles people that aren't super neurotypical. It certainly dismantles me and I'm whoever, I'm Austin, I'm one person in the distance. But I think it's prevalent throughout everything in tech and I would love to see that interrogated more. \n\nYou're starting to see a lot of the golden geese of the tech industry being interrogated because of the pandemic. Things like the value of people working in person with each other, or the value of having companies in San Francisco, or the value of hiding your pay, of pay inequity. \n\nI think this idea of what should our expectations of ourselves be, of our teams, of the performance of our software even, I made a joke the other day that’s like, I want to see smaller applications written by fewer people that are paid more, that don't work as well and I'm not kidding. \n\nBecause I think that the idea of oh no, we want the Googles, we want the big companies of the world to encompass everything. We want this one-stop shop. It's not great. It's harmful, it's actively harmful, and I know that there's a lot of voices and people are like, “Well, you can't just dismantle, you can't just cut Google into two pieces, or five pieces, or Amazon into five pieces and have it all worked out.” I agree, you need to be intentional about this. \n\nBut I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and I remember what technology was like a little more than and the idea that someone could go into business for themselves maintaining a library and just selling a license for people to use that library. Maybe they figured out a really fast way to do a bubble sword and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to sell you a library, a Pascal library that you can link to and it does this work really fast and if you have a problem with it, then you get support from me and you email me, or whatever and I fix this bug for you.”\n\nWe've taken all those things that people used to be able to do and build and craft and just said, “Hey, we're going to socialize all that expensive maintenance and put it on the open source community and have them do that for free and then we're going to build businesses around extracting value from all that labor.” \n\nCORALINE: That's one of the seven criteria of the ethical source principles is that we have a right to be paid. We have a right to have the value of our work respected and if you're making billions off of an open source library, you would better be giving back.\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and I think but it feeds back from – this all goes back to the capitalism.exe; It's all from the same source and a lot of ways. But I think that idea of expectations setting and never setting the bar low; that is a product of this and it's all intersectional. It's all interrelated. There is no one evil other than really big sociological complex sociotechnical human systems, or whatever and we can make it better, but we can't fix it without equally big changes. \n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think that the capitalism more is always better rule is what's poisoning this because you could make a small app and it can be successful and it could be two people on the team and those people could be very happy. But everything in society is saying, “Well, make it bigger, add a bigger team, do more things, blah, blah, blah.” \n\nI remember reading a story about, at one point a couple of years ago, the Uber like iPhone app was growing by 1 megabyte of compiled code per week because they were adding all this stuff to it and that just boggled my mind. It's like, it's Uber. They do really just one thing and they were having to do all these things and they kept bumping up against iOS store limits of the size of the binary. Just that mentality of let's do all the things because we can and let's stress ourselves out and work ourselves raw just because more is better.\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and I think it's a team problem. It's an organizational problem. Because how does that happen without you having so many people working in the same small space that are duplicating effort, that are duplicating features even, or other things behind the scenes? You just keep hiring and hiring, you keep growing and growing because that's all you can do, because that's the only way you can exist in society as a corporation, or as people building a product, or whatever is to constantly consume and grow and grow. \n\nThis goes into Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, that have taken, at least my corner of the internet, by storm and the idea that oh, this is a way that you can introduce scarcity into digital art and it's like, “Oh my God, it's such a bad idea.” Every blockchain thing is so, so awful. But the amount of energy it takes to actually encode these things under the blockchain, even on Ethereum blockchain, because of how proof of work algorithms function, the only purpose of these things is to consume more energy for a completely pointless purpose. \n\nIf you're consuming energy for the sake of consuming energy, to prove that you're doing some work in order to “prove that you own something.” You can't own a tweet; Twitter technically owns that tweet. There are people who are selling cryptographic signatures like, “Oh, it's like a signed tweet. You own the signed tweet.” It's like you own a link and that I'm not even sure that you can own that from any sort of legal, or moral, or ethical standard. That's not how ownership works, especially intellectual property ownership. \n\nOh my God, this industry. Every day, it makes me want to move to the woods and raise alpaca. \n\nCORALINE: Well, maybe there'll be an alpaca feature added to Animal Crossing soon.\n\n[laughter]\n\nAUSTIN: Maybe, yeah. Just live out my alpaca farming dreams in Animal Crossing. It’s a shame that we need money to live.\n\nJOHN: So we've come to the time on the show and we go into our reflections, which is a where each of us talks about the things that we're going to take away from this conversation. Maybe the things we're going to keep thinking about, or any new ideas that we were exposed to and just what's going to stick with us. \n\nSo for me, I think I heard about Deserted Island DevOps last year when it happened, I think some of my friends presented there, but hearing you talk about it more in-depth in behind the scenes, should we a bit more about the creativity, both on your side and in the audience as they put together new ways to experience the conference. \n\nI am really excited by that because it's not a place where I've seen a ton of creativity being expressed and finding new ways to have a conference-like experience like different mediations, different ways of participating, I think are really valuable because right now, we're copying online what we used to do in-person, but kind of and it's not always working out great. So if you just sort of throw away all the stuff and start over from, this is our platform and these are our constraints, I think that that leads to creativity and so, it's nice to see that.\n\nCORALINE: And I'm thinking about what you said about moderation and the importance of moderation. I was involved in the famous tech feminist wars of the 2010s and I was one of the voices calling for codes of conduct at in-person conferences. I think that becomes even more important with virtual conferences and the need for moderation. I don't think we do a good job, as an industry, of thinking about what moderation means, thinking about how to manage random people on the internet coming to a virtual space and I'm hoping that virtual events continue to invest some more technology. \n\nI think Twitch does a great job of giving us tools and I'm hoping that that idea of really investing in moderation takes off because I think that will have ripple effects in a lot of different domains.\n\nAUSTIN: I'm going to reflect, I think when you were talking about with failure and psychological safety and how to communicate failure, or those feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to not only peers, but also to people I'm organizing events with, or two people I'm working with. Because I think that one thing that this conversation really led me to realize is that I don't actually communicate it as well as I thought I had, or there's things I don't think about. Sometimes, you need someone to mention it to really piggy back up. \n\nI'm wondering if there's ways that we can develop toolkits, or playbooks, or even just point by point, like, “Hey, here's a guide to have these conversations,” because they're hard conversations and they're conversations that maybe you think you're ready to have, or that you think you've communicated. But it's like, “Well, did you think about this?” \n\nSo that's something I'm definitely going to take away from this. I will put it out in the moderation thing. I used your code of conduct for the Deserted Island one. So yes, I appreciate the work that went into that because it was invaluable to me to make a good one for this.\n\nCORALINE: I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, Austin. \n\nJACOB: I haven’t been to any conference since the pandemic started and I think part of it is that being stuck at home like pretty much everyone else, hopefully, is that I think I was always telling myself, “Do I really need to take time off when I would probably be bored and restless and would wish I could just watch the video later anyway?” \n\nI think I was kind of missing the point because I think maybe what I really need to do is find a conference like this one that has been thoughtful about how participants can interact when not in-person and make the leap and force myself to take the day off, or days off. That’s the only thing I’m doing and force myself to be engaged with it because I’ve got nothing else to do just like any in-person conference. I’m going to give it a shot.\n\nCORALINE: Well, Austin, it’s been great talking to you today. Thank you for your openness, your honesty, your vulnerability, and you great ideas. I think we all have a lot to take away from this conversation so, it was really great talking to you today. Thank you so much.\n\nAUSTIN: Thanks! It was wonderful to be here.Special Guest: Austin Parker.","content_html":"01:04 - Austin’s Superpower: Pain Tolerance
\n\n02:06 - Deserted Island DevOps (Running an Online/Virtual Conference in Animal Crossing or Other Mediums)
\n\n24:09 - Failure; Making it Safe to Fail
\n\n32:51 - Safety and Setting Expectations (The Problem with More is Better)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The creativity of new ways to experience a conference.
\n\nCoraline: The importance of moderation.
\n\nAustin: How to communicate feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to people you’re working with.
\n\nJacob: Find a conference that has been thoughtful about interaction when not in person and go.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nCORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 231 of Greater Than Code podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke and I’m joined by my friend, John Sawers.
\n\nJOHN: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m here with Jacob Stoebel.
\n\nJACOB: Thanks. John! It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, Austin Parker.
\n\nAustin makes problems with computers and sometimes solves them. He’s an open-source maintainer, observability nerd, DevOps junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring Hacker News threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing.
\n\nSuch a nice pleasure to have you on the show.
\n\nAUSTIN: It's fantastic to be here.
\n\nJACOB: We can start the show like we always do by asking you a question. What's your superpower and how did you develop it?
\n\nAUSTIN: Right now, my superpower is I'm 50% through a COVID-19 vaccine and I developed it by staying indoors for the past year, but more hilariously I guess, I developed a strong resistance to burns by working as a gas station cook for quite a while, back in my younger days. So I ran the fryer and you get really good at ignoring hot oil spattering on you. So I'd like to think that that level of pain tolerance is what helped me get through a lot of DevOps stuff and getting used to computers.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah. I hate Kubernetes and it's hot oil splashing. They should do something about that. It's open source. I guess, I could open my PR, but .
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. Well, they say PR is welcome, but that's the open-source maintainers. Bless your heart, right?
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, exactly. So Austin, I want to know more about this DevOps conference that you ran in Animal Crossing.
\n\nAUSTIN: So let's start at the beginning, let's take everyone back to just about a year ago now where we were all kind of settling in for our wonderful pandemic that has been extremely not wonderful for most people, but I think everyone was coming to grips with how long it would take at first.
\n\nMy day job, I work as in developer relations. I'm a marketer, effectively. But I remember a lot of people were talking, the marketing team and certainly, the entire events space like, “Oh, what's this going to do about the summer events, what's this going to do about the fall events?” and I'm sitting here like, “Hey, I think this is going to last a little longer than till June.”
\n\nSo the conversation kind of pivots as everything gets progressively worse and people are starting to come to grips like, “Well, can we do a virtual event?” I don't think anyone at the time really had a good idea of what a virtual event would be. We all know video conferencing certainly is something that we've come to rely on in our day-to-day lives over the past year. Even if you weren't already in tech, or weren't already working remotely, Zoom is – it’s been Q-tip. It's been Kleenex. It's a no matter what you're using, you're Zooming someone. So they have that going for them, I guess.
\n\nPeople, I think there was a lot of possibility and not a lot of real, strong ideas about what does this actually mean? So I wanted to try something different. I was joking around on Twitter and I had just gotten a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I was staging with screenshots with like, “Oh look, this is funny. It's like a conference booth.” It's like ha, ha, we're all giving out t-shirts and laughing.
\n\nAnd the code people picked up on and they were like, “Oh, that's funny. I bet you could actually do a conference in Animal Crossing and stream it out” because you can actually have people like join you, come over to your island and stand around. I was like, “Well, actually, you could just composite that video from the output of the game over some slides and what's the difference?” Someone's talking, someone's clicking through slides, and it spiraled from a joke. I put up a page, a landing page on April 1st, which is the best time to announce anything thing. Because if people don't go for it, you can always be like, “Ha, ha, April fools. Got you!”
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut I put up a landing page and we had a 100 people register for more information that first day, I messaged them on Slack, and I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to do it now; a 100 people one day. That's great.”
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah.
\n\nAUSTIN: So long story short, over the next 30 days, we basically put together, myself and then my co-organizer, Katie @thekatertot on Twitter, or Katie Farmer, a virtual conference inside of Animal Crossing. It's called Deserted Island DevOps. You can go watch it on YouTube, the one from last year. We're doing another one this year on April 30th. It's just a one-day live stream. If you're watching it, you're just watching it on Twitch. We have a Discord that you can talk and do the hallway track stuff and ask questions and network.
\n\nBut the gimmick is basically, everyone's presenting has a Switch and they are in Animal Crossing. They're on this island, they're dressing up their little Animal Crossing character and we overlay their slides with the video coming out of the Switch so they can emote and react and it's cute experience to watch.
\n\nBut I think it's also interesting because what I saw, last year at least, is that it solves a lot of the problems, I think most virtual conferences don't quite nail, which is, I think a good event is something that takes you out of your day-to-day. It takes you out of where you are and put you somewhere else. Now, if you go into KubeCon, or re:Invent, or even devopdays, if you're doing this physically like, you're not at your office, you're not at home, you're somewhere else talking to people, literally, you have changed the physical location you're in. But most virtual events, it still boils down to, “Hey, I'm watching a Zoom effectively and I'm talking to people in Slack.” If I wanted to do that, I could just do my actual job.
\n\nSo I think one of the things that people appreciated about Deserted Island and continue to is the idea that this is produced differently. There's a couple other people that are doing stuff like this. I think Software Circus out of the UK, they've done a lot of themed events, themed virtual events like this, where the presenters are wearing costumes. Or there was The Great Kubernetes Bake-Off, I want to say where it’s a cloud kitchen theme so everyone has their chefs’ hats.
\n\nI think having that concept also gives presenters a lot of mileage in terms of hey, you can theme what you're talking about. Here is an analogy in a box, here is a world that you can put your talk in and you have an idea that everyone can use those shared experiences, that shared language to develop your talk and give people an anchor for it, which I think is one of the good ways you help people learn. If you give them something they know about and then you tie your concept into that concept, then they're going to get more out of it.
\n\nThe other thing is that it's a great way to be expressive. In Animal Crossing, you are who you are, you are whoever your avatar is. So you don't get any of the – I hate being on camera a lot. It gets exhausting because you feel like you're performing for the camera. It’s not the same, but in this, nobody's seeing your actual face; they're hearing your voice and then you can dress your Animal Crossing your avatar whatever. So you can be creative. You can be who you are without having that weird performance pressure of a bunch of people that you can't see staring at your face
\n\nJOHN: This is an important topic these days because there's still everything's online and will be for a while and I think so many people are still learning how to do online events and those skills are going to need to keep happening over the next coming years. I think because you can do now online events, which are more accessible to more people all over the world, you don't have to be the sort of person who can fly places in order to attend certain events. Having them online is a great accessibility option. So finding new modalities for making that interesting and not just sitting on Zoom all day, I think is a worthy endeavor.
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and it's super challenging. I don't want to sound like I'm like dragging people's work because I know CNCF has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. I know of the entire devopsdays community has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. This is super hard to do. It's not easy. It requires a lot of intentionality; a lot of planning and I think we will all get better at it over time.
\n\nThe future is not necessarily going to be like the past, I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where we just kind of flip a switch and it's all like, “Oh, we're back to how we were before March of 2020,” I think. So there's still going to be a desire for virtual events and there's still going to be a desire for figuring out ways to be more inclusive and to bring people in, especially because of climate change and everything like that. At some point, we have to come to a reckoning about the actual cost of a global travel-based society but that's maybe a slightly different topic. I don't know.
\n\nCORALINE: I actually think a good side effect of all this is a focus on accessibility and like you said, a lot of people aren't people to travel. It's expensive. I know conferences, typically in-person conferences, used to spend quite a bit of money with programs to bring in marginalized folks who maybe couldn't afford the travel.
\n\nBut one thing I do miss is getting that audience reaction. Especially as a storyteller, I tend to tell a lot of stories in my talk and I like to be able to see, is the audience with me, is the audience getting what I'm saying? I can tune my presentation in real-time based on audience reactions and I really miss that. I really missed that aspect of it, that feedback aspect of it, because at the end of people are like, “Oh, great talk.” I'm like, “Yeah, but did it get to you?”
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, did you connect with it?
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and that's so hard.
\n\nAUSTIN: It's challenging, especially because so many of – on the production side, there's a bias, I think in virtual events to prerecord, due to a lot of factors and this is not a diss on prerecording. I personally hate it. I basically have stopped doing any event that's like, “Oh, we want you to prerecord.” I'm just like, “Eh, I'd rather not” because that’s the style, that's the way I talk. I agree with this idea of storytelling like, you're not just reading slides. If I just want someone to read slides, I could just hand them a book.
\n\nBut what's weird to me is one of the things that I think that we did, that I haven't seen anyone else really do, is there's already a way that people do this. If you watch Twitch, if you watch twitch.tv, or live streams like the kids do these days, there is a real-time chat and people are reacting in real-time. It's a little bit delayed. It's a couple seconds delayed, but I don't know why you haven't seen other virtual event platforms take that idea and really try to have even just a button like a clap button, or a sparkle fingers button, or something to kind of let people know that there's people out there watching you and that they're reacting positively and maybe not negatively, but they're reacting. That they are cognizant of what you're saying.
\n\nIt's really surprising to me that we haven't seen more like that and I would love if some of these event platforms thought about that. How do you make that actual, immediate real-time, or near real-time audience connection with the speaker?
\n\nCORALINE: The Twitch thing is really interesting. Back in October, I started streaming in addition to everything else I do in my life—I'm a musician—and I started streaming, recording, and music production and I have a weekly show. You're right, the audience interaction is great and I incorporate that into my show. I'll stop what I'm doing after I finish laying down one track and I'll ask the people in chat, “What instrument should I pick up next?” Or, “What sound would you like to hear there?” Things like that. It does make that more interactive and it brings some of that human connection back and I think you're right. That's what's missing from a lot of these online conferences is that connection.
\n\nCORALINE: Yeah, and I actually think you've hit on it right there with streaming. There's been a big question – I don't know how much you follow the CNCF, KubeCon EU talk acceptance drama that kind of popped off a week, or so ago. But the short version is obviously, KubeCon is a very prominent conference in the Cloud Native world and it gets a lot of submissions and because it gets a lot of submissions, a lot of talks get dropped, a lot of things get cut. That's every event; there's always more submissions than there are slots for people to speak, but it turned into a bit of a blow up on Twitter and they actually wrote a blog post that's very explicitly described again hey, this is how we pick these talks. There's a lot of factors that go into it.
\n\nThe thing that occurred to me and I've seen some people talk about, especially people that have been in the industry for a while is, what really is the benefit of a conference at all? When you have things like Twitch and you can build an audience for yourself and it's easier than it's ever been to get a platform. Some people in the world have used that for good ends and some people in the world have used that for ill ends, but regardless, I could go out and just say, “I'm not doing talks and I'm not doing conferences anymore. I'm just going to stream. I'm going to produce things and put them on YouTube.”
\n\nThe only reason you would be at a conference at that point is as like okay, this is a quality filter. These are some people saying, or suggesting that these talks, or these individuals have a higher value to the community because we got a bunch of people, smart people to look at it and say like, “Yeah, we think this one's better than that one.”
\n\nBut I really wonder if all of this with COVID, with the pandemic, with the change in events is going to inspire a different model going forward, where there's less of a centralization factor of you haven’t made it until you've done a KubeCon keynote, or you haven't made it until you've done the devopsdays circuit, or you haven't made it until you've written a book, or whatever. If you’ve got something to say, go say it and I think maybe that's a better way because that also is more accessible. You don't have to necessarily – there's less gatekeepers and a lot of times, gatekeepers and experts are useful because they help cut through all the chaff.
\n\nBut on the flip side, it can be harmful, too because everyone has biases and even the best process is never going to weed out bias and most of the time, you don't want it to weed out bias. You want it to be biased for good things, not bad things. I don't know. I feel like there's a conversation that needs to happen about this that hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet. I'm interested to see where it goes.
\n\nJACOB: One thing that sounds interesting about this Animal Crossing conferences, you talked about it was a different modality altogether and I'm just curious if did this conference include, or at least was it like there was a side-effect of conference goers just playing the game with each other?
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, actually that was one of my really interesting learnings from it was that when you have a community started, just the best thing to do is just let them go do stuff. We had a bunch of people form impromptu watch parties where they would open up their island and invite people are watching to come and be in the same game space as them as viewers and run around together while watching the stream. So they would tweet out pictures like you would do at an actual conference, where it's like, “Oh, hanging out with the besties,” and then tweet out a picture, a screenshot of their island with people sitting. Some people went really into this; they built little watch party rooms where everyone had chairs and a little movie projector set up. Some people had coffee machines and a little snack plates, or whatever in the game.
\n\nIt was really interesting to me how, when you kind of let people be creative about it and you let people try to build what they want inside this modality, this world, this bigger world, I guess, of being at a virtual conference, that they'll do stuff with it because it's fun and because it gets you engaged. Again, it's not just watching another Zoom. It's not just chatting on Slack. It's, you're doing something and the really good thing about that is if you are doing something, if you do make it a unique experience, people will actually take the time for it.
\n\nOne thing that I think gets lost in a lot of these virtual events right now is that it's not something you're blocking off time for. You're saying like, “Okay, I've got maybe two, or three talks I really want to watch. So I'm going to block off 45 minutes in my calendar here and there and I'm going to watch this different screen for a minute.”
\n\nBut with this, what we saw was people had blocked the entire day off. It was a 6-hour, maybe 5 hours total and people were there the entire time. We had 8,000, 9,000 people watching basically consistently from the beginning to the end and about 15,000 people total watched it over the course of the day. So nearly 50% of that were people that were there the whole time roughly.
\n\nI think by giving people that space to make time for themselves and to say like, “I'm going to treat this like an actual thing and not just something I'm going to pop back into.” That meant they could do the networking. They could do the chatting. They could react in Twitch and they could do the little clap emojis and the sparkle emojis. They could have those hallway track conversations and network and bond and get that social jazz you get by talking to people that have this similar problems, or have overcome challenges and are like, “Oh, this is how I solved X and Y problem in Kubernetes,” or even, “Oh yeah, this is a strategy I learned for dealing with managers that don't understand me, or making sure that we – how do I communicate this technical concept to the business?” It wasn't just, “I want to talk about really cool IP tables configs.” It really was like, “Hey, we're all people trying to solve these problems,” and that was, I think, wonderful to see and something that I'm really hoping that we can nail again this year.
\n\nJACOB: I think the wonderful thing about conferences is that, as someone who has a good deal of social anxiety, or shyness, is the in-person experience is an excuse to sort of – well, it was like it prevented me from having the excuse of like, “Oh, I could just watch it on – is this something I can just watch it on YouTube?” I was able to like, convince myself, like, “No, you actually have to go there and you have to sit next to someone you don't know and introduce yourself.”
\n\nI feel like conferences that I could get the exact same experience just watching the video anyway, I lose that side effect, which is, I think the more valuable thing is that there's an experience that I would miss out on if I wasn't there.
\n\nSo it made me think about what Caroline is saying about that immediacy of being a speaker and I guess, what I’m wondering is maybe the secret is if you can't reproduce the immediacy of people being in the same room together, and I'm not certain that's true, or not whatever it is, maybe the trick is how do you use technology to your advantage rather than thinking about it as a barrier to get around?
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. I'm not going to say I have all the answers, certainly. The thing that I really hope, because I wrote a big thing about it on my blog and I feel like there's a progression of events, virtual events that have happened where people are experimenting and trying new things. I would like to think they're trying to get to that point. How do you use the technology we have to enhance connections rather than viewing it as just like, “Oh, this is a thing we’ve got to do until we can get everyone back on a plane”?
\n\nCORALINE: And really, that's the best thing about technology is when you find an unexpected use for it. When you find something outside the use case that it's designed for and you get that feeling of delight, I think that's when tech is at its best.
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah. I think that was one of the things. The two big things about Deserted Island is the idea that this is a deliberately delightful and cute and comfortable place. It is the softest game you can imagine. There are no harsh edges. There is no failure state. I don't think there's a 90-degree angle in that entire game, but it also gives you enormous constraints because it's a very crafted world and so, working around and through those constraints, but also having sort of the delight of overcoming them and figuring out like, “Oh, this is this really soft round space that I can do stuff in, but I have these walls. I have these barriers set up that I have to work around.” I mean, that's why I'm in technology; it’s because it's endless source of challenges and it's an endless source of like, “Oh, here's a hill I can overcome.”
\n\nI was never super popular, or fast, or anything. I sucked at sports. I still suck at sports. The one time I went skiing, I tore my ACL in 15 minutes. I'm just not a coordinated guy, but in technology, there's always a new hill to summit. There's always something new to learn. There's always a new challenge that presents itself. That, to me, is that's why I stick with it. I could do other things, but here's something that's always going to challenge me and it's always going to give me something new to do.
\n\nThat, I think is worth celebrating in itself and if we can find a way to blend all these things together, blend all the different ideas about events and the delight and constraints and challenges of technology and dah, dah, dah, dah, and throw that together in a Twitch stream. Cool, rad, let's do that. I think that was a lot of the inspiration. It was just like, “Hey, this might blow up in my face. This might fail terribly, but it's better to try it and see what happens.” Every day when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh my God, it's never going to be as big of a success. Everyone's going to hate me,” whatever, I come back to that like, “Well, better to try and just like fall on my face than it is to wonder what might've been if I hadn't tried.”
\n\nCORALINE: That reminds me of safety and something that we talk about at least in workplaces is making more places safe to fail and I think at the event level, the fear of failure has got to be a lot more on a different level. So were you prepared to fail and how did you prepare to fail?
\n\nAUSTIN: It’s a great question. To be super honest, I'm not sure I was prepared to fail by the time it actually – so there's two types of failure. There was the technical failure and that was something that I did have plans for. There's a lot of technical failure that can happen during a live event production; my computer could have crashed, my internet could have gone down, a presenter's internet could have died. In preparation for that, there was a playbook effectively of okay, if this goes wrong, then do this. If this goes wrong, do that.
\n\nNow, in doing so, I actually discovered a lot of other things that I didn't think could go wrong that did go wrong. One example was, we had very strong moderation in the chat because it's the internet, it's a public thing. There's no registration. Anyone could come into the Twitch chat and say whatever. So I was pretty biased towards okay, now let's crank up the moderation filters and make sure that people aren't going to just come in and say some mean things.
\n\nOne thing I didn't think to ask any of the presenters is like, “Hey, do you have something that's interactive outside of this?” One of them did, they had an interactive presentation where people went to Slido, or something and could that had its own chat input, text input.
\n\nAny large enough Twitch stream, you had some trolls that had come in and started typing some slurs and other non-code of conduct things. So it's like, “Oh, crud,” and switch that scene off really quick and try to make sure, coordinate in chat like, “Hey, are you aware of what's going on with the speaker?” In real-time while they were continuing to present. We managed to deal with that and then cut out the offensive language in the video on demand version. So it's not there and it didn't disrupt things. there was a blip of like, “Ah,” and then we dealt.
\n\nI think beyond that, though, the actual psychological failure because my expectations were pretty low in terms of like, “Oh, what is a success?” Because we didn't spend a lot of money on it. I didn't have any sponsors. I think I had an email list with 1,500 people on it and I was like, “Well, 50 roughly, you have some sort of webinar, or whatever, you get 50% of the sign-ups and that's a good one.” A 100 people sign up and 50 people show up. Great, you're doing fantastic. So my expectations were like, “Oh, here's my bar, 1,500.” If we hit that, if we hit anything close to that, we're doing great and then we hit 8,000.
\n\nSo the problem coming back to this a year later is oh, now the expectations are so much higher and we've taken sponsorship. We have sponsors now; we have a sponsor money in order to fund things like scholarships. One of the problems last year was you had to have a Switch to participate. This year we've come, I've gone around and said, “Hey, if you want to sponsor this and pay for someone that doesn't have access to a Switch, or Animal Crossing, or whatever, you can sponsor us by buying that person the equipment thingy to join this because not everyone can afford that.”
\n\nObviously, it's some level of exclusionary, like not everyone has internet, but within the group of people, the class people are giving talks to this, I figured that's about what we can do. Especially since you don't need a good camera, you just need a microphone. But because they're sponsors now, because there were so many people last year. It's like, “How do I set myself up for the chance that this is a failure psychologically?” And that, I don't have a great answer to. Therapy, I guess, is the answer to that. I talked to my therapist about this stuff. But it is. I think the psychological effects are actually much harder to plan around and much like in a workplace, psychological safety is significantly harder than technical safety.
\n\nSo my advice is to be very open and honest and transparent with the people that you're organizing with and to talk about it. I think this is the problem with most things is we don't talk about failure enough and we don't talk about how does it feel to fail? How do you get back up after you failed? By keeping all that inside, that leads to a lot of negative stress outcomes and stuff and you just feel like crud. So normalize talking about failure.
\n\nJOHN: Were there any specific structures, or just communications that you set up with your organizing team around that to get everyone on the same page about thinking through failure and how it feels and how you're going to react to it, anything like that?
\n\nAUSTIN: So that's also a really great question. It's an area that I could do better at. The organizing team is very small and informal for this like, it's mostly just me and Katie, and I've wound up doing quite a bit of it just for a variety of reasons that are really important. But we've had a lot of conversations about, I think that level of nervousness and that level of stress that you can have. A lot of it is both of us talking ourselves down right and being nobody – and some of it also just being very straightforward with people, with external people.
\n\nWhen I did this last year, literally the expectations were very, very low and when people applied to speak, it's like, “Well, you know what you're getting into.” I didn't pretend this was anything other than what it is. This year as well, when I'm going and I'm talking about it, or I'm putting together sponsorship perspectives, or whatever, I'm saying, “Look, here's what happened last year. I can't guarantee you the same level of thing, but I'm also not asking a ton from you.”
\n\nSo I think one lesson from this is preemptive de-escalation. It's better, or maybe a better way to say this is under promise/overdeliver. The perspectives is very clear. It's like, “Look, this is historically what we had. Here's what I'm asking from you and here's what you're getting for it.” I've seen what a lot of conferences charge for sponsorships, I'm asking you for much less and maybe compared to those, you're not getting as much. You're getting a 30-second ad a couple of times over the day, you're getting your logo, you're getting some shoutouts and that's it. You're not getting leads. You're not getting an attendee list because there is none. That's one nice thing, I think about doing stuff like this is you don't have to be super aggro about stuff because it's like well, this doesn't exist. There's no registration so I can't tell you who's attending.
\n\nBut by lowering the stakes a little bit, people are still willing to throw you a couple grand, or whatever on a community conference, because one, that's a rounding error in most places’ event budgets. Two, even if you only get a 1,000 people and you expected 8,000, the video's going to be there. It's a long-term asset. Those videos are going to be on YouTube forever and they're going to be something that people go back and watch so, under promise. And the third thing really is and this actually makes it worse, not better, but this is probably the longest I've talked about this to anyone, this podcast right here.
\n\nMost of the promotion for this has come from people that attended last year and spoke last year that are going around and talking it up and being like, “Oh no, this was the best thing I did in 2020. You should definitely put this on your calendar.” That actually makes it worse because that's all of your internet friends are like, “Oh my God, this was so great,” and you're just sitting here like, “Wow, I hope I don't let all these people down,” but that's life. I'm not going to tell people, “Hey, don't talk good about this because I'm worried that it's going to fail.” Let those external expectations try to lift you up a little. If everyone knew what it was last year and if you can deliver that again at least, then you're probably going to be doing all right.
\n\nJOHN: There's two threads I wanted to pull on with that. First of all, you talked about having multiple different people, different constituencies like there's you as the organizing team, there's you and the speakers, there's you and the attendees, there's you in the sponsors. There's all these different groups and there's different levels of safety with each of them that. A different type of relationship with each of those and they each have a different level of communication and setting expectations.
\n\nAnd then I think the other thing that really jumped out was the setting of expectations. I think that's such a key to managing an emotional reaction to something because so often those negative reactions come from missed expectations and that proactive communication about where things can land and what's possible and what's likely is a great way of keeping everyone on the same page.
\n\nAUSTIN: Absolutely. So I want to actually start on that second one about expectations because I think this is something that catches me a lot and probably catches a lot of other people that are – wherever you are in your career, really, but there's both a tyranny of low expectations and a tyranny of high expectations. We tend to focus on one, or the other, but the hardest thing in the world is actually figuring out what that band is in the middle between your expectations are too low and your expectations are too high.
\n\nI think the tech industry is absolute hot garbage just stem to stern. There's a ton of practices we have in the industry that I think because we're so afraid because the way capitalism works, the way funding works, the way everything works, every incentive is tuned towards preventing you from ever setting expectations too low.
\n\nSo if you look at OKRs, the concept of OKRs, the idea is the objective and key result and you should always set those as something you'll never hit; you should never set your key result too low. I think the Google-y way to think about this as if you achieve 70% of OKR, then that's good. That's what you should expect. To me, that's terrible. I hate that with every fiber of my being because you're giving me an objective that I'm always going to fail.
\n\nThat's how I perceive it and I get why we do this because it's always bad to be too low and I think a lot of this is cultural. It's the success win whatever business culture that's infested technology, where we would much rather set a very high bar for ourselves and then not meet it rather than set a low bar and clear it because if you set a low bar and you clear it, then that means you weren't pushing yourself. Because of the way that all of the money works an d how monetized we make all of our labor, if you aren't doing enough, you might as well not have done anything at all.
\n\nSo the thinking is better to have that high bar and then miss it. But that's extremely, I think just dismantles people that aren't super neurotypical. It certainly dismantles me and I'm whoever, I'm Austin, I'm one person in the distance. But I think it's prevalent throughout everything in tech and I would love to see that interrogated more.
\n\nYou're starting to see a lot of the golden geese of the tech industry being interrogated because of the pandemic. Things like the value of people working in person with each other, or the value of having companies in San Francisco, or the value of hiding your pay, of pay inequity.
\n\nI think this idea of what should our expectations of ourselves be, of our teams, of the performance of our software even, I made a joke the other day that’s like, I want to see smaller applications written by fewer people that are paid more, that don't work as well and I'm not kidding.
\n\nBecause I think that the idea of oh no, we want the Googles, we want the big companies of the world to encompass everything. We want this one-stop shop. It's not great. It's harmful, it's actively harmful, and I know that there's a lot of voices and people are like, “Well, you can't just dismantle, you can't just cut Google into two pieces, or five pieces, or Amazon into five pieces and have it all worked out.” I agree, you need to be intentional about this.
\n\nBut I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and I remember what technology was like a little more than and the idea that someone could go into business for themselves maintaining a library and just selling a license for people to use that library. Maybe they figured out a really fast way to do a bubble sword and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to sell you a library, a Pascal library that you can link to and it does this work really fast and if you have a problem with it, then you get support from me and you email me, or whatever and I fix this bug for you.”
\n\nWe've taken all those things that people used to be able to do and build and craft and just said, “Hey, we're going to socialize all that expensive maintenance and put it on the open source community and have them do that for free and then we're going to build businesses around extracting value from all that labor.”
\n\nCORALINE: That's one of the seven criteria of the ethical source principles is that we have a right to be paid. We have a right to have the value of our work respected and if you're making billions off of an open source library, you would better be giving back.
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and I think but it feeds back from – this all goes back to the capitalism.exe; It's all from the same source and a lot of ways. But I think that idea of expectations setting and never setting the bar low; that is a product of this and it's all intersectional. It's all interrelated. There is no one evil other than really big sociological complex sociotechnical human systems, or whatever and we can make it better, but we can't fix it without equally big changes.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I think that the capitalism more is always better rule is what's poisoning this because you could make a small app and it can be successful and it could be two people on the team and those people could be very happy. But everything in society is saying, “Well, make it bigger, add a bigger team, do more things, blah, blah, blah.”
\n\nI remember reading a story about, at one point a couple of years ago, the Uber like iPhone app was growing by 1 megabyte of compiled code per week because they were adding all this stuff to it and that just boggled my mind. It's like, it's Uber. They do really just one thing and they were having to do all these things and they kept bumping up against iOS store limits of the size of the binary. Just that mentality of let's do all the things because we can and let's stress ourselves out and work ourselves raw just because more is better.
\n\nAUSTIN: Yeah, and I think it's a team problem. It's an organizational problem. Because how does that happen without you having so many people working in the same small space that are duplicating effort, that are duplicating features even, or other things behind the scenes? You just keep hiring and hiring, you keep growing and growing because that's all you can do, because that's the only way you can exist in society as a corporation, or as people building a product, or whatever is to constantly consume and grow and grow.
\n\nThis goes into Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, that have taken, at least my corner of the internet, by storm and the idea that oh, this is a way that you can introduce scarcity into digital art and it's like, “Oh my God, it's such a bad idea.” Every blockchain thing is so, so awful. But the amount of energy it takes to actually encode these things under the blockchain, even on Ethereum blockchain, because of how proof of work algorithms function, the only purpose of these things is to consume more energy for a completely pointless purpose.
\n\nIf you're consuming energy for the sake of consuming energy, to prove that you're doing some work in order to “prove that you own something.” You can't own a tweet; Twitter technically owns that tweet. There are people who are selling cryptographic signatures like, “Oh, it's like a signed tweet. You own the signed tweet.” It's like you own a link and that I'm not even sure that you can own that from any sort of legal, or moral, or ethical standard. That's not how ownership works, especially intellectual property ownership.
\n\nOh my God, this industry. Every day, it makes me want to move to the woods and raise alpaca.
\n\nCORALINE: Well, maybe there'll be an alpaca feature added to Animal Crossing soon.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAUSTIN: Maybe, yeah. Just live out my alpaca farming dreams in Animal Crossing. It’s a shame that we need money to live.
\n\nJOHN: So we've come to the time on the show and we go into our reflections, which is a where each of us talks about the things that we're going to take away from this conversation. Maybe the things we're going to keep thinking about, or any new ideas that we were exposed to and just what's going to stick with us.
\n\nSo for me, I think I heard about Deserted Island DevOps last year when it happened, I think some of my friends presented there, but hearing you talk about it more in-depth in behind the scenes, should we a bit more about the creativity, both on your side and in the audience as they put together new ways to experience the conference.
\n\nI am really excited by that because it's not a place where I've seen a ton of creativity being expressed and finding new ways to have a conference-like experience like different mediations, different ways of participating, I think are really valuable because right now, we're copying online what we used to do in-person, but kind of and it's not always working out great. So if you just sort of throw away all the stuff and start over from, this is our platform and these are our constraints, I think that that leads to creativity and so, it's nice to see that.
\n\nCORALINE: And I'm thinking about what you said about moderation and the importance of moderation. I was involved in the famous tech feminist wars of the 2010s and I was one of the voices calling for codes of conduct at in-person conferences. I think that becomes even more important with virtual conferences and the need for moderation. I don't think we do a good job, as an industry, of thinking about what moderation means, thinking about how to manage random people on the internet coming to a virtual space and I'm hoping that virtual events continue to invest some more technology.
\n\nI think Twitch does a great job of giving us tools and I'm hoping that that idea of really investing in moderation takes off because I think that will have ripple effects in a lot of different domains.
\n\nAUSTIN: I'm going to reflect, I think when you were talking about with failure and psychological safety and how to communicate failure, or those feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to not only peers, but also to people I'm organizing events with, or two people I'm working with. Because I think that one thing that this conversation really led me to realize is that I don't actually communicate it as well as I thought I had, or there's things I don't think about. Sometimes, you need someone to mention it to really piggy back up.
\n\nI'm wondering if there's ways that we can develop toolkits, or playbooks, or even just point by point, like, “Hey, here's a guide to have these conversations,” because they're hard conversations and they're conversations that maybe you think you're ready to have, or that you think you've communicated. But it's like, “Well, did you think about this?”
\n\nSo that's something I'm definitely going to take away from this. I will put it out in the moderation thing. I used your code of conduct for the Deserted Island one. So yes, I appreciate the work that went into that because it was invaluable to me to make a good one for this.
\n\nCORALINE: I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, Austin.
\n\nJACOB: I haven’t been to any conference since the pandemic started and I think part of it is that being stuck at home like pretty much everyone else, hopefully, is that I think I was always telling myself, “Do I really need to take time off when I would probably be bored and restless and would wish I could just watch the video later anyway?”
\n\nI think I was kind of missing the point because I think maybe what I really need to do is find a conference like this one that has been thoughtful about how participants can interact when not in-person and make the leap and force myself to take the day off, or days off. That’s the only thing I’m doing and force myself to be engaged with it because I’ve got nothing else to do just like any in-person conference. I’m going to give it a shot.
\n\nCORALINE: Well, Austin, it’s been great talking to you today. Thank you for your openness, your honesty, your vulnerability, and you great ideas. I think we all have a lot to take away from this conversation so, it was really great talking to you today. Thank you so much.
\n\nAUSTIN: Thanks! It was wonderful to be here.
Special Guest: Austin Parker.
","summary":"Austin Parker gives the full exclusive of what ended up being a smash-hit success in 2020 at the height of the pandemic called Deserted Island DevOps but tells us that it wasn’t without hesitation and fear of failure in both the technical and psychological senses. His main goal was to underpromise and overdeliver, and he talks about safety and setting expectations both for speakers and participants.","date_published":"2021-04-21T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/5d665540-be2f-4f11-aa59-5a3132cdc84f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":34999610,"duration_in_seconds":2858}]},{"id":"ce571062-57bb-4ef4-9f2c-0e269167f1cf","title":"230: Using Tech + Policy For Good with Corey Ponder","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/using-tech-and-policy-for-good","content_text":"01:55 - Corey’s Superpower: Empathy\n\n\nFinding Voice: You Are Not a Statistic\nWhat does it mean to support Black lives?\nAuthentic Self\nHaving Conversations Around Allyship\nOwning Vulnerability\n\n\n09:06 - Having People Hear Your Stories\n\n\n“How are you doing?”\n“Me Too” Movement – learned something about self and blind spots in the process and the feedback was helpful \n\n\n13:01 - Allyship Best Practices\n\n\nGrowth Mindset\nTrusted Sidekicks; Augmenting Journies\nInvisible Knapsack: How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality (Peggy McIntosh)\n\n\n19:04 - Developing Empathy \n\n\nWatch Hamilton! When it comes to leadership, Aaron Burr was right — “Talk less, smile more” (Being Able to Hear vs Being Able to Listen) \nDeep Canvassing – How to talk someone out of bigotry: These scientists keep proving that reducing prejudice is possible. It’s just not easy. \nGoogle Assistant Research; Inclusive Design\nEmpathy Mapping (From UX Design) – Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team \nEmpathy Can Combat Mis/Disinformation\nFearing What We Don’t Understand: Nas - Hate Me Now ft. Puff Daddy (song) | Lyrics \nActive Processing (psychology)\n\n\n36:03 - Using Tech + Policy For Good\n\n\nEducating & Empowering People Online\nCompany and Community Values\nPipeline Investment and Early Exposure\nDiversifying the Tech Policy Space / Manifestos?\n\n\nAlgorithmic Justice League \n\nVirility\n\n\nClubhouse Is Worth $1 Billion Off the Backs of Black Folks. Now What? \n\n\n\nReflections:\n\nArty: Centering around empowerment + asking, “How ARE you?” with the intention of listening.\n\nChanté: We can’t outsource empathy.\n\nCorey: How the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based to follower-based and influencing. \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 230 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Thurmond.\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone and I had the great pleasure of introducing our guest of honor today, Corey Ponder. \n\nWelcome, Corey.\n\nCOREY: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.\n\nCHANTÉ: We're so glad to have you. If you don't mind, I'd love to read your bio so everyone knows who you are.\n\nCOREY: Sounds great.\n\nCHANTÉ: Corey has over 10 years of work experience, he has had several roles across two industries and has also served in community organizations and nonprofits. At the core of each of these experiences is a passionate commitment to building community and developing people and programs. \n\nCorey most recently worked at Google serving as a senior policy advisor focused on privacy, advising product teams on best practices and approaches to inspire user trust. He also owns and manages his own business, em|PACT Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations build inclusive communities by prioritizing empathy as a skillset. Corey serves on boards of InnovatorsBox, a firm focused on creativity, and Youth Speaks, a nonprofit focused on youth arts and education.\n\nGreat background. Corey, did we forget anything else?\n\nCOREY: Well, I have to just because I am a lifetime SEC, Southeastern Conference, person, that I have to shout out Vanderbilt University, where I went for undergrad and then also, because I'm in California, I have to shout out University of California, Berkeley, where I went for my Master's in public policy. So those two things I would add.\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great institutions for education. So good. \n\nLet's start off with the first question that we give everyone and that is: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nCOREY: Yes. I love this question. It gives me a chance to really nerd out. So I would say the first thing that comes up for me is empathy. When I think about empathy, I think about how superheroes, oftentimes exhibit qualities around being empathetic that we might look at as healing abilities, or the ability to regenerate themselves, or regenerate others, the stamina, or the fortitude, last, or survive in a space where there's a lot of things attacking them mentally and emotionally and able to persevere in spite of all of that. \n\nSo I would say empathy is definitely the superpower that I have. I think when I step into spaces, I'm always thinking about what can I do to make other people feel more welcome, or feel more authentically themselves, which I feel like is the healing part. I feel like the regeneration piece is often me putting myself into positions where I don't like conflict, or seek it out, but I definitely feel like I put myself into spaces where I'm like, I want to support you and it might come at some risk to me, but I think I can bounce back from this. And then the stamina piece. I mean, none of this work, showing up for others even is not just a one-time thing and so, the consistency piece, I think, is something that I've really over time become more comfortable with just knowing that things might be protracted. People might need you for long periods of time and I'm here for it.\n\nCHANTÉ: So you said a few things here that really, I think, demonstrate the skillset for somebody who is in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space and I will bet that you probably didn't see that 10 years ago, or whenever you started down this journey. \n\nSo if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to know how you got to this space now and I'll also add in, before you answer that question, that a lot of folks, BIPOC folks like us, we know what it's like to be othered. We know what it's like to be excluded. So I know for myself, I'm in the DEI space, but I'm just really curious. I did peek at your background, but just for folks who haven't or who don't have those quick fingers right now, they just want to hear your background, walk us through how you got here.\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. So there are two inflection points. The first is I am a Black man so there are moments that I think about as a part of my growth as a Black boy and feeling like I had to grow up very fast to be taken seriously in whatever space that I was interested in to see the world from a perspective of hey, you really have to make sure that you're showing up and representing the person that you want to be because people will quickly ascribe something to you. \n\nThis was a conversation that was permeating all around me so that when I got to college, there was an inflection point. The first one where I remember I was like, “I want to be a biologist and I might also go to medical school.” When I took lab for the first time, it was a moment where I realized like, oh man, despite all of the things that I have done, all of the things that are within my control, I studied hard. I was getting great grades. \n\nI was just woefully unprepared for that space of even just being in a lab and doing a titration. I was like, “What the heck is a titration? What is an Erlenmeyer flask?” I realized that in a lot of ways it was because I didn't have access to the resources, or the conversations, or nobody had even told me that I could do those things. I wasn't seen as somebody that could do those things and so it's like, I didn't know what I didn't know and I think that I really started doubting in many ways from that moment who I could be, what I felt like I needed to thrive in the spaces, what I felt like I was capable of in these spaces. \n\nIt took me throughout college—great relationships and friendships, but also investment and resources around me to really find that voice that said, “Hey, actually, here's your story,” You're not this other narrative, this person that can't do it and you're not a statistic in a sense of a Black man that is x as opposed to a successful Black man. That was the first inflection point for me. \n\nThen I think the second was just having been at this point, maybe like 6, or 7 years working. I was at a moment at Facebook actually, where there was an increased conversation around what does it mean to support Black lives? Why are people talking about Black Lives Matter? In particular, during 2015, 2016, I forget specifically when, but Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were two Black men who were killed by police officers in different instances, in different cities, in different places, but within the same week. It was one of the first times that from a technology perspective, we were discussing this in an international way because it had been captured on Facebook Live.\n\nSo there was this conversation around who are we as a part of this broader conversation? It was the second inflection point because it reminded me that was man, I am a Black man so even as I've done all of these things, I've been in careers, I've had these jobs and these opportunities where I've done things that I can be proud of, I'm still walking into this space the next day, after hearing about these instances and really feeling like I'm carrying something that I don't know how to speak to. I don't know how – I've never really talked to anybody about how it impacts the way that I am showing up in this space. \n\nSo from there, I just made the commitment where I said, “I'm going to start trying to be more authentically myself. I'm going to start talking about all the parts of me that make me who I am.” I didn't have a plan for it; I just knew that I wanted to have those conversations. The interesting thing was I started having those conversations and people naturally, after I would talk to people, would say, “Well, what's next? What can I do to support you?” It really just made me think about the broader conversation around allyship. \n\nThere's a broader conversation around what does it actually mean to show up for somebody and then I realized retroactively that there have been many examples, not only in my life, that people who have shown up for me that now I can pinpoint and look at as case studies, as data points, but also that I have naturally gravitated to doing that because of what I said earlier about the superpower of empathy. It has been something that I had always valued, even if I didn't know what it was, or what I was doing, or what it meant, but it was really important for me to see other people's stories because I knew how important it was for people to see mine. \n\nSo those two inflection points really shaped how I viewed diversity, equity, and inclusion in my role, in the broader conversation. One, my own vulnerability with myself, but also two, how valuable it is to have people hear your story and validate who you are and your experience and how it's a part of a whole and how they see you.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.\n\nARTY: With stories like you mentioned being able to have this experience where you really understood what it meant to show up for someone.\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. I'll give two stories. \n\nOne was actually when someone showed up for me and I remember it was my boss actually shortly after the conversations, or at least what I mentioned earlier about Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. I just was having a really rough, it was a rough day. I mean, I was trying to show up business as usual was very much like, well, I have a job, I have meetings I have to go, and my boss asked me, “How are you doing?” That's a question you hear maybe a hundred times a day and it's also a question that feels like a rhetorical. I mean, you're supposed to say, “Good,” and keep it moving. I said that, but she really stopped me, told me like, “Hey, I'm asking because I really want to know and I have time. How are you doing?” \n\nI think just in that simple moment of making the space, creating an avenue for me to actually express a real truth, it just made me feel like wow, you didn't have to listen to my story. You didn't have to consider that I was something more than this a meeting I had to go to, or that I was more than this deliverable, or this project that I was working on. And you did. That meeting was, I, even years later, still to think about it because it was just like, wow, that meeting didn't have to happen that way. But I felt like this wasn't just my burden to bear after that question, or that conversation. The question that she asked and the conversation that followed. \n\nI think for me, showing up for others actually has been in this work—working through impact strategies and thinking through how do you actually show up as an ally. I've had a number of experiences. But in particular, there was one right around the decree, I would say the resurfacing of the Me Too movement and that conversation around sexual harassment in the workplace. \n\nThere was an event, or a town hall, or an opportunity where I had a chance to really show up. I initially—and this is also a part of the failures piece—showed up to that very equally with the best of intentions and said, “Hey, what can I do to move this conversation forward?” Along the way, I remember realizing that oh man, in all of my eagerness to show up to this, I actually have silenced, or not included the voices that were probably most important to actually have this conversation. Women in particular, but also just thinking about in general, people who are survivors, or have been a victim of assault.\n\nSo it was one of those moments where I took on feedback from people, some of my coworkers, colleagues, friends, I figured out a way to revamp the event, postponed the event so that I could do it the right way. And then I remember in the aftermath of that, seeing I learned something through that process about myself and also, the feedback that I received about the event afterwards was like, all right, this was a conversation where it really prompted people to think about a story that they haven’t thought about before—people who showed up to the event. Because I was helping organize it, showed up, and got something else out of it because I wasn't the only voice in the room. \n\nIt was another moment where it was like, wow, this isn't necessarily my story, but I leaned in a little bit, or leaned in a lot in the beginning, learned a lot in the process about myself and even where my blind spots were within that entire process of learning in some ways helped tell a story that other people realized like, oh, wow, thanks for helping me see this narrative.\n\nCHANTÉ: That is so helpful. I feel like the times where I've had to show up as an ally and lean in to something that I didn't necessarily understand, really helped me to better articulate the needs I had as a Black identified woman, or as a Latino woman to say, “Hey, friend or colleague, you want to show up and help me. This is how you can help me,” Because I've learned from my own ouch moments like, oops, I shouldn't have done that and thankfully, somebody was gracious enough to share feedback in that moment, but many times, they're not. \n\nDo you have any best practices in terms of folks who want to show up, especially right now in this year, as an ally, they're very well-intentioned, well-meaning people, but they don't necessarily have somebody like an insider to give them the lay of the land, or to tell them where the real pain points are?\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing is that to your point about the feedback, I think feedback is so critical and also, we have to recognize that for many communities, like you said, we're in the intersect. We are at the intersection of a lot of identities. \n\nI recognize that even though I am underrepresented as a Black person in many spaces, I also am in a privileged position because I'm a man. So I'm having to constantly examine those different nuances and intersections of my identity. Yet that also helps me understand that there's a lot of emotional labor in just showing up to be Black every day so, then sometimes, I might not have the energy, or might not have the capacity to give that feedback to somebody who was looking to be on their journey as an ally. \n\nThe first thing that I would say is showing up for others is really, there's got to be a hunger, or a desire to actually grow and change. This idea of a growth mindset and it has to be separate from passively taking on the information, or the stories of others. \n\nI think once you have that, really having said, “I want to do this and I am motivated to do it.” Then I think the second thing is to go back to the superpower question from earlier, is I like to think about showing up for others as a trusted sidekick. So this model of thinking about you're not showing up to save the day, because that's also a lot of labor. Expecting to be the person to in the movie on a high note and be the person that walks down the aisle to get an award, or reward is not really the goal. But what it really is about is really understanding the stories of the people that you're playing in the same universe with and then figuring out what ways you can augment their journey.\n\nI think about three things that are a part of that, which is really those everyday moments. When I've had conversations through my work, oftentimes people are like, “Black lives matter. We need to March,” or “Gender equity. We need to dismantle capitalism.” It’s like, that is probably true and there are scholars out there that are speaking more deeply than I can ever speak to on that, but what about those moments that are outside of that? \n\nSo you might say that Black lives matter,” and you might have the t-shirt, or you might step up in a forum and say, “Hey, I'm declaring that I believe in this cause,” but are you then actually including your coworker who was Black in the team lunches that happen every day that y'all just get together organically, but somehow that person is never on the organic chain? Or if you're thinking about gender equity and pay discrimination, that is a big thing, but also, are you actually making space and not taking up the room when you're in a meeting everyday being the person that has to get the last word, or are you making sure that everybody's opinions are on the table, including your women colleagues, or female colleagues are heard in the room? I think these are the everyday moments where we can show up as an ally. \n\nI think the second piece is thinking about these things that we have to confront about ourselves. It might be ugly or scary, but are necessary. We all have biases. We all are a product of certain privileges because we have identities that confer some amount of power to us and some type of favoritism to us. So if we're thinking about that, we have to really examine that how those show up and affect us.\n\nPeggy McIntosh wrote Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, where she did a lot of research in this space, where the idea is that we carry this around and even if we don't acknowledge it, it's still there. This idea of it might be invisible to us, but you can imagine walking into a room with a big knapsack on not realizing that every time you turn left or right, you're hitting somebody with your privilege. So I think it's important to acknowledge that we have that backpack on whether we realize it, or not and it's affecting people whether we accept it, or not. \n\nAnd then the third thing is taking that next step of we have the positionality. So if you're talking about supporting from your identity, or from your perspective, you have some ability to influence change. Again, even if it's at a micro level. Because I'm a man, I have some privilege in the communities and spaces that I hold. Because of I’m a man, people are going to see me a certain way so then what I talk about what I represent, what I say, what I'm willing to advocate for is going to hold a different weight, whether that's right or wrong, it's going to hold a different weight than if a woman were to ask, or advocate for the same thing. So then what can I do to use that privilege in support of what that community might actually be asking for, or want? That might take a little discomfort on my part, but I guarantee it is way less uncomfortable than underrepresented groups having to advocate for their right to be seen, or heard, or validated in spaces. \n\nSo those would be three things, I think you could do in that journey.\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are awesome things. The one that really resonates for me, too is just the empathy part because I feel like that is a core skill that we're going to need for the future of work. Oftentimes, when I say that people ask me, “Well, how do I develop empathy?” I have my own answer there, but I'd love to hear yours. \n\nHow do you think people can get better at working on that empathy muscle and if you have anything that's worked for you personally, or that you recommend more professionally that you've seen in the workplace? That'd be helpful.\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing that came up for me is Hamilton. I feel like everybody has seen it now. If you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, there's a theme that goes throughout Hamilton where Ehrenberg says, “Talk less, listen more.” There's this idea that I feel like with empathy, we often think of it as just like, ”I have to be in touch with my feelings,” but actually what I think it is, is actually a skill, a tangible skill of can I actually listen to someone and I think there's a difference between being able to hear and being able to listen. \n\nSo I think the first thing that I have done is like, how can I actually actively listen more effectively to the people around me? There's actually this research, I think 2014, 2015, it was focused on can we use empathy? Like, actually measure the effect of empathy on reducing, in this case, anti-trans gender opinions? I think the research was called “Durably reducing transphobia,” but essentially, what they did was it was an exercise around active listening. \n\nThey used the political tool called deep canvassing to essentially equip these researchers to go into a home where people expressed, or had been exposed to anti-transgender views and they literally just listened to them. They processed actively with this person about why they believe what they believe and then through that process, they didn't actually rebut with facts, or say, “But actually, that's not true,” or “Did you know that that's actually not true?” \n\nWhat actually happened was people realized through their own act of processing that you know what, this is not actually about transgender. It's actually about safety. I can relate now. I can empathize because now that I've come full circle and have been able to tell my story about why I'm processed out loud, I realized that I do have something in common with the transgender community. They want to feel safe. This law makes them feel unsafe. I want to feel safe in bathrooms, but those two things don't have to compete with each other. We're all people that want to be safe. That that research for me really sticks out whenever I think of active listening.\n\nI think the second thing is I've talked a couple of times about storytelling; there's a part of this for me, that really is seeing people as these amazing figures in a story you just haven't read yet. I think when I practice empathy, it often is just me really taking an interest more deeply in the why somebody does what they do as opposed to what they are doing. This hearkens back to Simon Sinek, who was a leadership consultant, or coach, but he had that phrase in a TED Talk where he said, “People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I think for me, that boils down to the core, how I think about if you want to cultivate empathy as a muscle, or a skill, it's really asking that question, “Why did they do that?”\n\nAn actual tool that I often use in my work is something called empathy mapping, which is often used in UX design actually, in tech, to really think about human centered approaches to product design. But it lays out all of these ways about how do you think they would feel? How do you think they would see this? How do you think they would hear, or receive this message? And then it really gets you to ask this question about why would they react this way to what you're about to present, or why would they react to these set of circumstances in a certain way?\n\nCHANTÉ: One of the things that you're talking about here is the empathy mapping. I actually do this course, or this workshop with some collaborators around designing for inclusion and that is something that we really focus on. Have you seen that in practice well somewhere that you could illustrate, or show? I guess, we could provide an example, or a case study so folks know what you're talking about. \n\nCOREY: Yeah. One of the things that this makes me think of is Google Assistant space, which is also a space that I spent some time in. But within the Google's Trust and Safety team, there was a focus on thinking about digital assistants and whether they had an inclusive voice when it came to gender, because there is a lot of research now that exists about voices and people perceive assistants to be female, but because of the voices. \n\nCompanies are really doing a lot of that work now to think through what the implications are around that. But at the time, I remember in this work very early on, what I thought was interesting about this was just the steps that the Trust and Safety team went through to actually figure out if there was an issue here because you design a product, the product is meant to respond to queries. \n\nBut soon, what they started finding was that maybe some of the queries that the digital assistant was getting were actually maybe more vulgar, or maybe more derogatory. So how does that break down? Does that break down like, is it just objectively that's how people talk to digital assistants? Well, no, and actually doing work and trying to reduce those offensive, or shocking, or risky experiences, what they found was that maybe this is actually offensive, or derogatory on the Google Assistant voices that present, or sound feminine. \n\nSo now that we have done this research, how can we actually address that in the broader product? I think the Google Assistant then did things to try to make the voices more gender neutral, to provide more options so that there were a range of voices and then also, not necessarily default to the feminine voice, or not even call them feminine. I think they started calling them like Voice 1, Voice 2. \n\nSo I think that that's one example of that I know, that I am aware of where when you're thinking about inclusion as it could be an objective truth that you're here to provide an answer to a problem. But often, that problem that you're solving might actually have many other subproblems within it. \n\nBut the idea of inclusive design is important. It's an important lens for everybody to have honestly, on the product, because there are a range of things that might be happening that we're just not aware of. But certainly, the power of doing extensive UX research, or a deep dive on some of those things, I think is what helps augment and move us away from those types of snafus happening in our technologies.\n\nCHANTÉ: That was a beautiful example. Thank you. That sounds like a really cool project that you got to be a part of. Was there anything else that you learned from being on that project team that you can share?\n\nCOREY: Yeah. Well, I should say, first off, this happened before I came into the team, but I think it was one of the things that I found very powerful about the team itself, doing the work and also, where they were centering people. I think that was one of the reasons why I've also been very interested in policy within tech, because it very much it's about centering and advocating for best practices for people and defining what users actually are. \n\nBut I think for me, the lesson that I took from that just was again, that we all really have to be our advocates for this type of work and this type of change in the products and also, that a lot of this is sometimes not as complicated as we make it out to be. I think that it's really about priorities and what we value. What I appreciated about this team was just this idea of wow, you actually value not just the objective user, but the user in a sense of what context would they use this and how would this impact this community that we're trying to build this ecosystem?\n\nARTY: So there's something you said earlier that really struck me when you were talking about this example with empathizing for these people that had been exposed to anti-transgender ideas and sitting down and listening. \n\nOne thing that strikes me about that is just that as opposed to these people being a certain way, you framed things as these people were exposed to a certain kind of content that then they had this fear that came up in resonant to something that they were exposed to. I see those sorts of dynamics in other contexts. Would you mind elaborating a little more on that thought?\n\nCOREY: Yeah. I definitely think that we are in – not that 2020, or certainly, the last 4 years since 2016 with President Trump, I don't think that that is unique. I think that it feels exacerbated because on top of that technology has been a lens through which we've seen almost an exponential growth in access to information. It may have outpaced the way in which we also keep up with the ways in which you are skeptically dissecting this information and analyzing it for truth and veracity. So I think that there's been a confluence of forces that have made it so that things like misinformation and disinformation are permeating and now, it is easily accessible. \n\nOne of the things that I think about a lot in this space, as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion and why I think empathy is so important is that I feel like it can become very easy to go down this path because we're always looking for ways to validate our own experiences. So if there's one thing that we – an easy way to do it that is harmful, or damaging to others, is to validate by saying that, “Well, it can't be that over there.” I'm invalidating that to bolster the way that I see the world, or my experiences.\n\nWhat I really focus on from my work and why I think the empathy piece has been so powerful is that it's a reminder as we move through that cycle of how can you be more empathetic, that at the core of our human experience is this idea that we all do not like the feeling of being othered, or unseen. Even if for someone who feels like they are, whether you agree or disagree with this idea, I'm disaffected. \n\nI think this election cycle is a great example. A lot of people felt disaffected on both sides like, you're white middle-class, or you're Black and in poverty, or you're white and in poverty. You have all these sects of people that are like, “Ah, nobody's listening to me,” and that's reinforced because you're like, “Nobody has the experience that I have and nobody knows what it's like to feel othered like this.” \n\nBut actually, the reality is, regardless of whether you understand what it means to be grow up white and poor, or Black and affluent, or Black and poor, or white and affluent, you all have this common experience where you have been othered at some point. \n\nEmpathy says at the core of that human experience is something we all should be able to understand. So we're not necessarily focusing on what you went through so much as why did you have to go through it? I think that this disinformation, this misinformation feeds the – \n\nIf we had more empathy, I think that would be the thing that would combat this because it would allow us to ask the right questions around maybe this is true, maybe this is not true. If I don't have the tools to actually assess whether it's true or real, what I can say is that I need to really think about the community that is centered in this story and understand how this would make them feel if this were true, how does it make them feel if this were not true. \n\nI think that that's where empathy and developing that as a skill could do a lot more work in this space where we're probably only going to see more honestly, content, or information where we have to vet where it comes from, whether it's real, who’s saying it and why they're saying it.\n\nARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about how powerful it is just that even in listening to this context, as opposed to trying to correct it, what you did find was this commonality of, “Oh, we both have a desire to feel safe, it is part of the human experience,” and then with this disinformation, you've got this dynamic that really plays on fear. A lot of this information that's associated with fear reminds me of this TED Talk by Daryl Davis that I think Chanté, you're the one who actually had me listen to that. But specifically, that ignorance breeds fear breeds hate and then if we can go about empathizing and listening and building those connections and tackling the ignorance, that it can have a chain reaction effect on all of these other things.\n\nCOREY: Yeah. This has made me randomly think of a song lyric by Nas, street prophet that he is, but his song with Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whoever he was calling himself at the time called Hate Me Now. He said that line: people “fear what they don't understand, hate what they can't conquer. I guess, that's just a theory of man.” I was like, ah, this is making me think about that because I think so often, we are pushed into those lanes where the idea is to think that you have to conquer something. So it's like your safety, your capacity to do what you want to do in this world is won by subjugating, or by conquering something else, someone else and that's the only way that it can happen. \n\nAnd then also that fear piece; if I don't understand it, then it's not safe. So if I can't wrap my head around it, then I need to assume the worst and fear it. I think why empathy has been so powerful for me is one, because we don't often talk about it as something that we can actually cultivate. We often talk about it in a you either have it, or you don't, or it's a natural gift, or it isn't. I think it actually is something that can be cultivated and brought to bear, like in that research, where it’s like this was a community. \n\nI think the first time I did it, it was in South Florida, or maybe somewhere outside of Miami. I'm not actually sure of the specific locale, but this community had been subjected to all sorts of messaging around the transgender community, because it was meant to drive a particular position, or opinion on a bill around bathrooms and whether bathrooms could be used by people of the multiple genders, or you had to have separate men and women bathrooms. They were able to do through this research, they were able to find that not only were they able to shift people's perception around those issues—actually shift them positively in the direction of saying like, “Oh, actually I do support transgender rights in this conversation.” But that it was a statistically significant shift and it lasted for three months after that conversation when they did a check-in. \n\nSo I think that it just really speaks to we don't have to fear what we don't understand. If you really just take the time to let people really work out their own narrative for themselves, they will often figure out that their own narratives are incongruent with how they actually are showing up in the space and it's not about telling them, “Your narrative is off,” like, “You're wrong.” \n\nI think that there's value in that, but if you're going to make the real change over time, in psychology, they call it act of processing. There's value in actually getting people to their own whatever it is, whatever reason they have for fearing what they don't understand to process that out loud in a way where they can actually be like, “I was heard and are realized that hearing myself is incongruent with how I actually like what I actually value.” So maybe coming to my own conclusions, I don't have to fear this, even though I don't understand all the parts of that experience\n\nCHANTÉ: That was really helpful, Corey and one of the thought bubbles—well, one of the many that popped up as you were responding to Arty's question was how do we then, because it sounds like there's a lot of value in anticipating, or using tech and policy for good in those moments. I'm just wondering, I know that you consult around this. \n\nSo maybe take us down that avenue, because I think we're at this place where we've seen coming off of this last election, the power of the misinformation strategies and how we've partnered that with let's say, the Cambridge Analytica situation where they used data to underpin those fears and then really influenced a community, or a country to the space that they wanted them to be. How do we get ahead of that? What are some things we can do? Or what are some things maybe you're working on that are worth mentioning here today?\n\nCOREY: Yeah. So those are very, very good questions, or good thoughts. I think that one thing that just thinking about even as you were saying with Cambridge Analytica, my first thought was just that we have existed in the technological space, in this information age where empowering people online, I feel like it has been separate from the using the data, or giving the data up in a way that, or using the data or giving the data up.\n\nBy that I mean, essentially, we're using these products and tools, wouldn't have never really thought about it as a platform for change, or a platform to see the world we want to sees except for these little blips, or these moments where there are revolutions around like Arab Spring. That was driven, I believe on Facebook and then conversations again, around Black Lives Matter because of live video that we now have, we're able to capture the experiences in real time.\n\nSo I think that the first thing that I would say is how can we actually educate people around being empowered online? You have a voice, but it's not just the voice to repeat what you have heard, but really to lend your own voice, your own vulnerability, your own story to what's happening in these forms. \n\nI think the second thing really is it comes down to the companies. I think that a lot of my conversations, when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, really comes back to values. Many companies, particularly ones that are community-focused and saying that our users are a part of an ecosystem, have to really ask themselves about what ecosystem are you actually trying to build? Because at a certain point, particularly if you are a private company, there are good ecosystems and there are destructive ecosystems.\n\nSo it can't be a libertarian view of the technology is just a tool and it will all sort itself out. It actually has to be maybe more curated than that and that might not have been the initial approach of technology. Certainly, wasn't the approach to the world wide web either when it first started out. It was just like, anybody could create a geo site, anybody could do anything on the internet, but in some ways, I think that view of technology maybe has to change. It helps lends itself very well to innovation, but the challenge is that it creates a lot of loopholes for abuse. \n\nSo then I think companies, as they start curating their experiences more, it has to be centered on very clear community values. What is your ideal world and your ideal state that you want to be contributing to as a part of this broader conversation around information and sharing data for the benefit of others? Most of these companies have that in their mission somewhere. They believe that they're doing a public good, even if they're also profiting in the process. Well, if that's true, then what values get you there and keep you there? \n\nSo I think that that's how the disinformation and misinformation is allowed to persist, because there's just questions that you have to ask around are some things allowable within this ecosystem? Are we willing to take a hard line on some things for the benefit of the greater good? \n\nThen it’s also acknowledging that it is hard being in technology and now it's like, even if you're 99% effective at something, if you have a billion users, that's still millions of people, or millions of cases. You have to then also acknowledge that you're always working and it never will be good enough, but you can try to close that gap and be consistent on what you actually value and believe and that at least shows a bit of sincerity over time around what you're trying to do.\n\nCHANTÉ: I appreciate your take on that. \n\nOne thing I might imagine to be true, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think from what I've seen is that the tech policy space is not Black enough. It is not; I don't see enough BIPOC folks. I don't see people really, outside of cis able-bodied white guys in that space. Is there anything that you recommend in terms of trying to change that so that in the future where we're going to have, for sure, undoubtedly more mixed-race people, just given the trends that we're on, how do we address that, or how do we curate for that?\n\nCOREY: Yeah. I mean, so much of – it reminds me of the story I was telling about biology and going into lab is that I think so much of it is about really understanding the possibilities of what is actually out there and having someone tell you, or exposing you to what those possibilities are. Some of that is pipeline development. \n\nSo I think we're many of these companies and also, just not even tech companies, but policy in general. This base is about how do you invest back in these communities, knowing that it might pay dividends in 10, or 15 years down the road to have this more diverse ecosystem of policy people, or practitioners, or technologists. Even if you're not developing them particularly for a job today, but down the road. I mean, I think some of that is pipeline investment and actually just telling people at a young age, “I see you, here's the three things you need to get started,” and then the sky's the limit. \n\nI know there are some programs around coding that have taken off where people go into the community and do that. It will be interesting to see how, if we were to look over time, whether that's really changing the overall dynamics of actual Black engineers, or BIPOC engineers, or a diverse representation of engineers. But I think that that would be the same for policy and the other thing that I would say is it would seem that many companies, in the tech space in particular, did not actually have – whether they should have, or shouldn’t have, they didn't necessarily have to focus on these types of questions for their growth and success in the early stages.\n\nSo I think that that also meant that there just wasn't an investment in the broader, we need a policy team. Maybe there were people there to focus on policy and ask these questions. But I think as we continue to see the growth and the impact of companies on just everything like our economic systems, the way we behave, and the way we think about different issues. \n\nNow, it is really important to think not just about whether building this product is going to net an additional 100,000 users, at the expense of so many other things, will it affect the political conversation happening in this country? Will it affect the access to resources in this place? \n\nNow we're seeing the investment in those communities and spaces, for companies that are growing, or building now, I think it's about really investing in there early and make sure you have the right team and the right representation of the team to address the issues that you could foresee being a challenge, or being a space that your product will exist in. \n\nBut I think policy is certainly one of many professional spaces where you do see underrepresentation really because of access, or knowledge about the opportunity. \n\nI'll just say, because this is a long, long way of saying, but I want to end with a personal story where it's just even for myself going into the technology space, I was always interested in policy, but really from the lens of how you can go directly into government as a civil servant and I try to push the machine, or move through the bureaucracy to actually make effective rules, or regulations that mattered, or meant something to different communities and I think government can still be that thing. There's a lot of challenges there, but it still can be that force. \n\nWhat I didn't realize was that this existed in the tech world, that these were conversations that were happening, that companies were having an influence on the way we legislate, or the way we behave, or the way we think about all sorts of issues that would “fit squarely” in the policy world. \n\nIt was only through my kind of exploration, but also, connecting with people who had gone over to these companies, in these spaces and the privilege that I had of being able to go to different institutions, where I had access to people who could have these conversations with me, where I realized hey, I could be in this space. But it was something that I didn't even realize was a thing and would never have explored, otherwise. So I think that that also for me, recognizing that I had access to resources and tools that helped me even see it as a possibility and so, I think that has to be the thing that we're in the companies that anybody who has the privilege, or capacity to do so should be investing in.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.\n\nARTY: I feel like there's some things that we could do in terms of new precedent setting, that we could do as a broader tech community, that could help drive change of adopting cultural practices within the context of organizations and everything that flows from there. \n\nSo one of the key threads you brought up was that it comes down to values and we ought to start with having a clear set of things that we want to value as a community and build as organizations and build around that. \n\nI started thinking back to you mentioned early days of the internet when anybody could do anything and spin stuff up on the internet and I think about some of the early tech interfaces and stuff we had and I feel like there was a lot more community and curation type things, too. We had message boards and I think about AOL days where you have little chatrooms that you join and stuff that were topic-focused. \n\nIt seems like, as opposed to being these topic-focused finding each other kind of things by having similar shared interests, we've shifted to this follower type model where it's just about networking and connecting with the people and not necessarily being connected for any other purpose other than getting the most followers. \n\nSo the purpose becomes the network and then the identity stuff is associated with how many followers you have and how many retweets you get. The dynamics of how we've framed identity dynamics and communication dynamics in tech has shifted quite dramatically. Tech has shifted the internet and then the people seem to have kind of shifted a mirror of the technology that we built. \n\nSo I'm thinking if we take a step back and start with what you're saying in terms of community values and what a reflection of that would look like technology wise, but what if we started with a manifesto and some vision, even if it's rough vision, of what that might look like? Do you have any thoughts on, if you were to write some of those things down, what you would say?\n\nCOREY: Yeah. This is making me – and I don't know them off the top of my head, but it's making me think of some of the AI ethics work, artificial intelligence work that several people are working on right now. I think of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, it was Dr. Tim McGraw, I think of a few other contemporaries of them, but there's actually, I think an Algorithmic Justice League where they are actually thinking of that. There's a manifesto of sorts, or a thing that we should be believing and that underpins the ethics that we should have as it relates to that technology. \n\nIf I were to think of just a couple of things, the first would really be around the empowerment piece and I think I mentioned that before that we're promoting people to feel not just that they can speak, or be on a platform, or they can have access, but that they are empowered with the information, which in my mind, when I say empowered means that they can actually, it's a call to action. They believe that they can do more of the thing that they want to do. \n\nI think that is important because then it helps you actually center, it makes you actually have to question all of the communities that are on the platform and what you want them to actually be able to be called to do. Right now, not saying empowerment means that I feel like you're removed from the actual impact of what you are allowing to be shared, or allowing to be set on the platform.\n\nI think the second is while there are a lot of companies that would say they do this; it is important to call out safety and authenticity as maybe two and three. The idea is to really root in vulnerability, the idea is really to root in this idea of safety, psychological safety, but also physical, depending on whatever the product is. Because again, I think that those two things require you to then center the user and actually really think about well, what does it mean to actually build a safe community where most of all people feel safe psychologically and while also being their truest selves. \n\nThose were the three values, or the three areas where I feel like you would shape some type of principles around, but I also just want to say, I love your point because I do think that in some ways, the way in which we consume technology, or consume information now has really centered on this viral nature. I think in some ways, virality motivates the way that information is even propagated. Whereas before, when you're talking about these interests, it may have really been just genuinely about the interest and then it coalesced around that chatroom. \n\nBut now virality, because that is the name of the game in so many ways, it almost requires people who have figured out the model of how to make things viral as opposed to people who have figured out something to say that is substantive, or something to say that is empowering to our broader community. Those two things are not always overlapping and so, you have people who will influence and then systems that might reinforce that influence when the influence is not necessarily earned on the merits of actually being empowering, or safe, or authentic dialogue. \n\nSo I think you're absolutely spot on that like, the way that we consume has shifted to maybe wanting things to be viral and virality being almost the barometer of truth and value when that's not always the case.\n\nCHANTÉ: It makes me think that perhaps we've been focusing so much on the tech and the product space, that nobody is—I shouldn't say nobody—but we probably haven't focused enough on the actual consumer and making sure that we stand up resources, or a hub to inform them and make them smarter consumers. Because as we know, every click leads to a dollar, or every like leads to something. So I think we reinforce the system unknowingly. \n\nCOREY: Yeah. \n\nCHANTÉ: I often feel this sort of pull, I don't know about you, but I've been watching versus on Instagram. Are you familiar with versus?\n\nCOREY: Yes, yes. There have been some good ones. There also have been some duds, but yes.\n\nCHANTÉ: Duds, I know. Don't get me started, but #BlackTwitter, right? I'm like, “Oh wow.” So where I was getting excited and I was online early for the pandemic, but there was this part of me that just couldn't. I didn't want to get too attached, or too into it because I was like, “Man, look, we're on somebody else's platform making them money.” I know that there's some stuff being done to shift that and I see this a lot with the Black culture specifically, I feel like sometimes we're online and we're making this tech space, or this product really dope and nobody's there to protect us as consumers. \n\nI get really upset about that and I just want so badly to make sure that the consumers are educated, that they are informed and understanding how they should, or shouldn't be using their social capital. How they should, or shouldn't be supporting something that probably doesn't always have their best interests at heart. I don't know, it's not like there's one or two of us who have to be responsible, there's a whole – it's everyone's job. Do you of any collectives, or projects, or are you a part of anything that is aiming to do that? \n\nCOREY: Yeah. Again, a really, really good point. That really resonates because, I'll just say before I answer the question, I've had that conversation around memes because I feel like memes are such a way that we communicate now as a part of popular culture, but I don't have the tools necessary to trace the lineage of the first meme, but I would bet again, going back to the virality of means that there was something that was also infused with Black youth culture in America that made memes popular and then made them more ubiquitous. So this idea of making technology cool is because there is a culture that is infused in again, making it cool. It's a tool that then you have a community, it feels empowered to do something a certain way, but then that empowerment is not protected. \n\nI would say that just in my experience in tech, I have seen companies that have made investments in this conversation on equity and well-being where really, the goal is to how do you work more closely with and partner with creators? How do you work more closely with users of the platform, either through research, or actually through direct partnerships to understand how the tool is actually being used and what are ways that actually supplement the way in which they are using it today? \n\nI know in the very, very beginning stages of Twitter, that was one reason why Twitter took off was because Twitter was just – I think it might've started, was it a 100 characters? I don't even know now is way more, maybe it started with the 140 characters, but other than just being that platform tweet 140 characters, everything else was community generated RTs, the idea of having a retweet button, these different features very early on were all things that had organically risen out from the community and they just listened. \n\nSo I think in many ways, it was cool to see our product at that early stage just say we've created a tool where they were just going to see how people use it and then build on top of that. I think that that work's still happening. Companies should continue to invest in it, of course, but really listening to your creators and rather than saying, “Here's what we need you to fit, we are going to start doing that,” doing more of learning how you're using it is either about talking to you directly, or analyzing or examining it and really understanding what will matter to you and now we're augmenting that with this feature that we have listened to you and heard that you need. \n\nAnd then on the reverse side, proactively thinking about these are the issues that people are citing that they have, then make them feel unsafe, make them feel like they can actually have a voice on this platform and we are listening to that and we are actively going address that even if it's not going to necessarily net us an additional dollar spent, or an additional user earn. This is important because this is preventing you from using a platform to the fullest. \n\nSo I've seen some things since I have been in the space, I think much of it is going to have to be a continued investment. I can't think of any one product, or any one area where I feel like it's like really landed. But I also think that that speaks to the broader point, which is that it's a journey and then as you continue to grow as companies, you're going to have more challenges. But also, I see opportunities because you're bringing more communities and more people onto the platform and as you scale, that has to be a part of the conversation. It's not just going to be a monolith, or one trigger response to a collective user, but actually many different types of users on your platform.\n\nCHANTÉ: No doubt. I’m trying to remember when it was specifically, it was probably three, four weeks ago when there was all this big announcement about Clubhouse, for example, going and people specifically felt some kind of way because here you had a situation where there was a bunch of Black users who were early on joining and you even had a Black man who was the representative of the icon and people were like, “Wait a minute. We're not being involved in this whole opportunity for more funding and what does that mean for us?” \n\nI listened in that week to a bunch of conversations and folks were incensed; they felt left out, they felt overlooked, taken advantage of. I think we've seen some action spur out of that, but it just reminded me of that moment that we have a lot of power collectively as a community. But you have to have times and spaces where people can organize and communicate that are not dependent upon somebody else's online community that looks free, but maybe it's not and my feeling is that it has to be a multi-stakeholder groups that are holding these technology companies and even the investor community accountable, but also at the same time, there's got to be people who are thinking about just consumer education and consumer engagement period, because we're only going to see more of this, not less of it.\n\nCOREY: Yes, on multiple points. Having worked in privacy for some time as well doing policy work, that is something that comes up continually is that even as you build out more mechanisms to keep people's data safe, or you're like, “Hey, we actually are committed to the cause and this is all the work that we're going to do to protect your data,” the number of choices become unwieldy if you don't also have an education around all the things that a company can do with your data. So then it almost feels insincere if all of these things are offered without the education, or the continual reinforcement in different ways throughout their product, or their company's values. \n\nAnd then your point about Clubhouse. Actually, I remember reading that and I agree. Again, it really speaks to what I was saying about the meme piece where it’s like there is something that becomes really, really cool and it helps the technology take off and then it suddenly comes ubiquitous in this different way and it's like, “Whoa, wow, did we really think about the core experience?” How the course readings was shaped by a smaller community, but a very important one. \n\nBut then the other thing I think about with Clubhouse, but I think a lot of apps are guilty of this in the US is, also just from a tech equity perspective, leaning into the iPhone development space in and of itself often, I feel like creates its own barriers around elitism and privilege. \n\nNot because iPhone, or Apple is uniquely trying to say, “Here's our image and here's who the customers are that we have.” But actually, that just even being on Clubhouse in and of itself, or iPhone only products often leave out an entire demographic of people when you think even in the US, I think 50 something percent of people are still are Android users and then you think globally, Android actually has a ridiculous market share of way more than Apple globally. \n\nSo I was just what you're also thinking about the equity perspective and inclusion, I often think about that as well. Even at the outset, you're already narrowing the lens a little bit, and I get some of that as developmental challenges, but given all the success—I remember reading this article about Clubhouse and what they're worth, I'm like, “Wow, it's all of that.” It would seem like for me, the next step would be now invest in the development of an Android app in order to really see us reach that community, a broader community of which some of the people who help shape the core experience are representative sample of, but we could probably get so much more from this broader community.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes like, I wish I had a lot of snap effects going right now. I agree with that, obviously. So thank you.\n\nARTY: We're getting to the end of the show where we finish up with reflections. \n\nSo the thing that—I mean, there's so many things in the show—I've been thinking about this idea of what it means to center around core values and community and what type of communities we want to build and everything that follows from those core values and especially this idea of centering around empowerment. I feel like that makes a lot of sense: centering around empowerment. If our goal in building these spaces is to empower people, then what are all the systems and policies and things that follow with that goal of empowerment in mind, how do we raise and lift up people, and create supportive spaces that do that?\n\nI think back to one of the things you said at the beginning around authenticity and the ability to, or this conversation that you had, where I think it was your manager, Corey, that asked you, “How are you?” which is normally this plain old question that you just reply with, “Oh, good.” There's an expectation that it's almost rhetorical like, we're just moving on and touching base and not really saying anything of substance. But there's something fundamentally different there with, “No, how are you?” and it's not about the words you're saying, it's about the intention to actually listen. The intention of giving someone the space to let their guard down, to be their authentic self, to tell you what's real.\n\nWith this goal of empowerment, I feel like that's another aspect that's really important is being able to create spaces where we can drop our guard and be real. We can say what's really going on. In order to learn, we’ve got to be able to be ourselves, too and I feel like there's a lesson in the small in that of something that we can all make an effort to do when we interact with people to really ask them, “How are you really doing? What's really going on?” As opposed to trying to fix it, to change anything, to just listen, to really listen to what's going on with them, to finding those commonalities of, “Oh, I guess we all just want to be safe.” \n\nSeeing those things that are the same, as opposed to trying to fix, or change someone else, just focusing on listening and hearing where they're coming from. I feel like if we move toward those combination of things with that intention, with that goal in mind, with that being our why, that how we design the technology, how we design the policies that follow from that will help move us in the right direction.\n\nCHANTÉ: For me, I'm thinking a lot about this empathy piece, because it makes me pause and say, “While I prioritize it, I value it,” I just don't know how many hiring managers out there are actually looking for and building empathy into one of their core values that they're prioritizing on their hiring rubric. But as we move to this next fourth industrial revolution where we're automating and people are losing their jobs, we can't outsource empathy. \n\nSo it's something that we definitely need to make sure we are working on individually and if you have children, I hope that people are thinking about ways that they can cultivate that early in young and teachers and educators, and especially folks who want to be a founder, or they want to be an investor. I think this is something that takes a community effort and I want to hear more people talking about empathy. \n\nSo I'm really happy, Corey, that that's one of the core things you're focusing on with your strategy and your consulting firm. Really looking forward to connecting with you after this, about that because I think let's celebrate it and make sure that we get more people knowing who you are so that we can see a better future.\n\nCOREY: Thank you. No, I appreciate you saying that and absolutely. I was looking at your background as well and also, just Greater Than Code. I just thought, “Wow, this is a great model, generally.” This idea of voice because really that's what I connected to when I saw the podcast, this idea of, we all have a story and oftentimes, either because on a micro level on a day-to-day, we're not asked to share our story, or in the broader society, or broader infrastructure or whatever it is, technology. We're not invited to share our story in a way that others are. I think it's just so important to have vehicles like this podcast. Again, I saw your work as well. So I hope to continue to be involved in whatever way I can and also, support in whatever way I can. \n\nI think there's been so much has come up today is iterative, which is also why I love these conversations because I feel like I literally want to go back through and dissect some of these points. But the one thing that really is still very top of mind for me is this idea of that came up, or we talked about how the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based almost to this follower-based. I think Arty, it was something that you said. The idea that now we're focused on following, influencing, and how that shifts the conversation and it's something that I had not really thought about until this call, but I think it's like a very important thing to think about.\n\nAgain, we talked about Clubhouse, but I think one of the reasons why Clubhouse may have taken off was because it really seems like it centers the idea of, “I just join a room and just come together around an interest,” and that is enough. I think that that idea, however, the model ultimately works, maybe that's a sign that people have an appetite for really finding that type of space again and maybe that means that virality is not – it might be entertaining and there's going to be echoes of it, but maybe that's where we're shifting, or we need to be thinking about shifting. \n\nMaybe if there were companies proactively trying to do more, when it comes to helping stories be told or helping to empower people, maybe that's something that we're thinking about, or that we're investing in more as technologists on the call, but also, as people who use technology and consume technology. So that really stood out to me and that's something I really want to think about more. \n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great reflections. Thank you so much. That was such a good note to end on, Corey. It's been a pleasure to have you on our show. Let's make sure that we definitely stay connected. \n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. It has been an absolute pleasure. I'm excited about this and also thank you for giving me a reason to talk about superpowers and superheroes at different points throughout the show.Special Guest: Corey Ponder.","content_html":"01:55 - Corey’s Superpower: Empathy
\n\n09:06 - Having People Hear Your Stories
\n\n13:01 - Allyship Best Practices
\n\n19:04 - Developing Empathy
\n\n36:03 - Using Tech + Policy For Good
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: Centering around empowerment + asking, “How ARE you?” with the intention of listening.
\n\nChanté: We can’t outsource empathy.
\n\nCorey: How the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based to follower-based and influencing.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 230 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Thurmond.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Hey, everyone and I had the great pleasure of introducing our guest of honor today, Corey Ponder.
\n\nWelcome, Corey.
\n\nCOREY: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.
\n\nCHANTÉ: We're so glad to have you. If you don't mind, I'd love to read your bio so everyone knows who you are.
\n\nCOREY: Sounds great.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Corey has over 10 years of work experience, he has had several roles across two industries and has also served in community organizations and nonprofits. At the core of each of these experiences is a passionate commitment to building community and developing people and programs.
\n\nCorey most recently worked at Google serving as a senior policy advisor focused on privacy, advising product teams on best practices and approaches to inspire user trust. He also owns and manages his own business, em|PACT Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations build inclusive communities by prioritizing empathy as a skillset. Corey serves on boards of InnovatorsBox, a firm focused on creativity, and Youth Speaks, a nonprofit focused on youth arts and education.
\n\nGreat background. Corey, did we forget anything else?
\n\nCOREY: Well, I have to just because I am a lifetime SEC, Southeastern Conference, person, that I have to shout out Vanderbilt University, where I went for undergrad and then also, because I'm in California, I have to shout out University of California, Berkeley, where I went for my Master's in public policy. So those two things I would add.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great institutions for education. So good.
\n\nLet's start off with the first question that we give everyone and that is: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nCOREY: Yes. I love this question. It gives me a chance to really nerd out. So I would say the first thing that comes up for me is empathy. When I think about empathy, I think about how superheroes, oftentimes exhibit qualities around being empathetic that we might look at as healing abilities, or the ability to regenerate themselves, or regenerate others, the stamina, or the fortitude, last, or survive in a space where there's a lot of things attacking them mentally and emotionally and able to persevere in spite of all of that.
\n\nSo I would say empathy is definitely the superpower that I have. I think when I step into spaces, I'm always thinking about what can I do to make other people feel more welcome, or feel more authentically themselves, which I feel like is the healing part. I feel like the regeneration piece is often me putting myself into positions where I don't like conflict, or seek it out, but I definitely feel like I put myself into spaces where I'm like, I want to support you and it might come at some risk to me, but I think I can bounce back from this. And then the stamina piece. I mean, none of this work, showing up for others even is not just a one-time thing and so, the consistency piece, I think, is something that I've really over time become more comfortable with just knowing that things might be protracted. People might need you for long periods of time and I'm here for it.
\n\nCHANTÉ: So you said a few things here that really, I think, demonstrate the skillset for somebody who is in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space and I will bet that you probably didn't see that 10 years ago, or whenever you started down this journey.
\n\nSo if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to know how you got to this space now and I'll also add in, before you answer that question, that a lot of folks, BIPOC folks like us, we know what it's like to be othered. We know what it's like to be excluded. So I know for myself, I'm in the DEI space, but I'm just really curious. I did peek at your background, but just for folks who haven't or who don't have those quick fingers right now, they just want to hear your background, walk us through how you got here.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. So there are two inflection points. The first is I am a Black man so there are moments that I think about as a part of my growth as a Black boy and feeling like I had to grow up very fast to be taken seriously in whatever space that I was interested in to see the world from a perspective of hey, you really have to make sure that you're showing up and representing the person that you want to be because people will quickly ascribe something to you.
\n\nThis was a conversation that was permeating all around me so that when I got to college, there was an inflection point. The first one where I remember I was like, “I want to be a biologist and I might also go to medical school.” When I took lab for the first time, it was a moment where I realized like, oh man, despite all of the things that I have done, all of the things that are within my control, I studied hard. I was getting great grades.
\n\nI was just woefully unprepared for that space of even just being in a lab and doing a titration. I was like, “What the heck is a titration? What is an Erlenmeyer flask?” I realized that in a lot of ways it was because I didn't have access to the resources, or the conversations, or nobody had even told me that I could do those things. I wasn't seen as somebody that could do those things and so it's like, I didn't know what I didn't know and I think that I really started doubting in many ways from that moment who I could be, what I felt like I needed to thrive in the spaces, what I felt like I was capable of in these spaces.
\n\nIt took me throughout college—great relationships and friendships, but also investment and resources around me to really find that voice that said, “Hey, actually, here's your story,” You're not this other narrative, this person that can't do it and you're not a statistic in a sense of a Black man that is x as opposed to a successful Black man. That was the first inflection point for me.
\n\nThen I think the second was just having been at this point, maybe like 6, or 7 years working. I was at a moment at Facebook actually, where there was an increased conversation around what does it mean to support Black lives? Why are people talking about Black Lives Matter? In particular, during 2015, 2016, I forget specifically when, but Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were two Black men who were killed by police officers in different instances, in different cities, in different places, but within the same week. It was one of the first times that from a technology perspective, we were discussing this in an international way because it had been captured on Facebook Live.
\n\nSo there was this conversation around who are we as a part of this broader conversation? It was the second inflection point because it reminded me that was man, I am a Black man so even as I've done all of these things, I've been in careers, I've had these jobs and these opportunities where I've done things that I can be proud of, I'm still walking into this space the next day, after hearing about these instances and really feeling like I'm carrying something that I don't know how to speak to. I don't know how – I've never really talked to anybody about how it impacts the way that I am showing up in this space.
\n\nSo from there, I just made the commitment where I said, “I'm going to start trying to be more authentically myself. I'm going to start talking about all the parts of me that make me who I am.” I didn't have a plan for it; I just knew that I wanted to have those conversations. The interesting thing was I started having those conversations and people naturally, after I would talk to people, would say, “Well, what's next? What can I do to support you?” It really just made me think about the broader conversation around allyship.
\n\nThere's a broader conversation around what does it actually mean to show up for somebody and then I realized retroactively that there have been many examples, not only in my life, that people who have shown up for me that now I can pinpoint and look at as case studies, as data points, but also that I have naturally gravitated to doing that because of what I said earlier about the superpower of empathy. It has been something that I had always valued, even if I didn't know what it was, or what I was doing, or what it meant, but it was really important for me to see other people's stories because I knew how important it was for people to see mine.
\n\nSo those two inflection points really shaped how I viewed diversity, equity, and inclusion in my role, in the broader conversation. One, my own vulnerability with myself, but also two, how valuable it is to have people hear your story and validate who you are and your experience and how it's a part of a whole and how they see you.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: With stories like you mentioned being able to have this experience where you really understood what it meant to show up for someone.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. I'll give two stories.
\n\nOne was actually when someone showed up for me and I remember it was my boss actually shortly after the conversations, or at least what I mentioned earlier about Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. I just was having a really rough, it was a rough day. I mean, I was trying to show up business as usual was very much like, well, I have a job, I have meetings I have to go, and my boss asked me, “How are you doing?” That's a question you hear maybe a hundred times a day and it's also a question that feels like a rhetorical. I mean, you're supposed to say, “Good,” and keep it moving. I said that, but she really stopped me, told me like, “Hey, I'm asking because I really want to know and I have time. How are you doing?”
\n\nI think just in that simple moment of making the space, creating an avenue for me to actually express a real truth, it just made me feel like wow, you didn't have to listen to my story. You didn't have to consider that I was something more than this a meeting I had to go to, or that I was more than this deliverable, or this project that I was working on. And you did. That meeting was, I, even years later, still to think about it because it was just like, wow, that meeting didn't have to happen that way. But I felt like this wasn't just my burden to bear after that question, or that conversation. The question that she asked and the conversation that followed.
\n\nI think for me, showing up for others actually has been in this work—working through impact strategies and thinking through how do you actually show up as an ally. I've had a number of experiences. But in particular, there was one right around the decree, I would say the resurfacing of the Me Too movement and that conversation around sexual harassment in the workplace.
\n\nThere was an event, or a town hall, or an opportunity where I had a chance to really show up. I initially—and this is also a part of the failures piece—showed up to that very equally with the best of intentions and said, “Hey, what can I do to move this conversation forward?” Along the way, I remember realizing that oh man, in all of my eagerness to show up to this, I actually have silenced, or not included the voices that were probably most important to actually have this conversation. Women in particular, but also just thinking about in general, people who are survivors, or have been a victim of assault.
\n\nSo it was one of those moments where I took on feedback from people, some of my coworkers, colleagues, friends, I figured out a way to revamp the event, postponed the event so that I could do it the right way. And then I remember in the aftermath of that, seeing I learned something through that process about myself and also, the feedback that I received about the event afterwards was like, all right, this was a conversation where it really prompted people to think about a story that they haven’t thought about before—people who showed up to the event. Because I was helping organize it, showed up, and got something else out of it because I wasn't the only voice in the room.
\n\nIt was another moment where it was like, wow, this isn't necessarily my story, but I leaned in a little bit, or leaned in a lot in the beginning, learned a lot in the process about myself and even where my blind spots were within that entire process of learning in some ways helped tell a story that other people realized like, oh, wow, thanks for helping me see this narrative.
\n\nCHANTÉ: That is so helpful. I feel like the times where I've had to show up as an ally and lean in to something that I didn't necessarily understand, really helped me to better articulate the needs I had as a Black identified woman, or as a Latino woman to say, “Hey, friend or colleague, you want to show up and help me. This is how you can help me,” Because I've learned from my own ouch moments like, oops, I shouldn't have done that and thankfully, somebody was gracious enough to share feedback in that moment, but many times, they're not.
\n\nDo you have any best practices in terms of folks who want to show up, especially right now in this year, as an ally, they're very well-intentioned, well-meaning people, but they don't necessarily have somebody like an insider to give them the lay of the land, or to tell them where the real pain points are?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing is that to your point about the feedback, I think feedback is so critical and also, we have to recognize that for many communities, like you said, we're in the intersect. We are at the intersection of a lot of identities.
\n\nI recognize that even though I am underrepresented as a Black person in many spaces, I also am in a privileged position because I'm a man. So I'm having to constantly examine those different nuances and intersections of my identity. Yet that also helps me understand that there's a lot of emotional labor in just showing up to be Black every day so, then sometimes, I might not have the energy, or might not have the capacity to give that feedback to somebody who was looking to be on their journey as an ally.
\n\nThe first thing that I would say is showing up for others is really, there's got to be a hunger, or a desire to actually grow and change. This idea of a growth mindset and it has to be separate from passively taking on the information, or the stories of others.
\n\nI think once you have that, really having said, “I want to do this and I am motivated to do it.” Then I think the second thing is to go back to the superpower question from earlier, is I like to think about showing up for others as a trusted sidekick. So this model of thinking about you're not showing up to save the day, because that's also a lot of labor. Expecting to be the person to in the movie on a high note and be the person that walks down the aisle to get an award, or reward is not really the goal. But what it really is about is really understanding the stories of the people that you're playing in the same universe with and then figuring out what ways you can augment their journey.
\n\nI think about three things that are a part of that, which is really those everyday moments. When I've had conversations through my work, oftentimes people are like, “Black lives matter. We need to March,” or “Gender equity. We need to dismantle capitalism.” It’s like, that is probably true and there are scholars out there that are speaking more deeply than I can ever speak to on that, but what about those moments that are outside of that?
\n\nSo you might say that Black lives matter,” and you might have the t-shirt, or you might step up in a forum and say, “Hey, I'm declaring that I believe in this cause,” but are you then actually including your coworker who was Black in the team lunches that happen every day that y'all just get together organically, but somehow that person is never on the organic chain? Or if you're thinking about gender equity and pay discrimination, that is a big thing, but also, are you actually making space and not taking up the room when you're in a meeting everyday being the person that has to get the last word, or are you making sure that everybody's opinions are on the table, including your women colleagues, or female colleagues are heard in the room? I think these are the everyday moments where we can show up as an ally.
\n\nI think the second piece is thinking about these things that we have to confront about ourselves. It might be ugly or scary, but are necessary. We all have biases. We all are a product of certain privileges because we have identities that confer some amount of power to us and some type of favoritism to us. So if we're thinking about that, we have to really examine that how those show up and affect us.
\n\nPeggy McIntosh wrote Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, where she did a lot of research in this space, where the idea is that we carry this around and even if we don't acknowledge it, it's still there. This idea of it might be invisible to us, but you can imagine walking into a room with a big knapsack on not realizing that every time you turn left or right, you're hitting somebody with your privilege. So I think it's important to acknowledge that we have that backpack on whether we realize it, or not and it's affecting people whether we accept it, or not.
\n\nAnd then the third thing is taking that next step of we have the positionality. So if you're talking about supporting from your identity, or from your perspective, you have some ability to influence change. Again, even if it's at a micro level. Because I'm a man, I have some privilege in the communities and spaces that I hold. Because of I’m a man, people are going to see me a certain way so then what I talk about what I represent, what I say, what I'm willing to advocate for is going to hold a different weight, whether that's right or wrong, it's going to hold a different weight than if a woman were to ask, or advocate for the same thing. So then what can I do to use that privilege in support of what that community might actually be asking for, or want? That might take a little discomfort on my part, but I guarantee it is way less uncomfortable than underrepresented groups having to advocate for their right to be seen, or heard, or validated in spaces.
\n\nSo those would be three things, I think you could do in that journey.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are awesome things. The one that really resonates for me, too is just the empathy part because I feel like that is a core skill that we're going to need for the future of work. Oftentimes, when I say that people ask me, “Well, how do I develop empathy?” I have my own answer there, but I'd love to hear yours.
\n\nHow do you think people can get better at working on that empathy muscle and if you have anything that's worked for you personally, or that you recommend more professionally that you've seen in the workplace? That'd be helpful.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing that came up for me is Hamilton. I feel like everybody has seen it now. If you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, there's a theme that goes throughout Hamilton where Ehrenberg says, “Talk less, listen more.” There's this idea that I feel like with empathy, we often think of it as just like, ”I have to be in touch with my feelings,” but actually what I think it is, is actually a skill, a tangible skill of can I actually listen to someone and I think there's a difference between being able to hear and being able to listen.
\n\nSo I think the first thing that I have done is like, how can I actually actively listen more effectively to the people around me? There's actually this research, I think 2014, 2015, it was focused on can we use empathy? Like, actually measure the effect of empathy on reducing, in this case, anti-trans gender opinions? I think the research was called “Durably reducing transphobia,” but essentially, what they did was it was an exercise around active listening.
\n\nThey used the political tool called deep canvassing to essentially equip these researchers to go into a home where people expressed, or had been exposed to anti-transgender views and they literally just listened to them. They processed actively with this person about why they believe what they believe and then through that process, they didn't actually rebut with facts, or say, “But actually, that's not true,” or “Did you know that that's actually not true?”
\n\nWhat actually happened was people realized through their own act of processing that you know what, this is not actually about transgender. It's actually about safety. I can relate now. I can empathize because now that I've come full circle and have been able to tell my story about why I'm processed out loud, I realized that I do have something in common with the transgender community. They want to feel safe. This law makes them feel unsafe. I want to feel safe in bathrooms, but those two things don't have to compete with each other. We're all people that want to be safe. That that research for me really sticks out whenever I think of active listening.
\n\nI think the second thing is I've talked a couple of times about storytelling; there's a part of this for me, that really is seeing people as these amazing figures in a story you just haven't read yet. I think when I practice empathy, it often is just me really taking an interest more deeply in the why somebody does what they do as opposed to what they are doing. This hearkens back to Simon Sinek, who was a leadership consultant, or coach, but he had that phrase in a TED Talk where he said, “People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I think for me, that boils down to the core, how I think about if you want to cultivate empathy as a muscle, or a skill, it's really asking that question, “Why did they do that?”
\n\nAn actual tool that I often use in my work is something called empathy mapping, which is often used in UX design actually, in tech, to really think about human centered approaches to product design. But it lays out all of these ways about how do you think they would feel? How do you think they would see this? How do you think they would hear, or receive this message? And then it really gets you to ask this question about why would they react this way to what you're about to present, or why would they react to these set of circumstances in a certain way?
\n\nCHANTÉ: One of the things that you're talking about here is the empathy mapping. I actually do this course, or this workshop with some collaborators around designing for inclusion and that is something that we really focus on. Have you seen that in practice well somewhere that you could illustrate, or show? I guess, we could provide an example, or a case study so folks know what you're talking about.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. One of the things that this makes me think of is Google Assistant space, which is also a space that I spent some time in. But within the Google's Trust and Safety team, there was a focus on thinking about digital assistants and whether they had an inclusive voice when it came to gender, because there is a lot of research now that exists about voices and people perceive assistants to be female, but because of the voices.
\n\nCompanies are really doing a lot of that work now to think through what the implications are around that. But at the time, I remember in this work very early on, what I thought was interesting about this was just the steps that the Trust and Safety team went through to actually figure out if there was an issue here because you design a product, the product is meant to respond to queries.
\n\nBut soon, what they started finding was that maybe some of the queries that the digital assistant was getting were actually maybe more vulgar, or maybe more derogatory. So how does that break down? Does that break down like, is it just objectively that's how people talk to digital assistants? Well, no, and actually doing work and trying to reduce those offensive, or shocking, or risky experiences, what they found was that maybe this is actually offensive, or derogatory on the Google Assistant voices that present, or sound feminine.
\n\nSo now that we have done this research, how can we actually address that in the broader product? I think the Google Assistant then did things to try to make the voices more gender neutral, to provide more options so that there were a range of voices and then also, not necessarily default to the feminine voice, or not even call them feminine. I think they started calling them like Voice 1, Voice 2.
\n\nSo I think that that's one example of that I know, that I am aware of where when you're thinking about inclusion as it could be an objective truth that you're here to provide an answer to a problem. But often, that problem that you're solving might actually have many other subproblems within it.
\n\nBut the idea of inclusive design is important. It's an important lens for everybody to have honestly, on the product, because there are a range of things that might be happening that we're just not aware of. But certainly, the power of doing extensive UX research, or a deep dive on some of those things, I think is what helps augment and move us away from those types of snafus happening in our technologies.
\n\nCHANTÉ: That was a beautiful example. Thank you. That sounds like a really cool project that you got to be a part of. Was there anything else that you learned from being on that project team that you can share?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. Well, I should say, first off, this happened before I came into the team, but I think it was one of the things that I found very powerful about the team itself, doing the work and also, where they were centering people. I think that was one of the reasons why I've also been very interested in policy within tech, because it very much it's about centering and advocating for best practices for people and defining what users actually are.
\n\nBut I think for me, the lesson that I took from that just was again, that we all really have to be our advocates for this type of work and this type of change in the products and also, that a lot of this is sometimes not as complicated as we make it out to be. I think that it's really about priorities and what we value. What I appreciated about this team was just this idea of wow, you actually value not just the objective user, but the user in a sense of what context would they use this and how would this impact this community that we're trying to build this ecosystem?
\n\nARTY: So there's something you said earlier that really struck me when you were talking about this example with empathizing for these people that had been exposed to anti-transgender ideas and sitting down and listening.
\n\nOne thing that strikes me about that is just that as opposed to these people being a certain way, you framed things as these people were exposed to a certain kind of content that then they had this fear that came up in resonant to something that they were exposed to. I see those sorts of dynamics in other contexts. Would you mind elaborating a little more on that thought?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. I definitely think that we are in – not that 2020, or certainly, the last 4 years since 2016 with President Trump, I don't think that that is unique. I think that it feels exacerbated because on top of that technology has been a lens through which we've seen almost an exponential growth in access to information. It may have outpaced the way in which we also keep up with the ways in which you are skeptically dissecting this information and analyzing it for truth and veracity. So I think that there's been a confluence of forces that have made it so that things like misinformation and disinformation are permeating and now, it is easily accessible.
\n\nOne of the things that I think about a lot in this space, as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion and why I think empathy is so important is that I feel like it can become very easy to go down this path because we're always looking for ways to validate our own experiences. So if there's one thing that we – an easy way to do it that is harmful, or damaging to others, is to validate by saying that, “Well, it can't be that over there.” I'm invalidating that to bolster the way that I see the world, or my experiences.
\n\nWhat I really focus on from my work and why I think the empathy piece has been so powerful is that it's a reminder as we move through that cycle of how can you be more empathetic, that at the core of our human experience is this idea that we all do not like the feeling of being othered, or unseen. Even if for someone who feels like they are, whether you agree or disagree with this idea, I'm disaffected.
\n\nI think this election cycle is a great example. A lot of people felt disaffected on both sides like, you're white middle-class, or you're Black and in poverty, or you're white and in poverty. You have all these sects of people that are like, “Ah, nobody's listening to me,” and that's reinforced because you're like, “Nobody has the experience that I have and nobody knows what it's like to feel othered like this.”
\n\nBut actually, the reality is, regardless of whether you understand what it means to be grow up white and poor, or Black and affluent, or Black and poor, or white and affluent, you all have this common experience where you have been othered at some point.
\n\nEmpathy says at the core of that human experience is something we all should be able to understand. So we're not necessarily focusing on what you went through so much as why did you have to go through it? I think that this disinformation, this misinformation feeds the –
\n\nIf we had more empathy, I think that would be the thing that would combat this because it would allow us to ask the right questions around maybe this is true, maybe this is not true. If I don't have the tools to actually assess whether it's true or real, what I can say is that I need to really think about the community that is centered in this story and understand how this would make them feel if this were true, how does it make them feel if this were not true.
\n\nI think that that's where empathy and developing that as a skill could do a lot more work in this space where we're probably only going to see more honestly, content, or information where we have to vet where it comes from, whether it's real, who’s saying it and why they're saying it.
\n\nARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about how powerful it is just that even in listening to this context, as opposed to trying to correct it, what you did find was this commonality of, “Oh, we both have a desire to feel safe, it is part of the human experience,” and then with this disinformation, you've got this dynamic that really plays on fear. A lot of this information that's associated with fear reminds me of this TED Talk by Daryl Davis that I think Chanté, you're the one who actually had me listen to that. But specifically, that ignorance breeds fear breeds hate and then if we can go about empathizing and listening and building those connections and tackling the ignorance, that it can have a chain reaction effect on all of these other things.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. This has made me randomly think of a song lyric by Nas, street prophet that he is, but his song with Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whoever he was calling himself at the time called Hate Me Now. He said that line: people “fear what they don't understand, hate what they can't conquer. I guess, that's just a theory of man.” I was like, ah, this is making me think about that because I think so often, we are pushed into those lanes where the idea is to think that you have to conquer something. So it's like your safety, your capacity to do what you want to do in this world is won by subjugating, or by conquering something else, someone else and that's the only way that it can happen.
\n\nAnd then also that fear piece; if I don't understand it, then it's not safe. So if I can't wrap my head around it, then I need to assume the worst and fear it. I think why empathy has been so powerful for me is one, because we don't often talk about it as something that we can actually cultivate. We often talk about it in a you either have it, or you don't, or it's a natural gift, or it isn't. I think it actually is something that can be cultivated and brought to bear, like in that research, where it’s like this was a community.
\n\nI think the first time I did it, it was in South Florida, or maybe somewhere outside of Miami. I'm not actually sure of the specific locale, but this community had been subjected to all sorts of messaging around the transgender community, because it was meant to drive a particular position, or opinion on a bill around bathrooms and whether bathrooms could be used by people of the multiple genders, or you had to have separate men and women bathrooms. They were able to do through this research, they were able to find that not only were they able to shift people's perception around those issues—actually shift them positively in the direction of saying like, “Oh, actually I do support transgender rights in this conversation.” But that it was a statistically significant shift and it lasted for three months after that conversation when they did a check-in.
\n\nSo I think that it just really speaks to we don't have to fear what we don't understand. If you really just take the time to let people really work out their own narrative for themselves, they will often figure out that their own narratives are incongruent with how they actually are showing up in the space and it's not about telling them, “Your narrative is off,” like, “You're wrong.”
\n\nI think that there's value in that, but if you're going to make the real change over time, in psychology, they call it act of processing. There's value in actually getting people to their own whatever it is, whatever reason they have for fearing what they don't understand to process that out loud in a way where they can actually be like, “I was heard and are realized that hearing myself is incongruent with how I actually like what I actually value.” So maybe coming to my own conclusions, I don't have to fear this, even though I don't understand all the parts of that experience
\n\nCHANTÉ: That was really helpful, Corey and one of the thought bubbles—well, one of the many that popped up as you were responding to Arty's question was how do we then, because it sounds like there's a lot of value in anticipating, or using tech and policy for good in those moments. I'm just wondering, I know that you consult around this.
\n\nSo maybe take us down that avenue, because I think we're at this place where we've seen coming off of this last election, the power of the misinformation strategies and how we've partnered that with let's say, the Cambridge Analytica situation where they used data to underpin those fears and then really influenced a community, or a country to the space that they wanted them to be. How do we get ahead of that? What are some things we can do? Or what are some things maybe you're working on that are worth mentioning here today?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. So those are very, very good questions, or good thoughts. I think that one thing that just thinking about even as you were saying with Cambridge Analytica, my first thought was just that we have existed in the technological space, in this information age where empowering people online, I feel like it has been separate from the using the data, or giving the data up in a way that, or using the data or giving the data up.
\n\nBy that I mean, essentially, we're using these products and tools, wouldn't have never really thought about it as a platform for change, or a platform to see the world we want to sees except for these little blips, or these moments where there are revolutions around like Arab Spring. That was driven, I believe on Facebook and then conversations again, around Black Lives Matter because of live video that we now have, we're able to capture the experiences in real time.
\n\nSo I think that the first thing that I would say is how can we actually educate people around being empowered online? You have a voice, but it's not just the voice to repeat what you have heard, but really to lend your own voice, your own vulnerability, your own story to what's happening in these forms.
\n\nI think the second thing really is it comes down to the companies. I think that a lot of my conversations, when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, really comes back to values. Many companies, particularly ones that are community-focused and saying that our users are a part of an ecosystem, have to really ask themselves about what ecosystem are you actually trying to build? Because at a certain point, particularly if you are a private company, there are good ecosystems and there are destructive ecosystems.
\n\nSo it can't be a libertarian view of the technology is just a tool and it will all sort itself out. It actually has to be maybe more curated than that and that might not have been the initial approach of technology. Certainly, wasn't the approach to the world wide web either when it first started out. It was just like, anybody could create a geo site, anybody could do anything on the internet, but in some ways, I think that view of technology maybe has to change. It helps lends itself very well to innovation, but the challenge is that it creates a lot of loopholes for abuse.
\n\nSo then I think companies, as they start curating their experiences more, it has to be centered on very clear community values. What is your ideal world and your ideal state that you want to be contributing to as a part of this broader conversation around information and sharing data for the benefit of others? Most of these companies have that in their mission somewhere. They believe that they're doing a public good, even if they're also profiting in the process. Well, if that's true, then what values get you there and keep you there?
\n\nSo I think that that's how the disinformation and misinformation is allowed to persist, because there's just questions that you have to ask around are some things allowable within this ecosystem? Are we willing to take a hard line on some things for the benefit of the greater good?
\n\nThen it’s also acknowledging that it is hard being in technology and now it's like, even if you're 99% effective at something, if you have a billion users, that's still millions of people, or millions of cases. You have to then also acknowledge that you're always working and it never will be good enough, but you can try to close that gap and be consistent on what you actually value and believe and that at least shows a bit of sincerity over time around what you're trying to do.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I appreciate your take on that.
\n\nOne thing I might imagine to be true, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think from what I've seen is that the tech policy space is not Black enough. It is not; I don't see enough BIPOC folks. I don't see people really, outside of cis able-bodied white guys in that space. Is there anything that you recommend in terms of trying to change that so that in the future where we're going to have, for sure, undoubtedly more mixed-race people, just given the trends that we're on, how do we address that, or how do we curate for that?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. I mean, so much of – it reminds me of the story I was telling about biology and going into lab is that I think so much of it is about really understanding the possibilities of what is actually out there and having someone tell you, or exposing you to what those possibilities are. Some of that is pipeline development.
\n\nSo I think we're many of these companies and also, just not even tech companies, but policy in general. This base is about how do you invest back in these communities, knowing that it might pay dividends in 10, or 15 years down the road to have this more diverse ecosystem of policy people, or practitioners, or technologists. Even if you're not developing them particularly for a job today, but down the road. I mean, I think some of that is pipeline investment and actually just telling people at a young age, “I see you, here's the three things you need to get started,” and then the sky's the limit.
\n\nI know there are some programs around coding that have taken off where people go into the community and do that. It will be interesting to see how, if we were to look over time, whether that's really changing the overall dynamics of actual Black engineers, or BIPOC engineers, or a diverse representation of engineers. But I think that that would be the same for policy and the other thing that I would say is it would seem that many companies, in the tech space in particular, did not actually have – whether they should have, or shouldn’t have, they didn't necessarily have to focus on these types of questions for their growth and success in the early stages.
\n\nSo I think that that also meant that there just wasn't an investment in the broader, we need a policy team. Maybe there were people there to focus on policy and ask these questions. But I think as we continue to see the growth and the impact of companies on just everything like our economic systems, the way we behave, and the way we think about different issues.
\n\nNow, it is really important to think not just about whether building this product is going to net an additional 100,000 users, at the expense of so many other things, will it affect the political conversation happening in this country? Will it affect the access to resources in this place?
\n\nNow we're seeing the investment in those communities and spaces, for companies that are growing, or building now, I think it's about really investing in there early and make sure you have the right team and the right representation of the team to address the issues that you could foresee being a challenge, or being a space that your product will exist in.
\n\nBut I think policy is certainly one of many professional spaces where you do see underrepresentation really because of access, or knowledge about the opportunity.
\n\nI'll just say, because this is a long, long way of saying, but I want to end with a personal story where it's just even for myself going into the technology space, I was always interested in policy, but really from the lens of how you can go directly into government as a civil servant and I try to push the machine, or move through the bureaucracy to actually make effective rules, or regulations that mattered, or meant something to different communities and I think government can still be that thing. There's a lot of challenges there, but it still can be that force.
\n\nWhat I didn't realize was that this existed in the tech world, that these were conversations that were happening, that companies were having an influence on the way we legislate, or the way we behave, or the way we think about all sorts of issues that would “fit squarely” in the policy world.
\n\nIt was only through my kind of exploration, but also, connecting with people who had gone over to these companies, in these spaces and the privilege that I had of being able to go to different institutions, where I had access to people who could have these conversations with me, where I realized hey, I could be in this space. But it was something that I didn't even realize was a thing and would never have explored, otherwise. So I think that that also for me, recognizing that I had access to resources and tools that helped me even see it as a possibility and so, I think that has to be the thing that we're in the companies that anybody who has the privilege, or capacity to do so should be investing in.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: I feel like there's some things that we could do in terms of new precedent setting, that we could do as a broader tech community, that could help drive change of adopting cultural practices within the context of organizations and everything that flows from there.
\n\nSo one of the key threads you brought up was that it comes down to values and we ought to start with having a clear set of things that we want to value as a community and build as organizations and build around that.
\n\nI started thinking back to you mentioned early days of the internet when anybody could do anything and spin stuff up on the internet and I think about some of the early tech interfaces and stuff we had and I feel like there was a lot more community and curation type things, too. We had message boards and I think about AOL days where you have little chatrooms that you join and stuff that were topic-focused.
\n\nIt seems like, as opposed to being these topic-focused finding each other kind of things by having similar shared interests, we've shifted to this follower type model where it's just about networking and connecting with the people and not necessarily being connected for any other purpose other than getting the most followers.
\n\nSo the purpose becomes the network and then the identity stuff is associated with how many followers you have and how many retweets you get. The dynamics of how we've framed identity dynamics and communication dynamics in tech has shifted quite dramatically. Tech has shifted the internet and then the people seem to have kind of shifted a mirror of the technology that we built.
\n\nSo I'm thinking if we take a step back and start with what you're saying in terms of community values and what a reflection of that would look like technology wise, but what if we started with a manifesto and some vision, even if it's rough vision, of what that might look like? Do you have any thoughts on, if you were to write some of those things down, what you would say?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. This is making me – and I don't know them off the top of my head, but it's making me think of some of the AI ethics work, artificial intelligence work that several people are working on right now. I think of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, it was Dr. Tim McGraw, I think of a few other contemporaries of them, but there's actually, I think an Algorithmic Justice League where they are actually thinking of that. There's a manifesto of sorts, or a thing that we should be believing and that underpins the ethics that we should have as it relates to that technology.
\n\nIf I were to think of just a couple of things, the first would really be around the empowerment piece and I think I mentioned that before that we're promoting people to feel not just that they can speak, or be on a platform, or they can have access, but that they are empowered with the information, which in my mind, when I say empowered means that they can actually, it's a call to action. They believe that they can do more of the thing that they want to do.
\n\nI think that is important because then it helps you actually center, it makes you actually have to question all of the communities that are on the platform and what you want them to actually be able to be called to do. Right now, not saying empowerment means that I feel like you're removed from the actual impact of what you are allowing to be shared, or allowing to be set on the platform.
\n\nI think the second is while there are a lot of companies that would say they do this; it is important to call out safety and authenticity as maybe two and three. The idea is to really root in vulnerability, the idea is really to root in this idea of safety, psychological safety, but also physical, depending on whatever the product is. Because again, I think that those two things require you to then center the user and actually really think about well, what does it mean to actually build a safe community where most of all people feel safe psychologically and while also being their truest selves.
\n\nThose were the three values, or the three areas where I feel like you would shape some type of principles around, but I also just want to say, I love your point because I do think that in some ways, the way in which we consume technology, or consume information now has really centered on this viral nature. I think in some ways, virality motivates the way that information is even propagated. Whereas before, when you're talking about these interests, it may have really been just genuinely about the interest and then it coalesced around that chatroom.
\n\nBut now virality, because that is the name of the game in so many ways, it almost requires people who have figured out the model of how to make things viral as opposed to people who have figured out something to say that is substantive, or something to say that is empowering to our broader community. Those two things are not always overlapping and so, you have people who will influence and then systems that might reinforce that influence when the influence is not necessarily earned on the merits of actually being empowering, or safe, or authentic dialogue.
\n\nSo I think you're absolutely spot on that like, the way that we consume has shifted to maybe wanting things to be viral and virality being almost the barometer of truth and value when that's not always the case.
\n\nCHANTÉ: It makes me think that perhaps we've been focusing so much on the tech and the product space, that nobody is—I shouldn't say nobody—but we probably haven't focused enough on the actual consumer and making sure that we stand up resources, or a hub to inform them and make them smarter consumers. Because as we know, every click leads to a dollar, or every like leads to something. So I think we reinforce the system unknowingly.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I often feel this sort of pull, I don't know about you, but I've been watching versus on Instagram. Are you familiar with versus?
\n\nCOREY: Yes, yes. There have been some good ones. There also have been some duds, but yes.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Duds, I know. Don't get me started, but #BlackTwitter, right? I'm like, “Oh wow.” So where I was getting excited and I was online early for the pandemic, but there was this part of me that just couldn't. I didn't want to get too attached, or too into it because I was like, “Man, look, we're on somebody else's platform making them money.” I know that there's some stuff being done to shift that and I see this a lot with the Black culture specifically, I feel like sometimes we're online and we're making this tech space, or this product really dope and nobody's there to protect us as consumers.
\n\nI get really upset about that and I just want so badly to make sure that the consumers are educated, that they are informed and understanding how they should, or shouldn't be using their social capital. How they should, or shouldn't be supporting something that probably doesn't always have their best interests at heart. I don't know, it's not like there's one or two of us who have to be responsible, there's a whole – it's everyone's job. Do you of any collectives, or projects, or are you a part of anything that is aiming to do that?
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. Again, a really, really good point. That really resonates because, I'll just say before I answer the question, I've had that conversation around memes because I feel like memes are such a way that we communicate now as a part of popular culture, but I don't have the tools necessary to trace the lineage of the first meme, but I would bet again, going back to the virality of means that there was something that was also infused with Black youth culture in America that made memes popular and then made them more ubiquitous. So this idea of making technology cool is because there is a culture that is infused in again, making it cool. It's a tool that then you have a community, it feels empowered to do something a certain way, but then that empowerment is not protected.
\n\nI would say that just in my experience in tech, I have seen companies that have made investments in this conversation on equity and well-being where really, the goal is to how do you work more closely with and partner with creators? How do you work more closely with users of the platform, either through research, or actually through direct partnerships to understand how the tool is actually being used and what are ways that actually supplement the way in which they are using it today?
\n\nI know in the very, very beginning stages of Twitter, that was one reason why Twitter took off was because Twitter was just – I think it might've started, was it a 100 characters? I don't even know now is way more, maybe it started with the 140 characters, but other than just being that platform tweet 140 characters, everything else was community generated RTs, the idea of having a retweet button, these different features very early on were all things that had organically risen out from the community and they just listened.
\n\nSo I think in many ways, it was cool to see our product at that early stage just say we've created a tool where they were just going to see how people use it and then build on top of that. I think that that work's still happening. Companies should continue to invest in it, of course, but really listening to your creators and rather than saying, “Here's what we need you to fit, we are going to start doing that,” doing more of learning how you're using it is either about talking to you directly, or analyzing or examining it and really understanding what will matter to you and now we're augmenting that with this feature that we have listened to you and heard that you need.
\n\nAnd then on the reverse side, proactively thinking about these are the issues that people are citing that they have, then make them feel unsafe, make them feel like they can actually have a voice on this platform and we are listening to that and we are actively going address that even if it's not going to necessarily net us an additional dollar spent, or an additional user earn. This is important because this is preventing you from using a platform to the fullest.
\n\nSo I've seen some things since I have been in the space, I think much of it is going to have to be a continued investment. I can't think of any one product, or any one area where I feel like it's like really landed. But I also think that that speaks to the broader point, which is that it's a journey and then as you continue to grow as companies, you're going to have more challenges. But also, I see opportunities because you're bringing more communities and more people onto the platform and as you scale, that has to be a part of the conversation. It's not just going to be a monolith, or one trigger response to a collective user, but actually many different types of users on your platform.
\n\nCHANTÉ: No doubt. I’m trying to remember when it was specifically, it was probably three, four weeks ago when there was all this big announcement about Clubhouse, for example, going and people specifically felt some kind of way because here you had a situation where there was a bunch of Black users who were early on joining and you even had a Black man who was the representative of the icon and people were like, “Wait a minute. We're not being involved in this whole opportunity for more funding and what does that mean for us?”
\n\nI listened in that week to a bunch of conversations and folks were incensed; they felt left out, they felt overlooked, taken advantage of. I think we've seen some action spur out of that, but it just reminded me of that moment that we have a lot of power collectively as a community. But you have to have times and spaces where people can organize and communicate that are not dependent upon somebody else's online community that looks free, but maybe it's not and my feeling is that it has to be a multi-stakeholder groups that are holding these technology companies and even the investor community accountable, but also at the same time, there's got to be people who are thinking about just consumer education and consumer engagement period, because we're only going to see more of this, not less of it.
\n\nCOREY: Yes, on multiple points. Having worked in privacy for some time as well doing policy work, that is something that comes up continually is that even as you build out more mechanisms to keep people's data safe, or you're like, “Hey, we actually are committed to the cause and this is all the work that we're going to do to protect your data,” the number of choices become unwieldy if you don't also have an education around all the things that a company can do with your data. So then it almost feels insincere if all of these things are offered without the education, or the continual reinforcement in different ways throughout their product, or their company's values.
\n\nAnd then your point about Clubhouse. Actually, I remember reading that and I agree. Again, it really speaks to what I was saying about the meme piece where it’s like there is something that becomes really, really cool and it helps the technology take off and then it suddenly comes ubiquitous in this different way and it's like, “Whoa, wow, did we really think about the core experience?” How the course readings was shaped by a smaller community, but a very important one.
\n\nBut then the other thing I think about with Clubhouse, but I think a lot of apps are guilty of this in the US is, also just from a tech equity perspective, leaning into the iPhone development space in and of itself often, I feel like creates its own barriers around elitism and privilege.
\n\nNot because iPhone, or Apple is uniquely trying to say, “Here's our image and here's who the customers are that we have.” But actually, that just even being on Clubhouse in and of itself, or iPhone only products often leave out an entire demographic of people when you think even in the US, I think 50 something percent of people are still are Android users and then you think globally, Android actually has a ridiculous market share of way more than Apple globally.
\n\nSo I was just what you're also thinking about the equity perspective and inclusion, I often think about that as well. Even at the outset, you're already narrowing the lens a little bit, and I get some of that as developmental challenges, but given all the success—I remember reading this article about Clubhouse and what they're worth, I'm like, “Wow, it's all of that.” It would seem like for me, the next step would be now invest in the development of an Android app in order to really see us reach that community, a broader community of which some of the people who help shape the core experience are representative sample of, but we could probably get so much more from this broader community.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yes like, I wish I had a lot of snap effects going right now. I agree with that, obviously. So thank you.
\n\nARTY: We're getting to the end of the show where we finish up with reflections.
\n\nSo the thing that—I mean, there's so many things in the show—I've been thinking about this idea of what it means to center around core values and community and what type of communities we want to build and everything that follows from those core values and especially this idea of centering around empowerment. I feel like that makes a lot of sense: centering around empowerment. If our goal in building these spaces is to empower people, then what are all the systems and policies and things that follow with that goal of empowerment in mind, how do we raise and lift up people, and create supportive spaces that do that?
\n\nI think back to one of the things you said at the beginning around authenticity and the ability to, or this conversation that you had, where I think it was your manager, Corey, that asked you, “How are you?” which is normally this plain old question that you just reply with, “Oh, good.” There's an expectation that it's almost rhetorical like, we're just moving on and touching base and not really saying anything of substance. But there's something fundamentally different there with, “No, how are you?” and it's not about the words you're saying, it's about the intention to actually listen. The intention of giving someone the space to let their guard down, to be their authentic self, to tell you what's real.
\n\nWith this goal of empowerment, I feel like that's another aspect that's really important is being able to create spaces where we can drop our guard and be real. We can say what's really going on. In order to learn, we’ve got to be able to be ourselves, too and I feel like there's a lesson in the small in that of something that we can all make an effort to do when we interact with people to really ask them, “How are you really doing? What's really going on?” As opposed to trying to fix it, to change anything, to just listen, to really listen to what's going on with them, to finding those commonalities of, “Oh, I guess we all just want to be safe.”
\n\nSeeing those things that are the same, as opposed to trying to fix, or change someone else, just focusing on listening and hearing where they're coming from. I feel like if we move toward those combination of things with that intention, with that goal in mind, with that being our why, that how we design the technology, how we design the policies that follow from that will help move us in the right direction.
\n\nCHANTÉ: For me, I'm thinking a lot about this empathy piece, because it makes me pause and say, “While I prioritize it, I value it,” I just don't know how many hiring managers out there are actually looking for and building empathy into one of their core values that they're prioritizing on their hiring rubric. But as we move to this next fourth industrial revolution where we're automating and people are losing their jobs, we can't outsource empathy.
\n\nSo it's something that we definitely need to make sure we are working on individually and if you have children, I hope that people are thinking about ways that they can cultivate that early in young and teachers and educators, and especially folks who want to be a founder, or they want to be an investor. I think this is something that takes a community effort and I want to hear more people talking about empathy.
\n\nSo I'm really happy, Corey, that that's one of the core things you're focusing on with your strategy and your consulting firm. Really looking forward to connecting with you after this, about that because I think let's celebrate it and make sure that we get more people knowing who you are so that we can see a better future.
\n\nCOREY: Thank you. No, I appreciate you saying that and absolutely. I was looking at your background as well and also, just Greater Than Code. I just thought, “Wow, this is a great model, generally.” This idea of voice because really that's what I connected to when I saw the podcast, this idea of, we all have a story and oftentimes, either because on a micro level on a day-to-day, we're not asked to share our story, or in the broader society, or broader infrastructure or whatever it is, technology. We're not invited to share our story in a way that others are. I think it's just so important to have vehicles like this podcast. Again, I saw your work as well. So I hope to continue to be involved in whatever way I can and also, support in whatever way I can.
\n\nI think there's been so much has come up today is iterative, which is also why I love these conversations because I feel like I literally want to go back through and dissect some of these points. But the one thing that really is still very top of mind for me is this idea of that came up, or we talked about how the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based almost to this follower-based. I think Arty, it was something that you said. The idea that now we're focused on following, influencing, and how that shifts the conversation and it's something that I had not really thought about until this call, but I think it's like a very important thing to think about.
\n\nAgain, we talked about Clubhouse, but I think one of the reasons why Clubhouse may have taken off was because it really seems like it centers the idea of, “I just join a room and just come together around an interest,” and that is enough. I think that that idea, however, the model ultimately works, maybe that's a sign that people have an appetite for really finding that type of space again and maybe that means that virality is not – it might be entertaining and there's going to be echoes of it, but maybe that's where we're shifting, or we need to be thinking about shifting.
\n\nMaybe if there were companies proactively trying to do more, when it comes to helping stories be told or helping to empower people, maybe that's something that we're thinking about, or that we're investing in more as technologists on the call, but also, as people who use technology and consume technology. So that really stood out to me and that's something I really want to think about more.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great reflections. Thank you so much. That was such a good note to end on, Corey. It's been a pleasure to have you on our show. Let's make sure that we definitely stay connected.
\n\nCOREY: Yeah, absolutely. It has been an absolute pleasure. I'm excited about this and also thank you for giving me a reason to talk about superpowers and superheroes at different points throughout the show.
Special Guest: Corey Ponder.
","summary":"Corey Ponder talks about what it means to support Black lives, having conversations around allyship, developing empathy, and using the intersections of tech + policy for good.","date_published":"2021-04-14T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ce571062-57bb-4ef4-9f2c-0e269167f1cf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52951607,"duration_in_seconds":4204}]},{"id":"2402ed84-d8fc-46be-8920-92c06c15cd4a","title":"229: Union Organization with Melissa McEwen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/union-organization","content_text":"02:21 - Melissa’s Superpower: Being Extremely Online\n\n03:06 - Unionizing Glitch\n\n\nGlitch workers sign tech’s first collective bargaining agreement \nMisconceptions re: Unions\nEngineer Salary Discrepancies\nMiddle Management, Product Management Unionization\nMinority Unions (i.e. Google)\nWhat is a Minority Union?\n[The Rise of Minority Unions: How Social Movements and Tech Giants Could Be Showing Signs of Things To Come](The Rise of Minority Unions: How Social Movements and Tech Giants Could Be Showing Signs of Things To Come) \n\n\n14:58 - Melissa’s Previous Experience with Working w/ Unions\n\n\nCommunications Workers of America (CWA)\nCivic Technology (What Is Civic Technology?) \nChi Hack Night \n\n\n17:13 - Positive Skills Union Organizers Should Have\n\n18:32 - Thoughts on Leading with Petitions\n\n\nWe are Frank — a platform for worker voice \n2018 Google Walkouts\n\n\n26:58 - Writing Online; Dismantling Publications and the Fracturing of the Media World\n\n\nThe Rise Of Substack—And What’s Behind It \nMelissa McEwen: The best JavaScript date libraries in 2021\n\n\n29:41 - Evaluating Human Performance\n\n\nPSA: DevRel isn’t fake !!\nHow to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for Your Team- Even If You Don't Have a Recruiting Department\nPeople Skills\n\n\n43:21 - Getting Started with Organizing a Union\n\n\nUse Signal, Not Slack\nBe Harder to Fire\n\n\nReflections:\n\nCasey: Hearing success stories re: unionizing.\n\nJacob: How people skills can be a function of your individual team.\n\nMelissa: Studying more about unions in other countries.\n\nRein: Looking more into co-ops and collectivisations. \n\nAn injury to one is an injury to all.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nJACOB: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 229. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with my co-panelist, Casey Watts. \n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. I'm here today with Melissa McEwen. \n\nMelissa is a web developer, working in content now. She often writes about the JavaScript ecosystem. She helped unionize Glitch, which recently signed their first Collective Bargaining Agreement in late February.\n\nWelcome, Melissa. So glad to have you.\n\nMELISSA: Hi, everyone.\n\nCASEY: We like to start each show by asking you a certain question. Melissa, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?\n\nMELISSA: My superpower is being extremely online and I acquired it by being given computers way too young and having nothing to do, but play with computers.\n\nCASEY: I like that phrase “extremely online.” What does that look like today for you?\n\nMELISSA: It means, I know way too much about what's going on in Twitter and the internet in general and sometimes, I'll make references that you only know if you're extremely online and it's kind of embarrassing. I don't even know what it's like to not be extremely online, but I'm trying to stop being extremely online because it's overwhelming trying not to check Twitter every 5 seconds.\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah. I did that a lot, too. I don't know if I would describe myself as extremely online, but I might have seen some of the same memes as you and I think that would [chuckles] give me a little bit of that.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I mean, memes, what's the latest drama on Twitter today, that kind of stuff.\n\nJACOB: Is there a way to turn that superpower and help people around you or, how do you leverage that? \n\nMELISSA: Yeah, the only thing that's good about it, I would say is that you know a lot. I try to write about things and provide my knowledge to other people. I mean, you know a lot, but on a surface level, that's the problem so, you have to always be aware of that. \n\nI'm not an expert on unions and for the Glitch union, I was one of the original organizing committee folks, but I was laid off last year in March and there were 18 people, I think laid off. So the union has been going on without me and that's just great. Me and some other externally online people, when we started the union, we leveraged our externally onliness because we were connected to a lot of people who helped us like the CWA, which is the Communications Workers of America. We found them online, for example and they were critical in getting the union actually started because we'd been talking about it, but they were the people that pushed us and they're one of the bigger unions. They've been around for a long time. They have an organized telecommunications workers, primarily and now they're doing some tech stuff. So very interesting.\n\nJACOB: Well, as someone who is moderately online at best, I have been reading a little bit about recent union news with Glitch, but I would love to hear your story about how it started and how it brought us to today.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, I mean there's only so much I can say, but the stuff that really was – building a union is about connecting with your coworkers and a lot of people have said, “How are we going to build a union to the remote workplace?” Well, I was remote and half the company was remote. \n\nThat's one good thing about being extremely online is you’re probably used to talking to people online. I connected to people in my workplace and people on my team. At first, it was mainly people on my own team and then what CWA teaches you to do is to build connections in your workplace. It's almost like you map it out and you talk to other people in your workplace and you try to leverage those connections. I wasn't connected to everybody in the workplace, but I was connected to some other people who were connected to people I wasn't connected to.\n\nSo it was challenging in that this was not an office where I could go see these people every day. I had to kind of – you can't just sneakily invite someone to a call unionizing. You have to actually build social capital and build relationships and then turn those into those connections you need to build a union. \n\nA lot of us had been following union stuff in tech. I was a member of Tech Workers Co, I think others were and we thought since Glitch is a very diverse workplace, we want to make sure that workers have a seat at the table and can actually help each other and to help the company do right by the workers. \n\nWe had some bumps along the road. It is hard to organize people remotely and a lot of people have misconceptions about unions. They think unions are only for certain workers like people working in a mine, or they have bad impressions of unions. Like, I don't know. I grew up and my parents were like, they told me that unions were bad. We watched On the Waterfront and they were like, “Oh, look, unions, they’re so corrupt.”\n\nBut a union is just like an organization. It's a big organization and they have a history and they have a context and a union is just like anything. Like a company. It can be bad; it can be good. It's based on the people and once you join a union, you can help guide that union by being part of it. \n\nJACOB: I would think an extremely online person would be very good at that.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, it did help to be constantly on Slack and on Twitter.\n\nJACOB: And good at really just making those connections. That would not come naturally to make all those personal connections, what you just said.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, but also, it was. I do think people who had those real life – who were at the office did have an advantage in forming those connections because not everybody at Glitch was extremely online, for example. Also, meeting each other in real life, occasionally like, we'd go to the conferences and stuff, that really helped. It's complicated about how much organizing you can do in the workplace and at what times. You don't want to ever do it on times are supposed to be working, for example, so.\n\nCASEY: What were some of the things that made this unionization effort successful and possible and what were some of the things that got in the way? I think we've covered some already.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I think having a pretty social workplace, that was social online, but that doesn't include everybody. There’s some people who were more online than others, for example and the fact that we relied so much on online organizing, it was harder to reach those people. \n\nSo it was very crucial that we have people in the New York City office who were able to do some on the ground in-person organizing and getting those people on board was like, once we got those people on board, that was a very important thing that we did. Because originally, it was all remote people and then we added in the New York City office people. \n\nYeah, the bumps along the road are just misconceptions about unions, what they mean. People can union bust themselves just by having these misconceptions like, “Oh, union is a third-party. It'll affect my relationship with my manager. I can't be friends with my manager anymore.” It's not true at all. \n\nSo some of the organizing committee had been in unions before. Like, there was one woman, who was a social worker, who had been a social worker union and I had been in a Civil Workers Union before. So I knew that I was friends with my managers in these unions and I mean, not that being friends with the manager is the priority, but the idea that if you're friends with a manager, you can't do a union. That's just not true. But some people thought that.\n\nCASEY: The biggest misconception I can think of is why do you well-compensated professionals need a union and I'm sure you've heard this all the time. \n\nMELISSA: Oh yeah, that’s a big one. \n\nCASEY: Yeah. Fill us in for that. Like what do you say to that?\n\nMELISSA: I think so. Online, someone was like, “Oh, it's cultural appropriation of blue-collar workers.” I do not agree with that. I think all workers benefit from a union and it is just an organization that allows workers to negotiate with their bosses and on a fair playing field. It's not a culture. You don't have to be in the movie, The Irishman, or On the Waterfront, or even know people like that. It's just a way of organizing a workplace and having a seat at the table, so.\n\nJACOB: You mentioned earlier that I think, or maybe you implied that this union joins multiple disciplines, too. Is that true? \n\nMELISSA: Yeah, like we had engineers and then we also had a media department. That's where things would be hard because a lot of workplaces are quite siloed and I've always been against that. Like, I hate the term non-technical for example, like video production people, those are the most technical people I know they're literally working with like technical equipment every day and they know so much about it. Those people are tactical. \n\nAnd then another big obstacle is who is eligible for a union? Who can join? It's not clear because tech has roles that aren't very traditional, like product manager. Is that a manager, or is that an individual contributor and often, that’s hashed out on the negotiating table. \n\nIt's based on all these laws and I've read some of the laws, I'm not an expert, but it's good to read a little bit of the labor law just to understand. But even if you know it, it's interpreted differently by different courts and stuff. There's a National Labor Review Board that reviews labor disputes and stuff and that was Trump's appointed board. So we wanted to make sure we got a voluntary recognition because we didn't want anything to do with that board at that time because they were very hostile towards workers.\n\nJACOB: The reason I was curious about joining together all kinds of different people from different roles, I was just curious if that diverse workforce came with a diversity of priorities and goals for a union and if those presented any challenges.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. There's a big class difference between engineers and people outside of engineering. Engineers are overwhelmingly paid higher than people outside of engineering, for example and I totally understand the resentment towards engineers. We need to acknowledge that if you're organizing multiple people and outside of engineering. I mean, the fact that engineering is so well-compensated. I don't understand why, for example, a video producer isn't compensated the same as an engineer. It's just an accident of history, how culturally valued, supply and demand, all these things mixed up together. \n\nSo you have to realize that and when it comes down to money, paying dues. For an engineer, it might be like, “Oh, you're taking 1%, or 2% for the union,” and that's like, “Oh, that’d take you away from being able to go on vacation.” Whereas, for someone who is making a lot less, that's taking away from their ability to pay rent. \n\nSo that is really, really hard and I don't have a good solution for that. I wish unions would offer things like maybe peg it to your income, maybe not, maybe at a lower percentage, but it tends to not be that high of a percentage; it's 1 to 3%. But acknowledging that that can be the difference between someone being able to afford or not. Especially the salary ranges were quite extreme in our case so, that was really hard.\n\nCASEY: I'm listening to this conversation based on my background as a product manager who happened to have managed engineers, designers, and product managers, I don't know how that structure came into play. But even that tier, I wanted to be part of a union, but I think it's US law maybe that gets in the way that says managers at any level can't be unionizing in any form, not even like—let's use a synonym for a union—collective people who tell each other, “Yes, you deserve more money,” or something like that. It's not we're not incentivized to work together in any way and we pretend that the HR department of the company does that for us, which they do the opposite often. \n\nWhat do you think about that middle management kind of thing and how it plays into product management? Your thought process?\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That really sucks because then it becomes like some people feel left out who wanted to be part of the union and at that point, they feel like, “Oh, am I part of –?” Like, they're obviously not C-suite so that's really hard. \n\nOther countries have other types of unions like sectoral bargaining that get around that. I don't know that much about that, but we weren't sure if a product manager fit under the definition of qualify, or not. It just depends on if you make decisions on employment, if you tell people what to do, there's a lot of criteria. We did find that product managers were not going to be part of the union. So what does the product manager do? Well, they can't organize themselves, but they're just not legally protected under this bargaining thing under a labor law. So that really sucks and I don't know what the solution is. I guess, getting involved in bigger organizations that work for unionization. \n\nThe Google union is very interesting and that is a different form of union. It's called a minority union and I don't know that much about those, but I know that people who are managers can join that one, but it has fewer legal protections. So I assume when CWA decided to organize Google under a minority union, it was because they felt they were not capable of doing the traditional union because there are so many obstacles to doing so in Google—Google’s size and multiple locations. It's very difficult.\n\nYou can organize however you want, it's just what is legally protected and that kind of goes in, in that article. I talk about petitions, for example. Petitions are an example of organizing. That's not unionization, it's not protected by US labor law, but it is a form of organizing. The Google walkout, that's a form of organizing. That's not unionization. You just have fewer legal protections and you don't have the structure that you get from a union when you do those things.\n\nCASEY: Well, that's awesome. I'm not up-to-date on this. I'm going to be Googling minority union and sectoral bargaining after this call.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I didn't even know what a minority union until that came out. I was like, “Wow, I guess, someone should write a book.” There probably is a book. I'm going to find that book.\n\nJACOB: Melissa, what brought you to doing this in the first place? Did you have experience with organizing before, or was it something new to you?\n\nMELISSA: I didn't have any experience organizing, I suppose, but I was in a union before. I worked at University of Illinois in Chicago and their IT departments are in a union, an older established union. As soon as you join as an employee there, you're a part of that union. \n\nActually unions, some of them aren't that great. Our union was kind of mediocre, to be honest. They barely involved people, for example, in the very top down. That's one thing when you're organizing, you have to choose which union you're going to organize under, or even to start your own union. We thought about starting our own union. I don't feel that qualified to hire union lawyers. You need to advantage money because CWA provided that all the lawyers and stuff like that and all the structure.\n\nCWA has gotten a lot of flack on Twitter recently with the Google union stuff. People have dug up the fact that they've represented security guards in the past, but it's a big organization; it's like working with the government. You can't expect perfection, we've got to get involved. If you want to change things, you've got to be involved yourself. \n\nI'm very skeptical of the idea that we should just throw that away and start our own thing as tech workers. Because I think people of different ages and classes and stuff have so much to teach us and that's what you get when you join a big union like CWA and you can't demand they fit your extremely online standards. So if you want them to follow the standard, you've got to join and get involved.\n\nJACOB: So definitely a politics of compromise from the get-go.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I've been involved with the civic technology a little bit. So I was a little bit familiar with that. I've worked in government contracting and I've gone to Chai Hack Night, which is a Chicago meetup, for quite a while. It's a Chicago meetup focused on civil technology and government. I was familiar with some of that, but if you're a startup person, maybe that's harder. You expect unions are going to cater to you, treat you like a freaking princess or whatever, but no, they're not. They are a saboteurization. They've got members, they have a history, and you've got to take that for what it is.\n\nCASEY: All right, Melissa, you brought to the table to the union organizing effort your superpower of being extremely online. What other skills did some of the union organizers have that really helped?\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. Actually being consistent and organized, that's really important. Organizing meetings. I'm not into that kind of thing and thankfully, there were other people who did that and I thank them quite a lot. Taking notes, following up, once you make me angry, I'm very effective at arguing with people. So that's a good thing about extremely online, but it's bad about being extremely online, but it did come in handy a few times when unionizing. But otherwise, doing in-person on the ground work, I couldn't do because I was remote and organizing the meetings, taking notes, following up with CWA, coordinating between different people, that stuff. The other people helped with that. The other members of the organizing committee and then after the union was recognized, we had an election and some people did that election where you elect the reps and other people did that and I was really happy because I was tired at that point. [chuckles]\n\nCASEY: So I'm going into a little bit of a different topic. Melissa, I think you mentioned something about companies and nonprofits who want to lead with petitions and you have some thoughts on that I'm curious to hear.\n\nMELISSA: I am super anti petitions. I think these organizations push them and I think they're just antithetical to unionization. A Coworker, for example, they really push you to do these petitions and a, you're alerting your boss that you're organizing, you're doing it under a way that's not legally protected. Why don't you just unionize? I understand that some people can't and if you genuinely can't, that's great, but I wouldn't trust Coworker to tell you if it's okay, or not.\n\nI have noticed that some of the conflict on Twitter regarding the Google union, some people involved with that are also involved in Coworker. So I'm really against that and another company that's spread it out. It's a startup, they're called Get Frank but they're also doing petitions. They're very antithetical to unionization and people don't want to say that because the people who were involved with that are nice people and some of them are even involved with Tech Workers Co and stuff and they're nice online, or they're well-respected, but at some point, you’ve got to say, “This is just anti-union.”\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, taking a collective bargaining opportunity that can stretch across multiple issues and organize the workforce to push for all of them and turning into a petition about a specific thing that has marginal support. I don't see how that helps. I mean, I don't think that those startups are disrupting business organization. I think they're disrupting union organization.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I think more people should call them out and the fact that a lot of people who the media goes to for comments about tech organizing are like – so, Liz Fong-Jones, I really respect her. She's on Twitter and she's a member of the board on Coworker and I find that not good.\n\nREIN: I mean, I guess the argument is that any place where you can voice concerns and generate support within the workers, the employees is better than none, but that's not how the world works. We can have unions, too, or instead actually putting effort into that means that you're not spending that time putting effort into organizing.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. So when we were first thinking about unionizing, I was on Tech Workers Co and they connected me to people at Coworker and they were really pushing out to do a petition. I'm really lucky that my coworker, Steph, could have connected with CWA because she was like, “No, let's talk to CWA.” CWA took it from there and they actually got us the motivation and the resources we needed to unite us. Whereas, Coworker was like, “Oh, we love unions, but why don't you do this petition first, it's building organization?” and CWA is like, “No.” \n\nUnfortunately, some people are taking the CWA being against that as an insult on them personally, which is really weird, that it's an insult for people who did past organization efforts that weren’t unionizing. I don't see why that is relevant. I understand sometimes you can't unionize and I respect other organization efforts, but you're taking an example of a company that can unionize and you're pushing them to do a petition. You're wasting their time. You're endangering their jobs. It's just bad.\n\nREIN: Well, I think if there was evidence that it starting with petitions led towards more formal union organizing, I would be more in favor of it, but I don't know of any.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. People use the Google walkout, for example and I guess, the Google unions and the controversy on Twitter was about how the union wasn't involving the past organizers who did all this work for the Google walkout. I recognize Google walkout was an amazing thing and the people who organized that were really great, but that doesn't mean that you have to use their expertise to unionize. \n\nA union should be for the current employees. When I'm talking about our union at Glitch, I'm not speaking for the union. I was laid off. I'm not a member anymore. That's very sad. It's very unfair, but I'm not a member and the employees who are working there have insight into the company that I don't. So I don't expect them to recognize me, or to ask me for advice, or anything. I don't even talk to them that much anymore because that's their sphere.\n\nCASEY: I'm not an expert on Coworker, but this reminds me of another metaphor a little bit. Let me know if this is close, or not, or similarities and differences. \n\nSo you know how when you look on the bottom of a solo cup, you see a triangle, or a cycle symbol with a number? Some of those aren't really recyclable and the lobbyists who made that happen, and you’re required to put them on, knew that ahead of time. So they are doing this small change, “Look, you can do the thing,” and then that stops people from pushing back against the production of it. It's helping, but not really and I'm hearing your view of Coworker seems to be helping, but not really.\n\nMELISSA: I mean, the Frank one is even worse. They're a for-profit startup. I'm like, “If anyone is giving them positive coverage, they are not asking the right questions here.” Actually, when I saw them written about, I attempted to join just to see what they were about and they rejected me because they were like, “Oh, you're already in a union. You don't need us.” So very interesting. They occasionally email me asking for my feedback, but I'm like, “I don't think you're worth my time.”\n\nREIN: If someone wanted to make a platform for unionizing, but I don't think you're going to get much traction in Silicon Valley on that one.\n\nMELISSA: There is one person who's doing that. It's called Unit, but I don't know that much about it. I'm just very skeptical of the idea that tech can disrupt unions and it's the easy way out to say, “Oh, the old unions, they're not radical enough. They don't cater to tech workers.” To throw that all away for those reasons is bad in my opinion, because they're not perfect, existing unions, but you're unionizing with a diverse workforce that has a history and has power and I don't know. \n\nI think it's also classist, too, like, “Oh, we don't want to organize with these people that aren't tech workers. We don't want to organize with these blue-collar workers.” They're not thinking that maybe explicitly, but that's what they're saying in a way. They don't want to say that, but that's what they're saying.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I personally have a problem with trade unions that is that they fracture the workforce and they prevent people with different trades from organizing together and historically, that's been on purpose. Like there's a reason the AFL is still around, but the Knights of Labor aren't.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I mean, unions are organizations, they’re just like companies and stuff. There's some that even have dark histories of racism and stuff like that. Although, trade unions are a little different than like CWA. This is where I wish I was more up to the terminology, but it's very complicated.\n\nREIN: I would just like to unionize whole companies and not worry about what job titles people have because I think that's the systems thinking way to do it.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and we unionized everyone in our company that qualified under the labor, the national labor law, and not just engineers so, that was good. Luckily, the people were into engineers being craftsmen, or whatever are usually typically anti-union, but otherwise, you'd think that they'd be like, “Oh, we need an engineer's trade union because we're like electricians, or something.” But I think that would not be a good direction.\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense that there are unions for people who work at a company, separate from groups of people working on a technology like, Ruby user groups and all the other meetup groups for every technology everywhere and the conferences. It's like the skills are separate from the union, from the company and it's funny, I guess maybe historical that a lot of them are conflated together. All the engineers in the company are doing both a little bit. I like that we're cleanly splitting it now sometimes. That sounds great. \n\nMelissa, I noticed that you have a Substack newsletter, which is a popular thing lately. Not that you're working on a lot lately. I know we talked about that, but there's a trend for individual people to be writing more and more online lately and it seems like you're aware of that and in that sphere. What's your experience lately writing online, trying to get an audience and all that? The process.\n\nMELISSA: I say no to Substack because I'm like, “This is just more work and I don't need any more work.” I started a Substack because I was like, “Oh, a lot of people have Substacks.” But then I was like, “Oh, this requires me to do, this is another job.” You have to have a consistent thing and at least, we are starting to – Substack encourages paying creators. That's good. \n\nBut at some point, it's like, “Oh, I'm paying like ten different creators. I wish there was this thing where I could just pay them all at the same time and they could have jobs and benefits. Oh, that's called a publication. Too bad, we've systematically disabled these by predatory capitalists, hedge funds and stuff, buying them and disposing of them.” Like what's happened to the Chicago Tribune. I had friends who worked there and that thing it's basically just been totally dismantled by predatory companies. So I think Substack is going to be here and other similar models are going to be here for the foreseeable future. But I don't think they are – I think it's sad.\n\nCASEY: Have you worked with any of the traditional publications to try to get things published? I know you do JavaScript content work.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. So I originally was a food writer and I've worked for Chicagoist. I left Chicagoist because I didn't have time due to my tech job, but they unionized and they were shut down because they unionized and that's really sad. A lot of my friends lost their jobs. \n\nSo I have a little bit of experience in the media world and I've watched the media world become so fractured and precarious and I think the tech industry has been unfortunately, a negative actor in that. But now, I primarily write about JavaScript and I do so professionally. It'd be nice to write about food instead, but I like JavaScript. I like coding a lot so that's cool. There's no jobs in food writing, though.\n\nCASEY: Tell us about something you wrote recently.\n\nMELISSA: I wrote about JavaScript date libraries and like the different ones that are out there and when you should use the library and when you shouldn't use the library and that's for the blog I work for, which is called Skypack blog and I do DevRel all for them in there, a CDN for JavaScript modules. \n\nOh, here's the thing we can talk about: how people attack DevRel as being non-technical and I hate that. \n\nJACOB: Yeah, please. \n\nMELISSA: There was a tweet this week, or maybe it was on Friday, it was like, “Offend a developer relations person in one tweet,” and I'm like – so it was a variation on the original one, which was, “Offend a software engineer, offend a DBA in one tweet,” and those were often there a software engineers making fun of software engineers or DVA's people making jokes about data structures, or a bad data. The DevRel one was like, “Oh, your job is fake.” That's what all the jokes were and most of them were not from DevRel people and I'm like, “I hate this.”\n\nI used to be a frontend developer and people used to joke like that about frontend developers, like, “Oh, you just play with CSS all day and you just push little boxes around the page and give them different colors.” \n\nWe need to recognize that there’s sexism involved in this and also, racism because frontend development and DevRel tend to be more diverse subsections of tech. I'm just tired of men saying a job is fake and that I'm not technical. I left frontend dev because of that, partially. I shouldn’t have done that because the end of the day, there's no way to convince these people that you're a real engineer. They're just not going to be convinced because they're sexist and they're jerks and they should be deleted.\n\nREIN: Yeah. It was kind of funny when it was software engineers laughing at themselves, but it turned into punching down pretty quickly and then it just got me in and I did not like it. I would say to those people that they should try a day in the life of a DevRel and see if you think you're good at it.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. It's thinking that, okay, if you have these skills, you don't have the technical skills and also, that your other skills aren't valuable at all. This is a constant struggle, working with engineers, especially working in cross-departmental is engineers not recognizing other skills.\n\nI was talking about video editing before. I'm like, “That is the worst thing I can totally think of is calling a video editor non-technical; they're literally the most technical people I could think of.” They're walking with software technology and also, a lot of engineers who are like, “Oh, anyone can write things,” and I'm like, “I've edited y’all’s writing. I know you can't write.” [chuckles] Even me, I feel like sometimes the more engineering I do, the worst I become as a writer. That's scary, but I try to balance it. I try to be a mediocre engineer and a mediocre writer.\n\nREIN: I want people to stop doing that because it’s just a shitty thing to do, but I will also say that as you get more experienced as a software engineer – so I'm a principal now, which means I'm a huge deal, but as you get more experienced, you need to get good at a lot of the stuff that DevRels are good at. You need to be able to convince people that your ideas are good. You need to be able to communicate both verbally and written in writing. You need to give a shit about product and marketing and customer support and people who aren't engineered. You have to start doing all that stuff if you want to grow as an engineer. So to some extent, I think these people are limiting themselves more than are limiting DevRel. They should still stop being shitty people, though.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. The whole principal engineer thing is funny because I was just thinking about how every company has a different definition for principal, senior, junior. That's one of the things that a union can help with and otherwise, it can be very arbitrary and you can feel like they're used to discriminating against people. \n\nSo if the union can negotiate what a ladder is and what it means, that's way better than having just a random manager do it. That's my rant with all of tech. We're always constantly reinventing the same thing over and over again. Ladders were like, “Oh, we’ve got to build this from scratch for ourselves. Even though we have no training on building ladders, we're just going to invent this because we know everything because we're engineers.” \n\nSame with interviewing process. I'm like, “Oh, there's decades of research on interview process. but you want to invent your own new interviewing process.” I'm like, “At some point, you're just like experimenting on people and that's unethical.” I'm like, “Take your weird games elsewhere. If you want to design weird games, play Dungeons & Dragons, or something.”\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, if you want to take human performance seriously, you can do that. People have been doing that for decades. You just need to go take a course and read some books and started taking it seriously. It's not hard. I mean, it's hard to evaluate human performance because human performance is very complex, but it's impossible if you don't know what you're doing.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I tried to get – any interview process I'm involved with designing. I'm like, “First of all, why am I involved with designing this? I'm not qualified. Second of all, at least I did read some research and I do know that the research shows that you want to do a structured interview.” If I can just get people to agree to that one thing, it's so much better than if they're just asking random questions. \n\nSo structured interview means you agree on a structure beforehand for the interview, you agree on questions and what you're going to talk to the person about, or what exercise you're going to do, if you insist on doing programming exercise. You ask the same ones to every candidate. There's other things you could do to make it more fair, but if you just have that one baseline. Otherwise, it's so arbitrary.\n\nREIN: There's a book called Hiring A-Players, or something like that and I like some of the advice that it has, but I think the idea that you can distinguish between “A and B players” in an interview is pretty marginal. But I do like the parts about trying to make things more evidence-based when you're trying to assess capability. I think that a lot of the hiring practices we have today mostly are about providing motivated reasoning to hire people who look like you and that's about 90% of what they do.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and there's also this thing, I will die in this hill, but I have people who insist if we don't do a specific code exercise, or do some kind of screener that we're going to hire someone who can't code, who literally can't code and some people will have insisted that they've worked with such people. I'm really skeptical that like can't code. What does that mean? I don't know. Does it mean they just didn't integrate with the team correctly? No one tried to help them? I'm not sure. I'm just really skeptical of that. It just sounds like more hoops to jump through, but I have not convinced anybody of that besides myself. [chuckles] At least in workplaces.\n\nREIN: I think in my career, I've maybe worked with one person who I genuinely thought couldn't code, but that's when I was pretty new. What I think now is that they were really not put in an environment where they could be successful. They were dropped in immediately into a high-pressure scenario, with little experience, with a team that was small, under-resourced, over pressurized, and didn't have time to support them. So what I thought then was, “Wow, this guy sure can't code. He sucks.” What I think now is, “Wow, we sure screwed up putting him in that position.”\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I've taught people to code who are 12. I'm really skeptical that someone was hired that managed, I don't know, I just sound like they're not managed well, or not onboarded well, but that'd be a cool, like, I don't know. Maybe I'm becoming too interested in HR, I will become an HR researcher and study the phenomenon of people saying that their coworkers can't code and what does that mean? \n\nREIN: Yeah.\n\nMELISSA: I mean actually find those people, ask them, and then find the people who supposedly can’t code and find out they actually can. They were in a very difficult environment, for example, or I don't know. I've been in environments where getting the dev environment started took you five days. No wonder they had trouble; you thought they couldn't code because you did set them up to being able to code. They had to install 40 different things and do a proxy, or whatever. So yeah.\n\nJACOB: I’m someone who’s very – well, there's that phenomenon stereotype threat you perceive that other people are making preconceived judgements about you. Like, “Oh, I'm the only person of color in my team and I can tell that I'm not expected to do well.” It affects your performance and as a white male, that actually does make some sense to me. If I can feel that I'm going to be judged for the output that I put out, instantly whether it's I didn't follow the great style, or it looks like my work is going to be picked apart immediately. That's just going to be debilitating and I'm just going to be constantly focused about looking good rather than trying to solve the problem. That is not what – Rein’s story does not surprise me at all. \n\nMELISSA: Yeah. If I actually hired someone who couldn't code, that would be actually exciting to me, it would be like My Fair Lady, or something because I could definitely teach them how to code and I'd be really impressed because I was like, “Oh, they were able to talk about all these projects and stuff and not actually be able to code?” I don't believe this person exists, by the way.\n\nREIN: The other thing I really wish people would understand is that human performance is ecological. The context matters. If you take one person and drop them into five different hypothetical companies, you'd get five different outcomes. They'd perform in different ways. You wouldn't get the same performance for them in those different companies because it's not just about the person.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and it's also about the demands of the job. I worked with one guy and people told me he couldn't code and what they actually meant was that they just didn't think he was technical, or something, but he was coding every day. He was doing Dribble templates, which is not considered the highest level of work by some snobby engineers. But that guy could definitely code and he did his job and it was very unfair to say he couldn't code.\n\nCASEY: I have a story I can share about some evidence-based interviewing I did back at the IT department. We evaluated hundreds of student employees to fix laptops every year—we hired a whole bunch—and we evaluated them based on the people skills and their technical skills on a scale we put that into data for all the points that evidence and structured questions and all that. Some people had a 5 on people's scales out of 5 and 1 on technical skills, or vice versa, or something close to that. \n\nAnd then we look back a year, or 2, or 3 later, after they had time to learn and grow in the position, we loved all the people with the 5 on people's skills. They were the best employees. They learned the most over time. We're proud of them. They were great to work with. They taught other people a lot, too. \n\nBut the ones with the technical 5s weren’t people ones. A lot of them resigned, or didn't like the job, or people avoided working with them, they were solo employees. Maybe they got some work done, but that lesson that you can learn the technical part, but you can't necessarily learn the people part. Some of it's learnable if you're motivated, but the disposition is what really drove success in that role. I think that applies everywhere. It's not surprising.\n\nMELISSA: I wish there were more approaches teaching people skills because, I don't know, it feels like there's a lot of trainings for engineering skills, but not for people's skills. I've definitely like, I was raised by parents who were weird and homeschooled me. So I definitely use a lot of stuff like books to learn people skills and stuff like that. I don't know. It's super basic, but How to Win Friends and Influence People, that one. You could just read that. I mean, it gets you some of the way there. So I wish there were more resources like that.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I would say that you can learn people skills, but companies don't teach them. That's not what companies think is part of their responsibility. They think that they're hiring the person as they are and can teach them technical things. That's another problem, which is that companies aren't providing the opportunities to grow that people need.\n\nJACOB: There's probably different people's skills for different companies, that would be successful.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and it's the same thing. It's the saying that I've heard at workplace is like, “Oh, he doesn't know how to code.” I've also heard the same thing like, “He has no social skills.” It's like something you're born with and can't be changed and that's just your lot in life and I don't believe that. I was homeschooled and when I first went to school, you would have said, “I had poor social skills,” but now I have serviceable social skills.\n\nJACOB: I think Casey pointed out an important distinction between a disposition to be personable and learn and apply people skills versus the skills you have at a particular moment. I, as a neurodiverse person, I think that's a really important thing because I'm sure people have said behind my back many times in my life that I don't have people's skills without commenting on the disposition of my ability to do well and interface with people. I think they’re two different things.\n\nMELISSA: I think neurodiverse people—I'm also in that category—also sometimes are even better at certain people's skills because we've been told we have these issues and we really want to think about them. I've read a lot of books; I don't think most neurotypical people have read as many books as I have on human psychology. I wasn't a psychology major—I just want to know why are these normal people trying to get me to do these things? What does it mean? That's a level I’m asking? Yeah, but that's a skill and it's a learned skill that is valuable to me.\n\nREIN: Can we talk about unions again because I have a question? If you already talked about this before I got here, just let me know. But my question is: what would you say to someone who really has no idea how to get started with this, but thinks that there's an opportunity to organize their company is worried about retaliation and things like that and wants to get started?\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. Get in contact with, they could DM me and I could connect them to people at the current Glitch union, or two, you can approach a union directly. CWA is happy to help. The union that Kickstarter organizers worked under OPEIU, I think is also another option. It can be hard to pick a union because some only do local organizing, but there are some that are national like CWA. CWA has a lot of resources. I would just go with them at first. But you can always do your research and stuff. I'd just be careful with people who direct you to those petition sites, or whatever and that did happen to me. \n\nREIN: And don’t do your organizing on the company Slack.\n\nMELISSA: Oh yeah, for sure. Use Signal, don't do it on company time when you're supposed to be working, build social relationships with people at work. Although, it could be, I don’t know if – I was a member of a company where they specifically seem to discourage social relationships. I was a contractor. I wonder if that was a way that they were discouraging organization and unionizing. \n\nYou see that with Uber and stuff like that. Uber drivers, they're not given a company Slack, pr whatever, or even like, they don't have a way to chat with other drivers. They've had to do this on their own time on Facebook; they've used Facebook to organize. \n\nSo definitely don't use any company resources, or company time. You're not legally protected if you do that. If you do contact CWA and stuff, they'll tell you what's legal and illegal. It is for example, legal to organize during lunch, I believe, but you should definitely check that beforehand. And then you get into issues if you're remote, time zones, everyone has lunch at a different time. You have to be creative.\n\nREIN: Yeah. It turns out it's legal, except for all of these loopholes that make it not legal and companies are incentivized to make the case that what you did was illegal so that they can fire you. So just be extra careful.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I don't know. I've known of union organizers that they're going to find a way to fire some of them, but if you can stand up and up in your job, you're harder to fire. Make sure to attend all your meetings. Don't be late to work. I am not a fan of that and I think it's very unfair that you have to be expected to live by this perfect standard that non-organizing employees don't have to follow, but I'm willing to do it for the union.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, just be aware that once it becomes apparent that this is what you're doing, they're going to try to fire you—any company will—and so you need to be on your best behavior even more so than you were before.\n\nMELISSA: And it is scary organizing unions. I've often wondered would I have been laid off if there was a union, or not? I don't know. But the thing is you negotiate severance for me and I didn't have to do that individually. So it gave me a good cushion when I was laid off and I know people who are laid off who didn't have those things. A company can hurt you even if you don't unionize and at least, unions give you some protection and I'm very grateful to CWA negotiating my severance.\n\nREIN: So are we getting close to reflections?\n\nCASEY: I think it is time for reflections. I can go first.\n\nAs a product manager and engineering manager before, I've always been interested in being part of a union and it's awesome hearing a success story about how, what happened at a company, even though it was the formal type that I'm not eligible for as a manager. But now I'm very interested in looking up some of these alternative forms like sectoral marketing, minority union. I think there's a whole lot happening recently that could help middle managers like me and a lot of my roles have the benefits. \n\nOften, I hear, “No, you can't possibly ever be part of a union. Why would you even ask that question?” And it's just great to hear someone actually who has worked with a union and say, “No, that's possible. It's just a different form. Not covered by loss.” That's what I want to hear. That's what I wanted to believe. \n\nMELISSA: Yeah. It's so unfair. Unions are just what's the law now doesn't have to be the law tomorrow, for example and different countries have different forms of unions and stuff, so.\n\nJACOB: I'm thinking more about the thread we got on about personal skills, people skills and I'm thinking more about how those can be really just a function of the culture of your team and who's on it and what everyone's individual needs are and how their brains are wired and so many other factors. I'm just thinking about, “Well, what are the right skills that I need for my team rather than just an arbitrary, or a universal list of what those skills might be?”\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I'm thinking I need to like – I'm here talking about unions and there's so much I don't know about unions. I'd like to study unions in other countries, especially. I really want to learn about different forms of unionization and really delve into the history of unionization. I've done it a little. \n\nI was never taught that much about unionization in school and stuff like that, especially from homeschool because my parents were anti-union. But even when I went to public school, after being homeschooled, we really didn't talk that much. I know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, but I think for most people, we don't know that much about it and I definitely want to beef up my history and international knowledge on that.\n\nREIN: Yeah. I think also looking into collectivization work around collectives, things like that, there's a tech consultancy that does the websites for Verso and Haymarket and some other lefty publications and there are workers collective and there are actually a surprising number of them.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That's super interesting to me. I've done a little bit of co-ops and stuff. I've been members of co-ops. There is an interesting article, I forget where I saw it, but it was about how co-ops can be good, but they're not the answer to work, or organizing because often they replace work, or unionization. For example, they were talking about this coffee shop that they were trying to unionize and they all got fired and then they formed a co-op and that was seen as success, but it's not necessarily. \n\nFor example, I'm a member of a co-op, a food co-op, and the workers there were trying to unionize and the co-op was union busting them and that was like, wow, that is really special and as a member of the co-op, I was writing to the board. I was like, “How dare you, I'm going to quit.” [chuckles] We should recognize the union. They really fought that union and I was like, “This is supposed to be – co-op is supposed to be empowering to workers,” but just like unions, there are many different forms of co-ops. \n\nThere's a very interesting history, especially internationally and I don't even know the tip of the iceberg on that. But I'm very fascinated and having been in co-ops and been involved with co-ops. Another issue with co-ops is often the membership that can be almost like trade unions in that, there can require an onerous process to join one.\n\nREIN: I think the thing I'd like to leave our listeners with, you might've heard the saying, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” and you might know that that comes from the IWW, I believe. But you might not know that it comes from preamble to their constitution, which says in part, “Trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to feed one another in wage wars. Trade unions aid the employing class to mislead workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. \n\nThese sad conditions can only be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all of its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on.” So the IWW obviously believes very strongly, you have to organize whole companies and not just the techies maybe get their union because they're special. \n\nI mean, can you imagine if Uber, if the tech workers and the drivers unionized together? They share the same interests, folks they could do that.\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That's an interesting question. Like, could they? That's another thing that contracting, or permalansing, I don't know, maybe there'll be a major court challenge, especially with the Biden administration where the National Labor Board might be more sympathetic. Can contractors unionize with regular workers? Contracting is a way to bust unions and to keep people in a position of precarity, but what if they ruled that you can unionize. Once you realize that’s arbitrary, you're like, “Oh, if you've got good enough lawyers, if you have politicians that can get involved, maybe unionization 10 years from now will look really different because maybe they –”\n\nREIN: Yeah, the main difference is that the drivers don't have multi-million dollar lobbying organization that they're backed by. That's the main difference and the reason they're not getting the respect they deserve.Special Guest: Melissa McEwen.","content_html":"02:21 - Melissa’s Superpower: Being Extremely Online
\n\n03:06 - Unionizing Glitch
\n\n14:58 - Melissa’s Previous Experience with Working w/ Unions
\n\n17:13 - Positive Skills Union Organizers Should Have
\n\n18:32 - Thoughts on Leading with Petitions
\n\n\n\n26:58 - Writing Online; Dismantling Publications and the Fracturing of the Media World
\n\n29:41 - Evaluating Human Performance
\n\n43:21 - Getting Started with Organizing a Union
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCasey: Hearing success stories re: unionizing.
\n\nJacob: How people skills can be a function of your individual team.
\n\nMelissa: Studying more about unions in other countries.
\n\nRein: Looking more into co-ops and collectivisations.
\n\nAn injury to one is an injury to all.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nJACOB: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 229. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with my co-panelist, Casey Watts.
\n\nCASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. I'm here today with Melissa McEwen.
\n\nMelissa is a web developer, working in content now. She often writes about the JavaScript ecosystem. She helped unionize Glitch, which recently signed their first Collective Bargaining Agreement in late February.
\n\nWelcome, Melissa. So glad to have you.
\n\nMELISSA: Hi, everyone.
\n\nCASEY: We like to start each show by asking you a certain question. Melissa, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nMELISSA: My superpower is being extremely online and I acquired it by being given computers way too young and having nothing to do, but play with computers.
\n\nCASEY: I like that phrase “extremely online.” What does that look like today for you?
\n\nMELISSA: It means, I know way too much about what's going on in Twitter and the internet in general and sometimes, I'll make references that you only know if you're extremely online and it's kind of embarrassing. I don't even know what it's like to not be extremely online, but I'm trying to stop being extremely online because it's overwhelming trying not to check Twitter every 5 seconds.
\n\nCASEY: Oh, yeah. I did that a lot, too. I don't know if I would describe myself as extremely online, but I might have seen some of the same memes as you and I think that would [chuckles] give me a little bit of that.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I mean, memes, what's the latest drama on Twitter today, that kind of stuff.
\n\nJACOB: Is there a way to turn that superpower and help people around you or, how do you leverage that?
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, the only thing that's good about it, I would say is that you know a lot. I try to write about things and provide my knowledge to other people. I mean, you know a lot, but on a surface level, that's the problem so, you have to always be aware of that.
\n\nI'm not an expert on unions and for the Glitch union, I was one of the original organizing committee folks, but I was laid off last year in March and there were 18 people, I think laid off. So the union has been going on without me and that's just great. Me and some other externally online people, when we started the union, we leveraged our externally onliness because we were connected to a lot of people who helped us like the CWA, which is the Communications Workers of America. We found them online, for example and they were critical in getting the union actually started because we'd been talking about it, but they were the people that pushed us and they're one of the bigger unions. They've been around for a long time. They have an organized telecommunications workers, primarily and now they're doing some tech stuff. So very interesting.
\n\nJACOB: Well, as someone who is moderately online at best, I have been reading a little bit about recent union news with Glitch, but I would love to hear your story about how it started and how it brought us to today.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, I mean there's only so much I can say, but the stuff that really was – building a union is about connecting with your coworkers and a lot of people have said, “How are we going to build a union to the remote workplace?” Well, I was remote and half the company was remote.
\n\nThat's one good thing about being extremely online is you’re probably used to talking to people online. I connected to people in my workplace and people on my team. At first, it was mainly people on my own team and then what CWA teaches you to do is to build connections in your workplace. It's almost like you map it out and you talk to other people in your workplace and you try to leverage those connections. I wasn't connected to everybody in the workplace, but I was connected to some other people who were connected to people I wasn't connected to.
\n\nSo it was challenging in that this was not an office where I could go see these people every day. I had to kind of – you can't just sneakily invite someone to a call unionizing. You have to actually build social capital and build relationships and then turn those into those connections you need to build a union.
\n\nA lot of us had been following union stuff in tech. I was a member of Tech Workers Co, I think others were and we thought since Glitch is a very diverse workplace, we want to make sure that workers have a seat at the table and can actually help each other and to help the company do right by the workers.
\n\nWe had some bumps along the road. It is hard to organize people remotely and a lot of people have misconceptions about unions. They think unions are only for certain workers like people working in a mine, or they have bad impressions of unions. Like, I don't know. I grew up and my parents were like, they told me that unions were bad. We watched On the Waterfront and they were like, “Oh, look, unions, they’re so corrupt.”
\n\nBut a union is just like an organization. It's a big organization and they have a history and they have a context and a union is just like anything. Like a company. It can be bad; it can be good. It's based on the people and once you join a union, you can help guide that union by being part of it.
\n\nJACOB: I would think an extremely online person would be very good at that.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, it did help to be constantly on Slack and on Twitter.
\n\nJACOB: And good at really just making those connections. That would not come naturally to make all those personal connections, what you just said.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, but also, it was. I do think people who had those real life – who were at the office did have an advantage in forming those connections because not everybody at Glitch was extremely online, for example. Also, meeting each other in real life, occasionally like, we'd go to the conferences and stuff, that really helped. It's complicated about how much organizing you can do in the workplace and at what times. You don't want to ever do it on times are supposed to be working, for example, so.
\n\nCASEY: What were some of the things that made this unionization effort successful and possible and what were some of the things that got in the way? I think we've covered some already.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I think having a pretty social workplace, that was social online, but that doesn't include everybody. There’s some people who were more online than others, for example and the fact that we relied so much on online organizing, it was harder to reach those people.
\n\nSo it was very crucial that we have people in the New York City office who were able to do some on the ground in-person organizing and getting those people on board was like, once we got those people on board, that was a very important thing that we did. Because originally, it was all remote people and then we added in the New York City office people.
\n\nYeah, the bumps along the road are just misconceptions about unions, what they mean. People can union bust themselves just by having these misconceptions like, “Oh, union is a third-party. It'll affect my relationship with my manager. I can't be friends with my manager anymore.” It's not true at all.
\n\nSo some of the organizing committee had been in unions before. Like, there was one woman, who was a social worker, who had been a social worker union and I had been in a Civil Workers Union before. So I knew that I was friends with my managers in these unions and I mean, not that being friends with the manager is the priority, but the idea that if you're friends with a manager, you can't do a union. That's just not true. But some people thought that.
\n\nCASEY: The biggest misconception I can think of is why do you well-compensated professionals need a union and I'm sure you've heard this all the time.
\n\nMELISSA: Oh yeah, that’s a big one.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah. Fill us in for that. Like what do you say to that?
\n\nMELISSA: I think so. Online, someone was like, “Oh, it's cultural appropriation of blue-collar workers.” I do not agree with that. I think all workers benefit from a union and it is just an organization that allows workers to negotiate with their bosses and on a fair playing field. It's not a culture. You don't have to be in the movie, The Irishman, or On the Waterfront, or even know people like that. It's just a way of organizing a workplace and having a seat at the table, so.
\n\nJACOB: You mentioned earlier that I think, or maybe you implied that this union joins multiple disciplines, too. Is that true?
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, like we had engineers and then we also had a media department. That's where things would be hard because a lot of workplaces are quite siloed and I've always been against that. Like, I hate the term non-technical for example, like video production people, those are the most technical people I know they're literally working with like technical equipment every day and they know so much about it. Those people are tactical.
\n\nAnd then another big obstacle is who is eligible for a union? Who can join? It's not clear because tech has roles that aren't very traditional, like product manager. Is that a manager, or is that an individual contributor and often, that’s hashed out on the negotiating table.
\n\nIt's based on all these laws and I've read some of the laws, I'm not an expert, but it's good to read a little bit of the labor law just to understand. But even if you know it, it's interpreted differently by different courts and stuff. There's a National Labor Review Board that reviews labor disputes and stuff and that was Trump's appointed board. So we wanted to make sure we got a voluntary recognition because we didn't want anything to do with that board at that time because they were very hostile towards workers.
\n\nJACOB: The reason I was curious about joining together all kinds of different people from different roles, I was just curious if that diverse workforce came with a diversity of priorities and goals for a union and if those presented any challenges.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. There's a big class difference between engineers and people outside of engineering. Engineers are overwhelmingly paid higher than people outside of engineering, for example and I totally understand the resentment towards engineers. We need to acknowledge that if you're organizing multiple people and outside of engineering. I mean, the fact that engineering is so well-compensated. I don't understand why, for example, a video producer isn't compensated the same as an engineer. It's just an accident of history, how culturally valued, supply and demand, all these things mixed up together.
\n\nSo you have to realize that and when it comes down to money, paying dues. For an engineer, it might be like, “Oh, you're taking 1%, or 2% for the union,” and that's like, “Oh, that’d take you away from being able to go on vacation.” Whereas, for someone who is making a lot less, that's taking away from their ability to pay rent.
\n\nSo that is really, really hard and I don't have a good solution for that. I wish unions would offer things like maybe peg it to your income, maybe not, maybe at a lower percentage, but it tends to not be that high of a percentage; it's 1 to 3%. But acknowledging that that can be the difference between someone being able to afford or not. Especially the salary ranges were quite extreme in our case so, that was really hard.
\n\nCASEY: I'm listening to this conversation based on my background as a product manager who happened to have managed engineers, designers, and product managers, I don't know how that structure came into play. But even that tier, I wanted to be part of a union, but I think it's US law maybe that gets in the way that says managers at any level can't be unionizing in any form, not even like—let's use a synonym for a union—collective people who tell each other, “Yes, you deserve more money,” or something like that. It's not we're not incentivized to work together in any way and we pretend that the HR department of the company does that for us, which they do the opposite often.
\n\nWhat do you think about that middle management kind of thing and how it plays into product management? Your thought process?
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That really sucks because then it becomes like some people feel left out who wanted to be part of the union and at that point, they feel like, “Oh, am I part of –?” Like, they're obviously not C-suite so that's really hard.
\n\nOther countries have other types of unions like sectoral bargaining that get around that. I don't know that much about that, but we weren't sure if a product manager fit under the definition of qualify, or not. It just depends on if you make decisions on employment, if you tell people what to do, there's a lot of criteria. We did find that product managers were not going to be part of the union. So what does the product manager do? Well, they can't organize themselves, but they're just not legally protected under this bargaining thing under a labor law. So that really sucks and I don't know what the solution is. I guess, getting involved in bigger organizations that work for unionization.
\n\nThe Google union is very interesting and that is a different form of union. It's called a minority union and I don't know that much about those, but I know that people who are managers can join that one, but it has fewer legal protections. So I assume when CWA decided to organize Google under a minority union, it was because they felt they were not capable of doing the traditional union because there are so many obstacles to doing so in Google—Google’s size and multiple locations. It's very difficult.
\n\nYou can organize however you want, it's just what is legally protected and that kind of goes in, in that article. I talk about petitions, for example. Petitions are an example of organizing. That's not unionization, it's not protected by US labor law, but it is a form of organizing. The Google walkout, that's a form of organizing. That's not unionization. You just have fewer legal protections and you don't have the structure that you get from a union when you do those things.
\n\nCASEY: Well, that's awesome. I'm not up-to-date on this. I'm going to be Googling minority union and sectoral bargaining after this call.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I didn't even know what a minority union until that came out. I was like, “Wow, I guess, someone should write a book.” There probably is a book. I'm going to find that book.
\n\nJACOB: Melissa, what brought you to doing this in the first place? Did you have experience with organizing before, or was it something new to you?
\n\nMELISSA: I didn't have any experience organizing, I suppose, but I was in a union before. I worked at University of Illinois in Chicago and their IT departments are in a union, an older established union. As soon as you join as an employee there, you're a part of that union.
\n\nActually unions, some of them aren't that great. Our union was kind of mediocre, to be honest. They barely involved people, for example, in the very top down. That's one thing when you're organizing, you have to choose which union you're going to organize under, or even to start your own union. We thought about starting our own union. I don't feel that qualified to hire union lawyers. You need to advantage money because CWA provided that all the lawyers and stuff like that and all the structure.
\n\nCWA has gotten a lot of flack on Twitter recently with the Google union stuff. People have dug up the fact that they've represented security guards in the past, but it's a big organization; it's like working with the government. You can't expect perfection, we've got to get involved. If you want to change things, you've got to be involved yourself.
\n\nI'm very skeptical of the idea that we should just throw that away and start our own thing as tech workers. Because I think people of different ages and classes and stuff have so much to teach us and that's what you get when you join a big union like CWA and you can't demand they fit your extremely online standards. So if you want them to follow the standard, you've got to join and get involved.
\n\nJACOB: So definitely a politics of compromise from the get-go.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I've been involved with the civic technology a little bit. So I was a little bit familiar with that. I've worked in government contracting and I've gone to Chai Hack Night, which is a Chicago meetup, for quite a while. It's a Chicago meetup focused on civil technology and government. I was familiar with some of that, but if you're a startup person, maybe that's harder. You expect unions are going to cater to you, treat you like a freaking princess or whatever, but no, they're not. They are a saboteurization. They've got members, they have a history, and you've got to take that for what it is.
\n\nCASEY: All right, Melissa, you brought to the table to the union organizing effort your superpower of being extremely online. What other skills did some of the union organizers have that really helped?
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. Actually being consistent and organized, that's really important. Organizing meetings. I'm not into that kind of thing and thankfully, there were other people who did that and I thank them quite a lot. Taking notes, following up, once you make me angry, I'm very effective at arguing with people. So that's a good thing about extremely online, but it's bad about being extremely online, but it did come in handy a few times when unionizing. But otherwise, doing in-person on the ground work, I couldn't do because I was remote and organizing the meetings, taking notes, following up with CWA, coordinating between different people, that stuff. The other people helped with that. The other members of the organizing committee and then after the union was recognized, we had an election and some people did that election where you elect the reps and other people did that and I was really happy because I was tired at that point. [chuckles]
\n\nCASEY: So I'm going into a little bit of a different topic. Melissa, I think you mentioned something about companies and nonprofits who want to lead with petitions and you have some thoughts on that I'm curious to hear.
\n\nMELISSA: I am super anti petitions. I think these organizations push them and I think they're just antithetical to unionization. A Coworker, for example, they really push you to do these petitions and a, you're alerting your boss that you're organizing, you're doing it under a way that's not legally protected. Why don't you just unionize? I understand that some people can't and if you genuinely can't, that's great, but I wouldn't trust Coworker to tell you if it's okay, or not.
\n\nI have noticed that some of the conflict on Twitter regarding the Google union, some people involved with that are also involved in Coworker. So I'm really against that and another company that's spread it out. It's a startup, they're called Get Frank but they're also doing petitions. They're very antithetical to unionization and people don't want to say that because the people who were involved with that are nice people and some of them are even involved with Tech Workers Co and stuff and they're nice online, or they're well-respected, but at some point, you’ve got to say, “This is just anti-union.”
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, taking a collective bargaining opportunity that can stretch across multiple issues and organize the workforce to push for all of them and turning into a petition about a specific thing that has marginal support. I don't see how that helps. I mean, I don't think that those startups are disrupting business organization. I think they're disrupting union organization.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I think more people should call them out and the fact that a lot of people who the media goes to for comments about tech organizing are like – so, Liz Fong-Jones, I really respect her. She's on Twitter and she's a member of the board on Coworker and I find that not good.
\n\nREIN: I mean, I guess the argument is that any place where you can voice concerns and generate support within the workers, the employees is better than none, but that's not how the world works. We can have unions, too, or instead actually putting effort into that means that you're not spending that time putting effort into organizing.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. So when we were first thinking about unionizing, I was on Tech Workers Co and they connected me to people at Coworker and they were really pushing out to do a petition. I'm really lucky that my coworker, Steph, could have connected with CWA because she was like, “No, let's talk to CWA.” CWA took it from there and they actually got us the motivation and the resources we needed to unite us. Whereas, Coworker was like, “Oh, we love unions, but why don't you do this petition first, it's building organization?” and CWA is like, “No.”
\n\nUnfortunately, some people are taking the CWA being against that as an insult on them personally, which is really weird, that it's an insult for people who did past organization efforts that weren’t unionizing. I don't see why that is relevant. I understand sometimes you can't unionize and I respect other organization efforts, but you're taking an example of a company that can unionize and you're pushing them to do a petition. You're wasting their time. You're endangering their jobs. It's just bad.
\n\nREIN: Well, I think if there was evidence that it starting with petitions led towards more formal union organizing, I would be more in favor of it, but I don't know of any.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. People use the Google walkout, for example and I guess, the Google unions and the controversy on Twitter was about how the union wasn't involving the past organizers who did all this work for the Google walkout. I recognize Google walkout was an amazing thing and the people who organized that were really great, but that doesn't mean that you have to use their expertise to unionize.
\n\nA union should be for the current employees. When I'm talking about our union at Glitch, I'm not speaking for the union. I was laid off. I'm not a member anymore. That's very sad. It's very unfair, but I'm not a member and the employees who are working there have insight into the company that I don't. So I don't expect them to recognize me, or to ask me for advice, or anything. I don't even talk to them that much anymore because that's their sphere.
\n\nCASEY: I'm not an expert on Coworker, but this reminds me of another metaphor a little bit. Let me know if this is close, or not, or similarities and differences.
\n\nSo you know how when you look on the bottom of a solo cup, you see a triangle, or a cycle symbol with a number? Some of those aren't really recyclable and the lobbyists who made that happen, and you’re required to put them on, knew that ahead of time. So they are doing this small change, “Look, you can do the thing,” and then that stops people from pushing back against the production of it. It's helping, but not really and I'm hearing your view of Coworker seems to be helping, but not really.
\n\nMELISSA: I mean, the Frank one is even worse. They're a for-profit startup. I'm like, “If anyone is giving them positive coverage, they are not asking the right questions here.” Actually, when I saw them written about, I attempted to join just to see what they were about and they rejected me because they were like, “Oh, you're already in a union. You don't need us.” So very interesting. They occasionally email me asking for my feedback, but I'm like, “I don't think you're worth my time.”
\n\nREIN: If someone wanted to make a platform for unionizing, but I don't think you're going to get much traction in Silicon Valley on that one.
\n\nMELISSA: There is one person who's doing that. It's called Unit, but I don't know that much about it. I'm just very skeptical of the idea that tech can disrupt unions and it's the easy way out to say, “Oh, the old unions, they're not radical enough. They don't cater to tech workers.” To throw that all away for those reasons is bad in my opinion, because they're not perfect, existing unions, but you're unionizing with a diverse workforce that has a history and has power and I don't know.
\n\nI think it's also classist, too, like, “Oh, we don't want to organize with these people that aren't tech workers. We don't want to organize with these blue-collar workers.” They're not thinking that maybe explicitly, but that's what they're saying in a way. They don't want to say that, but that's what they're saying.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I personally have a problem with trade unions that is that they fracture the workforce and they prevent people with different trades from organizing together and historically, that's been on purpose. Like there's a reason the AFL is still around, but the Knights of Labor aren't.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I mean, unions are organizations, they’re just like companies and stuff. There's some that even have dark histories of racism and stuff like that. Although, trade unions are a little different than like CWA. This is where I wish I was more up to the terminology, but it's very complicated.
\n\nREIN: I would just like to unionize whole companies and not worry about what job titles people have because I think that's the systems thinking way to do it.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and we unionized everyone in our company that qualified under the labor, the national labor law, and not just engineers so, that was good. Luckily, the people were into engineers being craftsmen, or whatever are usually typically anti-union, but otherwise, you'd think that they'd be like, “Oh, we need an engineer's trade union because we're like electricians, or something.” But I think that would not be a good direction.
\n\nCASEY: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense that there are unions for people who work at a company, separate from groups of people working on a technology like, Ruby user groups and all the other meetup groups for every technology everywhere and the conferences. It's like the skills are separate from the union, from the company and it's funny, I guess maybe historical that a lot of them are conflated together. All the engineers in the company are doing both a little bit. I like that we're cleanly splitting it now sometimes. That sounds great.
\n\nMelissa, I noticed that you have a Substack newsletter, which is a popular thing lately. Not that you're working on a lot lately. I know we talked about that, but there's a trend for individual people to be writing more and more online lately and it seems like you're aware of that and in that sphere. What's your experience lately writing online, trying to get an audience and all that? The process.
\n\nMELISSA: I say no to Substack because I'm like, “This is just more work and I don't need any more work.” I started a Substack because I was like, “Oh, a lot of people have Substacks.” But then I was like, “Oh, this requires me to do, this is another job.” You have to have a consistent thing and at least, we are starting to – Substack encourages paying creators. That's good.
\n\nBut at some point, it's like, “Oh, I'm paying like ten different creators. I wish there was this thing where I could just pay them all at the same time and they could have jobs and benefits. Oh, that's called a publication. Too bad, we've systematically disabled these by predatory capitalists, hedge funds and stuff, buying them and disposing of them.” Like what's happened to the Chicago Tribune. I had friends who worked there and that thing it's basically just been totally dismantled by predatory companies. So I think Substack is going to be here and other similar models are going to be here for the foreseeable future. But I don't think they are – I think it's sad.
\n\nCASEY: Have you worked with any of the traditional publications to try to get things published? I know you do JavaScript content work.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. So I originally was a food writer and I've worked for Chicagoist. I left Chicagoist because I didn't have time due to my tech job, but they unionized and they were shut down because they unionized and that's really sad. A lot of my friends lost their jobs.
\n\nSo I have a little bit of experience in the media world and I've watched the media world become so fractured and precarious and I think the tech industry has been unfortunately, a negative actor in that. But now, I primarily write about JavaScript and I do so professionally. It'd be nice to write about food instead, but I like JavaScript. I like coding a lot so that's cool. There's no jobs in food writing, though.
\n\nCASEY: Tell us about something you wrote recently.
\n\nMELISSA: I wrote about JavaScript date libraries and like the different ones that are out there and when you should use the library and when you shouldn't use the library and that's for the blog I work for, which is called Skypack blog and I do DevRel all for them in there, a CDN for JavaScript modules.
\n\nOh, here's the thing we can talk about: how people attack DevRel as being non-technical and I hate that.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, please.
\n\nMELISSA: There was a tweet this week, or maybe it was on Friday, it was like, “Offend a developer relations person in one tweet,” and I'm like – so it was a variation on the original one, which was, “Offend a software engineer, offend a DBA in one tweet,” and those were often there a software engineers making fun of software engineers or DVA's people making jokes about data structures, or a bad data. The DevRel one was like, “Oh, your job is fake.” That's what all the jokes were and most of them were not from DevRel people and I'm like, “I hate this.”
\n\nI used to be a frontend developer and people used to joke like that about frontend developers, like, “Oh, you just play with CSS all day and you just push little boxes around the page and give them different colors.”
\n\nWe need to recognize that there’s sexism involved in this and also, racism because frontend development and DevRel tend to be more diverse subsections of tech. I'm just tired of men saying a job is fake and that I'm not technical. I left frontend dev because of that, partially. I shouldn’t have done that because the end of the day, there's no way to convince these people that you're a real engineer. They're just not going to be convinced because they're sexist and they're jerks and they should be deleted.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. It was kind of funny when it was software engineers laughing at themselves, but it turned into punching down pretty quickly and then it just got me in and I did not like it. I would say to those people that they should try a day in the life of a DevRel and see if you think you're good at it.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. It's thinking that, okay, if you have these skills, you don't have the technical skills and also, that your other skills aren't valuable at all. This is a constant struggle, working with engineers, especially working in cross-departmental is engineers not recognizing other skills.
\n\nI was talking about video editing before. I'm like, “That is the worst thing I can totally think of is calling a video editor non-technical; they're literally the most technical people I could think of.” They're walking with software technology and also, a lot of engineers who are like, “Oh, anyone can write things,” and I'm like, “I've edited y’all’s writing. I know you can't write.” [chuckles] Even me, I feel like sometimes the more engineering I do, the worst I become as a writer. That's scary, but I try to balance it. I try to be a mediocre engineer and a mediocre writer.
\n\nREIN: I want people to stop doing that because it’s just a shitty thing to do, but I will also say that as you get more experienced as a software engineer – so I'm a principal now, which means I'm a huge deal, but as you get more experienced, you need to get good at a lot of the stuff that DevRels are good at. You need to be able to convince people that your ideas are good. You need to be able to communicate both verbally and written in writing. You need to give a shit about product and marketing and customer support and people who aren't engineered. You have to start doing all that stuff if you want to grow as an engineer. So to some extent, I think these people are limiting themselves more than are limiting DevRel. They should still stop being shitty people, though.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. The whole principal engineer thing is funny because I was just thinking about how every company has a different definition for principal, senior, junior. That's one of the things that a union can help with and otherwise, it can be very arbitrary and you can feel like they're used to discriminating against people.
\n\nSo if the union can negotiate what a ladder is and what it means, that's way better than having just a random manager do it. That's my rant with all of tech. We're always constantly reinventing the same thing over and over again. Ladders were like, “Oh, we’ve got to build this from scratch for ourselves. Even though we have no training on building ladders, we're just going to invent this because we know everything because we're engineers.”
\n\nSame with interviewing process. I'm like, “Oh, there's decades of research on interview process. but you want to invent your own new interviewing process.” I'm like, “At some point, you're just like experimenting on people and that's unethical.” I'm like, “Take your weird games elsewhere. If you want to design weird games, play Dungeons & Dragons, or something.”
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, if you want to take human performance seriously, you can do that. People have been doing that for decades. You just need to go take a course and read some books and started taking it seriously. It's not hard. I mean, it's hard to evaluate human performance because human performance is very complex, but it's impossible if you don't know what you're doing.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and I tried to get – any interview process I'm involved with designing. I'm like, “First of all, why am I involved with designing this? I'm not qualified. Second of all, at least I did read some research and I do know that the research shows that you want to do a structured interview.” If I can just get people to agree to that one thing, it's so much better than if they're just asking random questions.
\n\nSo structured interview means you agree on a structure beforehand for the interview, you agree on questions and what you're going to talk to the person about, or what exercise you're going to do, if you insist on doing programming exercise. You ask the same ones to every candidate. There's other things you could do to make it more fair, but if you just have that one baseline. Otherwise, it's so arbitrary.
\n\nREIN: There's a book called Hiring A-Players, or something like that and I like some of the advice that it has, but I think the idea that you can distinguish between “A and B players” in an interview is pretty marginal. But I do like the parts about trying to make things more evidence-based when you're trying to assess capability. I think that a lot of the hiring practices we have today mostly are about providing motivated reasoning to hire people who look like you and that's about 90% of what they do.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and there's also this thing, I will die in this hill, but I have people who insist if we don't do a specific code exercise, or do some kind of screener that we're going to hire someone who can't code, who literally can't code and some people will have insisted that they've worked with such people. I'm really skeptical that like can't code. What does that mean? I don't know. Does it mean they just didn't integrate with the team correctly? No one tried to help them? I'm not sure. I'm just really skeptical of that. It just sounds like more hoops to jump through, but I have not convinced anybody of that besides myself. [chuckles] At least in workplaces.
\n\nREIN: I think in my career, I've maybe worked with one person who I genuinely thought couldn't code, but that's when I was pretty new. What I think now is that they were really not put in an environment where they could be successful. They were dropped in immediately into a high-pressure scenario, with little experience, with a team that was small, under-resourced, over pressurized, and didn't have time to support them. So what I thought then was, “Wow, this guy sure can't code. He sucks.” What I think now is, “Wow, we sure screwed up putting him in that position.”
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I've taught people to code who are 12. I'm really skeptical that someone was hired that managed, I don't know, I just sound like they're not managed well, or not onboarded well, but that'd be a cool, like, I don't know. Maybe I'm becoming too interested in HR, I will become an HR researcher and study the phenomenon of people saying that their coworkers can't code and what does that mean?
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMELISSA: I mean actually find those people, ask them, and then find the people who supposedly can’t code and find out they actually can. They were in a very difficult environment, for example, or I don't know. I've been in environments where getting the dev environment started took you five days. No wonder they had trouble; you thought they couldn't code because you did set them up to being able to code. They had to install 40 different things and do a proxy, or whatever. So yeah.
\n\nJACOB: I’m someone who’s very – well, there's that phenomenon stereotype threat you perceive that other people are making preconceived judgements about you. Like, “Oh, I'm the only person of color in my team and I can tell that I'm not expected to do well.” It affects your performance and as a white male, that actually does make some sense to me. If I can feel that I'm going to be judged for the output that I put out, instantly whether it's I didn't follow the great style, or it looks like my work is going to be picked apart immediately. That's just going to be debilitating and I'm just going to be constantly focused about looking good rather than trying to solve the problem. That is not what – Rein’s story does not surprise me at all.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. If I actually hired someone who couldn't code, that would be actually exciting to me, it would be like My Fair Lady, or something because I could definitely teach them how to code and I'd be really impressed because I was like, “Oh, they were able to talk about all these projects and stuff and not actually be able to code?” I don't believe this person exists, by the way.
\n\nREIN: The other thing I really wish people would understand is that human performance is ecological. The context matters. If you take one person and drop them into five different hypothetical companies, you'd get five different outcomes. They'd perform in different ways. You wouldn't get the same performance for them in those different companies because it's not just about the person.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and it's also about the demands of the job. I worked with one guy and people told me he couldn't code and what they actually meant was that they just didn't think he was technical, or something, but he was coding every day. He was doing Dribble templates, which is not considered the highest level of work by some snobby engineers. But that guy could definitely code and he did his job and it was very unfair to say he couldn't code.
\n\nCASEY: I have a story I can share about some evidence-based interviewing I did back at the IT department. We evaluated hundreds of student employees to fix laptops every year—we hired a whole bunch—and we evaluated them based on the people skills and their technical skills on a scale we put that into data for all the points that evidence and structured questions and all that. Some people had a 5 on people's scales out of 5 and 1 on technical skills, or vice versa, or something close to that.
\n\nAnd then we look back a year, or 2, or 3 later, after they had time to learn and grow in the position, we loved all the people with the 5 on people's skills. They were the best employees. They learned the most over time. We're proud of them. They were great to work with. They taught other people a lot, too.
\n\nBut the ones with the technical 5s weren’t people ones. A lot of them resigned, or didn't like the job, or people avoided working with them, they were solo employees. Maybe they got some work done, but that lesson that you can learn the technical part, but you can't necessarily learn the people part. Some of it's learnable if you're motivated, but the disposition is what really drove success in that role. I think that applies everywhere. It's not surprising.
\n\nMELISSA: I wish there were more approaches teaching people skills because, I don't know, it feels like there's a lot of trainings for engineering skills, but not for people's skills. I've definitely like, I was raised by parents who were weird and homeschooled me. So I definitely use a lot of stuff like books to learn people skills and stuff like that. I don't know. It's super basic, but How to Win Friends and Influence People, that one. You could just read that. I mean, it gets you some of the way there. So I wish there were more resources like that.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I would say that you can learn people skills, but companies don't teach them. That's not what companies think is part of their responsibility. They think that they're hiring the person as they are and can teach them technical things. That's another problem, which is that companies aren't providing the opportunities to grow that people need.
\n\nJACOB: There's probably different people's skills for different companies, that would be successful.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah, and it's the same thing. It's the saying that I've heard at workplace is like, “Oh, he doesn't know how to code.” I've also heard the same thing like, “He has no social skills.” It's like something you're born with and can't be changed and that's just your lot in life and I don't believe that. I was homeschooled and when I first went to school, you would have said, “I had poor social skills,” but now I have serviceable social skills.
\n\nJACOB: I think Casey pointed out an important distinction between a disposition to be personable and learn and apply people skills versus the skills you have at a particular moment. I, as a neurodiverse person, I think that's a really important thing because I'm sure people have said behind my back many times in my life that I don't have people's skills without commenting on the disposition of my ability to do well and interface with people. I think they’re two different things.
\n\nMELISSA: I think neurodiverse people—I'm also in that category—also sometimes are even better at certain people's skills because we've been told we have these issues and we really want to think about them. I've read a lot of books; I don't think most neurotypical people have read as many books as I have on human psychology. I wasn't a psychology major—I just want to know why are these normal people trying to get me to do these things? What does it mean? That's a level I’m asking? Yeah, but that's a skill and it's a learned skill that is valuable to me.
\n\nREIN: Can we talk about unions again because I have a question? If you already talked about this before I got here, just let me know. But my question is: what would you say to someone who really has no idea how to get started with this, but thinks that there's an opportunity to organize their company is worried about retaliation and things like that and wants to get started?
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. Get in contact with, they could DM me and I could connect them to people at the current Glitch union, or two, you can approach a union directly. CWA is happy to help. The union that Kickstarter organizers worked under OPEIU, I think is also another option. It can be hard to pick a union because some only do local organizing, but there are some that are national like CWA. CWA has a lot of resources. I would just go with them at first. But you can always do your research and stuff. I'd just be careful with people who direct you to those petition sites, or whatever and that did happen to me.
\n\nREIN: And don’t do your organizing on the company Slack.
\n\nMELISSA: Oh yeah, for sure. Use Signal, don't do it on company time when you're supposed to be working, build social relationships with people at work. Although, it could be, I don’t know if – I was a member of a company where they specifically seem to discourage social relationships. I was a contractor. I wonder if that was a way that they were discouraging organization and unionizing.
\n\nYou see that with Uber and stuff like that. Uber drivers, they're not given a company Slack, pr whatever, or even like, they don't have a way to chat with other drivers. They've had to do this on their own time on Facebook; they've used Facebook to organize.
\n\nSo definitely don't use any company resources, or company time. You're not legally protected if you do that. If you do contact CWA and stuff, they'll tell you what's legal and illegal. It is for example, legal to organize during lunch, I believe, but you should definitely check that beforehand. And then you get into issues if you're remote, time zones, everyone has lunch at a different time. You have to be creative.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. It turns out it's legal, except for all of these loopholes that make it not legal and companies are incentivized to make the case that what you did was illegal so that they can fire you. So just be extra careful.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I don't know. I've known of union organizers that they're going to find a way to fire some of them, but if you can stand up and up in your job, you're harder to fire. Make sure to attend all your meetings. Don't be late to work. I am not a fan of that and I think it's very unfair that you have to be expected to live by this perfect standard that non-organizing employees don't have to follow, but I'm willing to do it for the union.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I mean, just be aware that once it becomes apparent that this is what you're doing, they're going to try to fire you—any company will—and so you need to be on your best behavior even more so than you were before.
\n\nMELISSA: And it is scary organizing unions. I've often wondered would I have been laid off if there was a union, or not? I don't know. But the thing is you negotiate severance for me and I didn't have to do that individually. So it gave me a good cushion when I was laid off and I know people who are laid off who didn't have those things. A company can hurt you even if you don't unionize and at least, unions give you some protection and I'm very grateful to CWA negotiating my severance.
\n\nREIN: So are we getting close to reflections?
\n\nCASEY: I think it is time for reflections. I can go first.
\n\nAs a product manager and engineering manager before, I've always been interested in being part of a union and it's awesome hearing a success story about how, what happened at a company, even though it was the formal type that I'm not eligible for as a manager. But now I'm very interested in looking up some of these alternative forms like sectoral marketing, minority union. I think there's a whole lot happening recently that could help middle managers like me and a lot of my roles have the benefits.
\n\nOften, I hear, “No, you can't possibly ever be part of a union. Why would you even ask that question?” And it's just great to hear someone actually who has worked with a union and say, “No, that's possible. It's just a different form. Not covered by loss.” That's what I want to hear. That's what I wanted to believe.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. It's so unfair. Unions are just what's the law now doesn't have to be the law tomorrow, for example and different countries have different forms of unions and stuff, so.
\n\nJACOB: I'm thinking more about the thread we got on about personal skills, people skills and I'm thinking more about how those can be really just a function of the culture of your team and who's on it and what everyone's individual needs are and how their brains are wired and so many other factors. I'm just thinking about, “Well, what are the right skills that I need for my team rather than just an arbitrary, or a universal list of what those skills might be?”
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. I'm thinking I need to like – I'm here talking about unions and there's so much I don't know about unions. I'd like to study unions in other countries, especially. I really want to learn about different forms of unionization and really delve into the history of unionization. I've done it a little.
\n\nI was never taught that much about unionization in school and stuff like that, especially from homeschool because my parents were anti-union. But even when I went to public school, after being homeschooled, we really didn't talk that much. I know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, but I think for most people, we don't know that much about it and I definitely want to beef up my history and international knowledge on that.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I think also looking into collectivization work around collectives, things like that, there's a tech consultancy that does the websites for Verso and Haymarket and some other lefty publications and there are workers collective and there are actually a surprising number of them.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That's super interesting to me. I've done a little bit of co-ops and stuff. I've been members of co-ops. There is an interesting article, I forget where I saw it, but it was about how co-ops can be good, but they're not the answer to work, or organizing because often they replace work, or unionization. For example, they were talking about this coffee shop that they were trying to unionize and they all got fired and then they formed a co-op and that was seen as success, but it's not necessarily.
\n\nFor example, I'm a member of a co-op, a food co-op, and the workers there were trying to unionize and the co-op was union busting them and that was like, wow, that is really special and as a member of the co-op, I was writing to the board. I was like, “How dare you, I'm going to quit.” [chuckles] We should recognize the union. They really fought that union and I was like, “This is supposed to be – co-op is supposed to be empowering to workers,” but just like unions, there are many different forms of co-ops.
\n\nThere's a very interesting history, especially internationally and I don't even know the tip of the iceberg on that. But I'm very fascinated and having been in co-ops and been involved with co-ops. Another issue with co-ops is often the membership that can be almost like trade unions in that, there can require an onerous process to join one.
\n\nREIN: I think the thing I'd like to leave our listeners with, you might've heard the saying, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” and you might know that that comes from the IWW, I believe. But you might not know that it comes from preamble to their constitution, which says in part, “Trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to feed one another in wage wars. Trade unions aid the employing class to mislead workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
\n\nThese sad conditions can only be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all of its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on.” So the IWW obviously believes very strongly, you have to organize whole companies and not just the techies maybe get their union because they're special.
\n\nI mean, can you imagine if Uber, if the tech workers and the drivers unionized together? They share the same interests, folks they could do that.
\n\nMELISSA: Yeah. That's an interesting question. Like, could they? That's another thing that contracting, or permalansing, I don't know, maybe there'll be a major court challenge, especially with the Biden administration where the National Labor Board might be more sympathetic. Can contractors unionize with regular workers? Contracting is a way to bust unions and to keep people in a position of precarity, but what if they ruled that you can unionize. Once you realize that’s arbitrary, you're like, “Oh, if you've got good enough lawyers, if you have politicians that can get involved, maybe unionization 10 years from now will look really different because maybe they –”
\n\nREIN: Yeah, the main difference is that the drivers don't have multi-million dollar lobbying organization that they're backed by. That's the main difference and the reason they're not getting the respect they deserve.
Special Guest: Melissa McEwen.
","summary":"Melissa McEwen talks about how she helped unionize Glitch, common misconceptions when it comes to the idea of unions, Melissa’s previous experience with working with unions, positive skills union organizers should have, evaluating human performance, and tips for those who are interested in how to go about organizing such an endeavor.","date_published":"2021-04-07T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/2402ed84-d8fc-46be-8920-92c06c15cd4a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32199377,"duration_in_seconds":3210}]},{"id":"13a942f3-3af6-4434-9d2a-f733f6fd250a","title":"228: Career Snarkiness – Words Hold Weight with Corey Quinn","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/career-snarkiness-words-hold-weight","content_text":"02:21 - Corey’s Superpower: Reading 3,400 WPM\n\n\nIncreasing Reading Speed\n\n\n05:35 - Keeping Up w/ AWS\n\n\nLast Week in AWS\nAWS Morning Brief\nScreaming in the Cloud\n\n\n08:45 - Delivering Corey Quinn – Personal Evolution\n\n\nSpeaking Truth to Power (Kindly, but Snarkily)\nPrivilege\nSonia Gupta and Corey Quinn - Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans \nHolding Yourself Accountable\nDefensiveness\nThis Cloud Computing Billing Expert Is Very Funny. Seriously. (NYT Article) \nIntentionality\n\n\n25:51 - Career Snarkiness\n\n\n@SimpsonsOps\n@killedbygoogle \n\n\n28:05 - Approaching and Handling D&I as a Business Owner\n\n\nDiscussing Salary Compensation\n\n\n43:44 - Making and Delivering Jokes\n\n45:08 - The Prospect of Being a Public Figure\n\n50:03 - Recognizing Your Own Failure Mode\n\n\nThe Art of Delegation\n\n\n54:32 - Approachability\n\n\nAdmitting Mistakes\nWhat’s the point?\n\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems.\n\nTim: Iterating on oneself to become a better person. Becoming a human optimized.\n\nArty: Holding yourself accountable. Taking responsibility for how other people see you in a public context.\n\nMando: There’s a power in not hiding who you are. Apologizing for not letting people know what’s going on.\n\nCorey: Words are loud. Words are heavy. Words carry weight. Words carry impact. There is a balance.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nPRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.\n\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.\n\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.\n\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.\n\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the \"Create Free Account\" button to get started. \n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 228 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Mando Escamilla. \n\nMANDO: Thank you, Artemis. I'm delighted to be here with my good friend, Rein Henrichs. \n\nREIN: Thanks, Mando and I'm here with my friend and brand-new co-host, Tim Banks. \n\nTIM: Thanks, Rein. I am Tim Banks and I am delighted to have our guest for this show, Corey Quinn.\n\nCOREY: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to once again, indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice.\n\nTIM: Just so everyone knows, Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and somewhat less horrifying. He also hosts the Screaming in the Cloud and AWS Morning Brief podcasts; and curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.\n\nCOREY: I would agree that that is a fair characterization of what I do. Excellent work. Thank you.\n\nMANDO: Corey, we like to start off every podcast with asking our guests kind of the same question and that question is what do you consider your superpower to be and how did you get it?\n\nCOREY: I would consider my superpower to be the fact that as tested and certified by some random site on the internet, I read 3,400 words a minute and the way that I got there was growing up, most people have friends, I had books because of the wonderful thing that happens in my world namely, having a personality that is pretty obvious to anyone who's spoken for more than 30 seconds. In my early phases of my life, this didn't resonate super well so I turned to escapism in the form of reading. Later in life, this turned into something of a superpower when you're trying to do something like, I don't know, read every release that comes out of AWS in a given afternoon. \n\nMANDO: Yeah, that'll do it. [laughs]\n\nREIN: There are so many.\n\nMANDO: I went to a private elementary school for a year and one of the less weird things that they had us do was do speed reading training. They had this little cylinder and you would feed in a piece of paper and the cylinder had room for, I don't know, 8 to 10 lines of the paper and it would scroll automatically at a certain rate and you would read the story and then take a test afterwards and then as you pass the tests, they would both speed up the cylinder and then also shrink the amount you could see at one time to point where it got to just reading line by line and this thing's scrolling superfast. It was really weird and really struck my competitive juices like, I really wanted to show the teachers that I could read as fast as possible. So that's the one thing from that weird private school that I went to that I think has had any sort of payoff in my adult life.\n\nCOREY: There are a bunch of tools and techniques that people can use to increase reading speed, and I've never done any of them. I don't know how I do it, I just do it. It's easy to sit here and think that, “Oh, I'm going to read super quickly. That's a superpower. That's something I can use and leverage, too,” and then what? \n\nThe skill, or the talent is necessary, but not sufficient the way that I do things and you have to refine it and apply it in different ways. Sitting here and doing it as a spectacle or sport on a conference panel or something and look at how fast I can consume information, not much of a party trick. Using that and applying it to something that for, in my case, distilling vast quantities information down in an understandable and meaningful way, that was the outcome.\n\nIt was never about just “being smart,” which is how I often hear other folks talking about various superpowers. “Oh, I have a natural innate intelligence.” Great, what do you do with it? How do you apply that? That's the thing that often gets overlooked; at least by folks in a somewhat early stage of the development that they're dealing with professionally. \n\nREIN: So let me ask, you do the Last Week in AWS podcast, why do you give a shit about that stuff? \n\nCOREY: Functionally, what I do and what I started doing when I started The Duckbill Group, it was understanding the AWS bill so that I can reduce it. Sure, it's easy to do that from a pure numerical analysis perspective and figure out oh, what reservations, or commitments you can use. But a lot of it required insight into what the application was doing because the worst consultants in the world are the ones that walk in, look around, have no idea what they're looking at, and then start telling you that you screwed everything up. That's not helpful, it's not compelling, and it's the sign of a terrifically awful consultant, in most cases.\n\nI see something that looks like it's ridiculous, my first question is: great, can you help me understand this? I don't tend to, by default, assume the person I'm talking to is a moron and similarly, I had to understand the various economic impacts of different capabilities, features, and services. They're changing all the time. I had to keep up with this stuff so I shoved a bunch of things into my RSS feed and I was tracking this because there was nowhere else to do it. That got me 80% of the way there to being able to share this with the rest of the world. I figured, ah, I can make other people do my work for me. I figured I would launch a newsletter, run it for a few weeks, someone would chime in, “Well, why don't you just read, insert other thing here?” and then great. I can turn off the newsletter. I found the thing that does this for me and I can focus on other things. \n\nInstead, 550 people signed up for the first issue and it's been growing ever since and it turns out that thing that people should read to solve this problem is the thing that I built. It still surprises me and the reason I care about it all is because my customers need to know these are the things, but they don't want to read all of it. They don't want to know all of these things. They want to solve their problem.\n\nREIN: It seems relatively easy for a consultant to go in and say, cut here, trim there, and then you'll get 20, 50% off of your AWS bill. But isn't the thing that you want for the people who will be there long after you're gone to be able to make better decisions about their own spend?\n\nCOREY: One of the nuanced areas of what I do is this idea that, “Oh, I'm going to come in and lower your bill,” That virtually always happens, but that's not the actual goal. The goal is to inform the business so that they can make decisions around managing spend, managing capability, and managing risk. \n\nIn some cases, we suggest spending more on certain areas such as, “Huh, you claim that that thing is an incredibly critical to your business set of data and you're not backing it up anywhere. Perhaps, you should consider doing that.” It's the idea of doing the right thing, not the cheap thing. It's we don't ever charge for example, by percentage of savings, or percentage of bill, it's flat rate only because once that's done and we agree on what that rate is, there's no other conflict of interest. I'm not trying to rack up savings to claim a percentage of it. I have no partnerships with any vendor in the space, so I'm not getting a kickback if I say, “Oh, use this tool or that tool or that service.” Instead, it purely reduces me down to, “This is what I would do if I were in your position, take it or leave it.”\n\nTIM: So I think Corey, it's fair to say that people recognize your expertise, both in optimizing of costs and optimizing the practice. Writing good tools, adopting best practices, having sound resilient architectures, and saving money. But it's also fair to say that that's not why people follow you. You have a voice and a particular way of analyzing things that appeals to people. Snark has its place and it's very well-placed in your commentary, but what it mostly involves is true insight. \n\nSo can you give me the story behind what really empowered you and made you comfortable in delivering your full Corey Quinn to people in an industry where maybe people aren't really supposed to be their whole selves?\n\nCOREY: My entire career, I had a core competency that I was always the absolute best in the room at, across the board and no one could step to me as far as being good at that thing and that thing was getting myself fired because of the things that I said. My entire career, every boss, every mentor, every teacher, every family member, every vague acquaintance that I pass on the street has given me the same advice: “Your sense of humor/personality is going to hold you back in your career.” \n\nWhen I started this place, I was so tired and beaten down from hearing that, that I figured that either everyone I've ever spoken to is right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and they're all wrong. And with the confidence born of being a mediocre white man in tech, I figured let's try it and see. Because worst-case, if the whole thing blows up in my face, well, I can go back to using my maiden name professionally. I can effectively shove the Corey Quinn identity as it is down the memory hole and I can go back to being an unhappy employee somewhere else. It started to resonate and it took on a life of its own and for the first time in my entire career, I don't feel like I have to hide who and what I am and that is a powerful thing.\n\nTIM: So one of the things that I think people appreciate, especially in your very active and humorous Twitter feed, is saying the things that everyone is thinking about the Giants. You speak truth to power, but you do so in a manner that does not insult nor mischaracterize the people who make the technology, who make the decisions. \n\nCan you talk to us a little bit about how being kind while still being somewhat snarky guides – what's your thought processes and how does that guide your commentary?\n\nCOREY: You say this like it's a done deal, but it's very much not. Earlier, the week that we're having this recording, I wound up doing a snarky, sarcastic rebuttal of the profile of me that appeared in the New York Times in the voice of AWS. I made some snarky offhanded comments that implied basically that AWS marketing was crap and I heard from several people inside that team that, that they thought that hurt them and to be very direct, I got that wrong. \n\nIf people are hearing what I have to say and feeling bad about themselves, about their work, then I've gone in a wrong direction. It's a very fine line to walk, given who and what I am, but when people see what I have to say and hear it and they walk away hurt, I failed. I don't always get it right, clearly. All I can strive to do is be better and not make the same mistake twice. It's a constant process of evolution and learning. And to be very direct, I am incredibly grateful by people feeling that they have the psychological safety to reach out to me and say, “That hurt my feelings.”\n\nMANDO: One thing that I've seen you do, Corey, as an accessory to that is be on the lookout for people who maybe don't feel that same kind of psychological security, but also feel some, or have some negative impact, or connotation with what you said. \n\nI've seen this a couple of times. I saw it once this week, when you were talking about – you had a Twitter thread talking about how to find a job in tech, how to negotiate salaries and stuff like that. And then there was a Slack group that we're both involved in and someone made a comment saying that they felt put out a little bit by the tone of what you had said and I personally found it impressive and a little bit inspirin, the way that you responded to that individual. \n\nWould you mind building on that a little bit, why you think that's so important and then how you address and maybe manage those kinds of situations?\n\nCOREY: Sure. Privilege is a funny thing because we all swim in it in various ways, no matter who you are or what you do, there are elements of privilege that are inherent to you based upon aspects of your life and to you. That's not something that you're generally aware of in a conscious sense. Instead, it's very much a part of the background of your own lived experience and it's difficult, at times, to put yourself in the shoes of people who have different stories.\n\nThe natural response, in some cases, when being told about privilege is to push back, “Excuse me, nothing was handed to me. I had to work and build this thing and sure, maybe that's true on some level, but you did not have to deal with a headwinds against you that a lot of other people did.” And there is an element of, “Well, I was born on third base. I didn't hit a triple.” Yes, that's true. It absolutely is. But you still got to go from third base to home on some level. It's easier than someone who's starting off on home and having to round all of the bases and there's still work that has to be put in. But it's important to understand that this is an important thing and a lot of people struggle with it because our society is inherently unjust. There is no way around that. \n\nThe differences is that I'm not sitting here when I have these conversations, talking about how I wish the world was, or how it should be. I'm one of those people that sees the world as it is, or as I assume, as I interpret it to be, and I speak from a position of this is how I function in the environment in which I find myself.\n\nNow, some aspects of what I do, do not apply to people who don't look like I do. I generally go out of my way to avoid airing those things. I don't want to build a conference talk on how to handle job interviews for white guys, because that's awful. It's about getting interesting perspectives on this one. \n\nI did that actual talk, or something close to it back in 2016, or so and when I realized what I'd built, I was horrified and didn't give it again for a couple of years and then I gave it as a keynote at devopsdays Charlotte. I did that with my co-speaker, Sonia Gupta, who she and I sat there and gave the talk called Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans. Her background is as an attorney. She also doesn't look like I do. And it became a much more equitable talk, it became a much more universal talk, it was better in every respect, and it remains one of the talks I'm proudest of giving. \n\nIt's a matter of when you realize that you have done something that inadvertently causes harm, or perpetuate some of the inequality that is rampant around us, it's incumbent on you, if you want to continue to be a good person, even if nowhere else other than you're in your own mind, to correct the misbehavior, say, “I'm sorry about that,” and then this is the key part, strive not to do it again. We're all works in progress.\n\nTIM: I think that notion of us all being a works in progress rings more true than I think most people like to admit. We constantly iterate on ourselves as we should be doing to find our mistakes, correct them, and then implement those corrections as we go forward. The thing that I think most people miss is the fact that they have to admit the fact that they did something wrong in the first place, especially in the form of public opinion. \n\nIn a very public place like Twitter, Corey, you have done really well at that and I think there's a lot of wisdom that people can gain just by watching how you say, “Hey, this was not right,” or “I can do better,” and holding yourself accountable when especially other people hold themselves accountable. How do you think that we can promote this type of behavior in our culture and in our industry?\n\nCOREY: Okay. Let me tell you a dark secret then because I don't want people to get an unrealistic expectation of who I am, or what I do. When I get it wrong, very often someone will either say something on Twitter or DM me with a, “This isn't a great take,” and every time like clockwork, my immediate response is to get defensive because no one likes being called out. \n\nWhat I learned I going by through the process is when I feel that flash of defensiveness: shut up. I do not respond. I step back for a minute. I go for a walk. I think. I wait for that reaction to subside and then really think about the feedback that I'm given from a place that is not in the moment, fraught with emotion. There are times that I can do that in seconds. There are times it takes me days. \n\nUsually, what happens is I realize that they have a point. Very occasionally, I disagree with what they're saying either because I didn't communicate clearly, or they misunderstood, or on some level, past a certain point, it is so far below even the level of rising to microaggression that it's one of those. Yeah, I have a bit of a hard time accepting that feedback where easy example of this is, I wound up having a gag recently called AWS Hambone, where they had some line art drawings in some of the AWS stuff that was put out, and I wound up having an event called AWS Hambone. \n\nTwitter Safety blocks someone who tweeted the phrase at one point, it was, “What is this?” Someone said, “Ah. Well, on Urban Dictionary, if you look up the word Hambone and scroll down a few things,” and of course, it's something horrific. There's always something horrific for three quarters of the words in the English language and at that point, you're so far into the weeds that I don't know that I necessarily would agree with that in that sense, but it's also not going to be a recurring gag that I use all the time. \n\nWhen I named my company, The Duckbill Group, and slapped a platypus up on as our mascot, I spent a week researching is there anything problematic on any aspect of the platypus and every bit of research I could do was no and here we are and no one has ever told me, the platypus is problematic. At this stage, that offer has expired. Please don't email me. \n\nBut it's about doing your best to make these things right when you get it wrong, taking people's advice seriously and again, I don't do this in a vacuum. I have a number of people whose insight I trust and with whom I have a sense of psychological safety that I can reach out to and ask them, “Is this too far afield or not?” I want to be very clear, the majority of those people that I reach out to look an awful lot like me, because I'm not asking folks who are not overrepresented to do additional on paid free labor.\n\nREIN: I’d really liked to dig in a little bit more deeply to the part where you said you get defensive and then you take a moment because that seems like the key to me and it also seems like something that's really, really hard in the moment to do. Virginia Satir says that the problem isn't the problem, how we cope as the problem and that these emotions come unbidden to our consciousness, and then we get to decide, we have an opportunity to decide what we do with them. \n\nSo what I'm hearing you say is you make a conscious effort to decide what to do. You feel defensive. You don't have control over that. What you have control over is what you do with it and so, my question is how do you create the space for yourself to cope?\n\nCOREY: It helps tremendously in that the most common form that I use for my aggressive shitposting, hot takes, et cetera, et cetera, but also testing new things out is Twitter. There is no SLA around responses on Twitter. I don't need to respond within 30 seconds or so. Right now, we're having a conversation, if I stop for 2 minutes to really think something through, you're going to wonder if the call dropped. Twitter doesn't have that problem and from where I sit, it's a place of, I don't believe that I can control my own emotions to the point where I don't that defensive flare, but that's on me. That's something I need to think through. \n\nI don't wind up turning aside and kicking the dog, or punching a hole in the wall. I sit there because it never feels great, but it's where growth comes from. If you've doubled down on being wrong when people whose lived experience are actively telling you that what you're saying or doing causes harm, I don't believe that you are being the kind of person that in your heart of hearts, you wish you were. Now, some people want to be shitheads and that's fine. Good for you. I don't want to be around you.\n\nREIN: I want to make it possible to say your real yeses and your real nos.\n\nCOREY: Yes, absolutely. Punch up. It's hilarious. I mean, I'm a hell of a cyber bully to a company that's worth $1.6 trillion, the last time I checked. If they can't take it on the chin, they need to deal with it. But there are individual people who work there and they don't deserve getting dragged. \n\nAs I mentioned previously and repeatedly, the single exception to this is of course, Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. Because even if someone's garbage, they have friends and family who love and care for them and Larry Ellison is an asshole who does not. Nobody likes Larry Ellison and the best part of that is I got a lot of pushback and a lot of feedback on that article in the New York Times and the one thing that I thought was notable is not a single person defended Larry, or said that I was wrong because I'm right. He's an who has no friends QED, but everyone else, off the table.\n\nREIN: You're obviously very intentional about this. So what do you do intentionally to stay on the right side of that line?\n\nCOREY: The honest and easy way is I talk to people. I fall into the trap personally of forgetting people behind things. To my worldview, a big company is one that has 200 people and when I don't know anyone on a service team at AWS who is involved in building a project, or launching a service, I just view it as this thing, this enormous behemoth thing and then I make fun of it. As soon as I talked to someone who was involved with that it's, “Oh crap, I need to understand who these people are.”\n\nHonestly, one of the reasons I've been so rough on Amazon Marketing is that no one in that group talks to me. It's basically a void so it becomes almost a punchline and then I have to be reminded from time to time that there are people there. That's an area I get it wrong in. \n\nNow on some level, the Amazon corporate posture is if we ignore Corey, he'll probably go away, which is absolutely the wrong direction to go in. It's akin to, “Well, if we kidnap the bear cubs, then may be that grizzly will let me pet her.” It doesn't work. \n\n[laughter]\n\nIt's like smacking an alligator over the snout with a rock in the hopes it'll make him friendlier. Don't do that. I guess, I'm saying I crave attention. Well, roll with it.\n\nREIN: I think you compared yourself to an alligator.\n\nCOREY: Oh, absolutely. \n\nTIM: Oh, that sounded deliberate.\n\n[overtalk]\n\nREIN: It’s fair.\n\nTIM: Alligators, to my recollection, do not have bills, correct? \n\nCOREY: No, no. Those are reserved for generally ducks, geese, and platypuses. \n\nTIM: Is it platypus or platypi?\n\nCOREY: Platypi is a myth. It's platypoes, if you want to go down that particular\nLatin root.\n\nTIM: I don't know if there's a witty monotremes joke in general so, I'll just let that go.\n\nCOREY: Exactly. There are, but you have to look for them. That's why my mascot is an extreme monotreme.\n\nREIN: I like that you explicitly tried to avoid being [inaudible] platypus.\n\nCOREY: There is always that aspect of things.\n\nREIN: All right, so I can tell you that platypus is actually extremely racist! [laughs]\n\nCOREY: Exactly. No, no. The platypus for the mascot that we have is not racist. Well, insofar as other than the [inaudible], we are all racist to some extent, which is problematic but it is a thing to say in some quarters, but let's be a little more intentional of how we say it. The platypus isn't a bigot. The platypus isn't even usually angry most of the time. The platypus is just disappointed in all of us, because realistically, we could be doing better than we are.\n\nREIN: Do you have any advice for any of our listeners who might want to make a career out of being snarky? \n\nCOREY: Quite honestly, don't do it. I'm serious. They're either a number of folks who try it periodically because they see what I'm doing, or they reach out to me and ask for advice and the advice is the same: don't do it. The reason is that with almost anything else that you're trying to do, the failure mode is just, okay, no one cares. It doesn't make a splash. It doesn't work. Okay, great. The problem with being snarky is the failure mode isn't obscurity, it's being an asshole and that failure mode is potentially very damaging. \n\nTo that extent, when I see various parody accounts on Twitter, the novelty accounts that are doing snarky, or sarcastic things, I generally don't engage for a while. I want to get a read on them. \n\nTwo of the parody accounts that absolutely nail it are, what is it? @SimpsonsOps is the parody account there.\n\nMANDO: Oh god, that’s fantastic.\n\nCOREY: And @killedbygoogle. Both are phenomenal. They get it. I talk with the people behind those accounts regularly and I learn from them. There are times, I get it wrong and they correct me and very occasionally, I will give feedback to them when I think they've gone in a different direction and we all sort of make each other better for it as a result. \n\nBut most folks do it. It doesn't end super well. There's an Andy Jassy parody account and has been for years and it's just mean. It's just mean, I'm sorry. One of the most distressing things I ever heard, that got to me through the grapevine. was that some exec at AWS was convinced for a little while that it was me and that hurt because to be very honest, I don't operate like that. I'm not here crapping on people individually, with a remarkably small subset of exceptions to that and those exceptions universally have something in common and that is that they punched down, they drive good people away, and they're small people in positions of inflated importance. Think the corporate equivalent of a number of senators that I'm sure already leaped to mind when I say that.\n\nTIM: So Corey, I'd like to ask—we talked about how you handle things on Twitter, we talked about your personal evolution—now as a business owner in the tech industry, a small business owner, B2B, not a large trillion-dollar company yet. But how are you approaching in handling diversity inclusion, especially around hiring and retention and salary equity in your own company?\n\nQ: Fair question and no one has ever asked me that, if you can believe that. The answer is that in order to build and hire diverse teams, it takes effort. The easiest thing in the world to do is to reach out to the people you know from your background. Well, that's not generally hugely diverse because regardless of what we look like, you're generally encountering them in the same types of environments, doing the same kinds of things, and you basically wind up accidentally hiring half your fraternity or whatnot for those who went to college and that's a bit of a challenge. \n\nSo you have to be intentional about it, for one. You have to be prepared to expand your hiring pool. Do things that don't necessarily come naturally. There are folks who specialize in diversity, equity, and inclusion who have tremendous advice on how to do this, pay them for it. Advice is worth what you pay for it and have them assist and then from there, it's do your best. Have a way to measure what you're trying to achieve and whether you get there or not. \n\nAs far as salary goes, that's relatively straightforward for us because we publish the ranges when we put the job position up and the ranges are relatively narrow and we stick to them. We are very transparent internally with what our structure is and how we approach these things and to be very direct, the delta between the highest and lowest paid employee is smaller than people would expect.\n\nMANDO: I've got a question about salary ranges. I have a hard time understanding what good reasons a company might have for not making their pay scales and salary ranges transparent, at least within the company. I've worked at several places where if you're lucky, your manager may know what the salary ranges are, but as an individual contributor, you're not supposed to find out and I have a hard time coming up. Are there any good reasons why, other than exploitation?\n\nCOREY: There are a bunch of bad reasons, but not many good ones, but here's one that we can try on for size. If you and I have the same job and we work at the same company and I discover that you make $20,000 more than I do, there are a few different ways that I can react. I can get angry at the company, which is not generally constructive in that context. I can ask what I would need to do to get to a similar level of compensation. If I want to be nosy, I can start digging into well, why do you get more? And there are a bunch of answers to that. Maybe you've been doing this for a longer and a better experience. Maybe you have a skillset that was challenging. Maybe it's competitive bid situation. Maybe it's an accident of fate. Maybe you asked for it and I didn't. \n\nBut there is a very common mode where now that I know that you're making $20,000 more than I am, I'm going to be a shit heel to you. I am going to hold it against you personally, because I'm envious and jealous and instead of asking how I can get up to your level, my immediate response is how to drag you down to mine. That can be a subtle and pernicious thing and if I look like I do and you don't, then that manifests in a whole bunch of other ways that are reinforced by systemic biases and as a result, it winds up impacting some of the folks that that transparency would be designed to help. That is one expression of a good reason. Is that outweighed otherwise? I don't know. I really don't. \n\nWe speak in generalities and total budget. We don't disclose individual's compensation internally because that is not – \n\nMANDO: True.\n\nCOREY: Again, it's a weird thing if I tell your coworker how much you make and then they're mad at you. Same type of problem. We strive very hard not to have that culture and I don't believe that we do, but I'm not willing to risk someone's psychological safety on that.\n\nMANDO: Yeah, no, I get that. I think in my experience, it's been a little more, I can't find out what the top and bottom band is for this role, unless I have people working for me in those roles and that's where, at least for me, it makes it difficult to understand why that's the case. It's hard to talk to people who you're managing about moving in different directions, moving possibly to other areas of the company, or even up and down the ladder without being able to say, “Here are the numbers that you could be looking at.”\n\nCOREY: I'm also coming at this from a different/possibly privileged position where we do not offer equity in The Duckbill Group. The way we're structured, it doesn't support that. We're a services company that does not have anything approaching an exit strategy. I'm not looking sell the company to the very types of companies I energetically and enthusiastically insult.\n\nSo we're not offering the brass ring of equity because there's no expectation of ever turn into anything. Instead, we offer cash comp and we have a bonus structure that is tied to what the company does. It becomes very easy for you to look at what we're doing and if you're toying with a role here, we have those conversations and figure out what your compensation is going to look like. Is it comparable to Netflix pay? Of course not. They pay top of market and tend to, but that's okay. We also don't have you on edge every day, wondering if you're about to get fired. So there are benefits to the way we approach things. There are drawbacks as well. \n\nAgain, it's different people want different things and that's okay. At a company that has a significant equity component to compensation, that usually is removed entirely from transparency in compensation, unless you're a named executive. How many shares have you been granted? Are there options? What was the strike price? How is the vesting work? Did you come aboard as part of an acquihire? In which case, there was a very distinct compensation structure, that was almost certainly set up for you, that does not apply to other people. Do you have a particular rare skillset that was incredibly valuable? Let's be direct here, is your cousin the CEO of a target customer and having you there has that nice, quiet benefit that no one is ever going to dare whisper out loud? There are a whole bunch of reasons that compensation will vary, that companies don't necessarily want to explain to each other. \n\nWhen I worked at an agency consultancy, they would periodically have a consultant/engineer who would discover one day that the company was billing it out for roughly twice what they were being paid, which is a fairly standard and reasonable structure given the overhead cost, and they would be incensed by this because well, sales and marketing, how hard could that be? I should just go direct and wind up making all that extra margin myself. It is never that simple. If you can do it, good luck. It's a near certainty you can't because no one can, not at any step and that's scale. \n\nThere is the lack of maturity that is understood, or not understood by folks you're dealing with and especially as you grow beyond a certain size, you can't expect everyone you're talking to in your company that you hire, or potentially hiring to come in with that level of maturity. \n\nSo it's far easier just to avoid the topic altogether and then of course, there's a nefarious thing if we want to see how much we can rip people off. I have a hard time accepting that as being a genuine reaction, because for example, from a company perspective, the difference of a $10,000 or $20,000 to make someone happy versus angry, your payroll costs at a certain point of scale is never going to notice or feel that you don't want to waste money. But if that's all it takes to make someone happy, why wouldn't you spend it?\n\nMANDO: Has anyone here worked at a place where payroll numbers accidentally got sent out to the entire company, or is that just me? \n\nTIM: I have not worked at a place like that, but I wish that had happened.\n\nMANDO: It happened to me super early on in my career. I've been doing this professionally for maybe 2, or 3 years and it was a small little dev shop here in Austin and it was, you had your classic accidental reply all situation from whoever's in charge of keeping the books and the next day, like 8 people out of the 30 who worked there just walked out. It was kind of bad and ugly, yeah.\n\nCOREY: One of the things that I find the most interesting about that type of story is that when those things come out and half the company is in flames over it, this was preventable. \n\nWhen we started The Duckbill Group, we did the exact same thing. We have always operated in such a way that if our internal documents and chats and everything else were to become public, there would be some missing context we'd have to fill in, but there's no one that would, or at least no one who has understanding of the relevant issues would look at this and say, “Well, that's just not fair, or just.” \n\nThat even goes down to our pricing structure with our clients. Like we don't disclose what our margins are on certain things, but if they were to see that they would look at that, understand the value of that process of how we got to those price points and say, “Yes, that is fair.” That has always been our objective and it's one of those if you act as if it's going to be made public, it turns out that no one can really hold things over anymore, which is interesting because given the nature of what we do with AWS bills, confidentiality is super important. \n\nIt's critical because some of our largest customers do not let us admit to anyone that they are in fact, our customers and I get that; there's a strong sensitivity around that. Other customers are, “Yeah, by all means, please talk about us all you want. Put us on the website.” I mean, the New York Times mentioned that Epic Games, Ticketmaster, and The Washington Post were customers of ours. Yes, we have logo rights. We are very clear in whether or not we're allowed to talk about folks publicly. It's great. We love our customers, but what are the tricks to getting there incidentally is if you don't respect a company's business, you probably shouldn't do business with them.\n\nWe're not sitting here making massive value judgements about various companies that we look at. But when it's one of those, you make landmines, not so much. Whereas, I noticed, I was like, “Okay, you’re ad tech, do I love it? Not usually, but I also understand how the world works. It's fine. Don't worry about it.” Unless, you're into truly egregious territory, there's never one of those, “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” The “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” question honestly distills down to, “Can we actually help them get to where they need to go/think they need to go and is it the right thing for them?” If the answer that's no, then all we're going to do is have an unhappy customer story out there in the world. We don't want that. It's not that hard to act ethically, as it turns out.\n\nREIN: There is an interesting contrast between Corey, your story about salary disclosure and Mando's, which is you made the point of that it could be in your employee's best interest to not disclose. I don't think you're lying, but I bet if you had asked Mando's company's executives, they could have very well may have given the exact same story. The thing that, I think is difficult is when you have to trust in the benevolence of capitalists to figure this thing out.\n\nCOREY: Absolutely and from my perspective, again, I have this position that I'm coming from, which is, I assume good faith. From my position, if our salary compensation numbers were to be exposed internally, the external is a whole separate thing. Because honestly, if there's a certain implicit expectation of privacy, if you work at my company and suddenly without warning you, I tell the world how much you're being paid. That's not necessarily a situation you would be thrilled to find yourself in. So let's remove that from the table entirely. \n\nWhen we speak internally about what you're making, I have always operated with the expectation that you will exercise, in the US, your federally protected to discuss your compensation with your coworkers, because not discussing your compensation with your coworkers only really helps those capitalists, as you put it, who run companies themselves. If I want to exploit people, yes. Step one, make sure that they're all scared to talk about how much they're making with each other. That doesn't align with anything I ever want to see myself doing. \n\nSo from my perspective, why would I not disclose salary information? The only reason I can think of that would really matter is that, does it make it harder either first, most importantly, for my employees to operate as they want to operate and two, does it do any harm to my business in any meaningful way and that is a nuanced and challenging thing to figure out. I don't know the answer is the short response to it. I don't think there'd be anything necessarily good that would accelerate my business if we're suddenly talking about compensation numbers publicly. I don't know that necessarily anything bad would happen either, but it's not the story that I want people telling about the company. \n\nWe're small. We don't have a marketing budget. We have a spite budget. So when people bring us up, I don't want it to be in the context of compensating employees. I want it to be in the context of fixing the AWS bills since that's the thing that lets us compensate those employees, [laughs]\n\nIt's a fun and interesting nuanced issue and it's easy to take a singular position from all of the different stakeholders that are involved in something like that and make strong pro, or con arguments from that person's position. But one of the weird things about running a company that I discovered is you have to put yourself in multiple shoes simultaneously all the time, where you have to weigh the opinions and perspectives of various stakeholders. \n\nYou ask someone in engineering what they think we should be focusing on strategically, the answer is probably going to align around engineering, but is engineering going to align with what the company needs to do? If you're getting no sales coming in, is engineering going to be the way you fix that? Maybe not. Maybe you invest in marketing or sales as a result and it's always about trade-offs and no one's perfectly happy with what you decide. \n\nThe world is complicated and for better or worse, one of the bad tendencies of Twitter is to distill these principles down to pithy soundbites that fit 280 characters and the world doesn't lend itself to that.\n\nREIN: Okay. Let's try to distill this down into a pithy soundbite.\n\nCOREY: By all means.\n\nREIN: No, I was just kidding.\n\nCOREY: And I'm sure someone's going to be pithed. It'll be fine. \n\nMANDO: Hey!\n\nTIM: I was waiting. Took longer than I expected. \n\n[laughter] \n\nCOREY: Latency.\n\nREIN: What's the most important thing in comedy?\n\nTIM: It's timing.\n\nCOREY: Timing.\n\nREIN: Timing!\n\n[laughter] \n\nIt’s easier to love that joke in-person.\n\nTIM: It is.\n\nCOREY: Or if you’re going to put that in, just make sure you insert a bunch of time before audio engineer can wind up doing that.\n\n[laughter]\n\nTIM: Right. I was going to ask if an audio engineer can actually make that joke funny, or is that?\n\n[laughter]\n\nCOREY: Yeah. Or it’ll just come off as corny. So many jokes work super well when you deliver them in-person or face-to-face with a small group, but then you deliver into, to an audience of 5,000 people and they fall completely flat because the energy is different. That observation right there is why so many corporate keynotes are full of jokes that bomb horribly, because with the 20 people who were in there and have context and nuance, it's great in the rehearsal, but then you have a bunch of people and it just feels lame.\n\nTIM: Yeah, I thought the corporate keynote jokes, they failed because the 20-person focus group was a bunch of sycophants ready to laugh at anything they said. Whereas, the audience, maybe not so much.\n\nCOREY: Yes. Do you end up with the entire executive committee watching it? They're just a bunch of yes men and the one token yes woman, but diversity is important to them. Just look at their website. No, no, the point that makes the statement about diversity being important, not the pictures of their team.\n\nMANDO: That part. One of my favorite speakers in the technical circuit is Aaron Patterson and I think part of the reason why I love his delivery so much is that he himself personally laughs at all his jokes. Like it really [laughs] like he cracks himself up and so you just can't help, but get pulled along with him.\n\nCOREY: I find that most of my jokes that I put in my talks and whatnot are for me, because without it, I get bored and I lose interest and have other people come along for the joke, great. And if not, well, that's okay, I'm still laughing.\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Yeah.\n\nTIM: So Corey that I have a question that I had wondered and then never got to ask out loud. But seeing as how, although we pretty much knew that Andy Jassy was going to be the new CEO of Amazon, would obviously need someone to replace him at AWS. What would you say to the AWS recruiter when they offered you the job and why?\n\nCOREY: Directly, that would be one of the most thankless jobs I can possibly imagine for the way I see the world and how that job has to be done, in all seriousness. It is the ultimate expression of responsibility without the ability to directly impact an outcome. You will have to delegate absolutely everything and it's paradoxical, but the higher you rise in a role like that, the less you're able to say.\n\nEvery time Jeff Bezos makes a comment in public, it hits the news. He doesn't get to go effectively shitposting on Twitter. How Elon Musk manages to do it, couldn't tell you, but his random jokes move markets and that's why he's constantly in trouble with the SEC. \n\nThe reason that I enjoy the latitude and the freedom that I do is that I am functionally, a nobody and that's okay. As soon as I start becoming someone who is under global public scrutiny, then that entire thing becomes incredibly misaligned. Every time there's a controversy or a scandal, I would never be allowed to sit down and be directly and completely honest about what I think about those things because you can't in those roles. These things are always nuanced and public messaging is a problem. I do firmly believe.\n\nFor example, the reason I don't weigh in very often on a lot of the labor relations issues, for example, that Amazon winds up finding itself confronted with is, I believe firmly that there is a choice that I get to make as part of my expression of privilege. Here, I can be part of the mob on Twitter, yelling at them over these things, or I can have conversations directly with people who you are in a much better position to influence these things internally. I do not believe you can do both, simultaneously. \n\nWe pick and choose our battles sometimes and I can't wind up going off about every outrage, real, or perceived, that accompany does, or I simply look like an endless litany of complaints. You have to find the things that make an impact and there's always a price to that. \n\nAn example of a fight that I do go to bat for is Amazon's position on non-competes for their employees and their decision to pursue them after they leave Amazon. I think it has beneath them, I think it makes the entire industry poorer for it, and it's one of the areas in which I do not respect Amazon's position, full stop. Their employees are better than that and deserve more. That's an issue that I feel profoundly about and I'm willing to go to the mat on that one, but when I do it, it comes with a price. It makes them look at me like a little bit of a, “Oh, is he going to be one of those?” whatever those happen to be and maybe. There's a reason I don't bring it up casually. There's a reason I don't drag them with that in casual joke threads, but it's there and that's what one of those issues I'm willing to be known for. \n\nNow, labor organizing and the rest. There's an entire universe of people paying better attention to a segment of their business that I don't talk about, or know about and who are well-suited to lead a public opinion, to have conversations internally. I don't know about a lot of those things and this is why I've never cut out to be a VC either, by the way, where when I don't know something, I don't feel that I should be sounding off about that thing on Twitter. Apparently, that is not normal in D.C. land, but here we are. \n\nThe beautiful part about being me is that I'm fundamentally in possession of a platform I can use to broadcast every harebrained idea that crosses my mind out to an audience to test it. So I don't feel constrained in what I can say. In fact, that's the reason that I am what I am is that no one can fire me. I'm an AWS customer, but I have no client that is a significant percentage of our revenue base, which means I can't get fired.\n\nThe only real risk is something either systemic that happens globally, in which case, all bets are off, or we're at a scenario where I have surprise, become a secret dumpster goblin and no one is going to want to do business with me anymore and everyone abandons me. But that doesn't seem likely because that is not my failure mode. \n\nREIN: Do you know what your failure mode is? \n\nCOREY: Oh, absolutely. I sometimes, as I mentioned, go too far. I find that things that are funny, just wind up being mean at times. A joke wasn't that great there. \n\nI mean, my entire company is fundamentally built around aspects of my own failures. I am possessed of a profound case of ADHD that manifests in a bunch of interesting ways. A lot of the company is functionally scaffolding around me and picking up the things that I am not good at and will not be successful at if left to my own devices. I feel bad about it on some level, but on the other, it frees me up to do the things I am great at. It's an area of being able to take the things that make me, for better or worse, borderline unique and really focus on those because I don't have to continue to wrestle with things like making sure that JIRA tickets get done for us to use an example from my engineering days. \n\nWe tend to have this bias when hiring people to optimize for hiring folks who have no weaknesses rather than hiring for strengths. Yeah, there are a lot of things I'm crap at, but I'd rather be very, very good at the subset of things that are intensely valuable and that means that okay, maybe someone else can handle making sure my expense report gets filed, if you want to use a banal example.\n\nREIN: One of the first things that you talked about was sometimes to improve the way a customer uses AWS; they have to spend more money in one area rather than less. There's an interesting property of systems, which is that you can't improve a system just by making each individual part better and actually, sometimes you have to make some parts worse to make the system better. \n\nSo I'm hearing a little bit of that here as well, which is you want to build a system that works well and takes advantage of the parts that you have, the people you have, their relationships, their strengths, how they work together, and you're not interested in everyone having to be perfect. You're okay with parts that work in different ways and accounting for that and focus. So the other thing is that a system is not the sum of its parts. It's the product of its interactions and what I'm getting is that you care about those interactions.\n\nCOREY: Very much so. It's hard to build things in isolation. It's hard to wind up treating everyone as interchangeable components that you can shuffle up and have them do different things. You don't want to know what would happen if you put me in charge of accounting, for example. \n\nThere's this also this idea as well that is endemic, particularly to the world of developers and software engineers in the context of – I saw this most prominently with a number of professors in my first job, as a Unix systems administrator at a university, where I have a Ph.D., I am a world leading expert in this very narrow field of knowledge and I am brilliant in it, which means I'm very good at everything else, too, ha, Getting the computer to work. Oh, they don't even offer Ph.Ds. in that so how hard could it really be? This idea that, “Oh, I am terrific at this one very valuable, highly advanced skill; I should be good at everything else.” Well, not really. It doesn't work that way and is there even value in you learning that particular skill? \n\nLet's use an example that's germane to what we're doing right now. When I record podcasts, I'm good at having the conversations. I'm good at making the word noises come out of my mouth to varying degrees of good and then we're done with the recording and what tends to happen next? Well, it has to get edited, put together, and the rest, and I don't know how to do that. Now, do I go and spend a year learning how audio engineering works and then spend my time doing the audio engineering piece, or do I find someone who lives in that world, who loves it, who they are great at it, and they want to do it and they want to do it more and wind-up paying people for their expertise and let them come out with a far better product than I'm ever going to be able to deliver?\n\nIf it doesn't need to be me doing a thing, I might want to tag someone else in to do it instead. That's the art of delegation and increasingly, I have to be more and more comfortable with letting more and more things go as our company continues to grow. It's a hard lesson to learn. I mean, the biggest challenge of running a business bar, none, I don't care what anyone else tells you, it's always the same and it is managing your own psychology.\n\nARTY: So you mentioned earlier with you were talking about psychological safety and people being able to give you feedback about when their feelings were hurt, or things that are challenging to talk about. What factors do you think contribute to your approachability when you have the stance of being this kind of snarky identity? What makes you approachable still?\n\nCOREY: I think it's that when I get it wrong, I'm very vocal at apologizing. Let me use an example of the time I got it spectacularly wrong. A while back, I did a parody video of Hitler Reacts, the Downfall parody thing that everyone's doing and it was Hitler receives his AWS bill was my entire shtick. I did a whole dialogue thing for it, as one does. There's generators for it—this was not an artistic endeavor whatsoever—and one line I have in there is one woman turns to the other and says, “Yeah, I get gigabytes and terabytes confused, too,” and it goes on. People started liking it on Twitter and I went to bed. \n\nThe next day, I get a message from someone that a number of women were having a thread somewhere else that they thought it was offensive because that was the only speaking line women had and it was admitting that math is hard, more or less and when I heard that my response was, “Holy shit.” I took the video down and did a whole thread about here's how I fucked up and some people were saying, “Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. It's fine.” You are wrong. I'm sorry. People felt shitty because of what I said and that's not okay and just deleting it, or not talking about it again is a response, but it's not an instructive one and what I did ideally, will help people avoid making similar mistakes in the future. \n\nAgain, this stuff is not easy. We're all learning. I've made jokes when I was – if I go back in time 10 years, I made a whole bunch of jokes and had a sense of humor of now I look back and I am very honestly ashamed of them and I'm not talking about things that the kind of joke we have to look over your shoulders before you tell anyone to make sure that someone doesn't look like you isn't within earshot. No, I'm just talking about shitty jokes that punch down. I don't make those jokes anymore because guess what? They're just not that funny and that's important. We all evolve. So that's part of it is I vocally critical of myself when I get it wrong. \n\nI also have DMs open for this specific reason. Again, I am not in the demographic people going to harass me by a DM. Not everyone has that privilege so people can reach out to me when they think I get something wrong, or they just want to talk and I view confidentiality as sacrosanct. If someone says that wasn't funny, I always thank them first off and then I try and dig deeper into what it is that they're saying. If someone says it on Twitter, because they don't feel that a call-in is warranted—no one knows you would call-in—a callout is fine, too. I try to engage in the same behavior just because if nothing else, I can set an example.\n\nI don't know if people feel they have a sense of psychological safety in approaching me, to be perfectly honest. No one knows their own reputation. But the fact that people continue to and I have never once broken the faith and thrown someone out under a bus publicly, or even mentioned who they were without their permission first, that's powerful and I hope anyway. \n\nI mean, again, no one knows their own reputation. For all I know, there are whisper networks out there that are convinced that I'm a complete piece of crap and if that's true, I'm not going to inherently say that they're wrong. I would be honored if someone would tell me and would let me know what I'm doing that has caused that opinion to form, because if possible, I'd like to fix it. If not, I at least want to hear the perspective.\n\nBut feedback is an opinion and not everyone's opinion carries equal weight and I don't agree with everyone's opinion, but I would like to know how I'm being perceived. The biggest problem I get is with all the podcasts, with all of the tweets, with all of the newsletters, that most common response by landslide is silence. There are days I wonder I remember to turn the microphone on. There are other days where oh, I get emails and I love those days because I at least get to learn how I'm coming across.\n\nARTY: I can imagine just seeing someone having a history of admitting when they make a mistake and trying to correct it and fixing it, turning you into someone that if you have feedback that feeling like you'd be heard, that your feedback would be listened to and taken seriously, I can see that really making a difference. \n\nI also really appreciate you modeling that kind of behavior, too because I think it is important. We are human. We make mistakes and having models to follow of what it looks like to be confident enough in ourselves that we can screw up publicly, I think is really important.\n\nCOREY: I have the privilege and audience and at least apparently public reputation to be allowed to fail, to be allowed to mess these things up and if I can't own those things that I get wrong and what's the point, really. The honest way that I feel about all of this is I just recently crossed 50,000 Twitter followers, which is a weird, trippy, and humbling experience. But if I can't use that vast audience to help people, then what the fuck was the point of it all? Why did I do it? It's not just for my own self-aggrandizement, or trying to sell consulting projects. If I can't leave a little bit of a dent in the universe in the sense of helping people become better than they are then what was the point? Spoiler, the answer to what was the point never starts with a dollar sign.\n\nREIN: What do you think is the point? \n\nCOREY: I think it has to be different for other folks. For me, the point has always been about helping people and I have a sense of indebtedness that I have my entire career because early on in my career and consistently throughout, people have done me favors and there's no way for me to repay them for the kindness that they have shown and the help that they've given. All you can ever do is pay it forward. But I help people with an introduction. It doesn't take much from me. You two people have problems that would be a solved by having an introduction between the two of you? Wonderful. Go ahead and talk. Let me know how I can help and it costs me nothing and when people are like, “How can I thank you for this?” Help someone else. It's always the same answer. It's a someday, you're going to be in a position to help someone else, do it. Don't think about how it's going to come back and help you. Maybe I will, maybe it won't. Cosmically, I found it always does somehow, but again, you don't have to take that on faith. Just assume it doesn't help you in the least. \n\nThe more you help people, the more you wind up doing favors for people, the more it comes back around and that is something that opens up a tremendous level of, I guess, leverage. I guess, it makes sense of being able to make a difference in the world. Now, please, don't misunderstand what I've just said as, “Oh, you should do a bunch of uncompensated work for anyone who demands a moment of your time.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting you let people take advantage of you, but when you find someone who's struggling at something that you know would approach it, it really doesn't cost you much to reach out and ask if they need a hand.\n\nARTY: That seems like a good note to switch to reflections.\n\nREIN: I think that's great. I was thinking about Corey, how you look at mistakes as opportunities to get better, not just for yourself, but also for how you participate in communities that matter to you. One of the interesting things about systems is that systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. So an engine drives its purpose from how it relates to the other parts of the car. If you take the engine out of the car, the car doesn't move, but neither does the engine. \n\nSo I think that the best communities, whether they're basketball teams, or software development teams, whatever they are, are communities that make each person better and that we derive our purpose and our meaning from our relationship with other people.\n\nTIM: I can offer my reflection on this. I've often been either disappointed with, or very impressed by people's ability to learn about themselves and about the impact that they have on the world. I have observed in Corey and have been inspired to do self-optimization, where I have a course of action or behavior, or a line of thinking or reasoning presented into the ether and then based upon the feedback in whatever other means of observability, I amend and iterate on myself to become better. Never perfect—perfect is the enemy of good—but just to be better, to be continually improving. If I were going to find a term to describe Corey and the term that I would ascribe to myself to become a human optimist. \n\nI think if we take some of those examples that Corey has discussed and apply them, we can all reach that point to where we'll always know that there's always ways to improve and if we listen to those around us and we study the impact that we have on those people that we can do that.\n\nARTY: It's been interesting listening to you talk and have this description of you in my head of this kind plus snarky being and what does that look like. One of the things I've seen you model repeatedly as I've listened to you talk is holding yourself accountable. In one context, being able to take in one-on-one reflections from other people and really take it in and think about what people say. But two, also taking responsibility for how other people see you and your position in the world and how those things you do end up affecting other people. \n\nSo, I really appreciate your taking responsibility for the one-on-one interactions that you have as well as how people see you in a public context and react to those things as well such that when you're out there being a model and someone that people look up to, that you try and have a good influence on the communities around you, too.\n\nMANDO: What's kind of striking me today is strangely enough, it's a little bit of a meta reflection almost. It's like a reflection about y'all's reflections, which is kind of weird, but today is what, February 26th. It's been a rough couple of weeks here in Texas and it's been a rough couple of years, if I'm being truly honest. \n\nBut the past couple weeks have been really tough and I found myself not being, I don't know, maybe as open about the rough time that I've been having. Especially with people at work because I’m an engineering leader at work and I feel like I don't want to put that on folks, but something that Rein, that you said is the system is a product of its interactions. I've been intentionally cutting off parts of myself from the interactions of the system that is work and the people that I work with. \n\nSomething that hit me really hardcore when you said earlier was that there's a power in not having to hide who you am and what you are and what you're bringing to the table and how you're doing at a certain time. I want nothing more than to be able to model that kind of behavior to the rest of the company and make it so that they can be okay with coming in and saying, “It's been a rough couple of weeks. I'm sorry, I'm not going to hit my” whatever deadlines, or whatever they said they were going to do. So maybe I need to spend some time doing a little bit of apologizing and apologizing for not letting people know what's really been going on and working to make myself better.\n\nCOREY: For my part, I know that my words are loud. I imagine that my words are funny, but this is really reinforcing the notion that my words are heavy in that they carry weight. My baseline assumption is I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm going to just have fun with it. \n\nI talk about how I see the world and how I view things, but it's more than a little disconcerting to hear and have it presented in plain view that people are changing how they approach things based upon the things that I say. That my words carry impact and that is a heady thing and it feels dangerous on some levels where I wind up deciding to do a random joke and people don't realize that's a joke. Does that have potential impact? I mean, I’ve always been viscerally aware of it where I don't want to come across as if people misunderstand what I'm saying, they'll wind up causing harm to others. There is a balance and there is a, I guess, growing awareness that maybe all these people aren’t just sticking around for the jokes.\n\nARTY: Well, thank you, Corey for coming on the show.\n\nREIN: Also, everyone.\n\nCOREY: Thank you for having me.\n\nREIN: Thanks, Corey.Special Guest: Corey Quinn.Sponsored By:Linode: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.\r\n\r\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.\r\n\r\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.\r\n\r\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.\r\n\r\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the \"Create Free Account\" button to get started.","content_html":"02:21 - Corey’s Superpower: Reading 3,400 WPM
\n\n05:35 - Keeping Up w/ AWS
\n\n\n\n08:45 - Delivering Corey Quinn – Personal Evolution
\n\n25:51 - Career Snarkiness
\n\n28:05 - Approaching and Handling D&I as a Business Owner
\n\n43:44 - Making and Delivering Jokes
\n\n45:08 - The Prospect of Being a Public Figure
\n\n50:03 - Recognizing Your Own Failure Mode
\n\n54:32 - Approachability
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems.
\n\nTim: Iterating on oneself to become a better person. Becoming a human optimized.
\n\nArty: Holding yourself accountable. Taking responsibility for how other people see you in a public context.
\n\nMando: There’s a power in not hiding who you are. Apologizing for not letting people know what’s going on.
\n\nCorey: Words are loud. Words are heavy. Words carry weight. Words carry impact. There is a balance.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.
\n\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
\n\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.
\n\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started.
\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 228 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Mando Escamilla.
\n\nMANDO: Thank you, Artemis. I'm delighted to be here with my good friend, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Mando and I'm here with my friend and brand-new co-host, Tim Banks.
\n\nTIM: Thanks, Rein. I am Tim Banks and I am delighted to have our guest for this show, Corey Quinn.
\n\nCOREY: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to once again, indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice.
\n\nTIM: Just so everyone knows, Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and somewhat less horrifying. He also hosts the Screaming in the Cloud and AWS Morning Brief podcasts; and curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.
\n\nCOREY: I would agree that that is a fair characterization of what I do. Excellent work. Thank you.
\n\nMANDO: Corey, we like to start off every podcast with asking our guests kind of the same question and that question is what do you consider your superpower to be and how did you get it?
\n\nCOREY: I would consider my superpower to be the fact that as tested and certified by some random site on the internet, I read 3,400 words a minute and the way that I got there was growing up, most people have friends, I had books because of the wonderful thing that happens in my world namely, having a personality that is pretty obvious to anyone who's spoken for more than 30 seconds. In my early phases of my life, this didn't resonate super well so I turned to escapism in the form of reading. Later in life, this turned into something of a superpower when you're trying to do something like, I don't know, read every release that comes out of AWS in a given afternoon.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, that'll do it. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: There are so many.
\n\nMANDO: I went to a private elementary school for a year and one of the less weird things that they had us do was do speed reading training. They had this little cylinder and you would feed in a piece of paper and the cylinder had room for, I don't know, 8 to 10 lines of the paper and it would scroll automatically at a certain rate and you would read the story and then take a test afterwards and then as you pass the tests, they would both speed up the cylinder and then also shrink the amount you could see at one time to point where it got to just reading line by line and this thing's scrolling superfast. It was really weird and really struck my competitive juices like, I really wanted to show the teachers that I could read as fast as possible. So that's the one thing from that weird private school that I went to that I think has had any sort of payoff in my adult life.
\n\nCOREY: There are a bunch of tools and techniques that people can use to increase reading speed, and I've never done any of them. I don't know how I do it, I just do it. It's easy to sit here and think that, “Oh, I'm going to read super quickly. That's a superpower. That's something I can use and leverage, too,” and then what?
\n\nThe skill, or the talent is necessary, but not sufficient the way that I do things and you have to refine it and apply it in different ways. Sitting here and doing it as a spectacle or sport on a conference panel or something and look at how fast I can consume information, not much of a party trick. Using that and applying it to something that for, in my case, distilling vast quantities information down in an understandable and meaningful way, that was the outcome.
\n\nIt was never about just “being smart,” which is how I often hear other folks talking about various superpowers. “Oh, I have a natural innate intelligence.” Great, what do you do with it? How do you apply that? That's the thing that often gets overlooked; at least by folks in a somewhat early stage of the development that they're dealing with professionally.
\n\nREIN: So let me ask, you do the Last Week in AWS podcast, why do you give a shit about that stuff?
\n\nCOREY: Functionally, what I do and what I started doing when I started The Duckbill Group, it was understanding the AWS bill so that I can reduce it. Sure, it's easy to do that from a pure numerical analysis perspective and figure out oh, what reservations, or commitments you can use. But a lot of it required insight into what the application was doing because the worst consultants in the world are the ones that walk in, look around, have no idea what they're looking at, and then start telling you that you screwed everything up. That's not helpful, it's not compelling, and it's the sign of a terrifically awful consultant, in most cases.
\n\nI see something that looks like it's ridiculous, my first question is: great, can you help me understand this? I don't tend to, by default, assume the person I'm talking to is a moron and similarly, I had to understand the various economic impacts of different capabilities, features, and services. They're changing all the time. I had to keep up with this stuff so I shoved a bunch of things into my RSS feed and I was tracking this because there was nowhere else to do it. That got me 80% of the way there to being able to share this with the rest of the world. I figured, ah, I can make other people do my work for me. I figured I would launch a newsletter, run it for a few weeks, someone would chime in, “Well, why don't you just read, insert other thing here?” and then great. I can turn off the newsletter. I found the thing that does this for me and I can focus on other things.
\n\nInstead, 550 people signed up for the first issue and it's been growing ever since and it turns out that thing that people should read to solve this problem is the thing that I built. It still surprises me and the reason I care about it all is because my customers need to know these are the things, but they don't want to read all of it. They don't want to know all of these things. They want to solve their problem.
\n\nREIN: It seems relatively easy for a consultant to go in and say, cut here, trim there, and then you'll get 20, 50% off of your AWS bill. But isn't the thing that you want for the people who will be there long after you're gone to be able to make better decisions about their own spend?
\n\nCOREY: One of the nuanced areas of what I do is this idea that, “Oh, I'm going to come in and lower your bill,” That virtually always happens, but that's not the actual goal. The goal is to inform the business so that they can make decisions around managing spend, managing capability, and managing risk.
\n\nIn some cases, we suggest spending more on certain areas such as, “Huh, you claim that that thing is an incredibly critical to your business set of data and you're not backing it up anywhere. Perhaps, you should consider doing that.” It's the idea of doing the right thing, not the cheap thing. It's we don't ever charge for example, by percentage of savings, or percentage of bill, it's flat rate only because once that's done and we agree on what that rate is, there's no other conflict of interest. I'm not trying to rack up savings to claim a percentage of it. I have no partnerships with any vendor in the space, so I'm not getting a kickback if I say, “Oh, use this tool or that tool or that service.” Instead, it purely reduces me down to, “This is what I would do if I were in your position, take it or leave it.”
\n\nTIM: So I think Corey, it's fair to say that people recognize your expertise, both in optimizing of costs and optimizing the practice. Writing good tools, adopting best practices, having sound resilient architectures, and saving money. But it's also fair to say that that's not why people follow you. You have a voice and a particular way of analyzing things that appeals to people. Snark has its place and it's very well-placed in your commentary, but what it mostly involves is true insight.
\n\nSo can you give me the story behind what really empowered you and made you comfortable in delivering your full Corey Quinn to people in an industry where maybe people aren't really supposed to be their whole selves?
\n\nCOREY: My entire career, I had a core competency that I was always the absolute best in the room at, across the board and no one could step to me as far as being good at that thing and that thing was getting myself fired because of the things that I said. My entire career, every boss, every mentor, every teacher, every family member, every vague acquaintance that I pass on the street has given me the same advice: “Your sense of humor/personality is going to hold you back in your career.”
\n\nWhen I started this place, I was so tired and beaten down from hearing that, that I figured that either everyone I've ever spoken to is right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and they're all wrong. And with the confidence born of being a mediocre white man in tech, I figured let's try it and see. Because worst-case, if the whole thing blows up in my face, well, I can go back to using my maiden name professionally. I can effectively shove the Corey Quinn identity as it is down the memory hole and I can go back to being an unhappy employee somewhere else. It started to resonate and it took on a life of its own and for the first time in my entire career, I don't feel like I have to hide who and what I am and that is a powerful thing.
\n\nTIM: So one of the things that I think people appreciate, especially in your very active and humorous Twitter feed, is saying the things that everyone is thinking about the Giants. You speak truth to power, but you do so in a manner that does not insult nor mischaracterize the people who make the technology, who make the decisions.
\n\nCan you talk to us a little bit about how being kind while still being somewhat snarky guides – what's your thought processes and how does that guide your commentary?
\n\nCOREY: You say this like it's a done deal, but it's very much not. Earlier, the week that we're having this recording, I wound up doing a snarky, sarcastic rebuttal of the profile of me that appeared in the New York Times in the voice of AWS. I made some snarky offhanded comments that implied basically that AWS marketing was crap and I heard from several people inside that team that, that they thought that hurt them and to be very direct, I got that wrong.
\n\nIf people are hearing what I have to say and feeling bad about themselves, about their work, then I've gone in a wrong direction. It's a very fine line to walk, given who and what I am, but when people see what I have to say and hear it and they walk away hurt, I failed. I don't always get it right, clearly. All I can strive to do is be better and not make the same mistake twice. It's a constant process of evolution and learning. And to be very direct, I am incredibly grateful by people feeling that they have the psychological safety to reach out to me and say, “That hurt my feelings.”
\n\nMANDO: One thing that I've seen you do, Corey, as an accessory to that is be on the lookout for people who maybe don't feel that same kind of psychological security, but also feel some, or have some negative impact, or connotation with what you said.
\n\nI've seen this a couple of times. I saw it once this week, when you were talking about – you had a Twitter thread talking about how to find a job in tech, how to negotiate salaries and stuff like that. And then there was a Slack group that we're both involved in and someone made a comment saying that they felt put out a little bit by the tone of what you had said and I personally found it impressive and a little bit inspirin, the way that you responded to that individual.
\n\nWould you mind building on that a little bit, why you think that's so important and then how you address and maybe manage those kinds of situations?
\n\nCOREY: Sure. Privilege is a funny thing because we all swim in it in various ways, no matter who you are or what you do, there are elements of privilege that are inherent to you based upon aspects of your life and to you. That's not something that you're generally aware of in a conscious sense. Instead, it's very much a part of the background of your own lived experience and it's difficult, at times, to put yourself in the shoes of people who have different stories.
\n\nThe natural response, in some cases, when being told about privilege is to push back, “Excuse me, nothing was handed to me. I had to work and build this thing and sure, maybe that's true on some level, but you did not have to deal with a headwinds against you that a lot of other people did.” And there is an element of, “Well, I was born on third base. I didn't hit a triple.” Yes, that's true. It absolutely is. But you still got to go from third base to home on some level. It's easier than someone who's starting off on home and having to round all of the bases and there's still work that has to be put in. But it's important to understand that this is an important thing and a lot of people struggle with it because our society is inherently unjust. There is no way around that.
\n\nThe differences is that I'm not sitting here when I have these conversations, talking about how I wish the world was, or how it should be. I'm one of those people that sees the world as it is, or as I assume, as I interpret it to be, and I speak from a position of this is how I function in the environment in which I find myself.
\n\nNow, some aspects of what I do, do not apply to people who don't look like I do. I generally go out of my way to avoid airing those things. I don't want to build a conference talk on how to handle job interviews for white guys, because that's awful. It's about getting interesting perspectives on this one.
\n\nI did that actual talk, or something close to it back in 2016, or so and when I realized what I'd built, I was horrified and didn't give it again for a couple of years and then I gave it as a keynote at devopsdays Charlotte. I did that with my co-speaker, Sonia Gupta, who she and I sat there and gave the talk called Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans. Her background is as an attorney. She also doesn't look like I do. And it became a much more equitable talk, it became a much more universal talk, it was better in every respect, and it remains one of the talks I'm proudest of giving.
\n\nIt's a matter of when you realize that you have done something that inadvertently causes harm, or perpetuate some of the inequality that is rampant around us, it's incumbent on you, if you want to continue to be a good person, even if nowhere else other than you're in your own mind, to correct the misbehavior, say, “I'm sorry about that,” and then this is the key part, strive not to do it again. We're all works in progress.
\n\nTIM: I think that notion of us all being a works in progress rings more true than I think most people like to admit. We constantly iterate on ourselves as we should be doing to find our mistakes, correct them, and then implement those corrections as we go forward. The thing that I think most people miss is the fact that they have to admit the fact that they did something wrong in the first place, especially in the form of public opinion.
\n\nIn a very public place like Twitter, Corey, you have done really well at that and I think there's a lot of wisdom that people can gain just by watching how you say, “Hey, this was not right,” or “I can do better,” and holding yourself accountable when especially other people hold themselves accountable. How do you think that we can promote this type of behavior in our culture and in our industry?
\n\nCOREY: Okay. Let me tell you a dark secret then because I don't want people to get an unrealistic expectation of who I am, or what I do. When I get it wrong, very often someone will either say something on Twitter or DM me with a, “This isn't a great take,” and every time like clockwork, my immediate response is to get defensive because no one likes being called out.
\n\nWhat I learned I going by through the process is when I feel that flash of defensiveness: shut up. I do not respond. I step back for a minute. I go for a walk. I think. I wait for that reaction to subside and then really think about the feedback that I'm given from a place that is not in the moment, fraught with emotion. There are times that I can do that in seconds. There are times it takes me days.
\n\nUsually, what happens is I realize that they have a point. Very occasionally, I disagree with what they're saying either because I didn't communicate clearly, or they misunderstood, or on some level, past a certain point, it is so far below even the level of rising to microaggression that it's one of those. Yeah, I have a bit of a hard time accepting that feedback where easy example of this is, I wound up having a gag recently called AWS Hambone, where they had some line art drawings in some of the AWS stuff that was put out, and I wound up having an event called AWS Hambone.
\n\nTwitter Safety blocks someone who tweeted the phrase at one point, it was, “What is this?” Someone said, “Ah. Well, on Urban Dictionary, if you look up the word Hambone and scroll down a few things,” and of course, it's something horrific. There's always something horrific for three quarters of the words in the English language and at that point, you're so far into the weeds that I don't know that I necessarily would agree with that in that sense, but it's also not going to be a recurring gag that I use all the time.
\n\nWhen I named my company, The Duckbill Group, and slapped a platypus up on as our mascot, I spent a week researching is there anything problematic on any aspect of the platypus and every bit of research I could do was no and here we are and no one has ever told me, the platypus is problematic. At this stage, that offer has expired. Please don't email me.
\n\nBut it's about doing your best to make these things right when you get it wrong, taking people's advice seriously and again, I don't do this in a vacuum. I have a number of people whose insight I trust and with whom I have a sense of psychological safety that I can reach out to and ask them, “Is this too far afield or not?” I want to be very clear, the majority of those people that I reach out to look an awful lot like me, because I'm not asking folks who are not overrepresented to do additional on paid free labor.
\n\nREIN: I’d really liked to dig in a little bit more deeply to the part where you said you get defensive and then you take a moment because that seems like the key to me and it also seems like something that's really, really hard in the moment to do. Virginia Satir says that the problem isn't the problem, how we cope as the problem and that these emotions come unbidden to our consciousness, and then we get to decide, we have an opportunity to decide what we do with them.
\n\nSo what I'm hearing you say is you make a conscious effort to decide what to do. You feel defensive. You don't have control over that. What you have control over is what you do with it and so, my question is how do you create the space for yourself to cope?
\n\nCOREY: It helps tremendously in that the most common form that I use for my aggressive shitposting, hot takes, et cetera, et cetera, but also testing new things out is Twitter. There is no SLA around responses on Twitter. I don't need to respond within 30 seconds or so. Right now, we're having a conversation, if I stop for 2 minutes to really think something through, you're going to wonder if the call dropped. Twitter doesn't have that problem and from where I sit, it's a place of, I don't believe that I can control my own emotions to the point where I don't that defensive flare, but that's on me. That's something I need to think through.
\n\nI don't wind up turning aside and kicking the dog, or punching a hole in the wall. I sit there because it never feels great, but it's where growth comes from. If you've doubled down on being wrong when people whose lived experience are actively telling you that what you're saying or doing causes harm, I don't believe that you are being the kind of person that in your heart of hearts, you wish you were. Now, some people want to be shitheads and that's fine. Good for you. I don't want to be around you.
\n\nREIN: I want to make it possible to say your real yeses and your real nos.
\n\nCOREY: Yes, absolutely. Punch up. It's hilarious. I mean, I'm a hell of a cyber bully to a company that's worth $1.6 trillion, the last time I checked. If they can't take it on the chin, they need to deal with it. But there are individual people who work there and they don't deserve getting dragged.
\n\nAs I mentioned previously and repeatedly, the single exception to this is of course, Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. Because even if someone's garbage, they have friends and family who love and care for them and Larry Ellison is an asshole who does not. Nobody likes Larry Ellison and the best part of that is I got a lot of pushback and a lot of feedback on that article in the New York Times and the one thing that I thought was notable is not a single person defended Larry, or said that I was wrong because I'm right. He's an who has no friends QED, but everyone else, off the table.
\n\nREIN: You're obviously very intentional about this. So what do you do intentionally to stay on the right side of that line?
\n\nCOREY: The honest and easy way is I talk to people. I fall into the trap personally of forgetting people behind things. To my worldview, a big company is one that has 200 people and when I don't know anyone on a service team at AWS who is involved in building a project, or launching a service, I just view it as this thing, this enormous behemoth thing and then I make fun of it. As soon as I talked to someone who was involved with that it's, “Oh crap, I need to understand who these people are.”
\n\nHonestly, one of the reasons I've been so rough on Amazon Marketing is that no one in that group talks to me. It's basically a void so it becomes almost a punchline and then I have to be reminded from time to time that there are people there. That's an area I get it wrong in.
\n\nNow on some level, the Amazon corporate posture is if we ignore Corey, he'll probably go away, which is absolutely the wrong direction to go in. It's akin to, “Well, if we kidnap the bear cubs, then may be that grizzly will let me pet her.” It doesn't work.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's like smacking an alligator over the snout with a rock in the hopes it'll make him friendlier. Don't do that. I guess, I'm saying I crave attention. Well, roll with it.
\n\nREIN: I think you compared yourself to an alligator.
\n\nCOREY: Oh, absolutely.
\n\nTIM: Oh, that sounded deliberate.
\n\n[overtalk]
\n\nREIN: It’s fair.
\n\nTIM: Alligators, to my recollection, do not have bills, correct?
\n\nCOREY: No, no. Those are reserved for generally ducks, geese, and platypuses.
\n\nTIM: Is it platypus or platypi?
\n\nCOREY: Platypi is a myth. It's platypoes, if you want to go down that particular
\nLatin root.
TIM: I don't know if there's a witty monotremes joke in general so, I'll just let that go.
\n\nCOREY: Exactly. There are, but you have to look for them. That's why my mascot is an extreme monotreme.
\n\nREIN: I like that you explicitly tried to avoid being [inaudible] platypus.
\n\nCOREY: There is always that aspect of things.
\n\nREIN: All right, so I can tell you that platypus is actually extremely racist! [laughs]
\n\nCOREY: Exactly. No, no. The platypus for the mascot that we have is not racist. Well, insofar as other than the [inaudible], we are all racist to some extent, which is problematic but it is a thing to say in some quarters, but let's be a little more intentional of how we say it. The platypus isn't a bigot. The platypus isn't even usually angry most of the time. The platypus is just disappointed in all of us, because realistically, we could be doing better than we are.
\n\nREIN: Do you have any advice for any of our listeners who might want to make a career out of being snarky?
\n\nCOREY: Quite honestly, don't do it. I'm serious. They're either a number of folks who try it periodically because they see what I'm doing, or they reach out to me and ask for advice and the advice is the same: don't do it. The reason is that with almost anything else that you're trying to do, the failure mode is just, okay, no one cares. It doesn't make a splash. It doesn't work. Okay, great. The problem with being snarky is the failure mode isn't obscurity, it's being an asshole and that failure mode is potentially very damaging.
\n\nTo that extent, when I see various parody accounts on Twitter, the novelty accounts that are doing snarky, or sarcastic things, I generally don't engage for a while. I want to get a read on them.
\n\nTwo of the parody accounts that absolutely nail it are, what is it? @SimpsonsOps is the parody account there.
\n\nMANDO: Oh god, that’s fantastic.
\n\nCOREY: And @killedbygoogle. Both are phenomenal. They get it. I talk with the people behind those accounts regularly and I learn from them. There are times, I get it wrong and they correct me and very occasionally, I will give feedback to them when I think they've gone in a different direction and we all sort of make each other better for it as a result.
\n\nBut most folks do it. It doesn't end super well. There's an Andy Jassy parody account and has been for years and it's just mean. It's just mean, I'm sorry. One of the most distressing things I ever heard, that got to me through the grapevine. was that some exec at AWS was convinced for a little while that it was me and that hurt because to be very honest, I don't operate like that. I'm not here crapping on people individually, with a remarkably small subset of exceptions to that and those exceptions universally have something in common and that is that they punched down, they drive good people away, and they're small people in positions of inflated importance. Think the corporate equivalent of a number of senators that I'm sure already leaped to mind when I say that.
\n\nTIM: So Corey, I'd like to ask—we talked about how you handle things on Twitter, we talked about your personal evolution—now as a business owner in the tech industry, a small business owner, B2B, not a large trillion-dollar company yet. But how are you approaching in handling diversity inclusion, especially around hiring and retention and salary equity in your own company?
\n\nQ: Fair question and no one has ever asked me that, if you can believe that. The answer is that in order to build and hire diverse teams, it takes effort. The easiest thing in the world to do is to reach out to the people you know from your background. Well, that's not generally hugely diverse because regardless of what we look like, you're generally encountering them in the same types of environments, doing the same kinds of things, and you basically wind up accidentally hiring half your fraternity or whatnot for those who went to college and that's a bit of a challenge.
\n\nSo you have to be intentional about it, for one. You have to be prepared to expand your hiring pool. Do things that don't necessarily come naturally. There are folks who specialize in diversity, equity, and inclusion who have tremendous advice on how to do this, pay them for it. Advice is worth what you pay for it and have them assist and then from there, it's do your best. Have a way to measure what you're trying to achieve and whether you get there or not.
\n\nAs far as salary goes, that's relatively straightforward for us because we publish the ranges when we put the job position up and the ranges are relatively narrow and we stick to them. We are very transparent internally with what our structure is and how we approach these things and to be very direct, the delta between the highest and lowest paid employee is smaller than people would expect.
\n\nMANDO: I've got a question about salary ranges. I have a hard time understanding what good reasons a company might have for not making their pay scales and salary ranges transparent, at least within the company. I've worked at several places where if you're lucky, your manager may know what the salary ranges are, but as an individual contributor, you're not supposed to find out and I have a hard time coming up. Are there any good reasons why, other than exploitation?
\n\nCOREY: There are a bunch of bad reasons, but not many good ones, but here's one that we can try on for size. If you and I have the same job and we work at the same company and I discover that you make $20,000 more than I do, there are a few different ways that I can react. I can get angry at the company, which is not generally constructive in that context. I can ask what I would need to do to get to a similar level of compensation. If I want to be nosy, I can start digging into well, why do you get more? And there are a bunch of answers to that. Maybe you've been doing this for a longer and a better experience. Maybe you have a skillset that was challenging. Maybe it's competitive bid situation. Maybe it's an accident of fate. Maybe you asked for it and I didn't.
\n\nBut there is a very common mode where now that I know that you're making $20,000 more than I am, I'm going to be a shit heel to you. I am going to hold it against you personally, because I'm envious and jealous and instead of asking how I can get up to your level, my immediate response is how to drag you down to mine. That can be a subtle and pernicious thing and if I look like I do and you don't, then that manifests in a whole bunch of other ways that are reinforced by systemic biases and as a result, it winds up impacting some of the folks that that transparency would be designed to help. That is one expression of a good reason. Is that outweighed otherwise? I don't know. I really don't.
\n\nWe speak in generalities and total budget. We don't disclose individual's compensation internally because that is not –
\n\nMANDO: True.
\n\nCOREY: Again, it's a weird thing if I tell your coworker how much you make and then they're mad at you. Same type of problem. We strive very hard not to have that culture and I don't believe that we do, but I'm not willing to risk someone's psychological safety on that.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, no, I get that. I think in my experience, it's been a little more, I can't find out what the top and bottom band is for this role, unless I have people working for me in those roles and that's where, at least for me, it makes it difficult to understand why that's the case. It's hard to talk to people who you're managing about moving in different directions, moving possibly to other areas of the company, or even up and down the ladder without being able to say, “Here are the numbers that you could be looking at.”
\n\nCOREY: I'm also coming at this from a different/possibly privileged position where we do not offer equity in The Duckbill Group. The way we're structured, it doesn't support that. We're a services company that does not have anything approaching an exit strategy. I'm not looking sell the company to the very types of companies I energetically and enthusiastically insult.
\n\nSo we're not offering the brass ring of equity because there's no expectation of ever turn into anything. Instead, we offer cash comp and we have a bonus structure that is tied to what the company does. It becomes very easy for you to look at what we're doing and if you're toying with a role here, we have those conversations and figure out what your compensation is going to look like. Is it comparable to Netflix pay? Of course not. They pay top of market and tend to, but that's okay. We also don't have you on edge every day, wondering if you're about to get fired. So there are benefits to the way we approach things. There are drawbacks as well.
\n\nAgain, it's different people want different things and that's okay. At a company that has a significant equity component to compensation, that usually is removed entirely from transparency in compensation, unless you're a named executive. How many shares have you been granted? Are there options? What was the strike price? How is the vesting work? Did you come aboard as part of an acquihire? In which case, there was a very distinct compensation structure, that was almost certainly set up for you, that does not apply to other people. Do you have a particular rare skillset that was incredibly valuable? Let's be direct here, is your cousin the CEO of a target customer and having you there has that nice, quiet benefit that no one is ever going to dare whisper out loud? There are a whole bunch of reasons that compensation will vary, that companies don't necessarily want to explain to each other.
\n\nWhen I worked at an agency consultancy, they would periodically have a consultant/engineer who would discover one day that the company was billing it out for roughly twice what they were being paid, which is a fairly standard and reasonable structure given the overhead cost, and they would be incensed by this because well, sales and marketing, how hard could that be? I should just go direct and wind up making all that extra margin myself. It is never that simple. If you can do it, good luck. It's a near certainty you can't because no one can, not at any step and that's scale.
\n\nThere is the lack of maturity that is understood, or not understood by folks you're dealing with and especially as you grow beyond a certain size, you can't expect everyone you're talking to in your company that you hire, or potentially hiring to come in with that level of maturity.
\n\nSo it's far easier just to avoid the topic altogether and then of course, there's a nefarious thing if we want to see how much we can rip people off. I have a hard time accepting that as being a genuine reaction, because for example, from a company perspective, the difference of a $10,000 or $20,000 to make someone happy versus angry, your payroll costs at a certain point of scale is never going to notice or feel that you don't want to waste money. But if that's all it takes to make someone happy, why wouldn't you spend it?
\n\nMANDO: Has anyone here worked at a place where payroll numbers accidentally got sent out to the entire company, or is that just me?
\n\nTIM: I have not worked at a place like that, but I wish that had happened.
\n\nMANDO: It happened to me super early on in my career. I've been doing this professionally for maybe 2, or 3 years and it was a small little dev shop here in Austin and it was, you had your classic accidental reply all situation from whoever's in charge of keeping the books and the next day, like 8 people out of the 30 who worked there just walked out. It was kind of bad and ugly, yeah.
\n\nCOREY: One of the things that I find the most interesting about that type of story is that when those things come out and half the company is in flames over it, this was preventable.
\n\nWhen we started The Duckbill Group, we did the exact same thing. We have always operated in such a way that if our internal documents and chats and everything else were to become public, there would be some missing context we'd have to fill in, but there's no one that would, or at least no one who has understanding of the relevant issues would look at this and say, “Well, that's just not fair, or just.”
\n\nThat even goes down to our pricing structure with our clients. Like we don't disclose what our margins are on certain things, but if they were to see that they would look at that, understand the value of that process of how we got to those price points and say, “Yes, that is fair.” That has always been our objective and it's one of those if you act as if it's going to be made public, it turns out that no one can really hold things over anymore, which is interesting because given the nature of what we do with AWS bills, confidentiality is super important.
\n\nIt's critical because some of our largest customers do not let us admit to anyone that they are in fact, our customers and I get that; there's a strong sensitivity around that. Other customers are, “Yeah, by all means, please talk about us all you want. Put us on the website.” I mean, the New York Times mentioned that Epic Games, Ticketmaster, and The Washington Post were customers of ours. Yes, we have logo rights. We are very clear in whether or not we're allowed to talk about folks publicly. It's great. We love our customers, but what are the tricks to getting there incidentally is if you don't respect a company's business, you probably shouldn't do business with them.
\n\nWe're not sitting here making massive value judgements about various companies that we look at. But when it's one of those, you make landmines, not so much. Whereas, I noticed, I was like, “Okay, you’re ad tech, do I love it? Not usually, but I also understand how the world works. It's fine. Don't worry about it.” Unless, you're into truly egregious territory, there's never one of those, “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” The “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” question honestly distills down to, “Can we actually help them get to where they need to go/think they need to go and is it the right thing for them?” If the answer that's no, then all we're going to do is have an unhappy customer story out there in the world. We don't want that. It's not that hard to act ethically, as it turns out.
\n\nREIN: There is an interesting contrast between Corey, your story about salary disclosure and Mando's, which is you made the point of that it could be in your employee's best interest to not disclose. I don't think you're lying, but I bet if you had asked Mando's company's executives, they could have very well may have given the exact same story. The thing that, I think is difficult is when you have to trust in the benevolence of capitalists to figure this thing out.
\n\nCOREY: Absolutely and from my perspective, again, I have this position that I'm coming from, which is, I assume good faith. From my position, if our salary compensation numbers were to be exposed internally, the external is a whole separate thing. Because honestly, if there's a certain implicit expectation of privacy, if you work at my company and suddenly without warning you, I tell the world how much you're being paid. That's not necessarily a situation you would be thrilled to find yourself in. So let's remove that from the table entirely.
\n\nWhen we speak internally about what you're making, I have always operated with the expectation that you will exercise, in the US, your federally protected to discuss your compensation with your coworkers, because not discussing your compensation with your coworkers only really helps those capitalists, as you put it, who run companies themselves. If I want to exploit people, yes. Step one, make sure that they're all scared to talk about how much they're making with each other. That doesn't align with anything I ever want to see myself doing.
\n\nSo from my perspective, why would I not disclose salary information? The only reason I can think of that would really matter is that, does it make it harder either first, most importantly, for my employees to operate as they want to operate and two, does it do any harm to my business in any meaningful way and that is a nuanced and challenging thing to figure out. I don't know the answer is the short response to it. I don't think there'd be anything necessarily good that would accelerate my business if we're suddenly talking about compensation numbers publicly. I don't know that necessarily anything bad would happen either, but it's not the story that I want people telling about the company.
\n\nWe're small. We don't have a marketing budget. We have a spite budget. So when people bring us up, I don't want it to be in the context of compensating employees. I want it to be in the context of fixing the AWS bills since that's the thing that lets us compensate those employees, [laughs]
\n\nIt's a fun and interesting nuanced issue and it's easy to take a singular position from all of the different stakeholders that are involved in something like that and make strong pro, or con arguments from that person's position. But one of the weird things about running a company that I discovered is you have to put yourself in multiple shoes simultaneously all the time, where you have to weigh the opinions and perspectives of various stakeholders.
\n\nYou ask someone in engineering what they think we should be focusing on strategically, the answer is probably going to align around engineering, but is engineering going to align with what the company needs to do? If you're getting no sales coming in, is engineering going to be the way you fix that? Maybe not. Maybe you invest in marketing or sales as a result and it's always about trade-offs and no one's perfectly happy with what you decide.
\n\nThe world is complicated and for better or worse, one of the bad tendencies of Twitter is to distill these principles down to pithy soundbites that fit 280 characters and the world doesn't lend itself to that.
\n\nREIN: Okay. Let's try to distill this down into a pithy soundbite.
\n\nCOREY: By all means.
\n\nREIN: No, I was just kidding.
\n\nCOREY: And I'm sure someone's going to be pithed. It'll be fine.
\n\nMANDO: Hey!
\n\nTIM: I was waiting. Took longer than I expected.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCOREY: Latency.
\n\nREIN: What's the most important thing in comedy?
\n\nTIM: It's timing.
\n\nCOREY: Timing.
\n\nREIN: Timing!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt’s easier to love that joke in-person.
\n\nTIM: It is.
\n\nCOREY: Or if you’re going to put that in, just make sure you insert a bunch of time before audio engineer can wind up doing that.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nTIM: Right. I was going to ask if an audio engineer can actually make that joke funny, or is that?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nCOREY: Yeah. Or it’ll just come off as corny. So many jokes work super well when you deliver them in-person or face-to-face with a small group, but then you deliver into, to an audience of 5,000 people and they fall completely flat because the energy is different. That observation right there is why so many corporate keynotes are full of jokes that bomb horribly, because with the 20 people who were in there and have context and nuance, it's great in the rehearsal, but then you have a bunch of people and it just feels lame.
\n\nTIM: Yeah, I thought the corporate keynote jokes, they failed because the 20-person focus group was a bunch of sycophants ready to laugh at anything they said. Whereas, the audience, maybe not so much.
\n\nCOREY: Yes. Do you end up with the entire executive committee watching it? They're just a bunch of yes men and the one token yes woman, but diversity is important to them. Just look at their website. No, no, the point that makes the statement about diversity being important, not the pictures of their team.
\n\nMANDO: That part. One of my favorite speakers in the technical circuit is Aaron Patterson and I think part of the reason why I love his delivery so much is that he himself personally laughs at all his jokes. Like it really [laughs] like he cracks himself up and so you just can't help, but get pulled along with him.
\n\nCOREY: I find that most of my jokes that I put in my talks and whatnot are for me, because without it, I get bored and I lose interest and have other people come along for the joke, great. And if not, well, that's okay, I'm still laughing.
\n\nMANDO: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nTIM: So Corey that I have a question that I had wondered and then never got to ask out loud. But seeing as how, although we pretty much knew that Andy Jassy was going to be the new CEO of Amazon, would obviously need someone to replace him at AWS. What would you say to the AWS recruiter when they offered you the job and why?
\n\nCOREY: Directly, that would be one of the most thankless jobs I can possibly imagine for the way I see the world and how that job has to be done, in all seriousness. It is the ultimate expression of responsibility without the ability to directly impact an outcome. You will have to delegate absolutely everything and it's paradoxical, but the higher you rise in a role like that, the less you're able to say.
\n\nEvery time Jeff Bezos makes a comment in public, it hits the news. He doesn't get to go effectively shitposting on Twitter. How Elon Musk manages to do it, couldn't tell you, but his random jokes move markets and that's why he's constantly in trouble with the SEC.
\n\nThe reason that I enjoy the latitude and the freedom that I do is that I am functionally, a nobody and that's okay. As soon as I start becoming someone who is under global public scrutiny, then that entire thing becomes incredibly misaligned. Every time there's a controversy or a scandal, I would never be allowed to sit down and be directly and completely honest about what I think about those things because you can't in those roles. These things are always nuanced and public messaging is a problem. I do firmly believe.
\n\nFor example, the reason I don't weigh in very often on a lot of the labor relations issues, for example, that Amazon winds up finding itself confronted with is, I believe firmly that there is a choice that I get to make as part of my expression of privilege. Here, I can be part of the mob on Twitter, yelling at them over these things, or I can have conversations directly with people who you are in a much better position to influence these things internally. I do not believe you can do both, simultaneously.
\n\nWe pick and choose our battles sometimes and I can't wind up going off about every outrage, real, or perceived, that accompany does, or I simply look like an endless litany of complaints. You have to find the things that make an impact and there's always a price to that.
\n\nAn example of a fight that I do go to bat for is Amazon's position on non-competes for their employees and their decision to pursue them after they leave Amazon. I think it has beneath them, I think it makes the entire industry poorer for it, and it's one of the areas in which I do not respect Amazon's position, full stop. Their employees are better than that and deserve more. That's an issue that I feel profoundly about and I'm willing to go to the mat on that one, but when I do it, it comes with a price. It makes them look at me like a little bit of a, “Oh, is he going to be one of those?” whatever those happen to be and maybe. There's a reason I don't bring it up casually. There's a reason I don't drag them with that in casual joke threads, but it's there and that's what one of those issues I'm willing to be known for.
\n\nNow, labor organizing and the rest. There's an entire universe of people paying better attention to a segment of their business that I don't talk about, or know about and who are well-suited to lead a public opinion, to have conversations internally. I don't know about a lot of those things and this is why I've never cut out to be a VC either, by the way, where when I don't know something, I don't feel that I should be sounding off about that thing on Twitter. Apparently, that is not normal in D.C. land, but here we are.
\n\nThe beautiful part about being me is that I'm fundamentally in possession of a platform I can use to broadcast every harebrained idea that crosses my mind out to an audience to test it. So I don't feel constrained in what I can say. In fact, that's the reason that I am what I am is that no one can fire me. I'm an AWS customer, but I have no client that is a significant percentage of our revenue base, which means I can't get fired.
\n\nThe only real risk is something either systemic that happens globally, in which case, all bets are off, or we're at a scenario where I have surprise, become a secret dumpster goblin and no one is going to want to do business with me anymore and everyone abandons me. But that doesn't seem likely because that is not my failure mode.
\n\nREIN: Do you know what your failure mode is?
\n\nCOREY: Oh, absolutely. I sometimes, as I mentioned, go too far. I find that things that are funny, just wind up being mean at times. A joke wasn't that great there.
\n\nI mean, my entire company is fundamentally built around aspects of my own failures. I am possessed of a profound case of ADHD that manifests in a bunch of interesting ways. A lot of the company is functionally scaffolding around me and picking up the things that I am not good at and will not be successful at if left to my own devices. I feel bad about it on some level, but on the other, it frees me up to do the things I am great at. It's an area of being able to take the things that make me, for better or worse, borderline unique and really focus on those because I don't have to continue to wrestle with things like making sure that JIRA tickets get done for us to use an example from my engineering days.
\n\nWe tend to have this bias when hiring people to optimize for hiring folks who have no weaknesses rather than hiring for strengths. Yeah, there are a lot of things I'm crap at, but I'd rather be very, very good at the subset of things that are intensely valuable and that means that okay, maybe someone else can handle making sure my expense report gets filed, if you want to use a banal example.
\n\nREIN: One of the first things that you talked about was sometimes to improve the way a customer uses AWS; they have to spend more money in one area rather than less. There's an interesting property of systems, which is that you can't improve a system just by making each individual part better and actually, sometimes you have to make some parts worse to make the system better.
\n\nSo I'm hearing a little bit of that here as well, which is you want to build a system that works well and takes advantage of the parts that you have, the people you have, their relationships, their strengths, how they work together, and you're not interested in everyone having to be perfect. You're okay with parts that work in different ways and accounting for that and focus. So the other thing is that a system is not the sum of its parts. It's the product of its interactions and what I'm getting is that you care about those interactions.
\n\nCOREY: Very much so. It's hard to build things in isolation. It's hard to wind up treating everyone as interchangeable components that you can shuffle up and have them do different things. You don't want to know what would happen if you put me in charge of accounting, for example.
\n\nThere's this also this idea as well that is endemic, particularly to the world of developers and software engineers in the context of – I saw this most prominently with a number of professors in my first job, as a Unix systems administrator at a university, where I have a Ph.D., I am a world leading expert in this very narrow field of knowledge and I am brilliant in it, which means I'm very good at everything else, too, ha, Getting the computer to work. Oh, they don't even offer Ph.Ds. in that so how hard could it really be? This idea that, “Oh, I am terrific at this one very valuable, highly advanced skill; I should be good at everything else.” Well, not really. It doesn't work that way and is there even value in you learning that particular skill?
\n\nLet's use an example that's germane to what we're doing right now. When I record podcasts, I'm good at having the conversations. I'm good at making the word noises come out of my mouth to varying degrees of good and then we're done with the recording and what tends to happen next? Well, it has to get edited, put together, and the rest, and I don't know how to do that. Now, do I go and spend a year learning how audio engineering works and then spend my time doing the audio engineering piece, or do I find someone who lives in that world, who loves it, who they are great at it, and they want to do it and they want to do it more and wind-up paying people for their expertise and let them come out with a far better product than I'm ever going to be able to deliver?
\n\nIf it doesn't need to be me doing a thing, I might want to tag someone else in to do it instead. That's the art of delegation and increasingly, I have to be more and more comfortable with letting more and more things go as our company continues to grow. It's a hard lesson to learn. I mean, the biggest challenge of running a business bar, none, I don't care what anyone else tells you, it's always the same and it is managing your own psychology.
\n\nARTY: So you mentioned earlier with you were talking about psychological safety and people being able to give you feedback about when their feelings were hurt, or things that are challenging to talk about. What factors do you think contribute to your approachability when you have the stance of being this kind of snarky identity? What makes you approachable still?
\n\nCOREY: I think it's that when I get it wrong, I'm very vocal at apologizing. Let me use an example of the time I got it spectacularly wrong. A while back, I did a parody video of Hitler Reacts, the Downfall parody thing that everyone's doing and it was Hitler receives his AWS bill was my entire shtick. I did a whole dialogue thing for it, as one does. There's generators for it—this was not an artistic endeavor whatsoever—and one line I have in there is one woman turns to the other and says, “Yeah, I get gigabytes and terabytes confused, too,” and it goes on. People started liking it on Twitter and I went to bed.
\n\nThe next day, I get a message from someone that a number of women were having a thread somewhere else that they thought it was offensive because that was the only speaking line women had and it was admitting that math is hard, more or less and when I heard that my response was, “Holy shit.” I took the video down and did a whole thread about here's how I fucked up and some people were saying, “Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. It's fine.” You are wrong. I'm sorry. People felt shitty because of what I said and that's not okay and just deleting it, or not talking about it again is a response, but it's not an instructive one and what I did ideally, will help people avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
\n\nAgain, this stuff is not easy. We're all learning. I've made jokes when I was – if I go back in time 10 years, I made a whole bunch of jokes and had a sense of humor of now I look back and I am very honestly ashamed of them and I'm not talking about things that the kind of joke we have to look over your shoulders before you tell anyone to make sure that someone doesn't look like you isn't within earshot. No, I'm just talking about shitty jokes that punch down. I don't make those jokes anymore because guess what? They're just not that funny and that's important. We all evolve. So that's part of it is I vocally critical of myself when I get it wrong.
\n\nI also have DMs open for this specific reason. Again, I am not in the demographic people going to harass me by a DM. Not everyone has that privilege so people can reach out to me when they think I get something wrong, or they just want to talk and I view confidentiality as sacrosanct. If someone says that wasn't funny, I always thank them first off and then I try and dig deeper into what it is that they're saying. If someone says it on Twitter, because they don't feel that a call-in is warranted—no one knows you would call-in—a callout is fine, too. I try to engage in the same behavior just because if nothing else, I can set an example.
\n\nI don't know if people feel they have a sense of psychological safety in approaching me, to be perfectly honest. No one knows their own reputation. But the fact that people continue to and I have never once broken the faith and thrown someone out under a bus publicly, or even mentioned who they were without their permission first, that's powerful and I hope anyway.
\n\nI mean, again, no one knows their own reputation. For all I know, there are whisper networks out there that are convinced that I'm a complete piece of crap and if that's true, I'm not going to inherently say that they're wrong. I would be honored if someone would tell me and would let me know what I'm doing that has caused that opinion to form, because if possible, I'd like to fix it. If not, I at least want to hear the perspective.
\n\nBut feedback is an opinion and not everyone's opinion carries equal weight and I don't agree with everyone's opinion, but I would like to know how I'm being perceived. The biggest problem I get is with all the podcasts, with all of the tweets, with all of the newsletters, that most common response by landslide is silence. There are days I wonder I remember to turn the microphone on. There are other days where oh, I get emails and I love those days because I at least get to learn how I'm coming across.
\n\nARTY: I can imagine just seeing someone having a history of admitting when they make a mistake and trying to correct it and fixing it, turning you into someone that if you have feedback that feeling like you'd be heard, that your feedback would be listened to and taken seriously, I can see that really making a difference.
\n\nI also really appreciate you modeling that kind of behavior, too because I think it is important. We are human. We make mistakes and having models to follow of what it looks like to be confident enough in ourselves that we can screw up publicly, I think is really important.
\n\nCOREY: I have the privilege and audience and at least apparently public reputation to be allowed to fail, to be allowed to mess these things up and if I can't own those things that I get wrong and what's the point, really. The honest way that I feel about all of this is I just recently crossed 50,000 Twitter followers, which is a weird, trippy, and humbling experience. But if I can't use that vast audience to help people, then what the fuck was the point of it all? Why did I do it? It's not just for my own self-aggrandizement, or trying to sell consulting projects. If I can't leave a little bit of a dent in the universe in the sense of helping people become better than they are then what was the point? Spoiler, the answer to what was the point never starts with a dollar sign.
\n\nREIN: What do you think is the point?
\n\nCOREY: I think it has to be different for other folks. For me, the point has always been about helping people and I have a sense of indebtedness that I have my entire career because early on in my career and consistently throughout, people have done me favors and there's no way for me to repay them for the kindness that they have shown and the help that they've given. All you can ever do is pay it forward. But I help people with an introduction. It doesn't take much from me. You two people have problems that would be a solved by having an introduction between the two of you? Wonderful. Go ahead and talk. Let me know how I can help and it costs me nothing and when people are like, “How can I thank you for this?” Help someone else. It's always the same answer. It's a someday, you're going to be in a position to help someone else, do it. Don't think about how it's going to come back and help you. Maybe I will, maybe it won't. Cosmically, I found it always does somehow, but again, you don't have to take that on faith. Just assume it doesn't help you in the least.
\n\nThe more you help people, the more you wind up doing favors for people, the more it comes back around and that is something that opens up a tremendous level of, I guess, leverage. I guess, it makes sense of being able to make a difference in the world. Now, please, don't misunderstand what I've just said as, “Oh, you should do a bunch of uncompensated work for anyone who demands a moment of your time.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting you let people take advantage of you, but when you find someone who's struggling at something that you know would approach it, it really doesn't cost you much to reach out and ask if they need a hand.
\n\nARTY: That seems like a good note to switch to reflections.
\n\nREIN: I think that's great. I was thinking about Corey, how you look at mistakes as opportunities to get better, not just for yourself, but also for how you participate in communities that matter to you. One of the interesting things about systems is that systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. So an engine drives its purpose from how it relates to the other parts of the car. If you take the engine out of the car, the car doesn't move, but neither does the engine.
\n\nSo I think that the best communities, whether they're basketball teams, or software development teams, whatever they are, are communities that make each person better and that we derive our purpose and our meaning from our relationship with other people.
\n\nTIM: I can offer my reflection on this. I've often been either disappointed with, or very impressed by people's ability to learn about themselves and about the impact that they have on the world. I have observed in Corey and have been inspired to do self-optimization, where I have a course of action or behavior, or a line of thinking or reasoning presented into the ether and then based upon the feedback in whatever other means of observability, I amend and iterate on myself to become better. Never perfect—perfect is the enemy of good—but just to be better, to be continually improving. If I were going to find a term to describe Corey and the term that I would ascribe to myself to become a human optimist.
\n\nI think if we take some of those examples that Corey has discussed and apply them, we can all reach that point to where we'll always know that there's always ways to improve and if we listen to those around us and we study the impact that we have on those people that we can do that.
\n\nARTY: It's been interesting listening to you talk and have this description of you in my head of this kind plus snarky being and what does that look like. One of the things I've seen you model repeatedly as I've listened to you talk is holding yourself accountable. In one context, being able to take in one-on-one reflections from other people and really take it in and think about what people say. But two, also taking responsibility for how other people see you and your position in the world and how those things you do end up affecting other people.
\n\nSo, I really appreciate your taking responsibility for the one-on-one interactions that you have as well as how people see you in a public context and react to those things as well such that when you're out there being a model and someone that people look up to, that you try and have a good influence on the communities around you, too.
\n\nMANDO: What's kind of striking me today is strangely enough, it's a little bit of a meta reflection almost. It's like a reflection about y'all's reflections, which is kind of weird, but today is what, February 26th. It's been a rough couple of weeks here in Texas and it's been a rough couple of years, if I'm being truly honest.
\n\nBut the past couple weeks have been really tough and I found myself not being, I don't know, maybe as open about the rough time that I've been having. Especially with people at work because I’m an engineering leader at work and I feel like I don't want to put that on folks, but something that Rein, that you said is the system is a product of its interactions. I've been intentionally cutting off parts of myself from the interactions of the system that is work and the people that I work with.
\n\nSomething that hit me really hardcore when you said earlier was that there's a power in not having to hide who you am and what you are and what you're bringing to the table and how you're doing at a certain time. I want nothing more than to be able to model that kind of behavior to the rest of the company and make it so that they can be okay with coming in and saying, “It's been a rough couple of weeks. I'm sorry, I'm not going to hit my” whatever deadlines, or whatever they said they were going to do. So maybe I need to spend some time doing a little bit of apologizing and apologizing for not letting people know what's really been going on and working to make myself better.
\n\nCOREY: For my part, I know that my words are loud. I imagine that my words are funny, but this is really reinforcing the notion that my words are heavy in that they carry weight. My baseline assumption is I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm going to just have fun with it.
\n\nI talk about how I see the world and how I view things, but it's more than a little disconcerting to hear and have it presented in plain view that people are changing how they approach things based upon the things that I say. That my words carry impact and that is a heady thing and it feels dangerous on some levels where I wind up deciding to do a random joke and people don't realize that's a joke. Does that have potential impact? I mean, I’ve always been viscerally aware of it where I don't want to come across as if people misunderstand what I'm saying, they'll wind up causing harm to others. There is a balance and there is a, I guess, growing awareness that maybe all these people aren’t just sticking around for the jokes.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you, Corey for coming on the show.
\n\nREIN: Also, everyone.
\n\nCOREY: Thank you for having me.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Corey.
Special Guest: Corey Quinn.
Sponsored By:
02:28 - Jonan’s Superpower: Jonan’s Friends
\n\n09:07 - How Developer Relations is Changing (DevRel)
\n\n22:41 - Doing DevRel Right
\n\n31:45 - Engaging with Communities & Networks via DevRel
\n\n40:22 - Internal DevRel
\n\n53:32 - Addressing Trauma & The Evil in the World
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“I respect facts but I live in impressions.”
\n
Reflections:
\n\nMando: We are who we spend time with.
\n\nRein: If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and experiences.
\n\nJess: If it works, it’s going to be obvious it works.
\n\nJonan: Talking about the things that suck and talking about who you are in a real way.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
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\n\nJONAN: Welcome back to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 227. I am Jonan Scheffler and I'm joined today by my guest, Jessica Kerr. How are you, Jessica?
\n\nJESSICA: Thank you, Jonan. Well, I’m great today because I get to be here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Aw thanks, Jessica. And I'm here with my friend, Mando Escamilla.
\n\nMANDO: Thanks, Rein and just to bring it back around, I'm here with my friend, Jonan Scheffler.
\n\nJonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, although his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively, he is particularly excited about observability as of late, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night.
\n\nWelcome to Greater Than Code, Jonan. How are you doing today, bud?
\n\nJONAN: I am great. I liked the part where I got to intro your podcast. That was a lot of fun, actually.
\n\nMANDO: It was fantastic, man.
\n\nJONAN: This bio, this guest sounds really interesting, if I would be permitted to say so myself as the guest.
\n\nMANDO: So we like to start off every podcast with our normal question that we ask every guest, which is, what is your superpower, Jonan and how did you acquire it?
\n\nJONAN: My superpower is my friends. They are my superpower and I acquired them after a long career in software and talking to a lot of humans. I don't know actually why, but it's been easy for me to make friends in software. I felt like early on, I found my people and then I just got lucky and it's going okay so far. I'm very fortunate to have them.
\n\nMANDO: Well, we're fortunate to have you, bud. It's interesting that you say this, I mean, just like Slack for operators, DevOps folks, and Savvy folks, there’s been a lot of discussion as of late on the quality and reliability of one's personal network in things like finding new jobs, finding new opportunities, learning and growing in your career, and stuff like that.
\n\nIt’s been interesting for me personally, because my experience, Jonan sounds a lot more like yours. I was very lucky to find some strong communities of folks that were very welcoming to me. I found my people pretty early on, but a lot of the folks in this other community that I'm tangentially related to seem to have had wildly different experience. I don't know if it's like a software development versus operator kind of thing and in-person versus not in-person kind of thing. It's something that struck me as weird.
\n\nJONAN: I think it varies by community, too. I've gone to a lot of conferences for a lot of different languages and depending on the conference and depending on the community, I think that you're going to have a different time. I think if I were starting over again, I would probably follow about the same path—attend small conferences with tight focuses and get to know a couple people early on who seem to be having a lot of those conversations, watch for a social butterfly and tag along for a bit and you'll get introduced.
\n\nMANDO: I'm pretty sure that I met Rein at a local Ruby conference here in Austin. Is that right, Rein?
\n\nREIN: Sounds right. Sure, yeah.
\n\nMANDO: But I think it was one of the first Lone Star Ruby Conferences where we met.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, that sounds right.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. I think speaking of butterflies, I also met Rein, I think at one of the very first conferences I attended back in the day. Being welcomed and seeing the application of the Pac-Man rule, where when standing in a circle, you always leave a space for a guest to join and someone joins and you open up again in-person back in the Ruby community in that day was, I think inspiring for me; directed how I decided I was going to be when I showed up here. So thank you, Rein.
\n\nREIN: It's funny. I remember when I was new to the Ruby community and not sure what to do. I was new to programming, too. I started going to the local Austin meetup actually and the welcome I got as someone who didn't go to college for computer science, someone who wasn't a professional programmer, someone who was just thought it was cool and thought maybe that I could get paid to do it at some point in the future really made a big difference in my life.
\n\nJONAN: Jessica, how did you get started?
\n\nJESSICA: Good question. Before I answer it, I noticed that we're talking about Ruby conferences and Ruby programmers and indeed, I learned Ruby in order to go to Ruby conferences so that I could talk to Ruby people because part of the superpowers that that language gives you is friends or buds back in the day, but still is because the Ruby conferences are still super friendly back when we had them.
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, that's a really good point. I was a professional programmer for probably 5, or 6 years before I started doing Ruby programming. I would say that for those first 5, or 6 years, before I joined the Ruby community, I didn't feel at all like I had any kind of community or group of people.
\n\nJONAN: What do you think inspires that in a community? I think strong leadership is part of it. Matt has certainly received his share of criticism over the year, but I think that fundamentally, he was trying to build a place where people focused on people instead of the glyphs that we type into our little boxes. I think that matters. What else do you think there is to that?
\n\nREIN: We here at Greater Than Code also agree with that sentiment.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJONAN: Seems to align, doesn't it?
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, that focus on people and Ruby was always about programmer joy. It was always about the experience; it was always about being happy and there wasn’t that expectation that the optimal thing to do is to go in a corner and type.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, I think it's very fortuitous timing that we're actually discussing Ruby so much on the 24th, which was the day that Ruby was named 28 years ago on February 24th, Ruby became the name of this language. So happy birthday, Ruby.
\n\nJESSICA: Aw. Yeah, happy [inaudible].
\n\nJONAN: It really has changed my life. I have regularly, whenever I've seen Matt at a conference, got up to thank him for my house and my kids' college education. Before I got into software, I did a lot of things, but none of them would have brought me either of those. I spent probably 10 years in factories and hotels and casinos. I was a poker dealer for my last gig before I got into software and the number of opportunities that Ruby opened up for me, I can't as long as I live be too grateful; I'll be paying it forward till I die.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, but not the language it's the community—the people, the friends.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, exactly. It's the community. It's the people who welcomed me with open arms and made sure that they were contributing to my growth in a far more altruistic sense than, I think is reasonable to expect. I mean, I had nothing to offer in return except a good conversation and high fives and hugs and they spent their time in their energy taking me around conferences and making sure I met people and it was great.
\n\nREIN: I remember when you first went to New Relic and you were first thinking about, “Hey, maybe I could do this developer relations thing.” What I remember about that, in addition to your obvious aptitude at talking to people about things, is the help that you got, the advice, the mentorship that you got from your friends in the community. I remember at the time being blown away by that; by how many people were willing to just take an hour of their time to talk to you about what it was like for them as a DevRel and things like that.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, and I'm still very fortunate to have those people who have helped me build this team here. When I did the onboarding, I put together an elaborate onboarding process. I was able to hire all ten of the DevRel engineers here at the same time. We spent a week doing improv training and having speakers come in as guests and I was able to invite all of these DevRel leaders from over the years to give a perspective on what DevRel was in their eyes, but it is today and always has been clear to me that I am only here where I am by the grace of the communities that I was lucky enough to join.
\n\nI wonder if developer relations is changing; if it's at a different place than it was when I started out. I feel like certainly, pandemic times have affected things, but all that aside, the segment of the industry is still pretty small. There are only maybe 10,000 people doing this work around the world. It's hard to believe because we're quite loud, right? [chuckles] We’ve got a lot of stages. You see a lot of us, but there are many of us and I think that the maturity of the discipline, I guess, is progressing. We are developing ways to measure the effectiveness. Being able to prove the value to a company is going to change the game for us in a lot of ways.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I would love to talk to you about that at length, [chuckles] but for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that you're someone who wants to start a program at a company that doesn't have directly tangible make numbers go up in a business sense value, but you believe that if you're given the chance to do it, that you can show them the value. How do you get that opportunity?
\n\nJONAN: That's a really good question. Kicking off a developer relations program is, I think it's the same as building most major initiatives within a company. If you had an idea for a software project that should be undertaken, or a major feature that mattered to you, it's about building allies early and often. Making sure that when you show up in that meeting to have the conversation with the decisionmaker, that nine out of ten people in that meeting already know about the plan. They have already contributed their feedback; they feel ownership of that plan and they're ready to support you so that you have the answer going in.
\n\nI think the mistake that I made often in my career was walking into that room and just pitching my idea all at once and then all of the questions that come out of that and all of the investigation that is necessary and the vetting appears as though this wasn't a very well-thought-out plan, but getting the people on board in the first place is vitally important. I think also you have a lot of examples to look through. You have a chance to talk about other programs and the success that they've brought, the companies where they started off.
\n\nIt's not a thing that you need to start in a big way. You can put a couple of people on the conference speaking circuit, or a couple of people focusing part of their week on outreach and community growth and see where it takes you. If you start to see the numbers, it becomes a lot easier case to make.
\n\nREIN: You were talking about how you're excited about being able to make this value more tangible in the future. What do you think is the shift that's happening in DevRel that’s making that possible?
\n\nJONAN: So I think there are actually kind of a lot of factors here. One is that DevRel had a division almost of method where some people, probably by the leadership of their companies, were convinced that what they should be doing is talking about the product all of the time. You're there to talk about the product and evangelize the product and get people to use the product.
\n\nThat is part of your role, but it shouldn't be, in my opinion, the primary role that you play. You should be there in the community participating. In the same way that Rein stood in that hallway and welcomed me to Ruby, I need to stand in that hallway and welcome newcomers to all the communities of which I'm part and in so doing, build that group of friends and build that understanding of the community and their needs.
\n\nI develop empathy for the developers using our product and, in the industry, generally and that's invaluable intelligence. I sometimes think of ourselves as these like operatives—we’re undercover marketing operatives out there in the developer world talking to developers and just understanding them and it at one point, took a turn towards, “Well, I'm just going to talk about New Relic all the time,” for example. It feels good to see all that content and see all those talks. However, you're only talking to your existing audience. No one is Googling “what exciting things can I do with New Relic,” “seven awesome New Relic tips.” No one's searching for that.
\n\nThey're out there looking at things that are interesting. They want to click on a link on Twitter that is about some random topic. Running Kubernetes on Raspberry Pis and soldering things to Yoda dolls. That's the kind of stuff that I'm going to click on in my free time and in that spirit of play, that's where I want to be engaged and that's where I want to be engaging people.
\n\nSo I think there was this turn. That's part of it and then in reaction to that, I think that the teams who were doing DevRel well and actually seeking out ways to lift up and support the communities and gather that information for their companies—and yes, certainly talk about their products when the situation warrants it. But I mean, how do you feel about that person who shows up to a conference wearing a New Relic hoodie and a New Relic shirt and a New Relic backpack and says “New Relic,” the first 10 minutes you meet them, a hundred times? But you're like, “Wow, this is a friend who is here for my best interests.”
\n\nMANDO: Right, or every presentation that they give is 30-minute infomercial for whatever company.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. So I think people are headed away from that and in response to that, you saw a lot of success from the people who are doing DevRel well. In addition to that, it's becoming to measure these things in hopefully less creepy ways. We can track the people who show up to anything that we do now. If I have a Twitch stream, I can see how many people were there; Twitch provides good stats for me. I can pull those stats out via an API, I can connect them to my podcasting for the week, I can connect them my blogging for the week, and I can show that my audience is growing over time.
\n\nSo whether or not it is valuable yet, we're building the machine right now. We're finding ways to measure those things and that will allow us to adjust the content in a direction that is popular and that’s really just what we're trying to do. We're trying to give the people what they want. We want to talk about the things that people want to hear about.
\n\nI want to talk about the fun stuff, too, but I'm very surprised sometimes when I learn that hey, nobody wants to hear about my 3D printer API project with Ruby. They want to watch me solder a Raspberry Pi to a Yoda doll and that's great. I'm down for both of those things, I really don't care. But being able to adjust your content towards the sort of thing that is going to interest your community is really valuable obviously to developer relations and we're getting better at it. We have more data than we've had before and not in a way that, to me, feels like that is violating people's personal privacy.
\n\nREIN: Where do you think that DevRel ought to fit in a company's structure? Is it part of revenue? Is it a sales adjunct? Like, what is the correct role of DevRel?
\n\nJ: I don't think it's part of revenue. I think that it leads to that. But in developer relations, we talk about orbits a lot instead of funnels. We talk about bringing people into the orbit. You generate content so that you generate gravity and you move people in the orbits closer to the company so, you can talk to them more and help them with their problems.
\n\nWhen you tie that to revenue, it changes the goal. Is the goal to be out there and help, or is the goal to get the cogs into the machine and continue turning them until they produce coins? When you tie developer relations to revenue, you become trapped in this cycle because look, we’re hackers. If you give me a number you want me to hit, then I can hit the number. But am I hitting the number in the most useful way? Am I generating long-term value for the company? Almost certainly not.
\nIt's like the leader that you bring in. So like, “Hey, revenues are up because I fired customer support. Yes, all of them.” In the short-term, there's going to be some great numbers. You just believe yourself and entire team. Long-term, you’re the new Xfinity with the lowest customer support ratings that have ever existed for a company.
So I think that actually the majority live under marketing right now and I think it makes sense. I think that developer relations people do themselves a disservice by not understanding marketing and understanding the role they play there. I actually think it belongs under its own organization. But if you try and think about that means from a corporate hierarchy perspective, that means that there's probably a C-level who is responsible only for community growth and C-levels by design, they have numbers, they have dollars that they are bringing in.
\n\nSo until we get to a point where we can prove that the dollars are coming in because of our work, there's not going to be a chief developer relations officer at any company. But give me 5, 10 years, maybe I'll be the first CDRO.
\n\nMANDO: It's interesting to hear you. I didn't know that they were usually grouped under marketing, but that sounds right. In my most recent life, I worked at two different companies who did a combination of social media management, analytics platforms, and stuff like that. A majority of our customers at both of these places were in the marketing org and they were hitting the same kinds of things that you're talking about that developer relations groups are hitting. They're trying to provide numbers for the kinds of stuff that they're doing, but there's that inherent, not contradiction, but discord between trying to give customers what they want, but have it also not be infomercials.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, and I think that that is a tough spot for DevRel teams. I think no matter where you stand in the organization, you need to be very close friends with marketing. They have a tremendous amplifying effect for the work that I do; what I want to do is produce content and I am uniquely suited to do that. I’m a person who can show up on the podcast and wax philosophical about things like developer relations. I enjoy that. I would like it if that was my whole day.
\n\nWhat you need to try and design is a world where it is your whole day. There are people who are better at that than you are; that's why you're there as a team. Your job is to get up and talk about the thing, explain technical concepts in easily digestible ways—a process called vulgarization, I guess, a more commonly used word in French. But I think it's very interesting that we vulgarize things.
\n\nI mostly just turn things into swear words, but the marketing organization puts a huge amount of wind at your back where I can come onto a podcast and spend an hour talking words and then the podcast is edited, tweets go out, images are made and it's syndicated to all the various platforms. If you can get that machine helping you produce your work in the background, you don't have to know all of the content creation pieces that most of us know. Most of us are part-time video/audio/any content platform, we mostly do it ourselves and taking the support of your organization where you can get it is going to be tremendously helpful in growing the team.
\n\nREIN: So if you can't tell, this is a personally relevant topic for and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the short-term pressures of there might be for DevRel orgs to produce numbers that the business likes and how you balance that with your long-term vision? What's the story you tell leadership that's effective there?
\n\nJONAN: That's a really good question. So I talk about this developer orbit as being almost pre-funnel work, that there are people that we have within the company who are real good at turning an email address into a dollar and turning a dollar into 10. There are people who have spent 20 years learning how to do that thing.
\n\nWhat I'm really good at is getting people to care in the first place and that's my job here. I describe it sometimes like an awareness campaign in marketing; this is the thing that you put the money on the billboards all over San Francisco and people spend millions and they'll go and get VC events, spend every dollar, making every billboard look like their logo because it works.
\n\nBecause just making people aware whether or not they like the billboard, making people aware that you exist is a first step and I would rather that people complain about our product and complain about our company on Twitter than just not think of us because then you're irrelevant. You're not even part of the conversation. Being able to shift sentiment in the community and being able to hear people, genuinely hear people. It doesn't matter to them, when they're angry on Twitter, that they're factually incorrect. Wrong answer. It's your fault. Show up and just address it, “Hey, that sucks. I hate that. Wow, I'm sorry that happened. Let me see if I can fix it,” and go talk to the product team. So I talk about it in that way as this kind of pre-funnel work.
\n\nAnd then I talk about how we are measuring it and where we measure it as a team is this care orbit where we have a curiosity and awareness step that work in tandem, where people either have seen the words New Relic, or they've seen the logo, and this is awareness. Or they are curious and they've actually clicked on a thing; they've actually followed that down the rabbit hole. And sometimes, they may be aware because we sponsored a conference one time; they've seen us, they know that we exist, but they have no idea what we do.
\n\nSo if they are curious, they're getting to a step where they could buy a free word association exercise, connect New Relic and observability, for example. And when they're doing research, I don't think there's a whole lot of interactivity we have there as a team there.
\n\nWhen I go and research product – think about how you'd buy a developer product. I hear someone say something three times, tail scale. I've been seeing a lot of conversation about tail scale lately. So I hear someone say tail scale three times and then I think to myself, wow, I should probably care about that thing because it's relevant to my career and I don't want to fall behind. In a couple of years, this may be the thing that everyone is using for whatever it does. I don't even know what it does. I better go figure it out and then I go and I do my research and, in that step, I'm reading documentation and I might have run across a blog post, but I'm certainly not watching webinars. I'm just not going to be in that step.
\n\nAnd then there's entry. I say entry instead of sign-up because I just want people close to us. I want them to enter the orbit. I want them to be bought in on the dream of the community and hopefully, we've expressed our values in a way that makes it clear that this is the place for them and we're talking about values and not features of a product. Think about how Apple has been successful. Apple is selling a dream. Apple's throwing a woman throws a sledgehammer through the screen in front of people and that's the dream. That's what you're actually buying is this identity, this tribe.
\n\nI think companies more often end up creating these bulleted lists of checkmarks. I saw one the other day that was probably 50 items long. Here are the 50 things that we do and look at those 2 checkmarks. Our competitor doesn't have those. Gotcha! I don't care. Prove to me that you value the things that I value. Sell me on the purpose and that's the kind of thing that we're really good about talking about.
\n\nAnd if you can demonstrate that in a boardroom, then your program will be fun, but you've got to measure it, you've got to show that people are making progress, and you've got to show growth over time. “See, look, we may not be pointing the megaphone in the right direction right now, but it's growing. We're getting a better megaphone. Is that enough for now?”
\n\nAnd then we can direct over time, our contact direction towards the place that is being most successful for us as a company and hey, maybe it's I just talk about New Relic all the time, but I'm willing to bet it won't be and when the time comes, I'll have data to prove it.
\n\nREIN: In the meantime, how do you know whether what you're doing is working? What are your feedback loops look like?
\n\nJONAN: My feedback loops, our feedback loops as a team right now, we know what we're doing is working when our total audience size is growing. This is kind of a sketchy metric because there are different values to different audiences.
\n\nFor example, Twitch versus Twitter. If I'm going to follow on Twitter, then I follow on my personal account or I follow on the New Relic account because those both provide a place for me to use my voice to engage people. It's a much lower value engagement platform, though from a one follow perspective. 30,000 people I tweeted in front of, 5 will click or 5 will care about the content and that's great and maybe I'm really good at Twitter. I'm not, if I fail, I don't spend as much time on it as I should, but maybe I can refocus my content. I get more via the platform.
\n\nIf you look at something like Twitch, however, someone follows me on Twitch, that means that every time I go live on my stream, they get a notification on every single one of their devices by default. I mean, you can turn it off, but what's the point in following someone, if you're going to turn off the notification; you want the notification. You're saying, “This is the content that I am here for, watching Jonan solder on this silly thing or teach people how to write Ruby from scratch. That's the stuff I signed up for. That's why I'm here on Twitch and I want to be a part of that.” Those have a kind of a higher value.
\n\nSo there is something to weighted consideration across the platforms. But first of all, is your audience grow, just generally? Are you getting a bigger megaphone and more importantly, how are you doing it and moving people from “I'm aware that you exist” to curiosity, “I'm investigating you”? And that's a step when they're aware they've done something like click on a Twitter profile. It's a hard case to make that if they click on my Twitter profile and they see that it says New Relic, that they will have no idea what New Relic does. I have now at least made it into their brain somehow and they will say, “Oh, I've heard that name before.”
\n\nBut the next step of getting people over to curiosity, let's say that we successfully get 10% of our audience over there and 1% of our total audience size, this quarter actually ended up creating accounts and that's where things get real hard because companies tend to have really entrenched MarTech, measuring marketing technology, measuring, and Google analytics setups.
\n\nAnd it's hard to bind that piece together to be like, “That signup? That came from us.” We did that and you need to stand up and say it loudly within a company because everyone else is. Everyone else is real excited to take credit for your work, believe me. You’ve got to stand up and prove it, stand up and say, “DevRel did this. DevRel was growing the company.” We're doing good things for the community. We're helping people understand how to use our product. They're caring more about us because we care about them first and here are the numbers to show it.
\n\nDid that answer your question? I tend to ramble.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, no it did. Can we do a thing? Can we do a little improv thing, Jonan?
\n\nJONAN: Yes.
\n\nREIN: Okay. So I am a chief revenue officer and I hear your pitch and what I say is, “Okay, so I get the DevRel increases engagement. So how much are you committing to improve conversion? How many percentage points are you guaranteeing that you'll deliver in the next quarter?”
\n\nJONAN: In the first quarter of our existence, I'm going to go with none. I would say in the second quarter of our existence, we will have developed a baseline to compare against and I can guarantee that we will be growing the audience by 10% month over month, over our previous audience size. As the audience grows, it is very directly correlated to numbers that you care about like, signups. If I talked to a 1,000 people, I get 10 signups. If I talk to 10,000 people, I get a 100 and that's the baseline. I mean, that's just the math of it. And if I'm doing a great job, maybe I get 15.
\n\nSo if we want to actually do the math, give me a quarter to do the math. Give me a quarter to establish a baseline because I don't know where our company stands in the market right now. If I'm starting off here at this company and you're Google, I'm not going to have a hard time raising awareness, am I? I think most people have heard of you. If you're Bob's awesome startup and you don't have any awareness out there, then we have some different things to focus on and our numbers are going to look different. We're have a slower ramp.
\n\nBut if you're asking me to commit to where you are right now, then I need numbers first. I need to be able to build the machine, I need to be able to measure it, and once I have those metrics in place, I can tell you what those goals should be and we can set them together and when we exceed them, we will adjust upwards because we are aggressive by nature. We like to win at these things. We like to be good at it because for us, it means that we're doing a better job of loving our people.
\n\nThat's what success means by the numbers. The numbers that to you mean money. If we're doing DevRel right, to me, they mean that I am living with purpose. So yes, I can measure those things, but you’ve got to give me time to get a baseline, or the numbers that I make up will be meaningless and we'll be optimizing for the wrong things. How'd I do?
\n\nREIN: I’d buy it for a dollar.
\n\nJONAN: Yes! Sold!
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I believe you. So tangentially related; you talked about Twitter and Twitch as two platforms that you're using to engage with prospective folks and grow and welcome the community. I was wondering if there were other places, other things that you use either personally, or as part of your DevRel work to do that same kind of stuff, or if you have specific types of interactions for specific different types of networks?
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, absolutely. I had left one of our primary platforms off of there, which was YouTube because we're still headed in a direction where we can make that a lightweight process of contributing our work to YouTube.
\n\nSo our strategy, as a team, is to head for platforms that offer two-way engagement. I think that in our generation, we've got a lot of criticism for being the Nintendo generation. “Oh, you were raised by television; you have no attention span.” I have no attention span for TV news. I have no attention span for this one-way oration that has been media consumption my entire life because I live in a world where I have “choose your own adventure” media.
\n\nWhere I can join a Twitch channel and I can adjust the direction of the conversation. Where I can get on Twitter and have a real conversation with famous people, because I am interesting and engaging and responding to them in intelligent ways, hopefully. When you tweet poop emojis at people in your software community as your only game, it's not as likely to drive engagement, but they're very engaging platforms and so, we're aiming for things like that.
\n\nYouTube being the possible exception. YouTube is still levelling up there. I'm not sure if you find out on the YouTube comments section lately, but it's a little bit wild in there. It's getting better; they're working on it. And those are the kinds of platforms that I want to be a part of.
\n\nSo as far as new things go, I'm going to go with not Clubhouse. Clubhouse has one, got some accessibility stuff to work out, but two, in my opinion, stuck in a trap where they're headed towards that one-way conversation. Anyway, it may be a conversation like this podcast, which I love doing, but our audience isn't given an opportunity to respond in real-time and to drive the direction. Clubhouse is eventually going to turn into a similar platform where you have a hundred people in a room. Can a hundred people speak at once in the same conversation? I don't think so. So there's the accessibility piece – [overtalk]
\n\nJESSICA: In text!
\n\nJONAN: In text, they could.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the combination.
\n\nREIN: Clubhouse needs to innovate by providing a text version of their application.
\n\nJONAN: Or when we get NLP, when we get natural language processing to the point where those kinds of things can become accessible conversations automatically, then it's different and people can contribute in their own ways. You can have a realistic sounding robot voice who’d read your thoughts aloud for the group. But beyond those, beyond Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, we're checking out TikTok a little bit, that's kind of fun content. It's a good way for us to reuse clips and highlights from our Twitch stuff without having to go through the old process of creating the new content and similarly, for YouTube.
\n\nIf I get on my high horse and I'm waxing philosophical about why you should use instance variables instead of class variables, I can put that piece out and I can make a YouTube video about why you should use instance variables instead of fostered. That kind of content does well on that platform, but you need to consider the platform and I would say, choose a few and focus there, look for the ones that actually have high engagement.
\n\nDiscord is another good place to hang out, love hanging on Discord. And then you've got to be blogging too, but blog in a place where you can own the conversation and make it about what matters to you as a community. We're real focused on learning and teaching, helping people become content creators, and focusing on the quality of software, generally. We're data people. We want to be talking about that.
\n\nSo we have our own community on therelicans.com where we talk about that. That's just a instance of forum. It's just like dev.to, but we own it and we get to period the content a little bit in a direction that is valuable. You want to keep them loose when you're going in community so that you can let the community take shape as it grows into those values. But that's my recommendation for platforms.
\n\nMANDO: Right on. Thanks, man. It's funny that you bring up TikTok—not at all related how I've recently fallen down and continuing to fall down the TikTok rabbit hole and out of all the different types of content I see on TikTok, it is tech content that I have seen almost zero of. It’s just like, I don't know if there's just like a dearth of the content or if the algorithm hasn't set stuff up to me.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: The algorithm is super good about all other kinds of things that I'm super into like, I'm inundated with cute dogs and goats and [laughs] you name it, but I don't know. Maybe the algorithm is telling me something about myself that...
\n\nJONAN: No, I mean, you just have to click on it.
\n\nJESSICA: Or something about tech content.
\n\nJONAN: I always just cause answer. Yeah. Jessica, you have thoughts on TikTok?
\n\nJESSICA: Well, TikTok is really cool but it t's just takes a ton of work to make a piece of content that tight, especially around something technical.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. I think that's a good point, actually, that it's not as easy as it looks ever producing a piece of content. You may watch a video for 2 to 3 minutes. I once had a 5-minute lightning talk, but I did 65 takes on it. it took me maybe 20 hours to just record the thing, not counting the 100 hours of research I put into the actual content.
\n\nSo depending on the piece of content and how polished you’re going to make it – TikTok’s initiating platform, though.
\n\nLook up Emily Kager. If you go watch Emily Kager’s TikToks, you'll head down the right path, I suspect into the good tech ones.
\n\nMANDO: Awesome. Thanks, man.
\n\nJONAN: I really like the ones that are explaining algorithms with M&Ms. That kind of video, I like those ones a lot. Here's how databases work under the hood. This is actually what in the endgame using toys or whatever is handy. Cats, I saw someone that worked with their cats and the cats are running all about it. [chuckles] It was fun.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, that's awesome and that's the kind of stuff that, I mean, I don't know what the time limit is on TikTok stuff, but our TikToks, if they seem to be about a minute to a minute and a half, it's not like you could do any kind of in-depth deep dive on something, but something like describe what Kubernetes with Legos, or something. It seems like you could fit some sort of bite-size explanations, or a series of definitions, right?
\n\nJONAN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: I mean, there's someone, whose videos I see all the time, who does these videos on obscure Lord of the Rings facts. She'll describe this intricate familial family tree of beings whose definitions have spanned not only the Silmarillion, but other – and she fits it all in a minute and a half. It's fascinating and it's amazing to watch. I'm sure, like you were saying, the stuff she's been researching and she knows this stuff. She spent probably years and years and user for life gathering this knowledge and gathering the ability to distil it down into a minute and a half.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, and I mean, it's not even – look, I think a lot of people have the perception, especially starting out creating content, that you have to be the expert. You don't have to be the expert. You just have to do the work, go read about the thing, then talk about the thing. You're actually better suited to talk about it when you've just learned it, by far. Because you know the pain, you have a fresh memory of the pain and the parts of that API you're describing that were difficult to understand and once you become a Kubernetes expert, those things are lost to you. They become opaque; you can't find the parts that were terrible because the memory of the pain goes away. So TikTok is a good place to explore with that kind of stuff in a short-form piece of content.
\n\nI have a couple more recommendations for you that I'll drop for you in the show notes, too about the people on Twitter—@theannalytical is great at that thing, @cassidoo, and @laurieontech. I'll put them all for you in the show notes. But there are, there are some people you can emulate early on and if you're just starting out, don't be afraid to get up there on the stage. The bottom line is in life in general, we're all just making it up as we go along and you can make it up, too. What have you really got to lose? You're not doing it today. Tomorrow, you would still not be doing it if you don't try.
\n\nREIN: Continuing with my program of using this podcast to ask Jonan to help me with my personal problems, do you have any thoughts about internal developer relations? Or let me ask this a different way. There are companies that are big enough that there are teams that have never met other teams and there are teams that produce platforms that are used by application development teams and so on. What are your thoughts about building more cohesive and engaged developer communities within a company?
\n\nJONAN: Yes, do it. I've considered this a huge part of what developer relations needs to be doing generally. Binding those departments together and finding the connections for people and advocating the use of internal software, those internal tooling teams. This is why a lot of DevRel people have a background in internal tooling, myself included. It's just fun to be helping out your friends. That's why you get into DevRel. You like helping your friends and developers are your friends and they're my favorite people.
\n\nThe point that I was making about internal developer relations is yeah, you should be doing it already as part of a DevRel team, but there are actually dedicated teams starting to form. Lyft, I think was one of the first people I heard of doing this where there's an entire team of people. Because the bottom line is DevRel is a very, very busy job. Because you don't have this marketing machine behind you working very effectively, you're probably doing a lot of the production work of your role anyway and it takes a full day to do a podcast well, in many cases.
\n\nSo you're losing a day every time you spend an hour on a microphone. But if you're doing that and then you're going to conferences and then you're writing blog posts and then you're having the usual buffet of meetings and everyone wants to talk to you all the time to just check in and sync and see how we can collaborate; we need forms for that.
\n\nWhen people come to me and they want us to speak at their event, or they want us to collaborate on a piece of conduct, I have a form for that and once a week, the entire team sits down and we review all of those in a content review meeting and that guarantees that person, the highest quality of feedback for their project, all 10 of us, 11 of us counting myself, are going to look at that and give them the answers they need and we have guaranteed timeline for them. We have a deal that we will respond to you by Friday 2:00 PM Pacific if you give us the thing by Thursday morning, every single week like clockwork and that encourages the rest of the organization to engage you the way that makes sense for you as a team, instead of just little random ad hoc pieces.
\n\nSo yes, it should be done internally. You need to make space for it. If you are doing external DevRel, too, but it's already part of your job and having a dedicated team actually makes a ton of sense. I would love to see more of that.
\n\nREIN: Let's say that I am a technical lead, or a senior developer and there's this thing that my team has been doing and I really wish the rest of the company knew about it because I think it could help them. What should I do?
\n\nJONAN: You should find marketing people. You're looking for the internal comms team in your marketing organization. There are people whose whole job is to communicate those things to the rest of the company; they're very good at it and they can tell you about all those avenues. We all have that internal blog thing, whatever. They're all pretty terrible, honestly, especially in larger companies—nobody reads them, that’s the problem—but they can help you get engagement on those things, help them be shared in the right channels, in your chat platform. That's the people I would work out to.
\n\nThere are humans who are real good at helping you talk about your work and they're in marketing and it's a difficult place to engage, but look for your internal comms person. Failing that, make sure that your project is on point before you take it to people. If you don't have a read me that is at a 110%, that's your first step. Make sure that people understand how they can get involved and how to use the project and try it over and over and over again from scratch. Break it intentionally and see how painful it is to fix. Make it just the most user-friendly product you possibly can before you take it out there and you'll get better.
\n\nMANDO: This is something also that not just techniques and senior engineers should be thinking about management should be thinking about this for their entire teams and the people that they manage and lead. Because if you can provide visibility for the stuff that your people are working on and have worked on throughout the year, when you, as a manager, go to your management when salary reviews and unit reviews come up, it's much easier to make the case that your team mates or your people on your team should get the salary increases that you're trying to get them. If they have had the visibility for their work. If you can say, “Oh, remember this big thing,” and you can point to the blog post and you can point to the Slack conversation where 10 people congratulated Sam on her upgrade for Costco or whatever it is. You know what I mean?
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, and you have to talk loud here.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nJONAN: You’ve got to scream about it. Look, people are only going to hear 25% of what you say anyway, and it feels like bragging, but overcommunicate and often, especially people in management. I mean, really think about how many bulleted lists go across a manager's desk and how you want yours to matter. Better make it longer and more relevant and as detailed as possible so that some portion of it actually makes it through to their consciousness and they can communicate it on there's superiors. Superiors is a terrible way to say that; they're managers.
\n\nMANDO: They're managers, right? Yeah. This is something that I learned as I was going through management and something that was never taught to me and it's something that I advocate really strongly about. But if you're managing people, if you're leading people and you're not advocating for them and for their work, like you're saying, as loudly as possible to the point of possibly being annoying, you're straight up not doing your job.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, you are. I learned early on in my career that the loudest people were the ones getting the promotions and having the career success, whether or not they were good, or they were actually contributing things that were value. I watched someone merge 600 lines of untested code against the objections of his coworkers and get a promotion about it. That's about conversations; it's not about quality.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, I also think there are things that companies can be doing to make this easier. So you can have a weekly show and tell email.
\n\nJONAN: Yes.
\n\nREIN: You can let people pitch stuff to it, you can track engagement with it, and see whether people are getting value out of it and try to make it better.
\n\nJONAN: And that's exactly it: you have to have a feedback mechanism so that you can adjust the direction of your content. We actually have plans, when we get our feet under us a bit, to do a morning news show like of us had in high school. Just 5 minutes in the morning where we take a question a day and explain it.
\n\nThere are a lot of people who work at our companies who have no idea what a virtual machine is, or at what layer it operates, and how it differs from a container. Telling them the difference between LXC and VMs, that's a thing that DevRel people do well. So we can actually explain, I can take Kubernetes and I can explain it with M&M's in 5 minutes, and then I can invite people to come and talk to the devil to come hang out in the Slack channel. There's a Q&A form. We answer one of these every morning, maybe your question will be next.
\n\nBy the way, here's some fun and interesting stuff that we're up to this week, come check it out. You can find this all on therelicans.com and we've got the internal page over here, and we've got this over here. And then you just have an opportunity daily to communicate this, what feels like a waterfall of work coming out of your team, but getting those daily touchpoints, or maybe weekly to start is a good place to go.
\n\nMANDO: I love the idea of morning announcements, especially as for specific teams. You assume that a certain size of an org to be able to do this kind of stuff. The place that I'm at right now, there's 4 of us total, so we're not going to be doing this kind of thing. But my last gig, there were thousands of people who worked there and I was in charge of the operations team.
\n\nJONAN: I actually think the morning news show is a really good way to do that, but you're right that in a smaller team, it's not as relevant. I would argue however, that you're doing it anyway, because with 4 people, you're able to communicate everything that you're all working on all the time.
\n\nMANDO: That is exactly what happens.
\n\nJONAN: And you don't have to scale.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nJONAN: But it's nice to be bought in on the dream and to feel like you're living your life with purpose and work is a huge part of our lives whether we like it or not. We live in this system and we get to choose every day. I choose to live a life that feels purposeful. I choose to seek meaning because I want to wake up in the morning and be excited to come to work. I want to help lift up the rest of my team so that we're out there making more developers who get to turn this into their dream, which we can't know or predict. I just want to help those people get over the line because I now have desperate it feels on the other side of the fence.
\n\nI mean, I worked 16-hour days for several years at 5 different jobs and I came home and the world was telling me to live myself up by my bootstraps. You’ve got to be kidding me. That's your American dream? Come on.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I got no more bootstraps.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. I want you politician to go and spend 3 hours getting a jug of milk that you pay twice as much as it's necessary for it and have to take two buses to find. I want you to have that experience, how desperate and time consuming and expensive it is to be poor in this country and then lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Because it's not a thing.
\n\nWe have a finite amount of motivation, of will in our day to spend and you've got to make the room. You've got to pay yourself first in that. Get up in the morning and write some code and then go exhaust yourself so your employer gets shortchanged. Your fourth job of the day, they're going to get a little bit less of your time and energy because you gave it to yourself first. That's how you're going to build a wedge to get into tech and I want to be there to help people do that thing. That's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is making more developers and supporting them as that grow.
\n\nI mean, I can see dystopia from here. The tech is headed towards a place.
\n\nMANDO: Oh, yeah.
\n\nJONAN: We have 1% of people on earth able to program today and we're about to double the global access to high-speed internet. When Starling comes on board – they're launching 70 satellites a month now. When Starlight comes on board, everyone on earth will have access to hopefully low-cost, high-speed internet access. We will double the global audience for many of our services. That's going to be real bad for the world if that 1% who can program and control most of the money in power on the internet becomes half a percent. Historically, that has not worked out great for humanity. So we need to start loosening that up.
\n\nWe need to make more developers yesterday by the thousands, by the millions. We need more people writing this code and helping us to turn this industry into a place that we want to be because the model culture is not going to make it. We will extinct us. We will eliminate humanity whether only the soul or in reality, if we continue down this path where we have a whole bunch of people collected in Valley somewhere, who are defining the rest of the planet. Facebook had no small part in recent revolutions around the world. That's tech. That's us. Whether you want to own it or not, you contributed to the culture and the software that built that monster.
\n\nREIN: And the other side to making more developers is not having work that chews up and spits out their desiccated husks at a profoundly troubling rate.
\n\nJONAN: It's true. It’s absolutely true and I think that that's equally, if not more important, that we're not feeding more to the machine. We have toxic spaces in our companies and in our communities and we define them. We need to change them. We need to create better ones. That's, I think a better option, even because you're not going to change that many people's minds. I think that especially this late in the game, for many people—people who have had success with their bad opinions—they continue to spout those bad opinions and believe them.
\n\nMake a new space. Make a new space and prove it. Show your community, the numbers. If you have another meetup, because the one you're going to has had 18 months of 18 white men speaking and mostly the same people, then make a new meetup and see if the community likes it better and I bet you, they will. I bet you, they'll come. If you build it, they will come. But we got to do the work to make these places better before we just bring people in and watch them suffer.
\n\nI can't do that anymore. I can't be that person in the world. For a while, I stopped speaking at code schools and bootcamps because I felt like a monster because I knew what I was setting these people up for. I was looking around tech and seeing the poison and I was bringing people, who I genuinely cared about, to the slaughter and I couldn't do it anymore. But I think that now I can do along the way is advise them how to avoid it, what red flags to look out for, how to find the good parts in between, and that's a better approach. It enables me to feel good about my work.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah. Building up that, I don't want to jump us to reflections yet, but the thing that I keep coming back to is the desire to help your friends.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: And for me, personally, something that I've been struggling with for a long time now and it's really crystallized over the past, I don't know, year or so, is seemingly how few people have that desire. Maybe not have the desire, I think it's natural to have a desire to want to help your friends. But maybe there's so few people who see everybody as someone who is potentially your friend and someone that you want to help. It's like, they'd be willing to help the person that they hang out with every weekend. But they're going to step over the homeless guy who is standing in front of Target while they walk in. You know what I mean?
\n\nJONAN: Yeah, and I don't think that they're bad people. Like, I’m not actually a big believer in bad people; I think that there are good misguided people. I don't think there are a whole lot of humans on this earth, with the exception of maybe a handful, who wake up in the morning to do evil. Who wakes up and is like, “Man, today, I'm going to make some real bad days for those around me.” They mostly, I think, believe that they're contributing too good to the world and many of them are very misguided in those attempts, to be clear. There are people actively contributing harm every day, but they don't see it as such.
\n\nSo we have that piece of the conversation and the other part, where I just fail to have empathy for other people, is probably in part about not having good experiences. When I reached out to other people, having a form of attachment in my life, maybe when I was younger, that was traumatic for me. That taught me that I could not trust the world to catch me when I fall; that I couldn't trust other people will be there for me and to show up. Because of that, I had to rely on myself and here I go again on my own.
\n\nThis song I'm off on this walk and it's just me and I need to look out for myself because nobody else will. It's the hurt people hurt people. We saw a church sign when I was driving with my son when he was quite young and he said, “Hurt people hurt people. Why do they want to hurt people so bad?” So internally, in our family, this became a chant: hurt people hurt people instead of hurt people hurt people conversation.
\n\nBut I think the part where we are perpetually enacting our traumas on those around us, because as a society, we've decided that addressing your own traumas, getting your own crap out of the way first is somehow a taboo subject. Like, just go to therapy, people. We just have to put mandatory therapy for people. I want to see a government program that institutes mandatory therapy for people. I'm sure the people will love that.
\n\n“Oh sure, everyone gets to see a doctor now. I bet you don't want people to die of preventable diseases either?” No, I don't. I want people to get over their collective trauma and stop harming other people because you were harmed and it takes work. Because you got to do the work if you're going to make the world a better place.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, I don't know. I personally feel like it's difficult for me when it seems as though the trauma is ongoing. Without this turning into my own therapy session, it makes me sad to see how different I've become over the past year. Is it a year ago? I would've said the same thing that you did, Jonan where I didn't believe that most people were awful monsters hellbent on destroying me and everyone that I love. I don't know so much that I believe that anymore.
\n\nJONAN: I think
\n\nJESSICA: They don't think of themselves as monsters.
\n\nMANDO: Right, right.
\n\nJESSICA: They may be hellbent on destroying you because they really think that's somehow good are wrong.
\n\nMANDO: Right. At the end of the day, you're absolutely right, Jessica. How much of that matters? How much of that distinction matters?
\n\nJESSICA: It does matter.
\n\nJONAN: I think it does.
\n\nJESSICA: It matters in what we do about it.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: And I don't want to destroy them either. I do want to segregate them off in their own little world.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. I love that.
\n\nMANDO: For me, the ratios make it work in the other direction.
\n\nJESSICA: Like you want to segregate off in your own little world?
\n\nMANDO: Well, just that there's way more of them.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, okay.
\n\nMANDO: And so, putting them off someplace would never happen.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah. I think it's worth noting here that I am a large loud white man speaking from a place of tremendous privilege in that I maybe have experienced less of that “You don't get to exist.” Like, “You're not welcomed here in life in general.” Not even a maybe but that like over my lifetime, very few people have come out to me and just said like, “I wish that you weren't a thing. I wish that you as a human didn't exist on this earth, that you were never born, that your parents were never born.” I've not had that experience. I mean, I have when I've received somehow particular malice from someone usually as a result of my ridiculous jokes.
\n\nJESSICA: But then it’s personal which yeah.
\n\nJONAN: But then it’s personal and that’s [inaudible]. People who don't even know me. So yeah, I do. I speak from that position, but I think that this is another – gosh, I'm really not trying to be like let's all come together and have a conversation person because some are too far gone from that. But I think that I'm not ready to give up on humanity as a whole just yet, as much as I'm inclined to. I might be ready to give up on the United States, looking into options overseas.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nREIN: I think for me, the reason this distinction is so important is because when someone claims that there's just evil in the world and these chaotic forces, it decontextualizes people's behavior from ideology, from culture, from socialization, from the worldviews that they have that mediate these behaviors.
\n\nSo I think it's important to understand that people aren't just evil. People have certain worldviews and ideologies and that those manifest in these behaviors.
\n\nJONAN: And that we built the –
\n\nJESSICA: Which meant the ideology is evil.
\n\nJONAN: It makes the ideologies evil.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, which causes the behavior of the people to be evil. That if – [overtalk]
\n\nJONAN: And these are the systems that we build and perpetuate.
\n\nJESSICA: Right, exactly and if we keep blaming the people and saying, “There are evil people,” then we will never fix the system.
\n\nJONAN: Exactly.
\n\nREIN: The most profound example of this I am aware of and if this is too heavy, we can cut it out of the show is [laughter] when Jordan Peterson claimed that the Nazi's final solution was because they were just evil, chaotic forces. In fact, their worldview demanded it. Their ideology demanded it.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, there was nothing chaotic about that.
\n\nJONAN: No, it was pretty organized.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nMANDO: Thanks, IBM.
\n\nJONAN: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Did you say IBM?
\n\nMANDO: I said thanks IBM for their efforts.
\n\nJONAN: And Bosch and every other company, right?
\n\nMANDO: Yeah.
\n\nJONAN: I mean, the world would not be able to sustain its current population without the work of Bosch creating nitrogen out of the air and also, then the Nazis used it to get gunpowder when they had no access.
\n\nSo we have a lot of those kinds of systems that we've built over the years and that's absolutely a part of it. You talked about the industries that are involved across these bridges. You don't get to show up to work, team and just be like, “I don't actually care about the impact that I have on humans. I care about the impact that I have on this graph.” You can't be that person anymore if we're going to make it and you can't walk around and point at those people and be like, “Yeah, they were fundamentally flawed from birth.” Whatever that thing means to you, you can't just say like, “Yeah, that person's evil. They probably had bad parenting.” Yeah, maybe they did. But I know a lot of people who had bad parenting or no parenting and turned out okay because they fought their way up that mountain. They overcame it.
\n\nJESSICA: And they found friends, it helps them.
\n\nJONAN: Yes.
\n\nJESSICA: It's not, “Fight your way up the mountain, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” No, it's, “Keep looking for a better place,” and by place, I mean friend group.
\n\nJONAN: Yes. Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about you and care about the things that you care about. I wish I'd learned that earlier in my life. Man, I hung out with some people who had different values than I did over the years and I changed my life just by finding a good friend.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Because we are social animals and we really are the people we're closest to.
\n\nMANDO: Yeah, absolutely.
\n\nJESSICA: That's what makes sense with us. That is the world we live in. What was that John Gall quote from earlier? “I respect facts, but I live in impressions.” Especially the default appropriate behavior is whatever the people around us do ad that is what we will fall back to without active intervention and we only have so much of that willpower to combat in a day.
\n\nREIN: Oh, I've got a new thing for a fact that I just read. So this is from Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior and there's a diagram where reality minus meaningfulness equals facts.
\n\nMANDO: I’d buy that.
\n\nJESSICA: I mean, okay. But reality very broadly because when we're looking at more than what's just in front of us, it comes to us as facts and stories, but stories can lead us either way. Oh, manipulated facts can, too. But we still have to look for facts in order to realign our vision of reality and meaning with something bigger than we can personally see.
\n\nMANDO: Have y'all seen the movie In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter, back from the 90s? It's a super good kind of thriller horror movie, kind of Lovecraftian in the ancient ones are coming to take over and stuff like that.
\n\nBut it's about this guy who, he's an author. His name is Sutter Cane. He's like the new Stephen King; super prolific and writes these kind of horrifying, terrifying books that are just sweeping the zeitgeist. And then something changes and it seems as though his books start affecting the people who are reading his books, not in the [inaudible] was a genius, I’ve been affected by it, but making them bleed from their eyes and go crazy affected.
\n\nSo the movie plays around with these ideas of facts and reality as something that is mostly shared and understood as opposed to something that is concrete and stands alone by itself. It's super freaky and really good. My daughter and I just watched it again a couple of days ago so it's kind of fresh on the mind, but I highly recommend it. I think it's on Amazon Prime.
\n\nJONAN: I think I like this discussion because it speaks to weaving the facts into the narrative of your life. You need to leave the reality that you're presented with and the reality that people share with you, the facts into the story that is you develop that shared story we're all telling together.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. You need a Dirk gently belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things sort of thing. Another thing is diagram is that phenomena minus interconnecting context equals objects. So the whole point, well, for me, what I take to be the point is you have the fact, but you have to understand them in context.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, the connections. And the weaving is really important because we can't understand anything top down. We can't understand anything bottom up, not fully. You have to weave back and forth.
\n\nREIN: By the way, Lewontin in his biology, his ideology lectures, talks about how the mechanistic approach to understanding the world didn't work, but the holistic approach and isolation didn't work either. So Jessica, exactly what you're talking about that you need both.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah.
\n\nJONAN: All right. Reflections time. What do we do for reflections?
\n\nMANDO: I'll go first. There was a lot in the conversation, but right here towards the end, the idea of who we spend time with and we are who we keep that small circle of friends with is super important. I had this realization, Jessica, as you were talking about that that my deep-seated negativity that's been growing in me for the past year or so, it comes out more and more and it really only comes out with that small, tight circle of friends.
\n\nSo I need to be very, very careful that I'm not turning into the toxic one [laughs] in my group and that might be a way to help me self-regulate this stuff. It’s not like I don't want to share it because I do because these people, they're my family. Like, I’ll lay down in traffic for them.
\n\nJESSICA: Is it something that emerges within the group or do you only see it in yourself?
\n\nMANDO: No, no, no. It's only in me. I mean, not only, but you know what I mean? Like it's what's more pronounced and sometimes, I feel like I'm convincing [laughs] them, which I don't want to do.
\n\nJESSICA: Because eventually, they'll reflect that back and it'll spiral.
\n\nMANDO: Right. Exactly. I don't want to turn them into me. [laughs] So I should be more careful and maybe listen a little more.
\n\nREIN: We started and we ended this conversation by talking about people helping each other and about friends and as I've been studying resilience engineering, what I realized that it's about is the ecology of human performance. If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and their experiences and sharing adaptive capacity—people helping each other when they need help. So ecology of human performance and sharing of adaptive capacity.
\n\nThere's a story in science, in social biology that humans are inherently aggressive and competitive and domineering, and that this explains and motivates and justifies social systems of domination and oppression and so on. And what, at least my experience tells me is that the reason their people are putting so much effort into asserting these things to be true, is that the plain evidence of our eyes is they're not true. That people are helping people, that that's what we're good at.
\n\nJESSICA: Something that stood out to me from early is there was a question about how do you convince people that something is valuable when it's not going to move the metrics that they're currently looking at? And sometimes what is needed, if it works, it's going to be obvious that it works even if it's not going to be measurable by what you're measuring now. Jonan had made the point that if you get enough people on board and everyone in the room considers this, obviously the right thing to do, then it becomes obvious in a social sense and that makes it easier to convince someone.
\n\nJONAN: I think these all tie together for me. I think talking about being vulnerable and understanding what it takes and how that is necessary to really build empathy on the other side, to just stand up and talk about the things that suck, talk about who you are in a real way and have the deeper conversation.
\n\nI'm sure it's happened to you all, but there've been plenty of times in my life where I sat down with someone and 5 minutes later, I felt like we were just opened like, this is just me and reaching that level of vulnerability, sometimes never comes for some people and that ultimately, to me is this kind of curve of self-actualization that humans are setting up for their lifetime, hopefully.
\n\nWe can help people up on that and especially people who have had the kind of privilege that I've had, this wind at my back, and I'm not even just talking about all of the socioeconomic pieces. I'm talking about you. I’m talking about all three of you, you being my friends, being here to support me, you make it possible for me to hand that support onto the people around me and it's not actually a choice at some level. You have demonstrated as peers, the kind of behavior that I want to emulate. And I have no choice, but to spend the rest of my life, trying to offer that hand to the next person, who's going to come along and continue doing the good work that you all are doing.
\n\nSo I am feeling grateful today, more than anything, for having been here and had this conversation. So thank you all.
Special Guest: Jonan Scheffler.
Sponsored By:
01:49 - Kurt’s Superpower: Lifting Others Up: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
\n\n07:00 - “Self-Taught” vs “Self-Guided” vs “Self-Motivated” Developers
\n\n11:32 - The Intersection of Incarceration and Technology
\n\n22:15 - Having Privilege Working in DevRel to Raise These Issues
\n\n26:51 - Helping and Advocating For the Formerly Incarcerated
\n\n29:32 - The Interview Process as it Relates to the Formerly Incarcerated
\n\n36:26 - Always Be Applying (ABA); Technical Interviews and Fabrication/Bending Truths
\n\n45:29 - Problematic Binary Identities
\n\n47:07 - What can companies and hiring managers do? / Problems with Hiring in Tech and Tech Interviews
\n\n01:05:19 - Contextualizing Advice
\n\nReflections:
\n\nKurt: Community is what you surround yourself with.
\n\nLaurie: Having empathy and understanding as a hiring manager for people who have perceivably negative things in their background.
\n\nJacob: Polyglotism and not being so gatekeep-y.
\n\nJohn: Being reminded of how terrible our carceral state is here in the U.S.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
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\n\nJACOB: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 226 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, John Sawers.
\n\nJOHN: Thank you, Jacob and I’m here with Laurie Barth.
\n\nLAURIE: Thanks, John. I’m excited to introduce our guest today, Kurt Kemple.
\n\nKurt Kemple is a technical writer, speaker, and software developer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s very passionate about the intersection of technology and incarceration. Currently, he works for Apollo GraphQL, as a Developer Relations Manager and when not working he can be found by the ocean or relaxing with his family, which sounds really incredible.
\n\nSo Kurt, I'm going to have you start us off by answering the question we ask all of our guests, which is what is your developer superpower?
\n\nKURT: Well, first thank you for that awesome introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.
\n\nSo diving into what is my superpower, I thought about this a lot and I'm not really someone who I feel has some innate skill or ability that really makes me stand out in any particular area. But I think one thing that I do really well is I care very much about lifting up the people around me. I work actively to generally help others more than I'm helping myself. I think the rising tide lifts all boats kind of mentality and I think that that is definitely something that sets me apart is I gauge my success by how successful folks around me are.
\n\nJACOB: That sounds fantastic. Was that something you felt like you've always done, or was it something do you consciously develop, or did it just sort of come around?
\n\nKURT: I think it evolved out of situations in my life. I've dealt with a lot of stressful situations and pretty tough upbringing and I think a lot of it is just finding opportunities to make sure people don't have to experience those things and not being so drastic that it's always in relation to something very life altering. But there's something about removing roadblocks for other folks that you have the ability to do that is very rewarding to me and I think I just started to realize that later in life that that's something I value greatly.
\n\nLAURIE: That's really interesting to hear because I think in a lot of areas of technology and in the industry, we often hear people saying like, “I had to do it, so you have to do it, too.” I've heard that with sort of the toxic interview, it's almost like hazing mentality and the tools may be abstracted, but if you don't know the super, super low-level piece of it, then you're never going to understand it the way I do sort of mentality. A lot of this gatekeeping stuff comes from that. So it's really refreshing to hear that you feel sort of the opposite of that.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. Like I remember very distinctly, many times starting out programming, like getting the response: RTFM. It's like, people, they don't want to help for whatever reason. They want you to – it's like almost like a badge of honor; forcing folks to figure things out for themselves. There's something to be said with taking on learning as your own responsibility, but part of learning is knowing how to get answers and ask for help when you aren't figuring it out and so, I definitely really cannot stand to see that kind of lift the ladder up behind me mentality, or pull yourself up by the bootstraps type mentality.
\n\nJACOB: So who are those people around you in your role with Apollo? Who are the people that you would measure the success of?
\n\nKURT: Yeah. So it's actually spread out across multiple things, but I'll start from Apollo. I'm a manager of the developer relations team so definitely my direct reports absolutely care about how well they are doing as well as the DX organization, it extends out to their world.
\n\nWe're all part of developer experience and we want to make sure that things we're doing is helping lifting up the education team and DX as a whole. And then of course, that spreads out into Apollo, which is just by helping developers be successful with Apollo, we're actually helping a policy succeed.
\n\nBut when we talk about developer relations, really that's just communities I'm involved with at all. So that could be anybody from the communities that I'm a part of, whether that's content creation, DevRel, things around GraphQL, or developments, it could be anything related to that. Pretty much any person that I have interaction with, I start to look at ways in which I can help them move forward.
\n\nJOHN: It's funny the phrase “bootstrap” is so embedded in our culture because it's coming from – it’s technical terminology at this point, but it's so interesting and I think important to think back to the origin of that phrase, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was satirical because it's obviously, not possible to do that for you. You can't lift yourself by grabbing your boots and that's the whole point, but it's almost like turned over on itself and becoming oh, that's just what you do as economic policy or a social policy despite the fact that it was originally the complete opposite of that.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's funny. I never really thought about that, but it's very true. They took something that was meant to be like satire, like, “Oh yeah, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and then turned it into something serious. I still view it as satire. To me, it's the silliest phrase ever, but a lot of folks take that very seriously.
\n\nJACOB: What else is satire or was originally satire was the word, “meritocracy”?
\n\nKURT: Oh wow.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah. It was basically like oh, the new aristocracy of people who think they're on top because of their merit; it's the meritocracy. It's something else I think about is the phrase self-taught; ex self-taught developer, self-taught engineer, or the million Medium posts of how I taught myself to code in 12 weeks. What does that mean, taught yourself? Do you have no interactions with any human?
\n\nJOHN: You didn’t think a human produced?
\n\nLAURIE: Yeah. The self-taught thing is actually really complicated and nuanced in my mind because a lot of people like to claim it and say, “Well, we're all self-taught because we all read blog posts and have to teach ourselves other things because as a developer, you're always learning new things and so, we can all claim that title.” And then there's the area of people who consider themselves self-taught, but they were working one-on-one through DMs with someone that is a working developer and they know really well.
\n\nBut then there's actually a last category of people, which is what I feel the label was sort of designed for, which is they never had any formal classroom experience that taught them like, the variable goes on the left side of the expression. So they had to learn just those super fundamental syntactical things through reading and through example videos and potentially sometimes asking questions, but it was a very async process. I think that's what self-taught is designed to imply that there wasn't a curriculum laid out in front of them and that they didn't have a helping hand along the way.
\n\nI think there's something incredibly powerful about that and I hate the idea that it's been co-opted as well, everyone's self-taught, I'm like, “No, I got to sit in a computer science program and have teachers tell me what I needed to know in a certain order.” Was that necessarily the best way for me to learn? No. Did I have to go in and teach myself how to do things after that fact and for the rest of my career? Absolutely. But did I have some of those baseline foundational things conveyed to me based on someone who knew the order of operations of learning this topic? I did. So I am not self-taught in any sense of the word.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. I think that's very interesting point and what I've been using. So I'm the other end of that spectrum. No official – that's actually not true, I took intro or intermediate web development course when I was incarcerated. But this was basically, here's a book on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and good luck.
\n\nBut aside from that, I had no real formal education, but I've adopted the term self-guided, which I feel is a better descriptor of that. Because it's more about guiding yourself through a curriculum to learn programming and it's like, you're pulling bits and pieces from wherever. You can find it to create your own curriculum is essentially what you're doing. But I did learn from lots of other folks along that journey, both through asynchronous communication and DMs, watching videos, reading, blog posts and stuff. So it's not like I was in a room with no outside influence and had a computer and was like, “I will code.” But I think I really like that term, self-guided, because that's a better representation, I feel like of what actually happened.
\n\nLAURIE: I love that and it reminds me of when I was in high school where you get to take independent study and it's sort of the same concept of you get to go in-depth on a topic, but you're determining what shape that takes and where you go and what you focus on.
\n\nJACOB: What successful means.
\n\nKURT: Yeah.
\n\nJACOB: And then no one will probably care, to be truthful. No one will actually care if you don't do it.
\n\nLAURIE: Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing; self-motivated is a big part of that. Like, no one's grading papers or assignments. There's no papers in coding.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nNo one is grading assignments. You don't have deadlines that are imposed by other people. If you buy the course and you never watch a single video, the only one accountable for that is sunk cost fallacy of having wasted the money. There's nothing forcing you to power through and that's actually a great way to prepare yourself for coding on the job. Because it's like, technically, there's just this ticket and you need to be looking at it and feel the sense of oh no, I need to get this done because no one can actually force you to do it! [laughs]
\n\nKURT: Yeah. That's very accurate. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Concurred. It sounds like from your bio there that the group of people that you consider yourself to be responsible for helping to lift up is beyond just the team that you're responsible for. So I’d love to hear more about the other groups that you're working with on that level.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. So, I think it's interesting when we talk about community and groups and to me, community is not like a thing with guidelines and boundaries, community is whoever you surround yourself with and so, to me, there is no React community, or GraphQL community. There's just people in my community who happened to know React, or GraphQL and I think it's an interesting way to look at community because it breaks down a lot of barriers.
\n\nBut if we do talk about specific groups, I am very into the intersection of incarceration and technology and the reason why is because I myself am formerly incarcerated and getting into tech had such a drastic effect on my life. So it’s just naturally, I want to and again, a lot of this motivation for lifting others up stems from this. I feel like I am often sitting on a gold mine and I feel selfish when I know that there are people who were in a similar situation who are coming out of prison and don't have any idea that this industry exists, that they can have a future in it with some self-guided learning, some hard work, and a lot of perseverance. It's by no means easy, let's be real.
\n\nCoding is a very difficult skill, but most folks can accomplish that goal of learning it and it just feels like if I'm not actively working to help expose people, who are coming out of incarceration, find this industry and see if it's a fit for them, then I feel like I'm just like holding something that I should be freely giving away. I think a lot of where it comes with lifting others up is that feeling of, I'm holding something that other people should have access to and that's education, information.
\n\nWhen we talk about self-guided, it's actually one thing about picking your own curriculum that is anxiety inducing is, am I picking the right things to learn? The industry is huge and you could pick so many different things and I lucked out that I was introduced to something that was a good path into tech for me.
\n\nI would like to provide folks coming out the information that the industry exists, but also a little bit of guidance around some of the different ways that you can go and break into it. So I'd say that is definitely a community, or a group of folks in my community that I care deeply about is those who are transitioning from incarceration back into society.
\n\nLAURIE: I'm curious if – obviously, this is an experience and a community that a lot of us don't have a lot of insight into and it's great that you do and you have those connections. Can you talk to us a little bit about the kinds of things that we all can do to make that transition easier to support those groups of people, whether it's in an organization or outside of that?
\n\nKURT: Yeah. I'll say there's really two avenues where you can do a lot of good. One is in de-stigmatization. So it's sharing information about incarceration, figuring out who these people in the community are, building relationships with them, checking at your companies, and seeing if they're adhering to the laws around hiring formerly incarcerated folks.
\n\nA lot of times background checks will violate labor laws within states and companies don't check that. They say, “Give me the default. I want all the information.” It's up to the company to actually check and make sure that they have the proper configuration that they're not losing people based on laws.
\n\nA good example of this is in California, they can only look 7 years back on your record for criminal activity, barring certain types of activity. But for most things, only 7 years. However, there's companies that will do background checks and pull stuff up from way back. I had this happen with a company and I was like, “Hey, just to let you know, you're not allowed to pull up information from when you did. You showing me that you found my background is actually admitting that you're violating the state laws.”
\n\nNow here's where the problem lies. It takes people who are the ones, the vulnerable being affected by it to push this forward because our only recourse is to hire a lawyer and to fight it in court. I'm jobless, have just come out of prison; I don't have any money for a lawyer to fight some company, to do that and then do you want to go now work for a company that you had to fight for the job in court?
\n\nSo it takes people who are not in that situation asking their employer, “Hey, what is our policy on hiring formerly incarcerated? What programs do we have in place to make sure we're not dropping them out of the pipeline?” That's a huge one.
\n\nAnd then the second one is most people don't really want to go back to prison. That's not always true. You have people who actually do want to go because it's a place where they can get more stability and safety and stuff than they can. That says a lot about the United States as a whole, but most people, they come into prison with high hopes.
\n\nI wasn't the only one in that web programming class like, I wasn't the only one learning how to train dogs, learning welding, carpentry, plumbing; taking every course that was available to me. There's a lot of other folks, too. But what people don't have and why recidivism is so high is there's no stability. So we get these skills. We get out into the world. We have no income. We have no job history for years because of this. Companies that would hire folks for the skills that we have learned are doing background checks and turning us down because of them.
\n\nSo it's like yeah, we're learning skills, we're learning stuff, but none of it can actually be used until x amount of years after you get out and you're just kind of left floating there. So finding programs, local programs that are based in civil activities, providing housing, providing food, providing access to equipment and education, further education for folks coming out of incarceration. Those are the two best places that you can by far have a huge impact.
\n\n$50 worth of food can be the difference between somebody going back to prison or not. Because if they don't have it, they're going to revert to what they know and what they know is crime often, and then boom, they go back. Of course, if we look at who's the most affected by this, it's marginalized communities. So focusing on those communities is especially going to be impactful.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I would also imagine that the lack of a support system in the outside world is also a huge factor there. Like you were saying the $50, people that have a support system can probably make-do relying on other people that they know to help out, to get by through that part where they need that extra money for food. But if you don't have that, there aren't really any other options.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It took me almost 3 years to land my first job coding as a software developer and I can pinpoint multiple times during that 3 years where I came very close to committing a crime again and that's wild to think about now. Now, I would never in a million years do anything, but I also have stability.
\n\nIt’s just a living example, somebody directly in front of you just proving that the prison system, prison industrial complex is really just a money-making machine that is not incentivized in any way to help provide you with stability and keep you out of prison. Most of our prisons are actually owned by private businesses and private businesses need revenue and for a private prison, what do you think the revenue stream is? Prison labor, slave labor, me working for 14 cents an hour. That is how they make money. So what is the real incentivization, or real incentive, I guess, is the actual word to actually have programs to help people be stable when they get out? To provide learning and education around things they'll actually be able to get jobs for? To not have lobbyists literally fight to keep laws around hiring formerly incarcerated as strict and terrible as they are?
\n\nSo the prison industrial complex literally sends people to Congress and have them lobby against improving these systems and then they pay people at the state level and it's just like all the way down. They pay judges to make sure they send non-violent offenders into the prison system. It's a nightmare of a system, but to circle back to that, that $50 makes a huge difference and can really be the differentiator.
\n\nLAURIE: For what it's worth, I appreciate you being so candid about all of this. I think it's a topic that some of us are tangentially aware of, but don't necessarily have the specifics. I remember some of this from my poly-sci degree and it was horrible then and it's worse now.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's not fun or pleasant, but I am privileged enough to be in a position to candidly speak about it and so, again, if we use manager speak, [chuckles] circle back to lifting up others and feeling like I'm holding onto something.
\n\nThis stuff is really stressful. It's hard to talk about even with as much as I do, but I find that the DMs that I get from folks who are struggling and trying to get into tech. When they reach out to me and they're like, “I found your blog posts or this podcast or video and it gave me hope,” I'm going to keep trying that's that motivates the ever-living crap out of me and it far outweighs that pressure.
\n\nBut another thing, too is not everyone is in a position to be able to speak about this. It's just, I've developed enough of a brand and identity in the industry. I have enough of a work background. The incidents have happened so far in the past now that they can't really be held against me for finding future work. So not everyone has that situation.
\n\nLAURIE: I'm curious if you feel like being in the developer relations space has impacted your ability to have those conversations and have those interactions and be more visible compared to some sort of a more IC coding role where you don't necessarily have the same kind of network effect based on the work that you're doing day-to-day.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. Oh, that's a really interesting insight. I mean, yes, the faster the audience grows that I can reach, clearly, it’s the more people I can reach with this message. So I definitely think DevRel has put me into a situation where I can reach more people faster because my network is growing faster than it was as an individual contributor. So yeah, a 100%.
\n\nI think it's also interesting to find the balance between like, we all know how tech folks feel about people being people and having lives outside of technology. So it's like finding that line of growing your audience while producing information about things or causes that you care about and stuff without causing a lot of churn in drop off is a feat in and of itself. Every time I tweet about prison or something like that, I watch my followers drop. It's just like you can set a clock to it. But it's an interesting balance to try to not overshare in that regard and just continue to lose audience because then that affects things like algorithms and how many people I reach and stuff. So it is interesting. I never really thought about that, though.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that like the way you talk about the work you're doing. At this point, you have the privilege to be able to talk about those things when so many people don't and that's certainly a powerful way to use that privilege that you currently have.
\n\nWhat you're talking about there is losing follower count, which affects your job a little bit and trying to balance how you're talking about these things without cussing yourself too much. But it's interesting that those are the costs that you're weighing about speaking out and you know what those are and you also know that so many other people can't speak out because their consequences are going to be so much more drastic.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, absolutely. When we start to look at this through the lens of bias in the industry. I am cis white dude; I have the benefit of like failing upwards. So it's like me going to prison, I get to spin it as this redemption story and I get to be the symbol of hope for prisoners coming out and breaking into tech. But it's not the same story for a lot of folks that I talk to who don't look like me or aren't basically white men. It gets really tough the further you get from that.
\n\nSo I also want to call out, too that a lot of times, the privilege to be able to speak is based on literal white privilege; I always get the benefit of the doubt. It's interesting, but yes, I get the benefit of doubt. I get to fail upwards. I'm formerly incarcerated, who's now the DevRel manager of Apollo. But I know so many other formerly incarcerated people who are way better at this stuff than I am and they still haven't found a work yet.
\n\nSo those disparities exist and when you compound other issues that the tech industry faces against that. Like, the hiring rate for formerly incarcerated Black women is like 4% or something ridiculous like that according to last statistics, from what I could find, which was about 2019. That's 4% compared to white males, which is about 43 or 44%. We have to take that into account, too. That privilege is steeped in white male privilege as well.
\n\nJOHN: It's like the prison association just magnifies all of those existing inequities.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You're an ex-con, or a felon—I get to be formerly incarcerated, not a felon.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, the language matters a lot.
\n\nKURT: Oh, yeah.
\n\nJACOB: So what are some of the details of how you're helping folks? It looks like you have, it’s a Twitch stream? I just pulled up your Twitter account just a minute ago, but tell me details.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's interesting. So when we think about helping people, I have stream, which I do a lot, a lot of blogging, involved in a lot of communities. Most of the work that I do. So if we're just talking about community in general, also the Apollo stream; I do a lot of streaming for them. My calendar is open; folks drop in there a lot.
\n\nWhen it comes to helping formerly incarcerated, that's a lot more scaled down and on a one-on-one basis because every single person has a different situation. Also, a lot of them can't come forward and say that they're formerly incarcerated. There's an entire network of folks. Some of them can and they have, but there's an entire network of folks who I'm working with regularly and just, nobody knows because they can't really share or express that information.
\n\nBut I really focus on a couple of things, which is helping them figure out their path into tech, what it is that they'll like. So trying to get them guided on that, helping them build their network, teaching them about things like learning in public and how to do that. We work on freelance, because it's really hard for folks to get jobs, full-time employment so we focus on freelance work and how to look for red flags, clients, promote yourself, and stuff like that.
\n\nIt's generally different for each person because it all depends on where they are on the scale of their education into tech, how stable is their environment at home. It's just a lot of things that go into it. I am working on starting a nonprofit to formalize this training, but it's very slow going. I just really don't have the time that I would like to dedicate to it.
\n\nSome other ways that I've been helping out is there's a really cool nonprofit project called The Marshall Project. They take a data-driven approach to exposing issues within the criminal justice system. I do a lot of stuff with that. I sponsor and support a lot of prison reform lawyers. They don't get paid a lot and stuff like that so monetary support for them, monetary support for the people who are coming out, who need that.
\n\nThere's really where I spend most of my focus, but if you ask anyone, I'm available. If somebody wants or needs something from me, I try to make myself available I talk to a wide range of people from all different communities about all sorts of different things. But I don't really have a centralized way, a singular path into helping folks out. It's pretty disparate, honestly.
\n\nLAURIE: This is a slightly different topic, but it's something you touched on and what you just said. I'm wondering if we can talk about the interview process as it relates to being formerly incarcerated and revealing that information. Because I think one of the –
\n\nI had an interaction with someone a couple of years back who said, “I got all the way through the process. I didn't tell them they offered me the job and now I have to tell them because it's about to come up on a background check,” which the efficacy of that we can discuss for a long time. “But it's about to come up on a background check, what do I do? How do I have this conversation?” I think we all know that especially for entry level positions, there's thousands of applicants and the minute you give them one red flag, they're like, “Oh, well, we have 500 other people to talk to.”
\n\nSo what has been your experience with talking to people going through this and how they can navigate what is already an incredibly stressful and difficult process, even not having some flags that unfortunately, don't get perceived the way that we wish they would?
\n\nKURT: Yeah, this is a really great question.
\n\nIt’s the most – I won't say the most, it is an extremely stress and anxiety inducing situation. I've developed a system over the years from having dealt with this, but in the beginning, it was very chaotic. You would just get through the process; you don't say that you have a record, you don't come upfront and say it. You never do that. If they're going to do a background check, let them do it.
\n\nI've had situations where companies have made me fill out paperwork for background check and then they never, I guess, submitted it because they never came and said anything about it, or maybe at that job, they were following their state's laws and it didn't come back. I would say it's a multi-step process.
\n\nSo first things first, never say that you have a background upfront. Second of all, is investigate the state laws around hiring the formerly incarcerated for that company for where they are located. Where is their business set up at? Understand those state laws?
\n\nThe next thing that's going to happen is if you get through the interview process and they're going to do a background check, so what they always do—this is the most annoying thing. Oftentimes, you will sign your offer letter. You will have a start date. You will do all this and in there, it says contingent upon a background check. This puts you in this situation where, especially if you're at an existing company, you want to give them time. Do you put in your leave and throw all of your eggs into this basket only to then come on and then they do the background check and then it comes back and they fire you? It puts you in this just purely stressful situation for about two weeks.
\n\nBut a couple of things that you can do to get ahead of it is I started doing things where I will message them and I get real creative and I'm like, “Look, I've had issues with discrepancies, with insurance and other things, not going through before I've signed my start date and then there were problems, disagreements. I need to know all the paperwork. I need to have that signed upfront and have everything taken care of before I will decide on a start date. I want to make sure I give ample time to leave.” So sometimes that will work and that will get you a lot closer.
\n\nWhen that doesn't work, the other thing that I do is anytime they're going to do a background check, you have to consent to it and part of that consent is they'll tell you the company that they're going to use. If I've made it this far, I will then pay out of pocket and go get my own background check from this company. For most of them, you can do that. Now what it is that even if a company reaches out, I will put them off until I get the background check so I can see what has come back about my record so I can better prepare my statement for how I want to discuss this with them.
\n\nIf you make it through all of that and you get there, sometimes they just still are going to say no, or they'll just ghost you and I've had that happen to me, too. Just literally been ghosted and it's just hard, it's stressful. There's not a lot you can do with it. The best thing that you can do is understand the laws around the different 50 states, figure out which ones are the most forgiving towards you and your situation, apply for jobs—ideally, remotely—within that place. If you're in that position, a lot of people aren't in that position, but it's just stress-inducing nightmare.
\n\nOne thing that I did do is I always had backups. I would have offers from multiple jobs and accept multiple offers, which sucks. But then if I get one, I stay in and I don't, but I would stagger the start dates.
\n\nLAURIE: Wow.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. I learned that from my 3 years of trying to get my first job because even trying to work at Target, Walmart, all these places I check yes on that have you been convicted of a felony in the last 7 years and I'd never hear from them. So I just stopped checking it.
\n\nI would get a job at Target. I would work there for three weeks and then they would be like, “Hey, background check came through. Wish you wouldn't have lied to us. You're one of our best workers, but now we have to let you go.” It's like, “Well, cool. You wouldn't have hired me anyway. I'll take my 3-week paycheck. I've already got a job lined up at McDonald's. So I'm going to go work there for three weeks now.”
\n\nMy first 2 years out of prison, I had like at least 10 W-4s, at least 10, probably closer to 20 my first year and then I got a little bit smarter about places that I was picking through the second year so I was able to stay places longer. But you just have to do whatever you have to do or you have to resort back to crime, really.
\n\nThat's always, my advice to folks is rolling jobs like, ABA. Always be Applying. Always be applying for jobs and lining them up so if they come at you, “We did your background check. We're going to let you go.” You can just go to the next place and you don't have to go so long without having income.
\n\nLAURIE: That sounds like an incredibly stressful way to live.
\n\nKURT: It is a very stressful way to live. Yeah, it absolutely is. And that kind of comes back to tech can change lives. Even my first job was a really crappy paying job doing pretty boring work, but I was so happy when I actually got my first job. It changed my whole life. Literally changed my life and then after learning about the industry, finally getting my job, talking to other industry professionals, I was able to realize how drastically underpaid and overworked I was. Slowly started to work my way out of that and up to a standard developer salary for this day and age.
\n\nI make money today that I never dreamed in a world of possibility that I would ever make in my entire life ever. Never thought that this would be the life that I live today and it can really change folks' lives and that's why I'm so aggressively trying to help folks.
\n\nLAURIE: It's interesting that you talk about Always be Applying. There was some Twitter threads stuff going around a couple of weeks back about that in relation to the tech industry and talking about you should always see what's out there and see if there's better possibilities. My first reaction was interviewing is the most stressful part of working in tech, who would voluntarily do that if they're not looking to leave a job?
\n\nI suspect it is slightly less stressful in some ways, if you're applying to retail positions, but more stressful if you're dealing with something like a record. Just having to have that in the back of your mind and always trying to find a new job and that new security is – I mean, we talk about people in tech who do it every 1 to 3 years and that already seems like way too often. Every three weeks is just unfathomable to me.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's like you said, it's a lot of stress. By the time you figure out who everyone is, you're onto the next place. You get so tired of hearing, “You're one of our best workers, but we have to let you go.” You can only hear that so many times in a year before you just never want to hear that phrase again. It's just very aggravating for sure. I will say that that was less stressful than tech interviews in my opinion.
\n\nLAURIE: Oh, that's damning!
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, that was way less stressful. The anxiety of technical interviews, especially when they're asking me questions about my background, because I have to fabricate basically 10 years of my life and that was one of the hardest parts.
\n\nSo one of the hardest parts about having a record and not being able to share it, especially in an industry where everybody wants to know how you got there, it's very hard to build that lie around what you do and it starts to really weigh on you. I made me really depressed constantly having to lie. “Oh, how'd you learn how to code?” “Well, actually I was in prison and they had a course called Intermediate Web Page and I took it.” I can't say that. I can't say that.
\n\nSo I have to fabricate and then I just bend the truth, which it was true. Like, “Oh, a friend of mine was going to take this course, I decided to take it with them.” That was true. I just left out that that decision was made in prison. It's like, “Oh, I got my first taste of it and then I just started buying books to continue to learn and use any opportunity I could in front of a computer to continue programming.” Also true. Just didn’t mention that for the next about year and a half, I didn't have access to a computer and I picked that back up when I got out.
\n\nYeah. It's just about bending those truths and it's like, “Oh, well, where did you work?” Not a full lie, I'm like, “I did a lot of freelancing and consulting,” which I did. I did IT and website development and stuff, freelancing and consulting work, the little bits I could get. Doing a local plumber's website or something like that, helping somebody get all the viruses off their computer. Wonder how those got there. But it's stuff like that. So that's what I had to do. I had to fabricate this false history.
\n\nPart of me coming out and talking about this was also selfish. It was just very depressing and I was tired of lying all the time. I was finally in a position where I felt that while coming forward about this part of my life could still have negative impacts that I have enough of a time distance and enough of an identity that I could probably still have a future in tech.
\n\nThat's what I did. I was at Major League Soccer and I let my team know and the people around me know and then I posted a blog post about it and that's really when everyone started to find out. This is only 2018, 2019. I got my first job in tech – or 2018. I got my first job in tech in 2013 so it was like 5 years, I went with only telling a couple people.
\n\nLAURIE: I was about to ask if you still have to lie because I feel like the minute you Google you, that's one of the first thing that comes up, this really incredible post about your experience. It's like if someone didn't check your Twitter, I'm questioning the due diligence that they did and just relying on a background check seems a little odd if they haven't even looked up your social media. Your public technical, social media, not looking to see if you have a Facebook with lots of beer cans behind you sort of thing.
\n\nKURT: Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. But you'd be amazed. I mean, people don't look at your social media first. It's interesting when we think about especially tech hiring; your resume in a pile and before you even get to that pile, you're just a resume that gets pumped through a system a lot of times. It's like until you build a network that is often yeah, you are a victim of that a lot of times. They're not going to know who you are personally before they see you on paper and that's very detrimental, but you would think they would do a little bit of research and look that up.
\n\nIt's actually funny, you brought up a good point, which is if you search, you'll bring it up. I worked so hard to actually get my actual prison from North Carolina thing pushed off the first page and build a public profile and now it's right back at the top, but because I put it there. So that is really funny.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nLAURIE: But that matters, right?
\n\nKURT: It matters.
\n\nLAURIE: It’s like voluntary disclosure versus something that you don't have control over, that is a huge, huge difference. I’m thinking of the Meghan Markle thing right now, where everyone's like, “She sued because they published a letter with her father, but now she's disclosing her pregnancy,” and I'm like, “Yeah, very different! One she chose to and the other one, she did not.”
\n\nKURT: Exactly. Yeah, that's a huge difference. But it's just really interesting to think about that I'm back at the top of Google now for being formerly incarcerated.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nBut under much better terms and I get to tell my story and explain why. Not just be like a mugshot with some records.
\n\nJACOB: If you had asked me before this episode, “Have you ever worked with an incarcerated person while you’re working in tech?” I privately would have told myself, no. I mean, I probably would have said, “I'm not sure,” but I think my implicit bias would have said no.
\n\nKURT: Yeah.
\n\nJACOB: And I think this is making me realize I probably have and I think probably a lot of our listeners have, too and it just either a, it didn't come up at all, or b, was handled in a way that it didn't get around to the rest of the workforce, which is probably the best thing.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, there are some companies. I have found the companies that do you actually advocate for formerly incarcerated. They do it really well and only because I'm so vocal is why my team knows. Even at Apollo, they're very careful about it. We talked about my background actually coming up and then they were like, “Well, this wasn't supposed to show up, but even regardless, we're not going to hold this against you even if it was within the timeframe.” It was very nice and this is between us, it won't matter and I'm like, “Well, I've kind of let the cat out of the bag so it's not a big deal if it's between us,” but I loved seeing the approach that they took.
\n\nYou're right, you probably have worked with people who were incarcerated before. It's a large percentage of people who have been to prison in the US. A very large percentage, way more than it should be and so, it's really interesting to think about, but you're right. It hasn't come up. Most people who have been incarcerated aren't going to just leap out and be like, “Oh, that's an interesting thing. Let me tell you about the time I was locked up and how this was.” They're going to keep that to themselves because you never know how people are going to take it. You just don't know how people will react and some people, even if they are cool with it, will still look at you differently and I've had situations like that happen and it's tough to deal with, but it's a part of life.
\n\nAgain, I'm not trying to make this a sob story. I did things that put me in prison and I did my time and I I've paid my dues to society. Rightfully so. Well, there's a whole thing about the sentencing and what we should be doing in the US, but according to law, I paid my dues and I was released and really, the buck should stop there, but you don't stop doing time when you're released.
\n\nYou continue to do it pretty much forever because the US again, we have the stigma around prisons and why do we have that? Because the prison industrial complex is pushing this agenda that we have a lot of crime and we need a lot of cops and we need to lock people up and people who come out of prison are in prison or felons and bad people and deserve to be there. This is instilled into us from the time that we're kids and that's why I say the two most important things are providing stability for folks getting out and helping de-stigmatize having a record and helping break down the prison industrial complex. It's the only way we see a future where this is not an issue.
\n\nLAURIE: This could probably be a whole other episode, but you saying that and talking about there are felons and they're bad people in there and it's instilled in us. It's the idea of a binary identity, which exists in so many different places in our society. There's good and bad, and there's right and wrong, and there's the reason that people hate using this term, because it's incredibly racist and problematic. It's black and it's white.
\n\nAll of these things are rooted in the same ideology, which is that to simplify the way that our brain experiences life, we can categorize things into one is good and one is bad. That's not the way the world works and that's not who people are. People take bad actions and they take good actions, but that doesn't make them bad people or good people. A lot of the reason we do that is because we like to tell ourselves we're good people.
\n\nAnd I'm sure you've heard this phrase, I'm sure all of us have heard this phrase, but the phrase, “You didn't make good choices. You had good choices” is the same as the meritocracy argument, which is like, you had the ability to get somewhere because you started on third base, you had the ability to make all the right decisions and do all the things because you had stability and resources and comfort. Without those things, would you have made the same choices as the person that you're looking down on? Probably honestly, probably and you just have no idea what that's like. So I appreciate you pointing that out because I think we've had episodes in the past about binary identities and what problems that causes.
\n\nJOHN: So Kurt, you called out something that's pretty interesting that was going by and what you were saying earlier about how Apollo treated you when they found out about your record and the way they went through that. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about if there's someone who's a hiring manager, maybe in a small company without a giant HR organization and strict policies around the hiring. What is a good way for that person to handle when they find out through the background check that the candidate that they really like has a record of some sort like, what's the good path there?
\n\nKURT: Yeah. There's two things there. So I want to answer that question, but one thing I do want to actually circle back to very quickly, which is what you said about bigger companies with stricter policies. In my experience, it's actually the bigger companies that you have an easier chance of getting a job at. They have huge HR departments and law teams and want to protect themselves and we'll make sure that they're actually following the proper hiring laws and state regulations for wherever it is they are.
\n\nI had no problem getting a job at AWS, but when you flip it in reverse to these startups and they outsource their HR to these other companies, that is actually where most of the trip-ups happen because they don't have – well, a lot of times it's ignorance of the situation. They're ignorant of the fact they're violating hiring and labor laws and they don't even know.
\n\nSo I just want to state that is something because that was something I learned, too that actually shifted my job search function was I would actually target more organized companies because I stood a better chance of knowing that if they did do a background check, it would actually follow the state guidelines.
\n\nBut to answer the question, that's a really good point and a really good question, I mean and a tough one to answer. I think just number one is making no assumptions. There's a couple things and this actually kind of relates to some other stuff. So there's going to be – you can't be defensive. I've discovered that a lot of times when people find out that you have a background, they feel somewhat lied to and it's like, “I didn't come up front about it up forward,” but it's kind of a bomb when it lands.
\n\nAgain, we have the stigma about people with records and then they see it, their first instinct is to be like, “Well, why don't you share this with me?” The obvious reason that it wasn't shared with you, but you might not be realizing it at the time, is because I don't know if it's going to matter getting this job. It's something that could hurt me and I don't want to reveal it until you've had a chance to get to know me. So just know that, the reason that they did not share it with you is because they wanted you to know them as a person and go through the interview process before you find out about something like this. They're just trying to get a little bit of empathy from you.
\n\nThe second thing is to avoid things like feigned surprise, like, “Oh my goodness, I can't believe you have a record,” or “I never would have guessed that you would have a background.” Things like that, they start to split somebody's identity and make them feel like again, we talk about this good and bad binary and that's going to really cause them a lot of stress and anxiety. You want to avoid things like that.
\n\nAnd then the last thing to do is just to continue to treat them the exact same way that you did before you knew.
\n\nIf you can do those things, that person is going to feel safe and they're going to have a great experience working with you.
\n\nJOHN: Great. That's super handy. I imagine that there's some people out there having that question like, “Oh I've never been in that situation, but what's the best way to handle that?” So it's definitely good to know.
\n\nLAURIE: Totally outside the episode, but Mandy Moore just released a screenshot of a place that wanted to interview her about her entire career and she said she wouldn't talk about the abuse allegations against her ex-husband and they canceled the interview and they said it would be essential to the story. She said, “If you only want me for my trauma, when I have a 20-to-30-year long career, then I have no interest in having this conversation,” and how upsetting that was. It’s like one person is not their worst – I mean, not even a mistake. Like, one person is not their association with another person's bad actions.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. That actually brings up a really interesting topic, too, which is people trying to take advantage. When you talk about lifting others up, I often find myself in situations where people are just blatantly trying to take advantage of me and my willingness to help folks. That happens all the time.
\n\nJACOB: How so?
\n\nKURT: Just a lot of things like, private companies will want me to do webinars or talks on things about breaking into tech and just different topics, or ask me for access to my network or do I know formerly incarcerated folks who might be interested in contract work? I can tell that they're asking because they feel like they could get them for a cheaper price. You know what I mean? They're not going to have to pay them as much and it's like a lot of shady business practices and stuff like that. I get that on the regular. It's pretty frustrating.
\n\nLAURIE: Oh my gosh. It's Women in Tech in a different outfit. [chuckles]
\n\nKURT: Yeah.
\n\nLAURIE: It feels the same hearing you explain it. I'm like, yup, yup, yup, yup.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's been an interesting side effect of this.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of we had Veni Kunche on the show a while back talking about the diversified tech system platform that she's built and how people paid to post jobs to her audience. But she does a lot of work to vet those companies to make sure that they're not going to just come in the door and be kicked out again in eight months because there's no support for actually having those sorts of people joining the team.
\n\nSo it's such an important trust relationship there with the community you represent, especially because most of them need to be somewhat on the DL as being part of that community. It's like, if you're a Black woman, it's no surprise that you're a part of that community, but it's still so important for you as someone, who's much more public and representing them, that you have to be so careful about who you're connecting to.
\n\nKURT: This has been one of the biggest holdups for me starting this nonprofit and providing training is there's a lot of issues with exposing people through this. So it's like the end goal would be for them to leave and be able to seek training, or employment, but the real problem comes afterwards when you are trying to help them seek employment or freelance jobs. It's like you have to disassociate your network and attachment with them from that nonprofit. If a lot of people know that I'm doing that nonprofit, then they're going to automatically start to assume everyone who I provide through my network is going to be coming from this program. So there's just like a lot of things.
\n\nI've been very much trying to figure out how do I prioritize these folks and vulnerable people, in general and I think a lot of that has to do with, I don't know, I'm like why I've been so hesitant to move forward with this? I don't want to start a nonprofit with the best of intentions, but that the impact of that nonprofit ends up being more harmful than good and it's like, who does that really benefit?
\n\nThat's why so far, I've been sticking with this more kind of like one-on-one. I know it doesn't scale well, but that's okay. If I help some people that's better than helping no one, first of all and second of all, helping a few people and having that be really beneficial to them, as opposed to helping a bunch of people and it might end up good for you, or it might end up bad for you and we don't really know, it seems very risky to me.
\n\nSo I think it's why I've been working very slowly at that and really trying to figure out what does that process look like once they're done training because there's still a lot of unknowns there.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. It's a conundrum that most training programs and diversity programs don't have to deal with because most of them, they want to highlight the intersections of the people that come through their program because that's part of what they're after and raising the profile there and you have the exact opposite situation, which is how do you smuggle them in before prejudges?
\n\nKURT: Exactly and so, completely flips the game on its head. I think it was you Laurie, that tweeted if you had your salary, your developer salary and you could do anything, what would you do? I would actually become a prison reform lawyer. I think the real goal is to stop the flow of folks going in. The band-aid is helping folks come out. The real work is stopping folks from going in to begin with, but I can't go back to school for another 8 years to become a lawyer and then move forward with that direction.
\n\nSo that's what I want to talk about. I've been helping sponsor prison reform lawyers and look for ways to get involved with that. I've offered volunteer time to The Marshall Project to help with them and their data collection efforts and stuff like that. Again, taking myself out of the center, the nonprofit I'm very centered in that scenario and I feel like I can have a bigger impact in more areas by just contributing as opposed to being the creator of the thing. So right now, that's kind of where my mind is at while I feel out this nonprofit and see if I can develop something I'm comfortable with, from that.
\n\nLAURIE: I was just going to say, I was doing that math and you just said 8 years. Does that mean you have your GED? This may not be a thing that I know.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, I have my GED and no college education. I went to college for a little over a year for graphic design, but could not afford to go anymore, so stopped and then that's like my education. In order to get a law degree, I would first have to get a Bachelor's so I need 4 years of college—I don't know how many of my credits would be transferable from graphic design—and then I would have to go to law school afterwards and then still deal with certain states. If I can even take the test for the bar, or be on the bar being a convicted felon, which in most states you can, but there are still states where you cannot.
\n\nLAURIE: So the reason I asked and it wasn't to do the math, but it was more, that is another community that you belong to that, I think perhaps in the past had a very different set of opportunities available to them in tech. And as tech has become higher paying and we've done a lot more recruiting from the Stanfords and the MITs and Harvard and Yale and all of those things, it used to be, you could break in – it goes back to the self-taught like, you could break in without any undergrad degree and now that's getting harder and harder and harder and harder.
\n\nSo I'm curious if—obviously, it's hard to decouple those based on your experience because you were formerly incarcerated and you didn't have that formal Bachelor's degree. But have you seen situations in which that has been a different community that you're a part of, or that has impacted the opportunities that you can pursue?
\n\nKURT: Yeah. I wouldn't be able to separate maybe if I went back and thought about it, but in my mind, every time I've been ghosted has primarily been – well, it stopped me from not applying to a lot of places. That's for sure.
\n\nIt's blocked me from feeling confident enough to even apply and that was definitely in the beginning before I knew the industry and how bad most job application postings are and realize that the requirements they often ask for are way beyond what you actually need to do the job. But I didn't know that. So I would see like needs a Bachelor's degree and I'd be like, “Nope, not applying to that one.”
\n\nSo I guess, I did miss out on a lot of opportunities just from that. But most times, I feel like if it came down to decision and I went through the interview process and they did a background check—I just always assumed it was the background check that I got ghosted.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. Usually, if the degree is going to be a factor, it's right at the front of the process.
\n\nKURT: Early on, yeah. But it could be a deciding factor, especially with entry-level folks. Two people made it through the interview process. They both did really well. It really comes down to what the person who makes that decision cares more about, do they care more about this on paper or some sort of like behavioral give that seems this person would be better to work with. It's like, what do they care about and so, it can definitely have huge effects.
\n\nThis gets into a whole another discussion, but that's just the tech industry and hiring in general is just terrible.
\n\nLAURIE: Broken!
\n\nKURT: Beyond broken. Yeah. It's just like you know?
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nThe fact that it can come down to whether or not you get a job based on the preference of the person who's looking at the things in front of you is just super problematic. But I definitely feel that I'm sure, there's a lot of cases where people would see one has a degree, the other does not and they're going to go, “Oh, taking the CS grad anytime, because we're about to go write all these algorithms.”
\n\nLAURIE: Kurt, do you know my favorite story about ridiculous things that should not be a thing?
\n\nKURT: Oh, I can't wait.
\n\nLAURIE: So I was interviewed for a job, internal transfer. I got the job. They sent the paperwork to HR and HR said, “Sorry, you can't hire her because she has a Bachelor of Arts and Mathematics, not a Bachelor of Science and Mathematics.” Literally not even joking, this is a real thing that happened.
\n\nI was halfway through a Master's of Science in Computer Science because I was annoyed by the fact that they cared that I had a Bachelor of Arts and they said, “So because she doesn't have the right degree, she needs to have the right amount of courses that would be equivalent to the degree.” In that case, that was 16 computer science or math specific hard science courses, which is more than the Bachelor's degree was required!
\n\nSo if I had that, I would have had a Bachelor's degree of Science and Computer Science or a Bachelor's degree of Arts and Computer Science, because I went to a liberal arts school and they are not accredited to give Bachelor's of Science regardless of what your major is. So on the scale of ridiculous things that happen in tech, just add that as a fun story to remember.
\n\nKURT: It's like what goes through their heads? It's like, “Oh, well, we must adhere to this policy because clearly, the policy makes more sense than somebody who has worked here, has a proven track record of doing their job well, has already moved to the other team and everyone is cool with it, but wait a minute, you don't have enough credits.”
\n\nLAURIE: I got blocked. I didn't get to move. To be fair, it was the federal government so that's sort of how the world works, but still.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. Still, it shouldn't work like that and it's symptomatic of the ridiculous hiring process that we've developed as a tech industry. It just like, I don't know, I've worked in construction. I've worked in the restaurant industry. I've worked at a lot of other places and none of my interviews have ever felt really like somebody was trying to prove that they knew something I didn't, or like catch me in a gotcha. You know what I mean?
\n\nThis is what I mean by tech interviews are more stressful than even when I was interviewing at all those other jobs combined, because I never felt like I was being interrogated and that's the difference. Honestly, tech interviews feel a lot like when I was actually being interrogated. That should tell you something. It just feels like they're constantly trying to trip you up, trying to get you to say something that disagrees with what you said five minutes ago, prove they know something that you don't. Does all of this sound familiar?
\n\nLAURIE: I mean, Kurt, if you're a personal brand is that you're kind and you help people and you were formerly incarcerated and you do cool things now, you know that mine is just railing against tech interviews, so.
\n\nKURT: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nLAURIE: This is a known thing.
\n\nKURT: Well, that's amazing. But it's a very aggressive interview process. It often pits folks against each other as opposed to working with each other. I just have never been a big fan of tech interviews.
\n\nLAURIE: Terrible for anyone who has ever had anxiety in their life or deals with any kind of PTSD or trauma. Yup. No, it's really –
\n\nMy favorite tweet about this is that Tatiana explained that she felt it was equivalent to – it was an abusive relationship and that it's string you along for seven interviews and then they're like,” Oh, well you don't have the skill that we need,” except you would have known that I didn't have this skill because it was on my resume and it's been in every conversation, but you just put me through all of this just to say no, because you told yourself that it was better for me and you were giving me a chance and all of these things.
\n\nA lot of people came back and they were like, “That's going to step too far,” and I was like, “You know what? I honestly don't think it is.” It really is that bad and that's horrifying and it's why so many people stay in toxic work environments because the idea of going through a toxic interview process doesn't feel like something they can possibly do.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, and those folks who are saying it ain't that bad are probably the ones who are normally on the other side of that table, so. [chuckles]
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. I always find I have to hold my tongue when people are in otherwise, decent situations or even when they're in bad situations, my automatic recommendation is, “Well, start looking for something else,” but I always have to back up from that and not say that because if there's any sort of difference in privilege between us, I can't give that advice because it's such so much more work for them than for me. So I have to be very careful.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. That's another really awesome point and something that I have worked a lot on over the last 2 years in helping folks, which is contextualizing my advice and making sure that anything that I share comes with the statement that this was my experience, it may not be your experience, and then also reach out to other folks who share similar situations to you to trust, but verify this advice and make sure that it lines up with their experiences as well.
\n\nAlso, why I always try to connect people that I'm working with to people who are more representative of them than myself, if we're that far off. It's hard for me to share advice with a Black woman because I don't have that lived experience, I don't know a lot of the issues that they'll hit and even being as aware of the harm that I can cause in my privilege as I am, I still will cause harm. So it's about connecting folks; a big part of what I do honestly, is just connecting folks quietly.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That's a good point. When you're poised to give advice, having that second thought of, “Okay, I can give this advice, but I need to put all the caveats on there to point out that this may not be your experience.” But then being able to follow that up with someone else in your network who is going to be able to give something much more accurate and representative is I think is a really useful second step there.
\n\nKURT: Absolutely.
\n\nLAURIE: This was a conversation probably a few months back where people had a similar association with people coming out of bootcamps right now and people trying to enter the tech industry right now. Anyone who did it even 3 years ago probably doesn't have the relevant advice or lived experience to understand what it's like with the oversaturation of people coming in with very, very similar skillsets.
\n\nEspecially true in the frontend area because there's so many bootcamps that have just popped up in the React space specifically, because there are a ton of jobs that are needed there, but there also need to be senior resources to help those junior resources—I hate the term junior. But it's a similar thing where it's like, “Yeah, I did it 5 years ago.” “I did it 10 years ago.” The amount of time in which your experience is relevant is getting shorter and shorter and shorter every day and it's very, very challenging to tell someone, or give them advice on this is how you stand out in an interview process, this is how you stand out in a resume when you just have no idea what the current environment is like.
\n\nKURT: Yeah. It's interesting because it's repetitive. I call this the JavaScript bubble and l it's popping. It's at the point where it's popping.
\n\nLAURIE: Hey!
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKURT: It is. We're meeting the inflection point where there are so many people, it used to be that getting a job doing JavaScript development was a bit easier because like when Node first came out and JavaScript aren't being used in all these different places and we started building entire frontends, SPAs in JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. Everyone started to learn JavaScript and we saw this with UX designs.
\n\nI don't know how many folks remember this, but there was a time when UX design was first coming to be a thing. It was a very high paid, very sought-after role, and then a lot of schools started to focus curriculum on UX design and eventually, so many people entered the industry and eventually, enough people will become senior in that industry. That runs out right. The market flips.
\n\nNow it becomes, there's too many people for the jobs that are available and while I think JavaScript, we're getting there, but eventually, this is going to happen as well. All the boot camps focus on JavaScript. All of this is coming out. Those people who came out of boot camps 2 or 3 years ago are very close to becoming seniors and it's like, eventually, we're going to hit this inflection point where choosing JavaScript as your starting language might actually not be the best opportunity anymore.
\n\nI think—here's my little prediction—is that really things like Python and Rust will probably be the most beneficial over the next few years, Python for the machine learning and AI stuff. Almost all of that is written in Python or R for data science. And then Rust just because it's becoming the next JavaScript. You're being able to run it in a lot of places. It's also way faster and a lot of other things typed and stuff.
\n\nSo that's my prediction is that eventually, a couple of years, JavaScript jobs will be much harder to get even at senior level and the easier path into tech will be less about frontend and more about machine learning and backend development with Rust.
\n\nJACOB: My prediction is that companies that can somehow figure out a way to hire the roles they need without firm requirements on prior technology experience are going to excel. So it’s like I need Python developers, but I can hire former Ruby developers, then suddenly, your pipeline gets so much bigger.
\n\nKURT: Absolutely.
\n\nLAURIE: It's interesting because Rust, specifically as a language – so I've done Python, Java, JavaScript, and PHP for a little while and those comparatively, I consider them siblings. Rust, to me, is much closer to a C type language. It requires a lot more knowledge of what's happening under the hood when you're coding it and it's a great language, really great air handling all of that, but there are pieces of it that are just harder than using something like JavaScript, harder than using something like TypeScript. So it's going to be really interesting to see that evolve.
\n\nKurt, I agree with you. I think Rust is going to be everywhere, but I think Rust is going to be everywhere in the tooling and systems space. So many of those software technologies are open source and therefore, aren't funded and actually getting a job that pays you to write in Rust is going to be – I'm interested to see how it evolves. I think you may be right, but there's this really weird kind of give and take of where Rust excels and where we tend to pay people to build proprietary things, and I'm very curious to see what the overlap is going to end up being.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, that's very true and again, this is based right on my experience and what I've seen. I'm just thinking about the emergence of FOSS, which is Financed Open Source Software. Us, at Apollo specifically, we're using Rust for a lot of things in our backend and UCLI is built in Rust and those are people who are paid to write open source software.
\n\nI think as the emergence of FOSS continues to grow, combined with the flexibility and adoption of Rust, I do think that it stands to be a pretty good – Now I did say backend, but I should step back. I don't mean APIs. I don't see a lot of APIs written in Rust. Much more of like what you're talking about; systems infrastructure, command line tooling, stuff like that. I just kind of bucket all of that into the backend. Probably shouldn't.
\n\nLAURIE: I call it middle end.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, middle end. There you go.
\n\nLAURIE: It's the backend of the frontend. It's the tooling ecosystem. The other reason I call it that is because it's really hard to describe what the heck I do every day.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's not frontend, it's not like CSS, and it's not backend. I don't touch databases anymore. I don't make fetch calls. I build middle end. [chuckles]
\n\nKURT: Yeah, that's funny.
\n\nLAURIE: We need a better term for it though, because no one can describe it and it's a very large, ever-growing set of software that needs to be built. It's basically software that allows other developers to be productive.
\n\nKURT: And just to touch on what Jacob mentioned before, I completely agree that companies who are smart enough to recognize not about the technology specifically are just always going to excel. And those who are even willing to have polyglot environments and let teams figure out what is the right technology stands so much of a better chance to be successful in just about anything.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, it's the environment to know that when I hire someone with not the specific technology that I need them to eventually do, are they going to be successful? Because I don't actually know what that means, but I think that's a really challenging question.
\n\nKURT: It is, but I think a good example of this might be a backend engineer. You're familiar with caching and why that's important and performance, database operations, and how you structure and organize your APIs. It's like remove Python and drop in Ruby or Java or anything and all those principles still remain and are very important and yes, the surrounding technology has changed, but you've also surrounded them with a team of people who are extremely familiar with that technology.
\n\nThere's something to be said that is definitely in my opinion, easier to ramp up in a new language in an environment like that than it is to completely adopt a new part of the stack or something where it's like the underlying things that are important and that you just have to understand and have experienced dealing with. Those are really heavy.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nLAURIE: I agree with all of that except Rust. Rust is my exception to everything right now because it's such a mindset shift and mutability and ownership [chuckles] is just such a wild thing that doesn't exist in any other language. I'm sorry, I'm being a total nerd right now.
\n\nBut no, I absolutely agree and I think anyone can learn any language. I think people can read Rust if they know JavaScript. I know how to write five lines of Rust so this isn't even me gatekeeping something I understand. I'm saying I don't understand it yet, it's hard and I've learned a lot of different languages over the years.
\n\nI used to do exactly what Jacob was just implying because I was a consultant and so, I had to learn whatever language the client was using. I've done that for PHP and I've done that with Python and Java and that sort of thing. I actually don't think I could do it with Rust. I really don't think I could, unless I was given a couple months to sit down and study. It's hard. It's awesome, but it's hard.
\n\nKURT: That's fair. I mean, that is also transitioning levels of abstraction when we go from something like JavaScript to Rust, which is very valid. I had to spend a year working in C++ and it was horrible for me, personally, just for me. I don't like being that close. I want my garbage collected for me. I don't want to know what I've put into memory. I really don't care. I mean, I care about performance, but I don't want to be responsible at that level for it. I had a lot of issues with C++ and memory leaks, just going to say.
\n\nLAURIE: Yeah, I've never had to learn a C language and I think that's part of why Rust is so hard for me. I always assumed Java was very similar to C and I think in a lot of ways, it is, but the automatic garbage collection is a really big distinction between languages.
\n\nKURT: It really is. That's funny.
\n\nJOHN: So at the end of every episode, we like to do what we call reflections, which is each panelist and guest get to chance to reflect on the things that they enjoyed most about the conversation, or the ideas that they're going to be thinking about for days afterwards. So who'd like to start with that?
\n\nKURT: I can take it. I’ve got something that I've been thinking about. We started off talking about community and I said something that I've been running through my mind since, which is communities are things that you’re a part of. Community is what you surround yourself with and I think that that's been an interesting distinction for me and has helped me break down barriers between different parts of my life and make it easier for me to connect those different parts of my life.
\n\nIt's something that I think I'm going to express probably pretty soon in some form of writing or another because it's just a change in mindset that I think has been really beneficial to me and allowed me to be more of my whole self, especially online, than I had been previously so.
\n\nLAURIE: I think my takeaway is that we all know and have experienced the fact that interviews can be a bit of a landmine depending on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. Having empathy and understanding both, as a hiring manager, or someone who's involved in making these choices, or someone who's a fellow perspective candidate for roles. Having empathy and understanding for the fact that this is infinitely more challenging to navigate if you have things in your background that employers have not previously looked kindly upon.
\n\nKnowing that those people not only have to navigate that, but they also have to know their legal rights in a country that isn't really great about providing that and that if you get an opportunity in the future and you look up those rights and you know the fact that they shouldn't be able to look x number of years in your background, even if there's nothing there for them to find and you can push back on the behalf of someone else in the future. You can have an impact and paying attention to knowing those rules when you aren't required to know them can be really important and really helpful.
\n\nJACOB: So we talked a little bit about polyglots and some one thing that really appealed to me to the job that I'm in now is during the hiring process, they seemed pretty not concerned with specific technology I was talking about. That was really a positive for me. So we write Python in my job and what I'm thinking about is what's work that I can do on team that if we hire somebody new who is new to Python would be able to get up to speed as fast as possible? What are the implicit idioms of Python that could be made more explicit? Or what are the things that could be done that make it not quite so gatekeeping?
\n\nAnd then that what that transition needs to is another thought is okay, I was thinking earlier about how there's probably someone at my company who was formerly incarcerated and I just don't know it. What are things I could do on my team that would make their life better in some way, but without them having to tell me, without I need to actually know who that specific person is? What are some things that would just make their life better working with me?
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I think coming into this conversation, I'm aware of how terrible our carceral state is here in the US. But I think it's also valuable to get Kurt's perspective on that and to be reminded, on a personal level, what that experience is just to help keep that concept alive in my mind so I can be more aware of the people that are in that situation and ways that I can make that easier for them.
\n\nAlso, to do simple administrative things like checking in with my HR department and finding out what their policy is on these things, if nothing else, just to know and even more, if there's ways that I can push back on those to say that that's not really something we need to care about, like, why is that requirement there? So I think that’s really helpful for me to keep in mind.
\n\nThank you for joining us, Kurt. This was a fantastic conversation.
\n\nKURT: Yeah, my pleasure. This was a blast. I really enjoyed talking with you all.
Special Guest: Kurt Kemple.
Sponsored By:
03:31 - Uncovering Patterns
\n\n13:22 - Taking Care of People as Whole People
\n\n28:43 - The Tech Industry: Now vs Then (aka we still have A LOT of work to do)
\n\n45:59 - The Messaging Around Diversity and Inclusion
\n\n51:26 - Changing Mindsets
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Capitalism and White Supremacy are the same thing. The Invention of the White Race.
\n\nWe have an obligation to not just make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but to also make it healthy.
\n\nJohn: It’s always great to have these conversations as reminders.
\n\nTim: Figure out why something makes you uncomfortable. Look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you run away, you’re never going to grow and things are never going to get better.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
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\n\nJOHN: Hello, everybody. This is Greater Than Code, Episode 225. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: And I’m here with our guest, my friend, and Dungeons & Dragons party member, Tim Banks.
\n\nTim Banks has a career spanning over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine in avionics. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to work as a government contractor. He then went into the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.
\n\nToday, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups in his current role as a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, having won American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championships in his division.
\n\nHi, Tim!
\n\nTIM: Hi! Good to see everybody in here.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, I did that on the first take and I'm very proud of myself.
\n\nTIM: I am so, so proud of you. That was amazing.
\n\nREIN: Tim, it's time for the question.
\n\nTIM: Right.
\n\nREIN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nTIM: So my superpower is using empathy to uncover patterns that people haven't seen in the past and I think that's a superpower because a lot of people can look at something, there's a lot of folks out there that can see a pattern just on the surface like this does that, this does that, this does that. But when you really talk to groups and you talk to people, you can see some common things that aren't necessarily things that are going to have an output or a metric, but you can see how people feel about a thing. And then when you get enough people who feel a certain way about a thing, that's not going to be a coincidence, it's going to be a pattern. So finding those patterns is my superpower.
\n\nAs far as how I acquired it, it's hard for me to say. The easy way to say is over time, but over time and myself being a person who necessarily wasn't listened to, or seen, or heard trying to explain how things are, why things are the way they are without having metrics. So having been on one side of that equation, I've been able to see people on the other side of it.
\n\nREIN: So Tim, you said “to uncover patterns.” Can you say a bit more about the word uncover? Because I feel like that might've been a specific choice that you made to use.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. There are typically, as we see with anything else, especially being tech or people that like to take things apart, I'm sure as we all did as kids, there are things that you see on the surface. There are things that you see, this pattern or this thing happening here, but you take the face plate off of something, or you delve down below the API, or you delve down below the operating system and there are so many other things that are happening beneath that.
\n\nIf you kick over amount of dirt and you see an ant hill, the ants have their own system, how they do things down there that you don't necessarily create, but you're just going to see it and you have to uncover a few things. You have to move things around. You have to look below the surface to see some of these patterns that happen just below the surface that bring the things at the surface to fruition.
\n\nREIN: This reminds me a lot of I guess, it's a mantra that I learned from Virginia Satir, which drink if you're playing that game, make hidden things visible, make the covert overt and make the general specific and related to you, me, here, now, and the current situation.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. I think that's actually a good – I had not heard of that one before, but I do like that a lot.
\n\nREIN: So when you say uncover, that makes me think, make the covert over.
\n\nTIM: Yeah, I think so. I like that. It's interesting because people sometimes think that things are covered up to make them hidden and it's not necessarily, they're hidden like someone has hidden them so you can't find them. A lot of times they're hidden in plain view.
\n\nYou don't find them because you're not looking for them and when you actually start to look for some of these things, some of the underlying causes, you'll be surprised what you find. It's like a lot of us here have done RCAs on things and oftentimes, if you do a good RCA, you're going to go through a few levels and different layers to find what the actual root cause. Like, most of the times the root of something is not at the surface, it's way down. So you actually have to go down and dig to uncover these things, to really find out what's at the base of something.
\n\nREIN: So since this is the show where we talk about the social side of things, I want to ask you about these things that are covered that are maybe covered for a reason and maybe that the reason that they're covert is that people are trying to protect themselves and they don't feel safe to make them overt. So do you think about these situations and how do you go about making that safe to talk about?
\n\nTIM: So I do think about these situations and there's a couple of reasons why. First, obviously, is in the professional world you can't always call people out immediately for things. Even if you know that there's something that's a lie or something that's not right, there are the political reasons why you have to be tactful or you have to be very deliberate and cautious about how you uncover these things because even if people aren't necessarily intentionally hiding things, or it is their mind that I must hide this as he'll feel safe, people's egos are the number one obstacle, I think to innovation.
\n\nSomeone has staked out a claim. Someone has a territory. Someone has some domain that they have, that they are a gatekeeper thereof and it is their ego that makes sure that you have to pay homage to them or to that ego in order to get anything done. So figuring out what they're protecting, whether they're protecting their job, whether they're protecting their ego, whether they're protecting levels of influence so that they can rise in their career. You have to figure out what that is, that what that thing is that is important to them so that way you can make sure that it's either protected, or you can make sure that there are more than one person that have access to that thing so you can make your way.
\n\nAt personal levels, there are things that people cover up because they don't feel safe and doing the work of trying to make them feel safe so you can talk about these things, I think that's the hardest thing that we do in the industry. Solving technical problems is easy compared to solving people problems, or cultural problems, or societal problems because those are the problems that we've had for millennia that we, collection of people in a common industry, are trying to figure out.
\n\nSaying to somebody, “Hey, I see these patterns here of work, or absenteeism, or productivity, or whatever it is and I need to know what it is that's going on so that we can fix that,” and make them understand that you are there to help them and there to fix that problem, whatever it may be, that takes some work on the part of the person who's trying to uncover that pattern. It takes vulnerability and it takes confidentiality. It takes empathy. Especially if it's something that you've never dealt with before.
\n\nSomeone's going to tell you, “Hey, I have this problem,” and you're going to say, “All right, well, I know leadership or I know management or unknown this senior technical professional here, but I don't know the answer to this problem, but I can say that I will help you find it and then we can work together on it.” And a lot of people don't like to say, “I don't know the answer.”
\n\nWe see a lot of people that are very technically savvy and because they're very technically savvy, they are now considered to be experts in all kinds of domains. Nobody in particular—Elon Musk—but there are people that are looked to be some kind of great genius just because they happen to know how to code something, or architect something. I think when you display the vulnerability of saying, “I don't know.” Or you are upfront about your problems or upfront about your struggles, it makes people feel safer about being upfront about theirs and then you can go through the work of trying to solve those problems.
\n\nWell, first of all, identifying if it's a pattern, and then solving the problem that's causing those patterns.
\n\nJOHN: I like that you use the metaphor of anthill earlier on in this, because rather than when you describe something as pattern, it's very abstract and feels like an object. But when you talk about an anthill, it's individual entities working together in a system. It's something that exists on its own, made up of other individuals. It's not just some object that we can examine and I think that brings it into thinking about it in a different way and much like the way you've been describing how you talk about these things and how you work with people. Very humanizing and I like that.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. I do think there's a lot of us when we're looking at an organization, whether we're looking at a society, or government, or whatever it is, a neighborhood even all of us have the role that we play whether we're aware of it or not. It's a role not necessarily either we're assigned, that we signed up for, or that we just have by nature of and by coincidence of our birth. But we all do something that contributes in some way to the organizations that we're in.
\n\nWhen we look at that as that – okay, that role covers a lot of things. No one is just one thing; no one is just a software developer, or no one is just a cashier at a grocery store, or no one is just an artist. No person is monolithic. No one is defined by their job save except maybe the police and that's not a slam—they're always at work apparently. But there are all these things that we have that yes, as you look at an ant farm, this one ant does all these various things, but they have this contribution to the colony as a whole. And I do think that when we look at it as a pattern, if we look at one individual person and all the things that they do, it is important to see that they are more than just a worker.
\n\nWe are not ants. We're not that specialized. We have all kinds of things that we contribute to. So like the colony metaphor breaks down there just to understand that all of us have different things that we do outside of just what our role is to make money or to contribute. We all have dreams. We all have hopes. A lot of times, the fact that these dreams or hopes have been unrealized or worse yet, they have been forcefully deferred by the society as a whole affects that role that we have. It affects how we view ourselves. It affects how others view us.
\n\nThat's what we bring when we sit down at our desk every morning, that collection of all those things rides along with whatever your skills are, that is it's not compartmentalized. As much as people may want to say they can't compartmentalize these things, you can't. You can’t contain it forever. So when these things start to manifest themselves in different ways, we as people—whether we are neighbors, whether we are leaders in government, whether we are coworkers, whether we're management—need to do whatever we can to make sure that these people can become a whole and they can thrive. When people thrive on a personal level, they thrive on a professional level. Maybe not at the job that they're in, maybe not at the company that they're in, but wherever they end up, when they thrive as people, they are going to thrive as professionals.
\n\nREIN: I also want to throw in another element of the ant colony metaphor, which is that ant colonies are dynamic. They're constantly changing. Tunnels are caving in, new ones are being constructed; the colony itself changes over time. You were talking about the complexity of a person in a given moment, but their roles within the company are also constantly shifting based on how they interact with other people.
\n\nTIM: That's true; how they interact with other people and how the companies need change. I mean, no company is typically monolithic in and of themselves. They always have to be growing, they have to be thriving, and they have to be moving into different segments and as that happens, your roles change within that company.
\n\nWhat's been being kicked around Twitter these past few weeks is people talking about like, “I don't understand why people leave jobs,” and I was like, “Well, yeah, they leave jobs because they want to go do other stuff.” People don't like to stagnate, typically and people who do like to stagnate, most companies don't want to keep them around. So stagnation is not really in human nature. As resistant as we are to change, we are all extremely adaptable. It's built into our damn DNA so we tend to do that well.
\n\nI do like the fact that people are dynamic, or if you look at what maybe people had expectations of what 2021 was going to be in 2019, it's clear that a lot of things have changed due to the various circumstances around the world—pandemic, social uprising, Nazis, whatever it is. We've all had to make some big changes and even though it sucked and it has sucked, we're still here.
\n\nWe are in the new normal because we are adaptable and so are the dynamics of our existence lend ourselves to the fact that our roles are constantly changing. What does it look like when you were a working parent 2 years ago versus what does it look like you're a working parent now? What does it look like if you were a single person with a job 2 years ago versus if you're seeing a person with a job now? So many things have changed and it speaks to the fact that we are adaptable.
\n\nThat all said, if you're looking at how we can improve and make better for people, we can't look at the ideal state or the state we were in 2019 or whatever it was. We have to look at how things are now and then we had to look at what we have learned in the past year, year and a half will prepare us for what's yet to come because we know that shit is always going to roll downhill. So we have to figure out what have we learned here and what can we do next?
\n\nI think a lot of the things that we still need to embrace is how to take care of our people as a whole people, and not just employees and not just take care of how they can contribute to us. How many commits can they do? How many tests can they write? Or anything like that. We need to take care of their needs as people and when we take care of their needs as people, they are more likely to be able to take care of us, our needs from them as companies and orgs.
\n\nREIN: What Russell Ackoff always says when people talk to him about total quality management and all of these things about how to improve the quality of your business, what he always says is, “The quality that matters is quality of work life.” The quality of the lives of the people who are doing the work.
\n\nTIM: That is absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Some of the worst cases of burnout that people ever have, some of the worst working environments, it's because they do not treat their people like people. They treat them like any other resource, like print, toner, cartridge, and the people personally as people cannot thrive and people burn out that way. People have a hard time setting and maintaining boundaries around their work life.
\n\nYay, capitalism. That's one of the things that we start from. It's like, if you want to get ahead, you’ve got to work real, real, real, real hard. Well, yes, to some extent, but the higher up you go, let's be honest that “hard work” looks way different. You're working hard on a yacht apparently, or you're working hard on a vacation to Paris apparently, but the people that are actually doing the labor to enrich the people higher up the chain, those basic human needs for rest, relaxation, recovery, they're oftentimes not being met and I think that's a fucking shame.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and if something is particularly incumbent upon leadership to show that by example and to encourage that behavior because I think lower down in the ranks, if they've probably been punished for any sort of thing like that, or they've seen people punished for that kind of thing, they're going to be highly resistant to doing that unless you can prove that it's safe for them to do so.
\n\nTIM: Oh, absolutely. I think it's interesting when you talk about what it is for a person lower down in the rung and the common gatekeeping tactic you see is “Well, they've got to pay their dues.” They've got to suffer through this role so that way, they can make it for other people or they can be a better employee going forward. That is so horribly bassackwards.
\n\nI mean, you really want to nurture junior folks. You want to nurture people coming into the industry. You want to nurture people who are just starting. You want to mentor them. You want to give them knowledge and guidance. You don't want to push their nose into the grindstone. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish there. That's fine if you're in the Marine Corps. That's fine if you're going into the military service. That's obviously, a consequence of the choice you made to join. But if you're not doing that, you don't need to punish people at the bottom ranks, really
\n\nYou should be, as a leader, like you said, modeling those behaviors, but you should also be making sure that they can thrive, whatever that looks like. Thriving for a junior person doesn't look like giving them a half hour lunch break and watching them clock in and clock out. It doesn't look like monitoring their bathroom breaks, or some of the stuff that I've seen the junior folks have to do. These people are whole people, they are not servers. They're not computers. They're not billed by the hour like that to perform X number of tasks. They really have to be nurtured and they have to be guided and mentored.
\n\nThe other thing we have to take into the fact is that not everybody learns the same. People are neurodivergent. So what productivity looks like for some persons, it’s going to look completely different for another person.
\n\nFor me, the worst thing I had as a senior person was to be expected to sit down and work 4 hours, take a half hour break, and then work another 4 hours straight. I have ADHD and anxiety and that is torturous for me. Now I did it and some people will turn around and say, “Well, I did it. So you can do it. too” like the motherfuckers that talk about student loans. But I would say, “I had to do it and it sucks. So I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.” That's what we should be doing. We should be iterating on our practices as an org, iterating our practices as a society to say that, “Oh, well, just because I had to suffer, that doesn't mean that you should have to as well. We should actually fix that so that you don't have to go through that.”
\n\nTypically, in capitalism, that's how they say you're supposed to do. A 2021 Ferrari has more features than the Model T because you add features, and you add features, and you add features. So I don't see why we can't do that for the people that actually build these vehicles, or build anything else for that matter.
\n\nREIN: There's a study that whenever this topic comes up, that I refer people to, because I think it's really, really good. It is from Kahn in 1990 and this is interesting because this is the study of the “Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work.” So even the idea that in a capitalist country, you could get a grant to study the engagement of the human spirit at work is amazing to me. But the idea is that there are three psychological conditions that relate to this. What I wanted to do was list them and then get your thoughts.
\n\nTIM: Sure.
\n\nREIN: Add them, change them, do they resonate with you? The conditions are meaningfulness. Do I find meaning in the work and my job title, my tasks, and so on? The second is psychological safety. And the third is the availability of emotional and psychological resources and this includes things like, am I emotionally drained at the end of the day? Do I wake up looking forward to going to work? Am I being supported by my manager or my supervisor?
\n\nTIM: I like all of those. I think those are all really good, but I do think it overlooks the financial aspect and the reason why I say it overlooks the financial aspect is because those things are important for how you feel about your work. But if you are struggling financially, your ability to deal with the normal rigors of work are significantly decreased when you have to then go home and figure out how you're going to make the ends meet. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you going to pay off debt? You're trying to figure out how to take care of your children. You're going to have to figure out how to do all these other things.
\n\nYour overall capacity is reduced because you have these other concerns as well. So I think it cannot be overstated, the impact of making sure that people's needs outside of work are met to make sure they can also, you can also take care of the needs inside of work. But going back, I do think those are very, very important aspects of people feeling spiritual engagement at work.
\n\nI think the meaningfulness and the psychological safety to me are the two most important. You can do meaningful work, but if you're getting harassed all the fucking time, it's not a great place. Or you can have a great loving and nurturing environment, but you're just toiling away in dumb anguish and it's like, “Oh, well, I don't know why I'm doing this job. Everyone's super happy and I'll stay here for a while because I really like everybody, but I don't really get any meaning out of what I do.”
\n\nSo I think I like that list. I would just add a fourth one talking about making sure people are financially compensated to make sure their needs are met plus, plus.
\n\nREIN: And actually, the study doesn't consider that and I think you're right that that's a huge oversight. There's a second study that attempts to quantify these relationships to say how much each of these influence engagement and the result is that meaningfulness was the highest correlation, but the way they did this is interesting. They did a quantitative survey and the survey would include different sections with questions on for example, rewarding coworker relations with questions like, “I feel worthwhile when I am around my coworkers.” I think we should be asking questions like that more often. I think that the engagement surveys you get in the modern world are superficial.
\n\nTIM: Oh, they absolutely are. They absolutely are. Well, I mean, it goes back to a lot of topics we have in observability. What are your metrics if whatever you measure is what you're going to do?
\n\nI learned this lesson working in tech support call centers right out of the Marine Corps where if they're going to reward you for the number of calls or they're going to – the primary metric is the number of calls you took in a day. So people were going to do whatever they can do to take the most number of calls, then to like, “Oh, then we're going to do NPS scores after that.” But they set the NPS score pretty low and saying, “Well, we just need you to answer the calls. They don't have to be that good.” That's what you're going to get.
\n\nIf you were measuring things like, “Oh, did your manager make you feel good this month?” If you ask that and they answer honestly, maybe they made you feel good once a month or something like that since the last one, but primarily, they made you feel like crap. That's kind of what you need to ask. I do think the interpersonal relationship aspects, they're hard to quantify because it looks different for everybody and even the nature of the questions are different for everybody. What that question looks like to a cis, white, straight male is going to look way different to say, a queer Black woman.
\n\nREIN: What if the question is: “I feel a real kinship with my coworkers and I'm like a little, eh about that one?”
\n\nTIM: Yeah, that goes back to that we're a family thing and I don't necessarily like that at all because we aren't a family. You can't fire your family or lay your family off.
\n\nREIN: But then there were questions like: “I believe that my coworkers appreciate who I am,” and I like that one a lot.
\n\nTIM: That's a good one. The appreciates who I am, that speaks to being a whole person and the more that we can be whole people at our jobs, the better off we are going to be. If you have to bite your tongue, if you have to cover your tattoos, if you have to make sure your hair is undyed, or you have to wear clothes that you don't necessarily like because they’re considered “professional” whatever that means. That the more that a person has to distance themselves from who they are as a whole person, probably the less happy they're going to be in that environment. Less safe they're going to feel in that environment.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I find that there is a gap between the rhetoric about bringing your whole self to work and the practice of building a space where it's safe to do that. Like I myself know some things that can lead us in that direction, but I don't feel like there's a great playbook on building that all out.
\n\nTIM: There really isn't and part of the reason is that the tech industry started out, by and large, as an artifact of the US government, US military, which is never not really known for being very welcoming and safe for people outside of a certain demographic.
\n\nYou talk about what the industry looked like when I got in back in the late 90s, IBM had just stopped requiring people to wear suits to work and they were allowed to wear polo shirts and khakis. That look was what you had. It was the “business casual.” Couldn't have long hair, couldn't have accessed piercings, no visible tattoos; not unlike dress codes or appearance regs that you would see in the military.
\n\nSo you make everybody look like the stereotypical white guy, essentially, because this is what you have to wear because some old white guy said, “This is what people should look like.” Those things are hard to break because who still has power in those things and it's a self-perpetuating society. People that do not fit that mold do not last in that industry, or the people that do last in industry had to divorce themselves of who they are so much that it becomes hard to break that mold once you get into places of power, because you can very quickly be run out for rocking the boat too much and it was very, very self-standing.
\n\nThis is the one thing that I think came out of the .com bubble burst after Y2K and the early aughts was that it broke up a lot of these big companies, big old legacy companies and you saw a lot of smaller startups come out. A lot of these smaller startups that came out of it maybe had a different way of thinking because they weren't run by 70-year-old white guys who were defense contractors.
\n\nBut I do think, when we get into that, if you look at what a person in the tech industry looks like in 2021 versus what they look like in 2001 is dramatically different. I can have my hair long. I can expose my tattoos. I can have a beard. I can say, “I'm a queer, ADHD, Black-Mexican man,” whereas such a thing would be dangerous career-wise and maybe even personally, 20 years ago.
\n\nI remember in the industry when the first person that I knew personally came out as being transgender and the harassment that she had to go through was horrifying, but it was considered perfectly normal in 2001. We have come a long way, but that just speaks to what a shitshow it was before. Not that we're doing great now, because we have so much farther to go and we are still here in 2021 seeing all white panels, all white male leadership, diversity being heralded when you bring a white woman onto a board or when you bring a gay white man onto a board. And that ain't it chief. That is not it. We have so much more to do and the hard part about that is convincing people that you can't rest on your laurels. Convincing people that you haven't done enough in the first place. Convincing people that there are still problems.
\n\nThat goes back to what you're saying about some of these questions, about some of these metrics that we have about people in the workplace. The questions that you have to ask on these to really get an idea of where you are, have to be uncomfortable. They have to be uncomfortable. They have to challenge people's safe spaces and not just a safe spaces of other people who are marginalized, but certainly, the safe space of the people who are overrepresented.
\n\nIt goes back to talking about, “Hey, do you realize that you have gotten where you are largely by privilege?” or that you've been able to fail up, or that doors have been opened to you that haven't been opened to others, or bars have been lowered for you that weren't as lower for others, or even at the bar wasn't lower, the bar was not raised for you like it was for others? People don't like to hear that. People get very upset when you challenge the notion that maybe they haven't had to work as hard as other people have to get where they have. If you tell somebody, “Well, you got here because you had a fair amount of pillars to help you along the way.” People don't like to hear that.
\n\nNow I will very much, I've said in the past I may be Black and I may be queer but I'm still a man so I have some privilege that goes along with that that women and non-binary folks have not been able to enjoy. I typically don't have to go to a conference and worry about whether I'm going to be sexually assaulted. God help the person that tries at least with me. But that is a worry and a concern that people have to have going to a conference that's supposed to help their career and that's a big detractor. That is a big obstacle that people don't realize that they have and then worse.
\n\nI mean, heaven forbid, we even talked about motherfuckers that actually do the harassing there that are still allowed to enjoy their place in the industry, that are still allowed to hold positions of power, positions of influence where they can continue to do this. Not even just keep their jobs, but they keep being by to back these places and they can continue to perpetuate that kind of harassment and making the industry hostile to brilliant people.
\n\nBut it's funny that I will say that here I am on a podcast and every podcast I've ever been on with the exception of one – well, no, all the podcasts I've ever been on hosted by all white people. Every last one. Some have had white women in them, but it's all white people. So when we talk about these subjects, it still comes from a certain perspective that white folks aren't going to have, or that men aren't going to have. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to do something about it. We need to have more of these voices routinely, not just in our panels at tech conferences, but in our normal, everyday consumption and I think that's important.
\n\nWe talk about what do these things look like? What are the patterns we're seeing? If you look at a tech company, especially in Silicon Valley, tech companies look like the neighborhoods. It's not very diverse. People refer their friends, people refer their coworkers, or they have these things about what was that Google employee letter? “We only want people with Bachelor's from Stanford or Ph.Ds. from these places and no one else gets accepted.” Those places are already quite exclusionary in and of itself. They list no HBCUs on that piece of paper, because they don't value HBCUs. They don't value schools that allow people of lower economic or lower in the socioeconomic strata to attend. It's literally self-perpetuating, that kind of gatekeeping.
\n\nThese people who pass through these gates erect those exact same ones and only the people that fit that mold are going to go through it and you never fix the problem. We do not do enough to break those gates down. We don't do enough to model that kind of behavior that we should be expecting. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to be more about doing it.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and our whole panel for this show is majority not white dude, but it might not surprise you that the people who most often have the spoons and the privilege to take time out of their workday to do this podcast are the white dudes.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah.
\n\nTIM: Yeah. But I think when we talk about going forward, it's one thing to see a pattern and I think people who, if they're looking, they can see what it is, but what do you do? Do you just throw up your hands, go, “We tried, it's hard to do, so we're not going to do”? “Ah, all right, we gave it a shot. We asked some folks, but they can’t do it.” Or what do you do?
\n\nI've seen a couple of folks, to call out the good behavior when I see it, I know Ashley McNamara when she had said that she was going to step aside from doing conferences, she was like, “Don't talk to me about conferences. Go talk to underrepresented minorities about these roles. Don't talk to me. I'm not going to take it.” I've seen folks that will say, “I'm not going to speak at this thing if it's an all white panel or if it's all male panel.” “If you're not paying your speakers, especially of color, to come, I'm not going to do these things.” That's how we see it in action.
\n\nHolding the people that build the platform accountable to make sure that everyone has access to it. I think the thing that the pandemic has taught me that I've seen, for the most part, is a lot of these conferences have become free or very, very low in price because there were virtual, a lot more people showed up. People that couldn't necessarily go before and sometimes, it was harder even for them like you mentioned before Rein, just to get off of work and now they can kind of manage to do it in between because they don't actually have to leave.
\n\nSo when we get to a point where we can have in-person conferences again, I think it behooves the organizer of these conferences that if they're really serious about doing something about being more inclusive about breaking these patterns, not to have them in Silicon Valley, in the most expensive real estate on earth. Have them someplace less expensive to lower the cost for people, if they charge it at all.
\n\nIf anything, you cannot tell me that AWS cannot put the cost of an entire – AWS, Microsoft, all these panels’ sponsors cannot put the cost such that you don't have to charge people for a standard price of admission. You can't tell me that they can't sponsor it to the level where you can pay your speakers, especially women, underrepresented minorities, people of color, like that to come in and appear and talk about these things. Especially if it's a topic on which they have to do the emotional labor for.
\n\nThat's what I want to see us do to break some of the patterns that we're seeing, to make things better for everyone else, and then once some start doing that, that is going to be it. Once you start modeling that behavior, you're going to see other conferences do the same, where these big trillion-dollar companies that are sponsoring these orgs or sponsoring these conferences can actually put some money into it so that more people can come.
\n\nI don't really have a good understanding yet as of why that hasn't happened and I'm sure folks who organize conferences will probably have plethora of reasons. But I feel like the time has come to do these kinds of things and if it means we have fewer conferences, okay. Move them more virtual, it's fine.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I have liked that some conferences are starting to do two tier tickets where if the company's paying, you pay the higher price and if you're just an individual or whatever, then you're paying a much lower price, and then usually, there's also some sort of scholarship program again, to try and bring people in.
\n\nBut I think you're right. Especially if it's the much more company focused things like AWS re:Invent or whatever, why is there a cost to attend that? Even for the tickets, but on top of that, there's all the travel, there's taking time off work, there's childcare; there's so many other attendance costs to going to a conference at a place that even if the tickets were free, there's still a huge barrier there.
\n\nTIM: You could even go as far as say some of these venue choices. You go to a place like D.C., or New York City, or someplace that have HBCUs, those HBCUs have [inaudible] and conference centers. You don't have to go to some Richie rich hotel. Why don’t you give Howard some money to use their facilities? Why don't you do it in the [inaudible] area? Why don't you give Home by the Sea Hampton University some money? Or Atlanta?
\n\nAny of these places where you have – or some of these are just lower income schools that serve underprivileged communities, give them the money to host these conferences. Not some hotel. Have it catered by minority-owned businesses, have something, do some things to get more people in. Like, have scholarships for HBCUs CS students where if you're a student—junior, senior—looking for internships where they're like, “Hey man, you know what, come to this conference, we’re not going to charge you and we're actually going to give you a stipend for travel.” That's doing something and it is almost the peak of intellectual dishonesty for people to try and act like the money isn't there because it's there. We've seen time and time again, all these earnings calls coming out, all these market caps going up and up and up and up. The money is there; just people don't want to open up them purse strings, I guess.
\n\nREIN: Before the moment passes, I do want to point out that you call this podcast out for not doing enough to schedule things so that all of the panel can attend. I gratefully appreciate the rebuke and we're going to go work on that.
\n\nTIM: I appreciate that and I appreciate you for giving me a space that I feel safe to say that. That matters. Like, if you want to do something, give people space to talk about it and don't get butthurt when they say something.
\n\nREIN: So when you were talking about white person dress codes and the need to assimilate into that, I was reminded of this thing that actually just was published by CNN about a Maori representative in New Zealand’s parliament who was objected for refusing to wear a tie.
\n\nTIM: I think he called it a colonizer's noose?
\n\nREIN: He did and when they changed the rule and he was allowed back in, I am still thinking about what he said, which is, “The noose has been taken off our necks and we are now able to sing our songs.”
\n\nTIM: It's true and it's a big deal because I know for me as, especially as a young Black male, it is imperative for our survival to not be threatening and I'm not overstating that. It is imperative for our survival to not be deemed as threatening. If you go into a workplace and you don't have a comfortable appearance whether your hair's cut close, you can't have dreadlocks, you don't want to have anything that's let's say, too Black. You have to look a certain way. Your car has to look a certain way. You can't listen to certain music. Can't talk a certain way. Those are the guardrails which I had to perform under and I say perform early on when I was early in the industry, because that's what was expected.
\n\nYou would see when the few Black people in an org would get together and the white folks weren't around, we would relax and it looks a whole lot different. If you're a fly on that wall, you would look and sound a lot different because we could be who we were and the problem happened was that you would see, you'd have to go out there and you'd be like oh, man. “Hey, Tim you have a blah, blah. You don't really sound Black.” Hm, okay.
\n\nREIN: You’re so articulate.
\n\nTIM: Oh yeah, that's a good one. “You're so articulate,” “You know a lot of words,” and that kind of stuff. The problem with that is that in order to do that, in order to assimilate into that culture to make a living, you have to do that and then we have to go back to our communities and hear about it. Hear about selling out, hear about – and it's one thing to get a job. People like to see people succeed, but what they don't like people have to do is change who they are in order to succeed. But that's what was expected of us to fit into this predominantly white culture. White people didn't have to change. Not really.
\n\nI can't recall how many dudes I saw walking around with mullets. Even to this day, you see guys walking around with khakis, the polo shirt tucked into the belt, the mullet, the wraparound sunglasses. That has been unchanged since like 1985. But Black people now are starting to be able to be our whole selves, but how many didn't last in the industry because they couldn't? There's a lot and that was just for being Black. Heaven forbid, people who are gay, people who are trans, people who were immigrants first generation, or immigrants that really had a hard time. It's not great. We have not done, this “progressive tech industry” has not done a lot. Did not do a lot early to be welcoming or to do anything, really towards inclusion. It had to be done kicking and screaming by people who have kicked down the doors and I think, honestly, we really need to be.
\n\nI am grateful that you are kicking down the doors for me and I've done my best to kick down doors for people behind me, who've come after me. But we need to keep doing that and I don't think we acknowledge really, how bad it was because it's uncomfortable. Especially the folks who are still in the industry that were part of that. You catch a lot of these high-tech level CEOs, C-levels SVPs who say they've been in the industry 20 plus years. They were complicit.
\n\nNo one was talking about that. They want to talk about what they're doing now, but no one wants to come up front and be like, “Yeah, I actually participated in this. This is the things that I was doing back then.” Or “I didn't speak up for whoever, whoever.” I guarantee you, if people had an honest disclosure of all that, you're going to see that. It talks about what US history looks like if we don't whitewash it. If we're really honest about it. We can prevent making the same mistakes, hopefully because we don't have this narrative that we were great all the time.
\n\nCompanies are the same way, managers are the same way, people who are long in the tooth of this industry are the same way and I think it's important that we talk about that especially when we talk about even now. You take salespeople, that is a good foray into tech for people that don't have a technical background, especially people of color and women and they still have to look like they're fucking bankers to sell a SaaS to people who are wearing hoodies and boardshorts to work. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense.
\n\nREIN: Can I share a hot take with you, Tim?
\n\nTIM: The hottest of takes, please give me lava.
\n\nREIN: I'm getting really frustrated with the messaging around diversity and inclusion that works and the fact that we have to use it, which is look how good this is for the business and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who do that work, sell that message. A lot of the people I've talked to who are doing this are Black women and they know how to get it done better than I do, but it must be grading to not be able to just say, “Look, we do this because it's right. We do it because it's just.”
\n\nTIM: It's because the people that they have to placate in order to get this signed off on. Who are they? They are, by and large, white men and to try and give a message to them of doing it just because. People who are a hundred millionaires, billionaires sometimes, if you don't tell them it's going to be good for their bottom line, they're not going to do it. For the most part.
\n\nThen there are some folks that I'm sure that wouldn't, but in the most part, you're talking about raging capitalists that will be glad to cut off. That would be the same people that didn't offer health insurance to their employees because they didn't have to. The same ones that give them shitty healthcare, but the executives get really, really nice healthcare.
\n\nThe stratification of the value that you hold to the companies is very apparent in the benefits package, pays, and other kinds of things they offer them. To expect them to do it for altruistic reasons is the peak of naivety. So yes, the people that can get those people to sign off on a diversity and inclusion program are fucking miracle workers.
\n\nREIN: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not mad at them for choosing that messaging. I have a huge amount of respect for their ability to be pragmatic and use the messaging that gets the job done. I mad that that's what they have to do because of how the system is. Because of how racism is.
\n\nTIM: I wished we could live in a society where we can say, “This is the right thing to do so we're going to do it.” I've talked about this before, where you look at that AWS Leadership Principle of leaders are right. There's no impetus on doing the right thing. You can say, “Oh, I was right about this.” Well good, congrats on your fucking jeopardy win. But do you do the right thing?
\n\nDoing the right thing is an ethical question. Do you do the right thing? Not for the business, right thing for the business. There's no parenthetical after that, there's no qualifying clause. If you are ethical, you will do the right thing and if that right thing isn't necessarily good for the business, okay. That's fine. All right. There's more money to be made and if your business cannot withstand you doing the right thing, then you're probably a shitty business in the first place.
\n\nREIN: It’s not a means, it’s an end.
\n\nTIM: Exactly.
\n\nREIN: Okay. Well, there's my hot take for the episode.
\n\nTIM: That was like medium hot. That was like jalapeno hot.
\n\nJOHN: It's something we've all noticed, that language always comes up the moment you start talking about DE&I.
\n\nTIM: What I think for me, the hurtful part is when I watch these things especially as you see these things like what you're seeing at Google because of fucking course, Google is that when people really start to move the needle, when people start to make a real impact, the powers that be get uncomfortable and then they start to let people go and they replace them with someone that they are more comfortable with. They don't realize that the discomfort that they feel is what's supposed to happen and you can make it very, very simple for them.
\n\nIf you were to talk about this as a digital transformation, as we say, it's like, “Oh, well, we're going to go from this monolithic gigantic system that we’re running on to microservices, cloud-based API, stuff like that,” and people say, “Well, these old school database administrators are very uncomfortable with it and they tell them.” It’s like, “Hey, well this is how it is now. You're going to have to deal with it, or you're going to probably have to find a different way to get the industry, because this is the way it's going and it's better for everyone involved.” They explain all these benefits and they tell people that discomfort is part of this journey. You're going to have to learn to swim in new waters and things are going to be different, but they're going to be better overall once you get on the other side of that, but they can't apply that to them fucking selves when it comes to about diversity and inclusion and I don't get it.
\n\nJOHN: I mean, that's the privilege that they haven't had to be practiced at being uncomfortable in those situations, or even if it's a little bit of technical discomfort versus the much more impactful discomfort that comes when you start actually talking about race.
\n\nTIM: Yeah, there's a level of introspection that they haven't had to do and they are seemingly unwilling to do. That's the part that's most frustrating; the people that have the least to lose in this are the most unwilling to change.
\n\nREIN: Oh, do you think it's worthwhile if what we're talking about here is a change in mindset? It's a change in what these people strive for, what they want and I think that that change is incompatible with let’s call it, white supremacy and capitalism. So do you think that it's worthwhile to try to pursue that, or do you think we have to continue doing these pragmatic things?
\n\nTIM: Well, first of all, I would say that white supremacy and capitalism are redundant, but I would say that we cannot change the minds of the people in power with anything other than pragmatic reasoning because if we could, they would have already. There has been more than enough reason, appeals to emotion, consequence, societal collapse, all these other things that we've seen, especially these past 18 months or so.
\n\nA reasonable person would say like, “You know what,” or all the people who are reasonable about this and who are ethical about this have already changed their minds. At this point, anybody who doesn't see the need for it, the self-evident need for it without for the justification for business reasons, but the self-evident need for it will not be convinced. So you have to appeal to pragmatic reasons until they leave the industry.
\n\nREIN: This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift: the people with the old views have to die or otherwise go away and be replaced.
\n\nTIM: Essentially, that's it and so that's why it's so important for us to nurture the junior folks coming into the industry and the people who are mid-career to make sure that people who understand this, to make sure that the people who are underrepresented, and to make sure your LGBTQ, your people of color, any manner of folks that are not properly represented or that have been heretofore unsafe in this industry, stay in the industry by any means necessary. To make sure that the industry can change in the long run.
\n\nIt is incrementalism and as unpopular as it is in some circles to say, “Oh, we can't just change everything right now because we're inspired to do so.” I'm sorry, you don't steer a ship that quickly. This is a large thing we have to change. The industry is a lot of people and it's a lot of money. So you're going to have to change it a bit at a time and the only way to bring that change about is to bring and keep people in the industry that can affect that change.
\n\nREIN: And for those of us who are more securely in the industry, whether it's because we're white dudes or we have experience, whatever it is, we have an obligation to do what it takes to keep them around you.
\n\nTIM: You absolutely do and you also have an obligation to continue to push on the folks that don't see the value in keeping them around. Very openly. You have to use your privilege. You have to use your privilege to speak to power. You don't have to take anyone else's voices. You don't have to pick up someone else to sign a waiver on his own, certainly, but you have to keep them from being silenced and that is the important thing that we need to do. If you are a straight white male in this industry and you have seen the necessity of the industry being more inclusive, diverse, and to have a good sense of belonging, then what you have to do is you have to check your peers when people speak.
\n\nREIN: And not just keep them around, but make it possible for them to thrive.
\n\nTIM: Absolutely, absolutely. They have to have strong roots in the industry. They have to feel like they're safe here, that they can grow here, and that they belong here and then when they do that, that's when they can affect change.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah. That is how you keep them around, either that, or you don't want to them to have to rely on just complete bloody mindedness to have the perseverance to go through all of the pain to stay in the industry. You want it to be them thriving in the industry. Like you said, they can be the tomorrow's leaders that can start that real change.
\n\nTIM: The last thing I want to do is also say, I want to make sure that when we talk about doing that thriving, that again, we're talking about not just taking care of them in the workplace, but taking care of them as whole people. I will beat this drum every time I can get on, we cannot let, we cannot let women leave this industry. We cannot do it. We're losing too many women because they have to make the choice right now in 2021, in this pandemic, as to whether or not they have to be mothers or whether they have to be career professionals and it’s bullshit. It is bullshit and it goes two ways with that: we're not supporting mothers and we're not supporting our fathers. We can support our fathers, then they can play a more active role in raising their children and Mom doesn't have to take care of everything.
\n\nNow obviously, work can't influence whether a father is a piece of shit father or not and there are a lot of them out there, I'm going to be honest about it, that won't change a diaper, that won't clean the house, shit like that. We can't do that, but we'll at least avail them the opportunity and not have them use work as an excuse.
\n\nSo we have to change the way we do business to make sure that working mothers can be whole people so they don't have to choose between raising their children and doing work. If we don't protect these women, and the reason I say that is because it is the women of color that are the most susceptible to having to make this choice, because they have fewer resources outside of that, typically.
\n\nSo we need to protect people. We need to protect these people so that they can stay in the industry and we need to do that now. Because we are bleeding off too many women as it is like way, way too much. And that goes beyond whether or not we're actually treating them as they should be treated like equals, like the brilliant engineers they are in the conference rooms. So that's a whole other problem. We need to tackle that too, but we need to at least keep them from saying, “Hey, I’ve got to leave the industry because I got to take care of my kids.” We should be fixing that and we should be fixing that yesterday.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, that’s part of bringing your whole self to work is the other selves that you're taking care of. Like, if you can't have that baby on your lap for the meeting, then you're not going be on the meeting and then it's snowballed from there.
\n\nTIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we start coming back, whatever that looks like post-pandemic, think about what they did in World War II and beyond to keep women in working. They had daycares, like the companies had daycares. But why fuck can't we do that now? We have so much money. You mean to tell me Amazon can’t have a daycare at the facilities You mean to tell me that Microsoft can have a daycare facilities? You mean to tell me that fucking WeWork can't have WeWork fucking daycare that companies pay for? Like, there's no reason for it. People just don't want it and it comes down to greed and it’s bullshit.
\n\nREIN: So maybe now is a good time for us to do reflections. I usually have two things, I guess, that's my pattern now. One is I wanted to point out that Tim said that capitalism and white supremacy are the same thing and I didn't want that one to go under the radar either. If you're a white person who doesn't know what Tim is talking about, I can recommend a book called The Invention of the White Race. Maybe Tim has some of his own recommendations.
\n\nMy reflection is that we have an obligation not just to make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but if we're dragging them through the barbed wire that is this toxic garbage industry, we're hurting them, too and so, our obligation is to make it healthy.
\n\nJOHN: Yeah, I think that's really just been reinforcing a lot of my own thoughts on things like, I don't know if this is a reflection other than just it's always great to have these kinds of conversations as reminders. These are thoughts that happen, but sometimes they happen in the background or you're not quite sure to connect them to action and continuing to have these conversations to continually remind me what the priorities are and what the other perspectives are is incredibly useful to me. So Tim, if nothing else, I appreciate you spending the time talking with us, talking to me in specific about your perspective on this. So thank you.
\n\nTIM: I want to take a moment again, to acknowledge and thank you all for giving me a space and a platform. I know it's difficult sometimes to hear criticism especially if you're doing what you think is right for someone to say, “Hey, well, you can do better.” It's hard, but I think it's important for us also acknowledge that growth is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable.
\n\nOne of the things that I learned in jujitsu, if it has taught me anything and it's something that I've reinforced in my life, is that adversity makes you thrive in some ways. Not adversity for adversity’s sake, but when you exercise harder, you get stronger. If you run faster, run harder to get faster. If you spend more time being crushed under a 300-pound man, you get better at jujitsu.
\n\nIn this context, the more time you spend listening to some of these things, the voice of the people that have been marginalized and it makes you uncomfortable, figure out why it makes you uncomfortable and don't figure out how to disqualify the person talking. Think about why you're uncomfortable, look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself and in your world and how you interact with it, and then once you find that pattern, fix the problem. Once you do that, you can then help others do it. But you have to at first be comfortable with being uncomfortable and to do, if there's maybe sound a little cliche, but it's true. If you just run away from that feeling, you're never going to grow, you're never going to improve, and things are never going to get better.
\n\nJOHN: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Tim.
\n\nTIM: I appreciate it, John. Thank you all for inviting me. I’m honored and humbled.
Special Guest: Tim Banks.
","summary":"Tim Banks talks about uncovering patterns and making the covert overt, taking care of people as whole people, doing the right thing, and changing mindsets by using privilege to speak to power.","date_published":"2021-03-10T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/21a0d83a-57a5-46e5-b62b-fdcd0da6a8a3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44004161,"duration_in_seconds":3783}]},{"id":"6d61dc00-4bd5-4ed9-919b-f475bb9ef2fc","title":"224: Better Allies with Karen Catlin","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/better-allies","content_text":"02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things\n\n\nSimplifying in a Team Context\n\n\n05:55 - Better Allies – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research \n\n\n@BetterAllies\nBetter Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (Book)\nThe Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring (Book)\nPresent! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking (Book)\n\n\n14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias\n\n\nChanneling White Men; Men Listening to Other Men\nWhistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Book)\n[Podcast] 'Whistling Vivaldi' And Beating Stereotypes \nReduce the influence of unconscious bias with these re:Work tools \nBuild the Culture Instead of Fit the Culture\n\n\n26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit\n\n\nRecognizing Bias Instead of Removing It\nMeritocracy\n\n\n32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous Networks\n\n\nMarginalization + Privilege Can Be Self-Reinforcing\n50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace \n\n\n41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job\n\n48:12 - People to Follow\n\n\nMinda Harts\n\n\nThe Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table\n\nJeannie Gainsburg\n\n\nThe Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate \n\nDavid Smith & Brad Johnston\n\n\nGood Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace \n\nCorey Ponder\n\n\nLearning the ABCs of Allyship\n\n\n\n51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry\n\n\nWomen in Tech -- The Missing Force: Karen Catlin at TEDxCollegeofWilliam&Mary \n\n\n58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech.\n\nDamien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens.\n\nChanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge.\n\nArty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts.\n\nKaren: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nTranscript:\n\nPRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.\n\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.\n\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.\n\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.\n\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the \"Create Free Account\" button to get started.\n\nREIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two. \n\nSo full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again. \n\nI'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke. \n\nDAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond.\n\nCHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr. \n\nARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin. \n\nSo after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.\n\nToday, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: \"Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces,\" \"The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and \"Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking.\"\n\nWelcome, Karen to the show! \n\nKAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me.\n\nARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us.\n\nSo our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? \n\nKAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth.\n\nAnd I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized. \n\nCertainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do. \n\nYeah. So that's my superpower. \n\nARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that?\n\nKAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other. \n\nHearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was. \n\nActually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.”\n\nARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful.\n\nKAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too.\n\nCHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey. \n\nKAREN: Okay. \n\nCHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people.\n\nKAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to. \n\nSo the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity. \n\nNow I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening.\n\nSo while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit. \n\nSo about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.”\n\nSo I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive. \n\nAll of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies. \n\nAlso, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others. \n\nSo I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work. \n\nIn hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that? \n\nOthers are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there?\n\nSo I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven. \n\nThen the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing. \n\nSo I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?” \n\nSo I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don't have a book. I don't have a book. I don't have a book, sorry.” But I did finally write my book. In fact, I've written two books on the topic—\"Better Allies\" and also, \"The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.” The Better Allies book, I just released a second edition. It's been out there for 2 years. I've learned so much that I wanted to do a full update on the book. So I've just released that a few weeks ago.\n\nCHANTÉ: I have a follow-up question then, because Karen, you mentioned that you wanted to maintain your anonymity when you started off that handle and I would just love to hear maybe why that's so important when you're doing this work of allyship and accomplishing in this space?\n\nKAREN: Yes, and I don't know if it is important for everyone—and I'm not anonymous anymore. I have claimed credit for this. As soon as I published my books. Writing a book is a lot of work; I'm going to claim the credit. But I didn't in the beginning because okay, I'm going to say this. A lot of people thought it was a man behind the Twitter handle and I must admit, I was kind of channeling white men that I have worked with over my career and thinking about what would they really do? What could I get them to do? \n\nAll of my tweets are first person, “I pledge to do this,” “I will do this,” I'm going to do this,” and there were people I have friends even who were like, “Hey, have you seen this @betterallies Twitter handle? I wonder who's behind it. I'd like to interview him for my podcast,” That type of thing.\n\nSo I think that there were people out there who thought it was a white man behind the Twitter handle and I was comfortable with that because not only was I channeling these white men I had worked with in the past, but I also think that there's power in men listening to other men. I'll just say that. I have actually gotten speaking engagements when I've said, “I'm a contributor.” They're like, “Are there any men who could speak because we think men would like to hear this message from another man.” \n\nSo anyway, that's kind of why I started out with that anonymous Twitter handle and with this character behind the scenes of this fake man. [laughs] But now it's okay. I say that I curate it, it's me, and I'm comfortable with that. I still do it first person because I think that white women can also be allies. We all can be allies for others with less privilege than ourselves in the workplace and I think it's important for us, everyone to be thinking, “This is a job I can and should do to be inclusive at work and to look for these everyday situations. I can take ally actions and make a difference.” \n\nARTY: How's that changed things like, revealing your identity and that you're not actually a big white dude?\n\n[chuckles]\n\nKAREN: I know. Well, I never really said I was a big white dude! Or even a small white dude, or whatever. But I think it's fine. I claimed the association with the Twitter handle when I published my book and it was just time to just own it. It's not like people stopped following me or stopped retweeting or anything like that. It's only grown since then. So Arty, it's a good question, but I don't know. I don't know.\n\nREIN: And this is more than a little ironic because when you were talking about your coaching—and I'm going to read into this a little bit, but I think you can confirm that it's backed up by the research—to appear equally competent or professional, women have to do more and other minoritized groups have to do more. So what I was reading in was that part of the problem you had with coaching was that to get them to an equal playing field, they had to be better.\n\nKAREN: Yes. What you're describing, Rein is “prove-it-again” bias and this is well-researched and documented. Prove-it-again means that women have to prove themselves over and over again where men just have to show potential. This often happens and I'm going to give you just a scenario to bring it home. \n\nImagine sitting in some sort of promotion calibration discussion with other managers in your group and you're talking about who gets promotions this cycle. Someone might say, “Well, I'd like to see Arty prove that she can handle managing people before we move her to the next level.” When Arty, maybe you've already been doing that for a few years; you've already managed a team, you've built a team, whatever. “I'd like to make sure she can do this with this additional thing,” like, make sure she can do it with an offshore team or something. “I want to see her do it again.”\n\nWhereas a man's like, “Ah, Damien's great. I know he can do the job. Let's promote him.” Okay, totally making this up. But you see what I'm saying is that this is what the prove-it-again bias is. \n\nSo whether it is women have to be twice as good or something like that, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but they have to deal with this bias of once again, I have to prove that I'm worthy to be at this table, to be in this conversation, to be invited to that strategic planning meeting, to get that promotion, and I don't want to coach women to have to keep proving themselves over and over again. Instead, I want to change the dynamics of what's happening inside these organizations so it is a better playing field, not just for my clients who are mostly women, but also, anyone out there who's from an underrepresented group, who might be facing challenges as they try to navigate this world that really has been designed for other people.\n\nARTY: Wow, that's really enlightening. I'm just thinking about this from a cognitive science perspective and how our brains work, and then if you're making a prediction about something and have an expectation frame for that. If I have an expectation that someone's going to do well, like I have a dream and image in my mind that they'll fit this particular stereotype, then if they just show potential to fit this image in my head, I can imagine and envision them doing all these things and trust that imaginary dream in my head. \n\nWhereas, if I have the opposite dream in my head where my imagination shows this expectation of this person falling on their face and doing all these things wrong, I'm already in a position of having to prove something that's outside of that expectation, which is so much harder to do. \n\nSo this is the effect of these biases basically being baked into our brain already is all of our expectations and things are set up to work against people that culturally, we have these negative expectations around that have nothing to do with those actual people.\n\nKAREN: Thanks. Arty, have you ever read the book, Whistling Vivaldi?\n\nARTY: I haven't. I am adding that to my list. \n\nKAREN: It explores stereotype threat, which is exactly what you've just described, and the title, just to give you some insight into this, how this shows up. The title, Whistling Vivaldi, is all about a story of a Black man who had to walk around his neighborhood, which I believe is mostly white and got just the concerns that people didn't trust him navigating this public space, his neighborhood.\n\nSo what he would do, and I don't know if it was just in the evenings or any time, he went out to walk to be outside, he would whistle Vivaldi to break the stereotype that he was a bad person, a scary person because of the color of his skin. Instead, by whistling Vivaldi, he gave off the feeling that he was a highly educated person who studied classical music and he did that so that he could navigate his neighborhoods safely. It's awful to think about having to do that, but this book is full of these examples. It's a research-driven approach so, it's a great book to understand stereotype threat and combat it.\n\nDAMIEN: So in the interest of us and our listeners, I suppose being better allies, you spoke about stereotype threat and gave an example there. You spoke about prove-it-again bias and specifically, with prove-it-again bias, I want to know what are ways that we can identify this real-time and counter it in real-time?\n\nKAREN: Yes. With prove-it-again bias—well, with any bias, really. First of all, reminding yourself that it exists is really important. At Google, they found that simply reminding managers, before they went into a calibration, a performance calibration meeting, probably some rank ordering exercise of all the talent in the organization. Before they started a calibration meeting, they were all given a 1-page handout of here's the way bias can creep into this process. That simple act of having people review the list of here's the way bias creeps into the process was enough to help combat it during the subsequent conversation. \n\nSo I think we have to remind ourselves of bias and by the way, this resource I'm describing is available as a download on Google's re:Work website. I think it's R-E-: work. There's a re:Work website with tons of resources, but it's available for download there.\n\nSo that's one thing you can do is before a calibration meeting or before you're about to start an interview debrief session with a team, is remind people of the kinds of bias that can come into play so that people are more aware. \n\nOther things, and I'll talk specifically about hiring, is I am a huge proponent of making sure that before you interview the first candidate, you have objective criteria that you're going to use to evaluate the candidates because otherwise, without objective criteria, you start relying on subjectivity, which is code for bias. Things will start to be said of, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit,” which is code for bias of “They're different from us. They're different from me. I don't think I'd want to go get a beer with them after work,” or “If I had to travel with them and get stuck on a long layover somewhere when we can travel again, I don't think I'd enjoy that.” People just instead say, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit. \n\nSo you get away from that by, instead in your objective criteria, looking for other things that are technically needed for the job, or some values perhaps that your company has in terms of curiosity or lifelong learning or whatever your company values are. You interview for those things and you figure out how you're going to measure someone against those objective criteria. \n\nOther way bias creeps into interviews is looking at or saying something like, “Well, they don't have this experience with Docker that this other candidate has,” but really, that wasn't part of the job description. No one said that the candidates needed Docker experience, but all of a sudden, because one of the candidates has Docker experience, that becomes important. \n\nSo instead of getting ahead of that, make sure you list exactly what you're going to be interviewing for and evaluating people for so that the bias isn't there and bias, maybe all of a sudden Docker becomes an important thing when you realize you could get it. But it may be that it's the person who seems the most like the people in the team who has it and that’s another – you're just using that as a reason for increasing that candidate’s success to join your team because you'd like to hang out with them. You'd like to be with them. You would want to be getting a beer with them. Does that help, Damien?\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that's very helpful. The framing is an absolutely pre-framing before an evaluation, before an interview what biases can happen. That's a wonderful tool, which I am going to be using everywhere I can. And then what you said about culture fit and really, every subjective evaluation is, I think the words you used was “code for bias.” Like, anytime you have a subjective evaluation, it's going to be biased. So being able to decide in advance what your objective evaluations are, then you can help avoid that issue.\n\nCulture fit is just such a red flag for me. You said, I wrote down the words, “culture built,” right? Decide what the culture is – because culture is important in the company, decide what the culture is you want and then interview and evaluate for that.\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Build the culture instead of just fit the culture. I've also heard people say, “If you ever hear someone say, I don't think they'd be a culture fit, respond with ‘Well, I think they'd be a culture add,’” or Damien, to quote you, “I think they build our culture instead of just fit in.” Really powerful, really powerful. \n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. I agree with you all and Karen, I'm not sure if you knew this, but one of the many things I do, which takes up most of my life, is I'm a DEI practitioner and I have a firm, and I also work in-house at a company, Village MD, as a director of DEI there. \n\nSo one of the things that I talk a lot about is culture add and one of the things I'd love to see more companies do is to think about like, basically take an inventory of all the people on your team and try to identify where you're strong, where you're weak, and look for the skills gap analysis, basically and say, “What don't we have here,” and then, “Let's go hire for that skillset or that expertise that we don't have that we believe could help us build this thing better this year.”\n\nThat's going to require people to do that exercise, not just once because your team dynamic shifts usually a few times a year. So if you're a high growth company, you should be doing that probably every quarter. But imagine what the difference would be if we approach interviewing and promotion building from that lens instead. \n\nKAREN: Yeah, and Chanté, the way you framed it is amazing. I love it. You said, “What do we not have that we need to build our product to deliver to our customers?” I don't remember the exact words you used, but that I think is important because I've also, in conversations I've had around culture fit and culture and everything, someone say to me, “Well, wait a second, Karen, what if you we're evaluating a white supremacist? It's clear, there are white supremacists and we don't have one of those yet on the team. Does that mean we should open the doors and let them in?” \n\nThat's when it's like, you can use the way you've just framed as “Well, if we're building a product for white supremacists, then yeah, probably.” But to be more serious about this, it's like what's missing from our team structure, from the diversity within this team, that is going to allow us to deliver on our product, on our offering better? I think that's important. \n\nAnother lens to apply here is also you can still do values fit. Make sure people fit with the values that you have as a company and that should allow you to interview out people who don't fit with your values and just to use that example of a white supremacist. That would be the way to do that, too.\n\nREIN: I think it's really important to say that ethics still matters here and values fit as a way to express that. One of the things that I would maybe caution or challenge is—and this isn't a direct challenge to you, Karen, I don't think—but it's been popular in the industry to try to remove bias from the equation. To do debiasing training and things like that and I think that that's the wrong way to go because I don't think it's cognitively possible to remove bias. I think instead what we should do, what I think that you're talking about here is being aware of the biases we have. Accounting for them in the way that we hire, because the same heuristic that leads to a bias against certain demographics is the one we use to say, “We don't want white supremacists.”\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Plus a hundred, yes. [laughs] I agree. What I was going to say, Rein to build on what you just shared is that it's important to see things like color, for example, to understand. Even if you feel you're not biased, it's important to see it, to see color, to see disability, to see someone who is going through a transition, for example, on their identity. \n\nIt's important to see it because that allows you to understand the challenges that they are facing and if you say, “I don't see color, I just see them as their new identity, post-transition. I don't see their disability; I just see the person,” it negates the experience they're having, as they are trying to navigate the workplace and to be the best allies, you need to understand the challenges people are facing and how you can take action to help them either mitigate the challenge, get around the challenge, whatever that might be, or remove the challenge. \n\nARTY: So you're not being empathetic to the circumstances by pretending that they don't exist. \n\nKAREN: Yes. Well said, yes.\n\nREIN: It’s the idea that you can be on bias that I think is dangerous. I want to call back to this idea of a meritocracy; the idea that every choice we make is based on merit and that whatever we choose is indicative of the merit of that person is the bias that is harmful. \n\nKAREN: Woo, yes. I can't wait to refer to that. I can't wait to come back and listen to you. What you just said, Rein that is powerful.\n\nREIN: Because becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We're a meritocracy so everything we've chosen is means – if we chose someone that means that they have merit by definition. There's no way out of that trap.\n\nKAREN: Right on.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. When you say that, it makes me think, too of just the sort of committal to always transforming and iterating. So if you come in the door saying, “Listen, there's no way we can eliminate bias all the time.” We're going to make the assumption that we're always being biased and therefore, what things can we put into place and what tools can we use? What resources can we leverage here to make sure that we're on a pathway for greater inclusion, greater accessibility? Therefore, making our organization more diverse and more innovative. \n\nI think, like Rein, I just want to really underscore that because that is something that I've had to really try to lead with versus add to the conversation later. So I'm appreciating that you brought it up today. Thank you.\n\nREIN: It’s like some of the choices, some of the evaluations we're making are subjective. We can't make them objective in every case; I think what we want is a framework that allows us to do these subjective evaluations in a way that accounts for bias. \n\nDAMIEN: So that's amazing. Where do we go from here?\n\nARTY: One of the things we talked about last time with regards to various people getting promoted, this effect of maler and paler as you get closer to the C-suite, is that one of the effects of that is when you're sitting down to hire someone, well, who do you know? Who's on the list of people that I know within my network? So one of the huge biases we end up having isn't necessarily a cognitive bias, it's just a effect of where our attention has been and who we've been hanging out and who we have relationships with that are preexisting. \n\nThese existing network effects also keep us in the thinking and stuff and making decisions within the context of those networks. We promote people that we know. We promote people that we have relationships with. So even just some of the dynamics of if you've got existing C-suite dynamics that is dominated by men and you've got these dynamics where it’s difficult for men and women to have relationships for various reasons, things that get complicated, that those sorts of things can end up creating a self-reinforcing effect, too.\n\nI'm wondering what are some of your thoughts on some of the ways that we can expand our networks and expand the people that we know to shift some of those systemic effects? \n\nKAREN: Yeah. Most of us have homogenous networks. Homogenous networks meaning people who are just like us because we have something in common with them, whether that is hobbies that we share, music we like talking about, food we like to go out to enjoy whatever we have things in common. So most of us end up having a –and it's true. Most white people have networks that are full of other white people and this also is friendship circles. There's again, social science research out there that shows that we tend to have networks full of people just like us. \n\nAs you just were saying, Arty this impacts so many aspects of work in terms of who we hire, who we recommend, who we promote, who we even ask to take on some like stretch assignment or tasks such as giving the update at the all-hands meeting for our team, or going in and exploring some new technology that might be on the horizon that we could leverage. Who are we going to trust with these stretch assignments are people that we know and the people that we know are the people in our network. So it is important to look to diversify our network. There's so many ways to do this. \n\nWhen I give talks, I share some of these ways. One is literally when new people join your team or from a different demographic than you, get to know them and get to know their work and their career goals and down the road, look for how you might be able to connect some dots. But really, take the time to get to know people who you might otherwise just like, “Oh yeah, they're joining the team, whatever,” but set up that virtual coffee or whatever. \n\nThe other thing you can do is join Slack groups or other discussion forums at your company for people from that demographic. After checking first, if you'd be welcome and invited, of course, but many of these groups will be open to allies and if you are wanting to join that discussion groups so that you can sort of understand the conversation, understand the challenges, get to know some of this talent. That's a great way to do it. \n\nYou can also go to conferences that are designed for members of other groups that you're not a part of. Again, asking first permission, if you'd be welcome as an ally, but in tech, there's so many of these, but there's lesbians who tech, there are Black women in tech or Black coders conferences. There are Latinas in tech. Meetups and things like that. So there's so many opportunities to go and hear incredibly talented speakers talking about the technology and the projects and the work that they do and it's a great way to expand your network. \n\nI'll share my favorite hack that I do when it's in-person and I'm going to a meetup or an event. I'm an introvert, I will let everyone know that. It's hard for me to go into a networking group like the meetup that's happening and there's some pizza and some drinks before it starts, or that conference reception. It's hard for me to go into a room like that. \n\nSo when I do, I quickly scan the room and I look for someone who's standing by themselves or sitting by themselves, who is from a different demographic and I go over and say, “Hi.” That's the easiest introduction for me as an introvert is to go find someone who's all by themselves and maybe feeling a little awkward that they're all by themselves too and it's a great way to strike a conversation and again, to expand my network, meet some new people, not just my friends that might be coming to the same event.\n\nDAMIEN: So one of the things that I want to call attention to, too with what you're saying there is that this marginalization and privilege is self-reinforcing. You don't have to have – even though we all have cognitive biases, they aren't actually necessary for marginalization and privilege to self-reinforce and in fact, because that actually takes effort to undo these things. If we just go along, if we pretend not to see color, or whatever, we are actually reinforcing the problems that exist.\n\nKAREN: Yeah, and Damien, on that note. In my book, and it's also a free download on my website, betterallies.com. I have a list that I've curated of 50 ways you might have privilege in the workplace. I like people to read through this list and think about all the ways they have privilege that others might not. The top of the list are “I'm a male,” and “I'm white,” and those are the top two things. But then it gets into more nuanced things and nuanced things being, “I'm not the primary caregiver for someone else.” Well, why is that something we should be aware of as allies? Well, when you're the primary caregiver, that means you may have to drop things at a moment's notice to take a child or a parent to a doctor's appointment, for example, or you might be interrupted in your work. So there's privilege when you don't have that caregiving responsibility. \n\nAnother one is that you actually have budget enough spare money so that you can do after work outings with a team that aren't company sanctioned. Like, “Yeah, I can afford to go out to dinner,” and gosh, this all sounds so weird now with the pandemic and how long it’s lasting. But “Yeah, I can go out for drinks or dinner with my team after work and pay my way,” or “I can do that whitewater rafting trip on the weekend that people are getting together with.” Even though it's not company work, it's still networking and that builds bonds that builds relationships and sure, work is going to be discussed. \n\nIt also includes things such as “I am not holding a visa,” which means that I have confidence that I maybe can take some risks with my career. “I can move teams, move to another manager, try something new out because I have confidence that I'm not going to potentially lose my job, which means losing my visa, which means losing my ability to live in the United States.”\n\nSo there's so many ways that we have privileged that I think at first blush, we might not realize and I think building on your point, Damien it's important for us to understand this privilege so that we can be understanding of how and why we should be diversifying our network and getting to know people who have different levels of privilege than ourselves.\n\nREIN: And if you're like a white dude who's like, “This is a lot to keep track of.” Yes. When you don't have them, it's obvious.\n\nKAREN: Yeah, you can be oblivious. Otherwise – not that you would be, Rein. I'm not saying that, but one can be very oblivious.\n\nREIN: I’m probably oblivious of like, at least 30 of them, so.\n\nDAMIEN: For people who are marginalized every axes, we really cannot be unaware. It's dangerous. Those of us who were unaware of it, suffer disastrous consequences. So in places where you are privileged, if one of the privileges is to not be aware of it and yes, it is a lot to keep track of and yes, as everybody else has to keep track of that stuff.\n\nKAREN: Yeah, and building on what you both just said, this is just like technology in some ways and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's not take it out of context because there's some nuanced stuff I'm about to share. But in tech, there are so many areas of specialty, whether that is in data science or product security or accessibility related engineering or internationalization engineering and, and, and like, there's so many areas of expertise. \n\nAnd Rein, you’re like, “As a white guy, how am I supposed to keep track of all of this?” Well, it's hard. I get it because the field keeps changing, things keep getting innovated on or brought to the surface and the same thing, I'm sure that Chanté sees this in the DEI space. We are learning all the time about how to create more inclusive workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. It's the same as like what am I learning about writing the right kind of code that is going to have lasting impact, that is going to not cause incidents over the weekend [chuckles] when we all want to be doing something else? When it's not going to down the road because technical debt that is going to have to be retired? \n\nSo yeah, it's hard work. I don't mean to say it's not, but we need to make sure we have people who are thinking about this around us, who are reminding us, who are teaching us the best practices so that we are getting ahead of this versus falling behind.\n\nREIN: One of the things you said last time that I really want to make sure we bring back up is that doing this work is everyone's job.\n\nKAREN: Yes. Yeah, and Rein, I think we got into that conversation talking specifically about product security, software security. You can have a team of people who are software security specialists/experts. In fact, when I was at Adobe in my department, that was one of the groups in my department was cross-engineering product security specialists and they know this stuff. They are paying attention to the landscape. They know when those zero-day incidents happen and what the response is like, and what bounties are being paid and they know all of that because they love it. They're paying attention to it, but they can't solve the problem for the whole company. They cannot make sure that every piece of code is hardened so that the viruses don't get injected. There aren't security violations. \n\nWhat they need to do is educate others, be there to support them when things go bad. But it's really about educating every engineer to be using the libraries the right way, to be allocating memory in the right way, whatever so that we don't have those security violations and it's the same thing with being inclusive. \n\nI have so much respect for anyone and Chanté, it sounds like you do this work, but like, you are responsible for diversity at a company and are looking top down at what are the measurements we're going to have? What are the quarterly or annual goals that we want to have to improve our diversity? How are we going to measure that, make it happen? \n\nBut we also need people in every corner of the organization, in every code review meeting, in every interview debrief, in every casual hallway conversation, or a chat in a Slack, we need all of those people to realize they have a role to play in being inclusive and have some awareness of what it looks like to not be inclusive. What someone from a different demographic is experiencing in a way you might not and what are some of the ways you can take action? \n\nSo I see so many parallels there and I firmly believe, it's something I say all the time like, you don't have to have the words “diversity inclusion” belonging on your business card to make a difference. It's inclusion as a job for everyone.\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. That's one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to make sure that we directed folks to. I love that on your website. That was one of the things that before I ever even knew you were going to be a guest here. That's why I started following you. I love that and I want to actually dive into that because one of the things that I hear often from people when I'm doing this work, they're like, “You're so good at this.” I'm like, “Yeah, but this is a skill that you have to work towards.” \n\nSo it's just like any other thing you want to make a lifestyle. You have to wake up that day and make a decision. If you're somebody who wants to eat healthier, then you wake up every morning and you have decisions to make. If you are a yogi like me, you might decide that you want to get on your yoga mat or you might want to pick up a book and read the philosophy instead. So it's a lifestyle. \n\nI'd love it if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your journey because it's humbling to hear that you got into this work knowing that you wanted to coach women in tech, but you didn't necessarily aspire to be thinking about and writing about allyship, but that became a part of it. So what are some things that you did early on, or what are some things that you're doing now in terms of showing up every day and being a better ally? \n\nKAREN: Yeah. I think that one thing you have to be comfortable with and it's hard, but I do this a lot is being an ally means realizing you're going to be wrong some of the time, because you are constantly stepping outside of that comfort zone that is just so safe—\"I know how to navigate this kind of conversation, using these kinds of words and everything”—and you have to keep stepping outside that comfort zone so that you are taking some risks and you're going to make some mistakes. You are. \n\nI make them pretty regularly. I might put something in a newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called 5 Ally Actions with 5 ideas and things people can take and I get emails back from people who disagree with me or say, “If I had written that, I would have changed it slightly this way,” or whatever, and I'm comfortable with that because I approach everything with this mindset of curious, instead of furious. I want to be curious about why someone's giving me the feedback and what's underneath there and what can I learn from it as opposed to getting furious at them for giving me feedback and like, assaulting my expertise, or whatever, or my voice. \n\nSo curious, not furious, I think is an important thing here and I want to give a shout out. I learned that phrase from a podcast I was listening to and it was Kat Gordon, who has something called The 3% Movement, which is all about getting more gender diversity in the creative industry, like the ad industry. So hat tipped to Kat Gordon for that. \n\nSo getting back to you got to get comfortable with making mistakes and when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize. Heartfelt apology, folks. Apologize and then figure out what you're going to do differently the next time. That's what it's all about. \n\nSo the journey is real. No one ever gets an ally badge or an ally cookie. In fact, I will tell you, I recently searched on LinkedIn in job titles for ally. I was curious to see how many people put in their job titles. There are people out there who have claimed it and I don't think that's right. Unless someone else has told them that, in which case, okay, someone else has said, “You are an ally,” maybe you can put that in your title and claim the badge, but it's really not about that. \n\nIt's about being on a lifelong journey really, to be inclusive, to keep learning, to keep understanding how things are changing, and not putting the spotlight on yourself. Opening the doors for other people and just stand right behind that door and realizing that it's not about you. It's so hard to do this at times because we all want to be like, “Hey, look at the cool thing I just did for somebody else.” We want that feedback, but being an ally means stepping out of the limelight and letting someone else shine.\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great. Thank you so much, Karen, for that. I want to ask one more question since we're there. In terms of not making it about ourselves and not necessarily centering ourselves and taking action in the moment and not giving ourselves the allyship title, if you will, who are some people that you either align yourself with or that you learn from, whether it's up close and personal or from a distance? Like who are people that you feel are providing you with gems and knowledge so that you are then sharing with folks like us, that we can at least either put in the show notes or give a shout out to?\n\nKAREN: Yes! Oh, I love this. So many people. One, I will say right off the bat is Minda Harts. Minda Harts is a woman, a Black woman, and she wrote a book called The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Get a Seat at the Table, I think is the byline. She and I spoke on a panel together a few months ago and I learned so much from her. I learned a lot from reading her book about the experience with Black women in the workplace, but then also, on the panel and since then, I feel that we have a nice professional, Twitter kind of friendship going on, which I just value so much. So I learned from her and what she shares all the time. \n\nAnother person I learned from is Jeannie Gainsburg. Jeannie Gainsburg is an LGBTQ educator and wrote a book called The Savvy Ally and The Savvy Ally is all about – the funny thing is she and I connected. We realized we went to college together or the same class, but we didn't know each other in college, but we have the same mindset of understanding something and then distilling it into how an ally can show up. With her perspective, it's all about being an ally for the LGBTQ community and I've learned so much from her. In fact, I've quoted both Minda and Jeannie in my second edition pretty heavily. \n\nI also have learned a lot from David Smith and Brad Johnson. They recently published a book called Good Guys and their approach is also incredibly similar to mine, but they focus completely on how men can be allies for women and they don't focus on other aspects of allyship. But very much I learned about, they're the guys who are talking to other guys and basically saying, “Hey dude, it's your responsibility as a man in a professional setting to be an ally.” Like, it's part of your job to meet with the women on your team and sponsor them and support them. So, they tell it in a real way. \n\nOh my gosh, I feel like I learned from so many other people, too and I'm forgetting, I'm not thinking holistically. So anyway, those are four people it's nice to give shout outs to.\n\nCHANTÉ: We put you on the spot so thank you, Karen. [laughs]\n\nKAREN: Okay. Here's another one. Corey Ponder, he works in tech, but he also does speaking and writing about diversity and inclusion on the side and he is a Black man. I just learned about his experience and perspective in such a real, raw way and I value that a lot.\n\nDAMIEN: Karen, I'd like to ask you a bit about something you brought up really early in our conversation today. You mentioned that before you got into this work with Better Allies and that sort of work, before you became a executive coach, leadership coach, you noticed a decline in gender parity in the tech industry. Can you talk about what that decline was, how it might've happened?\n\nKAREN: Yeah. So first of all, Damien a question for you. Were you surprised when I said that?\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, no, not at all. I actually just today read about one of the earliest computers at NASA which is a woman, a Black woman, that the astronauts explicitly by name depended on, for example, Apollo 13. So I wanted to hear your story about what happened. \n\nKAREN: Yeah. Okay, okay. I asked only because there are many people who, when I just drop that into the conversation, they ended up coming back to it minutes and minutes later or towards the end of any kind of interview. At any rate, what happened? \n\nSo I have theory and actually I gave a TEDx talk about this, exploring the theory. I won't do all 20 minutes of my TEDx talk, but when I decided to study computer science, I was a senior in high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, what I wanted to study in college. My father said to me, “Hey, well, Karen, you're really good at math and you enjoy making things. You're always crafting and sewing and knitting, and you like solving problems. I've just been reading this article about this new field called computer science which seems like it would combine all the things you're good at and maybe you would enjoy making software and by the way, this is what people earn in this field.” [chuckles]\n\nI have to admit, I grew up in a very humble financial household and so, I wanted to make sure I could support myself and earn a living when I graduated from college. So I'm like, “Okay, I'll study computer science. I'll learn how to build software.” That was 1981, the year I graduated from high school. \n\nNow get this, I had never touched a computer. Okay, we didn't have – I mean, 1981 was the year the IBM PC was released into the field. The Macintosh did not come out until 1984. So in my home, we did not have computers in the part-time jobs I had after school and summers, no one had computers and certainly, we didn't not have computers in my high school where I could learn to code where it would probably would have been in basic. \n\nThis was a situation for many people across the United States. Going to college in the early 80s, if you wanted to study computer science, many people were coming with no experience. Maybe a little more than me. Maybe they had taken that basic class, but very little experience. It was almost like a level playing field at that point and we were encouraged to pursue this. \n\nMy graduating class from college, I went back through my yearbook not too long ago to count, there were 38% of the computer science degrees went to women in my class and that statistic 38% is very similar to what was happening across the whole United States. According to the Department of Education, the year 1985, when I graduated from college, 37% of all computer science and information science degrees went to women. So that was pretty good. \n\nNow, fast forward 20, 25 years and that number dropped to a low of about 17%, I think and the overall number also went down of how many women were getting these degrees. And now, you don't have to have a computer science degree to work in tech necessarily, but in many tech environments and tech companies, the engineers are incredibly valued and are very visible and are paid very well. They are an incredibly important part of any tech company. \n\nSo my point is that there used to be a lot more women computer scientists and it did drop. I do think it's this level playing field that I started at, but the decline happened because I believe a society, we as a society, started thinking and encouraging our young boys to get involved with robotics, with tinkering, with coding classes, with summer camps where you might learn to do coding or programming robotics. \n\nWe encouraged our young boys more than our young girls and over time, that meant that a girl, if she wanted to go to the summer coding camp in her neighborhood, would show up and see only boys there, or see only a very small number of girls and be like, “Well, maybe this isn't for me.” Or coding assignments in colleges that were much more aligned with masculine interests and more feminine interests. Things that might be more – oh, I don't even really want to get into stereotypes. I don't even want to go there, but things that would be more appealing to an 18-year-old boy than an 18-year-old girl who just have different interests and just became self-fulfilling. \n\nWhat we're seeing now though, is that graph is moving in the right direction. The numbers are inching upwards because there's been so much focus across the United States – and hopefully, around the world, but across the United States, in terms of gender diversity is important in this field and we should be welcoming of all and we're making changes to all of these programs and encouraging our young girls to study this field, get involved with STEM, and pursue it when they get to college and beyond.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, you avoided giving an example so I'll give one that you reminded me of, which is for a very long time, the standard, the most common image used as an example of compression algorithms was that of a undressed woman and so, we can –\n\nKAREN: Lena. Her name is Lena. Yes, actually I know her name. She was someone when they were working on an image compression algorithm like, “We need a picture,” and someone just grabbed the Playboy magazine from their cube, took the centerfold out, and used that. \n\nREIN: You do.\n\n[laughter]\n\nOr at least as you did. The effect here is really interesting and also, really, it makes me very sad, which is that computing became seen as a prestige job. Once men realized that there was something to this, it requires expertise, they decided that they were going to do it and when they did—there's research that shows this both ways. When men enter a field, it raises the prestige and increases wages. When women enter a field, it lowers the prestige and decreases wages. \n\nKAREN: Yeah, that's a problem, but real. I don't mean to at all disagree. It's a real problem. \n\nARTY: Just curious. Do we reinforce these things by saying them as a statement like that with a period versus bringing it up as a question? \n\nREIN: Yeah. \n\nARTY: I'm just wondering.\n\nREIN: What I’m trying to do is describe and not be normative, but I think that's a valid point.\n\nARTY: In my life coaching thing recently, we were talking about statements with periods and it's really easy to define the world of expectations of ourselves, define the world of expectations of everyone else for all time and all affinity as a statement with a period. As we go and do this, it creates these reinforcing effects, and then we go and do things and enact behaviors that reinforce those belief systems. \n\nSo we're sitting here talking about biases and how all of this stuff gets baked in her brain and one of the ways that it gets baked into her brain is by making statements of “Well, this is how it is period.” I realize you’re making a statement of something to challenge, but I think it's something that we really need to think about that if we want to change the status quo, it starts with reimagining it different. Coming up with a different statement, with a period even as a starting point, and then letting that lead to questions of how do we go and manifest this new reality that is more what we want. \n\nKAREN: Can I embarrass myself? [laughs]\n\nARTY: Yes, of course.\n\nKAREN: Okay, right.\n\n[laughter]\n\nKAREN: So I have two children. That's not embarrassing. They're in their early 20s now. That's not embarrassing. I had read, when they were younger, that there is research done that said that if you tell a girl just before she takes a math test, that girls aren't good at math, that her score will actually go down. \n\nThis is the embarrassing thing. So before dropping my daughter off for like her PSATs and SAT exams, I just said, “Remember, girls are really good at math and you are really good at math, too.” [chuckles] So maybe already changing the narrative by using different periods statements, too [laughs] making up alternate realities. \n\nOh gosh, I can't believe I just shared that story. My daughter would probably be so embarrassed.\n\nDAMIEN: That’s a modern story and I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about there and I think Arty brings up an amazing and very valuable points. The suggestion I want to make in response to that is, because what Rein was describing is a fact and I’m sure it's important to know about and to know that it happened—and I'm already using that language now: it happened.\n\nIn the past when men went into a field, it became more prestigious and higher paid. When women into a field, it became less prestigious and higher paid. And that's what has happened in the past and by stating it that way, now we can go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?”\n\nREIN: There's a thing I learned from Virginia Satir that I probably should have done here, which is when you find one of those ends with a period sentences Arty, like you're talking about, you add until now at the end. So when women enter a male dominated fields, wages go down until now.\n\nARTY: And now they go up. Now they go up because everyone wants women because they're so awesome. Women bring so much awesomeness to the table so wages go up. The more women you have, the better the wages. \n\nCHANTÉ: Period.\n\nKAREN: Yeah.\n\n[laughter]\n\nYeah, and—yes, and—the other kind of way to look at this is, I've been doing a lot of work with how might we statements and so the question is, how might we change the trajectory? How might we imagine the future of work where all people and all identities are welcome and we are building towards a future that is literally more equitable and more accessible for all? So how might we do that? We can maybe answer that question today, or we can invite folks who are going to listen in to weigh in when we post this online and talk to us on Twitter.\n\nARTY: I love that, though. I mean, I think if we really want to change the status quo, part of that is realizing that we're the ones who make it. We're the ones that create our reality and our culture is just a manifest of all these beliefs and things that are in our head emerging from all of us. If we realize that we're actually the ones that are in control of that, that we're the ones that are manifesting that, then we can create any type of world that we want. \n\nSo what does that vision look like? Let's go up to the whiteboard and create and dream up the type of world that we want, the type of vision that we want, the type of company we want, the type of culture we want. Write those things down, make them real to us, start selecting and doing things that reinforce those visions and beliefs. But we've got to start with believing. It's possible. We got to start with imagining that reality is already there, that we're already there, that we've already created it right now and now we're just living it.\n\nKAREN: 100%.\n\nREIN: Well, I think that is a great sentiment to end our episode on. We should do reflections and thanks to Arty, I already have one. So I can go first, if anyone else wants to?\n\nCHANTÉ: Take it away.\n\nREIN: So my reflection and Arty, you really sort of brought this home for me with the last thing you said, is that – Karen, you said that your superpower is your ability to simplify things and I would offer that you have another one, which is your ability to translate ideals, values, intentions into actions. There's a word for that and the word is practice. So what I think we all need to be thinking about is how to get better at practicing.\n\nKAREN: Thank you for that, Rein. In fact, I wrote it down because I clearly have to go look it up in the dictionary afterwards and become more familiar. So thank you. I learn something new every day and I've just learned a new vocabulary word and I'm honored. I don't even know what – I do know what it means based on how you used it just then, but I'm honored by your thoughts and your reflections to me. Thank you.\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I'll build on that because I learned so much in this conversation today and I'm so glad we had it. Specifically regarding very practical things that framing with the one sheet of how bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens and what Arty said about our use of language.\n\nI'm a certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner and so, these are the things that I've known, but hadn't applied. So just again, being reminded of them and being able to take that and go, “Okay, let me use these things in the service of this goal of being a better ally” to use your turn of phrase. So thank you. Thank you all. \n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that we didn't record it properly the first time so I could selfishly join this conversation. Yes! I love it when things work out that way. \n\nI really appreciated the fact that we talked about so many of the practical things, just what Damien mentioned here. We kind of reiterated some things I already knew, but could have an excuse to tweet out later [laughs] and that is just that we're all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Many of us, Karen, to your point of your story, that we don't start off doing this work, but the journey and the problem is big enough for all of us to take a part in it. What I love about where we are these days is that the world offers us so many resources, tools, and networks that we have a decision to make when we were talking about this lifestyle choice. \n\nSo today, you might be the ally. Tomorrow, you might be the bridge. The next day, you might be the person who simply passes on somebody's resume, but all of those parts matter when we're trying to imagine a different future, especially around technology. I'm really appreciative of the conversation and I'm looking forward to continuing it. Thank you. \n\nREIN: You're welcome, Chanté.\n\n[laughter]\n\nARTY: Yeah, we screwed this up just for you. \n\nCHANTÉ: [laughs] Yay!\n\nARTY: So my reflection, I wanted to bring up the thing that I actually mentioned last time as my reflection, because I feel like it's really important. One of the simple things that we can do to make a huge difference is just expanding our network and there's so much limitation that's caused by these homogenous networks we have and staying within our circle and friends. Even though, it takes some effort to get outside of our comfort zone and meet new people and to build relationships with people we might not otherwise. The benefits that happen because of all those new relationship, connections are huge and it's totally worth it. \n\nI love your simple trick at the conference thing of go find the person who's in the corner by themselves. Talk to them. They're the easy ones, right? I love that. Super easy, but I think change is one of those things that takes some courage on all of our parts to take one little bitty step that can make a big difference.\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Arty, there's a saying that says, “When you step outside your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens.” So I think you're already a believer of that and I hope that it plays out in real life for you.\n\nI'll just say to wrap up my reflection, I absolutely loved this conversation. I am glad we got to do it again, too. It's it was very different than the first time and I think it was absolutely wonderful. \n\nSo thank you everyone and if I think about, I learned something from all of you. The one that I think I will really be putting into practice is a combination of Arty and Rein, what you've shared in terms of if there is a period statement, how to turn that to more of a question, or to add to it to say until now. I want to try that out. I want to use that as I am speaking to people about allyship and navigating this on writing my newsletter. I'm not sure where, but it is something I want to try out and see how it – I'm sure it's going to be effective and I appreciate that. Thank you.\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Karen. This was a wonderful conversation.\n\nKAREN: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, everyone!Special Guest: Karen Catlin.Sponsored By:Linode: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.\r\n\r\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.\r\n\r\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.\r\n\r\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.\r\n\r\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the \"Create Free Account\" button to get started.","content_html":"02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things
\n\n05:55 - Better Allies – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research
\n\n14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias
\n\n26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit
\n\n32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous Networks
\n\n41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job
\n\n48:12 - People to Follow
\n\n51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry
\n\n\n\n58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech.
\n\nDamien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens.
\n\nChanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge.
\n\nArty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts.
\n\nKaren: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
\n\nPRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.
\n\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
\n\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.
\n\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started.
\n\nREIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two.
\n\nSo full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again.
\n\nI'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr.
\n\nARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin.
\n\nSo after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.
\n\nToday, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking."
\n\nWelcome, Karen to the show!
\n\nKAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me.
\n\nARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us.
\n\nSo our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nKAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth.
\n\nAnd I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized.
\n\nCertainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do.
\n\nYeah. So that's my superpower.
\n\nARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that?
\n\nKAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other.
\n\nHearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was.
\n\nActually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.”
\n\nARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful.
\n\nKAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey.
\n\nKAREN: Okay.
\n\nCHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people.
\n\nKAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to.
\n\nSo the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity.
\n\nNow I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening.
\n\nSo while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit.
\n\nSo about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.”
\n\nSo I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive.
\n\nAll of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies.
\n\nAlso, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others.
\n\nSo I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work.
\n\nIn hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that?
\n\nOthers are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there?
\n\nSo I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven.
\n\nThen the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing.
\n\nSo I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?”
\n\nSo I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don't have a book. I don't have a book. I don't have a book, sorry.” But I did finally write my book. In fact, I've written two books on the topic—"Better Allies" and also, "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.” The Better Allies book, I just released a second edition. It's been out there for 2 years. I've learned so much that I wanted to do a full update on the book. So I've just released that a few weeks ago.
\n\nCHANTÉ: I have a follow-up question then, because Karen, you mentioned that you wanted to maintain your anonymity when you started off that handle and I would just love to hear maybe why that's so important when you're doing this work of allyship and accomplishing in this space?
\n\nKAREN: Yes, and I don't know if it is important for everyone—and I'm not anonymous anymore. I have claimed credit for this. As soon as I published my books. Writing a book is a lot of work; I'm going to claim the credit. But I didn't in the beginning because okay, I'm going to say this. A lot of people thought it was a man behind the Twitter handle and I must admit, I was kind of channeling white men that I have worked with over my career and thinking about what would they really do? What could I get them to do?
\n\nAll of my tweets are first person, “I pledge to do this,” “I will do this,” I'm going to do this,” and there were people I have friends even who were like, “Hey, have you seen this @betterallies Twitter handle? I wonder who's behind it. I'd like to interview him for my podcast,” That type of thing.
\n\nSo I think that there were people out there who thought it was a white man behind the Twitter handle and I was comfortable with that because not only was I channeling these white men I had worked with in the past, but I also think that there's power in men listening to other men. I'll just say that. I have actually gotten speaking engagements when I've said, “I'm a contributor.” They're like, “Are there any men who could speak because we think men would like to hear this message from another man.”
\n\nSo anyway, that's kind of why I started out with that anonymous Twitter handle and with this character behind the scenes of this fake man. [laughs] But now it's okay. I say that I curate it, it's me, and I'm comfortable with that. I still do it first person because I think that white women can also be allies. We all can be allies for others with less privilege than ourselves in the workplace and I think it's important for us, everyone to be thinking, “This is a job I can and should do to be inclusive at work and to look for these everyday situations. I can take ally actions and make a difference.”
\n\nARTY: How's that changed things like, revealing your identity and that you're not actually a big white dude?
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nKAREN: I know. Well, I never really said I was a big white dude! Or even a small white dude, or whatever. But I think it's fine. I claimed the association with the Twitter handle when I published my book and it was just time to just own it. It's not like people stopped following me or stopped retweeting or anything like that. It's only grown since then. So Arty, it's a good question, but I don't know. I don't know.
\n\nREIN: And this is more than a little ironic because when you were talking about your coaching—and I'm going to read into this a little bit, but I think you can confirm that it's backed up by the research—to appear equally competent or professional, women have to do more and other minoritized groups have to do more. So what I was reading in was that part of the problem you had with coaching was that to get them to an equal playing field, they had to be better.
\n\nKAREN: Yes. What you're describing, Rein is “prove-it-again” bias and this is well-researched and documented. Prove-it-again means that women have to prove themselves over and over again where men just have to show potential. This often happens and I'm going to give you just a scenario to bring it home.
\n\nImagine sitting in some sort of promotion calibration discussion with other managers in your group and you're talking about who gets promotions this cycle. Someone might say, “Well, I'd like to see Arty prove that she can handle managing people before we move her to the next level.” When Arty, maybe you've already been doing that for a few years; you've already managed a team, you've built a team, whatever. “I'd like to make sure she can do this with this additional thing,” like, make sure she can do it with an offshore team or something. “I want to see her do it again.”
\n\nWhereas a man's like, “Ah, Damien's great. I know he can do the job. Let's promote him.” Okay, totally making this up. But you see what I'm saying is that this is what the prove-it-again bias is.
\n\nSo whether it is women have to be twice as good or something like that, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but they have to deal with this bias of once again, I have to prove that I'm worthy to be at this table, to be in this conversation, to be invited to that strategic planning meeting, to get that promotion, and I don't want to coach women to have to keep proving themselves over and over again. Instead, I want to change the dynamics of what's happening inside these organizations so it is a better playing field, not just for my clients who are mostly women, but also, anyone out there who's from an underrepresented group, who might be facing challenges as they try to navigate this world that really has been designed for other people.
\n\nARTY: Wow, that's really enlightening. I'm just thinking about this from a cognitive science perspective and how our brains work, and then if you're making a prediction about something and have an expectation frame for that. If I have an expectation that someone's going to do well, like I have a dream and image in my mind that they'll fit this particular stereotype, then if they just show potential to fit this image in my head, I can imagine and envision them doing all these things and trust that imaginary dream in my head.
\n\nWhereas, if I have the opposite dream in my head where my imagination shows this expectation of this person falling on their face and doing all these things wrong, I'm already in a position of having to prove something that's outside of that expectation, which is so much harder to do.
\n\nSo this is the effect of these biases basically being baked into our brain already is all of our expectations and things are set up to work against people that culturally, we have these negative expectations around that have nothing to do with those actual people.
\n\nKAREN: Thanks. Arty, have you ever read the book, Whistling Vivaldi?
\n\nARTY: I haven't. I am adding that to my list.
\n\nKAREN: It explores stereotype threat, which is exactly what you've just described, and the title, just to give you some insight into this, how this shows up. The title, Whistling Vivaldi, is all about a story of a Black man who had to walk around his neighborhood, which I believe is mostly white and got just the concerns that people didn't trust him navigating this public space, his neighborhood.
\n\nSo what he would do, and I don't know if it was just in the evenings or any time, he went out to walk to be outside, he would whistle Vivaldi to break the stereotype that he was a bad person, a scary person because of the color of his skin. Instead, by whistling Vivaldi, he gave off the feeling that he was a highly educated person who studied classical music and he did that so that he could navigate his neighborhoods safely. It's awful to think about having to do that, but this book is full of these examples. It's a research-driven approach so, it's a great book to understand stereotype threat and combat it.
\n\nDAMIEN: So in the interest of us and our listeners, I suppose being better allies, you spoke about stereotype threat and gave an example there. You spoke about prove-it-again bias and specifically, with prove-it-again bias, I want to know what are ways that we can identify this real-time and counter it in real-time?
\n\nKAREN: Yes. With prove-it-again bias—well, with any bias, really. First of all, reminding yourself that it exists is really important. At Google, they found that simply reminding managers, before they went into a calibration, a performance calibration meeting, probably some rank ordering exercise of all the talent in the organization. Before they started a calibration meeting, they were all given a 1-page handout of here's the way bias can creep into this process. That simple act of having people review the list of here's the way bias creeps into the process was enough to help combat it during the subsequent conversation.
\n\nSo I think we have to remind ourselves of bias and by the way, this resource I'm describing is available as a download on Google's re:Work website. I think it's R-E-: work. There's a re:Work website with tons of resources, but it's available for download there.
\n\nSo that's one thing you can do is before a calibration meeting or before you're about to start an interview debrief session with a team, is remind people of the kinds of bias that can come into play so that people are more aware.
\n\nOther things, and I'll talk specifically about hiring, is I am a huge proponent of making sure that before you interview the first candidate, you have objective criteria that you're going to use to evaluate the candidates because otherwise, without objective criteria, you start relying on subjectivity, which is code for bias. Things will start to be said of, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit,” which is code for bias of “They're different from us. They're different from me. I don't think I'd want to go get a beer with them after work,” or “If I had to travel with them and get stuck on a long layover somewhere when we can travel again, I don't think I'd enjoy that.” People just instead say, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit.
\n\nSo you get away from that by, instead in your objective criteria, looking for other things that are technically needed for the job, or some values perhaps that your company has in terms of curiosity or lifelong learning or whatever your company values are. You interview for those things and you figure out how you're going to measure someone against those objective criteria.
\n\nOther way bias creeps into interviews is looking at or saying something like, “Well, they don't have this experience with Docker that this other candidate has,” but really, that wasn't part of the job description. No one said that the candidates needed Docker experience, but all of a sudden, because one of the candidates has Docker experience, that becomes important.
\n\nSo instead of getting ahead of that, make sure you list exactly what you're going to be interviewing for and evaluating people for so that the bias isn't there and bias, maybe all of a sudden Docker becomes an important thing when you realize you could get it. But it may be that it's the person who seems the most like the people in the team who has it and that’s another – you're just using that as a reason for increasing that candidate’s success to join your team because you'd like to hang out with them. You'd like to be with them. You would want to be getting a beer with them. Does that help, Damien?
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, that's very helpful. The framing is an absolutely pre-framing before an evaluation, before an interview what biases can happen. That's a wonderful tool, which I am going to be using everywhere I can. And then what you said about culture fit and really, every subjective evaluation is, I think the words you used was “code for bias.” Like, anytime you have a subjective evaluation, it's going to be biased. So being able to decide in advance what your objective evaluations are, then you can help avoid that issue.
\n\nCulture fit is just such a red flag for me. You said, I wrote down the words, “culture built,” right? Decide what the culture is – because culture is important in the company, decide what the culture is you want and then interview and evaluate for that.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Build the culture instead of just fit the culture. I've also heard people say, “If you ever hear someone say, I don't think they'd be a culture fit, respond with ‘Well, I think they'd be a culture add,’” or Damien, to quote you, “I think they build our culture instead of just fit in.” Really powerful, really powerful.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. I agree with you all and Karen, I'm not sure if you knew this, but one of the many things I do, which takes up most of my life, is I'm a DEI practitioner and I have a firm, and I also work in-house at a company, Village MD, as a director of DEI there.
\n\nSo one of the things that I talk a lot about is culture add and one of the things I'd love to see more companies do is to think about like, basically take an inventory of all the people on your team and try to identify where you're strong, where you're weak, and look for the skills gap analysis, basically and say, “What don't we have here,” and then, “Let's go hire for that skillset or that expertise that we don't have that we believe could help us build this thing better this year.”
\n\nThat's going to require people to do that exercise, not just once because your team dynamic shifts usually a few times a year. So if you're a high growth company, you should be doing that probably every quarter. But imagine what the difference would be if we approach interviewing and promotion building from that lens instead.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah, and Chanté, the way you framed it is amazing. I love it. You said, “What do we not have that we need to build our product to deliver to our customers?” I don't remember the exact words you used, but that I think is important because I've also, in conversations I've had around culture fit and culture and everything, someone say to me, “Well, wait a second, Karen, what if you we're evaluating a white supremacist? It's clear, there are white supremacists and we don't have one of those yet on the team. Does that mean we should open the doors and let them in?”
\n\nThat's when it's like, you can use the way you've just framed as “Well, if we're building a product for white supremacists, then yeah, probably.” But to be more serious about this, it's like what's missing from our team structure, from the diversity within this team, that is going to allow us to deliver on our product, on our offering better? I think that's important.
\n\nAnother lens to apply here is also you can still do values fit. Make sure people fit with the values that you have as a company and that should allow you to interview out people who don't fit with your values and just to use that example of a white supremacist. That would be the way to do that, too.
\n\nREIN: I think it's really important to say that ethics still matters here and values fit as a way to express that. One of the things that I would maybe caution or challenge is—and this isn't a direct challenge to you, Karen, I don't think—but it's been popular in the industry to try to remove bias from the equation. To do debiasing training and things like that and I think that that's the wrong way to go because I don't think it's cognitively possible to remove bias. I think instead what we should do, what I think that you're talking about here is being aware of the biases we have. Accounting for them in the way that we hire, because the same heuristic that leads to a bias against certain demographics is the one we use to say, “We don't want white supremacists.”
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Plus a hundred, yes. [laughs] I agree. What I was going to say, Rein to build on what you just shared is that it's important to see things like color, for example, to understand. Even if you feel you're not biased, it's important to see it, to see color, to see disability, to see someone who is going through a transition, for example, on their identity.
\n\nIt's important to see it because that allows you to understand the challenges that they are facing and if you say, “I don't see color, I just see them as their new identity, post-transition. I don't see their disability; I just see the person,” it negates the experience they're having, as they are trying to navigate the workplace and to be the best allies, you need to understand the challenges people are facing and how you can take action to help them either mitigate the challenge, get around the challenge, whatever that might be, or remove the challenge.
\n\nARTY: So you're not being empathetic to the circumstances by pretending that they don't exist.
\n\nKAREN: Yes. Well said, yes.
\n\nREIN: It’s the idea that you can be on bias that I think is dangerous. I want to call back to this idea of a meritocracy; the idea that every choice we make is based on merit and that whatever we choose is indicative of the merit of that person is the bias that is harmful.
\n\nKAREN: Woo, yes. I can't wait to refer to that. I can't wait to come back and listen to you. What you just said, Rein that is powerful.
\n\nREIN: Because becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We're a meritocracy so everything we've chosen is means – if we chose someone that means that they have merit by definition. There's no way out of that trap.
\n\nKAREN: Right on.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. When you say that, it makes me think, too of just the sort of committal to always transforming and iterating. So if you come in the door saying, “Listen, there's no way we can eliminate bias all the time.” We're going to make the assumption that we're always being biased and therefore, what things can we put into place and what tools can we use? What resources can we leverage here to make sure that we're on a pathway for greater inclusion, greater accessibility? Therefore, making our organization more diverse and more innovative.
\n\nI think, like Rein, I just want to really underscore that because that is something that I've had to really try to lead with versus add to the conversation later. So I'm appreciating that you brought it up today. Thank you.
\n\nREIN: It’s like some of the choices, some of the evaluations we're making are subjective. We can't make them objective in every case; I think what we want is a framework that allows us to do these subjective evaluations in a way that accounts for bias.
\n\nDAMIEN: So that's amazing. Where do we go from here?
\n\nARTY: One of the things we talked about last time with regards to various people getting promoted, this effect of maler and paler as you get closer to the C-suite, is that one of the effects of that is when you're sitting down to hire someone, well, who do you know? Who's on the list of people that I know within my network? So one of the huge biases we end up having isn't necessarily a cognitive bias, it's just a effect of where our attention has been and who we've been hanging out and who we have relationships with that are preexisting.
\n\nThese existing network effects also keep us in the thinking and stuff and making decisions within the context of those networks. We promote people that we know. We promote people that we have relationships with. So even just some of the dynamics of if you've got existing C-suite dynamics that is dominated by men and you've got these dynamics where it’s difficult for men and women to have relationships for various reasons, things that get complicated, that those sorts of things can end up creating a self-reinforcing effect, too.
\n\nI'm wondering what are some of your thoughts on some of the ways that we can expand our networks and expand the people that we know to shift some of those systemic effects?
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Most of us have homogenous networks. Homogenous networks meaning people who are just like us because we have something in common with them, whether that is hobbies that we share, music we like talking about, food we like to go out to enjoy whatever we have things in common. So most of us end up having a –and it's true. Most white people have networks that are full of other white people and this also is friendship circles. There's again, social science research out there that shows that we tend to have networks full of people just like us.
\n\nAs you just were saying, Arty this impacts so many aspects of work in terms of who we hire, who we recommend, who we promote, who we even ask to take on some like stretch assignment or tasks such as giving the update at the all-hands meeting for our team, or going in and exploring some new technology that might be on the horizon that we could leverage. Who are we going to trust with these stretch assignments are people that we know and the people that we know are the people in our network. So it is important to look to diversify our network. There's so many ways to do this.
\n\nWhen I give talks, I share some of these ways. One is literally when new people join your team or from a different demographic than you, get to know them and get to know their work and their career goals and down the road, look for how you might be able to connect some dots. But really, take the time to get to know people who you might otherwise just like, “Oh yeah, they're joining the team, whatever,” but set up that virtual coffee or whatever.
\n\nThe other thing you can do is join Slack groups or other discussion forums at your company for people from that demographic. After checking first, if you'd be welcome and invited, of course, but many of these groups will be open to allies and if you are wanting to join that discussion groups so that you can sort of understand the conversation, understand the challenges, get to know some of this talent. That's a great way to do it.
\n\nYou can also go to conferences that are designed for members of other groups that you're not a part of. Again, asking first permission, if you'd be welcome as an ally, but in tech, there's so many of these, but there's lesbians who tech, there are Black women in tech or Black coders conferences. There are Latinas in tech. Meetups and things like that. So there's so many opportunities to go and hear incredibly talented speakers talking about the technology and the projects and the work that they do and it's a great way to expand your network.
\n\nI'll share my favorite hack that I do when it's in-person and I'm going to a meetup or an event. I'm an introvert, I will let everyone know that. It's hard for me to go into a networking group like the meetup that's happening and there's some pizza and some drinks before it starts, or that conference reception. It's hard for me to go into a room like that.
\n\nSo when I do, I quickly scan the room and I look for someone who's standing by themselves or sitting by themselves, who is from a different demographic and I go over and say, “Hi.” That's the easiest introduction for me as an introvert is to go find someone who's all by themselves and maybe feeling a little awkward that they're all by themselves too and it's a great way to strike a conversation and again, to expand my network, meet some new people, not just my friends that might be coming to the same event.
\n\nDAMIEN: So one of the things that I want to call attention to, too with what you're saying there is that this marginalization and privilege is self-reinforcing. You don't have to have – even though we all have cognitive biases, they aren't actually necessary for marginalization and privilege to self-reinforce and in fact, because that actually takes effort to undo these things. If we just go along, if we pretend not to see color, or whatever, we are actually reinforcing the problems that exist.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah, and Damien, on that note. In my book, and it's also a free download on my website, betterallies.com. I have a list that I've curated of 50 ways you might have privilege in the workplace. I like people to read through this list and think about all the ways they have privilege that others might not. The top of the list are “I'm a male,” and “I'm white,” and those are the top two things. But then it gets into more nuanced things and nuanced things being, “I'm not the primary caregiver for someone else.” Well, why is that something we should be aware of as allies? Well, when you're the primary caregiver, that means you may have to drop things at a moment's notice to take a child or a parent to a doctor's appointment, for example, or you might be interrupted in your work. So there's privilege when you don't have that caregiving responsibility.
\n\nAnother one is that you actually have budget enough spare money so that you can do after work outings with a team that aren't company sanctioned. Like, “Yeah, I can afford to go out to dinner,” and gosh, this all sounds so weird now with the pandemic and how long it’s lasting. But “Yeah, I can go out for drinks or dinner with my team after work and pay my way,” or “I can do that whitewater rafting trip on the weekend that people are getting together with.” Even though it's not company work, it's still networking and that builds bonds that builds relationships and sure, work is going to be discussed.
\n\nIt also includes things such as “I am not holding a visa,” which means that I have confidence that I maybe can take some risks with my career. “I can move teams, move to another manager, try something new out because I have confidence that I'm not going to potentially lose my job, which means losing my visa, which means losing my ability to live in the United States.”
\n\nSo there's so many ways that we have privileged that I think at first blush, we might not realize and I think building on your point, Damien it's important for us to understand this privilege so that we can be understanding of how and why we should be diversifying our network and getting to know people who have different levels of privilege than ourselves.
\n\nREIN: And if you're like a white dude who's like, “This is a lot to keep track of.” Yes. When you don't have them, it's obvious.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah, you can be oblivious. Otherwise – not that you would be, Rein. I'm not saying that, but one can be very oblivious.
\n\nREIN: I’m probably oblivious of like, at least 30 of them, so.
\n\nDAMIEN: For people who are marginalized every axes, we really cannot be unaware. It's dangerous. Those of us who were unaware of it, suffer disastrous consequences. So in places where you are privileged, if one of the privileges is to not be aware of it and yes, it is a lot to keep track of and yes, as everybody else has to keep track of that stuff.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah, and building on what you both just said, this is just like technology in some ways and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's not take it out of context because there's some nuanced stuff I'm about to share. But in tech, there are so many areas of specialty, whether that is in data science or product security or accessibility related engineering or internationalization engineering and, and, and like, there's so many areas of expertise.
\n\nAnd Rein, you’re like, “As a white guy, how am I supposed to keep track of all of this?” Well, it's hard. I get it because the field keeps changing, things keep getting innovated on or brought to the surface and the same thing, I'm sure that Chanté sees this in the DEI space. We are learning all the time about how to create more inclusive workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. It's the same as like what am I learning about writing the right kind of code that is going to have lasting impact, that is going to not cause incidents over the weekend [chuckles] when we all want to be doing something else? When it's not going to down the road because technical debt that is going to have to be retired?
\n\nSo yeah, it's hard work. I don't mean to say it's not, but we need to make sure we have people who are thinking about this around us, who are reminding us, who are teaching us the best practices so that we are getting ahead of this versus falling behind.
\n\nREIN: One of the things you said last time that I really want to make sure we bring back up is that doing this work is everyone's job.
\n\nKAREN: Yes. Yeah, and Rein, I think we got into that conversation talking specifically about product security, software security. You can have a team of people who are software security specialists/experts. In fact, when I was at Adobe in my department, that was one of the groups in my department was cross-engineering product security specialists and they know this stuff. They are paying attention to the landscape. They know when those zero-day incidents happen and what the response is like, and what bounties are being paid and they know all of that because they love it. They're paying attention to it, but they can't solve the problem for the whole company. They cannot make sure that every piece of code is hardened so that the viruses don't get injected. There aren't security violations.
\n\nWhat they need to do is educate others, be there to support them when things go bad. But it's really about educating every engineer to be using the libraries the right way, to be allocating memory in the right way, whatever so that we don't have those security violations and it's the same thing with being inclusive.
\n\nI have so much respect for anyone and Chanté, it sounds like you do this work, but like, you are responsible for diversity at a company and are looking top down at what are the measurements we're going to have? What are the quarterly or annual goals that we want to have to improve our diversity? How are we going to measure that, make it happen?
\n\nBut we also need people in every corner of the organization, in every code review meeting, in every interview debrief, in every casual hallway conversation, or a chat in a Slack, we need all of those people to realize they have a role to play in being inclusive and have some awareness of what it looks like to not be inclusive. What someone from a different demographic is experiencing in a way you might not and what are some of the ways you can take action?
\n\nSo I see so many parallels there and I firmly believe, it's something I say all the time like, you don't have to have the words “diversity inclusion” belonging on your business card to make a difference. It's inclusion as a job for everyone.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah. That's one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to make sure that we directed folks to. I love that on your website. That was one of the things that before I ever even knew you were going to be a guest here. That's why I started following you. I love that and I want to actually dive into that because one of the things that I hear often from people when I'm doing this work, they're like, “You're so good at this.” I'm like, “Yeah, but this is a skill that you have to work towards.”
\n\nSo it's just like any other thing you want to make a lifestyle. You have to wake up that day and make a decision. If you're somebody who wants to eat healthier, then you wake up every morning and you have decisions to make. If you are a yogi like me, you might decide that you want to get on your yoga mat or you might want to pick up a book and read the philosophy instead. So it's a lifestyle.
\n\nI'd love it if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your journey because it's humbling to hear that you got into this work knowing that you wanted to coach women in tech, but you didn't necessarily aspire to be thinking about and writing about allyship, but that became a part of it. So what are some things that you did early on, or what are some things that you're doing now in terms of showing up every day and being a better ally?
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. I think that one thing you have to be comfortable with and it's hard, but I do this a lot is being an ally means realizing you're going to be wrong some of the time, because you are constantly stepping outside of that comfort zone that is just so safe—"I know how to navigate this kind of conversation, using these kinds of words and everything”—and you have to keep stepping outside that comfort zone so that you are taking some risks and you're going to make some mistakes. You are.
\n\nI make them pretty regularly. I might put something in a newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called 5 Ally Actions with 5 ideas and things people can take and I get emails back from people who disagree with me or say, “If I had written that, I would have changed it slightly this way,” or whatever, and I'm comfortable with that because I approach everything with this mindset of curious, instead of furious. I want to be curious about why someone's giving me the feedback and what's underneath there and what can I learn from it as opposed to getting furious at them for giving me feedback and like, assaulting my expertise, or whatever, or my voice.
\n\nSo curious, not furious, I think is an important thing here and I want to give a shout out. I learned that phrase from a podcast I was listening to and it was Kat Gordon, who has something called The 3% Movement, which is all about getting more gender diversity in the creative industry, like the ad industry. So hat tipped to Kat Gordon for that.
\n\nSo getting back to you got to get comfortable with making mistakes and when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize. Heartfelt apology, folks. Apologize and then figure out what you're going to do differently the next time. That's what it's all about.
\n\nSo the journey is real. No one ever gets an ally badge or an ally cookie. In fact, I will tell you, I recently searched on LinkedIn in job titles for ally. I was curious to see how many people put in their job titles. There are people out there who have claimed it and I don't think that's right. Unless someone else has told them that, in which case, okay, someone else has said, “You are an ally,” maybe you can put that in your title and claim the badge, but it's really not about that.
\n\nIt's about being on a lifelong journey really, to be inclusive, to keep learning, to keep understanding how things are changing, and not putting the spotlight on yourself. Opening the doors for other people and just stand right behind that door and realizing that it's not about you. It's so hard to do this at times because we all want to be like, “Hey, look at the cool thing I just did for somebody else.” We want that feedback, but being an ally means stepping out of the limelight and letting someone else shine.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Those are great. Thank you so much, Karen, for that. I want to ask one more question since we're there. In terms of not making it about ourselves and not necessarily centering ourselves and taking action in the moment and not giving ourselves the allyship title, if you will, who are some people that you either align yourself with or that you learn from, whether it's up close and personal or from a distance? Like who are people that you feel are providing you with gems and knowledge so that you are then sharing with folks like us, that we can at least either put in the show notes or give a shout out to?
\n\nKAREN: Yes! Oh, I love this. So many people. One, I will say right off the bat is Minda Harts. Minda Harts is a woman, a Black woman, and she wrote a book called The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Get a Seat at the Table, I think is the byline. She and I spoke on a panel together a few months ago and I learned so much from her. I learned a lot from reading her book about the experience with Black women in the workplace, but then also, on the panel and since then, I feel that we have a nice professional, Twitter kind of friendship going on, which I just value so much. So I learned from her and what she shares all the time.
\n\nAnother person I learned from is Jeannie Gainsburg. Jeannie Gainsburg is an LGBTQ educator and wrote a book called The Savvy Ally and The Savvy Ally is all about – the funny thing is she and I connected. We realized we went to college together or the same class, but we didn't know each other in college, but we have the same mindset of understanding something and then distilling it into how an ally can show up. With her perspective, it's all about being an ally for the LGBTQ community and I've learned so much from her. In fact, I've quoted both Minda and Jeannie in my second edition pretty heavily.
\n\nI also have learned a lot from David Smith and Brad Johnson. They recently published a book called Good Guys and their approach is also incredibly similar to mine, but they focus completely on how men can be allies for women and they don't focus on other aspects of allyship. But very much I learned about, they're the guys who are talking to other guys and basically saying, “Hey dude, it's your responsibility as a man in a professional setting to be an ally.” Like, it's part of your job to meet with the women on your team and sponsor them and support them. So, they tell it in a real way.
\n\nOh my gosh, I feel like I learned from so many other people, too and I'm forgetting, I'm not thinking holistically. So anyway, those are four people it's nice to give shout outs to.
\n\nCHANTÉ: We put you on the spot so thank you, Karen. [laughs]
\n\nKAREN: Okay. Here's another one. Corey Ponder, he works in tech, but he also does speaking and writing about diversity and inclusion on the side and he is a Black man. I just learned about his experience and perspective in such a real, raw way and I value that a lot.
\n\nDAMIEN: Karen, I'd like to ask you a bit about something you brought up really early in our conversation today. You mentioned that before you got into this work with Better Allies and that sort of work, before you became a executive coach, leadership coach, you noticed a decline in gender parity in the tech industry. Can you talk about what that decline was, how it might've happened?
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. So first of all, Damien a question for you. Were you surprised when I said that?
\n\nDAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, no, not at all. I actually just today read about one of the earliest computers at NASA which is a woman, a Black woman, that the astronauts explicitly by name depended on, for example, Apollo 13. So I wanted to hear your story about what happened.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Okay, okay. I asked only because there are many people who, when I just drop that into the conversation, they ended up coming back to it minutes and minutes later or towards the end of any kind of interview. At any rate, what happened?
\n\nSo I have theory and actually I gave a TEDx talk about this, exploring the theory. I won't do all 20 minutes of my TEDx talk, but when I decided to study computer science, I was a senior in high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, what I wanted to study in college. My father said to me, “Hey, well, Karen, you're really good at math and you enjoy making things. You're always crafting and sewing and knitting, and you like solving problems. I've just been reading this article about this new field called computer science which seems like it would combine all the things you're good at and maybe you would enjoy making software and by the way, this is what people earn in this field.” [chuckles]
\n\nI have to admit, I grew up in a very humble financial household and so, I wanted to make sure I could support myself and earn a living when I graduated from college. So I'm like, “Okay, I'll study computer science. I'll learn how to build software.” That was 1981, the year I graduated from high school.
\n\nNow get this, I had never touched a computer. Okay, we didn't have – I mean, 1981 was the year the IBM PC was released into the field. The Macintosh did not come out until 1984. So in my home, we did not have computers in the part-time jobs I had after school and summers, no one had computers and certainly, we didn't not have computers in my high school where I could learn to code where it would probably would have been in basic.
\n\nThis was a situation for many people across the United States. Going to college in the early 80s, if you wanted to study computer science, many people were coming with no experience. Maybe a little more than me. Maybe they had taken that basic class, but very little experience. It was almost like a level playing field at that point and we were encouraged to pursue this.
\n\nMy graduating class from college, I went back through my yearbook not too long ago to count, there were 38% of the computer science degrees went to women in my class and that statistic 38% is very similar to what was happening across the whole United States. According to the Department of Education, the year 1985, when I graduated from college, 37% of all computer science and information science degrees went to women. So that was pretty good.
\n\nNow, fast forward 20, 25 years and that number dropped to a low of about 17%, I think and the overall number also went down of how many women were getting these degrees. And now, you don't have to have a computer science degree to work in tech necessarily, but in many tech environments and tech companies, the engineers are incredibly valued and are very visible and are paid very well. They are an incredibly important part of any tech company.
\n\nSo my point is that there used to be a lot more women computer scientists and it did drop. I do think it's this level playing field that I started at, but the decline happened because I believe a society, we as a society, started thinking and encouraging our young boys to get involved with robotics, with tinkering, with coding classes, with summer camps where you might learn to do coding or programming robotics.
\n\nWe encouraged our young boys more than our young girls and over time, that meant that a girl, if she wanted to go to the summer coding camp in her neighborhood, would show up and see only boys there, or see only a very small number of girls and be like, “Well, maybe this isn't for me.” Or coding assignments in colleges that were much more aligned with masculine interests and more feminine interests. Things that might be more – oh, I don't even really want to get into stereotypes. I don't even want to go there, but things that would be more appealing to an 18-year-old boy than an 18-year-old girl who just have different interests and just became self-fulfilling.
\n\nWhat we're seeing now though, is that graph is moving in the right direction. The numbers are inching upwards because there's been so much focus across the United States – and hopefully, around the world, but across the United States, in terms of gender diversity is important in this field and we should be welcoming of all and we're making changes to all of these programs and encouraging our young girls to study this field, get involved with STEM, and pursue it when they get to college and beyond.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, you avoided giving an example so I'll give one that you reminded me of, which is for a very long time, the standard, the most common image used as an example of compression algorithms was that of a undressed woman and so, we can –
\n\nKAREN: Lena. Her name is Lena. Yes, actually I know her name. She was someone when they were working on an image compression algorithm like, “We need a picture,” and someone just grabbed the Playboy magazine from their cube, took the centerfold out, and used that.
\n\nREIN: You do.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nOr at least as you did. The effect here is really interesting and also, really, it makes me very sad, which is that computing became seen as a prestige job. Once men realized that there was something to this, it requires expertise, they decided that they were going to do it and when they did—there's research that shows this both ways. When men enter a field, it raises the prestige and increases wages. When women enter a field, it lowers the prestige and decreases wages.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah, that's a problem, but real. I don't mean to at all disagree. It's a real problem.
\n\nARTY: Just curious. Do we reinforce these things by saying them as a statement like that with a period versus bringing it up as a question?
\n\nREIN: Yeah.
\n\nARTY: I'm just wondering.
\n\nREIN: What I’m trying to do is describe and not be normative, but I think that's a valid point.
\n\nARTY: In my life coaching thing recently, we were talking about statements with periods and it's really easy to define the world of expectations of ourselves, define the world of expectations of everyone else for all time and all affinity as a statement with a period. As we go and do this, it creates these reinforcing effects, and then we go and do things and enact behaviors that reinforce those belief systems.
\n\nSo we're sitting here talking about biases and how all of this stuff gets baked in her brain and one of the ways that it gets baked into her brain is by making statements of “Well, this is how it is period.” I realize you’re making a statement of something to challenge, but I think it's something that we really need to think about that if we want to change the status quo, it starts with reimagining it different. Coming up with a different statement, with a period even as a starting point, and then letting that lead to questions of how do we go and manifest this new reality that is more what we want.
\n\nKAREN: Can I embarrass myself? [laughs]
\n\nARTY: Yes, of course.
\n\nKAREN: Okay, right.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nKAREN: So I have two children. That's not embarrassing. They're in their early 20s now. That's not embarrassing. I had read, when they were younger, that there is research done that said that if you tell a girl just before she takes a math test, that girls aren't good at math, that her score will actually go down.
\n\nThis is the embarrassing thing. So before dropping my daughter off for like her PSATs and SAT exams, I just said, “Remember, girls are really good at math and you are really good at math, too.” [chuckles] So maybe already changing the narrative by using different periods statements, too [laughs] making up alternate realities.
\n\nOh gosh, I can't believe I just shared that story. My daughter would probably be so embarrassed.
\n\nDAMIEN: That’s a modern story and I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about there and I think Arty brings up an amazing and very valuable points. The suggestion I want to make in response to that is, because what Rein was describing is a fact and I’m sure it's important to know about and to know that it happened—and I'm already using that language now: it happened.
\n\nIn the past when men went into a field, it became more prestigious and higher paid. When women into a field, it became less prestigious and higher paid. And that's what has happened in the past and by stating it that way, now we can go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?”
\n\nREIN: There's a thing I learned from Virginia Satir that I probably should have done here, which is when you find one of those ends with a period sentences Arty, like you're talking about, you add until now at the end. So when women enter a male dominated fields, wages go down until now.
\n\nARTY: And now they go up. Now they go up because everyone wants women because they're so awesome. Women bring so much awesomeness to the table so wages go up. The more women you have, the better the wages.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Period.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, and—yes, and—the other kind of way to look at this is, I've been doing a lot of work with how might we statements and so the question is, how might we change the trajectory? How might we imagine the future of work where all people and all identities are welcome and we are building towards a future that is literally more equitable and more accessible for all? So how might we do that? We can maybe answer that question today, or we can invite folks who are going to listen in to weigh in when we post this online and talk to us on Twitter.
\n\nARTY: I love that, though. I mean, I think if we really want to change the status quo, part of that is realizing that we're the ones who make it. We're the ones that create our reality and our culture is just a manifest of all these beliefs and things that are in our head emerging from all of us. If we realize that we're actually the ones that are in control of that, that we're the ones that are manifesting that, then we can create any type of world that we want.
\n\nSo what does that vision look like? Let's go up to the whiteboard and create and dream up the type of world that we want, the type of vision that we want, the type of company we want, the type of culture we want. Write those things down, make them real to us, start selecting and doing things that reinforce those visions and beliefs. But we've got to start with believing. It's possible. We got to start with imagining that reality is already there, that we're already there, that we've already created it right now and now we're just living it.
\n\nKAREN: 100%.
\n\nREIN: Well, I think that is a great sentiment to end our episode on. We should do reflections and thanks to Arty, I already have one. So I can go first, if anyone else wants to?
\n\nCHANTÉ: Take it away.
\n\nREIN: So my reflection and Arty, you really sort of brought this home for me with the last thing you said, is that – Karen, you said that your superpower is your ability to simplify things and I would offer that you have another one, which is your ability to translate ideals, values, intentions into actions. There's a word for that and the word is practice. So what I think we all need to be thinking about is how to get better at practicing.
\n\nKAREN: Thank you for that, Rein. In fact, I wrote it down because I clearly have to go look it up in the dictionary afterwards and become more familiar. So thank you. I learn something new every day and I've just learned a new vocabulary word and I'm honored. I don't even know what – I do know what it means based on how you used it just then, but I'm honored by your thoughts and your reflections to me. Thank you.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah, I'll build on that because I learned so much in this conversation today and I'm so glad we had it. Specifically regarding very practical things that framing with the one sheet of how bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens and what Arty said about our use of language.
\n\nI'm a certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner and so, these are the things that I've known, but hadn't applied. So just again, being reminded of them and being able to take that and go, “Okay, let me use these things in the service of this goal of being a better ally” to use your turn of phrase. So thank you. Thank you all.
\n\nCHANTÉ: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that we didn't record it properly the first time so I could selfishly join this conversation. Yes! I love it when things work out that way.
\n\nI really appreciated the fact that we talked about so many of the practical things, just what Damien mentioned here. We kind of reiterated some things I already knew, but could have an excuse to tweet out later [laughs] and that is just that we're all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Many of us, Karen, to your point of your story, that we don't start off doing this work, but the journey and the problem is big enough for all of us to take a part in it. What I love about where we are these days is that the world offers us so many resources, tools, and networks that we have a decision to make when we were talking about this lifestyle choice.
\n\nSo today, you might be the ally. Tomorrow, you might be the bridge. The next day, you might be the person who simply passes on somebody's resume, but all of those parts matter when we're trying to imagine a different future, especially around technology. I'm really appreciative of the conversation and I'm looking forward to continuing it. Thank you.
\n\nREIN: You're welcome, Chanté.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nARTY: Yeah, we screwed this up just for you.
\n\nCHANTÉ: [laughs] Yay!
\n\nARTY: So my reflection, I wanted to bring up the thing that I actually mentioned last time as my reflection, because I feel like it's really important. One of the simple things that we can do to make a huge difference is just expanding our network and there's so much limitation that's caused by these homogenous networks we have and staying within our circle and friends. Even though, it takes some effort to get outside of our comfort zone and meet new people and to build relationships with people we might not otherwise. The benefits that happen because of all those new relationship, connections are huge and it's totally worth it.
\n\nI love your simple trick at the conference thing of go find the person who's in the corner by themselves. Talk to them. They're the easy ones, right? I love that. Super easy, but I think change is one of those things that takes some courage on all of our parts to take one little bitty step that can make a big difference.
\n\nKAREN: Yeah. Arty, there's a saying that says, “When you step outside your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens.” So I think you're already a believer of that and I hope that it plays out in real life for you.
\n\nI'll just say to wrap up my reflection, I absolutely loved this conversation. I am glad we got to do it again, too. It's it was very different than the first time and I think it was absolutely wonderful.
\n\nSo thank you everyone and if I think about, I learned something from all of you. The one that I think I will really be putting into practice is a combination of Arty and Rein, what you've shared in terms of if there is a period statement, how to turn that to more of a question, or to add to it to say until now. I want to try that out. I want to use that as I am speaking to people about allyship and navigating this on writing my newsletter. I'm not sure where, but it is something I want to try out and see how it – I'm sure it's going to be effective and I appreciate that. Thank you.
\n\nARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Karen. This was a wonderful conversation.
\n\nKAREN: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, everyone!
Special Guest: Karen Catlin.
Sponsored By:
02:15 - David’s Superpower: Being Confused
\n\n11:56 - Daily Writing
\n\n15:47 - Learning to Be Better at Emotions
\n\n23:22 - Achievement and Joy as Aspirational Goals
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Trying not knowing yourself.
\n\nRein: You shouldn’t be the owner of all your desires. Instead, you should measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values.
\n\nJacob: Thinking of yourself as the sum of all of the habits you maintain or don’t.
\n\nDavid: The [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) distinction, and cleaning a home as an ongoing process.
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\n\nJACOB: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 223. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-host, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Jacob and I'm here with my friend and also stranger because we haven't done this together in months, Jessica Kerr.
\n\nJESSICA: Thank you, Rein! And Iím really excited today because our guest is David MacIver. Twitter handle, @DRMacIver.
\n\nDavid MacIver is best known as the developer of Hypothesis, the property-based testing library for Python, and is currently doing a Ph.D. based on some of that work. But he also writes extensively about emotions, life, and society and sometimes coaches people on an eclectic mix of software development, intellectual, and emotional skills. As you can probably tell, David hasn't entirely decided what he wants to do when he grows u and that's the best because if you had decided well, then so few possibilities would be open.
\n\nDavid, hello!
\n\nDAVID: Hi, Jessica! Great to be here.
\n\nJESSICA: All right. I'm going to ask the obligatory question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nDAVID: So as you saw me complaining about on Twitter, this question doesn't translate very well outside of the United States.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, which is fascinating for me.
\n\nDAVID: I'm a bit too British to say nice things about myself without sounding like I'm being self-deprecating.
\n\nJESSICA: Self-depreciating it is!
\n\nDAVID: [laughs] So I thought about this one for a while and I decided that the answer is that I'm really good at being confused and in particular, I have a much more productive response to being confused than it seems like most people do because basically, the world is super confusing and I think I never know what's going on, but then I notice that I know what's going on and I look at it and I'm just like, ìHmm, this is weird, right?î
\n\nAnd then I read a book about it, or I sort of poke at it a bit and then I'm not less confused, but I'm less confused about that like, one little facet of the world and have found ten new things to be confused about.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: Nice.
\n\nDAVID: Usually, I can then turn this into being slightly better at the thing I was previously confused about, or writing about it and making everyone else differently confused than they started with.
\n\nJESSICA: Definitely confused. That is a win. That's called learning.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, exactly.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThis is where a lot of the writing you were talking about comes from and essentially, about 2 years ago, I just started turning these skills less on software development and more just going like, ìLife, it doesn't make sense, right?î
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd noticing a whole bunch of things, I needed to work on and then that a lot of these were shared common problems. So I am, if anything, far more confused about all of it than I was 2 years ago, but I'm less confused about the things I was confused about that and seem to be gradually becoming a more functional human being as a result of the process. So yay, confusion.
\n\nJESSICA: That superpower, the productive response to confusion, ties in with your reaction to the superpower question in general, which is as Americans, we're supposed to be ñ we want to have power. We want to be special. We want to be unique. We want to make our unique contribution to the world! And as part of that, we're not comfortable being confused because we need to know things! We need to be smart! We need to convey strength and competence and be the best! I hate the superlatives.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI hate the implied competition there, but instead, we could open our hearts to our own confusion and embrace that. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.
\n\nDAVID: One of the things that often comes up for me is it's a thing that I think is slightly intentioned with this American tendency youíre pointing at, which is that I kind of want to be the best, but I don't really want to be better than other people. I just want to be better than I am now.
\n\nI wrote a post a while ago about neuromas of excellence like, what would a community look like, which helped everyone be the best version of themselves and one of the top lists was basically that everyone has to be comfortable with not being good at things, but another is just that you have to not want to be better to the other people. You just need want to be better.
\n\nAgain, this is where a lot of the writing comes from. I've just gone, ìWell, this was helpful to me. It's probably helpful to other people.î That's not as sense of wanting to change the world and wanting to put my own stamp on things and it does require a certain amount to self-importance to go, ìYes, my writing is important and other people will like to read it,î but then other people like to read it so, that's fine and if they don't, that's fine, too.
\n\nJESSICA: Well, you didn't make anyone read it, but you did start a newsletter and let people read it.
\n\nJACOB: Is this weird thinking reflect a journey that you took in your life? Because I think about my company and my team and how incredibly generous everybody is and even still, I just find it's natural to compare myself to everyone else and needing to not be on the bottom. Part of me wonders if that's just like a natural human tendency, but just because it's natural doesn't make it so.
\n\nJESSICA: Way natural American.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah, basically I'm asking how do I stop doing that?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVID: It's definitely not something I've always been perfectly good at. But I think the thing that helped me figure out how to do this was essentially being simultaneously at the bottom of the social rung, but also super arrogant.
\n\nSo it's your classic nerd kit thing, right? It's completely failing at people, but also going, ìBut I'm better than all of you because I'm smart,î and then essentially, gradually having the rough edges filed off the second part and realizing how much I had to learn off the first part.
\n\nI think sometimes my attitude is due to a lot of this is basically, to imagine I was a time traveler and basically going back in time and telling little David all the things that it was really frustrating that nobody could explain to me and I sadly haven't yet managed to perfect my time machine, but I can still pay it forward.
\n\nIf nobody was able to explain this to me and I'm able to explain it to other people, then surely, the world is a better place with me freely handing out this information. I don't think it's possible, or even entirely desirable to completely eliminate the comparing yourself to others and in fact, I'd go as far as to say, comparing yourself to others is good, but I think theÖ
\n\nJESSICA: Itís how do we have a productive response to compare ourselves to others?
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely. There's a great section in The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a book that I have very mixed feelings about, but it has some great bits where he talks about competition.
\n\nIf you think of a mountain climber, a mountain climber is basically pitting themselves against the mountain, right? They're trying to climb the mountain because it is hard and you could absolutely take a helicopter to the top of the mountain, but that wouldn't be the point. It's you're improving yourself by trying a hard thing. I mean, you're improving yourself in the sense that you're getting better at climbing mountains. You might not be improving yourself in any sort of fully generalizable way.
\n\nJESSICA: Okay.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVID: When you are playing tennisóbecause this is a book about tennisóyou are engaged in competition with each other and you're each trying to be better than the other. In this context, essentially, what you are doing is you are being the mountain for each other. So you are creating the obstacles that the other people overcome and improve themselves that way and in doing this, you're not just being a dick about it. You're not doing this in order to crush them. You're doing this in order to provide them with the challenge that lets them grow.
\n\nWhen you think about it this way, other people being better than you is great because there's this mountain there and you can climb it and by climbing the mountain, you can improve yourself. The thing that stops everyone becoming great is feeling threatened by the being better rather than treating it as an opportunity for learning.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, trying to dynamite the mountain instead of climbing it. Whereas, when you are the mountain for someone else, you can also provide them footholds.
\n\nRein, do you have an example of this?
\n\nREIN: I sure do, Jess. Thanks for asking. So I was just [laughs] thinking while you were talking about this, about the speed running and speed running communities. Because speed running is about testing yourself against a video game, which in this case, serves the purpose of the mountain, but it's also about competing against other speed runners. If it was purely competitive, you wouldn't see the behaviors, the reciprocity in the communities like sharing speed running strats, being really happy when other people break your record.
\n\nI think it's really interesting that that community is both competitive, but there's also a lot of reciprocity, a lot of sharing.
\n\nJACOB: And it's like the way the science community should work. It's like, ìOh, you made this new discovery because of this discovery I shared with you and now I'm proud that my discovery is this foundation for all these other little things that now people can be by themselves in 10 seconds instead of 30.î
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Give other people a head start on the confusion you've already had so that they can start resolving new confusions.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely one of my hopes with all of this writing is to encourage other people to do it themselves.
\n\nEarlier this year, I was getting people very into daily writing practices and just trying to get people to write as much as possible. I now think that was slightly a mistake because I think daily writing is a great thing to do for about a month and then it just gets too much. So I will probably see if I can figure out other ways of encouraging people to notice their confusion, as you say, and share what they've learned from edge. But sadly, can't quite get into do it daily.
\n\nJESSICA: This morningís newsletter you talked about. Okay, okay, I can do daily writing, but now I want to get better at writing. I've got to go do something I'm worse at.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think daily writing is still a really good transitional stage for most people. To give them more context for this newsletter for people listening. Basically, most of my writing to date, I just write in a 1- or 2-hour sitting from start to finish. I don't really edit it. I just click publish and I've gotten very good at writing like that. I think that most people are ñ I mean, sometimes it's a bit obvious that I haven't edited it because they're obvious typos and the like. But by and large, I think it is a reasonably high standard of writing and I'm not embarrassed to be putting it out in that quality, but the fact that I'm not editing is just starting to be sort of the limiter on growth for me. It's never going to really get better than it currently is. It's certainly not going to allow me to tackle larger projects that I can currently tackle without that editing skill.
\n\nJESSICA: [laughs] I just pictured you trying to sit down and write a book in one session.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nAnd then you'd be tired.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I've tried to doing that with papers even and it doesn't really work. I mean, I do edit papers, but Iím very visibly really bad at editing papers and it's one of my weaknesses as a academic is that I still haven't really got the hang of paper writing.
\n\nJESSICA: Do you edit other people's papers?
\n\nDAVID: I don't edit other people's papers, but I provide feedback on other people's writing and say, ìThis is what worked for me. This is what didn't work for me. Here are some typos you made.î It's not reading as providing good feedback on things, that is the difficult part of editing for me. It is much more ñ honestly, it's an emotional problem more than anything else. It's not really that I'm bad at editing at a technical level. I'm okay at editing at a technical level. I just hate doing it. [laughs]
\n\nJESSICA: That is most problems we have, right?
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: In the end, itís an emotional problem.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is definitely one of the interesting things I've been figuring out in my last 2 years of working on learning more about emotions and the various skills around them is just going, ìOh, right. It's not this abstract thing where you are learning to be better at emotions and then nothing will change in your life because you're just going to be happier about everything.î I mean, some people do approach it that way, but for me, it's very much been, ìOh, I'm learning to be good at emotions because this really concrete problem that I don't understand, it turns out that that's just feelings.î
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nIt's like, for example, the literature on how to have a clean home, turns out that's mostly anxiety management and guilt management. It's like fundamentally cleaning your home is not a hard problem. Not procrastinating on cleaning your home is a hard problem. Not feeling intensely guilty and aversive about the dirty dishes in the sink and is putting them off for a week. I don't do that. But just as a hypothetical example.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nI mean, not a hypothetical example, I think a specific example that comes from the book, Unfuck Your Habitat, which is a great example of essentially, it's a book that's about it contains tips, like fill the spray bottle with water and white vinegar and also, tips about how to manage your time and how to deal with the fact that you're mostly not cleaning because of shame, that sort of thing. Writing books are another great example where 80% about managing the feelings associated with writing; it turns out practical problems pretty much all come down to emotionsóat least practical life problems.
\n\nREIN: Sorry, I was just buying Unfuck Your Habitat real quick.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVID: It's a good book. I recommend it.
\n\nJESSICA: Our internal like emotional habitat and our external habitat are very linked. You said something earlier about learning to be at emotions is not just you're magically happier at other things in your life change.
\n\nDAVID: Yes. I mean, I think there are a couple of ways in which it manifests. One of them is just that emotions often are the internal force that maintains our life habits. It's you live in a particular way because moving outside of those trained habits is scary or aversive in some way.
\n\nLike the cleaning example of how, if your home is a mess, it's not necessarily because you don't know how to make your home not a mess. Although, cleaning is a much harder skill than most people treat it as speaking as someone who is bad at the practical skills of cleaning, as well as the emotional side of cleaning. But primarily, if it were just a matter of scale, you could just do it and get better at it, right? The thing that is holding you in place is the emotional reaction to the idea of changing your habits.
\n\nSo the specific reason why I started on all of this process was essentially relationship stuff. I'd started a new major relationship. My previous one hadn't gone so well for reasons that were somewhere between emotional and communication issues, for the same reason basically every relationship doesn't go so well, if it doesn't go so ñ Oh, that's not quite true. Like there are actual ñ
\n\nJESSICA: Some people have actual problems. [chuckles] But these things are. I mean, our emotions really, as sometimes we treat them as if they're flaws. As if our emotions are getting in our way is some sort of judgment about us as not being good people, but no, it just makes us people.
\n\nDAVID: For sure.
\n\nJESSICA: So you started on this journey because of the external motivation of helping someone you're in a relationship with, because it's really hard to do these things just for ourselves.
\n\nDAVID: It is incredibly hard to do things just for ourselves. I guess, that is exactly an example of this problem, right? It's that there is a particular habit of life that I was in and what I needed to break out of that habit of life was the skills for dealing with it and then figuring out these emotional reactions. But unfortunately, the thing that the habits were maintaining, it was me not having the skills and so having the external prompts of a problem that was in the world rather than in my life, as it was, was what was needed to essentially kick me out of that.
\n\nFortunately, it turns out that my standard approach of reading a thousand books now was one that worked for me, in this case. I probably haven't read a thousand books on this, but that certainly worked.
\n\nJESSICA: It wouldnít surprise me. [laughs]
\n\nDAVID: I read fewer books than people think I do. I may well have read more than a hundred books about emotions and therapy and the like. But I probably haven't, unless I cast that brush really broadly, because I mean, everything's a book about emotions and therapy, if you look at your right.
\n\nREIN: Have you read any books by average Virginia Satir?
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVID: I don't know who that is, I'm afraid.
\n\nJACOB: Drink!
\n\nREIN: Excellent! Excellent news.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: Itís about Virginia Satir, right?
\n\nREIN: Virginia was a family therapist who wrote a lot about processing emotions and I have been a huge fan of her work and it's made a huge difference in my life and my career. So I highly recommend it.
\n\nDAVID: Okay. I will definitely hear recommendations on books. What's the book title, or what's your favorite book title by?
\n\nREIN: I think I would start with The Satir Model, which is S-A-T-I-R M-O-D-E-L. The Satir Model, which is about her family therapy model.
\n\nJESSICA: Chances are good, you've read books based on her work. I was reading Gerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management: Volume Two the other day, which is entirely based on The Satir Model.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. He was a student of hers. One of the things that she likes to say is that the problem is never the problem, how we cope is the problem.
\n\nJESSICA: Can we have a productive response to the problem?
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I think often, the problem is also the problem.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: It's often self-sustaining like the habits you're talking about. Our life habits form a self-sustaining system and then it took that external stimulus. It's not like an external stimulus somehow kicked you in the butt and changed you, it let you change yourself.
\n\nDAVID: Yes, absolutely. I guess what I mean is ñ so let's continue with the cleaning example. The problem is that your flat is messy and your flat is messy because of these life habits, because your emotional reactions to all these things. If you do the appropriate emotional work, you unblock yourself on shame and anxiety around a messy flat, and you look around and you've saw you've processed all these emotions. You fixed how you respond to the problem and it turns out your flat is still messy and you still have to clean it.
\n\nI think emotional reactions are what either ñ Iím making it sound like emotional reactions are all negative and I really don't mean that. I mean, that way is just ñ
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, right because once you've dealt with all that shame and the anxiety and stuff, and maybe you've picked up your flat some, and then you come in and you have groceries and you stop and you immediately put them away and you get a positive, emotional feeling from that as you're in the process of keeping your flat tidy. The emotions can reinforce a clean flat as well.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that has always been one of my goals more than it is what am I active?
\n\nJESSICA: No, I love this distinction that you're making here. Is it a goal or is it something I'm activelyÖ? The word goal is [inaudible].
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. So I think for me, one of the other problems, other than the relationships it starts, was me essentially realizing that my emotional experience, it wasn't bad. I mean, it wasn't great, but I wasn't actively miserable most of the time, but it also just didn't have very many positive features, which it turns out is also a form of depression. It's very easy to treat depression as just like you're incredibly sad all the time, but that doesn't have to what it can be like flatness is.
\n\nSo I think very much from early on in my mind was that the getting better at emotions wasn't just about not being anxious. It was also about experiencing things like joy, it was about being happier and I think having this as sort of an aspirational goal is very, very motivating in terms of a lot of this work and in terms of a lot of trying to understand all of this, because I think I don't want to be miserableóit only gets you so far.
\n\nIf you have a problem that you're trying to solve, and that turns out to be an emotional block, you have to actually wants to solve the problem. It's like, I think if you don't want to clean the flat, then it doesn't matter how much you sort of fix your anxiety around that. You're still just going to go, ìOkay. I'm no longer anxious about this messy flat. That's great,î and your flat is going to stay messy because you don't actually want it not to be and that's fine.
\n\nJESSICA: Itís just fine, yeah. Who cares? Especially now.
\n\nDAVID: Unless it becomes a health hazard, but yeah.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nDAVID: Certainly like thereís ñ
\n\nJESSICA: If you're affecting the neighboring flats with your roaches, thatís fine.
\n\nDAVID: [laughs] Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: So you were talking about joy as an aspirational goal, but it's not the kind of goal where you check the box at the end of the year and declare yourself worthy of a 2% raise.
\n\nDAVID: [laughs] No, absolutely not and I think for all big goals, really, I find that I want to be very clichÈ and say, it's the journey, not the destination.
\n\nJESSICA: But it is! No, it totally is!
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: See, the word goal really irks me because people often use it to mean something that you should actually reach. Like write every day per month, that's a goal that you find benefits from hitting, but feelings of joy are, as you said, aspirational. I call it a quest, personally. Some people call it a North Star. It is a direction that can help you make decisions that will move you in that direction, but if you ever get thereÖ No, that doesn't make sense. You wouldn't want to exist in a perpetual state of joy. That would also be flat. [laughs]
\n\nDAVID: No, absolutely. And I think even with big but achievable goals, it still is still quite helpful to treat them in this way. So for one, quite close to my heart right now, a goal of doing a Ph.D. I think you've got a 3-, 4-year long project in the States, I think it's more like 5 or 6 and if you treat the Ph.D. as it's pass/fail, like either you get the Ph.D. or those 3 or 4 years have been wasted, then that's not very motivating and also will result in, I think, worst quality results in work. Like the thing to do is ñ
\n\nJESSICA: Like anxiety, stress, and shame.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. [chuckles] So just thinking in terms of there's this big goal that you're trying to achieve of the Ph.D., but the goal doesn't just define a pass/fail; it defines a direction. Like if you get better at paper writing in order to get your Ph.D., then even if you don't get your Ph.D., you got better at paper writing and that's good, too.
\n\nJESSICA: Because the other outcome is the next version of you.
\n\nDAVID: Yes, exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: Itís about who does this aspirational goal prompt you to become?
\n\nREIN: This reminds me of the difference between homeostasis and homeorhesis. Homeostasis is about maintaining a state; homeorhesis is about maintaining a trajectory
\n\nDAVID: That makes sense. Yes, very much that distinction and also, one of the nice things about this focus on a trajectory is that even if a third of the way through the trajectory, you decide you don't want to maintain it anymore and actually you're fine where you are. This goal was a bad idea or you've got different priorities now, possibly because a global pandemic has arrived and has changed all of your priorities. Then you still come all that way. It's like the trajectory doesn't just disappear backwards in time because you're no longer going in that direction. You've still made all that progress. Youíve still got to drive some of the benefits from it.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. There's another thing that maybe it's an American thing, or maybe it's wider than that of if it doesn't last forever, then it was never real, or if you don't achieve the stated goal, then all your effort was wasted.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I don't think itís purely an American thing. It's hard to tell with how much American pop culture permeates everything and also, I shouldn't say that although I'm quite British, I am also half American. So Iím a weird third culture kid where my background doesn't quite make sense to anyone. But yeah, no, I very much feel that. This idea that permanence is required for importance and it's something that every time I sort of catch myself there, I'm just like, ìYeah, David, you're doing the thing again. Have you tried not doing the thing?î [chuckles] But it's hard. It's very internalized.
\n\nJESSICA: If you clean your flat and a week later, it's dirty again. Well, it was clean for a week. That's not nothing.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I do genuinely think that one of the emotions that people struggle with cleaning. Certainly, it is for me.
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, because it's a process. It is not a destination. Nothing is ever clean!
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJACOB: I think of myself sometimes as I want to be the kind of person that always has a clean home, as opposed to, I like it when my house is clean.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Is it about you or is it about some real effect you want?
\n\nJACOB: Yeah. Is it about like the story that that I imagine I could project if I could project on Instagram because I'm taking pictures of my pristine house all the time, or is it just like, I like to look around and see things where they belong?
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I'm curious, does this result in your home being clean?
\n\nJACOB: No, it doesnít and thatís sort of the issue that I'm just realizing is it's not actually a powerful motivator because it's just not possible trying to imagine that I could maintain homeostasis about it. It's not a possible goal and so yeah, it's not going to happen.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. The metaphor here is it changes motion, but it's always happening so it's more like the flow of time than motion through space.
\n\nJESSICA: Itís not motion, too.
\n\nREIN: Actually staying the same is very hard to do and very expensive.
\n\nDAVID: Absolutely.
\n\nJESSICA: No wonder it takes all of our feelings to help us achieve it.
\n\n[chuckles]
\n\nDAVID: So the reason I was asking by the way about whether this idea of being the sort of person who has a clean home is effective is that this ties in a little bit to what today's newsletter was about. There's this problem where when you have self-images that are constructed around being good at particular things, being bad at those things is very much, it's a shame trigger. It's essentially, you experienced the world as clashing with your conception of yourself and we get really good at not noticing those things.
\n\nYou see this a lot with procrastination, for example, where you are putting off doing a thing because it does force you to confront this sort of conflict between identity and reality. I think sometimes, the way out of it is just to identify less with the things that we want to achieve in the world and just try and go, ìI'm doing this because I want to and if I didn't want to, that would be fine, too.î Essentially, becoming fine with both an outcome and failing to achieve that outcome is often the best way to achieve the outcome.
\n\nJESSICA: So practicing editing in order to practice editing, whether you achieve writing a book or not, whether you're good at it or not, and it does come back to the journey. If what you're doing is a means to an end and yet not in line with that end, it often backfires because the means are the end. In the end, they become it.
\n\nSo having a clean house is stupid. That's not a thing. Picking up is a thing. That's something you can do and what I am picking up. True fact! [laughs] You don't have to worry about whether you can, are you doing it? All right then, you can! Whereas, having a clean house is not a thing.
\n\nDAVID: Very much. This kind of ties into the comments about books earlier, where you were talking about how many books I read, and one of the things that I think very much stops people from reading books is the idea that oh God, there are so many books to read, I'll never get through all of them.
\n\nJESSICA: If I started, I have to finish it.
\n\nDAVID: Oh, yeah. I mean, people definitely shouldn't do that; books are there to be abandoned if they're bad.
\n\nJESSICA: I read a lot of chapter ones.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I have a slightly bad habit of buying books speculatively because they seem good and as a result, I think my shelf of books that I'm probably never going to get around to read, but might do someday and might not and either is fine is probably like a hundred plus books now.
\n\nJESSICA: I love that shelf. I have big piles everywhere.
\n\n[laughs]
\n\nThere's always something to read wherever I sit and most of it, I will never read, but it's beautiful.
\n\nDAVID: I'm currently in a very weird experience where I write, for possibly the first time in my life, I have more bookshelf space than books.
\n\nJESSICA: Huh, that's not a stable state.
\n\nDAVID: No, no. This will be fixed by the time I leave this flat. The piles will return.
\n\nJESSICA: You will maintain the trajectory.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. [laughs] Because I'm just reading. I can read these as many books because I just sit down and read and at some point, I will finish a book or I will abandon the book and both are fine. But I think if you treat this as a goal where your goal is to read all the books, then that's not the thing and also, I think people go, ìMy goal is to read a hundred books a year,î or I don't know how normal people guesstimates are.
\n\nJESSICA: Itís like, is it really or itís their goal to learn something.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: And the means is reading books.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I think if one instead just goes, ìI like reading and it's useful so I'm going to read books,î you'll probably end up reading a lot more than setting some specific numerical goal. Also, you run into sort of Goodhart's law things where if your goal is to read a hundred books in a year, great buy the Mr. Men set. But wait, it's not a thing in ñ the Mr. Men are a series of kidsí books which tells ñ
\n\nJESSICA: With the big smiley face?
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. Exactly, that's the one.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYou can read a hundred of those in a weekóI assume there are hundred Mr. Men books, I don't actually knowóand youíll probably learn something.
\n\nJESSICA: Then again, you might choose Dynamics in Action, never get through it, and then feel bad about it, and that would be pointless because you learned more from the introduction than you did from the Mr. Men series.
\n\nDAVID: I don't think I've even opened my copy of Dynamics in Action. I think you recommended on Twitter or something and I was just like, ìThat does sound interesting. I will speculatively buy this book.î
\n\nJESSICA: It's a hard book.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. It's far from the hardest book on my shelves, but it's definitely in the top. I'm going to confidently say top 20, but it might be harder than that. I just haven't done a comparative analysis and I don't want to overpromise.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJESSICA: The point being read books because you want to know.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Or sometimes because you want to have read them. That's the thing. There's a lot of things I may not want to pick up, but I do want to have picked up and I can use that to motivate me.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, and even then, there are two versions of that and both are good, actually. I think one of them sounds bad. One version is you want to have read it because you want to understand the material in it and the other one is just, you want to be able to say that you have read it and thus, you ñ and probably for the status game and also, just sort of as a box ticking, like I think ñ
\n\nJESSICA: Oh, itís not completely wrong.
\n\nDAVID: No, it's not completely wrong.
\n\nJESSICA: You still get something out of it.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: On the other hand, if you want to read it because you want to be the kind of person who would read it. I don't know about that one.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, I agree. I thinkÖ
\n\nJESSICA: Then again, life habits. Sometimes, if you want to be the kind of person who picks up and so you fake it long enough to form the habit, then you are.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, absolutely and I read a book recentlyóof course, I didóby Agnes Callard called Aspiration, which I'm glad I read it. I cannot really recommend it to people who aren't philosophers, because there's a thing that often happens with reading analytic philosophy, where the author clearly has a keen insight into an important problem that you, as the reader, lack and the way they express that insight is through an entire bookís worth of slightly pedantic arguments with other analytic philosophers who have wrong opinions about the subjects.
\n\nJESSICA: Half of Dynamics in Action is like that.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, I think it very complicated.
\n\nREIN: Was it written as a thesis?
\n\nDAVID: I don't think so. I'm not certain about that, but it might've been. It ended up being quite an influential book and I think she was mentioning that there's going to be a special issue of a journal coming out to recently about essentially, its impact and responses to it. But I think it's just genuinely that analytic philosophers had a lot of really wrong opinions about this subject.
\n\nSo the relevance of this is the idea she introduces the book is that of a proleptic value where ñ
\n\nJESSICA: Proleptic, more words.
\n\nDAVID: Proleptic basically, I think originally comes from grammar and it means something that stands in place for another thing. A proleptic value is what you do when you're engaged in a process of aspiration, which is trying to acquire values that you don't currently have.
\n\nSo she uses the example of a music student who wants to learn to appreciate the genre of music that they do not currently appreciate and they find a teacher who does appreciate that genre and they basically use their respect for that teacher as a proleptic value. They basically say, ìI don't currently value this genre of music, but I trust your judgment and I value your opinion and I will use your feedback and that respect for you as a value that stands in place of the future value of appreciating this genre of music that I hope to acquire.î
\n\nSo I think this thing of reading a book because you want to be the sort of person who reads that kind of book can have a similar function where even though, you don't really wants to read the book, that process of aspiration gives you a hook into becoming the sort of person who does want to read the book.
\n\nJESSICA: That's like being the mountain for each other.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: In some ways. You're not going to get a view yet. You're only 10 feet off the ground, but meanwhile, just climb to climb because it's here.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah. I'm not necessarily very good at being the sort of person reading books for this reason. Partly because there are so many books, I have so many other reasons to read, but yeah.
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah, you're fine. You don't need more reasons to read a book.
\n\nDAVID: [laughs] But I think two books that I have read mostly to have read them rather than necessarily because I was having an amazing time and learning lots of things reading them are Seeing Like a State by James Scott, which it's a good book.
\n\nI don't think it's a bad book, but it is very much a history book that also has a big idea and there are like 70,000 blog posts about the big idea. So if you're going and wanting just the big idea, read one of the blog posts, but I'd seen a reference so many times and I was just like, ìYou know, this seems like a book that I should rate,î and my opinion is now basically that like, if you like history books and if you want lots of detail, then yeah, it's a great book to read. If you just want the big idea, donít.
\n\nJESSICA: Right, because other people have presented it more succinctly, which probably happens with your Aspiration book that you talked about.
\n\nDAVID: I would like it to happen with the Aspiration book. The Aspiration book is only a few years old.
\n\nJESSICA: You've written a ñ oh, okay, so it's too soon for that. So you'll write about it, if you haven't yet.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, I havenít yet. Looking at it, it was published in 2018 and you have the paperback from 2019. So this is really cutting-edge philosophy to the degree that there is such a thing. [chuckles]
\n\nJESSICA: Yeah. Oh no, what do you mean? [inaudible].
\n\nREIN: Seeing Like a State is.
\n\nDAVID: Well, I've had this argument with philosopher friends where I was arguing that it was a thing and the philosopher friend was just like, ìIs it a thing, though?î Because the interesting thing about philosophy is just that it never goes out to date. People are sort of engaging with the entire historical cannon so the question is not does new philosophy get done? The question is more, I think is this less ñ?
\n\nJESSICA: This isnít really a cutting edge.
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, exactly.
\n\nJESSICA: Itís more kind of a gentle nuzzling.
\n\nDAVID: [laughs] Yeah. But also, is this more cutting edge than, I don't know, reading Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics? I don't know.
\n\nJESSICA: Philosophy [inaudible].
\n\nDAVID: Yeah, I personally think that there is cutting-edge and this is on it, but plenty of room for philosophical dialogue on that subject if you can sort of dig Socrates up and ask him about it.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nYeah, and speaking of philosophy, the other book that I have read essentially to have read it rather than because I was getting a lot out of it was Wittgensteinís Philosophical Investigations where I essentially read it in order to confirm to myself that I had already picked up enough Wittgenstein by osmosis that I didn't really need to read it, which largely true.
\n\nJACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to reflect on what we took from everything and just wrap things up a little bit.
\n\nJESSICA: I have one thing written down. We talked a bit about who you are and who you want to be as a person, and how sometimes what you want to do is in conflict with how you think of yourself. Like, when you think of yourself as good at something, it's hard to be bad at it, long enough to learn better.
\n\nIt occurs to me that in our society, we're all about getting to know yourself and then expressing your true self, which is very much a homeostasis more than a homerhesis. But what have we tried not knowing yourself? What if we tried just like, I don't know who I am and then I can surprise myself and have more possibilities. That's my reflection.
\n\nREIN: All of this discussion about happiness and pleasure, and diversion and striving reminds me a lot of Buddhist philosophy, or what I should say is, it reminds me a lot of my very limited understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Specifically, this idea that you shouldn't judge your life by the outcome of your preferences; that you shouldn't identify yourself with your wants and cling to the outcome of things. You can acknowledge that these things have happened and you can avoid unpleasant things, but you shouldn't be the owner of all of your desires. Instead, what you should do is measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values.
\n\nJACOB: Yeah. Maybe to put another way, I'm starting to think maybe I could think of myself as the sum of all of the habits I maintain or don't, and try to think of outcome of those habits as what a lagging indicator, I guess, or as a secondary and think more of myself like, ìWell, what are the things that I find I am naturally doing and if I'm not, what can I do to just try to enforce it for myself that I'm going to do that more?î Or maybe I don't care.
\n\nDAVID: So I'm not finding myself with sort of a single cohesive summation of the conversation, but I've really enjoyed it and there's been a couple of things I'm going to take away from it and mull over a bit more.
\n\nI really liked the homeostasis versus homeorhesis distinction. I'd obviously heard the first word, but not the second word and so, I'm going to think about that a bit more. Sort of tying onto that, I very much liked Jessica's point of how a clean home isn't really a thing, you can only do cleaning and thinking much more in terms of the ongoing process than trying to think of it as a static goal that you are perfectly maintaining at all times. Slightly orthogonal in relation to that, but I'm also just going to look up Satir as an author and maybe read some of her books. [chuckles]
\n\nREIN: Yay!
\n\nDAVID: Because as we have established, always up for more reading. [laughs]
\n\nJACOB: That should wrap up our Episode 223. I'd like to thank David for joining us and weíll see you next time.
Special Guest: David MacIver.
Sponsored By:
02:05 - Elyse’s Superpower: Fearlessness
\n\n19:41 - Auditor => IT Consultant
\n\n24:02 - Broken Interview Processes and Evaluating Human Performance
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: The ways that I can be fearless.
\n\nArty: You only have one life. Don’t put limits on it.
\n\nRein: Being intentional about making our networks more inclusive.
\n\nElyse: There isn’t a pipeline problem in IT.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nTranscript:
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\n\nARTY: Hi, everyone! Welcome to Episode 222 of Greater Than Code. Iím Artemis Starr and Iím here with my fabulous co-host, Rein Henrichs.
\n\nREIN: Thanks, Arty. Iím here with my co-host, Damien Burke.
\n\nDAMIEN: Thanks, Rein and Iím here with our guest, Elyse Robinson.
\n\nElyse Robinson has been described as fearless. After losing her mother to blood cancer, she left America to mourn her mother in Mexico and decided to stay. Going into her 5th year of residing in Mexico, she is the Founder of NewsIn.IT and runs a blog, podcast, and a YouTube channel about her life in Mexico under ElyseRobinson.com.
\n\nBefore becoming the fearless person Elyse is now, she was an auditor that kept the public safe and before COVID hit, an IT consultant in Mexico helping people understand the intricacies of the cloud.
\n\nYou can find Elyse splitting her time between America and Mexico when she gets tired of tacos and Spanish, or Chick-Fil-A and English.†
\n\nWelcome to the show, Elyse.
\n\nELYSE: Thank you.
\n\nDAMIEN: So you know the first thing we do on this show is ask every one of our guests the same question. So for you, Elyse, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
\n\nELYSE: Fearlessness! Not many people would leave everything they know to go move to another country and then stay for almost 5 years. [chuckles] I tell people that closed mouths donít get fed. You have to put yourself out there for opportunities or else, theyíll just pass you by so I donít have an issue doing that.
\n\nMoving to a whole another country, not knowing anyone. Wanting to mourn, not knowing the language and not knowing the culture. Oh, that'll make you fearless all the way around. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Or the opposite. It could have had the exact opposite effect.
\n\nELYSE: That's true. That's true. Because I know many people that have moved to another country and then they came right back and so. [chuckles]
\n\nREIN: What do you think made the difference for you in terms of staying versus leaving?
\n\nELYSE: Everything just fell into place. I tell people all the time that I have not had a bad experience in Mexico; everything has been like roses and pearls, I guess. People are friendly. The food is good. I mean, I had a time of my life,
\n\nAbout a month and a half in, I called my father up and told him I wasn't coming back home daddy and he was like, ìOkay.î [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Well, for my own benefit. What part of Mexico are you in that's so wonderful?
\n\nELYSE: Well, I first had went to Mexico City, but I'm in MÈrida now. MÈrida is about, I live about 15 minutes from the ocean, which I can't even go to no more because of COVID. [laughs] But it's always hot. It's never cold.
\n\nBut I mean, before COVID hit, I was supposed to go back to Mexico City, but Mexico City is one of the largest cities on earth. So it just didn't make sense to go back and be all up underneath all those people with COVID. Mexico City also gets cold so I didn't want to be in the cold either dealing with COVID since it affects your lungs, but I definitely recommend Mexico City if you ever go. Don't go to Cancun, go to Mexico City. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: So you couldn't have known this at the time, but you picked an interesting decade and interesting 5 years to move to Mexico with everything that's happened since.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I meet all kinds of people that say they want to leave because of well, at the time it was Trump or because of racism, sexism, all the isms, or their job sucks, whatever.
\n\nBut my reason for moving was totally different. I literally had to quit my life to take care of my mother and help out my family. So I had nothing left and it just, for whatever reason, I think by that time Trump had got elected. Yeah, I knew by then because I left in November and it was what it was at the time because people literally think that people move because they just hate their country and that wasn't my reasoning, so. I thought I was going to come back, but I just didn't.
\n\nARTY: So this fearlessness, where do you think it comes from?
\n\nELYSE: I have no idea. I don't know. I feel like at least my motto is that you only have one life and so, why are you putting limits on it? I try not to put limits on my life and I want to experience all the things, all the things and fear always puts limits on things. If I am fearful, I try to put that to the side and do what Iíve got to do.
\n\nDAMIEN: So one of the things that would scare me in the situation like youíre in is working in another country and in another language. Did you speak Spanish before you moved to Mexico? Do you speak Spanish in your work as an IT consultant? How did that work?
\n\nELYSE: No. I knew like three words. I knew uno, dos, tres. [laughs] See, no.
\n\nIt was funny because I got lost my very first night in Mexico City. You hear all the things about Mexico; the cartel, they're going to sex traffic you and cut your body up, steal kidneys, all that stuff. So I didn't talk to anyone and I literally walked around in my neighborhood for like 2 hours before I finally broke down and was like, I'm going to talk to someone, [chuckles] or at least try. So everything worked out because somebody helped me find my place and everything like that.
\n\nBut no, when I became an IT consultant, I focused on real estate companies because real estate companies, they're usually bilingual, the people that work there and so I didn't have to know that much Spanish, But I ended up moving to Guatemala to get my Spanish down because Spanish classes in Mexico are ridiculously expensive for whatever reason.
\n\nMexico is one of those places where if you don't know Spanish, they will find someone that knows enough English to help you. [laughs] So for the longest, I never even knew Spanish. I never knew because I didn't have to know it.
\n\nREIN: I've had this question on my mind, but it's kind of heavy so if you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine.
\n\nELYSE: Okay.
\n\nREIN: But what is it like for a Black American, a Black woman to leave America and to go to a country that doesn't have a history of slavery? If thatís comparable.
\n\nELYSE: Uh, it actually does have a history of slavery.
\n\nREIN: Does it? Oh.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. There's this Black Mexicans that look just like me. So they do have a history of it, but they might have been the firstódon't quote me on that. They might have been the first to eliminate it, though but all of Central America, all of South America, they had it. Of course, America, Canada,
\n\nBut living in Mexico as a Black American woman. Like I said, I haven't had any bad experiences. I know of other people that have, but they live in small towns. I have not lived in a small town. So small town minds, small town behavior. Not to stereotype, but that stereotype is there for a reason. So they think these things and they're just not true, but it's been wonderful. I have no complaints.
\n\nREIN: Yeah. I feel like I just put my foot in my mouth. I want to just mention that I'm aware of the history of colonialism in Latin America. I didn't mean to erase that. So I would like to apologize for doing that.
\n\nELYSE: No, no. There's plenty. It's in Oaxaca area and Veracruz area is where the Black Mexicans live and a lot of them are just very dark skin and they have the Mexican features, but then there are some that look like me and my Auntie and my Uncle and everybody else. But yes, Mexico does have a history of slavery. Yes, they do.
\n\nREIN: I guess, my question is, is the impact today different? You mentioned that you haven't encountered as much racism. I guess, what I'm asking about is more of the structural conditions.
\n\nELYSE: That does exist. I think it comes more so into play because I am an American and so, they're more so curious about that, but it also doesn't come into play because a lot of times people don't even think I'm an American. They might think, since I'm closer to Belize, depending on how good my Spanish is for the day, I'm Cuban. If my Spanish is not that good, then I'm Belizean. So it's a strange dynamic.
\n\nMore so in Cancun area, they would automatically know that I'm American because Americans come through all the time, but in smaller areas, they're like, ìYou're Haitian,î ìYou're Jamaican,î because there's a lot of them there and unfortunately, they have a stereotype that we're poor. So it's a very interesting dynamic.
\n\nBut when I first moved to Mexico City, one of the first people that I had run into when I got lost was a Haitian guy and so, Iím asking him about like, should I live here, should I stay, things like that. He was born in New Mexico and so he doesn't know anything else like I do, but he said that he loved it. One of the first people I met was a Black person so it kind of put me at ease more so, especially when you hear all these things about Mexico.
\n\nDAMIEN: Then not being in America for the Trump administration.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nHow did you feel about that?
\n\nELYSE: Well, I actually came back very often. My father and my sister was getting tired of me because I would come back like every two months or so. So I came back very, very often and stayed probably like a month or so at a time.
\n\nI didn't work in America, of course and I didn't technically live here and funny enough, I'm back in the States now [laughs] for the holidays and I will be here until April because my sister is an essential healthcare worker and so, she took a travel contract. So I'm here, but I don't know. I guess, more so Mexicans wanted to know why Trump was the way that he was. So yeah, in the beginning I got a lot of flak about Trump and how crazy he was, but I definitely was in the States during Trump time a lot, I was.
\n\nREIN: You moved to Mexico, sort of, you just had to drop everything and move to Mexico and what was it like trying to pick things back up once you got there?
\n\nELYSE: I mean, I don't know. I guess, I tell people all the time I live in a dual existence because in my house, I'm full English, but when I step out, I'm in full Spanish and it can be difficult to switch. When I come back home, I'm still saying, ìhola,î ìbuenos dios,î ìsi,î ìgraciasî and then I don't know, when I come back, though it's like an instant turn on. I don't know. It's pretty instant.
\n\nThe only problem comes into play when I come backóhome, home is what I call itóbut that's really the only issues that I have is when I come back. Because if you're going months speaking another language and then you're only here for like a month or so, it's really different. But yeah, the dual existence gets difficult sometimes because I still do US things and I still live like an American and it gets to be a lot, a lot. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: Thereís like a whole new level of code switching now where it's not just different in English.
\n\nDo you have to code switch in Spanish, too? Like, are there different situations where you speak Spanish differently?
\n\nELYSE: Oh, yeah. No, they think I'm a child a lot of times because I sound like a kid, I guess. [laughs] They think I'm a child! I went somewhere at one time and they were like, ìAre your parents going to come sign the papers?î I'm like, ìIím like over 30!î
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I think that kind of plays into it. I think I sound like a child and then I'm also skinny and Mexicans are not known to be skinny and I really look like a child when I cut all my hair off because sometimes, I'll go totally bald. So they probably think I'm some little African child or something. I don't know. I donít know. [laughs] But I get it a lot. I get a lot that I'm a child. They were giving me discounts on the bus and I'm like, ìWhy are they giving me discounts on the bus?î
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nThey think I'm a child! So I don't know. I don't know, it's weird. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: I also speak Spanish at the level of a small child.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nSo I can see that happening to me.
\n\nELYSE: No, my voice sounds like a child too, though because when you learn another language, you don't sound the same when you speak your first language. Because I'm a part of a Black language group and I asked in the group, I'm like, ìHow does your voice down when you speak your other language?î and everybody's laughing because they don't sound the same. So I think I sound like a child when I talk. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I know from watching Dora the Explorer, but I then start talking like Dora and that's not how I normally sound. [laughs]
\n\nELYSE: Right, right, right. Well, yeah, itís very, very different.
\n\nARTY: I was wondering what kind of stuff you talk about on your podcast and blog?
\n\nELYSE: Ha! Whatever I feel like. Well, of course, recently I have been talking about COVID cause COVID has hit to Mexico very, very hard.
\n\nAt one point, Mexico was number three on the list with the deaths and lastly, people are just ñ well, they're still coming, but people were steadily coming in the middle of the freaking pandemic and I'm just like, Iím oh my gosh, literally thousands of people were dying a day and people were like, ìI'm coming to Mexico because Mexico is like the only country in the whole wide world that's open!î So I'm like, ìWell you can catch the COVIDî [laughs] because I mean, if it was pretty bad in my little small town, I don't even want to know what it was like or is like in Cancun and Mexico City and the bigger citiesóPuerto Vallarta.
\n\nWhen I'm home, I don't go anywhere. I mean, I go to the bank because I still have to get my rent out because they're behind and I go to the spa because that keeps me sane. But other than that, I don't go anywhere.
\n\nARTY: So like food wise, do you do groceries or what does your just day-to-day situation look like? What does a day in the life in Mexico like?
\n\nELYSE: The food? Uh. Where I am now, I don't enjoy the food. It's one of the main reasons I need to get back to Mexico City is because it's a large city, they have everything you can think of. But big city life, this is one of the reasons why I love Mexico City so much is because I can live like an American and then I also don't have to live like in an American if I don't want to.
\n\nIt was funny because when my sister and my nephew came to visit me, they were like, ìNo wonder you don't want to come back. You have all the American eats and you can do all the American things.î I mean, Mexico City has Six Flags. Mexico City has Cheesecake Factory, Red LobsteróRed Lobster is one of my favorites. I can just get all my American eats and be perfectly fine. That's why I say when I come back home, I get Chick-fil-A because we don't have Chick-Filet but yeah, lots of tacos.
\n\nBut where I live at now, it's really weird because it's not real Mexico. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico because it's really heavy European dominance. So they have a lot of Italian restaurants and like steakhouses and stuff, it's really weird. I don't know.
\n\nREIN: Weird. In America, we don't really have the places where you just don't have a local cuisine so that's just the stuff that you eat, but I guess, in Mexico I would expect to go eat Mexican food a lot.
\n\nELYSE: And I do, I do, but I mean, I'm still an American. We have the variety that other countries do not have and so, I still like my Indian, I still like my Thai, I still like my Vietnamese and that's to the point where I really want to come home is when I get tired of eating the same things all the time. [laughs]
\n\nBut MÈrida is a weird city. I don't know. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico and honestly, if it was the first place that I moved to [laughs] because MÈrida is really big with especially the older expats because it's hot. It never gets cold. It's on the beach. So there's a lot of older expats that want to live there and come live there and so, I guess, maybe they might cater to them, but it's really an odd place. Like I've asked Mexicans, I'm like, ìWhere do you go to get tacos?î and they were like, ìWe don't do tacos, tacos will give you the runs.î I'm like, ìWhat?!î [laughs]
\n\nMeanwhile, when I was in Mexico City, I would step out my front door and there's all kinds of taco carts. Now MÈrida is ridiculously hotót can easily get 110óso there won't be taco carts on the street. But there should be some type of place where I can get decent tacos because I used to literally leave the house and just go to the taco cart and get six tacos and go back up to my house. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: You described a very interesting way of transitioning to living in Mexico and not transitioning; some things changed and lot of things stay the same, especially when you're there in Mexico City.
\n\nBut you did go from being an auditor to an IT consultant. How did that transition work?
\n\nELYSE: Yeah, because people always ask me that. So I guess, when I was like 10 years old, I wanted to know how those websites worked because the internet was just getting started with dial-up and stuff. Showing my age, [chuckles] but I wanted to know how those websites worked and so I taught myself how to code.
\n\nShout out to the very first website that taught me. It was Lissa Explains it All and it still exists and it was funny because I had sent the lady a message over a year ago and she just checked her messages and she was like, ìOh, thank you. It still exists.î She's the same age as me. I thanked her and told her I learned how to code because of you.
\n\nMy parents actually thought something was wrong with me because I was 10 years old and I didn't go outside and play that summer. Like, I wanted to learn how to code so I did it and then I progressed to taking classes in high school and college, of course.
\n\nI won't sit up here and say that I did not get internships because I did, but they were government internships and so not stereotype, but it's true. [laughs] The government stagnates you because they don't get the latest and the greatest, they're slow, there's a bureaucracy and they're like 20, 30 years behind on so much things. So I wanted an internship and not necessarily Google or whatever, but even FedEx would have been fine. [laughs] I didn't find one so I was like, ìOkay, well, whatever, then I'll switch to accounting.î
\n\nSwitched to accounting, accounting was good to me. They actually have entry-level positions and funny enough, I went and worked for the government, though so. [laughs] But it wasn't hard to find a position; they didn't make me jump through all these hoops and all this other kinds of stuffs. I stuck with accounting and became an auditor and then of course, life happened. And that was my next step to Mexico.
\n\nSo then when I got to Mexico, I fell back on my IT skills. I learned about the cloud. One of the first things I built on the cloud was my podcast and so, I learned that on AWS, you can run a podcast for like pennies a month instead of paying Blubrry or something, I don't know how much it is, $25 a month or something like that. So yeah, I did that and then I built an email service on AWS, too. So instead of paying MailChimp $50 a month, it would be free or pennies for AWS to send hundreds of thousands of emails.
\n\nSo I got interested in the cloud that way and then of course, Mexico [chuckles] is a third world countryóit might be second world now I'm not a 100% sure on thatóand so they're behind on a lot of things. I came with this idea that I was going to put them into the cloud. They like to use Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pages to conduct business and my whole thing is if you're going to sell real estate to international people, are you going to look on Facebook Marketplace or Facebook Pages for property? [chuckles] No, you're going to want a website. So I built the websites on AWS using the cloud and then the databases in the background to pull the properties, depending on how big the real estate company was, and that's how I became an IT consultant.
\n\nTo fall back on being a Black American in Mexico and starting your own thing, not to say that America doesn't have a lot of resources, but Mexico has tons of resources to get you started doing business in Mexico. [chuckles] And being Black also helps, too because everybody's curious about you, so. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: So what I heard in that story was you ran into some really broken interview processes in tech so then you all went off and became an auditor and did that for X number of years and now that you're in Mexico doing your own consulting, it's different. You don't have to deal with the broken interview processes that we have in this industry.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I have interviewed recently just to see [laughs] and at this point, I kind of want to come back for grad schools because I said, I need to quit playing around and do something with my life, but. [laughs]
\n\nSo I have interviewed, and I don't know if it's gotten worse, but I see that it's really out there, and in comparison to audits and in comparison to say, the government process of interviewing, because I have interviewed at the government Level II for IT, it's really out there. I don't understand why.
\n\nREIN: What are the tech community is like that you've been a part of in Mexico, or how are they different from a bunch of white dudes with beards getting together in the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco?
\n\nELYSE: One of the first people that I had met moving to my second apartment in Mexico City was a programmer. So I asked him about the process and everything and he's like, ìYeah, no one does that here.î So I don't think it's like as gatekeeped in Mexico because you'll see women working in all types of industries, going to work in their little business suits and things like that. [chuckles]
\n\nNot to say it's equal because sexism is really bad in Mexico. They've literally been having marches for the amount of sexism that that's been going on in Mexico. But you do see women working in these roles and I have not talked to a woman in IT, only males. So I guess, I'm kind of biased on this. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Can you talk a little bit about the difference between entering or interviewing in IT versus auditing or government?
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. So Iíve interviewed at, I can't remember because it was so long ago, but I want to say it was KPMG. So I have interviewed at the big four and everything like that and of course, they do the are you a culture fit questions. It's more so on are you a culture fit, I guess. They're not asking you what is the difference between a debit and a credit [laughs] in accounting.
\n\nWith IT, they're asking you what is the difference between a join and whatever else in SQL and to spit something off the top of my head like that, that's detrimental to my psyche. [laughs] Because I've done it for years, I might not know the name of it, because it doesn't matter if I've been doing it for years and I couldn't even see it at the entry-level point because they didn't even do that at the entry level point for me.
\n\nBut the government process is very sterile because they're not supposed to be biased. They're supposed to give people with disabilities and women and minorities, equal opportunity. There is no video, usually. Everything's on the phone. There's probably no names on resumes and things like that. Like, they cut all that stuff out so there's no bias in the interview process because if your name is Hardeep, [laughs] you'll have some type of bias, potentially.
\n\nSo the government process is very sterile and then they rate you. It's very different. There's no hoops to jump through because if I have a portfolio of work or I've been working for this employer, then you just basically need to check references at that point, I guess, instead of having me do a coding interview on something that I wouldn't know what it was beforehand; putting me on the spot.
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. I've definitely seen that the gotcha questions of testing esoteric tech knowledge, but I've been on the other side interviewing people and because of the way we managed to structure the interviews, I get to meet the people before looking at their resumes, which I prefer. But I'll do some pairing with the person and then go, ìWell, this person does not know how to write code,î and then ñ like just don't understand the concept of giving instructions to a computer and I go back and I look at their resume and find like 5 years senior software engineer at this company I've heard of.
\n\nELYSE: So my question is though, do you think people are faking their portfolios, too? Because I mean, there's no portfolios and in accounting so it's basically their word against yours and like I said, you would check the references to be a 100% sure, but I guess, people can fake references at this point, too. But the background check comes into play because I've heard people say you need to do a video talking about yourself and then you have to have all these ñ you have to have ten projects, contribute to open source, and where does it end? [laughs]
\n\nREIN: My wife is an accountant, but she's in tax and I really don't understand how you would interview someone for that job because so much of it is looking stuff up all the time.
\n\nELYSE: What type of process can we do to where people aren't spending 6 hours doing these interviews? [laughs]
\n\nREIN: I mean, the tax code is so big that no one can remember it, then it changes. It has changed a lot under Trump. How do you demonstrate expertise in reading and parsing the tax code? That's weird to me. I don't know how you do that.
\n\nELYSE: That's why I said. More so I guess, it would be a culture fit because I'm trying to think back to one of my interviews for my auditor interviews, I don't recall them asking me any accounting questions. It was basically personality type questions like, do I want to work with you because every job, you're going to need some type of training to get up to speed and that's the other problem.
\n\nIt was funny because I asked a lady yesterday, I worked for the government so I have clearance, I asked her, ìAre you filling these roles?î [laughs] She said, ìNo, these roles have been open for months,î and I said, ìI'm not trying to get in your business, but I was just curious.î She started stuttering like she wasn't prepared to answer that question and she's like, ìNo, they've been open for forever,î and I'm like, ìYeah, I know they are. That's why I'm askingî because number one, you're looking for a cloud engineer and number two, you're looking for somebody with a top secret clearance. That's probably like one out of a million people on this earth, a billion, too at this point. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Thatís an absolutely ridiculous requirement like, it's only reasonable, to hire somebody you think you can get clearance for and then work to get their clearance. To require that sort of thing in advance is absolutely ridiculous.
\n\nELYSE: This is what I'm talking about and that's why I asked her because I get these things in my inbox all the timeócloud engineer with a clearanceóand they're like, ìYou need a top secret,î and I'm like, ìWhat's the chance of somebody having a top secret and is a cloud engineer and also knows enough about being in the cloud to fill your requirements?î Because like I said, the cloud is so vast number one, you would have to train someone on a lot of things and a top secret clearance? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: That dovetails with the other thing you said, the question being in an interview, ìDo I want to work with this person?î and that's actually the final question I use when I'm done with an interview. It's like, ìDo I want to work with this person tomorrow? Do I want to work with them tomorrow? Are they capable of doing the job?î And by capable of doing the job, I don't mean they know everything right now because they've never worked here before. They sure donít know our code base. Also, things are going to change so can they learn?
\n\nSo do I want to work with you and can you learn?
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. Not to say that I want to hire somebody that knows nothing and then train them up, which at this point, that might be what you have to do especially when you want some obscure requirements.
\n\nBut my thing is, can this person learn? Are they hungry? That's my whole thing. Are they capable of learning because some people are not capable; [laughs] they'll throw in the towel real, real quick. So can they figure out some things?
\n\nREIN: You know that thing I said about how accountants are always looking stuff up? Software engineers do that, too.
\n\nELYSE: Oh yeah, I know they do and I do it all the time with my own projects. It's like, you're asking me the difference between debits and credits. I can give you a baseline, but at the end of the day, I'm going to look it up to make sure that I got it right. As long as I know it and understand it to an extent.
\n\nSo those little questions on those things kind of insane and going back to what he said, people faking experience. Are you saying that people are faking their portfolios, too or do you not? Because that's the thing, people are saying do a portfolio, but no one has ever looked at mine. [laughs] Even as a contractor doing my own thing, no one has ever asked to see work that I've done before. They're like, ìOkay, well, she sounds good so we're going to hire her.î [laughs]
\n\nREIN: A lot of people that have worked at big companies don't have portfolios so they can just show people because it's not their work.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah, and that's the other thing because I worked for the government and a lot of things that I did was secret so a lot of things I can't talk about. So it's like what am I supposed to say here? [laughs]
\n\nREIN: As far as I can tell, every industry is just really bad at this, but tech might be one of the worst at actually evaluating human beings.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah, and like I said earlier, my sister's in health care and she recently just left to go on a contract to help out for COVID. So I'm asking her, I was like, ìWell, what did they do to see if you were qualified for the job?î She was like, ìWell, they just checked my license and they checked my references and that was it! î That was it. So it's crazy out here and I've had places where they were like, ìWe're going to do seven interviews.î Seven interviews for what?!
\n\nDAMIEN: The only way to know if a person is capable of doing the job is to do the job with them. To work with them over a course of weeks, months, years. So obviously, references are probably the best, but if you call up a stranger and say, ìHey, this person who used to work for you. Are they good at the job?î They're going to say yes or nothing because they risk litigation, otherwise.
\n\nI live in Hollywood, you see this in movies where directors, especially top named directors, work with the same cast over and over again because they've worked with that cast, they know how they work. Even not top named directors. If you go to a casting agent, you'll find that they bring in the same people over and over again and the same people get hired because somebody can say, ìOh yeah, I worked with them. They were great.î
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I understand where you're coming from. I do. But for a field that says there's such a shortage, [chuckles] such a shortage, it doesn't line up.
\n\nDAMIEN: That's the other half of it, too is I can take any reasonable human being and make them into an excellent software engineer. I've done it. Those weren't reasonably human beings; those people were awesome. [chuckles] But I think I can do it with reasonable people, too and I think a lot of our industry does not know how to do that. We don't. There's so much, especially in engineering management, they don't know how to make engineers better engineers or how to make people integrate engineers. So what are you going to do?
\n\nELYSE: I don't know, but I guess, IT was started kind of funny. I was a little bit too young to really fully understand, but I know at one point they were just throwing money at the most stupidest things. Maybe that's why these ridiculous requirements have come about because accounting has been around since the beginning of time, medicine has been around since the beginning of time so that's my only thought on that. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. If you could just solve that problem for us real quick, just right here on the podcast, that'd be great.
\n\n[laughter]
\n\nJust go ahead and tell us what to do.
\n\nDAMIEN: Weíd all appreciate that.
\n\nELYSE: I mean, interviewing like I said, at the government where they interview one time because everybody's already on the panel so they can get a feel for you because they're like, ìOkay, well you're going to interview with so-and-so,î and then the second interview, youíre going to interview with so-and-so, the third interview, you're going to interview with so-and-so. Can you just make it one whole thing so everyone can ask their questions, kind of like what we're doing right now and get it over with? [laughs] I mean, that's one of the first steps. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: If you look at like big companies like Google, they get so many applicants that they mostly just care about saying no to people. They mostly care about weeding out the people they don't want and they'd be happy to say no to people they do want; that's more important to them than saying yes to people. They would say no to someone they do want and say yes to someone they don't want because it's hard to fire people, which is good. But their hiring process is entirely built around saying no as quickly as possible and if Google can't do this with all of the resources they have, what hope do the rest of us have?
\n\nARTY: I don't know how useful it is to compare ourselves to Google, though because the problem totally shifts. When you move away from a filtering problem and you turn things around, you've got an attraction problem then instead. I think a better way to frame it is to look at it as how can we put ourselves out there as a company such that we attract the right people that are likely to be a good fit for us?
\n\nBecause you can get a whole bunch of the wrong people, but if you do a really good job at characterizing yourself, your company, your team, and things in a way that really shines and shows through what it is you're about and interested in and what your culture is about, then it makes it easier for the right people to find you.
\n\nBut not have ridiculous requirements. I imagine this Venn diagram with cloud engineer and then top secret security clearance where you've got like this set up for, you can only talk to us if you're a unicorn. Instead of doing that, focus on the things that you really care about and then eliminate all of the impossible to fill the requirements and just focus on the competencies that are actually relevant instead.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I don't know because every organization has some type of IT in it. So just like accounting, those probably are the two biggest fields where everybody is going to need it. It really needs to be fixed because everyone needs IT just like everyone needs accounting.
\n\nARTY: To your point earlier, in talking about there's a shortage and a supply problem. If that's the problem to solve, then figuring out how we improve education and support and learning for people that are interested in those sorts of fields. How do we support mentorship kinds of opportunities so that you can get more help and support on your journey?
\n\nELYSE: Oh no, there's plenty of programs out there. Plenty because I've done them. I've done them 2 years ago and I've done them now, but just like back then, I got discouraged with the process. I mean, if the process is ridiculous, it's going to turn a lot of people off and they're just going to go do something else. So that's another reason why it needs to be fixed.
\n\nI don't want people to go to school for computer science or whatever, and they don't know anything about this whole process, theyíve got to go through this hazing process, basically and they wasted their time because that literally could have been me, but I got smart on it and I switched to accounting. [laughs]
\n\nREIN: It seems like if the problem is that getting hired is a lot about who you know and that this is really discriminatory that on the one hand, you should change that by getting better at assessing human performance. But that seems like a really long-term plan that will take decades and so, maybe the thing to do in the short-term is to try to get more people those opportunities to be known and to be a part of that network.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I don't know because like I said, there's all types of organizations and everything else to help, all of that. There's plenty of that. Where the problem comes into play is like I said, there's such a shortage then why are so many people just out of the loop? Because you can go all up and down Twitter and people are constantly complaining about it. Theyíre constantly complaining about it.
\n\nI haven't looked to see if there's anything else for accounting or any other field. But like I said, I did two fields alreadyóaccounting and medicineóand obviously, they're not like that, so.
\n\nREIN: It's really interesting. This is true about capitalism in general. There are a lot of jobs that need people and there are a lot of people that need jobs and it's not efficient at all.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah, that's true. But again, I think part of the problem is we can go back to the cloud engineer and the security clearance. How many people on this earth actually have that? [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: Yeah. Theoretical efficiencies and capitalism are dependent on people being knowledgeable and rational to things that are not true about human beings, but we can improve that.
\n\nI love what Arty said about really finding the relevant things and the relevant thing is not you know what a credit or a debit is, you know the difference between a join and a left outer join. Honestly, if I'm hiring somebody, the relevant thing is, do I want to work with you? Are you a pleasure to work with? I can teach you all about IT; I can't teach you to care about your coworkers.
\n\nELYSE: Right. [laughs] That is true.
\n\nDAMIEN: And if I'm dealing with classified material, I need to be able to get people clearances. If I can't do that, I'm ñ yeah, that's not a thing.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah, and if you want to talk about the clearance trust. The trust factor, too. I mean, we don't want you out here selling the secrets and giving away credit card numbers and social security numbers. I don't know, but something needs to be fixed because yeah, I don't know and it's definitely not a pipeline problem. It's not a pipeline problem. I'm truly thinking it is the interview process.
\n\nREIN: Itís also maybe a little bit that the jobs people end up getting suck so much. There are a lot of toxic workplaces and people were treated really poorly.
\n\nELYSE: Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm really open to remote work because you don't have to look at people, you don't have to deal with them, and a lot of IT jobs probably need to be a remote so you don't have to go into the office. Especially now.
\n\nI joke with my father that all the people that's causing all the issues right now are the extroverts. [laughs] Us introverts, we're fine sitting at home and not too much people interaction and stuff. It's all the extroverts.
\n\nI guess, to an extent, it's probably the extroverts that's doing the hiring process and things like that so they come up with these ridiculous procedures to put people through these hazing processes, too. Recently, I saw job bulletin, it was Scrum master and a Python developer and I'm like, ìA Python developer doesn't want to talk to people like that.î [laughs] We just want to sit behind the computer and code! We're not going to facilitate meetings and do Scrum. You're crazy. I've seen tons of positions like that and I'm just like, ìGone are the days where you could just not have too much people interaction and just code or do whatever in IT.î
\n\nSo I think that might be a part of the problem, too becauseóI don't want to be stereotypical again, butóIT is for those that would just want to sit behind the computer and not really deal with people that much. So I think that's also a part of the problem. Extroverts are trying to get into IT and they probably shouldn't be. [laughs]
\n\nDAMIEN: So the thing that I'll be reflecting on is really, the ways that I can be fearless. The story Elyse told us felt to me like something had to be done, so she did it and if it has to be done and you do it because there's no room for fear and there's a lot of areas in my life where I have a lot of fear and it's not necessary, I don't have to have it. I could just do it. So I'm going to be reflecting on that.
\n\nARTY: The thing I've been thinking about is when you said, ìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î You think about all the limits we put on ourselves and all the things we don't do and you can kind of imagine yourself getting old and looking back at your life and like, ìWhy didn't I do that? Why was I so paralyzed by fear that I didn't take that chance? I didn't do that opportunity. I didn't pick up and move to a different country?î [chuckles]
\n\nThere's so many things in life that we have the opportunity to see yet all those limits hold us back from experiencing those things and why? Why do we let fear grip us in that way, as opposed to really living and experiencing our life? I find it so inspiring that you just picked up and left everything you knew, and moved to a different country without knowing anyone, without having any friends there. You found some stranger that helped find your place, ended up creating work opportunity and stuff with drawing on your skills that you had to make a living, and making the whole thing work and that's so powerful, just to be able to do that.
\n\nìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î
\n\nREIN: I have a couple reflections by the first one is that I need to learn more about the history of the transatlantic slave trade outside of the United States so that I don't sound like a dipshit on my own podcast and the second one is that, I think that folks in tech, especially people who look like me, should be intentional about making our networks more inclusive. If that's how the world works, then I think that's what we need to do and also, itíll enrich your lives if you do that because you'll get to it hang out and talk to more people.
\n\nELYSE: I will say that I don't think that there is a pipeline problem because I know tons of engineersówomen, Asian, Blackóand we're all minorities in IT and we're pumping through it and like I said, all over just on Twitter alone, there's all types of complaints about the process. Being from accounting was my ñ I don't want to see my original field but the field that I switched to after I found out that computer science was not as fair. There was none of these issues that I ran into.
\n\nSo living in another country for years and just frolicking has changed my perspective on so many things and I hope that the IT industry officially gets it together because they're missing out so much, so much talent. So much talent.
Special Guest: Elyse Robinson.
Sponsored By:
01:59 - Wesley’s Superpower: Connecting With People and Being a Social Chameleon
\n\n11:31 - Sharing Responsibility Based on Strengths; Delegating “Weakness”
\n\n23:52 - Mission Statements Are Bullsh*t (especially for marginalized people/groups)
\n\n“The real barrier is individuals who don’t want to lose power.”
\n\n32:16 - Talking Truth to Power: Enacting Change
\n\n“Strong opinions don’t mean right opinions.”
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: The decommodification of labor and people.
\n\nJohn: Finding strengths and leaning into them so you can be the most effective.
\n\nCasey: We are stronger together.
\n\nWesley: Skills are things you aren’t necessarily born with. You can create and cultivate them.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Wesley Faulkner.
Sponsored By:
01:48 - Josh’s Superpower: Teaching nearly anything he knows to almost anyone
\n\n05:04 - Safety Science and Staying Safe While Rock Climbing
\n\n17:42 - Transfer of Knowledge from Experts to Non-Experts
\n\n23:07 - Root Cause Analysis & Taking Gambles
\n\n33:00 - Failure As An Opportunity For Growth
\n\n\n\n50:07 - Psychological Safety
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Operators are always gambling and taking risks.
\n\nMando: How to properly build systems and teams that are friendly to lesser experienced individuals to bring up folx who are earlier in their careers or other industries.
\n\nJosh: Commemorating team learning experiences.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Josh Thompson.
Sponsored By:
03:19 - Mando’s Superpower: Willingness to Talk About Anything Personal with Others
\n\n08:39 - Dealing with Life in 2020/2021
\n\n18:30 - Finding Anchors
\n\nTed Lasso
\nThe Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
34:28 - Being Okay Being Less Productive
\n\n\n\n46:47 - Practicing Gratitude For Communities You Do Have; Talking to Kids About Feelings
\n\n\n\n\n“If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” – Fred Rogers
\n
Reflections:
\n\nRein: The ability for there to be a higher-level cognitive function that happens after emotional and affective responses and that it is capable of mediating between those responses and action.
\n\nMando: Giving a specific name to how he’s feeling right now: lost.
\n\nDamien: The value of interrogating feelings.
\n\n\n\n\n“Community is not the sum of its members but the product of their relationships.” – Russell Ackoff
\n
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Sponsored By:
02:12 - Isa’s Superpower: Being a Bridge
\n\n08:56 - Community Learning
\n\n19:16 - Pivoting From Rock’n’Roll to Software Engineering: Software + Music
\n\n27:57 - Grappling with Impostor Syndrome
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: Community over architecture.
\n\nCasey: Community and mentorship.
\n\nIsa: Talking to other engineers re: non-code + community and sustainability.
\n\nLaurie: Finding new ways to collaborate in a remote/pandemic world.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Isa Herico-Velasco .
Sponsored By:
02:05 - Laura’s Superpower: Problem Solving
\n\n04:07 - What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots
\n\n06:59 - The Human/Robot Partnership
\n\n14:34 - Human Behavior Towards Robots; Vice-Versa
\n\n20:38 - Robots as “Social Entities”
\n\n24:43 - How Media Affects The Way People View Robots
\n\n26:39 - How Humans Can “Update” Themselves: Experiencing Robotics
\n\n28:23 - Robots as “Social Entities” (Cont’d)
\n\n39:52 - Will and, if so, when will autonomous cars become the standard?
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: What is the right level of empathy for social entities?
\n\nJamey: Being in the process of consciously creating new social norms and thinking more thoroughly about who you could be hurting with your actions.
\n\nPush, the talking trash can, makes his final appearance after 19 years at Walt Disney World
\n\nCasey: Treating certain social entities in different ways; i.e. a Roomba and a dishwasher. And, the way you have to think about who is outside autonomous cars: not just the passengers. Also, we should be on the lookout for robotaxis!
\n\nLaura: Not wanting robots in the future to look too much like people.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Laura Major.
","summary":"In this episode, Laura Major, co-author of 'What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration' with our previous episode’s Julie Shah, explores the human/robot partnership and how we are attempting to make our world robot compatible. She also talks about the idea of robots as “social entities” and how media affects the way people view robots. ","date_published":"2021-01-13T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0e46b736-36e6-45a4-9620-83bffad0af97.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50341965,"duration_in_seconds":3040}]},{"id":"a4961cab-287b-4f0f-969c-7f5f475da791","title":"216: Robot and Human Collaboration with Julie Shah","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/robot-and-human-collaboration","content_text":"02:21 - Julie’s Superpower: Working Really Hard and Maintaining Focused Attention on Things for a Long Period of Time\n\n04:25 - Robotics and Working in Artificial Intelligence (AI)\n\n\nWhat To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration (Julie and Laura Major’s book)\n\n\n11:10 - Structuring and Optimizing the World for Machines, AI, and Robots\n\n\nThe Turing Test\nLabeled Data\nTeslas vs Airplanes\nMode Confusion\nTen challenges for making automation a \"team player\" in joint human-agent activity\n\n\n26:10 - Understanding Output and Building Calibrated Trust\n\n\nMental Models\n\n\n33:39 - Robots and Humans in Public Spaces\n\n\nPredictability\nDirectability\nStandardization\nInfrastructure\nSafety Imperatives\nFuture of Work Implications\nJoint Activity\n\n\nThe Shannon Model\n\n\n\n51:41 - What To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration (Book Discussion)\n\n54:40 - More on Human/Machine Collaboration:\n\n\nGirl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology\nReinforcement learning with human teachers: Evidence of feedback and guidance with implications for learning performance\nEvaluating fluency in human–robot collaboration\n\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: There may be a sense in which AI or ML systems are categorically different from the sorts of systems we’ve tried to control in the past because you can’t characterize the variety of the system anymore just by observing its inputs and outputs.\n\nDamien: Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, nor should it be. The goals are making systems and human lives better; not making the computer better.\n\nJulie: Aim for mediocrity!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Julie Shah.Sponsored By:Linode: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level.\r\n\r\nSimplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.\r\n\r\nGet started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode.\r\n\r\nLinode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more.\r\n\r\nVisit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the \"Create Free Account\" button to get started.","content_html":"02:21 - Julie’s Superpower: Working Really Hard and Maintaining Focused Attention on Things for a Long Period of Time
\n\n04:25 - Robotics and Working in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
\n\n11:10 - Structuring and Optimizing the World for Machines, AI, and Robots
\n\n26:10 - Understanding Output and Building Calibrated Trust
\n\n33:39 - Robots and Humans in Public Spaces
\n\n51:41 - What To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration (Book Discussion)
\n\n54:40 - More on Human/Machine Collaboration:
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: There may be a sense in which AI or ML systems are categorically different from the sorts of systems we’ve tried to control in the past because you can’t characterize the variety of the system anymore just by observing its inputs and outputs.
\n\nDamien: Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, nor should it be. The goals are making systems and human lives better; not making the computer better.
\n\nJulie: Aim for mediocrity!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Julie Shah.
Sponsored By:
01:41 - Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’
\n\n\n\n13:59 - Predicting How People Behave and Act via Machine Learning is Ethically Flawed
\n\n34:21 - Examining Machine Learning Models and Data
\n\n“When you get rid of what you don’t want, you do not necessarily get what you do want and you may get something you want a lot less. It is that simple…..anyone that ever watches television knows that!” – Russell L. Ackoff
\n\n50:09 - Important Ideosyncracies and Contaminating Factors
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMando: Cartesian thinking and worldview is embedded in us.
\n\nAvdi: “Contaminating factors.”
\n\n\n\n\n“Dive into yourself to find yourself.”
\n
Rein: Jainism has gotten this right for centuries.
\n\nJessica: Giving the Cartesian program credit for what it’s good for: using science as a way to break things down into parts and studying them deeply; we’ve learned a lot.
\n\nAbeba: It’s not all bad. BUT, we forget to put the pieces back together and acknowledge reality.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.)
Special Guest: Abeba Birhane.
Sponsored By:
01:26 - Rylan’s Superpower: Helping People & Giving Back to Community
\n\n03:01 - The Righteous Mind / Making and Rationalizing Choices
\n\n09:11 - An Example of a Moral Reaction (CW Beastiality)
\n\n10:26 - Humans as Individuals vs Humans as Species / Increasing Group-Level Cohesion
\n\n19:43 - Bridging the Gap Politically
\n\n27:59 - Looking at Morality
\n\n38:55 - Morality Binds and Blinds / Group Cohesion
\n\n48:37 - Moving Forward / Fixing Divisiveness / Welcoming People w/ Different Viewpoints
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDamien: The Happiness Hypothesis (The Elephant Metaphor): Reflecting on the elephant.
\n\nRylan: Finding a middle ground.
\n\n\n\n\n\n
John: The value of conservative viewpoints vs liberal viewpoints.
\n\nSwitch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
\n\nMore Resources:
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Rylan Bowers.
Sponsored By:
CONTENT WARNING: Eating Disorders, Substance Abuse & Addiction
\n\n01:12 - Cher’s Superpower: Making and Collecting Hot Sauce
\n\n04:33 - Good Ideas Can Come From Anywhere
\n\n12:50 - Bravery, Enduring, and Overcoming; Eradicating Stigmas and Breaking Stereotypes
\n\n30:12 - Struggle, Opportunity, and Recognizing White Privilege
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The incredible power we can have as people when we claim our story rather than deny it.
\n\nRein: There is a huge potential for empathy between people with a lot in common, and it’s just about unlocking the potential that already exists.
\n\nCher: Empathy is the glue that holds everything together.
\n\nJerome: The skills transfer of experience.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Cher.
Sponsored By:
01:17 - Veni’s Superpower: Being Adaptable and Not Giving Up
\n\n02:25 - Going From Coder to Entrepreneur
\n\n\n\n07:00 - Being Protective and Selective of Company Partnerships
\n\n14:05 - Changes Veni Has Seen Over Time re: Hiring Around Diversity and Inclusion
\n\n15:38 - Things Hiring Managers Should and Should NOT Do When Hiring for Diversity
\n\n19:13 - Entry-Level Support
\n\n21:50 - Upholding Integrity > Capitalism
\n\n25:48 - Revenue Transparency
\n\n32:13 - Finding Your Place in Tech and Serving Underrepresented People
\n\n51:29 - Being Vocal About Work Conditions; i.e.: “Whistleblowing” / Employee Dissent
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The critical role that organizations like Diversify Tech have created by placing themselves in a trusted position between job seekers and companies to protect underrepresented minorities.
\n\nRein: All Veni’s work developing rubrics and intuitions about companies that are worth working for/with is extremely important and her sharing this expertise is very valuable.
\n\nVeni: To learn more about how comfortable candidates/employees feel about talking about dissent within their organizations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Veni Kunche.
Sponsored By:
01:16 - Brandon’s Superpower: Recognizing Others’ Superpowers and Spotting Potential Talent
\n\n09:23 - Brandon’s Personal Journey & Transformation Towards Humility
\n\n25:40 - The Importance of Community and Community Leaders
\n\n\n\n34:35 - Being Kind vs Being Nice
\n\n40:59 - Being Austistic and Being Visible
\n\n52:32 - Tech Is Political
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: When someone gives you feedback it’s because they trust you that you’re going to do something about yourself and do better.
\n\nBrandon: Thinking about who is saying something.
\n\nJohn: The power we can embrace by talking about our personal history.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Brandon Weaver.
Sponsored By:
01:30 - Harini’s Superpower: Getting Sh*t Done
\n\n04:19 - Putting Technology to Use For Those Who Need it the Most
\n\n14:04 - Crisis Management and Rethinking Blueprints
\n\n39:45 - Duality: Humans As Interconnected Systems
\n\n48:16 - What do we do now (to get sh*t done)?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAmy: If we end up back where we were pre-pandemic, shame on us.
\n\nRein: To make changes effectively, we need to go to the people we’re trying to help and figure out from their perspective what they need.
\n\n\n\nArty: Getting shit done on the huge, grand, level of looking at the crisis we’re currently in and how to move forward to build the future we want as humans.
\n\nHarini: The sense of urgency of highlighting the problem and how we need to come together to co-create systemic, sustainable solutions that set in place new fundamentals and new structures for the world that lies ahead.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Harini Gokul.
","summary":"In this episode, Harini Gokul talks about putting technology to use for people who need it most, crisis management and rethinking blueprints, duality: humans being connected as interconnected systems, and what we need to be doing now to get the sh*t done.","date_published":"2020-11-25T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f3c18b81-3dd2-40b8-840d-ec866de2437d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66136695,"duration_in_seconds":3748}]},{"id":"649065df-05b2-4d1c-b502-7c8be56f3933","title":"209: Self-Identity and Parenting in Tech with Mia Mollie De Búrca","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/self-identity-and-parenting-in-tech","content_text":"01:25 - Mia’s Superpower: Adaptability\n\n\nApplicable Skills to Basic Computer Programming\n\n\nParsing Information\nResearch\n\n\n\n05:31 - Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology\n\n\nLinguistic Relativism (Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis)\n\n\n08:36 - Parenting While Having a Career in Tech\n\n09:42 - Objectivity and Truth in Software Development\n\n11:04 - Tech Parenthood (Cont’d)\n\n\nMaternity Leave and Returning to Work\n\n\nPart-Time Flexibility\n“Keep-in-Touch Days”\n\nReturning to Work as an Individual Experience\nDiscrimination & Stigma\nMultitasking Expectations For All\nGeographic Differences\nCompany Culture\n\n\n24:21 - Tenure in Tech, Job-Hopping, and Juggling Parenthood\n\n\nParenting in View During the New COVID/Remote Work Era\n\n\n\n“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.\" – Elizabeth Stone: teacher and author\n\n\n\nPsychological Safety and Privilege\nLiving and Operating in Fear\nCode-Switching\nVisibility of Parents\n\n\n44:05 - Self-Identity in the Tech Industry\n\n\nThe Handbook of Return to Work\n\n\n55:36 - Diversity Hiring\n\nReflections:\n\nMia: Psychological safety and privilege.\n\nJohn: “Just because I’m psychologically safe doesn’t mean everybody else is.”\n\nLaurie: The dichotomy of Mia and Christina’s experiences of being parents in tech.\n\nChristina: It is possible to remain optimistic that Moms in the United States will get better.\n\nRein: Comfort and guilt in diversity hiring.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Mia Mollie De Búrca.","content_html":"01:25 - Mia’s Superpower: Adaptability
\n\n05:31 - Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology
\n\n08:36 - Parenting While Having a Career in Tech
\n\n09:42 - Objectivity and Truth in Software Development
\n\n11:04 - Tech Parenthood (Cont’d)
\n\n24:21 - Tenure in Tech, Job-Hopping, and Juggling Parenthood
\n\n\n\n\n“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." – Elizabeth Stone: teacher and author
\n
44:05 - Self-Identity in the Tech Industry
\n\n\n\n55:36 - Diversity Hiring
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMia: Psychological safety and privilege.
\n\nJohn: “Just because I’m psychologically safe doesn’t mean everybody else is.”
\n\nLaurie: The dichotomy of Mia and Christina’s experiences of being parents in tech.
\n\nChristina: It is possible to remain optimistic that Moms in the United States will get better.
\n\nRein: Comfort and guilt in diversity hiring.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Mia Mollie De Búrca.
","summary":"Mia Mollie De Búrca talks about the trials and tribulations of being a parent while working in tech: returning to work, discrimination and stigma, geographic differences, and psychological safety and privilege.","date_published":"2020-11-18T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/649065df-05b2-4d1c-b502-7c8be56f3933.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":74706054,"duration_in_seconds":3940}]},{"id":"38ad1dd0-b4d5-4588-8dcc-4e368d685652","title":"208: Who Tells Your Story? with Janeen Uzzell","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/who-tells-your-story","content_text":"01:42 - Janeen’s Superpower: Storytelling\n\n\nThe Importance of Who Tells Your Story\nAccountability\nGeneralizations Are Harmful\nResponsibility\n\n\n07:56 - The Wikimedia Foundation\n\n\nTrust and Safety Team\nThriving Movement\n\n\n11:04 - Empowering Communities To Tell Their Stories\n\n\nCitations\nEdit-a-thons\n\n\n19:53 - Creating a Wikipedia Page\n\n22:07 - Approaching and Engaging Youth\n\n27:10 - Staying Connected As An Organization\n\n\nCultivating Great Leadership\nMentorship/Sponsorship\n\n\nFinding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem by Paula Williams Madison\nPaula’s Instagram \nDr. Imani's Instagram (Paula's Daughter)\n\n\n\n34:56 - Remote Working and Fostering/Maintaining Community \n\n39:11 - Encouraging and Influencing Participation\n\n47:31 - Janeen’s Move From Working at General Electric (GE) to The Wikimedia Foundation\n\nReflections:\n\nChanté: Making differences one edit at a time.\n\nJamey: The importance of mentorship as something that is empowering.\n\nRein: When a small system interacts with a larger system, it’s hard to change the larger system without being changed yourself.\n\nJessica: Greater Than Code as an open conversation.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Janeen Uzzell.","content_html":"01:42 - Janeen’s Superpower: Storytelling
\n\n07:56 - The Wikimedia Foundation
\n\n11:04 - Empowering Communities To Tell Their Stories
\n\n19:53 - Creating a Wikipedia Page
\n\n22:07 - Approaching and Engaging Youth
\n\n27:10 - Staying Connected As An Organization
\n\n34:56 - Remote Working and Fostering/Maintaining Community
\n\n39:11 - Encouraging and Influencing Participation
\n\n47:31 - Janeen’s Move From Working at General Electric (GE) to The Wikimedia Foundation
\n\nReflections:
\n\nChanté: Making differences one edit at a time.
\n\nJamey: The importance of mentorship as something that is empowering.
\n\nRein: When a small system interacts with a larger system, it’s hard to change the larger system without being changed yourself.
\n\nJessica: Greater Than Code as an open conversation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Janeen Uzzell.
","summary":"COO of The Wikimedia Foundation, Janeen Uzzell, talks about empowering communities to tell their stories, how to create Wikipedia pages, staying connected as an organization, and encouraging and influencing editor participation.","date_published":"2020-11-11T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/38ad1dd0-b4d5-4588-8dcc-4e368d685652.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62063197,"duration_in_seconds":3446}]},{"id":"21503090-5fa3-4ab9-b0a3-4a08c3b5cfb9","title":"207: Investigation and Influence with Chelsea Troy","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/investigation-and-influence","content_text":"03:36 - Chelsea’s Superpower: Software Detective Work\n\n\nGrant-funded Organizations\nContext Loss\nForensic Software Analysis\nSoftware (Initially) Never Works ‼️\n\n\n08:27 - Coding in Investigation Mode\n\n\nLucifer (TV Series)\nSetting Up a Debugging Environment (Includes a Velociraptor Example!)\n\n\n15:05 - Chelsea’s Techtivism Blog Series: Engineers Considering the Actions and Impact of Their Work Systematically\n\n\nTechtivism 1: Eyes on the Mountain\nTechtivism 2: The Four Levers\nTechtivism 3: Biding Time, Boycotts, and Beyond\n\n\n20:20 - The Power of Influence (See Techtivism 2)\n\n\nPatronage: buying from or donating to an organization\nPatronage Advocacy: convincing others to buy from/donate to an organization\nTalent: devoting time and energy to an organization\nTalent Advocacy: convincing others to devote their time and energy to an organization\n\n\n26:57 - Making a Connection Between Values and Your Work as an Engineer\n\n\nPrivilege\nThe Status Quo\nIncumbency \n\n\n37:08 - Individual vs Collective Action\n\n\n”A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” \n\n\n\nConfrontation\nAvoidance\n\n\nReflections:\n\nAmy: The ways people can be both confrontational and avoidant at the same time.\n\nDamien: How what we do impacts larger systems and how we can move entire societies.\n\nChelsea: The degree to which our fallibility creates the positions we get to occupy and what that means about the grace that we need to have about the fallibility of other people.\n\nJessica: Chelsea is awesome!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Chelsea Troy.Sponsored By:Virtual Genius: Explore DDD is offering hands-on and highly interactive workshops this year. Workshops will take place over the course of the last two weeks in October and the first three weeks in November. \r\n\r\nInstructors include industry leaders such as Scott Wlaschin, Kacper Gunia, Marijn Huizendveld, Jessica Kerr, Kent Beck, Alberto Brandolini, and Paul Rayner. \r\n\r\nWhy should you attend? No travel! No flight delays, passport control, or security checks. Worried about losing your luggage? Forget about it! \r\n\r\nChallenge your thinking in an open, sharing, and collaborative environment while accessing the workshops from the comfort of your own home or office. Take breaks as needed. These are strange times we are living in.\r\n\r\nUse the time you would be traveling to report to colleagues on the key lessons and takeaways. Help them to expand the skills you’ve learned from these innovative, remote sessions, and then incorporate them into your organization.\r\n\r\nTalk to your boss and tell them how you would benefit from attending online workshops from Explore DDD. Relay the cost savings you will benefit from by not traveling this year. Visit http://exploreddd.com/workshops/ and register today. Use the Code EDDDGTC to get 10% off the price of any of the workshop tickets! Promo Code: EDDDGTC","content_html":"03:36 - Chelsea’s Superpower: Software Detective Work
\n\n08:27 - Coding in Investigation Mode
\n\n15:05 - Chelsea’s Techtivism Blog Series: Engineers Considering the Actions and Impact of Their Work Systematically
\n\n20:20 - The Power of Influence (See Techtivism 2)
\n\n26:57 - Making a Connection Between Values and Your Work as an Engineer
\n\n37:08 - Individual vs Collective Action
\n\n\n\n\n”A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
\n
Reflections:
\n\nAmy: The ways people can be both confrontational and avoidant at the same time.
\n\nDamien: How what we do impacts larger systems and how we can move entire societies.
\n\nChelsea: The degree to which our fallibility creates the positions we get to occupy and what that means about the grace that we need to have about the fallibility of other people.
\n\nJessica: Chelsea is awesome!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Chelsea Troy.
Sponsored By:
02:11 - Brian’s Superpower: Being Able to Teach People Stuff
\n\n13:15 - Building Relationships
\n\n18:34 - Learning Useful, Real-World Material
\n\n31:39 - Constructive and Interactive Learning
\n\n37:12 - Conversation Theory
\n\n43:27 - Teaching Vs Mentoring
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: There isn’t enough content that is in the category of, “Here’s a problem for you, go solve it,” to learn.
\n\nJamey: Identifying things (i.e. hobbies) that get other people excited and motivated to learn.
\n\nRein: Often the best way to learn something is to teach it, and often the best thing for a teacher to do is get out of the way and find ways to support the learners.
\n\nBrian: The need for more complex problems to learn things.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Brian Hogan.
Sponsored By:
02:16 - Amir’s Superpower: Learning
\n\n05:42 - Growing Up As a Refugee
\n\n11:04 - A Founder’s Mindset
\n\n19:06 - Remote Work
\n\nMore Resources on Remote Work From Amir:
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The impact of having a globally high salary and what that positively enables.
\n\nAstrid: Negative events can help to shape you into the person that you want to be.
\n\nAmir: Using trauma to drive positivity.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Amir Salihefendić.
Sponsored By:
02:04 - Nicole’s Superpower: Empathy and Community Building
\n\n15:06 - Overcoming Isolation and Forming Connections in the Age of COVID-19
\n\n20:42 - Creating a Techincal Community
\n\n\n\n25:54 - Radiating Love and Compassion and Learning How-To Human
\n\n39:45 - Educational Tech Entrepreneurship (EdTech)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Meeting and socializing with other people outside of a professional sphere remotely since COVID.
\n\nArty: Leaning into being yourself.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\n_To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Nicole Archambault.
Sponsored By:
01:54 - Matt’s Superpower: Letting Things Go Easily
\n\n08:35 - Matt’s Journey From Anthropology to Tech
\n\n13:42 - Algorithmic Auditing and Accountability
\n\n29:38 - Data Surveillance: Gathering Enough Data vs Gathering Too Much Data (and particularly the effect on Black and Brown people)
\n\n36:57 - Speaking Out Regarding Racial Equity/Inequity and Social Justice in the Workplace
\n\n42:26 - Getting Involved in Politics on a Personal Level in 2020
\n\n48:12 - Medical/Healthcare Informatics & Thinking About Health Disparities
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Who unintended, affected by our technologies communities and people are.
\n\nChanté: Diving deeper into algorithmic auditing as it pertains to ethics and what that means for organizations and leaders who hold power and influence.
\n\nMatthew: Technology platforms are far-reaching and engineers and technologists are going to have to become more fluent social scientists.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Matthew Zhou.
Sponsored By:
00:42 - Asra’s Superpower: Unrelenting Love For Herself
\n\n02:32 - Storytelling
\n\n09:35 - Finding Passionate Builders
\n\n18:32 - The Responsibility of Creators and Consumers in Tech
\n\n42:12 - Telling and Monetizing Stories Globally with Opus AI
\n\n48:30 - The Role of Individual Responsibility
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: Creating your own power.
\n\nAsra: What an individual is and what they are responsible for.
\n\nRein: A system is a product of its’ interactions.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Asra Nadeem.
Sponsored By:
02:58 - Nils’ Superpower: Storytelling
\n\n09:39 - Deleting Code
\n\n20:17 - Is it ethical to invest time in learning and using technologies from companies that pay little or no taxes?
\n\n29:14 - What Can We Do About the Centralization of Power in Large Corporations?
\n\n53:18 - Using Tools for Free as Forms of Support
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Treating tax avoidance as a social negative.
\n\nJacob: Not feeling pressure to use the next new, hot thing.
\n\nNils: Practice arguing this problem. Software development is still an incredibly young field.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Nils Norman Haukås.
Sponsored By:
02:58 - Damien’s Superpower: Being able to hold contradictory beliefs at the same time.
\n\n07:05 - What is “Bad Code”?
\n\n16:38 - What should you do with “Bad Code”?
\n\n19:12 - Working With Others: Agreeing on “Good Code”
\n\n24:34 - Damien’s Background in Hypnosis
\n\n34:14 - Doing Things The Easy Way
\n\n41:07 - Distinctions Between Teaching and Learning
\n\n54:02 - Creating Shared Understanding (in code)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: 1) Doing things yourself. 2) I want code to be beautiful because I like things that are beautiful.
\n\nRein: The importance of small changes.
\n\nDamien: The power of language and story and its’ application in the engineering world in a team and in the code you write.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Damien Burke.
Sponsored By:
04:31 - Amy’s Superpower: Search Algorithms and Finding Things
\n\n08:39 - Toxic Masculinity and Hierarchies in Engineering Roles
\n\n14:22 - Measuring Skill Advancement
\n\n21:02 - Congressive vs Ingressive
\n\n22:43 - Ways Toxicity Shows Up in The Workplace
\n\n29:07 - Unlearning and Psychological Safety
\n\n37:07 - The Word “Nontechnical”
\n\n40:41 - Recognizing and Feeling Value
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Every person has a unique set of ways they can have an impact and best contribute.
\n\nJamey: Feeling like you belong and realizing that others might not. Being aware of both mindsets.
\n\nAmy: The onus really should be on people who have power and privilege in any conversation to be doing most of the work to be aware of what I see vs what they see.
Special Guest: Amy Newell.
Sponsored By:
02:30 - Rav’s Superpower: Learning to Learn
\n\n07:12 - Failing Fast – Getting Early Feedback Along the Way
\n\n17:02 - Empathy as a Life Skill
\n\n26:40 - Uplevel: Empowering Engineers to do Their Best Work
\n\n31:49 - Productivity and Judgement Value
\n\n41:42 - Using Data to Measure Well-Being and/or Engagement
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: 1) We need to take human performance necessary. 2) Steven Shorrock’s Model of Change.
\n\nJacob: Thinking more about ambient data.
\n\nJamey: Failing fast.
\n\nRavs: How do you know if you’ve built a great product if you don’t have a way to measure what people are clicking on and/or trying to find?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Ravs Kaur.
Sponsored By:
02:13 - Dan’s Superpower: Ability to Keep Calm
\n\n07:11 - Maximizing Your Potential as a New Developer and Making a Good Impression
\n\n17:55 - What Makes a Senior Engineer?
\n\n42:51 - Solving Big Problems vs Small Problems
\n\n50:39 - Creating an Organization Where People Can Thrive and Grow
\n\n53:17 - Letters To A New Developer
\n\n57:52 - Community and How They Help Developer Growth
\n\nReflections:
\n\nDan: Build your mental muscle around tradeoffs.
\n\nJacob: Thinking about talking to junior developers.
\n\nRein: The context we’re in when we’re thinking changes how we think.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Dan Moore.
Sponsored By:
02:26 - Aisha’s Superpower: Proofreading
\n\n04:05 - Documentation
\n\n07:54 - Forms of Documentation Worth Investing In
\n\n10:34 - Architecture and Stories
\n\n17:17 - Telling Stories Through Documentation
\n\n23:37 - Defining Documentation
\n\n26:17 - Making Documentation Accessible & Approachable
\n\n33:33 - Giving Constructive Feedback
\n\n44:37 - self.conference: Focusing on Human Aspects in Technology
\n\n48:49 - Technology is NOT Neutral
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Aisha Blake.
Sponsored By:
02:33 - Christina’s Superpower: Resourcefulness, Industrial Design
\n\n07:30 - Starting Makelab; Inspiration for 3D Printing
\n\n15:15 - Pivoting to PPE in Lieu of COVID-19
\n\n22:04 - Advice for Other Women Who Want to Start a Business
\n\n23:42 - Women in 3D Printing
\n\n35:15 - Liking What You Do
\n\n42:30 - Tackling Burnout and Getting Creative Juices Flowing Again
\n\n45:46 - Developing and Allocating Revenue to Respond to Current Events
\n\n55:30 - Manufacturing Jigs – Building the Tools to Build the Tools
\n\n\n\n59:23 - Adaptive Capacity
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Being in touch with your feelings as a business skill.
\n\nChristina M.: Stop, drop, and remember my why.
\n\nRein: Maintaining capacity for maneuver.
\n\nChristina P.: Emotions as APIs.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Christina Perla.
Sponsored By:
02:28 - Courtney’s Superpower: Speaking on the Topic of Racism
\n\n“You can’t prioritize your discomfort over living your own values.” – Courtney
\n\n13:16 - Adopting Attitudes Towards Antiracism
\n\n16:24 - 1000 Cut Journey
\n\n25:59 - Empathy is Insufficient
\n\n34:34 - The Tendency to Avoid Racism and Talking About Race
\n\n39:30 - Systemic Racism and Technology
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: “Intention without strategy is chaos.” – Dr. Kim Crayton
\n\nArty: Taking an antiracist approach to product development.
\n\nJacob: Thinking more about the phrase “transdisciplinary” and the difference between it and “interdisciplinary.”
\n\nCourtney: 1. Talking about difficult things in a way that can be anchored in learning. 2. It’s not about what you believe; it’s what you do. 3. There is no neutral in marginalization and oppression.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn.
Sponsored By:
02:09 - Tudor’s Superpower: Storytelling
\n\n13:04 - Reading Stories (and Code)
\n\n17:56 - Optimizing For Happiness
\n\n“The tools that we create end up influencing how we see the world.” – Marshall McLuhan
\n\n27:48 - Moldable Development
\n\n32:50 - Editing Code as a Joint Activity
\n\n38:40 - Encouraging and Supporting the Presentation of New Ideas and Out-of-the-Box Thinking
\n\n58:41 - Culture is Formed by Storytelling; Identity is the Story We Tell About Ourselves
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Reading and writing code can be different, but it can also be the same. See: the functional programming concept of lens.
\n\nJessica: At the end of the presentation, if there’s no question that makes you think, then maybe you haven’t moved anything. Look for surprises.
\n\nArty: Optimizing for happiness as a first principle. How do we do that more?
\n\nTudor: With software, we are forcing people to listen to our ideas and then act according to our thoughts. That is a big responsibility, a privilege, and we have to train that skill.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Tudor Gîrba.
Sponsored By:
02:36 - Siobhán’s Superpower: Catalyzing Personal and Community Change
\n\n04:19 - Managing Change During COVID-19
\n\n13:51 - Pros and Cons of Bringing Your Whole/Full Self to Work
\n\n34:08 - People Have to Do Work on Themselves
\n\n“You’re not categorically a good person.” – Siobhán
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: How can we inculcate more caring into corporate environments?
\n\nJerome: Being more fearless; acknowledging consequences but not letting them stop us.
\n\nJacob: Being more visible.
\n\nSiobhán: Building on each other’s ideas during the call and showing care while showing up.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Siobhán Cronin.
","summary":"Siobhán Cronin talks about managing change during COVID-19, the pros and cons of bringing your whole self to work, and that people have to do work on themselves to be successful.","date_published":"2020-07-22T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/32d9f1da-fb15-4aab-b330-3007a362130b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38543355,"duration_in_seconds":3044}]},{"id":"29725454-4fe8-45ee-8368-1549beaf031e","title":"191: Sitting Down Together with Amy Tobey","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/sitting-down-together","content_text":"02:14 - Amy’s Superpower: Looking at a mess and seeing the potential for what it could be.\n\n03:40 - Generalists vs Specialists\n\n\n071: Brein Power with Rein Henrichs\nT-Shaped Skills\n\n\n“The job description should describe the capabilities that the team needs, not that the individual needs.”\n\n15:28 - Finding a “Beautiful” Mess in Technical Systems\n\n“The biggest impediment to change is your users.” – Jessica\n\n\nRichard Dawkins Demonstrates Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe\n\n\n22:40 - Artisanal and Industrial Modes of Production\n\n\nSystems are indelibly stamped by the experience of the people who built them\n\n\n28:25 - Design, Use, and Reliability\n\n32:30 - Convincing Executives to Care About a Thing\n\n\nNow vs Later\nWhere do we spend our attention to maximize value?\nViable System Model\nContext Over Control / Communication Without Authority\n\n\n41:08 - Whistleblowing is Good Because Misuse of Authority is Bad\n\n51:33 - SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)\n\n“The goal of SRE is to change the way your organization relates to the systems it runs.” – Rein\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: Bonus question: Amy, why do you hate the word, “mature”?\n\nRein: “A problem is an abstraction extracted from a mess via analysis.” – Russel Ackoff\n\nAmy: Models: We keep trying the same patterns and complaining about the same outcomes.\n\n\nThinking by Machine: A Study of Cybernetics\nCybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile \nGreater Than Code Episode 093: BOOK CLUB! Cybernetic Revolutionaries with Eden Medina\nBrain of the Firm\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Amy Tobey.Sponsored By:strongDM: Today's show is sponsored by strongDM.\r\n\r\nManaging your remote team as they work from home? Managing a gazillion SSH keys, database passwords, and Kubernetes certs?\r\n\r\nMeet strongDM. Manage and audit access to servers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters, no matter where your employees are.\r\n\r\nWith strongDM, easily extend your identity provider to manage infrastructure access. Automate onboarding, offboarding, and moving people within roles. Grant temporary access that automatically expires to on-call teams.\r\n\r\nAdmins get full auditability into anything anyone does: when they connect, what queries they run, what commands are typed. It's full visibility into everything. For SSH, RDP, and Kubernetes, that means video replays. For databases, it's a single unified query log across all database management systems.\r\n\r\nstrongDM is used by companies like Hearst, Peloton, Betterment, Greenhouse, and SoFi to manage access. It's more control and less hassle.\r\n\r\nstrongDM. Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure.\r\n\r\nStart your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT\r\nAn Event Apart: Attention UX and Front End Experts! For years, An Event Apart conferences have been the best way to level up your skills, get inspiration from world-class experts, and learn what's next in web design.\r\n\r\nNow, An Event Apart is proud to introduce Online Together, a single-day online conference focused on Human-Centered Design. And it's all coming to a device near you, Monday, July 20th.\r\n\r\nFeaturing insights from Margot Bloomstein, Ron Bronson, Scott Jehl, Farai Madzima, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, and Aarron Walter, you'll learn how to handle unexpected design scenarios and unusual situations as our users face unprecedented challenges and stress.\r\n\r\nYou'll come away not only inspired but ready to put new techniques and ideas immediately into practice.\r\n\r\nGreater Than Code listeners can save 50 dollars off registration with promo code A E A G T C\r\n\r\nSo grab your spot and join us online this coming Monday, July 20th. Visit An Event Apart dot com to see the full agenda and register now. Promo Code: AEAGTC","content_html":"02:14 - Amy’s Superpower: Looking at a mess and seeing the potential for what it could be.
\n\n03:40 - Generalists vs Specialists
\n\n\n\n“The job description should describe the capabilities that the team needs, not that the individual needs.”
\n\n15:28 - Finding a “Beautiful” Mess in Technical Systems
\n\n“The biggest impediment to change is your users.” – Jessica
\n\n\n\n22:40 - Artisanal and Industrial Modes of Production
\n\n28:25 - Design, Use, and Reliability
\n\n32:30 - Convincing Executives to Care About a Thing
\n\n41:08 - Whistleblowing is Good Because Misuse of Authority is Bad
\n\n51:33 - SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
\n\n“The goal of SRE is to change the way your organization relates to the systems it runs.” – Rein
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Bonus question: Amy, why do you hate the word, “mature”?
\n\nRein: “A problem is an abstraction extracted from a mess via analysis.” – Russel Ackoff
\n\nAmy: Models: We keep trying the same patterns and complaining about the same outcomes.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Amy Tobey.
Sponsored By:
01:32 - Joe’s Superpower: Hospitality
\n\n\n\n06:20 - Social Media: It's time for us to stop acting like we are getting access to social media for free.
\n\n15:36 - Owing Your Identity & Data
\n\n25:25 - Protecting Children’s’ Privacy & Data
\n\n32:00 - Leading The Movement; Rolling Out a Solution: Taking back control of our data
\n\nReflections:
\n\nChristina: The value and the power of open source and thinking beyond giving your data out willy-nilly.
\n\nJacob: Teaching our children to be thoughtful technologists.
\n\nJerome: Keeping our kids safe is a job on top of a job, and the goalpost keeps moving!
\n\nJoe: A reminder that other people are thinking about this. We are all concerned about privacy.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Joe LeBlanc.
Sponsored By:
01:13 - Debbie’s Superpower: Having an excellent memory and a detailed-oriented brain
\n\n03:23 - Teaching Science in Fun Ways
\n\n05:49 - Understanding Data & Data Literacy
\n\n15:16 - Negative Results Are Important (Failure)
\n\n29:20 - Human Performance is Contextual – Science can be exclusionary
\n\n34:27 - Debbie’s Inspiration to Become a Scientist
\n\n41:17 - Debbie’s TV Career
\n\n50:29 - Finding Ways to Solve Complex Concepts
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory
\n\nArty: Teaching the how and teaching the why.
\n\nAstrid: Perseverance and authenticity: Being yourself and allowing yourself to evolve.
\n\nDebbie: This podcast was much different from being a guest on other podcasts.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Deborah Berebichez.
","summary":"Dr. Deborah Berebichez talks about teaching science to kids in fun ways, data literacy, why getting negative results in science is important, the fact that human performance is contextual, and her path to becoming a scientist and ultimately a TV-show host on The Discovery Channel.","date_published":"2020-07-01T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/3984b4d4-7002-48b3-b7ed-e37381fa23da.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48750474,"duration_in_seconds":4220}]},{"id":"ddfa47d5-b5e2-4760-837f-0c95fdb6ccf5","title":"188: Going Off the Rails with Damien Burke","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/going-off-the-rails","content_text":"01:10 - Damien’s Superpower: The ability to hold conflicting beliefs at the same time.\n\n\nBlind Men and an Elephant\nLaw of Excluded Middle\n\n\n04:09 - Life is Hard. How do we make things easy?\n\n\nSimon’s Ant\nEmergent Behavior\nConway’s Game of Life\nEmbodied Cognition\nCognitive Systems Engineering\nJoint Cognitive Systems\n\n\n12:03 - Treating Expertise as Transferable to Different Fields\n\n\nTechnical Privilege\nCognitive Bias – List of Cognitive Biases\nHeuristic Shortcuts\nSpecifications not Test – Damien’s “Don’t Call it Test-Driven Development Essay\nFundamental Attribution Error\n\n\n17:54 - Loving Yourself Unconditionally and Seeing Flaws\n\n\n“You are whole, perfect, and complete.” – Damien Burke\n\n\n\nVirginia Satir: The basis of human interaction is acknowledging the inherent value in ourselves and another person.\nGiving Feedback – The key is authenticity.\nTreating People The Way They Want to be Treated vs How YOU Want to be Treated\n\n\nThe Platinum Rule\n\nMister Rogers: What do you do with the mad that you feel?\n\n\n\n“The problem is never the problem; how we cope is the problem.” – Virginia Satir\n\n\n27:03 - Shakespeare was Garbage\n\n\nPlaying Shakespeare\nHighbrow Language\nLooking For Richard\n\n\n30:08 - Sponsorship Message\n\n31:20 - EarlyWords / Morning Pages\n\n\nThe Artist's Way by Julia Cameron\n\n\n36:08 - Damien’s Background in Theater and Applying it to Tech\n\n\n“I play the piano, but my instrument is the orchestra.” – Attribution Unknown\n\n“The conductor is the only person in the orchestra that doesn’t make a sound.” – Benjamin Zander\n\n\nBeing a Leader/Conductor/Manager is an Act of Service\n\n41:42 - Ontological Coaching\n\n\nEpistemic – What even is knowledge?\n\n\nThe Scientific Method\n\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice\n\nRein: It is hard to translate theory into practice. \n\nDamien: Life is hard. Make everything you can easy!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Damien Burke.Sponsored By:strongDM: Today's show is sponsored by strongDM.\r\n\r\nManaging your remote team as they work from home? Managing a gazillion SSH keys, database passwords, and Kubernetes certs?\r\n\r\nMeet strongDM. Manage and audit access to servers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters, no matter where your employees are.\r\n\r\nWith strongDM, easily extend your identity provider to manage infrastructure access. Automate onboarding, offboarding, and moving people within roles. Grant temporary access that automatically expires to on-call teams.\r\n\r\nAdmins get full auditability into anything anyone does: when they connect, what queries they run, what commands are typed. It's full visibility into everything. For SSH, RDP, and Kubernetes, that means video replays. For databases, it's a single unified query log across all database management systems.\r\n\r\nstrongDM is used by companies like Hearst, Peloton, Betterment, Greenhouse, and SoFi to manage access. It's more control and less hassle.\r\n\r\nstrongDM. Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure.\r\n\r\nStart your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT\r\n","content_html":"01:10 - Damien’s Superpower: The ability to hold conflicting beliefs at the same time.
\n\n\n\n04:09 - Life is Hard. How do we make things easy?
\n\n12:03 - Treating Expertise as Transferable to Different Fields
\n\n17:54 - Loving Yourself Unconditionally and Seeing Flaws
\n\n\n\n\n“You are whole, perfect, and complete.” – Damien Burke
\n
\n\n\n“The problem is never the problem; how we cope is the problem.” – Virginia Satir
\n
27:03 - Shakespeare was Garbage
\n\n30:08 - Sponsorship Message
\n\n31:20 - EarlyWords / Morning Pages
\n\n\n\n36:08 - Damien’s Background in Theater and Applying it to Tech
\n\n\n\n\n“I play the piano, but my instrument is the orchestra.” – Attribution Unknown
\n\n“The conductor is the only person in the orchestra that doesn’t make a sound.” – Benjamin Zander
\n
Being a Leader/Conductor/Manager is an Act of Service
\n\n41:42 - Ontological Coaching
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
\n\nRein: It is hard to translate theory into practice.
\n\nDamien: Life is hard. Make everything you can easy!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Damien Burke.
Sponsored By:
01:50 - Bryan’s Superpower: The ability to see the world as it is
\n\n06:52 - Conference Circuits / Virtual Conferencing
\n\n17:44 - Working Remotely During Quarantine
\n\n23:48 - The Premise of Being Greater Than Code
\n\n26:24 - Fighting/Overcoming Meritocracy
\n\n\n\n\n“I'm not underrepresented anymore. Y'all are over-represented. Not going to use a negative to describe my existence. I'm Bryan, and I'm supposed to be here.” – Bryan Liles via Twitter
\n
34:50 - How People Work and View the World
\n\n42:41 - Finding Power in Something Else
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Bryan Liles.
Sponsored By:
Emily has been on GTC before! Check out her previous episode: 037: Failure Mode
\n\n01:08 - Emily’s Superpower: Hunting Nazis and Data Science
\n\n14:55 - Being Willing to Be Wrong / Failure and Learning
\n\n34:49 - Cybernetics
\n\n\n\n38:43 - The COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis and The Need For Systematic Restructuring
\n\n47:16 - Nuance, Power, and Authority
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Emily Gorcenski.
","summary":"In this episode, Emily Gorcenski talks about hunting Nazis and how doing so involves data science. She also talks about failure and learning and being willing to be wrong, the need for systematic restructuring in America, and nuance, power, and authority.","date_published":"2020-06-10T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/5ce8ecb4-e202-4f39-b38f-c0302c2d2cae.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":70299774,"duration_in_seconds":3939}]},{"id":"c7c2d9b2-fcb3-441e-bd54-5497ac17cba3","title":"Special Edition: #BlackLivesMatter","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/black-lives-matter","content_text":"There are no show notes nessecary for this episode. Your job is to listen and learn from these 3 strong women.Special Guests: Isa Herico-Velasco , Kim Crayton, and Shireen Mitchell.","content_html":"There are no show notes nessecary for this episode. Your job is to listen and learn from these 3 strong women.
Special Guests: Isa Herico-Velasco , Kim Crayton, and Shireen Mitchell.
","summary":"Listen. Learn. Love.","date_published":"2020-06-04T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c7c2d9b2-fcb3-441e-bd54-5497ac17cba3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":99107879,"duration_in_seconds":5518}]},{"id":"ea723acc-9de9-41f3-a3d9-7d37ec2c7083","title":"185: Adaptive Capacity and Mutual Aid with Michelle Glauser","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/adaptive-capacity-and-mutual-aid","content_text":"02:27 - Michelle’s Superpower: Resilience\n\n\nGraceful Extensibility\n\n\n04:59 - Techtonica\n\n\nThe Board\nBreaking Barriers Into Tech\nIncome Sharing Agreements\nJob Placement Success\nSetting Cohorts Up For Success\nBecoming an Educator\nSocioeconomic Factors\n\n\nLimbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams\n\n\n\n25:35 - Adaptive Capacity and Mutual Aid\n\n\nSaying vs Showing You/They Care / Investment / Helping Others\nSponsorship\nHiring\nUnemployment\nSurvival Mode\n\n\n46:51 - Techtonica Success Stories\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: What’s going to happen after the pandemic? How will things be different?\n\nMichelle: The world has an opportunity to change.\n\nJamey: The things Techtonica provides to its’ cohorts to break down barriers to entry in tech is awesome. \n\nArty: Asking what can I do to make a difference?\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Michelle Glauser.","content_html":"02:27 - Michelle’s Superpower: Resilience
\n\n\n\n04:59 - Techtonica
\n\n25:35 - Adaptive Capacity and Mutual Aid
\n\n46:51 - Techtonica Success Stories
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: What’s going to happen after the pandemic? How will things be different?
\n\nMichelle: The world has an opportunity to change.
\n\nJamey: The things Techtonica provides to its’ cohorts to break down barriers to entry in tech is awesome.
\n\nArty: Asking what can I do to make a difference?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Michelle Glauser.
","summary":"In this episode, Michelle Glauser talks about Techtonica: full-time tech training with living stipends and laptops to Bay Area women and non-binary adults with low incomes, then place graduates into jobs with sponsor companies. ","date_published":"2020-06-03T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ea723acc-9de9-41f3-a3d9-7d37ec2c7083.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42932824,"duration_in_seconds":3512}]},{"id":"804d781a-09da-4133-93b3-0d322e753fac","title":"184: The Python Software Foundation and the Future of Conferencing with Naomi Ceder & Ewa Jodlawska","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/psf-future-of-conferencing","content_text":"01:39 - Ewa’s Superpower: Organization\n\n\nPyCon\n\n\n02:01 - Naomi’s Superpower: Empathy for the Marginalized\n\n02:51 - The Python Software Foundation (PSF)\n\n\nPyCon Online\nPyPI\n\n\n05:26 - Regional and Local Meetings: Building a Healthy Community\n\n06:52 - “Everybody Pays” and the PSF Budget\n\n\nFinancial Aid\n\n\n11:16 - How the Pandemic is Effecting the PSF\n\n\nFinancially\nMoving to Virtual Conferencing\n\n\nEuroPython 2020 Online\n\n\n\n13:20 - Intellectual Property\n\n\nHolding in Trust for Community\nPreserving Goodness\nPyLadies\nBrand Integrity\n\n\n16:36 - The Development of a Code of Conduct\n\n\nEnforcement\nRatio of Enforcers to Attendees\n\n\n23:08 - Naomi: Classics, Language, and Computer Science\n\n\nSimilarities and Differences\n\n\nJamshid Gharajedaghi\n\n\n\n29:15: Ewa: Ending Up in Governance\n\n31:03 - Ewa and Naomi’s Roles in PSF\n\n\nThe PSF Board\nThe PSF Staff\n\n\n35:49 - Creating Emergency Funds\n\n40:18 - Grants & Sponsorships\n\n\nHumble Bundle\nPPP Grant\n\n\n42:33 - Contractual Agreements \n\n46:22 - Engaging in a Virtual Setting Over In-Person Events\n\n\nPython Pizza\n\n\n51:15 - Approaching Issues Marginalized People Experience\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: If you want to understand how an accident happened, you need to understand why what a person was doing made sense to them at the time. “What would this mean if this made sense?”\n\nJacob: Looking forward to new conference formats.\n\nCarina: What solutions are people pitching for moving to virtual gatherings?\n\nNaomi: Only in our space do we think it’s \"weird\" to talk about whether or not we need emergency reserves. Also, online Hallway Tracks? Yes or no? What do now?\n\nEwa: Moving to online events is emotional.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guests: Ewa Jodlawska and Naomi Ceder.","content_html":"01:39 - Ewa’s Superpower: Organization
\n\n02:01 - Naomi’s Superpower: Empathy for the Marginalized
\n\n02:51 - The Python Software Foundation (PSF)
\n\n05:26 - Regional and Local Meetings: Building a Healthy Community
\n\n06:52 - “Everybody Pays” and the PSF Budget
\n\n11:16 - How the Pandemic is Effecting the PSF
\n\n13:20 - Intellectual Property
\n\n16:36 - The Development of a Code of Conduct
\n\n23:08 - Naomi: Classics, Language, and Computer Science
\n\n29:15: Ewa: Ending Up in Governance
\n\n31:03 - Ewa and Naomi’s Roles in PSF
\n\n35:49 - Creating Emergency Funds
\n\n40:18 - Grants & Sponsorships
\n\n42:33 - Contractual Agreements
\n\n46:22 - Engaging in a Virtual Setting Over In-Person Events
\n\n51:15 - Approaching Issues Marginalized People Experience
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: If you want to understand how an accident happened, you need to understand why what a person was doing made sense to them at the time. “What would this mean if this made sense?”
\n\nJacob: Looking forward to new conference formats.
\n\nCarina: What solutions are people pitching for moving to virtual gatherings?
\n\nNaomi: Only in our space do we think it’s "weird" to talk about whether or not we need emergency reserves. Also, online Hallway Tracks? Yes or no? What do now?
\n\nEwa: Moving to online events is emotional.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guests: Ewa Jodlawska and Naomi Ceder.
","summary":"In this episode, Naomi Ceder & Ewa Jodlawska talk about the Python Software Foundation and speculate what the future of conferences might look like due to the pandemic.","date_published":"2020-05-27T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/804d781a-09da-4133-93b3-0d322e753fac.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66231032,"duration_in_seconds":3688}]},{"id":"695466ff-0254-4f72-b10b-361ce99b250b","title":"183: How We Learn with Vaidehi Joshi","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/how-we-learn","content_text":"01:47 - Vaidehi’s Superpower: Learning new things and teaching them to other people\n\n\nTeaching Things Helps YOU Learn\nDeciding on Things to Learn\n\n\n05:01 - Approaching Learning\n\n\nReading\nRelating Things to Things Already Known\nAsk Yourself, “Why do I need to know this?”\nTricks for Reading Papers\nRead the Abstract & Conclusion\nPick Fights with the Paper\nUsing Tutorials\nAccountability & Motivation\nLearning with Others\nUnraveled\nHermeneutic Circle\n\n\n20:15 - Having Aha! Moments & Epiphanies: Brain Percolation\n\n\nRussell Ackoff\n\n\nAbsolution\nResolution\nSolution\nDissolution\n\nParadoxes\n\n\n32:02 - Technologists Are Good Storytellers\n\n39:03 - Improving Over Time and Doing Your Best\n\n\nHindsight Bias\nBlameless Retrospectives: Accountability\n\n\n47:55 - Creating Spaces for People to Succeed\n\n\nManager Training\n“Managing Up”: The Phrase – meh\n\n\n52:58 - Effective Mentorship\n\n\nMentorship vs Sponsorship\nTrust\nLara Hogan\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Incremental learning and progress – biting off small chunks and not beating ourselves up while learning. It’s not a waste of time to just do a little at a time.\n\nRein: Soft skills are technical skills.\n\nVaidehi: It’s hard to measure and quantify these things.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Vaidehi Joshi.Sponsored By:BrightonRuby: Alt::BrightonRuby: A slightly odd, quasi-conference for strange times by Andy Croll.\r\n\r\nThere's no in-person BrightonRuby this year, but Andy is still trying to bring Ruby-ists and other software folk together.\r\n\r\nIt will be recorded talks, a physical book, and a podcast. Delivered throughout June/July 2020.\r\nPlus a donation to Shelter's Coronavirus appeal.\r\n\r\nOn sale now. 29Euros + tax (which works out to a very affordable about $36.50 + tax in U.S. dollars!)\r\n\r\nhttps://alt.brightonruby.com\r\n\r\nP.S.: A trusted source tells us that the book is a beautifully typeset copy of Why's Poignant Guide.\r\n","content_html":"01:47 - Vaidehi’s Superpower: Learning new things and teaching them to other people
\n\n05:01 - Approaching Learning
\n\n20:15 - Having Aha! Moments & Epiphanies: Brain Percolation
\n\n32:02 - Technologists Are Good Storytellers
\n\n39:03 - Improving Over Time and Doing Your Best
\n\n47:55 - Creating Spaces for People to Succeed
\n\n52:58 - Effective Mentorship
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Incremental learning and progress – biting off small chunks and not beating ourselves up while learning. It’s not a waste of time to just do a little at a time.
\n\nRein: Soft skills are technical skills.
\n\nVaidehi: It’s hard to measure and quantify these things.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Vaidehi Joshi.
Sponsored By:
00:41 - Ellen’s Superpower: Knowing what her pets are thinking. (Observation and Paying Attention to Non-Verbal Cues.)
\n\n10:33 - Shareholder and Stakeholder Economies
\n\n18:30 - Termination of Employment Contracts
\n\n27:44 - Collective Action – Why aren’t tech workers organizing more?
\n\n37:47 - Moving in the Direction of Stakeholder Value – What do we do next?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: A reminder of the value of collective action.
\n\nRein: Tech workers are workers and workers have more in common with other workers than they do with bosses.
\n\nAaron: The practical ways of implementing collective action in tech.
\n\nEpisode 80: Crafting a Community with Kris Howard
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Ellen Wondra.
","summary":"In this episode, Ellen Wondra talks about labor organization. She explains what shareholder and stakeholder economies are, and talks a lot about how things are done in Germany. The panelists speculate about why tech workers aren’t organizing more, and how we could potentially help ourselves and our coworkers if we did.","date_published":"2020-05-13T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/29721637-5d00-494d-b863-b0b77dfdfca7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69219267,"duration_in_seconds":3001}]},{"id":"ee0d08a1-4074-4dfc-badc-489ce1f1f25d","title":"181: Normalcy Theater with Aaron Aldrich","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/normalcy-theater","content_text":"02:04 - Aaron’s Superpower: Relating to people on any level because he has so many hobbies!\n\n\nUseful in DevRel\nEnding Up in Unexpected Places\nTrying New Things and Nerding Out\n\n\n06:42 - Everything Has a Technical Aspect\n\n\nMusic vs Computer Programming\nComputer Systems as Sociotechnical Systems\n\n\n10:37 - Connecting High-Performing Resilient Teams\n\n\nCommon Ground Within Teams\nRecovering From Failure\nFailover Conf by Gremlin\n\n\n14:14 - Implementing Purposeful/Intentional Communication\n\n\nTeam vs Individual Work\nKen Mugrage - Keynote Speaker | Everything I need to know about DevOps I learned in The Marines\nTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet\n\n\n17:55 - Highlights from Failover Conf - (Videos not available)\n\n\nHeidi Waterhouse\nHoneycomb\n\n\n19:45 - How did an actual virtual conference go since COVID-19?\n\n\nSlack Implementation\n\n\nBots\n#Hallway-track channel\nEach Talk Had Its’ Own Q&A Channel\n\nChallenges\n\n\nPeople Interaction\nBreaktime\nTechnical Difficulties\n\nZoom Chat After the Conference\nDeserted Island DevOps\n\n\n26:27 - The Impact of Having ADHD\n\n\nAdvanced Forms of Coping Mechanisms\nQuality Time\nStruggling with ADHD During COVID-19\nWorking From Home and Being Thrown Into Remote Work\nJuggling Meetings\nMaintaining Comradery\n\n\n39:43 - Normalcy Theater: Maintaining a Sense That Everything is Fine (When It’s NOT.)\n\n\nGrief and Loss is Happening on a Global Level\nJ. Paul Reed\n\n\nShed Load\nSacrificing Thoroughness: we are ALL overloaded\nRecruiting Resources\nShifting Work and Time\n\nShowing Others Grace and Empathy\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The idea of a software team plays at software just like a music group plays at instruments. (Twitter thread)\n\nCarina: Everything has technical and human skills aspects.\n\nAaron: It’s okay to not be getting things done right now and to be taking the time that we need to take care of ourselves.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.Special Guest: Aaron Aldrich.Sponsored By:strongDM: Today’s show is sponsored by strongDM.\r\n\r\nTransitioning your team to work from home? Managing a gazillion SSH keys, database passwords, and Kubernetes certs? \r\n\r\nMeet strongDM. Manage and audit access to servers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters, no matter where your employees are.\r\n\r\nWith strongDM, easily extend your identity provider to manage infrastructure access. Automate onboarding, offboarding, and moving people within roles. Grant temporary access that automatically expires to on-call teams.\r\n\r\nAdmins get full auditability into anything anyone does: when they connect, what queries they run, what commands are typed. It’s full visibility into everything. For SSH, RDP, and Kubernetes, that means video replays. For databases, it’s a single unified query log across all database management systems.\r\n\r\nstrongDM is used by companies like Hearst, Peloton, Betterment, Greenhouse, and SoFi to manage access. It’s more control and less hassle.\r\n\r\nstrongDM. Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure”.\r\n\r\nStart your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/GTC.","content_html":"02:04 - Aaron’s Superpower: Relating to people on any level because he has so many hobbies!
\n\n06:42 - Everything Has a Technical Aspect
\n\n10:37 - Connecting High-Performing Resilient Teams
\n\n14:14 - Implementing Purposeful/Intentional Communication
\n\n17:55 - Highlights from Failover Conf - (Videos not available)
\n\n\n\n19:45 - How did an actual virtual conference go since COVID-19?
\n\n26:27 - The Impact of Having ADHD
\n\n39:43 - Normalcy Theater: Maintaining a Sense That Everything is Fine (When It’s NOT.)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The idea of a software team plays at software just like a music group plays at instruments. (Twitter thread)
\n\nCarina: Everything has technical and human skills aspects.
\n\nAaron: It’s okay to not be getting things done right now and to be taking the time that we need to take care of ourselves.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Aaron Aldrich.
Sponsored By:
02:34 - Tobie’s Superpower: Bridging tribes.
\n\n04:13 - Being a Co-Conspirator of Ethical Open Source
\n\n12:41 - Open Source: Prioritizing Implementers Over End-Users
\n\n17:19 - Developer Attachment to Technical Purity
\n\n34:54 - Open Source Practitioners Misguided Thinking When Building Software
\n\n47:03 - Talking About These Issues – What gives us hope?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Tobie Langel.
Sponsored By:
02:43 - PJ’s Superpower: Convincing people that karaoke is a good idea.
\n\n07:13 - The DevRel World (DevRel = Developer Relations)
\n\n13:42 - Online vs In-Person/Live Conferences
\n\n25:54 - Making Conferences Diverse & Inclusive
\n\n33:01 - Prompt and Talking About Mental Health
\n\n43:10 - Making Conferences Diverse & Inclusive (Cont’d)
\n\n54:14 - Accessibility
\n\nPJ's First Ever Full Talk at RubyMidwest: Act Locally - Think Globally
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCarina: The exaggerated visual of putting a hand down and throwing people into the air to lift them up.
\n\nJamey: Holding onto the feeling of being lucky while feeling awful.
\n\nJessica: Getting pushes to make output.
\n\nPJ: Be a Jim Weirich. Have a “Hello World” attitude. Human connection is important.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: PJ Hagerty.
Sponsored By:
Manning Publications has been kind enough to give our listeners a discount code. They're giving listeners of the show a permanent 40% discount, which is good for all products in all formats for everyone. Again, this is a PERMANENT discount code for all Greater Than Code listeners. Use the code PODGREAT20 every time you shop Manning.
\n\n02:30 - Emily’s Superpower: Finding all the dogs to pet.
\n\n05:05 - Emily’s Data Science Journey
\n\n08:21 - The Idea of Passion
\n\n10:46 - Defining Data Science
\n\n13:48 - Emily’s Book: Build a Career in Data Science
\n\n16:11 - Dealing with Failure
\n\n\n\n18:30 - Sponsorship
\n\n20:08 - The Spread of Data Science Roles
\n\n27:09 - Sponsorship (Cont’d)
\n\n36:20 - Themes Learned From Writing Build a Career in Data Science
\n\n40:02 - Companies Should Train People to be Mentors
\n\n\n\n43:07 - Measuring Productivity
\n\n45:48 - External vs Internal Data Science
\n\n47:18 - Women and Diverse Representation in Data Science
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAvdi: Mentorship does not have to be a huge commitment to be useful and sponsorship is often as important -- or more important than mentorship.
\n\nChanté: What are the things that we’re willing to do for people who need an extra boost or push or support?
\n\nJacob: Mentorship is possible without the mentors knowing they’re even doing it.
\n\nRein: If you’re a mentor and your mentees aren’t coming to you with well-formed questions, it’s your job to coach them into that as a mentor.
\n\nEmily: There aren’t enough resources for senior engineers on the non-technical side of things.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Special Guest: Emily Robinson.
Sponsored By:
Content warnings for discussion of pandemic and sickness, American politics, and mental health issues.
\n\nIn this special episode of Greater Than Code, several of our panelists have a candid conversation about the current COVID-19 situation, how it has been affecting them personally, and how they believe it will affect the tech industry as a whole. Discussion topics include how it feels both to be working and unemployed during the pandemic, productivity while quarantined, the effect on WFH and conference culture, the current political climate, and human resiliency in the face of the unknown.
\n\nLinks Mentioned:
\n\n\n\nAdditional show notes:
\n\nJamey wanted to report that after recording was finished, they called their favorite restaurant back and was able to successfully order takeout after all.
\n\n.
\n.
\n.
\n.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
","summary":"In this special episode of Greater Than Code, several of our panelists have a candid conversation about the current COVID-19 situation, how it has been affecting them personally, and how they believe it will affect the tech industry as a whole. Discussion topics include how it feels both to be working and unemployed during the pandemic, productivity while quarantined, the effect on WFH and conference culture, the current political climate, and human resiliency in the face of the unknown. ","date_published":"2020-04-09T15:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d7b8bbb3-bd39-4c40-9250-c847967f75f6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":63607445,"duration_in_seconds":3187}]},{"id":"290f8021-70cc-4f9c-b712-55d77e7afed4","title":"177: Source Docs and People with Chris Stead","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/source-docs-and-people","content_text":"00:56 - Chris’ Superpower: Not Knowing In Public\n\n\nAsking Questions\n\n\n02:53 - Source Documents and Their Relation To People\n\n\nGrace Hopper\nMaintaining Code to Give People Context (Writing Code For People)\nCritical Complexity\nIndu Alagarsamy\n\n\n06:44 - Encouraging Others To Write Code For People\n\n\nModeling Behavior\nEvent Storming\nECO Mapping (Ego, Command, Outcome)\nCreating Culture\nArlo Belshee: Naming is a Process\n\n\n12:39 - Naming Things in Code / Narratives in Software and Business\n\n18:53 - Asking the Right Questions\n\n\nGoogle-Fu\nMobbing Interviews\n\n\n22:38 - Interviewing for the Benefit of the Interviewee\n\n\nThe Problem with Being Transactional\nIt’s People All The Way Down\nEmpathetic Interviewing\n\n\n33:44 - Treating People as People; Making Things More Humane\n\n\nPeopleware\nBooks by Gerald Weinburg\nThe Mythical Man-Month\nThe Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings On Linux And Open Source By An Accidental Revolutionary\nWillem Larsen\n\n\n38:23 - Code Stores Emotion\n\n\nMeasuring Progression\nThe Valley of Despair\n\n\n45:19 - Deciding: “Will this be helpful for someone else?”\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: The idea that code can convey emotions. Even code can be Greater Than Code. \n\nJohn: Structuring interviews with goals around comfort and familiarity so people can perform at their best.\n\nJamey: Imbuing things with the feeling when you wrote it.\n\nChris: If you’re feeling frustrated, kind is great. Also, everything is a systemic whole.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Chris Stead.","content_html":"00:56 - Chris’ Superpower: Not Knowing In Public
\n\n02:53 - Source Documents and Their Relation To People
\n\n06:44 - Encouraging Others To Write Code For People
\n\n12:39 - Naming Things in Code / Narratives in Software and Business
\n\n18:53 - Asking the Right Questions
\n\n22:38 - Interviewing for the Benefit of the Interviewee
\n\n33:44 - Treating People as People; Making Things More Humane
\n\n38:23 - Code Stores Emotion
\n\n45:19 - Deciding: “Will this be helpful for someone else?”
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: The idea that code can convey emotions. Even code can be Greater Than Code.
\n\nJohn: Structuring interviews with goals around comfort and familiarity so people can perform at their best.
\n\nJamey: Imbuing things with the feeling when you wrote it.
\n\nChris: If you’re feeling frustrated, kind is great. Also, everything is a systemic whole.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chris Stead.
","summary":"In this episode, Chris Stead joins the show to talk about source documents and their relation to people, encouraging others to write code for people, interviewing for the benefit of the interviewee, and the fact that code stores emotion.","date_published":"2020-04-08T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/290f8021-70cc-4f9c-b712-55d77e7afed4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":45437179,"duration_in_seconds":3305}]},{"id":"312cd239-546f-4217-ae1a-56fcd0536693","title":"176: Career Karma with Ruben Harris","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/career-karma","content_text":"01:44 - Ruben’s Superpower: Believing in people more than they believe in themselves and helping people to meet their potential.\n\n03:00 - How Ruben Developed His Superpower\n\n\nNatural Belief In Self\nFather and Mother’s Example\n\n\n06:35 - Benefits Of Being Underestimated\n\n\nConquering Challenges\nCareer Karma Coaches And Squads\n\n\n11:15 - Career Karma Success Story\n\n13:50 - Fires Lit Inside\n\n15:03 - Origin Of Career Karma\n\n\nApp Launched January 2019\nCareerKarma.com/schools\nLearn And Experience The Companies \nBreaking into Startups\nThe Reality of Breaking Into Startups: The First Product You Build Is Yourself\n\n\n18:10 - How Career Karma Secured Funding\n\n23:38 - What Makes The Success Of Career Karma Different\n\n\nCulture of Experimentation\n\n\n25:25 - What It Feels Like To Know You Are Doing What You Are Meant To Be Doing\n\n\nPay Attention To The Patterns In Your Life\n\n\n31:21 - Impact of Coronavirus\n\n36:15 - Who Will Benefit From Remote Work\n\n38:00 - The Career Karma Team\n\n\nPay It Forward\n\n\n42:30 - If You Want To Be A Master In Life, You Have To Submit To A Master\n\n44:30 - What’s On The Horizon For Career Karma\n\n48:20 - The Biggest Lesson Ruben Has Learned Thus Far\n\nLINKS:\n\n\nState of the Bootcamp Market Report 2020\nRemote Working Tips and Complete Guide to Telecommuting in 2020\nHow to Pay for Coding Bootcamp: The Ultimate Guide\nIncome Share Agreements: State of the Market 2019\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Ruben Harris.","content_html":"01:44 - Ruben’s Superpower: Believing in people more than they believe in themselves and helping people to meet their potential.
\n\n03:00 - How Ruben Developed His Superpower
\n\n06:35 - Benefits Of Being Underestimated
\n\n11:15 - Career Karma Success Story
\n\n13:50 - Fires Lit Inside
\n\n15:03 - Origin Of Career Karma
\n\n18:10 - How Career Karma Secured Funding
\n\n23:38 - What Makes The Success Of Career Karma Different
\n\n25:25 - What It Feels Like To Know You Are Doing What You Are Meant To Be Doing
\n\n31:21 - Impact of Coronavirus
\n\n36:15 - Who Will Benefit From Remote Work
\n\n38:00 - The Career Karma Team
\n\n42:30 - If You Want To Be A Master In Life, You Have To Submit To A Master
\n\n44:30 - What’s On The Horizon For Career Karma
\n\n48:20 - The Biggest Lesson Ruben Has Learned Thus Far
\n\nLINKS:
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ruben Harris.
","summary":"Ruben Harris talks about Career Karma, the benefits of being underestimated, how the fire lit inside him, the origin of Career Karma and how they secured funding, the Career Karma team, and what’s on the horizon for Career Karma.","date_published":"2020-04-01T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/312cd239-546f-4217-ae1a-56fcd0536693.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":50494587,"duration_in_seconds":3155}]},{"id":"796de843-f5d2-47b8-8c44-069c40491e3d","title":"175: Developing for the Long Term with Eric A. Meyer","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/developing-for-the-long-term","content_text":"00:57 - Eric’s Superpower: The Ability To Explain Things In A Way That Makes Sense To Most People\n\n02:37 - Legacy Capability Of The Web\n\n\nWeb Technologies Are Long Term\nFrameworks\nLynx\nY2K\n\n\n11:30 - Creating Long Term Within Frameworks\n\n\nStatic Can Be Good\n\n\n15:50 - Ethical Dimensions\n\n\nRAINN\nInformation Accessible As Widely As Possible\nLong Term vs. Short Term Code\n\n\n20:50 - Longevity Of The Web\n\n23:11 - Edge Cases - Stress Cases\n\n\nEvan Hensleigh @futuraprime\nDesign For Real Life\n\n\n25:44 - Make Everything Accessible To The Most People\n\n\nDiverse Teams Are Stronger\nMaking Assumptions\nWrite People Off Explicitly\n\n\n44:00 - Design For Real Life\n\n\nChallenging Team Assumptions\nThe Designated Dissenter\nSarah Parmenter @sazzy\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The designated dissenter idea. Doing a pre-mortem on a project - planning ahead.\n\nCarina: A whole other conversation could come of the philosophy of agile and move fast and break things.\n\nJacob: How the dissenter could be a challenging position to be in. \n\nEric: The dissenter is stress testing, not criticizing.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Eric A. Meyer.","content_html":"00:57 - Eric’s Superpower: The Ability To Explain Things In A Way That Makes Sense To Most People
\n\n02:37 - Legacy Capability Of The Web
\n\n11:30 - Creating Long Term Within Frameworks
\n\n15:50 - Ethical Dimensions
\n\n20:50 - Longevity Of The Web
\n\n23:11 - Edge Cases - Stress Cases
\n\n25:44 - Make Everything Accessible To The Most People
\n\n44:00 - Design For Real Life
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The designated dissenter idea. Doing a pre-mortem on a project - planning ahead.
\n\nCarina: A whole other conversation could come of the philosophy of agile and move fast and break things.
\n\nJacob: How the dissenter could be a challenging position to be in.
\n\nEric: The dissenter is stress testing, not criticizing.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Eric A. Meyer.
","summary":"Eric A. Meyer talks about developing for the long term, diving into the topics of the legacy capability of the web, ethical dimensions, stress cases, and the designated dissenter. ","date_published":"2020-03-25T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/796de843-f5d2-47b8-8c44-069c40491e3d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":63893976,"duration_in_seconds":3993}]},{"id":"f3a36bf3-fde7-47b4-9e35-37d9c1525061","title":"174: Resilience","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/resilience","content_text":"01:38 - What Does Resilience Mean To The Panelists?\n\n\nJohn - [It’s] Like A Flexible Tree That Can Bend With The Wind Or Environment - It Does Not Resist Or Break\nChanté - Tenacity And Grit And Being Able To Cope Or Withstand Something That You Didn’t Foresee - It Doesn’t Break You, It Makes You Stronger\nAntifragile\nRein - [It’s] About Unforeseen Surprises\n\n\n03:36 - Thoughts On David Woods - Four Concepts for Resilience\n\n\nResilience As Rebound\nResilience As Robustness\nResilience As The Opposite Of Brittleness\nResilience As Sustained Adaptability\n\n\n04:49 - Applying Resilience To Leadership\n\n\nHigh Performance Organization - HPO\nPeople Make Up Companies\n\n\n14:40 - The Difference Between Sustainability And Resilience\n\n17:20 - Welcoming The Resilient Mindset\n\n18:30 - Creating And Acknowledging Resilience\n\n21:54 - Organization Resilience And Adaptive Capacity\n\n\nRichard Cook’s REdeploy 2019 Talk On The Resilience Of Bone\nConvincing Employers To Become More Resilient To Reduce Harm To Employees\n\n\n27:15 - Resilience Related To Diversity And Inclusion\n\n\nFamilies And Communities\n\n\n31:00 - Resilience Within Software Development\n\n\nSoftware Being Made Robust, Not Resilient\nRejection Proof - A Parallel Between People And Software\nCasey Rosenthal REdeploy2019 \n\n\n36:27 - What Price Do We Pay For Not Prioritizing Resiliency\n\n\nExistential Risk\n\n\n39:00 - Rein’s Wrap-Up On Resilience \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Sponsored By:Logz.io: If you are like most engineers, you probably prefer using open source. You may even prefer using tools like ELK and Grafana for observability due to their ease of use and built-in community. But, what if you could use these same tools, without sacrificing enterprise-grade scale, support and security. With Logz.io, you get the best of both worlds. A fully managed service that offers complete cloud observability on one unified platform; Log management and Cloud SIEM based on ELK, and Infrastructure Monitoring based on Grafana. The Open Source you love, at the scale you need. Sign up today for a 14-day free trial at Logz.io/gtc, and for your chance to receive your free Logz.io t-shirt.","content_html":"01:38 - What Does Resilience Mean To The Panelists?
\n\n03:36 - Thoughts On David Woods - Four Concepts for Resilience
\n\n04:49 - Applying Resilience To Leadership
\n\n14:40 - The Difference Between Sustainability And Resilience
\n\n17:20 - Welcoming The Resilient Mindset
\n\n18:30 - Creating And Acknowledging Resilience
\n\n21:54 - Organization Resilience And Adaptive Capacity
\n\n27:15 - Resilience Related To Diversity And Inclusion
\n\n31:00 - Resilience Within Software Development
\n\n36:27 - What Price Do We Pay For Not Prioritizing Resiliency
\n\n39:00 - Rein’s Wrap-Up On Resilience
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
02:22 - Coraline Talks About Her Work With The Open Source Movement
\n\n08:14 - Who Wrote The Open Source License
\n\n10:26 - The Open Source Initiative
\n\n11:25 - Licensing And The Evolution Of Open Source
\n\n18:43 - Litigation Thoughts
\n\n23:31 - Creators’ Rights
\n\n26:00 - Tying The Hippocratic License To Open Source
\n\n28:48 - Other Prongs Of Approach Other Than The License
\n\n30:50 - Coraline’s Candidacy For The OSI Board
\n\n34:00 - What Open Source Means To The Panelists
\n\n38:50 - The Concept Of Community
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
02:12 - Miko’s Superpower: Not Knowing Things.
\n\n03:30 - Coming To Your Senses
\n\n06:45 - Understand The Limits Of What You Can Know And What You Do Know
\n\n11:45 - Human Decision Making Is An Embodied Process
\n\n18:30 - Interviews As Coachable And Teachable Moments
\n\n25:33 - Problems With The Interview Framework
\n\n29:23 - Human Action Is Connected To Emotion
\n\n34:30 - Not Knowing As A Superpower
\n\n39:56 - Small Mind, Big Mind
\n\n45:50 - Being Over Reliant On The Posture Of Knowing
\n\n50:16 - The Notion Of Marriage
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Favorite part is the idea that if we think we know something, that leads to despair sometimes. The release of admitting we don’t know everything is a source of hope.
\n\nJacob: Feeling like I’m known personally and professionally is important to me, but being known in a deterministic way resonated with me.
\n\nArtemis: The Bob Marley principle that was mentioned. Thinking about that philosophy connects with the ideas we talked about. When you realize all the intelligence that is out there, thinking of how small you are. If we can lose our mind and come back to our senses and see that we are part of this fabric, we’re not really all that different.
\n\nMiko: “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” It is a way of connecting with the world of limitation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Miko Matsumura.
","summary":"Miko Matsumura talks about the limitations of human knowledge, including coming to your senses, understanding the limits of what you know, decision making as an embodied process, problems with the interview framework, and the idea of small mind/big mind.","date_published":"2020-03-04T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/a4e7e498-3719-41f1-9915-e951e84ae332.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":62701540,"duration_in_seconds":3918}]},{"id":"efc583e5-801f-4248-a850-78cf9687d7e6","title":"171: Web Accessibility with Chris DeMars","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/web-accessibility","content_text":"01:14 - Chris’s Superpower: His Ability to Sleep.\n\n01:50 - Why Chris Wants To Talk About Web Accessibility\n\n\nTop 3 Priorities When Building on the Web\n\n\nAccessibility\nPerformance\nSecurity\n\n\n\n02:45 - Whose Responsibility Is It To Build An Accessible Web?\n\n\nAnyone Building On The Web\nDominos’ Lawsuit\nWCAG\n\n\n07:38 - How To Inform And Get Colleagues On Board With Accessibility\n\n\nUnderstanding The Clientele\nHave Numbers To Back It Up\n\n\n11:45 - Image Descriptions\n\n\nAlt Attributes\nTwitter Adds Alt Text For .gifs\n\n\n16:34 - Companies Deal With Accessibility Lawsuits\n\n19:07 - Where To Start Making Changes\n\n\nOnly Shipping One Experience That Works For Everybody\nMake Sure You Are Using Semantic Markup\nColor Contrast\nMake Sure There Are Alt Attributes On Your Images\n\n\n27:50 - What Can Developers Do Today To Make Changes\n\n\nStart With An Audit\nCompare To Competitors\n\n\n31:06 - Work Collaboratively With The Designers \n\n34:15 - How To Be Accessible For Various Disabilities\n\n\nHearing \nCognitive \nPhysical\n\n\n37:10 - Accessibility Can Benefit Everyone\n\nReflections:\n\nChris: Accessibility is not a requirement, it is a must. From Marcy Sutton: Every little bit of accessibility you contribute is so necessary and so needed.\n\nCarina: The concrete useful examples such as audits are beneficial to business people.\n\nJacob: Wants to get better at using a screen reader to gain empathy about what the right thing is to do.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Chris DeMars.","content_html":"01:14 - Chris’s Superpower: His Ability to Sleep.
\n\n01:50 - Why Chris Wants To Talk About Web Accessibility
\n\n02:45 - Whose Responsibility Is It To Build An Accessible Web?
\n\n07:38 - How To Inform And Get Colleagues On Board With Accessibility
\n\n11:45 - Image Descriptions
\n\n16:34 - Companies Deal With Accessibility Lawsuits
\n\n19:07 - Where To Start Making Changes
\n\n27:50 - What Can Developers Do Today To Make Changes
\n\n31:06 - Work Collaboratively With The Designers
\n\n34:15 - How To Be Accessible For Various Disabilities
\n\n37:10 - Accessibility Can Benefit Everyone
\n\nReflections:
\n\nChris: Accessibility is not a requirement, it is a must. From Marcy Sutton: Every little bit of accessibility you contribute is so necessary and so needed.
\n\nCarina: The concrete useful examples such as audits are beneficial to business people.
\n\nJacob: Wants to get better at using a screen reader to gain empathy about what the right thing is to do.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chris DeMars.
","summary":"Chris DeMars talks about the importance of web accessibility: why it is so important, responsibility for creating an accessible web, getting your colleagues on board, where to start making changes, and accessibility for varying disabilities.","date_published":"2020-02-26T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/efc583e5-801f-4248-a850-78cf9687d7e6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":41202979,"duration_in_seconds":2575}]},{"id":"349b9efe-797b-44e5-889e-30537e7d9f98","title":"170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-case-for-vanilla-javascript","content_text":"00:53 - Chris’s Superpower: Derailing conversations and having a knack for taking complex tasks and breaking them down into smaller, simpler parts that people find easy to understand.\n\n01:44 - The Pitch for Vanilla JavaScript\n\n03:06 - Peoples’ Biggest Challenge as a Developer\n\n\nHaving Trouble Keeping Up\nAdding Processes and Tools Make it More Difficult to Get Started\n“The Right Way To Do It”\n\n\n05:50 - The Problem With The Way We Do Things Today\n\n\nFront-End Development\nBack-End Developers Move to Front-End\n\n\n08:30 - Modern Web Development\n\n\nThe Use of Frameworks\nPackage Managers \n“The Cascade is Bad” - Using More JavaScript\n\n\n11:42 - A Better Approach To Web Development\n\n\nSometimes Old Is Better\nDon’t Ditch The Old Just Because Something New Came Out\nEmbrace The Platform\nThink Smaller And More Modular\nRemember That The Web Is For Everyone\n\n\n17:15 - CSS and JavaScript\n\n\nWeb Bloat That Affects The End User\nAccessibility - Being Able To Work On Improvement\nAccessibility Audit On Gutenberg\nBeing Too Heavily Focused On One Programming Language\n\n\n25:05 - The Notion of Development At Scale\n\n\nThe Google Hiring Process And Frameworks\n\n\n27:45 - Silos Of Technology\n\n31:10 - Complexity And/Or Simplicity\n\n\nFocusing On Quality Over Volume\nFactoring For Growth\n\n\n37:20 - Advocating For Vanilla JavaScript\n\n\nDocumentation\nUnexpected Incidentals\n\n\n44:10 - Gradual Movement Of The Code Base\n\n45:30 - Using The Word “Just”\n\n49:30 - The Concept Of State\n\n52:45 - Use Of Static HTML\n\n53:40 - Do Companies Actually Build For The Web Like This\n\n\nNetflix Page Loads With Vanilla JS\nHappy Middle Ground\n\n\n58:05 - Summation Of Positives Of Vanilla JavaScript\n\n\nEase Of Beginner Developer Onboarding\nAllowing Non-JavaScript Developers To Participate More Meaningfully In Your Process\nOverall Resilience And Performance For The End User\n\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Pick the thing that reduces your suffering the most.\n\nJacob: If you are just starting to learn JavaScript, it is ok to not learn a framework immediately. It is also ok to dive into something else and come back to learn vanilla JS. Also, Noel Rappin - Modern Front-End Development for Rails, takes a great approach to using differing technologies and what they can bring to your project.\n\nChris: Thinking about the instances where it does make sense to use some of these tools as opposed to reasons why you shouldn’t use them. Liked the talk about minimizing your pain.\nIf you feel like there are too many moving parts to JavaScript, you are not alone, it’s not you, and you’ve totally got this.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi.","content_html":"00:53 - Chris’s Superpower: Derailing conversations and having a knack for taking complex tasks and breaking them down into smaller, simpler parts that people find easy to understand.
\n\n01:44 - The Pitch for Vanilla JavaScript
\n\n03:06 - Peoples’ Biggest Challenge as a Developer
\n\n05:50 - The Problem With The Way We Do Things Today
\n\n08:30 - Modern Web Development
\n\n11:42 - A Better Approach To Web Development
\n\n17:15 - CSS and JavaScript
\n\n25:05 - The Notion of Development At Scale
\n\n27:45 - Silos Of Technology
\n\n31:10 - Complexity And/Or Simplicity
\n\n37:20 - Advocating For Vanilla JavaScript
\n\n44:10 - Gradual Movement Of The Code Base
\n\n45:30 - Using The Word “Just”
\n\n49:30 - The Concept Of State
\n\n52:45 - Use Of Static HTML
\n\n53:40 - Do Companies Actually Build For The Web Like This
\n\n58:05 - Summation Of Positives Of Vanilla JavaScript
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Pick the thing that reduces your suffering the most.
\n\nJacob: If you are just starting to learn JavaScript, it is ok to not learn a framework immediately. It is also ok to dive into something else and come back to learn vanilla JS. Also, Noel Rappin - Modern Front-End Development for Rails, takes a great approach to using differing technologies and what they can bring to your project.
\n\nChris: Thinking about the instances where it does make sense to use some of these tools as opposed to reasons why you shouldn’t use them. Liked the talk about minimizing your pain.
\nIf you feel like there are too many moving parts to JavaScript, you are not alone, it’s not you, and you’ve totally got this.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi.
","summary":"Chris Ferdinandi talks about the positives of using vanilla JavaScript, challenges as a developer, modern web development and thoughts on a better approach to web development, using the word “just”, and gradual movement of the codebase.\r\n","date_published":"2020-02-19T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/349b9efe-797b-44e5-889e-30537e7d9f98.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":67076110,"duration_in_seconds":4192}]},{"id":"c03e0b2f-ae4a-4392-bdb0-78159e2e1de9","title":"169: Career Elbows","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/career-elbows","content_text":"01:49 - Rein Talks About His Recent Career Transition From Being a Consultant to a Full-Time Employee\n\n03:52 - Jamey Talks About the Decision to Leave Their Job \n\n\nMaking The Decision To Leave Your Comfort Zone\n\n\n05:34 - Pros and Cons of Staying for Job Stability and Comfort\n\n\nLearned Helplessness\nBeing a Part of a System\nDon’t Be The Smartest Person in The Room\nShared Space\n\n\n13:20 - Resilience and Regulatory Mechanisms\n\n\nDr. Richard Cook - REdeploy 2019 Talk\n\n\n15:59 - Interviews\n\n\nWatching Interviewers’ Reactions to Challenging Their Questions\nGerald Weinberg - Secrets of Consulting\nMost of the Things We Do Have No Effect Whatsoever in the Larger System\n\n\n20:20 - Job Success and Effort\n\n22:22 - Safety and Resilience\n\n\nAviation and Tech\nKubernetes\nDavid Woods - Resilience is a Verb\n\n\n26:05 - Interview Anxiety \n\n\nWho You Know\nGroup Bias\n\n\n30:25 - Team Creating/Building\n\n\nAssuming Competence\nConsideration of New Team Members\nDealing With Change After Being Comfortable\nSidney Dekker - Understanding Human Error\n\n\n38:04 - Feeling Comfortable in Tech\n\n\nPrivileges of Being in the Field\nSwitching Career Paths\n\n\n47:20 - Visualize How You Will Feel Working Somewhere\n\n\nAnalytical vs. Emotional Decision Making\n\n\n50:08 - No One in Tech is an Expert in Human Performance - Interviewing\n\n\nAsk Questions of the Interviewer\nBeing the One That Gets to Make the Decision\nAvdi on the Interview Process - We Should be Able to Speak Up\n\n\n58:25 - Discovering How to Make Better Systems\n\n\nTell More Stories\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"01:49 - Rein Talks About His Recent Career Transition From Being a Consultant to a Full-Time Employee
\n\n03:52 - Jamey Talks About the Decision to Leave Their Job
\n\n05:34 - Pros and Cons of Staying for Job Stability and Comfort
\n\n13:20 - Resilience and Regulatory Mechanisms
\n\n\n\n15:59 - Interviews
\n\n20:20 - Job Success and Effort
\n\n22:22 - Safety and Resilience
\n\n26:05 - Interview Anxiety
\n\n30:25 - Team Creating/Building
\n\n38:04 - Feeling Comfortable in Tech
\n\n47:20 - Visualize How You Will Feel Working Somewhere
\n\n50:08 - No One in Tech is an Expert in Human Performance - Interviewing
\n\n58:25 - Discovering How to Make Better Systems
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"The panelists discuss career transitions and share information about job searching, interviewing, and resilience.","date_published":"2020-02-12T04:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c03e0b2f-ae4a-4392-bdb0-78159e2e1de9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59153788,"duration_in_seconds":3697}]},{"id":"ef996069-815e-4453-a571-47eed17ba14f","title":"168: Appolition with Dr. Kortney Ziegler","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/appolition","content_text":"01:06 - Kortney’s Superpower: Being a visionary. Seeing things that aren’t necessarily there.\n\n01:50 - How Appolition Came to Be\n\n\nGrassroots Company Crowdfunding Money for Incarcerated Black Mothers\nTweeted About Using the Change Round Up Model\nEducating Those in Tech About What Bail Is\nGaining Trust\n\n\n07:20 - Kortney’s Professional Background\n\n\nBuilding Things in Technological Space\nPhD in 2011 - difficulty finding substantial employment\nFilmmaker, Scholar\nEncountered a lot of discrimination in professional career\nBecame Entrepreneur in 2012/2013\nAttended Filmmakers Hackathon\nLaunched Trans*H4CK\nAppolition\n\n\n13:10 - Appolition Specifics\n\n\nBail is Predatory\nEducate Yourself About Bail\nPartnered With Outside Team\n2000 Users, Waitlist of 8000\nThen Brought In House\nUnlimited Users\nWeb App - No Download Required\n\n\n19:45 - Partnering With Others To Provide Education\n\n21:00 - Surprises/Ah-Ha Moments\n\n\nThe Expenses\nHumbling to Recognize the Work That Goes Into It \nNaming of the App Traveling in Media Convos\n\n\n25:10 - The Goal of Appolition\n\n\nHow We Can Leverage Technology That Exists\n\n\n30:00 - Lessons From A Hackathon\n\n\nWent As Award Winning Filmmaker\nEngineers Not Willing to Hear Ideas of Creators\nLed to Creating Trans*H4CK\nRefuge Restroom\n\n\n35:19 - Changes Seen At Tech Events Since Trans*H4CK\n\n\nGreat Conversations and Events Happened\nStartups Can Shift Rules, They Haven’t been As Inclusive As the Discourse Surrounding Them Was Encouraging Them To Be\nSome Things Were Good, Some Things Were Bad, Some Things Need Improvement\n\n\n43:08 - Plans After Leaving Tech\n\n\nGetting Back to Creative Side\nFilmmaking\nSelf-Improvement\n\n\n45:49 - Fatigue\n\n50:00 - Future Endeavors\n\n\nFollow @Appolition\n#AppolitionBookList\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Appolition being a webapp so that it is accessible to those who don’t have smartphones. \n\nChanté: Going back into self improvement and self reflection is being tucked into the back of my mind.\n\nJacob: What are conversations I can have that I have access to about diversity and inclusion before the professional gets called in.\n\nKortney: Moved by the idea of finding community in tech.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Dr. Kortney Ziegler.","content_html":"01:06 - Kortney’s Superpower: Being a visionary. Seeing things that aren’t necessarily there.
\n\n01:50 - How Appolition Came to Be
\n\n07:20 - Kortney’s Professional Background
\n\n13:10 - Appolition Specifics
\n\n19:45 - Partnering With Others To Provide Education
\n\n21:00 - Surprises/Ah-Ha Moments
\n\n25:10 - The Goal of Appolition
\n\n30:00 - Lessons From A Hackathon
\n\n35:19 - Changes Seen At Tech Events Since Trans*H4CK
\n\n43:08 - Plans After Leaving Tech
\n\n45:49 - Fatigue
\n\n50:00 - Future Endeavors
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Appolition being a webapp so that it is accessible to those who don’t have smartphones.
\n\nChanté: Going back into self improvement and self reflection is being tucked into the back of my mind.
\n\nJacob: What are conversations I can have that I have access to about diversity and inclusion before the professional gets called in.
\n\nKortney: Moved by the idea of finding community in tech.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Dr. Kortney Ziegler.
","summary":"Dr. Kortney Ziegler talks about the Appolition app: an app that helps users turn spare change into bail money for those in need across the USA. He also talks about his involvement with Trans*H4CK, and his future plans and endeavors for when he leaves tech.","date_published":"2020-02-05T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ef996069-815e-4453-a571-47eed17ba14f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59352413,"duration_in_seconds":3709}]},{"id":"c3baa542-2288-404c-b733-94a3f5c6cef2","title":"167: Clarity of Thought with Ted M. Young","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/clarity-of-thought","content_text":"01:20 - Ted’s Superpower: Translating things for people to understand better.\n\n02:49 - Coding on a Live Stream\n\n\nCuriosity is Useful and Dangerous\nComparing Coding to Puzzles\n\n\n07:13 - Research is a Drug\n\n\nFinding Answers is Gratifying\nCurrent Reading Infects Daily Thought\nAnders Ericsson\n\n\n10:45 - Connecting the Academic Idea of Expertise to Everyday Context\n\n\nWorked Examples\nMemory Limits\nGaining a Solid Foundation for Training Purposes\nThe Path of Decision-making\n\n\n16:50 - Code Reviews\n\n\nLearning About Decisions Made Along the Way\nPair Programming and Mob Programming\nExternalizing Your Thinking\nCurse of Knowledge\n\n\n19:41 - Recording Yourself Coding/Learning Something New\n\n\nGaining Empathy\nImproving Documentation and Communication\n\n\n21:56 - Live Streaming as an Introvert\n\n\nWhat Other People Get Out of It\nSeeing People Struggle and Being Able to Help\nWe All Get Lost\nBuilding Community\nBeing Comfortable Showing Frustration\n\n\n29:41 - The Difference Between Training and Live Coding\n\n\nSuz Hinton\nAccountability in Live Coding\nPrivilege\n\n\n35:35 - Applying Research to TDD Teaching Technique\n\n\nJames Shore \nThe Thinking Part and the Predictive Aspect\nIt’s Not About the Test Failing, It’s About Validating Your Mental Model\nRetrieval Practice\nFormative and Summative Assessments\nSpaced Repetition \nAnkiApp\nThe Purpose of Patterns\n\n\n48:27 - Human Learning\n\n\nStop Teaching People What They Know and Find Out What They Don’t Know\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: ‘Predictions’ in TDD - Having more succinct language for things in your head strengthens understanding.\n\nArtemis: The concept of strengthening and muscle. If we can work deliberately on strengthening these muscles then in the moments of our everyday work we can improve the quality of our day to day decisions.\n\nTed: An aspect of expertise is you start connecting more things. We have to find a place for the ‘why.’\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Ted M. Young.","content_html":"01:20 - Ted’s Superpower: Translating things for people to understand better.
\n\n02:49 - Coding on a Live Stream
\n\n07:13 - Research is a Drug
\n\n10:45 - Connecting the Academic Idea of Expertise to Everyday Context
\n\n16:50 - Code Reviews
\n\n19:41 - Recording Yourself Coding/Learning Something New
\n\n21:56 - Live Streaming as an Introvert
\n\n29:41 - The Difference Between Training and Live Coding
\n\n35:35 - Applying Research to TDD Teaching Technique
\n\n48:27 - Human Learning
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: ‘Predictions’ in TDD - Having more succinct language for things in your head strengthens understanding.
\n\nArtemis: The concept of strengthening and muscle. If we can work deliberately on strengthening these muscles then in the moments of our everyday work we can improve the quality of our day to day decisions.
\n\nTed: An aspect of expertise is you start connecting more things. We have to find a place for the ‘why.’
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ted M. Young.
","summary":"Ted M. Young talks about coding on a live stream, research as a ‘drug,’ connecting the academic idea of expertise to everyday context, code reviews, recording yourself coding, live streaming as an introvert, the difference between training and live coding, applying research to the TDD teaching technique, and human learning.","date_published":"2020-01-29T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c3baa542-2288-404c-b733-94a3f5c6cef2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59498289,"duration_in_seconds":3718}]},{"id":"28f50a22-e984-410c-b0be-20c797bf1f02","title":"166: From Software Engineer to Management with Phil Wheeler","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/from-software-engineer-to-management","content_text":"01:10 - Phil’s Superpower: Putting Himself in Others’ Shoes.\n\n02:03/09:14 From Software Engineer to Management\n\n\nEmpathy Through The Career Shift\nThe Learning Curve\nMaking a Conscious Choice To Switch\nGaining Leadership Skills\nMaking Your Own Opportunities\n\n\n03:34 - How Phil Came Into The Greater Than Code Community\n\n\nFound Through Twitter\nCodemania\n\n\n05:54 - Commonalities Between Issues Between USA and NZ\n\n\nInclusion, Equality in Technology\n\n\n07:05 - Life Science Software Experience\n\n\nCloud Based, LT\nAwareness of Accessibility\n\n\n16:45 - To Get Into Management or Not\n\n\nIt’s Not For Everyone\nImpostor Syndrome\n\n\n18:55 - The Parallels Of Management And Parenting \n\n26:17 - Working From Home Or The Office\n\n\nSetting The Right Examples For The Team\nEncouraging People To Take Leave, Learning And Development Opportunities, Health Reasons Without Repercussions\n\n\n31:47 - Living In A College/University Town\n\n32:54 - Overcoming Impostor Syndrome\n\n\nExists In The Technology Sector\nExists In Other Disciplines\nTurn The Ship Around!\nThe Manager’s Path\n\n\n35:58 - Empathy For Managers And Employees\n\n\nLeadership Development\nSelf-Reflection/Self-Awareness\nJournaling/Note Taking\nBecoming A Technical Leader\n\n\n51:11 - Phil’s Thoughts For The Future\n\n\nCitizens Before Consumers\nWhat Can We Do Better?\nThe Global Digital Citizen Foundation\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJacob: Happy being an individual contributor but contributing to the art of management by being a better employee and having empathy for managers.\n\nPhil: Self-Awareness and empathy. Wanting to push his people in a certain direction but taking that step back and determining where that motivation is coming from.\n\nChanté: Impostor syndrome: at some point in time we’re all impostors. Doing reading about leadership can help whether you are taking that path or not.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Phil Wheeler.","content_html":"01:10 - Phil’s Superpower: Putting Himself in Others’ Shoes.
\n\n02:03/09:14 From Software Engineer to Management
\n\n03:34 - How Phil Came Into The Greater Than Code Community
\n\n05:54 - Commonalities Between Issues Between USA and NZ
\n\n07:05 - Life Science Software Experience
\n\n16:45 - To Get Into Management or Not
\n\n18:55 - The Parallels Of Management And Parenting
\n\n26:17 - Working From Home Or The Office
\n\n31:47 - Living In A College/University Town
\n\n32:54 - Overcoming Impostor Syndrome
\n\n35:58 - Empathy For Managers And Employees
\n\n51:11 - Phil’s Thoughts For The Future
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Happy being an individual contributor but contributing to the art of management by being a better employee and having empathy for managers.
\n\nPhil: Self-Awareness and empathy. Wanting to push his people in a certain direction but taking that step back and determining where that motivation is coming from.
\n\nChanté: Impostor syndrome: at some point in time we’re all impostors. Doing reading about leadership can help whether you are taking that path or not.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Phil Wheeler.
","summary":"Phil Wheeler talks about making the move from software engineer to into management, how he came into the GTC community, commonalities between the US and NZ, the life science software experience, determining if one should get into management, the parallels of management and parenting, working from home or the office, overcoming impostor syndrome, empathy for managers and employees, and his thoughts for the future.","date_published":"2020-01-22T12:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/28f50a22-e984-410c-b0be-20c797bf1f02.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59800907,"duration_in_seconds":3737}]},{"id":"40e8589b-23dc-402e-ab6d-b8c1f45d0445","title":"Fast & Furious with Penelope Phippen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/fastandfurious","content_text":"Please enjoy this mini-episode of Greater Than Code featuring guest Penelope Phippen as we begin to pivot to our new podcast theme, the Fast & Furious. *\n\n( * Just kidding, we are still a tech podcast.)\n\nBut we do hope you enjoy this set of outtakes where we grill Penelope on her Fast & Furious knowledge and speculate about the future of the franchise.)\n\nThis is the kind of content we normally release exclusively to our Patreon subscribers, but we didn't want to hoard such joy, so it's a gift to all of you. But if you want more content like this, an invite to our Slack group, AND an invite to the Fast & Furious party at Jamey's house, please support us on Patreon! * \n\n( * That is also a joke, if you're a Patron, thank you for your support, but please don't show up to Jamey's house unannounced.)Special Guest: Penelope Phippen.","content_html":"Please enjoy this mini-episode of Greater Than Code featuring guest Penelope Phippen as we begin to pivot to our new podcast theme, the Fast & Furious. *
\n\n( * Just kidding, we are still a tech podcast.)
\n\nBut we do hope you enjoy this set of outtakes where we grill Penelope on her Fast & Furious knowledge and speculate about the future of the franchise.)
\n\nThis is the kind of content we normally release exclusively to our Patreon subscribers, but we didn't want to hoard such joy, so it's a gift to all of you. But if you want more content like this, an invite to our Slack group, AND an invite to the Fast & Furious party at Jamey's house, please support us on Patreon! *
\n\n( * That is also a joke, if you're a Patron, thank you for your support, but please don't show up to Jamey's house unannounced.)
Special Guest: Penelope Phippen.
","summary":"Please enjoy this mini-episode of Greater Than Code featuring guest Penelope Phippen as we begin to pivot to our new podcast theme, the Fast & Furious. *\r\n\r\n( * Just kidding, we are still a tech podcast.)\r\n\r\nBut we do hope you enjoy this set of outtakes where we grill Penelope on her Fast & Furious knowledge and speculate about the future of the franchise.","date_published":"2020-01-15T12:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/40e8589b-23dc-402e-ab6d-b8c1f45d0445.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":6225055,"duration_in_seconds":618}]},{"id":"affdd630-38ca-4160-bdc5-b6be883b609f","title":"165: Rubyfmt with Penelope Phippen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/rubyfmt","content_text":"01:37 - Penelope’s Superpower: An extremely cursed knowledge of the Ruby programming language’s grammar.\n\n03:09 - Writing Ruby Programming\n\n05:50 - Why Penelope is Doing This the Way She Is\n\n\nWere Any Bugs Found in the Ruby Grammar \nThere is No Spec\nThere is No Written Standard for How Ruby is Supposed to Work\n\n\n07:32 - Inability to Extract Parse.y Out\n\n\nPenelope’s Ideas\n\n\n12:02 - What Problem Penelope is Trying to Solve With This Program\n\n\nRubocop Doesn’t Well Solve This Problem\n\n\n18:30 - Hierarchy of Nitpicking\n\n20:35 - Opportunities for Collaboration\n\n22:44 - Major Challenges Faced \n\n\nFinding Time\nNo Major Challenges\nCommunity Overwhelmingly Welcoming\nThis is Not a Gem\n\n\n25:58 - What Others Will Do With Rubyfmt\n\n28:08 - Finding Time and Motivation to Work on Rubyfmt\n\n30:00 - Why Penelope Hasn’t Got Pushback\n\n\nThere Isn’t Another Tool in This Class for Ruby\n\n\n34:25 - Heretically Creating An Ergonomic Way To Work With ASTs\n\n37:00 - The Fate of Regional Ruby Conferences\n\n\nRegional Conferences Are Valuable For Other People\nSpeakers Can Get Their Start\nLocal Conferences Can Benefit Local Speakers\nStruggling to Get Speakers\nOrganizers Burnout and No One Takes Over\n$$ - Hard to Break Even\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Penelope Phippen.","content_html":"01:37 - Penelope’s Superpower: An extremely cursed knowledge of the Ruby programming language’s grammar.
\n\n03:09 - Writing Ruby Programming
\n\n05:50 - Why Penelope is Doing This the Way She Is
\n\n07:32 - Inability to Extract Parse.y Out
\n\n12:02 - What Problem Penelope is Trying to Solve With This Program
\n\n18:30 - Hierarchy of Nitpicking
\n\n20:35 - Opportunities for Collaboration
\n\n22:44 - Major Challenges Faced
\n\n25:58 - What Others Will Do With Rubyfmt
\n\n28:08 - Finding Time and Motivation to Work on Rubyfmt
\n\n30:00 - Why Penelope Hasn’t Got Pushback
\n\n34:25 - Heretically Creating An Ergonomic Way To Work With ASTs
\n\n37:00 - The Fate of Regional Ruby Conferences
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Penelope Phippen.
","summary":"Penelope Phippen talks about the development of Rubyfmt, writing Ruby programming, why she is doing things the way she is, what problem she is trying to solve with this program, the hierarchy of nitpicking, opportunities for collaboration, challenges faced, what others will do with Rubyfmt, finding time and motivation to work on the program, why she hasn’t received any pushback, and the fate of regional Ruby conferences.","date_published":"2020-01-15T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/affdd630-38ca-4160-bdc5-b6be883b609f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":51757256,"duration_in_seconds":3234}]},{"id":"ed63069a-f12f-439c-b194-fc8e79dec78c","title":"164: Psychological Balance with Dr. Mireille Reece","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/psychological-balance","content_text":"01:14 - Mireille’s Superpower: Being just herself. The sense of respect around the individuality of every person.\n\n02:30 - Being Different From Others is a Good Thing\n\n\nNature vs. Nurture\nEpigenetics\n\n\n05:59 - Our Brains and Empathy\n\n\nMirror Neurons\nDr. Dan Siegel\nThe Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon/Frequency Illusion\n\n\n11:15 - The Brain vs. The Mind\n\n\nExtended Cognition\nSensation and Perception\nSurvival Rules - Virginia Satir\n\n\n19:22 - Three Brains in One\n\n21:51 - HPA Axis\n\n\nDr. John Briere\n\n\n23:06 - Overcoming Unconscious Impulses\n\n\nFight or Flight\nCollateral Data\nBrené Brown\nGrounding\n\n\n26:56 - Affective Prosody\n\n\nGavin de Becker - The Gift of Fear\nIncongruence\n\n\n33:26 - Balancing Transparency at Work\n\n\nHumanity in Tech\nCodeswitching\nArianna Huffington \nRelationships at Work\nPsychological Safety\nShame\nLearned Helplessness\n\n\n48:41 - Effort Over Outcome\n\n56:15 - Using the Word “While”\n\n59:25 - Decoding Your Anger\n\n\nUsing Energy\n\n\n01:05:28 - “Plays” or Neural Routes\n\n01:09:20 - Correlation vs. Causation\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Bringing our whole self to work without thinking about punishment or reprisal. Finding psychological safety.\n\nJacob: How he thinks one of the biggest problems in the tech industry is that there is this brick wall around feelings and how feelings and work don’t mix. Rather than a brick wall, what kind of filter can we put in front of our emotional lives that is appropriate for the professional world?\n\nMireille: It really is around being able to see other people as people and when we do that most of the time people are not trying to make our lives more difficult.\n\nCheck out Mireille’s podcast Brain Science here.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Dr. Mireille Reece.","content_html":"01:14 - Mireille’s Superpower: Being just herself. The sense of respect around the individuality of every person.
\n\n02:30 - Being Different From Others is a Good Thing
\n\n05:59 - Our Brains and Empathy
\n\n11:15 - The Brain vs. The Mind
\n\n19:22 - Three Brains in One
\n\n21:51 - HPA Axis
\n\n23:06 - Overcoming Unconscious Impulses
\n\n26:56 - Affective Prosody
\n\n33:26 - Balancing Transparency at Work
\n\n48:41 - Effort Over Outcome
\n\n56:15 - Using the Word “While”
\n\n59:25 - Decoding Your Anger
\n\n01:05:28 - “Plays” or Neural Routes
\n\n01:09:20 - Correlation vs. Causation
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Bringing our whole self to work without thinking about punishment or reprisal. Finding psychological safety.
\n\nJacob: How he thinks one of the biggest problems in the tech industry is that there is this brick wall around feelings and how feelings and work don’t mix. Rather than a brick wall, what kind of filter can we put in front of our emotional lives that is appropriate for the professional world?
\n\nMireille: It really is around being able to see other people as people and when we do that most of the time people are not trying to make our lives more difficult.
\n\nCheck out Mireille’s podcast Brain Science here.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Dr. Mireille Reece.
","summary":"Mireille Reece talks about epigenetics, our brains and empathy, the brain versus the mind, three brains in one, HPA Axis, overcoming unconscious impulses, affective prosody, balancing transparency at work, effort over outcome, using the word “while”, decoding your anger, neural routes, and correlation vs. causation.","date_published":"2020-01-08T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ed63069a-f12f-439c-b194-fc8e79dec78c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":81273732,"duration_in_seconds":5079}]},{"id":"757de462-e3eb-4b8b-960d-23de2e32da75","title":"163: Cause A Scene with Kim Crayton","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/cause-a-scene","content_text":"01:24 - Kim’s Superpower: Being a Black Woman in Tech with a Strategy and a Platform.\n\n02:21 - Continuously Validating Your Space as a Black Woman\n\n\nTechnical vs. Technology\nKamala Harris Suspending Her Campaign\nInclusion, Diversity, and Business Strategy\n\n\n08:10 - The System was Built to Harm and Oppress Black Women\n\n\nLift Ev’ry Voice and Sing\nStacey Abrams\nF*ck Civility\nWhite People are on a Spectrum of Racist\nIbram Kendi: How To Be an Antiracist\nBlack People Cannot be Racist\n\n\n15:42 - The Only Power Black People Have is the Power Whiteness Has Given Them\n\n\nCapitalism, Communism, Marxism, Socialism are Theories Rooted in White Supremacy\n\n\n21:24 - White Feminism is Bullsh*t\n\n\nWhite Women are Now the Default Diversity in Tech\n\n\n25:50 - Being a Strategist\n\n\nInfluencing Small to Medium Sized Business\nMaking Meaningful Impactful Change in Tech\n\n\n33:15 - #causeascene\n\n35:41 - Price Asymmetry \n\n36:48 - Kim’s Six-Step Process\n\n40:15 - Stop Looking for Simple Solutions to Complex Problems\n\n\nDefining Racism Beyond the Dictionary Definition\n\n\n44:29 - Future of Jobs Report from World Economic Forum\n\n45:55 - Strategies for Developing Your Other Technical Skills\n\n48:15 - Bounded Rationality\n\n\nFacts Change, Truth Remains the Same\nCollaboration Over Competition\n\n\n52:10 - Can We Have Antiracist Capitalism?\n\n01:00:59 - Defining Racism\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Kim Crayton.","content_html":"01:24 - Kim’s Superpower: Being a Black Woman in Tech with a Strategy and a Platform.
\n\n02:21 - Continuously Validating Your Space as a Black Woman
\n\n08:10 - The System was Built to Harm and Oppress Black Women
\n\n15:42 - The Only Power Black People Have is the Power Whiteness Has Given Them
\n\n21:24 - White Feminism is Bullsh*t
\n\n25:50 - Being a Strategist
\n\n33:15 - #causeascene
\n\n35:41 - Price Asymmetry
\n\n36:48 - Kim’s Six-Step Process
\n\n40:15 - Stop Looking for Simple Solutions to Complex Problems
\n\n44:29 - Future of Jobs Report from World Economic Forum
\n\n45:55 - Strategies for Developing Your Other Technical Skills
\n\n48:15 - Bounded Rationality
\n\n52:10 - Can We Have Antiracist Capitalism?
\n\n01:00:59 - Defining Racism
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kim Crayton.
","summary":"Kim Crayton talks about continuously validating her space as a black woman, how the system was built to harm and oppress black women, white feminism being bullsh*t, being a strategist, #causeascene, price asymmetry, her six-step process, strategies for developing other technical skills, and defining racism.","date_published":"2020-01-01T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/757de462-e3eb-4b8b-960d-23de2e32da75.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":61572200,"duration_in_seconds":3848}]},{"id":"b9bccb73-5f8c-478d-a672-1c6a66c177a8","title":"162: Glue Work with Denise Yu","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/glue-work","content_text":"00:58 - Denise’s Superpower: She is a classically trained musician and is good at transcribing music in her head.\n\n03:30 - Glue Work\n\n\nTanya Reilly\nDoing Tasks That Are Adjacent to Coding\nScheduling\nMaking Sure Meetings Have Agendas\nWho Tends to do Glue Work\nEmotional Labor\n\n\n13:07 - What Denise Has Done to Improve the Glue Work Situation\n\n\nHaving the Terminology Helps A Lot\n\n\n17:31 - How to Address Changing the Structure of Glue Work\n\n\nThinking Globally and Acting Locally\nBurnout\nWriting More Feedback Than Managers Expect\nWriting Feedback About Glue Work\nVirginia Satir\n\n\n31:40 - Offboarding Yourself\n\n37:10 - Release Engineering\n\n39:45 - Being a Product Manager\n\n46:39 - Being Back in the Development Role\n\n\nWorking With Teams\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The distinction between glue work that is just work that you are doing and glue work that you are enjoying and getting satisfaction out of. See what he can do to add glue work tasks into evaluations and part of everyone’s job.\n\nRein: Burnout isn’t just working long hours. Burnout becomes a real danger when those things combine with acute alienation. \n\nJacob: If product managers tried to be more transparent with their day to day tasks, and trying to listen more himself to what the PMs are saying. \n\nDenise: Thinking globally but solving locally. Always be offboarding yourself.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Denise Yu.","content_html":"00:58 - Denise’s Superpower: She is a classically trained musician and is good at transcribing music in her head.
\n\n03:30 - Glue Work
\n\n13:07 - What Denise Has Done to Improve the Glue Work Situation
\n\n17:31 - How to Address Changing the Structure of Glue Work
\n\n31:40 - Offboarding Yourself
\n\n37:10 - Release Engineering
\n\n39:45 - Being a Product Manager
\n\n46:39 - Being Back in the Development Role
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The distinction between glue work that is just work that you are doing and glue work that you are enjoying and getting satisfaction out of. See what he can do to add glue work tasks into evaluations and part of everyone’s job.
\n\nRein: Burnout isn’t just working long hours. Burnout becomes a real danger when those things combine with acute alienation.
\n\nJacob: If product managers tried to be more transparent with their day to day tasks, and trying to listen more himself to what the PMs are saying.
\n\nDenise: Thinking globally but solving locally. Always be offboarding yourself.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Denise Yu.
","summary":"Denise Yu talks about the concept of \"Glue Work\", what she has done to improve the glue work situation, how to address changing the structure of glue work, offboarding yourself, release engineering, being a product manager, and being back in a development role.","date_published":"2019-12-25T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b9bccb73-5f8c-478d-a672-1c6a66c177a8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59143014,"duration_in_seconds":3696}]},{"id":"63231577-d539-4824-a359-fb5751f51320","title":"161: Making Space with Bärí A. Williams","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/making-space","content_text":"01:48 - Bärí’s Superpower: Being a Black Woman\n\n05:20/22:50 - Admitting and Knowing What You Don’t Know\n\n\nIntersectionality and Culture\n\n\n10:00 - Born and Raised in Oakland\n\n\nGentrification\nWhat is the Deficit of the City\nBeing Connected to Your Roots\n\n\n19:30 - Unintended Consequences\n\n\nBuilding Algorithms That Fact Check\nYou Don’t Know What You Don’t Know\nFacts Are Not Facts Anymore\nTutorial to Boy Scouts About Getting Stopped by Police\nKeeping the Kids Alive\n\n\n33:15 - Where is the Light (In the Technology)\n\n\nTechnology is the Mirror of the People Creating It\nCreating an Open Space\nPrioritizing Important Events\n\n\n42:34 - Getting Organizations to Buy Into the Open Space Concept\n\n48:50 - Who’s Job is it to Educate the Children About Bias\n\n\nAllyship\nSeeing White Podcast\n\n\n58:47 - Diversity or Inclusion\n\n\nLagging Metric or Leading Metric\nDraw People In With Inclusion\n\n\n01:03:59 - Taking Space and Making Space \n\nReflections:\n\nArty: Multigenerational roots, becoming your own being, being raised to be proud of yourself and say what you think. Be the roots for the people around you. There has been a loss of grounding.\n\nChanté: Bärí is the real deal. It takes only a few to change history. Being real is valuable.\n\nJacob: Wants his son to know that he won’t have to worry when being pulled over, and he should be troubled by that fact.\n\nBärí: What do you connect to, who do you connect to? What and who are you thankful for? Think about that.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Bärí A. Williams.Sponsored By:SideTrak: SideTrak is an ultra-portable USB monitor that attaches to the back of your laptop for a more productive workday whether you are home, at the office, in a coffee shop, or on-the-go! Anyone who works with two screens knows just how tedious multitasking and referencing documents can be on a laptop. SideTrak allows you to combine the portability of a laptop and the productivity of a dual monitor setup. Studies show that you are 24% more productive and can save 4+ hours a week working with two\r\nscreens. Imagine what you can accomplish with all that extra time! I love my SideTrak portable monitor. It's a must-have and super easy to use. For 10% off, visit sidetrak.com/discount/GREATERTHANCODE Promo Code: greaterthancode","content_html":"01:48 - Bärí’s Superpower: Being a Black Woman
\n\n05:20/22:50 - Admitting and Knowing What You Don’t Know
\n\n10:00 - Born and Raised in Oakland
\n\n19:30 - Unintended Consequences
\n\n33:15 - Where is the Light (In the Technology)
\n\n42:34 - Getting Organizations to Buy Into the Open Space Concept
\n\n48:50 - Who’s Job is it to Educate the Children About Bias
\n\n58:47 - Diversity or Inclusion
\n\n01:03:59 - Taking Space and Making Space
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: Multigenerational roots, becoming your own being, being raised to be proud of yourself and say what you think. Be the roots for the people around you. There has been a loss of grounding.
\n\nChanté: Bärí is the real deal. It takes only a few to change history. Being real is valuable.
\n\nJacob: Wants his son to know that he won’t have to worry when being pulled over, and he should be troubled by that fact.
\n\nBärí: What do you connect to, who do you connect to? What and who are you thankful for? Think about that.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Bärí A. Williams.
Sponsored By:
01:50 - Getting Sucked into Twitter Vortexes
\n\n03:06 - Dynamics of Human Emotion
\n\n\n\n05:36 - Creating Safe Spaces for Emotionally Charged Conversations
\n\n07:57 - Radical Inclusion
\n\n09:49 - Overidentification/Over Attachment to Tribalism
\n\n12:15 - Digital Activism
\n\n15:22 - Tribal Dynamics
\n\n16:45 - People From Oppressed Groups Have the Right to Rage
\n\n24:30 - The Changing Frequencies of People
\n\n26:58 - Call-Out Culture
\n\n32:20 - We Are All Human!
\n\nReflections:
\n\nArty: How much our connectivity is an opportunity to see our diversity and the strength and power and creative coolness of one another and if we can come together in shared space, what is the vision we can craft together.
\n\nChanté: Synchronicity and thinking about the way things happen. Glad to have this conversation.
\n\nJacob: How to make a community of people that can have difficult conversations, certain boundaries need to be respected.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
On this day in Paris in 1948, the United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that sets out the fundamental rights and privileges of all people and all nations. In honor of the anniversary of this document, the panelists of Greater Than Code have come together to share their reading of the document with all of you.
","summary":"On this day in Paris in 1948, the United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that sets out the fundamental rights and privileges of all people and all nations. In honor of the anniversary of this document, the panelists of Greater Than Code have come together to share their reading of the document with all of you.","date_published":"2019-12-10T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/2f4e69ee-3dc8-4a75-bbaf-967665e29c20.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":14605500,"duration_in_seconds":730}]},{"id":"39a7c325-2407-4f07-850c-935057737391","title":"159: Bias in AI with Lauren Maffeo","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/bias-in-ai","content_text":"02:26 - Lauren’s Superpower: Remembering Useful Yet Sentimental Facts About People\n\n03:57 - Lauren’s Professional Background\n\n07:35 - Bias in the Downsides of AI\n\n\nAutomation vs. Augmentation\nMeredith Broussard\n\n\n11:15 - Media and AI/How the Media Affects People’s Perception of AI\n\n14:32 - Concerns of Small and Midsize Businesses Pertaining to AI\n\n18:37 - How to Mitigate Bias in AI\n\n22:23 - Ethics in AI\n\n\nLoomis v. Wisconsin\n\n\n25:39 - Defining Bias in AI\n\n\nGeorgetown University Law Center\nUnconscious Bias\nHarvard Implicit Bias Test\n\n\n32:04 - Fairness vs. Accuracy in Algorithms\n\n38:30 - Preventing Bias in AI Resources\n\n\nGartner\nTowards Data Science Blog\nGithub\n\n\n41:00 - Working Remotely\n\n\nProactively Communicating\nSetting Boundaries\n\n\n50:45 - Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace\n\n\nSlack\nAubrey Blanche, Atlassian\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Lauren talking about the work she’s doing to pre-educate people so they can prevent themselves from getting in trouble even before they build their models.\n\nChanté: It’s not enough to just be doing this internally. Bias happens in all shapes, sizes, and forms and it’s important to recognize that.\n\nJacob: In a biased society we can’t expect completely unbiased data; therefore we can’t train an algorithm on the theoretical equitable world that we want to create. There will always be a trace of the bias we have now.\n\nLauren: The first step is acknowledging the bias exists in the first place.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps,LLC.\nTo pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Lauren Maffeo.Sponsored By:SideTrak: SideTrak is an ultra-portable USB monitor that attaches to the back of your laptop for a more productive workday whether you are home, at the office, in a coffee shop, or on-the-go! Anyone who works with two screens knows just how tedious multitasking and referencing documents can be on a laptop. SideTrak allows you to combine the portability of a laptop and the productivity of a dual monitor setup. Studies show that you are 24% more productive and can save 4+ hours a week working with two\r\nscreens. Imagine what you can accomplish with all that extra time! I love my SideTrak portable monitor. It's a must-have and super easy to use. For 10% off, visit sidetrak.com/discount/GREATERTHANCODE Promo Code: greaterthancode","content_html":"02:26 - Lauren’s Superpower: Remembering Useful Yet Sentimental Facts About People
\n\n03:57 - Lauren’s Professional Background
\n\n07:35 - Bias in the Downsides of AI
\n\n11:15 - Media and AI/How the Media Affects People’s Perception of AI
\n\n14:32 - Concerns of Small and Midsize Businesses Pertaining to AI
\n\n18:37 - How to Mitigate Bias in AI
\n\n22:23 - Ethics in AI
\n\n\n\n25:39 - Defining Bias in AI
\n\n32:04 - Fairness vs. Accuracy in Algorithms
\n\n38:30 - Preventing Bias in AI Resources
\n\n\n\n41:00 - Working Remotely
\n\n50:45 - Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Lauren talking about the work she’s doing to pre-educate people so they can prevent themselves from getting in trouble even before they build their models.
\n\nChanté: It’s not enough to just be doing this internally. Bias happens in all shapes, sizes, and forms and it’s important to recognize that.
\n\nJacob: In a biased society we can’t expect completely unbiased data; therefore we can’t train an algorithm on the theoretical equitable world that we want to create. There will always be a trace of the bias we have now.
\n\nLauren: The first step is acknowledging the bias exists in the first place.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps,LLC.
\nTo pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Lauren Maffeo.
Sponsored By:
01:22 - Ariel’s Superpower: Extreme Irritability
\n\n07:30 - Accessibility Needs - Learning What Irritates Others
\n\n16:05 - Rabbinical School
\n\n20:30 - Developing Company/Corporate Values
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Using the process of establishing and/or revising values as a way of pulling in the experience of marginalized people in the company.
\n\nJamey: Think about who your values put pressure on.
\n\nJacob: Balance between whether values should be aspirational or should they be a reflection of things that people in the company have already internalized.
\n\nAriel: Aspirational vs. Reflective values and when is the right time for each. Also, there is a point of giving too much weight to the values.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ariel Caplan.
Sponsored By:
01:12 - Willem’s Superpower: Meta
\n\n02:20 - Accelerated Community Learning
\n\n12:45 - Reimagining the Education System
\n\n24:20 - Stages of Human Life
\n\n41:10 - The Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium
\n\n57:01 - Listening to What the Community Needs
\n\nThe Fall of Civilizations Podcast
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Local communities can surely agree on and find really innovative ways they can provide for each other.
\n\nArty: The magic can only happen with the existing system being out of the way and space being created for the people with the spaces and the people with the programs to work together around the shared interest.
\n\nWillem: Our culture has all these impediments to navigating complex systems in wise ways. We should get out of the way of people we have more power than and listen to the system and provide resources to the system.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Willem Larsen.
","summary":"Willem Larsen talks about accelerated community learning, reimagining the education system, stages of human life, the Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium, and listening to what the community needs.","date_published":"2019-11-20T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e714bfd7-bd42-4062-a8b3-805d3a219e85.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":73333577,"duration_in_seconds":4583}]},{"id":"1ae413c3-c2c2-4f5c-9c6b-caaa1b8e9c5e","title":"156: Authenticity in Interviewing with James Edward Gray II","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/authenticity-in-interviewing","content_text":"01:30 - James’ Superpower: Spending time chasing his daughter and her robots around. Helping with her robotics club at school.\n\n02:37 - “Just Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice\n\n03:50 - What Are You Trying to Accomplish in the Interview\n\n06:00 - Be Authentic: Which Parts of Yourself to Show\n\n\nBe a Strong Communicator\nBe an Avid Learner\nDon’t be a Jerk\n\n\n07:25 - Turn Your Interviewers into Your Advocates\n\n12:42 - Technical Interviews\n\n\nSaying “I Don’t Know” is OK\n\n\n16:00 Interviewee as the Interviewer\n\n\nMake Sure You Want to Work Here\nAnswer Questions Honestly\n\n\n18:53 - Prepare for Common Interview Questions\n\n\nRephrasing Weakness\n\n\n23:34 - Intrinsic Motivation\n\n\nMastery by Robert Greene\n\n\n29:29 - Storytelling in the Interview\n\n\nBeing Confident in Your Accomplishments\nInterviewers Explain Why You Are Asking the Question\n\n\n37:15 - Management Techniques\n\n\nRichard Cook\nHerbert Simon\n\n\n45:00 - Why Technical Interviews are Challenging\n\n\nCracking the Coding Interview\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Setting the context for being approachable as an interviewer is important.\n\nRein: Some of this advice works all the time, and some of this advice only works when you have been able to develop a personal connection with the interviewer/interviewee. \n\nJames: Think about if this is a place you want to work while interviewing.\n\nAvdi: Turning your interviewer into your advocate can help them also be able to tell you if this place will be a good fit for you.\n\nJessica: It’s not just about being able to interview well as the interviewee, but we need to choose a company that can interview well too. Ask your personal contacts about what it is like to work at a certain company.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: James Edward Gray.","content_html":"01:30 - James’ Superpower: Spending time chasing his daughter and her robots around. Helping with her robotics club at school.
\n\n02:37 - “Just Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice
\n\n03:50 - What Are You Trying to Accomplish in the Interview
\n\n06:00 - Be Authentic: Which Parts of Yourself to Show
\n\n07:25 - Turn Your Interviewers into Your Advocates
\n\n12:42 - Technical Interviews
\n\n16:00 Interviewee as the Interviewer
\n\n18:53 - Prepare for Common Interview Questions
\n\n23:34 - Intrinsic Motivation
\n\n\n\n29:29 - Storytelling in the Interview
\n\n37:15 - Management Techniques
\n\n\n\n45:00 - Why Technical Interviews are Challenging
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Setting the context for being approachable as an interviewer is important.
\n\nRein: Some of this advice works all the time, and some of this advice only works when you have been able to develop a personal connection with the interviewer/interviewee.
\n\nJames: Think about if this is a place you want to work while interviewing.
\n\nAvdi: Turning your interviewer into your advocate can help them also be able to tell you if this place will be a good fit for you.
\n\nJessica: It’s not just about being able to interview well as the interviewee, but we need to choose a company that can interview well too. Ask your personal contacts about what it is like to work at a certain company.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: James Edward Gray.
","summary":"James Edward Gray II talks about why “Just Be Yourself” is terrible advice, being authentic in an interview, turning your interviewer into your advocate, intrinsic motivation, technical interviews, storytelling in the interview, and management techniques.","date_published":"2019-11-13T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/1ae413c3-c2c2-4f5c-9c6b-caaa1b8e9c5e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":60345502,"duration_in_seconds":3771}]},{"id":"6409c46f-4a4f-4d37-9caa-babd1249db38","title":"155: Ethical Open Source with Don Goodman-Wilson","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/ethical-open-source","content_text":"01:10 - Don’s Superpower: He is a generalist. He has lots of skills he can bring together in one place.\n\n02:25 - Ethics and Open Source\n\n\nOpen Source is Broken\nOSI\nHow Can we Make Sure Our Code isn’t Weaponized\n\n\n08:34 - Consequentialism vs Contractualism \n\n\nOSI FAQ\nFree Software Foundation\n\n\n18:15 - The Paradox of Tolerance/Paradox of Openness\n\n19:15 - Is Licensing the Right Mechanism for Bringing Ethics into Open Source\n\n23:40 - Enforceability of Open Source Licenses\n\n28:40 - Compensation as an Ethical Consideration\n\n34:30 - Quantifying the Value the Open Source Software Gives\n\n38:24 - Empowering People Who Participate in Open Source\n\n\nIt’s OK to Question Authority\nNot Everyone Has the Privilege to Participate in Open Source\nEthics in Open Source Licenses\n\n\n48:31 Tierney Cyren @bitandbang\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Don Goodman-Wilson.","content_html":"01:10 - Don’s Superpower: He is a generalist. He has lots of skills he can bring together in one place.
\n\n02:25 - Ethics and Open Source
\n\n08:34 - Consequentialism vs Contractualism
\n\n\n\n18:15 - The Paradox of Tolerance/Paradox of Openness
\n\n19:15 - Is Licensing the Right Mechanism for Bringing Ethics into Open Source
\n\n23:40 - Enforceability of Open Source Licenses
\n\n28:40 - Compensation as an Ethical Consideration
\n\n34:30 - Quantifying the Value the Open Source Software Gives
\n\n38:24 - Empowering People Who Participate in Open Source
\n\n48:31 Tierney Cyren @bitandbang
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Don Goodman-Wilson.
","summary":"Don Goodman-Wilson talks about ethics and Open Source, consequentialism vs contractualism, the paradox of tolerance, enforceability of open source licenses, compensation as an ethical consideration, quantifying the value the Open Source Software gives, and empowering people who participate in Open Source.","date_published":"2019-11-06T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/6409c46f-4a4f-4d37-9caa-babd1249db38.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":52935913,"duration_in_seconds":3308}]},{"id":"f434c7b6-1115-4a22-a83c-c5195628fd1d","title":"154: Filtering Your Brain with Ambreen Hasan","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/filtering-your-brain","content_text":"01:12 - Ambreen’s Non-Technical Superpower: She is Very Good at Zoning People Out\n\n\nLearning necessary information from conversations\n\n\n03:20 - Ambreen’s Technical Superpower: Any Challenge She is Given She Will Try to Just Do It\n\n\nComfort with Uncertainty\n\n\n06:03 - Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset\n\n\nIt’s OK to Not Know Everything\nUsing Resources to Your Advantage\n\n\n08:40 - Ambreen’s Hobbies Outside of Software\n\n10:10 - Thinking About Things in a Molecular Way\n\n\nTaking Chunks at a Time When Learning Something New\nBreaking Down Big Concepts into Small Things You Can Learn\nBeing Comfortable Being Uncomfortable\n\n\n13:45 - Ambreen’s Journey to Software Engineering\n\n\nC++\nTurning a Love Into a Career\nRuby, Rails, Go, Docker\n\n\n20:30 - Self-Advocating for New Work Experience\n\n22:00 - Empathy in Engineering\n\n\nAuditory Fatigue\nPair Programming vs Mob Programming\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Intentionally recognizing uncomfortable learning situations and be okay with it.\n\nJacob: Your emotional state does matter at work and we as professionals need to recognize that this has relevance to one’s ability to do work.\n\nArty: It is important to help others to be able to come out of their comfort zone and be ok with not knowing everything.\n\nAmbreen: Likes Jacob’s idea of being productively lost, but there is progress being made. There are many different styles of learning.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Ambreen Hasan.","content_html":"01:12 - Ambreen’s Non-Technical Superpower: She is Very Good at Zoning People Out
\n\n03:20 - Ambreen’s Technical Superpower: Any Challenge She is Given She Will Try to Just Do It
\n\n06:03 - Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
\n\n08:40 - Ambreen’s Hobbies Outside of Software
\n\n10:10 - Thinking About Things in a Molecular Way
\n\n13:45 - Ambreen’s Journey to Software Engineering
\n\n20:30 - Self-Advocating for New Work Experience
\n\n22:00 - Empathy in Engineering
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Intentionally recognizing uncomfortable learning situations and be okay with it.
\n\nJacob: Your emotional state does matter at work and we as professionals need to recognize that this has relevance to one’s ability to do work.
\n\nArty: It is important to help others to be able to come out of their comfort zone and be ok with not knowing everything.
\n\nAmbreen: Likes Jacob’s idea of being productively lost, but there is progress being made. There are many different styles of learning.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ambreen Hasan.
","summary":"Ambreen Hasan talks about fixed mindset vs growth mindset, her hobbies outside of software, thinking about things in a molecular way, her journey into software engineering, self-advocating for new work experience, and empathy in engineering.","date_published":"2019-10-30T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f434c7b6-1115-4a22-a83c-c5195628fd1d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":42989321,"duration_in_seconds":2686}]},{"id":"498f8fbc-1260-4a1d-a191-ef7fb65b9467","title":"153: Your Favorite Philosopher Is You with Mannah Kallon","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/your-favorite-philosopher-is-you","content_text":"01:16 - Mannah’s Superpower: He is Comfortable in His Own Skin\n\n\nBeing Yourself\n\n\n02:17 - Assessing Identity and Evaluating Sense of Self in New Culture\n\n\nWhat a Philosopher is\n\n\n03:42 - Quoting Beyoncé and Using the B Word\n\n\nWho Takes Offense?\nIs Everyone Given the Same Consideration?\n\n\n06:25 - Moments of Self Doubt When Someone Doesn’t Believe You\n\n\nSimone de Beauvoir\nAddressing Terms of Identity with Conversation\nBotham Jean, Forgiveness, and Role Reversal\n\n\n09:14 - Empathy\n\n\nWho is Your Favorite Philosopher\nHaving the Ability to Consider and Alternative Viewpoint\n\n\n11:22 - Retaliation is a Thing\n\n\nImpeachment Whistleblower\nKavanaugh Investigation\nRowena Chiu\nColin Kaepernick\n\n\n16:33 - How to Deal With Coming Across a Viewpoint You Don’t Think Has Merit\n\n\nIt is Healthy to Have a Level of Empathy for Your Enemies\nAssigning Value to Situations\n\n\n18:56 - The Supreme Court Voting on Protections\n\n\nSystemic Hatred\nLife, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness \n\n\n23:23 - Origins of Thoughts and Root Causes\n\n28:57 - Recognizing Privilege\n\n\nRowena Chiu: Opinion | 'Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls …\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Mannah Kallon.","content_html":"01:16 - Mannah’s Superpower: He is Comfortable in His Own Skin
\n\n02:17 - Assessing Identity and Evaluating Sense of Self in New Culture
\n\n03:42 - Quoting Beyoncé and Using the B Word
\n\n06:25 - Moments of Self Doubt When Someone Doesn’t Believe You
\n\n09:14 - Empathy
\n\n11:22 - Retaliation is a Thing
\n\n\n\n16:33 - How to Deal With Coming Across a Viewpoint You Don’t Think Has Merit
\n\n18:56 - The Supreme Court Voting on Protections
\n\n23:23 - Origins of Thoughts and Root Causes
\n\n28:57 - Recognizing Privilege
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Mannah Kallon.
","summary":"Mannah Kallon talks about assessing identity and evaluating sense of self in a new culture, using offensive terms, moments of self-doubt when someone doesn’t believe you, empathy, retaliation, and recognizing privilege.","date_published":"2019-10-23T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/498f8fbc-1260-4a1d-a191-ef7fb65b9467.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":39139886,"duration_in_seconds":2446}]},{"id":"0052c096-be92-42de-be84-7a8f2521da69","title":"152: Embracing Mathematics with Philip Wadler","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/embracing-mathematics","content_text":"02:35 - Philip’s Superpower: Being Not Afraid of Mathematics\n\n04:07 - Programming Language Foundations in Agda\n\nPropositions as Types\n\nIsomorphism\n\nSoftware Foundations by Benjamin C. Pierce\n\nThe Coq Proof Assistant\n\n15:32 - Using a Proof Assistant\n\n22:57 - Human Creativity + Insight\n\nQuickCheck\n\nCompCert\n\n30:02 - Specifications\n\nUse of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services\n\nThe Evolution of Testing Methodology at AWS: From Status Quo to Formal Methods with TLA+\n\nHow Amazon web services uses formal methods\n\n35:25 - How To Translate Abstract Concepts So Practitioners Can Use Them\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: The way we are taught math makes us hate it.\n\nJess: There’s a difference between learning the foundations of programming and learning the skills of programming\n\nChanté: How do we make conversations like this more accessible?\n\nJacob: Ways of getting quick and seamless feedback as you are writing a program.\n\nJoint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Philip Wadler.Sponsored By:PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.\r\n\r\nFrom digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again.\r\n\r\nWe’re like the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We can analyze digital signals from virtually any software enabled system, and help you intelligently pinpoint issues like outages, as well as capitalize on opportunities, while empowering teams to take the right, real time action. To see how companies like GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters rely on PagerDuty to continuously improve their digital operations visit PagerDuty.com.","content_html":"02:35 - Philip’s Superpower: Being Not Afraid of Mathematics
\n\n04:07 - Programming Language Foundations in Agda
\n\n\n\n\n\nSoftware Foundations by Benjamin C. Pierce
\n\n\n\n15:32 - Using a Proof Assistant
\n\n22:57 - Human Creativity + Insight
\n\n\n\n\n\n30:02 - Specifications
\n\nUse of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services
\n\nThe Evolution of Testing Methodology at AWS: From Status Quo to Formal Methods with TLA+
\n\nHow Amazon web services uses formal methods
\n\n35:25 - How To Translate Abstract Concepts So Practitioners Can Use Them
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: The way we are taught math makes us hate it.
\n\nJess: There’s a difference between learning the foundations of programming and learning the skills of programming
\n\nChanté: How do we make conversations like this more accessible?
\n\nJacob: Ways of getting quick and seamless feedback as you are writing a program.
\n\nJoint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Philip Wadler.
Sponsored By:
There's a point in life, somewhere around the halfway mark, where the reality check hits -- you're going to die. There's a future without you in it. There's a new generation of children growing up, learning their way through the world, and humanity will keep moving forward without you.
\n\nOn one hand, this is depressing. Everyday, we go through the motions. Everyday, we play the game. And suddenly, it all seems so meaningless.
\nThe characteristic period of "mid-life crisis" starts with falling into a pit of nihilistic despair, and a quest to answer the most basic existential questions.
Does anything really matter? Who am I? What do I live for?
\n\nOn the other side of these questions, something magical happens.
\n\nThe finiteness of Life is also what gives it meaning. Every breath is something to cherish. Every joyful memory is a gift. And right now, in this moment, we have the opportunity to live and be, whoever it is we want to be.
\n\nWho are your heroes? Who do you admire?
\n\nWhat character do you want to play?
\n\nHow can you use your special gifts to lift the people around you?
\n\nLike a cacoon-shattering phase change, a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, we become an Elder, a steward, and a leader that works on behalf of the children of our future.
\n\nThis audio clip is a conversation between Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team & Arty Starr about the journey of becoming an Elder, and why Arty decided to change her name.
\n\nIf you want a bit more backstory, you can also check out this thread:
\n\n","summary":"This audio clip is a conversation between Claire Lew & Arty Starr about the journey of becoming an Elder, and why Arty decided to change her name.","date_published":"2019-10-15T14:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/32afcac2-9440-4d22-a5a1-01ab4888fa3d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":3709334,"duration_in_seconds":295}]},{"id":"391716b4-7477-4829-847f-07c6a2627b7e","title":"151: Off Meta with Amir Rajan","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/off-meta","content_text":"02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain\n\nA Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation\n\nEye Tracker\n\n06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints\n\nMagic Leap\n\n16:58 - Idea Flow\n\n21:00 - Building an Environment That Enables You\n\n\nFile Watching\nAutomating Leverage\n\n\n28:18 - Optimizing Local Maxima\n\nBret Victor: The Future of Programming \n\n\nDelta Time\n\n\n41:01 - Questioning Fundamental Assumptions\n\n\nContinuity of Design™️\nGradual Stiffening\n\n\n46:55 - Game Development\n\nUnity\n\n56:05 - Extremeness and Pushing Boundaries: Being a Weirdo/Being an Outlier/Thinking Differently\n\nOff Meta, Super Smash Brothers Melee Gods\n\nMeta and Off Meta\n\nDragonRuby Game Toolkit Sandbox\n\nReflections:\n\nJess: “A pin on my upkeeps.”\n\nAvdi: Meta and off meta.\n\nJohn: Continuity of design.\n\nRein: Continuity and discreteness.\n\nJanelle: Process-oriented thinking.\n\nAmir: Being consistent with philosophies.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Amir Rajan.Sponsored By:PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.\r\n\r\nFrom digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again.\r\n\r\nWe’re like the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We can analyze digital signals from virtually any software enabled system, and help you intelligently pinpoint issues like outages, as well as capitalize on opportunities, while empowering teams to take the right, real time action. To see how companies like GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters rely on PagerDuty to continuously improve their digital operations visit PagerDuty.com.","content_html":"this is great stuff! Artemis is a badass.
— Miko Matsumura ㋡ (@mikojava) October 13, 2019
02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain
\n\nA Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation
\n\n\n\n06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints
\n\n\n\n16:58 - Idea Flow
\n\n21:00 - Building an Environment That Enables You
\n\n28:18 - Optimizing Local Maxima
\n\nBret Victor: The Future of Programming
\n\n41:01 - Questioning Fundamental Assumptions
\n\n46:55 - Game Development
\n\n\n\n56:05 - Extremeness and Pushing Boundaries: Being a Weirdo/Being an Outlier/Thinking Differently
\n\nOff Meta, Super Smash Brothers Melee Gods
\n\nMeta and Off Meta
\n\nDragonRuby Game Toolkit Sandbox
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJess: “A pin on my upkeeps.”
\n\nAvdi: Meta and off meta.
\n\nJohn: Continuity of design.
\n\nRein: Continuity and discreteness.
\n\nJanelle: Process-oriented thinking.
\n\nAmir: Being consistent with philosophies.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amir Rajan.
Sponsored By:
01:34 - Brian’s Superpower: Communicating and Listening
\n\n02:36 - The Role of Empathy in Teaching/Communicating
\n\n04:11 - Learning and Teaching Functional Programming
\n\nThinking Functionally with Haskell
\n\n11:13 - Compositional Programming in JavaScript
\n\n16:02 - Problems That Can Be Solved by Learning Functional Programming
\n\n\n\nScalable program architectures
\n\n25:03 - Category Theory
\n\nCategories for the Working Mathematician
\n\n32:41 - Machine Learning and AI
\n\n53:54 - Discrete Representations of Continuous Phenomena
\n\n56:17 - Making Teaching Fun, Engaging, and Interesting
\n\nReflections:
\n\nBrian: Looking into L-systems further and thinking in terms of ranges.
\n\nRein: Dimensionality is imperative.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Brian Lonsdorf.
Sponsored By:
01:49 - Jesse’s Superpower: Empathy by Learning to be Empathetic
\n\n07:51 - Culture
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJacob: Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block: Community isn’t defined ahead of time. They define themselves.
\n\nRein: The more important aspect of any organization is the structure of the relationships between the people in that organization, including and especially, power relationships.
\n\nJesse: Personally taking effort in taking effort in finding third-party resources and sharing them with others.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jesse James.
Sponsored By:
00:43 - Jacob’s Superpower: Being Obsessive Re: Specificity; Allergic to Ambiguity on Teams
\n\n02:09 - Talking About Neurodiversity in Workspaces
\n\n13:49 - Driving Desire to Learn About Things
\n\n22:04 - Automating Boring Work
\n\n34:41 - “Floober Feature”
\n\n36:07 - Passing On Strategies and Data Organization
\n\n\n\n47:37 - Storycrafting and Succession Planning
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Consult a human when you don’t know, but often from the context of what directory you’re in and what branch you’re on the computer CAN figure it out.
\n\nChanté: Sociotechnical systems and thinking about personal automation.
\n\nJacob: What can I do to better organize to be a positive legacy?
\n\nArty: What are the ingredients to light your spark and your fire about software?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"Jacob Stoebel joins GTC as an official panelist and talks about neurodiversity in workplaces, driving desire to learn things, personal automation, and storycrafting and succession planning.","date_published":"2019-09-18T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/7b3c7f31-7361-4fc7-b8f8-bc08ae6b4cbc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":59490759,"duration_in_seconds":3523}]},{"id":"3c83871e-439b-4da7-9178-ed69a256cccb","title":"147: Organizing Organizations with Jennifer Tu","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/organizing-organizations","content_text":"00:52 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Seeing Inefficiencies in Processes\n\n02:56 - Coaching Clients to Reorganize Their Organizations Due to Growth\n\nJean Hsu: Re-structuring a growing team\n\nCommunicating Change and Values\nEncouraging Thoughtfulness\nAsking Questions + Questions as a Form of Communication\n\nSay What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer \n\nJennifer’s Podcast: Storytime with Managers\n\n25:24 - Deleting Old Code; Being Emotional Over Code\n\n30:34 - Avoiding Non-Consensual Teaching and Assumptions\n\n40:50 - Learning Sucks\n\nFixed Vs Growth Mindset\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Questions and what they reveal about the question-asker.\n\nJacob: Hiring for a growth mindset could be difficult.\n\nJamey: The people who have the most control over the situation are also the people who are going to have the least anxiety.\n\nJennifer: Learning to ask better questions isn’t something that you can do easily in a vacuum.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jennifer Tu.","content_html":"00:52 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Seeing Inefficiencies in Processes
\n\n02:56 - Coaching Clients to Reorganize Their Organizations Due to Growth
\n\nJean Hsu: Re-structuring a growing team
\n\nCommunicating Change and Values
\nEncouraging Thoughtfulness
\nAsking Questions + Questions as a Form of Communication
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer
\n\nJennifer’s Podcast: Storytime with Managers
\n\n25:24 - Deleting Old Code; Being Emotional Over Code
\n\n30:34 - Avoiding Non-Consensual Teaching and Assumptions
\n\n40:50 - Learning Sucks
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Questions and what they reveal about the question-asker.
\n\nJacob: Hiring for a growth mindset could be difficult.
\n\nJamey: The people who have the most control over the situation are also the people who are going to have the least anxiety.
\n\nJennifer: Learning to ask better questions isn’t something that you can do easily in a vacuum.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jennifer Tu.
","summary":"Jennifer Tu talks about coaching clients to reorganize their organizations due to growth, dealing with being emotional over your code, avoiding non-consensual teaching, and the fact that learning sucks!","date_published":"2019-09-11T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/3c83871e-439b-4da7-9178-ed69a256cccb.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":53932534,"duration_in_seconds":3128}]},{"id":"f5442e1c-99d6-4689-8b14-d959f6053acd","title":"146: Self.conference with Amber Conville","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/self-conference","content_text":"00:50 - Amber’s Superpower: Adaptability\n\n01:48 - Self.conference -- Coming again next year in early June!\n\n\nBackground/Origin\nEvolution of Diversity\nTransparency of Metrics\nPartnering with Organizations\nFocusing on the Detroit Area\n\n\n10:29 - The Detroit Tech Community\n\n\ntech[inclusive]\nDetroit Speaker Group\n\n\n12:50 - The Future of Self.\n\n\nSelf.learn\nSelf.work\nConf Conf\n\n\n14:35 - title of conf - An Upcoming Musical Conference!\n\n\nAisha Blake\n\n\n15:48 - Navigating the Conference Organization World\n\n\nAdvice\nCost\n\n\n19:41 - Attending the Conference\n\n\nSponsor Support\n\n\n23:13 - Human Potential + Emerging Technology + The Future of Work + Radical Inclusion\n\n\nThe Darkest Horse (Chanté’s Podcast)\n\n\n26:56 - Conference Highlights\n\n\nahmed jalloh: Coding out the Clink\nThe Sense of Community\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Amber Conville.","content_html":"00:50 - Amber’s Superpower: Adaptability
\n\n01:48 - Self.conference -- Coming again next year in early June!
\n\n10:29 - The Detroit Tech Community
\n\n\n\n12:50 - The Future of Self.
\n\n14:35 - title of conf - An Upcoming Musical Conference!
\n\n15:48 - Navigating the Conference Organization World
\n\n19:41 - Attending the Conference
\n\n23:13 - Human Potential + Emerging Technology + The Future of Work + Radical Inclusion
\n\n26:56 - Conference Highlights
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amber Conville.
","summary":"Amber Conville gives the 411 on all things Self.-related like the evolution and background, the transparency of conference metrics, partnering with organizations, navigating the conference organization world, and past conference highlights.","date_published":"2019-09-04T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f5442e1c-99d6-4689-8b14-d959f6053acd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":34487548,"duration_in_seconds":2221}]},{"id":"a7afe451-d132-4e5d-a48b-c22066c301b1","title":"145: Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations with Brandy Foster","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/balancing-hierarchies-and-equity-in-organizations","content_text":"01:17 - Brandy’s Superpower: Adaptability\n\n02:22 - Codes of Ethics\n\n\nFacial Recognition Technology\nFear Detection Software / Emotion Recognition\nAI \"emotion recognition\" can't be trusted.\nRoyal Oak police stop Black man for 'looking suspiciously' at white woman\nThe Fear Response to African Americans: A Summary of an fMRI Study on Amygdala Activation and Race\n\n\n11:09 - The Role of Diversity and Inclusion in Solving These Problems \n\n\nUnintended Consequences\nThe diversity and inclusion revolution: Eight powerful truths\nThe Truth About Diverse Teams\n\n\n24:18 - Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations\n\n\nThe Spoken Value System Vs The Lived Value System\nDoing Meaningful Work / Showing Appreciation\nFounder and Executive Support\nEthical HR\nOwning Up To Mistakes\nTreating Trauma of the System\n\n\n50:27 - Racism and Unlearning\n\nHow to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi \n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: If you know there’s spots on your team with missing demographics, seek out those people.\n\nJohn: The culture of a company comes from the top.\n\nRein: Helping teams work better together.\n\nBrandy: Improving manager boards to ensure that there is accountability when moving people up in hierarchical organizations.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Brandy Foster.Sponsored By:CodeNewbie: The CodeNewbie Podcast is all about stories from folks on their coding journey. They talk to new developers, experienced developers and everyone in between about how they got started learning to code, how they navigate their technical careers, and they also do deep dives into technical topics in a newbie-friendly way. Check out their podcast at www.codenewbie.org/podcast.\r\n","content_html":"01:17 - Brandy’s Superpower: Adaptability
\n\n02:22 - Codes of Ethics
\n\n11:09 - The Role of Diversity and Inclusion in Solving These Problems
\n\n24:18 - Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations
\n\n50:27 - Racism and Unlearning
\n\nHow to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: If you know there’s spots on your team with missing demographics, seek out those people.
\n\nJohn: The culture of a company comes from the top.
\n\nRein: Helping teams work better together.
\n\nBrandy: Improving manager boards to ensure that there is accountability when moving people up in hierarchical organizations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Brandy Foster.
Sponsored By:
01:53 - Jamison’s Superpower: Moving swiftly between layers.
\n\n03:59 - Being An Engineering Manager
\n\n23:44 - Starting the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast
\n\nMy Brother, My Brother and Me Podcast
\n\n35:42 - The Evolution of Tech Culture and Bootcamp Practices
\n\n39:54 - Conference Organization
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamison: Zone of Proximal Development.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jamison Dance.
Sponsored By:
01:20 - Keoni’s Background and Superpower: Building things quickly.
\n\n03:57 - Respect for Indiginous Cultures + Community + People
\n\n08:55 - Ownership of Data
\n\n14:52 - Learning Māori
\n\n18:59 - Indigenous Data Sovereignty
\n\n\n\n\n\n31:16 - History: The U.S. Occupation of The Kingdom of Hawaii
\n\n36:58 - Creating a License to Protect Data Sovereignty
\n\n41:45 - Sharing Data Responsibly
\n\n47:37 - Building and Having A Sense of Community
\n\n54:38 - Mauna Kea Protests; Cultural Fit
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: If we want to organize successfully in our communities, shared culture and deep connection of people enables solidarity.
\n\nAmy: Look back through history for examples of groups of people sharing skills and industry knowledge.
\n\nKeoni: Go to and experience Mauna Kea if you have the chance. Also, connecting to community. What enables to do the right thing? What is the right thing? Do the right thing.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Amy Newell and Keoni Mahelona.
","summary":"Keoni Mahelona talks about the importance of having respect for indiginous cultures, communities, and people. He talks about indigenous data sovereignty: creating a license to protect it, sharing data responsibly, and the importance of doing the right thing.","date_published":"2019-08-14T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d3512289-401d-4047-91f4-217ca4c7e790.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":57064873,"duration_in_seconds":4104}]},{"id":"fcc1f637-515d-435e-89f9-bc38d195fe75","title":"142: Modeling Constraints in Human Systems with Will Larson","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/modeling-constraints-in-human-systems","content_text":"00:48 - Will’s Superpower: 1) The ability to take something complicated and to find simple ways to think about it that work most of the time. 2) A rigorous love of structure.\n\nThinking in Systems: A Primer \n\n02:30 - Systems Thinking/Theory\n\nStella\n\n08:48 - How do you know when to stop modeling?\n\n10:12 - How do you figure out what your team’s rate of change is?\n\n\nOrganizational Changes\nProcess Changes\nChanges to the Software Systems You’re Managing\n\n\nVirginia Satir’s Change Model\n\n19:30 - Focusing Attention\n\nFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience\n\n20:31 - Impacting Systems\n\n24:47 - Patterns of Dysfunction\n\nThe First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded \n\n32:13 - Sharing Ideas and Contributing with Systems Thinking\n\nThe Portal Podcast\n\n38:59 - Having Adaptive Capacity\n\n44:30 - Taking Bets (Risks): Cheap vs Expensive\n\n48:10 - Systems Having Properties and Behaviors and Building Useful Missing Tools\n\nGood Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters \n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: The difference in reasoning about properties vs reasoning about behavior.\n\nWill: It’s easy to look at yourself sometimes as the lone practitioner trying to pull the industry forward. But, it’s exciting to have conversations like these to know there are other people out there trying to do the same thing.\n\nArty: Systems thinking as a way to think about how to optimize the quality of decisions.\n\nRein: A problem is a reduction of the system. One of the most important skills for a systems thinker and a problem solver is the ability for form a problem with a complete understanding of the complete mess that we’re choosing to not think about right now.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Will Larson.","content_html":"00:48 - Will’s Superpower: 1) The ability to take something complicated and to find simple ways to think about it that work most of the time. 2) A rigorous love of structure.
\n\n\n\n02:30 - Systems Thinking/Theory
\n\n\n\n08:48 - How do you know when to stop modeling?
\n\n10:12 - How do you figure out what your team’s rate of change is?
\n\n19:30 - Focusing Attention
\n\nFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
\n\n20:31 - Impacting Systems
\n\n24:47 - Patterns of Dysfunction
\n\n\n\n32:13 - Sharing Ideas and Contributing with Systems Thinking
\n\n\n\n38:59 - Having Adaptive Capacity
\n\n44:30 - Taking Bets (Risks): Cheap vs Expensive
\n\n48:10 - Systems Having Properties and Behaviors and Building Useful Missing Tools
\n\nGood Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: The difference in reasoning about properties vs reasoning about behavior.
\n\nWill: It’s easy to look at yourself sometimes as the lone practitioner trying to pull the industry forward. But, it’s exciting to have conversations like these to know there are other people out there trying to do the same thing.
\n\nArty: Systems thinking as a way to think about how to optimize the quality of decisions.
\n\nRein: A problem is a reduction of the system. One of the most important skills for a systems thinker and a problem solver is the ability for form a problem with a complete understanding of the complete mess that we’re choosing to not think about right now.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Will Larson.
","summary":"Will Larson talks about systems thinking and theory. How do you know when to stop modeling? How do you figure out what your team’s rate of change is? How can we share ideas and contribute together as a community? The panel discusses.","date_published":"2019-08-07T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/fcc1f637-515d-435e-89f9-bc38d195fe75.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":62138931,"duration_in_seconds":4231}]},{"id":"bd7ce2b0-ed76-4455-a416-df2c2cd1b0ab","title":"141: Navigating Blame","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/navigating-blame","content_text":"02:37 - Interpersonal Neurobiology and Emotionally Meaningful Experiences + Feelings Working on Software\n\nCode Smells\n\n05:42 - Postmortems and Incident Reviews\n\n09:05 - Blaming People / Blamelessness\n\nFrom Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper\n\n15:25 - Systems Are Benign: Equalizing Humans and What They Can Do to What Our Systems and Machines Can Do\n\n22:47 - Survival Rules\n\n27:37 - Perspectives on Blame\n\nThe Agile Prime Directive \n\n35:44 - Survival Rules (Cont’d)\n\nPersonal Iceberg Metaphor of the Satir Model\n\n37:48 - Gaining EQ and Inward Exploration\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Handling blame in a healthy way and not blaming people for blaming people.\n\nChanté: Read The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.\n\nJessica: Software teams are sometimes able to push back against the system because it can point to something tangibly not working.\n\nAlso, as an individual, it is not your job to change your whole company.\n\nAstrid: The importance of having these conversations with your team.\n\nRein: Dealing with a manager who blames through solidarity with coworkers.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Sponsored By:Pantheon: This episode is sponsored by Pantheon. Pantheon is the platform of choice for more enterprise Drupal / WordPress sites than any other platform. A platform with superpowers needs to be run behind the scenes by super humans of all diversities and backgrounds. Pantheon actively supports non-profit initiatives throughout the Bay Area and beyond such as Techtonica, the Tech Equity Collaborative, and Lesbians Who Tech. Learn more about career opportunities at pantheon.io/GreaterThanCode.","content_html":"02:37 - Interpersonal Neurobiology and Emotionally Meaningful Experiences + Feelings Working on Software
\n\n\n\n05:42 - Postmortems and Incident Reviews
\n\n09:05 - Blaming People / Blamelessness
\n\nFrom Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper
\n\n15:25 - Systems Are Benign: Equalizing Humans and What They Can Do to What Our Systems and Machines Can Do
\n\n22:47 - Survival Rules
\n\n27:37 - Perspectives on Blame
\n\nThe Agile Prime Directive
\n\n35:44 - Survival Rules (Cont’d)
\n\nPersonal Iceberg Metaphor of the Satir Model
\n\n37:48 - Gaining EQ and Inward Exploration
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Handling blame in a healthy way and not blaming people for blaming people.
\n\nChanté: Read The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.
\n\nJessica: Software teams are sometimes able to push back against the system because it can point to something tangibly not working.
\n\nAlso, as an individual, it is not your job to change your whole company.
\n\nAstrid: The importance of having these conversations with your team.
\n\nRein: Dealing with a manager who blames through solidarity with coworkers.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:29 - Running a Mail Server
\n\n08:49 - Amitai’s Superpower: Squirrel Power! and Orienting Himself in a New Problem Space (And Helping Others to Orient Them in Their Own Problem Spaces)
\n\n15:03 - Refactoring
\n\n23:15 - Managing Developer Time
\n\n\n\nBrooklyn November 2018: Global Day of Coderetreat
\n\n\n\n28:57 - Feedback and Systems
\n\n33:38 - Email Servers
\n\n35:46 - Predictability
\n\n\n\n40:39 - Quality and Collaboration
\n\n45:47 - Orienting and Problem Space
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Having useful questions.
\n\nJohn: The bounded perfectionism concept and the tests as questions.
\n\nRein: What are the minimum possible criteria for progress?
\n\nAmitai: “Make hidden things visible. Make abstract things concrete. Make implicit things explicit.” ~ Virginia Satir
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amitai Schleier.
Sponsored By:
02:43 - First Conference Experiences
\n\n08:31 - The Importance of Networking + Stickers!!
\n\n14:56 - Conference Fashion
\n\n16:51 - Approaching Speakers After Talks and Tricks to Remembering Names + Faces
\n\n18:49 - Speaking At Conferences
\n\n31:38 - Conveying Information in a Talk
\n\n34:59 - Crafting Proposals, What Selection Committees Look For, and Writing Talks
\n\n52:03 - Gathering Conference Talk Topic Inspiration
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Join our Greater Than Code Slack Community for friendly talk feedback!
\n\nSam: Being a conference speaker is an awesome introvert hack. It gives people a reason to come talk to you!
\n\nRein: You shouldn’t feel like you have to attend conferences or give talks at conference to have a career in the industry.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
02:13 - What is Job Satisfaction?
\n\n03:25 - Predictors of Job Satisfaction
\n\n14:02 - Evaluating Job Satisfaction: Questions to Ask During Interviews
\n\n18:02 - Maintaining Positive Company Culture
\n\n25:14 - Managers: What should you do if you know your team is unhappy?
\n\n27:42 - Positive Interactions with Coworkers + Feeling Needed / Relevant + Making Progress
\n\nEverything Is Broken, and It's OK - John Sawers
\n\nThe Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
\n\nRock Stars, Builders, and Janitors: You're Doing it Wrong
\n\n34:55 - When Jobs Respect Your Life 👍🏻
\n\n42:17 - “Passion” and Playing to People’s Strengths
\n\n54:34 - Values Interviews and Attitudes Towards Failure
\n\nSuperfluous Job Satisfaction Reflections:
\n\nJohn: Microvalidations.
\n\nJamey: Slack Airhorn Auto Response + Farm Meme Fridays
\n\nLaurie: Something associated with the start of her day that makes her smile before she even leaves for the office: a backpack.
\n\nRein: Asking “Hey, how can I help you with that?” Also: idiosyncratic emoji usage.
\n\nJacob: Offering to help new people set up their development environments.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Jacob Stoebel and Laurie Barth.
Sponsored By:
01:32 - Clare’s Superpower: Collecting and Sharing Useful Information
\n\n04:31 - Llewellyn’s Superpower: The Ability to Collaborate with Others
\n\n08:01 - Pairing Together: C++ Version of ApprovalTests
\n\n12:15 - Pairing Retrospectives: What emotions did you feel?
\n\n\n\n16:21 - Kinship Formed Through Working Together
\n\n18:55 - Working Asynchronously vs Live Pairing
\n\n20:15 - Writing Documentation for Pairing Sessions and Working to Improve the C++ Community Culture
\n\n\n\n30:44 - Safeguarding: Harnessing Pain For Good
\n\nSafeguarding: A step-by-step guide
\n\n\n\n35:04 - Documentation Cont’d
\n\n45:08 - Asking “Why” Questions vs “What” Questions: Observability
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The idea of using a retrospective in such a small scale. Also, the difference in the level of community while pairing: building kinship.
\n\nClare: Read more about the paradigm framing effect.
\n\nLlewellyn: Being appreciative of the people you pair with.
\n\nArty: Taking the time to think about what you’re doing from the perspective of sharing affects what you do.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Clare Macrae and Llewellyn Falco.
Sponsored By:
The Twitter thread:
\n\n\n\nAll I can say here is that I try to lead by example. If there’s a clear path to “make the change easy, then make the easy change,” make sure the commit history shows that explicitly, then ask for a code review even if your process doesn’t require it. 1/ https://t.co/VDxDbEQUf3
— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) June 9, 2019
Sam Livingston-Gray - F̶l̶u̶e̶n̶t̶ Refactoring Talk: Sam talks about refactoring a gnarly Rails controller method. This is a lightly edited version of a talk Sam gave in 2013.
\n\nResources:
\n\ngithub.com/geeksam/fluent-refactoring
\n\nIntroduction to the Technical Debt Concept
\n\n\n\n\n\n21:47 - Refactoring Resistance: Who are you trying to convince?
\n\n28:57 - The Risks of Refactoring
\n\n\n\nIdealized Design:
\n\n3 Different Kinds of Technical Debt:
\n\n35:08 - Documentation and Decision Records
\n\n36:59 - Code Value Judgement
\n\n42:00 - Convincing Coworkers Re: Refactoring a Codebase
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Adaptive Capacity.
\n\nRein: Viability.
\n\nSam: It’s about dealing with people and effectively working with and for them.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:24 - Saron’s Superpower: Being able to figure out what people need + read people.
\n\n02:26 - Codeland Conference
\n\nJuly 22nd, 2019 in New York City!
\n\nEpisode 026: Codeland, Capitalism, and Creating Inclusive Spaces with Saron Yitbarek
\n\n03:23 - Offering Free Onsite Childcare at Conferences
\n\n07:02 - CodeNewbie
\n\n\n\n08:18 - Expertise in Newbie-ism
\n\n14:55 - Learning and Teaching
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n22:27 - Encouraging Asking, Psychological Safety, and Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
\n\n29:48 - Building a Supportive Community and Advice for Code Newbies
\n\n\n\n34:12 - Dealing with Bad Actors
\n\n\n\n42:35 - Coding as a Reflection of People
\n\n49:23 - Lexicon and Creating a Shared Language
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nChanté: Everyone is a Newbie, and the living room metaphor.
\n\nRein: How much ego investment in our work is appropriate?
\n\nArty: Growing the magical living room.
\n\nSaron: Thinking about mitigation speech.
\n\nOutliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Saron Yitbarek.
Sponsored By:
01:43 - Halleemah’s Superpower: Cultural Fluency: Operating authentically and being who you are in any space you are in.
\n\n\n\n07:37 - Existing in Other Spaces; Active Listening
\n\n10:31 - Building Bridges to Change the Complexion of the Workforce
\n\n\n\n15:01 - Identifying Potential Talent, Engaging Underrepresented Populations, and Doing Intentional Work to Diversify Relationships
\n\n21:17 - Change, Evolution, and Reinvention
\n\n33:25 - Resilience and Acknowledging Privilege
\n\n40:10 - Shortening the Distance for Young People; “Urban Authenticity”
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: A door metaphor: Things that you can do with something that you originally think of as just being just a static part of the landscape around you that you can interact with and that you can change.
\n\nRein: Maximizing the potential to shine within each person and maximizing their ability to shine throughout the world.
\n\nArty: The concept of “Cultural Fluency”.
\n\nHalleemah: Radical professionalism.
\n\nRein: Bonus Reflection: Light bulbs have the ability to shine but only with their connections with others.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Halleemah Nash.
Sponsored By:
01:56 - Chanté’s Superpower: Spotting Talent (Dark Horses)
\n\n05:33 - Perceiving Talent/Potential
\n\n\n\n09:15 - Confronting Biases and Societal Categorization/Division/Labeling
\n\n18:54 - Identity as a Feedback Loop
\n\n25:04 - Health and Wellness and Human Potential
\n\n27:00 - Privilege vs Potential
\n\nActuality, Capability, Potentiality
\n\nBrain of the Firm by Stafford Beer
\n\n\n\n36:31 - Framing; Framing as Related to Coaching
\n\nMatt Ringel: Whiteboarding 101
\n\n\n\nRailsConf 2019 - Keynote: The Stories We Tell Our Children by Ariel Caplan
\n\n49:39 - Working with Organizations to Improve Diversity and Inclusion (Using Metrics)
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: When you pay attention to the margins, the marginalized, etc., and optimize for those getting better, you also optimize for the happiness of the rest of the people inside those margins.
\n\nJessica: Letting go of your goal allows emergence of outcomes you didn’t expect.
\n\nRein: Having values that we can use to determine whether we are moving in the direction we want to move in, and to continue to move in the direction that is towards our values.
\n\nChanté: It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality conversation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chanté Thurmond.
Sponsored By:
02:06 - Claire’s Superpower: The Ability to Distill Things and Catching Pellets
\n\n05:21 - Janelle’s Superpower: Seeing the Gifts of Others and Bringing Them to Surface
\n\n08:19 - Sam’s Superpower: Being Able to Make Connections Between the Shapes of Things Even if They Don’t Look the Same on the Surface
\n\n09:13 - Bad Bosses
\n\nCommand and Control Leadership
\n\n26:18 - Talent vs Skill
\n\nQuestions to ask yourself if you’re an aspiring manager:
\n\nMe, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Brian R Little
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: “Do we ever think about ourselves, that we me be someone else’s worst boss?”
\n\nArty: Claire asking the panelists questions was different! (In a lovely way!)
\n\nClaire: The different forms and threads that real leadership can take.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Claire Lew.
Sponsored By:
01:40 - Cat’s Superpower: Knowing What Other People’s Superpowers Are (before they do!)
\n\n03:32 - Managing a Platform with Ancient Value
\n\n07:54 - Telling Stories Within Code: History Matters
\n\n10:11 - Cat’s Journey from Finance to Tech
\n\n13:47 - Exploring Systems
\n\n17:24 - Wardley Mapping
\n\n31:52 - The Penguin Story: Looking For Poo-Covered Rocks
\n\n37:53 - The Power of Observation and Reflection
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Maintaining the history of an application.
\n\nJessica: So much of the world is what we can’t see. There is value in those poo-covered rocks!
\n\nAvdi: When you see a bunch of people trying to get somewhere that you don’t understand, look for the poo-covered rock.
\n\nCat: What would it look like if we had a platform bard?
\n\nJanelle: Scheduling specific time to stop, reflect, and observe as teams.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Cat Swetel.
Sponsored By:
01:54 - Britni’s Superpower: Resilience; Also: Failure as an Opportunity, Wallowing, and Acceptance
\n\nAwareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
\n\n10:55 - Building Support Networks and Spiritual Communities
\n\n13:16 - Facing Work Problems and Failures
\n\n16:11 - Lies Developers Tell
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Resilience and not wallowing.
\n\nCoraline: How we respond to failures and the impact it can have on other people.
\n\nBritni: Naming acceptance as a step of resilience.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Britni Alexander.
Sponsored By:
\n\n\nUse the coupon code GREATER20OFF to get 20% off on any WNDX School course in May!
\n
01:23 - Lori’s Superpower: Mapping
\n\n03:56 - “Positive Mania” and Getting Into Game Programming
\n\n\n\n\n\n07:42 - Fun, Learning New Stuff, and Abandoning Old Stuff
\n\n\n\n12:42 - Cultural Differences Between Programming Language Communities
\n\n23:18 - Thoughts on Platformification
\n\n\n\n27:44 - Maintenance; The Evolution of Home Automation
\n\n\n\n32:13 - Mentoring Novices and Beginners
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“Suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” -- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
\n
37:34 - Creating Tutorials for the WNDX School and Getting People Excited About Programming Via Game Programming
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSince this interview: A Dark Room pulled from Switch eShop for including code editor :’(
\n
Reflections:
\n\nJamey: “When I’m learning something new, I’m starting at the beginning, and it’s hard for me too.”
\n\nJanelle: Bringing the fun back to the corporate world.
\n\nLori: We have to bring the fun to the job ourselves.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Lori Olson.
","summary":"Lori Olson talks about bringing the fun to the jobs we do ourselves, as well as cultural differences between programming language communities, thoughts on platformification, mentoring novices and beginners, and creating gaming tutorials to get people (and kids especially) excited about programming.","date_published":"2019-05-08T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/59bb7155-ea0a-4643-bc65-f37c50718508.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":46679865,"duration_in_seconds":3446}]},{"id":"c97db3ec-1ec4-4821-a1f4-69d89ddb1ccd","title":"128: Finding and Cultivating Community Leaders with Ben Pollard","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/finding-cultivating-community-leaders","content_text":"00:48 - Ben’s Superpower: Making Arancini and Reading A Lot of Books\n\n02:00 - Starting Local Welcome and Helping Refugees\n\nDeath of Alan Kurdi\n\n09:37 - Humanization, Cognitive Biases, and Heuristics \n\nContact Hypothesis\n\nSocial Constructionism \n\nSocial Conformity - Brain Games\n\nIn-group Bias\n\nThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman \n\nRules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky \n\n21:25 - Empathy and Compassion; Humans Thriving Together\n\nThe Compassionate Mind Foundation\n\nThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells \n\nDoughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth \n\nThe 36 Questions That Lead to Love\n\n31:26 - Measuring Success\n\n\nConversion\nFinancial Resilience\nSocial Contact Hours\nNet Promoter Score (NPS)\nLanguage Ability\n\n\n41:56 - Getting People to Connect with Refugees in a Personal Way\n\nLump of Labour Fallacy \n\n“We come together through our sameness and we grow through our differences.” ~ Virginia Satir\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: The idea of communicative praxis.\n\nThe Self after Postmodernity by Calvin O. Schrag \n\nSam: The commodification of trust.\n\nAlso, The Tyranny of Structureless: In any organization there are both explicit and implicit power structures. Changing the implicit ones.\n\nBen: Having a safe space to reflect and have conversations.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Ben Pollard.","content_html":"00:48 - Ben’s Superpower: Making Arancini and Reading A Lot of Books
\n\n02:00 - Starting Local Welcome and Helping Refugees
\n\n\n\n09:37 - Humanization, Cognitive Biases, and Heuristics
\n\n\n\n\n\nSocial Conformity - Brain Games
\n\n\n\nThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
\n\nRules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky
\n\n21:25 - Empathy and Compassion; Humans Thriving Together
\n\nThe Compassionate Mind Foundation
\n\nThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
\n\nDoughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth
\n\nThe 36 Questions That Lead to Love
\n\n31:26 - Measuring Success
\n\n41:56 - Getting People to Connect with Refugees in a Personal Way
\n\n\n\n“We come together through our sameness and we grow through our differences.” ~ Virginia Satir
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: The idea of communicative praxis.
\n\nThe Self after Postmodernity by Calvin O. Schrag
\n\nSam: The commodification of trust.
\n\nAlso, The Tyranny of Structureless: In any organization there are both explicit and implicit power structures. Changing the implicit ones.
\n\nBen: Having a safe space to reflect and have conversations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ben Pollard.
","summary":"In this episode, Ben Pollard talks about starting Local Welcome, a charity in the UK that makes it fun and easy to cook and eat with refugees in folks' local community. Humanization, cognitive biases, and heuristics are discussed, as well as the ideas of humans thriving together and measuring success.","date_published":"2019-05-01T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c97db3ec-1ec4-4821-a1f4-69d89ddb1ccd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":60812442,"duration_in_seconds":3520}]},{"id":"70cb5c2c-33e2-4b8f-b3ac-17bba6c1b3d0","title":"127: Hope and Suffering with Amy Newell","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/hope-and-suffering","content_text":"01:47 - Amy’s Superpower: Sustaining hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith.\n\nLearned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E. P. Seligman \n\n07:40 - Amy’s talk on “Suffering in the Workplace”: Genesis and Overview\n\n13:40 - Living a Valuable Life vs a Happy Life\n\n\nExamining Causes \nFeeling The Pain\nRelieving Suffering by Seeking a Mindset of Innovation\n\n\n24:02 - Bringing Your “Whole Self” to the Workplace; Alleviating Suffering in the Workplace\n\n41:15 - Changing Culture in Organizations\n\nManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media \n\n54:40 - Bipolar Disorder\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: A framework for dealing with suffering. A separation of concerns between observing feelings and deciding what to do about them.\n\nJanelle: By supporting people, we can end up with a better, healthier, and more productive organization. \n\nAvdi: Kindness in the workplace and power structures.\n\nRein: How do you convince people to care about other people? \n\nAlso, work implies suffering. The obligation to reduce suffering is shared -- but not equally. \n\nAmy: Disparities amongst different types of engineers and between engineering and other departments in tech companies.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Amy Newell.","content_html":"01:47 - Amy’s Superpower: Sustaining hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith.
\n\nLearned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E. P. Seligman
\n\n07:40 - Amy’s talk on “Suffering in the Workplace”: Genesis and Overview
\n\n13:40 - Living a Valuable Life vs a Happy Life
\n\n24:02 - Bringing Your “Whole Self” to the Workplace; Alleviating Suffering in the Workplace
\n\n41:15 - Changing Culture in Organizations
\n\nManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
\n\n54:40 - Bipolar Disorder
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: A framework for dealing with suffering. A separation of concerns between observing feelings and deciding what to do about them.
\n\nJanelle: By supporting people, we can end up with a better, healthier, and more productive organization.
\n\nAvdi: Kindness in the workplace and power structures.
\n\nRein: How do you convince people to care about other people?
\n\nAlso, work implies suffering. The obligation to reduce suffering is shared -- but not equally.
\n\nAmy: Disparities amongst different types of engineers and between engineering and other departments in tech companies.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amy Newell.
","summary":"Amy Newell talks about suffering and sustaining hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith, living a valuable life vs a happy life, bringing your “whole self” into the workplace, changing culture in organizations, and bipolar disorder.","date_published":"2019-04-24T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/70cb5c2c-33e2-4b8f-b3ac-17bba6c1b3d0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":66857189,"duration_in_seconds":4003}]},{"id":"e9e09e1e-6a83-43fd-832d-825ad0402213","title":"126: Asking Powerful Questions with Suzan Bond","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/asking-powerful-questions","content_text":"01:04 - Suzan’s Superpower: Asking Powerful Questions\n\nThe Compassionate Coder\n\n07:30 - Blending Technology and Coaching\n\n10:32 - Blending Technology and Humans; Working Distributed/Remotely\n\n15:32 - Creating Organizational Divides (Intentional and Unintentional)\n\n20:24 - Company Cultures That Lend Themselves Well to Remote Work\n\nTheory X and Theory Y (Douglas McGregor)\n\n25:19 - Autocratic vs Autonomy\n\n26:23 - Becoming a Coach and Learning Coaching Skills\n\nEmotional API\n\n30:46 - Listening to Yourself and Intuition\n\n“Good decisions get better; bad decisions get worse.”\n\n33:28 - Management vs Leadership / Developing Leadership Skills: Deliberation and Introspection \n\nJulia Cameron’s Morning Pages\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Powerful questions. Coaching by asking powerful questions.\n\nSuzan: The word “autonomy”. \n\nJohn: Asking questions to illicit insight, movement, and motivation.\n\nAsk Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter by Will Wise \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Suzan Bond.","content_html":"01:04 - Suzan’s Superpower: Asking Powerful Questions
\n\n\n\n07:30 - Blending Technology and Coaching
\n\n10:32 - Blending Technology and Humans; Working Distributed/Remotely
\n\n15:32 - Creating Organizational Divides (Intentional and Unintentional)
\n\n20:24 - Company Cultures That Lend Themselves Well to Remote Work
\n\nTheory X and Theory Y (Douglas McGregor)
\n\n25:19 - Autocratic vs Autonomy
\n\n26:23 - Becoming a Coach and Learning Coaching Skills
\n\n\n\n30:46 - Listening to Yourself and Intuition
\n\n“Good decisions get better; bad decisions get worse.”
\n\n33:28 - Management vs Leadership / Developing Leadership Skills: Deliberation and Introspection
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Powerful questions. Coaching by asking powerful questions.
\n\nSuzan: The word “autonomy”.
\n\nJohn: Asking questions to illicit insight, movement, and motivation.
\n\nAsk Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter by Will Wise
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Suzan Bond.
","summary":"Suzan Bond, Coraline, and John discuss blending technology with coaching and humans, managing and working on distributed teams, autonomy, listening to yourself and your intuition, and developing solid leadership skills.","date_published":"2019-04-17T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e9e09e1e-6a83-43fd-832d-825ad0402213.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":55128290,"duration_in_seconds":3165}]},{"id":"8ea94301-a568-44b2-aa5f-ed51cba5c985","title":"125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/everything-is-communication","content_text":"01:42 - Sam’s Superpower: Staring at the same problem for days -- Patience and Delayed Gratification\n\n03:42 - Effective Communication: What is fluid? \n\n08:54 - Logging\n\nHoneycomb\n\nOpen Sound Control\n\n12:55 - Sonic Pi \n\nRaspberry Pi\n\nJeff Rose (@rosejn)\n\novertone\n\n22:41 - Fixed Tempo, Clocks, and Time\n\n35:38 - Live Coding and Performance\n\n40:58 - Teaching Kids and “Promoting Cheating”\n\n49:21 - The Difference Between Music and Code\n\n58:44 - Sam’s Latest Performance Experience\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: Checking for understanding.\n\nAvdi: The remix culture piece of this conversation.\n\nJanelle: Everything is conversation.\n\nSam: Thinking about programming rhythmically. \n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Sam Aaron.","content_html":"01:42 - Sam’s Superpower: Staring at the same problem for days -- Patience and Delayed Gratification
\n\n03:42 - Effective Communication: What is fluid?
\n\n08:54 - Logging
\n\n\n\n\n\n12:55 - Sonic Pi
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n22:41 - Fixed Tempo, Clocks, and Time
\n\n35:38 - Live Coding and Performance
\n\n40:58 - Teaching Kids and “Promoting Cheating”
\n\n49:21 - The Difference Between Music and Code
\n\n58:44 - Sam’s Latest Performance Experience
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Checking for understanding.
\n\nAvdi: The remix culture piece of this conversation.
\n\nJanelle: Everything is conversation.
\n\nSam: Thinking about programming rhythmically.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Sam Aaron.
","summary":"Sam Aaron chats with the panel about creating Sonic Pi, the importance of patience and delayed gratification, logging, and fixed tempo, clocks, and time.","date_published":"2019-04-10T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/8ea94301-a568-44b2-aa5f-ed51cba5c985.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":70139777,"duration_in_seconds":4113}]},{"id":"c756732d-0957-4756-a760-413924f26042","title":"124: Navigating Neurodiversity with Helen Needham","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/navigating-neurodiversity-with-helen-needham","content_text":"01:45 - Helen’s Superpower: Taking Abstract Information Seeing Things Others Don’t See \n\n05:26 - Decoding People: Asking Contextual Questions and Listening For Motivation\n\n11:52 - The Intersection of Empathy and Neurodiversity\n\n15:14 - Being Deliberate as a Survival/Coping Skill\n\n16:41 - Being Different, Understanding Yourself, and Discovering Your Unique Capabilities\n\n23:22 - Interfacing with the Neurodivergent Community and Actively and Openly Talking About Neurodiversity\n\n30:55 - Paying Attention to EQ: Emotional Intelligence\n\n37:01 - Becoming Self-Aware\n\nHelen Needham: My guide to working with me (an autistic adult) \n\n41:05 - MeDecoded: Personal stories from the Neurodivergent & allies, in the pursuit of decoding Neurodiversity\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Possibly implementing how to work with guides at their workplace.\n\nJessica: Making a deliberate process out of decoding people.\n\nAvdi: It’s not about changing who you are, it’s about working with the world while you still are who you are.\n\nJanelle: Owning your own special skills and talents and taking in the hurricane. \n\nHelen: The importance of support and understanding. The world needs more silent heroes.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Helen Needham.","content_html":"01:45 - Helen’s Superpower: Taking Abstract Information Seeing Things Others Don’t See
\n\n05:26 - Decoding People: Asking Contextual Questions and Listening For Motivation
\n\n11:52 - The Intersection of Empathy and Neurodiversity
\n\n15:14 - Being Deliberate as a Survival/Coping Skill
\n\n16:41 - Being Different, Understanding Yourself, and Discovering Your Unique Capabilities
\n\n23:22 - Interfacing with the Neurodivergent Community and Actively and Openly Talking About Neurodiversity
\n\n30:55 - Paying Attention to EQ: Emotional Intelligence
\n\n37:01 - Becoming Self-Aware
\n\nHelen Needham: My guide to working with me (an autistic adult)
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Possibly implementing how to work with guides at their workplace.
\n\nJessica: Making a deliberate process out of decoding people.
\n\nAvdi: It’s not about changing who you are, it’s about working with the world while you still are who you are.
\n\nJanelle: Owning your own special skills and talents and taking in the hurricane.
\n\nHelen: The importance of support and understanding. The world needs more silent heroes.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Helen Needham.
","summary":"Helen Needham, an autistic person and an advocate of promoting the value of neurodivergent thinking, talks about decoding people, the intersection of empathy and neurodiversity, being deliberate as a survival skill, and paying attention to EQ: emotional intelligence.","date_published":"2019-04-03T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c756732d-0957-4756-a760-413924f26042.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":42046258,"duration_in_seconds":3148}]},{"id":"fd90cbad-55db-4798-b427-6f9312716ce7","title":"123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance","content_text":"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig\n\n05:21 - Persig’s Two Paradigms: Classical and Romantic\n\n11:50 - What is beautiful? \n\n15:49 - Quality\n\n33:44 - Emotional Motivation\n\n41:13 - Balancing Objective and Subjective Measures of Quality\n\nReflections:\n\nJanelle: A shared definition of quality and creating bridges.\n\nBryan: When you recognize you have two different categories of measures of quality, the team starts to need guardrails to push the group towards just a couple of agreed upon things.\n\nJohn: Taking the different value systems, and fusing them together in some degree that can help unify groups into single directions and sets of values.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Bryan Karlovitz.Sponsored By:DevRelate.io: Are you truly involved in the developer communities you work in and sell to? Are you seeing the value in the events you are a part of? DevRelate.io can help! Developer and Community Relations as a Service: we speak developer!\r\n\r\nLearn more at DevRelate.io or email us at info@devrelate.io!","content_html":"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig
\n\n05:21 - Persig’s Two Paradigms: Classical and Romantic
\n\n11:50 - What is beautiful?
\n\n15:49 - Quality
\n\n33:44 - Emotional Motivation
\n\n41:13 - Balancing Objective and Subjective Measures of Quality
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJanelle: A shared definition of quality and creating bridges.
\n\nBryan: When you recognize you have two different categories of measures of quality, the team starts to need guardrails to push the group towards just a couple of agreed upon things.
\n\nJohn: Taking the different value systems, and fusing them together in some degree that can help unify groups into single directions and sets of values.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Bryan Karlovitz.
Sponsored By:
01:45 - Autopoiesis, Smell, and Passing
\n\nAutopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
\n\nThud!: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
\n\n11:15 - The Channels in Your Head (Noise)
\n\n12:15 - GeePaw’s Superpower: Having an enormous capacity for doubt -- especially self-doubt; The Cost of Certainty
\n\n18:25 - Doubt vs Narrowing
\n\n\n\n23:31 - Refactoring; Easiest, Nearest, Owie, First
\n\n25:53 - Defining “Better” and “Done”
\n\n30:55 - Thin vs Thick Culture
\n\n42:34 - FACT: Geeks Are Paid Extremely Well -- Why are we still not happy?
\n\n48:02 - Occupational Game Playing
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: When you act, you then see what happens.
\n\nSam: Any metric can be gamed and will be gamed.
\n\nThe Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
Special Guest: Michael "GeePaw" Hill.
Sponsored By:
01:26 - Resilience Engineering and Closed-loop Communication
\n\n06:55 - Acknowledging Burnout in the Developer Community
\n\n09:31 - Professionalization and Formal Training
\n\n\n\n17:41 - Reliability vs Resilience
\n\n20:40 - Resilience in the EMT Context
\n\n22:21 - Scene Size-up in Software
\n\n25:20 - Thai’s Superpower: The ability to remain calm in emergencies;Tech => EMT => Tech + Missing Seeing People You’re Helping
\n\nThe Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'
\n\n32:11 - Incident Response + Studying Incident Response; Normalization of Deviance
\n\n\n\n40:16 - Asking Questions
\n\nCognitive Interviewing Techniques
\n\nThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Part of resilience is how do you know where to get help? When to ask for help and who to ask.
\n\nJohn: Following up with the cognitive interview idea.
\n\nSam: Being explicit and deliberate about thinking about process and communication as a thing that you can get better at, that you can work on, and that you can talk about.
\n\nCheck out with the “Working With Other Humans” track that Sam is running at RailsConf 2019 from April 29 - May 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
\n\nThai: Cognitive interviewing Pokémon. Plus emotions as a state machine.
\n\nJohn’s Hacking Your Emotional API Talk
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Thai Wood.
","summary":"Thai Wood is a developer turned EMT turned developer again. He talks about resilience engineering and closed-loop communication, his experience as an EMT and the lessons he’s brought from there to his work as a developer, incident response, the normalization of deviation, and asking questions to get helpful answers.","date_published":"2019-03-13T05:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/a1204ecf-a702-47c3-bc8b-7aa346886049.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":55811958,"duration_in_seconds":3270}]},{"id":"0a9f0f36-f068-4274-bc5c-6433d350a5b9","title":"120: Expect The Unexpected with Andy Hunt","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/expect-the-unexpected","content_text":"01:55 - Andy’s Superpower: Explaining blindingly obvious things to people that they don’t see.\n\nThe Boiled Frog\n\n08:13 - Iterative Development and Continuous Learning: Becoming Comfortable with Uncertainty \n\n14:23 - Doing Things Differently\n\nThe Black Swan Theory\n\n20:41 - Writing and Timeboxing\n\nConglommora\n\nConglommora Found (Sequel) \n\nFeedback, Context, and Learning \n\n27:39 - Why should continuous be the goal?\n\n34:24 - Adaptability\n\n39:28 - Making Groups More Effective\n\n45:13 - Andy’s Software Development Journey\n\nReflections:\n\nJanelle: Shifting from a place of complaining about the constraints of the world, to figuring out strategies for solving these problems and figuring out templates for alternatives: Setting up alternative markets and economic systems that can support alternative ways of working.\n\nJessica: We can’t predict the future. We can’t know everything. We can’t give an accurate estimate of a number. But we can know something: we can know propensities to some degree, we can estimate in a range, and then we can choose whether to spend time researching to narrow that range. \n\nAvdi: The importance of slack time in teams and organizations.\n\nAndy: Experimentation. Learning. Context. Feedback. Rinse and repeat.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Andy Hunt.Sponsored By:DevRelate.io: Are you truly involved in the developer communities you work in and sell to? Are you seeing the value in the events you are a part of? DevRelate.io can help! Developer and Community Relations as a Service: we speak developer!\r\n\r\nLearn more at DevRelate.io or email us at info@devrelate.io!","content_html":"01:55 - Andy’s Superpower: Explaining blindingly obvious things to people that they don’t see.
\n\n\n\n08:13 - Iterative Development and Continuous Learning: Becoming Comfortable with Uncertainty
\n\n14:23 - Doing Things Differently
\n\n\n\n20:41 - Writing and Timeboxing
\n\n\n\nConglommora Found (Sequel)
\n\nFeedback, Context, and Learning
\n\n27:39 - Why should continuous be the goal?
\n\n34:24 - Adaptability
\n\n39:28 - Making Groups More Effective
\n\n45:13 - Andy’s Software Development Journey
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJanelle: Shifting from a place of complaining about the constraints of the world, to figuring out strategies for solving these problems and figuring out templates for alternatives: Setting up alternative markets and economic systems that can support alternative ways of working.
\n\nJessica: We can’t predict the future. We can’t know everything. We can’t give an accurate estimate of a number. But we can know something: we can know propensities to some degree, we can estimate in a range, and then we can choose whether to spend time researching to narrow that range.
\n\nAvdi: The importance of slack time in teams and organizations.
\n\nAndy: Experimentation. Learning. Context. Feedback. Rinse and repeat.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Andy Hunt.
Sponsored By:
01:55 - Bianca’s Superpower: Being a Cultural Broker
\n\n06:36 - Code-Switching and Identity As An Asset
\n\nKeynote: Who and What We're Leaving Behind by Bianca Escalante @ RubyConf 2018
\n\nOpen Source for ...Bad? by Bianca Escalante @ Codeland 2018
\n\n12:55 - Normalizing Conversations, Speaking About Race Openly, and the Concept of Distance Travelled
\n\n21:17 - Reconciling Failure, Repressing Feelings, and The Importance of Human Connection
\n\n34:02 - D&I: Who is responsible?
\n\nWinners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nBianca: Talking openly about the loneliness.
\n\nJohn: Having to develop superpowers as coping strategies.
\n\nJamey: When times are tough, you (sometimes) get to see the best of human connection.
\n\n_This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Bianca Escalante.
Sponsored By:
01:50 - Jess’s Superpower: Being a Property of a Situation
\n\n\n\n04:25 - The Interpretation of Luck and the Psychology of Scarcity
\n\n08:17 - Physics; Physics and Software
\n\n12:06 - Conference Speaking
\n\n15:53 - Undervaluing Code
\n\n22:13 - Defining ‘Done’ in Software Development
\n\n\n\nWe don’t want to define “done.” In an ongoing system, a symmathesy, there is no “done” except death.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 6, 2019
Instead, define “better.” Then you can know you accomplished something.
\n\nEmail is like laundry. There is no such thing as "done."
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 11, 2019
My job is not to do the laundry, it is to keep the laundry moving.
Nor to answer all the email, but to keep some correspondence flowing.
25:51 - TDD, the notion that “Coding is easy!”, and Resilience to Failure
\n\n\n\n\n\n42:04 - Learning While Teaching Others Programming
\n\nAvdi and Jess stumble through modern web development
\n\n\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Things never being “the end”.
\n\nFinite and Infinite Games (print)
\n\nFinite and Infinite Games (pdf)
\n\nSam: There might be an ending for you, specifically, but it’s not really an ending for anyone else.
\n\nJacob: Figuring out problems by vocalizing them.
\n\nJessica: Check out recent works from Karl Popper.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jacob Stoebel.
","summary":"Panelist, Jessica Kerr, talks about her superpower being a property of a situation. She also ponders the interpretation of luck, physics, conference speaking, TDD, and continuous learning.","date_published":"2019-02-20T05:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/8d7fde0c-6bd9-4cd9-a551-970a54efa8a7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":68720051,"duration_in_seconds":3950}]},{"id":"0d9010a2-01de-4762-a084-fb5aad5fd673","title":"117: Wholeness and Separation","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/wholeness-and-separation","content_text":"Virginia Satir\n\nThe Personal Iceberg Metaphor:\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://laveldanaylor.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/iceberg-ljn1.jpgnull\n\nHierarchical Organization of Constructs\n\nBecoming More Fully Human with Virginia SatirSponsored By:DevRelate.io: Are you truly involved in the developer communities you work in and sell to? Are you seeing the value in the events you are a part of? DevRelate.io can help! Developer and Community Relations as a Service: we speak developer!\r\n\r\nLearn more at DevRelate.io or email us at info@devrelate.io!","content_html":"\n\nThe Personal Iceberg Metaphor:
\n\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://laveldanaylor.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/iceberg-ljn1.jpg
null
Hierarchical Organization of Constructs
\n\nBecoming More Fully Human with Virginia Satir
Sponsored By:
Matty’s Talk, Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma @ REdeploy 2018
\n\n02:59 – Matt’s Superpower: Taking metaphors and ideas around self-help and turning them into allegories and analogies of how we could be better at technology
\n\nThe Five Love Languages of DevOps
\n\nThe Four Agreements of Incident Response
\n\n03:58 – What does healing organizational trauma mean?
\n\n05:50 – Incident Response Communication
\n\n16:00 – Trust, Hyperarousal, and Hypoarousal; Stuck On or Stuck Off
\n\n23:32 – Leading By Example, Not Being in a Rush to Solve Problems, Seeking to Understand, and Encouraging Safety
\n\n29:23 – Handling Postmortems: How to do them well and how to do them effectively
\n\n39:17 – The Hero’s Story vs The Story of the People; Crafting Our Narratives
\n\nJohn Allspaw: In the Center of the Cyclone: Finding Sources of Resilience
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: The metaphors of storytelling.
\n\nMatty: Creating a forum of discussion around postmortems.
\n\nJanelle: Thinking about Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and how, at the foundation of our mind is essentially a system of shapes that we see the world through, that we reason about through, that we feel emotions through, and that creates the sense of gut.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Matt Stratton.
Sponsored By:
01:30 – Sam’s Superpower: Persistence
\n\n\n\n08:07 – Mindfulness and Relaxation; Nonviolent Communication
\n\nSay What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Shambhala
\n\n17:23 – Collaborative Communication and Learning
\n\n26:17 – The Tension Between Code/Architectural Beauty and Delivering Working Solutions That Meet End-Users Needs
\n\nThe Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
\n\n38:49 – Being “Used to Things” and Getting Things Done via Incremental Changes
\n\nTechnology Strategy: Leaky Boats and Rocket Ships
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: 1) Thinking about relaxation as something you do as opposed to things you don’t do.
\n\n2) Learning how communication works and communicate better with other people more authentically.
\n\nJamey: Reading people cues is hard and beating yourself up over missed communication is not productive.
\n\nSam: Sometimes it’s okay to not have emotional energy to make changes.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Sam Joseph.
Sponsored By:
02:41 – JF’s Superpower: Systems Thinking
\n\n06:58 – Robots and Elixir
\n\nMarvin Minsky's Society of Mind
\n\n\n\nRodney Brooks -- Robots, AI, and other stuff
\n\n\n\n17:10 – Reapproaching Robotics, Predictive Processing, and Calibration of Attention
\n\n33:26 – Thinking and Talking About Object-Oriented Programming
\n\n43:51 – Intuition and Emergent Properties
\n\n54:02 – Unpacking Fractals
\n\n\n\n59:08 – The Ineffability of Smalltalk
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAvdi: Trying not to do work, but sometimes finding ways to be pulled into doing work.
\n\nSam: 1) Generating predictions and then correcting your model when those predictions turn out not to be confirmed by sensory data.
\n\n2) Object-Oriented Programming should be called Message-Oriented Programming.
\n\n3) Computer science as a field really wants to be math and the people who teach computer science want to be mathematicians.
\n\nJessica: Smalltalk feeling like a cathedral where you can get a sense of the architectural beauty.
\n\nEric Evans - Good Design is Imperfect Design
\n\nJean-Francois: Aikido.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jean-Francois Cloutier.
Sponsored By:
Amr Abdelwahab - An empathy exercise: contextualising the question of privilege (EuRuKo 2018 Video)
\n\n01:53 – Amr’s Superpower: Seeing the bigger picture.
\n\n04:24 – It’s Not Just Code
\n\n11:18 – Privilege
\n\n17:37 – Strategies For People with Privilege Who Are Open to Learning
\n\n22:57 – Why Diversity Matters and Avoiding Burnout
\n\n27:24 – Biases, Allyship, and Calling Out Others
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The metaphor of sexism and racism and cultural baggage being legacy code.
\n\nChristina: Listen and learn. Also, pushing organizations to contribute to bigger things, but making sure they understand why they are doing it, and not doing it blindly.
\n\nCoraline: We are currently living in an “unnatural state”. Equality is the natural state and we need to return to that.
\n\nAmr: The ability to have a politics-free life is a privilege of its own.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amr.
Sponsored By:
00:53 – Marcel’s Superpower: An Explosive Relationship with Laughter
\n\n01:45 – The Intersection of Public Health and Art
\n\n06:36 – Authenticity and Vulnerability; Bringing Your Whole Self While Remaining Professional
\n\n14:59 – Reading a Room and Determining Safety for Being Vulnerable & Making it Safe for People Around You While Being Vulnerable
\n\n19:41 – The Beauty of Dance
\n\n30:58 – Seeing and Being Outside The Box
\n\n38:57 – Gaining Confidence While Retaining Humility
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: The feedback loop can’t be, “I’m only going to keep doing this if I’m positively affirmed.”
\n\nCoraline: Vulnerability is scalable.
\n\nAvdi: Being the person on the dance floor not necessarily nailing their moves perfectly, but that has a big smile on their face regardless.
\n\nJessica: Imagination is paramount to creating a better world.
\n\nMarcel: Articulating the importance of art, creativity, and vulnerability.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Marcel Byrd.
","summary":"In this episode, Marcel Byrd talks about the intersection of public health and art, authenticity and vulnerability, reading a room and determining safety, and the beauty of dance.","date_published":"2019-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/efa99dc1-0450-4412-b9ba-7b7133704cf0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":41103110,"duration_in_seconds":2902}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1914","title":"111: Thermodynamics of Emotion with Thomas Perry","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/thermodynamics-of-emotion","content_text":"01:30 – Tom’s Superpower: Hot Toddies, Eccentricity, and Talking to Animals!\n\n04:42 – Observing Animal vs Humans Behavior and Organizational Restructuring\n\nParticipant Observation\n\n10:25 – Looking For Genuine Change, Empowering Workers, and the Conflation of the terms Boss and Manager\n\nThe Toyota Way\n\nAdrian Bejan: The Constructal Law\n\nYour Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves by Kevin Behan \n\nBrandt Stickley\n\n23:20 – Flow and How it Moves Through Systems\n\nDesign in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organizations by Adrian Bejan\n\n33:45 – Predictive and Explanatory Power\n\nThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn\n\n37:40 – Breaking Things Down\n\n43:37 – Alignment in Appetite and Emotion\n\nZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values\n\n52:08 – Defining Quality\n\n01:02:21 – Emotional Metaphors and Sensory Inputs\n\nDevOpsDays Boston 2017- Your Emotional API by John Sawers\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: When the language gets woo-ey, the ideas might be new-y.\n\nRein: Quality is individual and personal. It is subjective and intersubjective.\n\nThomas: The best ideas are often found in uncomfortable places.\n\nJohn: Systems of living things are living systems.\n\nJanelle: Don’t assume you understand anything immediately when you walk into a room. Let that understanding be emergent through the process of observation.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Thomas Perry.","content_html":"01:30 – Tom’s Superpower: Hot Toddies, Eccentricity, and Talking to Animals!
\n\n04:42 – Observing Animal vs Humans Behavior and Organizational Restructuring
\n\n\n\n10:25 – Looking For Genuine Change, Empowering Workers, and the Conflation of the terms Boss and Manager
\n\n\n\nAdrian Bejan: The Constructal Law
\n\nYour Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves by Kevin Behan
\n\n\n\n23:20 – Flow and How it Moves Through Systems
\n\n\n\n33:45 – Predictive and Explanatory Power
\n\nThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
\n\n37:40 – Breaking Things Down
\n\n43:37 – Alignment in Appetite and Emotion
\n\nZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
\n\n52:08 – Defining Quality
\n\n01:02:21 – Emotional Metaphors and Sensory Inputs
\n\nDevOpsDays Boston 2017- Your Emotional API by John Sawers
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: When the language gets woo-ey, the ideas might be new-y.
\n\nRein: Quality is individual and personal. It is subjective and intersubjective.
\n\nThomas: The best ideas are often found in uncomfortable places.
\n\nJohn: Systems of living things are living systems.
\n\nJanelle: Don’t assume you understand anything immediately when you walk into a room. Let that understanding be emergent through the process of observation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Thomas Perry.
","summary":"In this episode, Thomas Perry talks about thermodynamics of emotion. Observing animal and human behavior is also discussed, as well as organizational restructuring, Flow and how it moves through systems, and alignment in appetite and emotion. ","date_published":"2019-01-02T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/1766ec08-c5f6-4a5d-ba28-ee76920ba2cf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69482068,"duration_in_seconds":4218}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1893","title":"110: Human Incident Response with Courtney Eckhardt","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/human-incident-response","content_text":"RubyConf 2018 - Retrospectives for Humans by Courtney Eckhardt\n\n01:16 – Courtney’s Superpower: Explaining things.\n\n06:50 – Incident Response: How we talk to people how are are affected by incidents\n\nOther Great Incident Response GTC Episodes!\n\n\n088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock\n096: Resilience Engineering with John Allspaw\n\n\n13:52 – Disabilities in the Workplace and Professional Spaces\n\n20:25 – The Tension Between Accessibility and Security\n\n23:20 – Developing Coping Skills in Response to a Troubled Childhood / Combatting the Feeling of Being Othered\n\n29:16 – Incident Retrospectives and Defensiveness as a Natural Instinct to Feedback\n\n35:29 – Showing Vulnerability \n\n\n\"In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.\" - George Armitage Miller\n\n\n43:56 – Emotional Response\n\nTrauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror\n\nMental Health First Aid\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Trauma doesn’t stay in the past. Trauma has a continuous effect on our lives.\n\nCoraline: Thinking about therapy and frame it as a blameless retrospective.\n\nSam: Referring to “post mortems” as “retrospectives” and buying the book Agile Retrospectives. (Future book club episode?!)\n\nJamey: Even if you’re not changing things in a higher level, you can still help on a direct level.\n\nCourtney: Group therapy and handling retrospectives.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Courtney Eckhardt.Sponsored By:The Local Maximum: Check out this new podcast called The Local Maximum. It's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews a wide diversity of guests, including Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types. You can see their bios at localmaxradio.com, and subscribe to The Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen!","content_html":"RubyConf 2018 - Retrospectives for Humans by Courtney Eckhardt
\n\n01:16 – Courtney’s Superpower: Explaining things.
\n\n06:50 – Incident Response: How we talk to people how are are affected by incidents
\n\nOther Great Incident Response GTC Episodes!
\n\n\n\n13:52 – Disabilities in the Workplace and Professional Spaces
\n\n20:25 – The Tension Between Accessibility and Security
\n\n23:20 – Developing Coping Skills in Response to a Troubled Childhood / Combatting the Feeling of Being Othered
\n\n29:16 – Incident Retrospectives and Defensiveness as a Natural Instinct to Feedback
\n\n35:29 – Showing Vulnerability
\n\n\n\n\n"In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of." - George Armitage Miller
\n
43:56 – Emotional Response
\n\nTrauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Trauma doesn’t stay in the past. Trauma has a continuous effect on our lives.
\n\nCoraline: Thinking about therapy and frame it as a blameless retrospective.
\n\nSam: Referring to “post mortems” as “retrospectives” and buying the book Agile Retrospectives. (Future book club episode?!)
\n\nJamey: Even if you’re not changing things in a higher level, you can still help on a direct level.
\n\nCourtney: Group therapy and handling retrospectives.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Courtney Eckhardt.
Sponsored By:
01:11 – Jaya’s Superpower: Changing situations for the better.
\n\n02:54 – What does it take to change things?
\n\n99 Percent Invisible - Pockets: Articles of Interest #3
\n\n06:37 – The Lack of Science and Technology-Themed Clothing (Especially for Children)
\n\n08:30 – How Personal of a Choice Clothing Is -- The Importance of Expressing Yourself and Shattering Stereotypes and Social Norms
\n\n25:07 – Breaking Existing Customer Feedback Systems in Order to Expand
\n\n30:06 – Starting a Business like Svaha
\n\n\n\n39:03 – Coming in 2019....
\n\n41:34 – Business Challenges
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: How important it is to have clothing that can really express who you are and validate the parts of your identity that you want socially validated.
\n\nRein: All opportunities are unique to everyone.
\n\nJaya: The first time you fail does not mean you will fail every time. Never give up.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jaya Iyer.
Sponsored By:
00:57 – Kayte’s Superpower: Taking Something That Doesn’t Exist & Making It Real
\n\n02:12 – Having Confidence
\n\n06:45 – Paying Closer Attention to Your Accomplishments
\n\n\n\n08:30 – Dress Code at a Tactical Level
\n\n11:43 – The Intersection of Fashion and Coding
\n\n\n\n15:52 – Wearable Technology and Biotechnology
\n\n17:09 – Creation and Paving The Way For Women in Tech
\n\n23:17 – In-Home Coding Parties/Pop Up Shops
\n\n26:37 – Program and Course Feedback
\n\n29:57 – Debunking The Myth That Technology, Science, and STEM is For Boys
\n\n34:53 – Sign up to be find out about Holiday Promotions!
\n\n37:00 – The Gift of Innovation: Tech for Marginalized People and Communities
\n\n39:55 – Coming in 2019....
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Framing coding as an in-home, fun, party activity vs a classroom activity.
\n\nCoraline: Focusing on your accomplishments and building confidence through positive self-talk.
\n\nKayte: Fashion tech and retail tech is exciting!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kayte Malik.
","summary":"In this episode, Kayte Malik, of Dress Code, shares the mission of her company: to empower more girls and women to get involved in coding through creation and innovation. Kayte and the panelists discuss confidence, owning your accomplishments, and debunking the myth that code, tech, and STEM are for boys only.","date_published":"2018-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0de93297-0396-4264-9d50-ef5b9dc17742.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45783515,"duration_in_seconds":2740}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1870","title":"Special Edition: Ruby Together – LIVE! from RubyConf 2018","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/ruby-conf-ruby-together","content_text":"This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Adarsh Pandit, André Arko, Jonan Scheffler, and Valerie Woolard Srinivasan.","content_html":"This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Adarsh Pandit, André Arko, Jonan Scheffler, and Valerie Woolard Srinivasan.
","summary":"This special episode of Greater Than Code was recorded in-person during RubyConf in Los Angeles on November 15th. Ruby Together's Executive Director, André Arko, was joined by board members, Jonan Scheffler, Valerie Woolard Srinivasan, and Adarsh Pandit. They discussed recent changes to the organization, including André's decision to step down from the board into the executive director position, the RubyMe mentorship program, and a preview of awesome new things to come.","date_published":"2018-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/7bfff604-f189-403f-9afe-4a18becd7e93.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42389400,"duration_in_seconds":2428}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1864","title":"107: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-ruby-central-opportunity-scholarship-program","content_text":"The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship/Guide Program\n\n02:13 – Superpowers: Flying, Changing Diapers, and Empathy!\n\n03:21 – Scholars’ Favorite Parts of the Conference\n\n06:58 – Conferencing as an Introvert: Having Conference Buddies!\n\n08:06 – Meeting New People\n\n10:15 – Challenges of Conferencing\n\n11:55 – Navigating Conference Parties and the General Hubbub \n\n17:35 – Overcoming Pressure\n\n21:09 – Lightning Talks\n\n26:31 – Live Mob Programming Event\n\n30:07 – Advice For Future Scholars\n\n34:50 – Coming to Tech From Different Backgrounds and All Walks of Life\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Christine Seeman, Jennifer Tran, and Jeremy Schuurmans.Sponsored By:The Local Maximum: Check out this new podcast called The Local Maximum. It's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews a wide diversity of guests, including Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types. You can see their bios at localmaxradio.com, and subscribe to The Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen!","content_html":"The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship/Guide Program
\n\n02:13 – Superpowers: Flying, Changing Diapers, and Empathy!
\n\n03:21 – Scholars’ Favorite Parts of the Conference
\n\n06:58 – Conferencing as an Introvert: Having Conference Buddies!
\n\n08:06 – Meeting New People
\n\n10:15 – Challenges of Conferencing
\n\n11:55 – Navigating Conference Parties and the General Hubbub
\n\n17:35 – Overcoming Pressure
\n\n21:09 – Lightning Talks
\n\n26:31 – Live Mob Programming Event
\n\n30:07 – Advice For Future Scholars
\n\n34:50 – Coming to Tech From Different Backgrounds and All Walks of Life
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Christine Seeman, Jennifer Tran, and Jeremy Schuurmans.
Sponsored By:
01:20 – Laurie’s Superpower: Being a Timesuck
\n\n\n\n08:44 – Interviewing and Hiring Developers Effectively
\n\n12:24 – Creating False Negatives: Turning Down Candidates Prematurely
\n\n18:11 – Interviewing: Working With Existing Codebases and Asking Questions About Values
\n\nRailsConf 2018: The Code-Free Developer Interview by Pete Holiday
\n\n22:59 – How ^ Advice Pertains to Different Sized Companies
\n\n25:54 – Getting the Entire Team Involved in Hiring Processes: People First, Technology Second
\n\n29:05 – YOU CAN USE GOOGLE!!! (It’s Not Cheating!)
\n\n33:55 – Coding: Smartness vs Patience; Coming From Non-Coding Backgrounds (and why it’s a good thing!)
\n\nSet Design: Putting the "Art" in "Architecture" by Betsy Haibel
\n\n45:14 – Learning: Skill or Mindset? / Overcoming Demoralization and Overwhelm
\n\nEverything Is Broken, and It's OK - John Sawers
\n\n49:43 – Keeping a Developer Journal and Dealing with Past Development Baggage
\n\nReflections:
\n\nLaurie: Check out the talks we’ve linked to! Also, working together to make our industry not just accessible, but livable, enjoyable, and exciting.
\n\nJamey: Refining the interviewing and hiring process and thinking about how we evaluate the people we talk to.
\n\nJohn: Take up space and demand the attention that you need.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:49 – Maurice’s Superpower: Extreme Empathy
\n\n\n\n04:06 – Code Switching
\n\n13:21 – Creating and Fostering Safe Conference Environments
\n\n19:34 – Overcoming Feelings of Discomfort
\n\n22:16 – Human Decisions in Software: Why We Should Care
\n\n31:57 – Trust: How We’ve Lost It and How Should We Re-establish It?
\n\nA Developer Relations Bill of Rights
\n\n\n\n41:24 – Establishing Trust in a Company From the Ground Up: Glitch
\n\n47:03 – Diversity in Design and Shifting Your Mindset From a Creator to a Chronicler
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: It’s useful to think about code switching in context of my own behavior and using it as a practice for increasing empathy by trying to determine if other people are code switching in a certain situation.
\n\nJanelle: Putting myself in an outsider situation.
\n\nJess: Storytelling and experience creating.
\n\nAstrid: Parents encouraging young creators.
\n\nMaurice: We all have more work to do and we all have privileges we are blind to.
\nAre you Greater Than Code?
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Maurice Cherry.
","summary":"In this episode, Maurice Cherry talks about the concept of code switching: being different people around different people. He also talks about overcoming feelings of discomfort, trust and both how it’s lost and how it can be re-established, diversity in design, and shifting your mindset from a creator to a chronicler.","date_published":"2018-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/737a3a47-a4ac-49ce-b93f-b836cf4bad2f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60830257,"duration_in_seconds":4042}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1825","title":"104: Jellyfish Signaling with Sam Livingston-Gray","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/jellyfish-signaling","content_text":"01:33 – Is Sam a Jellyfish? \n\n03:14 – Sam’s Superpower: Making Connections Between Weird Things\n\n05:17 – Driving Evolution\n\n08:19 – “Fitness Landscape” and “Fitness Function”\n\naiweirdness.com\n\n21:17 – How Humans Make Decisions\n\nSam Livingston-Gray: Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies\n\nSaccade\n\nBlindsight by Peter Watts \n\n33:43 – Completion Bias\n\n40:52 – The Importance of Clarity of Communication in Code\n\n45:49 – Mimicry and The Theory of Mind\n\n52:18 – Scaling, Optimizing, and Thriving as Individuals and Communities\n\n57:38 – Rhetoric and Interacting with People\n\nEverything's an Argument\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Sponsored By:The Local Maximum: Check out this new podcast called The Local Maximum. It's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews a wide diversity of guests, including Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types. You can see their bios at localmaxradio.com, and subscribe to The Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen!","content_html":"01:33 – Is Sam a Jellyfish?
\n\n03:14 – Sam’s Superpower: Making Connections Between Weird Things
\n\n05:17 – Driving Evolution
\n\n08:19 – “Fitness Landscape” and “Fitness Function”
\n\n\n\n21:17 – How Humans Make Decisions
\n\nSam Livingston-Gray: Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies
\n\n\n\n\n\n33:43 – Completion Bias
\n\n40:52 – The Importance of Clarity of Communication in Code
\n\n45:49 – Mimicry and The Theory of Mind
\n\n52:18 – Scaling, Optimizing, and Thriving as Individuals and Communities
\n\n57:38 – Rhetoric and Interacting with People
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:12 – Marcus’ Superpower: Helping Engineers Become Good Bosses
\n\n02:30 – Bosses Who Don’t Wanna Boss: Ending Up in Management
\n\n\n\n10:37 – Are there people who just aren’t cut out for management or leadership?
\n\n14:20 – Applying Rationality to Organizations
\n\n20:23 – Alignment Not Agreement
\n\n24:52 – Is there a safe way to try and fail at management? Trying on Hats
\n\n\n\n31:16 – What does “BOSS” mean?
\n\nOutliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
\n\n36:03 – The Up/Down of the Hierarchy
\n\n\n\nHumble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Edgar H. Schein
\n\n36:03 – What are the skills that good managers have? How do you know if you’re doing a good job?
\n\nManaging Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp
\n\n\n\n53:26 – Giving and Receiving Feedback and Support, Reinforcing Behavior, and Focusing Attention
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Management vs. leadership.
\n\nSam: “I need this from you,” vs. “Why didn’t you do this?”
\n\nJess: When we react to something, it’s rarely about the thing we think we’re reacting to.
\n\nCareer narratives by Will Larson
\n\nAdditionally, management is like being on stage and you can be uncomfortable in your own role.
\n\nMarcus: Listening to others is critical and impactful. Also, letting people taste and see what it’s like to be in management and leadership without the commitment.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Marcus Blankenship.
","summary":"In this episode, Marcus Blankenship talks about wanting to be in management vs. just ending up in management, the idea of organizational alignment and not agreement, defining the word “boss”, and the up/down managerial hierarchy. ","date_published":"2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9529eea0-b18a-4651-ac08-fba8205f68b1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":69587762,"duration_in_seconds":4061}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1806","title":"102: Sticky in the Flow with Katrina Owen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/sticky-in-the-flow","content_text":"Greater Than Code Episode Episode 008: 99 Bottles of OOP with Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen\n\n01:29 – Katrina’s Superpower: Organizing and Systematizing \n\n09:44 – Motivation by Success\n\nThe 5 Second Rule | Mel Robbins\n\nProcrastination | Mel Robbins\n\n18:04 – Trust and Code Review\n\n27:04 – Systematizing and Refactoring\n\n30:54 – Training for Circus and its Parallels with Software Development and Mentorship and Working with Others\n\nSarah Mei: How We Make Software: A new theory of teams\n\n43:12 – Deliberate Practice and the Appearance of Expertise\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Short iterations and early feedback as a way of creating and maintaining motivation.\n\nCoraline: How to create a sense of psychological safety in code reviews, in particular.\n\nSam: The five-second window in which you can change your behavior and increase motivation.\n\nJanelle: Feedback loops as spirals that are reinforcing towards the positive or negative.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Katrina Owen.","content_html":"Greater Than Code Episode Episode 008: 99 Bottles of OOP with Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen
\n\n01:29 – Katrina’s Superpower: Organizing and Systematizing
\n\n09:44 – Motivation by Success
\n\nThe 5 Second Rule | Mel Robbins
\n\n\n\n18:04 – Trust and Code Review
\n\n27:04 – Systematizing and Refactoring
\n\n30:54 – Training for Circus and its Parallels with Software Development and Mentorship and Working with Others
\n\nSarah Mei: How We Make Software: A new theory of teams
\n\n43:12 – Deliberate Practice and the Appearance of Expertise
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Short iterations and early feedback as a way of creating and maintaining motivation.
\n\nCoraline: How to create a sense of psychological safety in code reviews, in particular.
\n\nSam: The five-second window in which you can change your behavior and increase motivation.
\n\nJanelle: Feedback loops as spirals that are reinforcing towards the positive or negative.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Katrina Owen.
","summary":"In this episode, Katrina Owen talks about organization and systematization, motivation by success, and how her past experience in training for circus is parallel to her career in software development.","date_published":"2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d6570ce5-42f0-49b8-ab19-439ad583bb3e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55079520,"duration_in_seconds":3331}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1729","title":"101: A Difficult Conversation with Sonia Gupta","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/a-difficult-conversation","content_text":"02:02 – Sonia’s Superpower: Talking about white supremacy and dealing with the fallout.\n\n05:27 – Feeling Rightness and Motivation to Stand Up for Your Beliefs\n\n10:15 – Seeing Your Advocacy and Efforts Make a Difference\n\n12:17 – When People Disagree\n\n16:26 – Ingroup vs Outgroup Empathy\n\n21:17 – Intersectionality\n\nWhite Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism\n\n26:07 – Navigating Situations with Empathy\n\n28:25 – Staying In Your Own Lane While Advocating For and Amplifying Others\n\n35:39 – Educating Yourself About Race\n\nSo You Want to Talk About Race\n\nOther Resources from Sonia:\n\n\nWhy I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race\nThe History of White People \nDamon Jones on racism\nAdrian Jackson on \"not all white people\" \n\n\n38:39 – Doing The Work\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: The place for these conversations is not Twitter!\n\nCoraline: Personalizing advocacy.\n\nJamey: Our advocacy is powerful because it comes from a place of passion.\n\nJohn: The fixed vs growth mindset in regards to racism.\n\nSonia: We can all be advocates and we can all be actors.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Sonia Gupta.","content_html":"02:02 – Sonia’s Superpower: Talking about white supremacy and dealing with the fallout.
\n\n05:27 – Feeling Rightness and Motivation to Stand Up for Your Beliefs
\n\n10:15 – Seeing Your Advocacy and Efforts Make a Difference
\n\n12:17 – When People Disagree
\n\n16:26 – Ingroup vs Outgroup Empathy
\n\n21:17 – Intersectionality
\n\nWhite Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
\n\n26:07 – Navigating Situations with Empathy
\n\n28:25 – Staying In Your Own Lane While Advocating For and Amplifying Others
\n\n35:39 – Educating Yourself About Race
\n\nSo You Want to Talk About Race
\n\nOther Resources from Sonia:
\n\n38:39 – Doing The Work
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: The place for these conversations is not Twitter!
\n\nCoraline: Personalizing advocacy.
\n\nJamey: Our advocacy is powerful because it comes from a place of passion.
\n\nJohn: The fixed vs growth mindset in regards to racism.
\n\nSonia: We can all be advocates and we can all be actors.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Sonia Gupta.
","summary":"In this episode, Sonia Gupta and the panelists have a candid conversation about white supremacy and standing up for your beliefs, advocating for others while staying in your own lane, intersectionality, and who has to ultimately do the work. ","date_published":"2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/565541ed-5e08-4ad0-b14e-3ef4c6918e76.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50227097,"duration_in_seconds":3219}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1717","title":"100: The Business of Documentation with Jaime Slutzky","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-business-of-documentation","content_text":"01:12 – Jaime’s Superpower: Taking complex ideas and figuring out the fastest way from here to there. (i.e.: logistics!)\n\nZapier\n\n05:41 – Tech as a Roadblock\n\n19:44 – Handing Off Responsibilities to Business Owners\n\nProcess Street\n\nThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right\n\nBullet Journals\n\n18:09 – Identifying Ideal Clients and Attitudes Towards Technology\n\n24:40 – Documentation\n\n36:53 – What do clients need to know about technology?\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Documentation is important.\n\nJamey: Getting tech recommendations from people you trust, pick one, and do it. Don’t be paralyzed by indecision.\n\nJaime: Document in isolation.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jaime Slutzky.","content_html":"01:12 – Jaime’s Superpower: Taking complex ideas and figuring out the fastest way from here to there. (i.e.: logistics!)
\n\n\n\n05:41 – Tech as a Roadblock
\n\n19:44 – Handing Off Responsibilities to Business Owners
\n\n\n\nThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
\n\n\n\n18:09 – Identifying Ideal Clients and Attitudes Towards Technology
\n\n24:40 – Documentation
\n\n36:53 – What do clients need to know about technology?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Documentation is important.
\n\nJamey: Getting tech recommendations from people you trust, pick one, and do it. Don’t be paralyzed by indecision.
\n\nJaime: Document in isolation.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jaime Slutzky.
","summary":"In this episode, Jaime Slutzky talks about making pieces of technology work together functionally, working for clients and business owners and then handing over processes and documentation, and what your clients need to know about tech stacks. ","date_published":"2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f632a2ca-7b55-426b-841d-8fac291a8af0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42975878,"duration_in_seconds":2627}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1704","title":"099: The Knowledge You Possess with Stephanie Morillo","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-knowledge-you-possess","content_text":"02:40 – Stephanie’s Superpower: Intellectual Curiosity\n\n13:06 – On Being a Content PM, Technical Writer, and Ruby Together Core Team Member\n\n@azureadvocates\n\nRuby Together\n\n19:44 – Validating Open Source Software Contribution\n\nWrite the Docs Slack Community\n\n24:27 – Filtering Feedback\n\n28:14 – The Importance of Content Strategy\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock\n\n43:24 – Don’t Minimize Yourself! (Psst: You’re awesome!)\n\n\nOne of the best (and worst) things about working in tech is how easy it is to get excited by something and wanting to learn it—right up until your brain tells you you're not doing enough, work harder, leading you to get overwhelmed with just how much there is to learn. 🙃\n— Stephanie Morillo (@radiomorillo) September 24, 2018\n\n\nCoraline's low-friction task management system (lftm)\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Understanding the teams you’re working with better.\n\nCoraline: The power of dreams.\n\nJamey: The value of being able to know when people in your life are interacting with you in good faith.\n\nStephanie: Figuring out the “why”.\n\nRubyMe\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Stephanie Morillo.","content_html":"02:40 – Stephanie’s Superpower: Intellectual Curiosity
\n\n13:06 – On Being a Content PM, Technical Writer, and Ruby Together Core Team Member
\n\n\n\n\n\n19:44 – Validating Open Source Software Contribution
\n\nWrite the Docs Slack Community
\n\n24:27 – Filtering Feedback
\n\n28:14 – The Importance of Content Strategy
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock
\n\n43:24 – Don’t Minimize Yourself! (Psst: You’re awesome!)
\n\n\n\n\nOne of the best (and worst) things about working in tech is how easy it is to get excited by something and wanting to learn it—right up until your brain tells you you're not doing enough, work harder, leading you to get overwhelmed with just how much there is to learn. 🙃
\n
\n— Stephanie Morillo (@radiomorillo) September 24, 2018
Coraline's low-friction task management system (lftm)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Understanding the teams you’re working with better.
\n\nCoraline: The power of dreams.
\n\nJamey: The value of being able to know when people in your life are interacting with you in good faith.
\n\nStephanie: Figuring out the “why”.
\n\nRubyMe
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Stephanie Morillo.
","summary":"In this episode, Stephanie Morillo talks about content strategy, technical writing, organizing and optimizing company internal systems, and that you need to give yourself more credit for the things you’ve already accomplished!","date_published":"2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/aa8760ff-5fc4-45d4-92c1-3b6706dafcfe.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53846765,"duration_in_seconds":3698}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1654","title":"098: Designing For Inclusion with Jenny Shen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/designing-for-inclusion","content_text":"01:51 – Jenny’s Superpower: Not Giving a F*ck and Sticking Up For Others\n\nThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life\n\n05:00 – Living a Remote Lifestyle and Cross-Cultural Communication\n\n08:34 – Design and UX For International Users / Research for Local Users\n\n18:08 – Designing to Include All People: Is it possible?\n\n27:07 – Paid Mentorship\n\nSunk Cost Fallacy\n\n34:32 – Offering Mentorship Scholarships \n\n37:15 – Privilege and Open Source\n\nRuby Together\n\n40:22 – Advice for People Looking to Freelance and Work Remotely\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Weaponizing the sunk cost fallacy for themself.\n\nSam: The importance of humans in tech and tech culture.\n\nJessica: The difference between internationalization and localization.\n\nJenny: Scholarships as a way to signal and inform other people what she values and what she wants to promote.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jenny Shen.","content_html":"01:51 – Jenny’s Superpower: Not Giving a F*ck and Sticking Up For Others
\n\nThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
\n\n05:00 – Living a Remote Lifestyle and Cross-Cultural Communication
\n\n08:34 – Design and UX For International Users / Research for Local Users
\n\n18:08 – Designing to Include All People: Is it possible?
\n\n27:07 – Paid Mentorship
\n\n\n\n34:32 – Offering Mentorship Scholarships
\n\n37:15 – Privilege and Open Source
\n\n\n\n40:22 – Advice for People Looking to Freelance and Work Remotely
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Weaponizing the sunk cost fallacy for themself.
\n\nSam: The importance of humans in tech and tech culture.
\n\nJessica: The difference between internationalization and localization.
\n\nJenny: Scholarships as a way to signal and inform other people what she values and what she wants to promote.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jenny Shen.
","summary":"In this episode, Jenny Shen talks about not giving a f*ck and why that’s okay, design and UX for international users, paid mentorship, and the intersection between privilege and open source.","date_published":"2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/6bd0611e-051d-41ae-9d83-4e329bde8137.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44558813,"duration_in_seconds":3069}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1615","title":"097: The Job of a Manager with Brandon Hays","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-job-of-a-manager","content_text":"00:43 – Brandon’s Superpower: Helping Other People Discover Their Own Superpower\n\n02:04 – Maintaining Relationships When People Change Jobs So Frequently\n\n04:31 – Climbing The Corporate Tech Ladder and Strategizing Career Growth\n\n10:25 – Mentorship and Power Disparity\n\n19:00 – Management and Leadership Skills\n\nThe Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change\n\n10 Traits of a Great Manager, According to Google's Internal Research (Project Oxygen)\n\n23:22 – Solving Problems Regardless of Job Title\n\n27:50 – Preservation of Context\n\n31:01 – Becoming a Manager…and Being Bad at it!\n\n32:58 – The New Manager’s Toolkit\n\nRadical Candor \n\n35:08 – Techniques for Managing From Below to Influence Your Manager\n\n38:19 – Engineers and Business-level Input\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: The deeply ingrained thread in “nerd” and “geek” culture how terrible managers are.\n\nAstrid: The power dynamics that exist that are untapped in engineering.\n\nCoraline: What kind of technical contribution do I want to leave as my legacy?\n\nBrandon: Translating skills from previous careers to new careers.\n\nNot Applicable: What Your Job Post is Really Saying\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Brandon Hays.","content_html":"00:43 – Brandon’s Superpower: Helping Other People Discover Their Own Superpower
\n\n02:04 – Maintaining Relationships When People Change Jobs So Frequently
\n\n04:31 – Climbing The Corporate Tech Ladder and Strategizing Career Growth
\n\n10:25 – Mentorship and Power Disparity
\n\n19:00 – Management and Leadership Skills
\n\nThe Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
\n\n10 Traits of a Great Manager, According to Google's Internal Research (Project Oxygen)
\n\n23:22 – Solving Problems Regardless of Job Title
\n\n27:50 – Preservation of Context
\n\n31:01 – Becoming a Manager…and Being Bad at it!
\n\n32:58 – The New Manager’s Toolkit
\n\n\n\n35:08 – Techniques for Managing From Below to Influence Your Manager
\n\n38:19 – Engineers and Business-level Input
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: The deeply ingrained thread in “nerd” and “geek” culture how terrible managers are.
\n\nAstrid: The power dynamics that exist that are untapped in engineering.
\n\nCoraline: What kind of technical contribution do I want to leave as my legacy?
\n\nBrandon: Translating skills from previous careers to new careers.
\n\nNot Applicable: What Your Job Post is Really Saying
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Brandon Hays.
","summary":"Brandon Hays talks about mentorship, management, and leadership skills, as well as maintaining relationships with people, climbing the tech ladder, strategizing career growth.","date_published":"2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/991b7127-0add-447d-9e47-a716bd709627.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44331551,"duration_in_seconds":2874}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1583","title":"096: Resilience Engineering with John Allspaw","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/resilience-engineering","content_text":"John Allspaw: Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems\n\n01:32 – John’s Superpower: Seeing connections across domains.\n\n05:45 – All Technical Communities Run Small, the Intersection of People, Technology, and Work, and the Resilience Engineering Community\n\n09:07 – Variety and Complexity\n\nRequisite Variety\n\nThe Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer\n\nThe Great Courses\n\nUnderstanding Complexity\n\n17:51 – Understanding Cognitive Work\n\n25:34 – Heuristics and Biases\n\n31:01 – Strategies for Generating Context-Specific Questions\n\nDebriefing Facilitation Guide (Morgan Evans)\n\n35:01 – Asking “Why?” Over “What?” Questions\n\nThe PreAccident Podcast\n\nTodd Conklin: People screw up – and it happens all the time\n\nTen challenges for making automation a “team player” in joint human-agent activity\n\n49:33 – Analyzing and Aggregating\n\nRational Choice Theory\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: How do we deal with the objective/subjective dialectic?\n\nJanelle: The thing we focus on and pay attention to is a clear signal of what matters.\n\nJessica: Looking up the Knowledge Elicitation Methods.\n\nRein: It takes variety to match variety.\n\nJohn A.: Guiding dialogue data.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: John Allspaw.","content_html":"John Allspaw: Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems
\n\n01:32 – John’s Superpower: Seeing connections across domains.
\n\n05:45 – All Technical Communities Run Small, the Intersection of People, Technology, and Work, and the Resilience Engineering Community
\n\n09:07 – Variety and Complexity
\n\n\n\nThe Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer
\n\n\n\n\n\n17:51 – Understanding Cognitive Work
\n\n25:34 – Heuristics and Biases
\n\n31:01 – Strategies for Generating Context-Specific Questions
\n\nDebriefing Facilitation Guide (Morgan Evans)
\n\n35:01 – Asking “Why?” Over “What?” Questions
\n\n\n\nTodd Conklin: People screw up – and it happens all the time
\n\nTen challenges for making automation a “team player” in joint human-agent activity
\n\n49:33 – Analyzing and Aggregating
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: How do we deal with the objective/subjective dialectic?
\n\nJanelle: The thing we focus on and pay attention to is a clear signal of what matters.
\n\nJessica: Looking up the Knowledge Elicitation Methods.
\n\nRein: It takes variety to match variety.
\n\nJohn A.: Guiding dialogue data.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: John Allspaw.
","summary":"John Allspaw talks about the intersection of people, technology, and work, variety and complexity, and the importance of generating context-specific questions.","date_published":"2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ff31b1c8-44d9-4b3c-86d0-7857a5805ce9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":68775691,"duration_in_seconds":4142}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1578","title":"095: Cleaning House with Heidi Waterhouse","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/cleaning-house","content_text":"01:20 – Heidi’s Superpower: Being Able to Remember Where Other People Set Things Down\n\n03:53 – Where will software be in three years?\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 084: Federation Is Bad with Aurynn Shaw\n\n08:28 – Resilience in People and Software\n\nBob Marshall / @flowchainsensei\n\n12:00 – Developer Relations\n\nHeidi’s Lady Conference Speaker Blog Posts\n\n19:24 – Measuring Success in Developer Relations\n\n23:43 – Fostering Relationships\n\n29:13 – Life Hacks for ADD and Claiming Personal Space\n\n41:37 – Housekeeping and Code Review; Clean Fights\n\nThe 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts \n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: The things you say can be heard by someone else a different way.\n\nJohn: If you think about what you need out of your household or codebase as being your preference, it allows you to work with people who have other preferences more easily.\n\nJamey: There’s always somebody that is going to care about something.\n\nJessica: Spreading enthusiasm without judging people who aren’t enthusiastic about the same things as you are.\n\nHeidi: Being able to discuss the emotional needs of having your own needs and space while having to compromise both in code and life.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Heidi Waterhouse.","content_html":"01:20 – Heidi’s Superpower: Being Able to Remember Where Other People Set Things Down
\n\n03:53 – Where will software be in three years?
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 084: Federation Is Bad with Aurynn Shaw
\n\n08:28 – Resilience in People and Software
\n\nBob Marshall / @flowchainsensei
\n\n12:00 – Developer Relations
\n\nHeidi’s Lady Conference Speaker Blog Posts
\n\n19:24 – Measuring Success in Developer Relations
\n\n23:43 – Fostering Relationships
\n\n29:13 – Life Hacks for ADD and Claiming Personal Space
\n\n41:37 – Housekeeping and Code Review; Clean Fights
\n\nThe 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: The things you say can be heard by someone else a different way.
\n\nJohn: If you think about what you need out of your household or codebase as being your preference, it allows you to work with people who have other preferences more easily.
\n\nJamey: There’s always somebody that is going to care about something.
\n\nJessica: Spreading enthusiasm without judging people who aren’t enthusiastic about the same things as you are.
\n\nHeidi: Being able to discuss the emotional needs of having your own needs and space while having to compromise both in code and life.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Heidi Waterhouse.
","summary":"Heidi Waterhouse joins the show to talk about developer relations, life hacks for ADD, and the similarities between housekeeping and code review.","date_published":"2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/2b720d0a-1a62-419a-b5a4-17427d980678.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60572871,"duration_in_seconds":3746}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1564","title":"094: Humans All The Way Down with April Wensel","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/humans-all-the-way-down","content_text":"01:07 – April’s Superpower: Synthesizing Seemingly Unrelated Concepts to Create Something New\n\n02:30 – Tension Between Code and Compassion\n\n05:47 – Living According to Your Values\n\n11:33 – Team Values and Feedback Loops\n\n17:23 – Changing Social Makeups of Teams\n\n22:22 – Conscious Business\n\n32:51 – Self-Compassion and Forgiveness\n\n40:34 – Alleviating Pain and Suffering\n\n43:51 – Being Kind vs Being Nice\n\n47:16 – Having Hard Conversations\n\n51:15 – “Clever” Code\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: Capturing how zero-sum thinking works and holding compassion for yourself and other people.\n\nJohn: Putting values evaluations into regular retrospectives.\n\nApril: You don’t just apply compassion in isolation. True compassion is unconditional.\n\nJanelle: Helping to relieve quiet suffering.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: April Wensel.","content_html":"01:07 – April’s Superpower: Synthesizing Seemingly Unrelated Concepts to Create Something New
\n\n02:30 – Tension Between Code and Compassion
\n\n05:47 – Living According to Your Values
\n\n11:33 – Team Values and Feedback Loops
\n\n17:23 – Changing Social Makeups of Teams
\n\n22:22 – Conscious Business
\n\n32:51 – Self-Compassion and Forgiveness
\n\n40:34 – Alleviating Pain and Suffering
\n\n43:51 – Being Kind vs Being Nice
\n\n47:16 – Having Hard Conversations
\n\n51:15 – “Clever” Code
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Capturing how zero-sum thinking works and holding compassion for yourself and other people.
\n\nJohn: Putting values evaluations into regular retrospectives.
\n\nApril: You don’t just apply compassion in isolation. True compassion is unconditional.
\n\nJanelle: Helping to relieve quiet suffering.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: April Wensel.
","summary":"April Wensel talks about compassion: living according to your values, changing social makeups of teams, conscious business, and self-compassion and forgiveness.","date_published":"2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/a98c0cbe-48aa-4a09-a054-91fde6efb094.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":64341166,"duration_in_seconds":3867}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1555","title":"093: BOOK CLUB! Cybernetic Revolutionaries with Eden Medina","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/cybernetic-revolutionaries","content_text":"Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Print Version)\n\n01:57 – Eden’s Superpower: Being a Patient Learner\n\n06:51 – Determining Your Ability/Eligibility to Speak as an Expert\n\n08:55 – Electrical Engineering => Law => PhD Work\n\n12:47 – The History of Cybernetics\n\n15:51 – American vs British Cybernetics\n\nThe Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by Andrew Pickering \n\nGrey Walter’s Tortoises\n\n17:37 – The Many Definitions of Cybernetics\n\nThe Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History) by Ronald R. Kline\n\n25:03 – Project Cybersyn\n\n45:56 – Sociotechnical Engineering\n\n53:24 – Creating Ethically Sound Tools\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: The power dynamics that are already baked into our tools and the history of computing is global.\n\nJessica: Looking into second-order cybernetics.\n\nRein: The importance of learning about history, culture, and how people work as being necessary for a technical career.\n\nEden: Making connections throughout the show.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Eden Medina.","content_html":"Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Print Version)
\n\n01:57 – Eden’s Superpower: Being a Patient Learner
\n\n06:51 – Determining Your Ability/Eligibility to Speak as an Expert
\n\n08:55 – Electrical Engineering => Law => PhD Work
\n\n12:47 – The History of Cybernetics
\n\n15:51 – American vs British Cybernetics
\n\nThe Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by Andrew Pickering
\n\n\n\n17:37 – The Many Definitions of Cybernetics
\n\n\n\n25:03 – Project Cybersyn
\n\n45:56 – Sociotechnical Engineering
\n\n53:24 – Creating Ethically Sound Tools
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: The power dynamics that are already baked into our tools and the history of computing is global.
\n\nJessica: Looking into second-order cybernetics.
\n\nRein: The importance of learning about history, culture, and how people work as being necessary for a technical career.
\n\nEden: Making connections throughout the show.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Eden Medina.
","summary":"In this book club episode, we talk to Eden Medina: author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile about speaking as an expert, sociotechnical engineering, and of course, cybernetics. ","date_published":"2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e5834231-651d-4c6a-ad64-28a85a38f2f8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":72537262,"duration_in_seconds":4007}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1442","title":"092: A11y Ally with Rob DeLuca","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/a11y-ally","content_text":"01:09 – Rob’s Superpower: Ambition\n\n05:00 – Designing and Testing for Accessibility\n\nWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview\n\nWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards\n\nYour Emotional API\n\n16:36 – Hard Problems and “Squishy Problems”\n\n19:49 – Rob’s Getting Involved with and Caring About Accessibility Story\n\n31:03 – The Accessibility World on the Web has an Accessible Problem\n\n38:04 – Moving From a Developer Role to a Business-y Role Within a Company\n\nRadical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott (Book)\n\nRadical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss (Talk)\n\n\n“We are investing in Rob the person, not Rob the developer.” ~ Brandon Hays\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Thinking about people problems as engineering problems.\n\nJessica: The Frontside as a human company that cares about the people in it.\n\nRob: The Human API.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Rob DeLuca.","content_html":"01:09 – Rob’s Superpower: Ambition
\n\n05:00 – Designing and Testing for Accessibility
\n\nWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview
\n\nWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards
\n\n\n\n16:36 – Hard Problems and “Squishy Problems”
\n\n19:49 – Rob’s Getting Involved with and Caring About Accessibility Story
\n\n31:03 – The Accessibility World on the Web has an Accessible Problem
\n\n38:04 – Moving From a Developer Role to a Business-y Role Within a Company
\n\nRadical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott (Book)
\n\nRadical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss (Talk)
\n\n\n\n\n“We are investing in Rob the person, not Rob the developer.” ~ Brandon Hays
\n
Reflections:
\n\nJohn: Thinking about people problems as engineering problems.
\n\nJessica: The Frontside as a human company that cares about the people in it.
\n\nRob: The Human API.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Rob DeLuca.
","summary":"In this episode, Rob DeLuca talks about ambition, designing and testing for accessibility on the web, hard problems vs squishy problems, and moving from a developer role into a bussiness-y roll within a company.","date_published":"2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/34747bf5-1e00-4180-9857-b2385bb3d14a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53766593,"duration_in_seconds":3025}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1435","title":"091: Solving Puzzles and Productive Failure with Kim Vanderspek","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/solving-puzzles-and-productive-failure","content_text":"02:03 – Kim’s Superpower: Being able to solve puzzles and problems and teaching others to do the same.\n\n05:39 – Speaking and Teaching Math\n\n11:44 – Using Technology to Visualize Math: Quilting, Sewing, Playdough, Boxes\n\n13:53 – Incorporating Programming Into Math Classes\n\nProcessing\n\n16:01 – Specialization and Efficiency\n\n23:38 – The Cinderella Dress in Action\n\n27:06 – Talking About Process, Mistakes, and Failures\n\n34:56 –Teaching Problem Solving and Failure\n\n39:08 – Perseverance Over Content\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Show your work.\n\nlftm\n\nSam: The value of perspective.\n\nJessica: To be perfect, it has to be repeatable for particular people in a particular context.\n\nJohn: Obstacles parallelisms. Fail first, learn from the failure, get better. But planning for that is integral.\n\nKim: Productive failure, trial and error, and doing beautiful things.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Kim Vanderspek.","content_html":"02:03 – Kim’s Superpower: Being able to solve puzzles and problems and teaching others to do the same.
\n\n05:39 – Speaking and Teaching Math
\n\n11:44 – Using Technology to Visualize Math: Quilting, Sewing, Playdough, Boxes
\n\n13:53 – Incorporating Programming Into Math Classes
\n\n\n\n16:01 – Specialization and Efficiency
\n\n23:38 – The Cinderella Dress in Action
\n\n27:06 – Talking About Process, Mistakes, and Failures
\n\n34:56 –Teaching Problem Solving and Failure
\n\n39:08 – Perseverance Over Content
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Show your work.
\n\n\n\nSam: The value of perspective.
\n\nJessica: To be perfect, it has to be repeatable for particular people in a particular context.
\n\nJohn: Obstacles parallelisms. Fail first, learn from the failure, get better. But planning for that is integral.
\n\nKim: Productive failure, trial and error, and doing beautiful things.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kim Vanderspek.
","summary":"In this episode, Kim Vanderspek talks about solving puzzles and teaching others to do the same by using technology to visualize math by quilting, sewing, Playdough, and other mediums. She also explains why failure is an important part of success, and why perseverance matters over content.","date_published":"2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/4f106acf-64f4-4cd0-ab25-b576a7d1e64f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49231461,"duration_in_seconds":2864}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1428","title":"090: The Journey with Chelsea Troy","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-journey","content_text":"02:03 – Chelsea’s Superpower: Pushing through and enduring discomfort to accomplish things\n\n06:24 – The Act of Writing and Reflection: Journaling as a Tool for Learning; Commit Tracing\n\nCoxswain\n\n14:27 – Getting and Dealing with Feedback\n\n17:44 – Measuring Participation in Meetings\n\nWhy are there always technical problems in remote meetings?\n\nWhy do remote meetings suck so much? (caucus checklist)\n\nHow do we make remote meetings not suck? (follow-up post) \n\n23:51 – Implementing Structure in Meetings\n\nValerie Aurora: Meeting Skills\n\n31:58 – Cultivating Questions Kindly Without Assumption or Judgement\n\nNo Feigning Surprise: The Recurse Center User’s Manual\n\nxkcd: Ten Thousand\n\nSOAP\n\n39:03 – The Problem with Claiming “Self-Taught”\n\n\n“The common industry accepted term to describe how I learned programming is “self-taught” but I’ve always found that so strange, considering all of the resources and communities that have helped me along the way.” – Jacob Stoebel\n\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Extending empathy to other people.\n\nChelsea: The story of where things come from and the people they come from can make them both much more interesting and much more accessible.\n\nCoraline: The value of history.\n\nSam: One of the best ways to understand a tool is to understand the context that existed before the tool existed.\n\nThe nature of a caucus penalizes people for listening.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Chelsea Troy.","content_html":"02:03 – Chelsea’s Superpower: Pushing through and enduring discomfort to accomplish things
\n\n06:24 – The Act of Writing and Reflection: Journaling as a Tool for Learning; Commit Tracing
\n\n\n\n14:27 – Getting and Dealing with Feedback
\n\n17:44 – Measuring Participation in Meetings
\n\nWhy are there always technical problems in remote meetings?
\n\nWhy do remote meetings suck so much? (caucus checklist)
\n\nHow do we make remote meetings not suck? (follow-up post)
\n\n23:51 – Implementing Structure in Meetings
\n\nValerie Aurora: Meeting Skills
\n\n31:58 – Cultivating Questions Kindly Without Assumption or Judgement
\n\nNo Feigning Surprise: The Recurse Center User’s Manual
\n\n\n\n\n\n39:03 – The Problem with Claiming “Self-Taught”
\n\n\n\n\n“The common industry accepted term to describe how I learned programming is “self-taught” but I’ve always found that so strange, considering all of the resources and communities that have helped me along the way.” – Jacob Stoebel
\n
Reflections:
\n\nJamey: Extending empathy to other people.
\n\nChelsea: The story of where things come from and the people they come from can make them both much more interesting and much more accessible.
\n\nCoraline: The value of history.
\n\nSam: One of the best ways to understand a tool is to understand the context that existed before the tool existed.
\n\nThe nature of a caucus penalizes people for listening.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chelsea Troy.
","summary":"In this episode, Chelsea Troy joins the show to talk about measuring participation in meetings, cultivating questions kindly without assumption or judgement, and the problem with claiming to be “self-taught”.","date_published":"2018-07-25T04:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/bb8d732c-07ac-41b6-bcea-0e556221552d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61915833,"duration_in_seconds":3523}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1419","title":"089: Something Something Agile with Noel Rappin","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/something-something-agile","content_text":"Greater Than Code Episode 001: Taking Payments on the Web with Noel Rappin\n\n02:58 – Noel’s Superpower: Extrapolating and Explaining Consequences of Tech Decisions to Others\n\n06:24 – Cultural Patterns of How Organizations Develop Software; Should this process be standardized?\n\n16:07 – Agile Adoption: Pros and Cons\n\nThe Leprechauns of Software Engineering: How folklore turns into fact and what to do about it by Laurent Bossavit\n\nThe Journal of Irreproducible Results\n\n26:40 – Making Decisions Without No Scientific Evidence\n\n32:05 – Metaphors for Software Engineering and Legitimizing the Profession\n\n38:33 – Trust-Driven Development\n\n44:12 – Decision Making Among Teams\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: We are working with systems that we can’t fully define and the idea that we’re acting on systems that we’re a part of. Therefore, it changes the observer effect.\n\nJessica: Getting the ships to all go in the same direction.\n\nCoraline: The understanding of our place in a given context.\n\nNoel: Aligning process, values, culture, and goals, and doing that to make teams work better.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Noel Rappin.","content_html":"Greater Than Code Episode 001: Taking Payments on the Web with Noel Rappin
\n\n02:58 – Noel’s Superpower: Extrapolating and Explaining Consequences of Tech Decisions to Others
\n\n06:24 – Cultural Patterns of How Organizations Develop Software; Should this process be standardized?
\n\n16:07 – Agile Adoption: Pros and Cons
\n\n\n\nThe Journal of Irreproducible Results
\n\n26:40 – Making Decisions Without No Scientific Evidence
\n\n32:05 – Metaphors for Software Engineering and Legitimizing the Profession
\n\n38:33 – Trust-Driven Development
\n\n44:12 – Decision Making Among Teams
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: We are working with systems that we can’t fully define and the idea that we’re acting on systems that we’re a part of. Therefore, it changes the observer effect.
\n\nJessica: Getting the ships to all go in the same direction.
\n\nCoraline: The understanding of our place in a given context.
\n\nNoel: Aligning process, values, culture, and goals, and doing that to make teams work better.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Noel Rappin.
","summary":"In this episode, Noel Rappin is back to talk about tech consequences, cultural patterns of how organizations develop software, the pros and cons of Agile, and metaphors for software engineering.","date_published":"2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/8d683d29-4ee0-4840-9f32-83db3451d5f7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61736182,"duration_in_seconds":3451}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1410","title":"088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-safety-2-dance","content_text":"01:46 – Steven’s Superpower: Being a Super-Recognizer and Empathy\n\nSteven Shorrock on the myth of human error (Courtney Nash & O’Reilly Radar)\n\n04:21 – Steven’s Occupational History, Background, and Mission: System Performance and Human Wellbeing\n\n08:19 – Critical Incident Stress Management\n\n10:40 – Social Capital, Bonds Within Groups, and Connectors\n\nAsset-Based Community Development (ABCD)\n\nAppreciative Inquiry\n\nABCD: Gifts, Skills, Passions\n\n29:37 – Cognitive Empathy vs Emotional Empathy, and Creating Serendipity\n\n36:33 – Safety-I and Safety-II\n\n55:11 – Work-As-Imagined & Work-As-Done; Work-As-Prescribed, Work-As-Disclosed\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: ABCD and thinking about ways to incorporate into everyday life.\n\nJamey: People who are connectors vs networkers vs gappers; differences are subtle but there.\n\nJessica: When you start at a small company, you know everyone in the organization; so then as the company grows, you continue to know someone in every part of the organization.\n\nIn people’s assets there are gifts, skills, and passion, and we tend to hire only for skills, which is also the only one of these things that is easy to change.\n\nSteven: What do the people closest to you say your gifts are?\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Steven Shorrock.","content_html":"01:46 – Steven’s Superpower: Being a Super-Recognizer and Empathy
\n\nSteven Shorrock on the myth of human error (Courtney Nash & O’Reilly Radar)
\n\n04:21 – Steven’s Occupational History, Background, and Mission: System Performance and Human Wellbeing
\n\n08:19 – Critical Incident Stress Management
\n\n10:40 – Social Capital, Bonds Within Groups, and Connectors
\n\nAsset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
\n\n\n\nABCD: Gifts, Skills, Passions
\n\n29:37 – Cognitive Empathy vs Emotional Empathy, and Creating Serendipity
\n\n36:33 – Safety-I and Safety-II
\n\n55:11 – Work-As-Imagined & Work-As-Done; Work-As-Prescribed, Work-As-Disclosed
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: ABCD and thinking about ways to incorporate into everyday life.
\n\nJamey: People who are connectors vs networkers vs gappers; differences are subtle but there.
\n\nJessica: When you start at a small company, you know everyone in the organization; so then as the company grows, you continue to know someone in every part of the organization.
\n\nIn people’s assets there are gifts, skills, and passion, and we tend to hire only for skills, which is also the only one of these things that is easy to change.
\n\nSteven: What do the people closest to you say your gifts are?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Steven Shorrock.
","summary":"In this episode, Chartered Psychologist, Ergonomist and Human Factors Specialist, Steven Shorrock talks about system performance and human wellbeing, asset-based community development, and Safety-I & Safety-II, which defines safety as the ability to succeed under varying conditions.","date_published":"2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b8da9303-4e86-4a6b-854f-4093ce62d662.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":30596742,"duration_in_seconds":3824}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1404","title":"087: The Jazz of Empathy with Chad Fowler","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-jazz-of-empathy","content_text":"02:17 – Chad’s Superpower: Empathy!\n\n07:47 – Using Introspection For a Means to Recover from and Deal with Bipolar Disorder\n\n10:51 – Modeling Yourself\n\n16:35 – The Importance of Self-Care\n\n19:22 – Practicing Empathy and Compassion\n\nThe Compassionate Coder\n\nYour most important skill: Empathy\n\n36:25 – Expressing Your Unique Voice\n\n40:34 – Merit-based Rewards Systems\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto\n\nOKR: Objectives and Key Results\n\n55:11 – Management and Leadership\n\nTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet \n\nGoodhart’s Law\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Freeing yourself from “supposed to”.\n\nJohn: Focusing on self as a gateway to understanding other people.\n\nJessica: Our duty in the world in order to help other people emotionally is to take care of ourselves.\n\nRein: Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance by Gordon Pask\n\nChad: Running internal dialogues that you have with yourself constantly through a bunch of other people who are thinking about the same things.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Chad Fowler.","content_html":"02:17 – Chad’s Superpower: Empathy!
\n\n07:47 – Using Introspection For a Means to Recover from and Deal with Bipolar Disorder
\n\n10:51 – Modeling Yourself
\n\n16:35 – The Importance of Self-Care
\n\n19:22 – Practicing Empathy and Compassion
\n\n\n\nYour most important skill: Empathy
\n\n36:25 – Expressing Your Unique Voice
\n\n40:34 – Merit-based Rewards Systems
\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
\n\nOKR: Objectives and Key Results
\n\n55:11 – Management and Leadership
\n\nTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Freeing yourself from “supposed to”.
\n\nJohn: Focusing on self as a gateway to understanding other people.
\n\nJessica: Our duty in the world in order to help other people emotionally is to take care of ourselves.
\n\nRein: Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance by Gordon Pask
\n\nChad: Running internal dialogues that you have with yourself constantly through a bunch of other people who are thinking about the same things.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Chad Fowler.
","summary":"In this episode, we are joined by Chad Fowler, who talks a lot about mental health, and specifically bipolar disorder. Practicing empathy and compassion is also discussed, as well as merit-based rewards systems, management, and leadership.","date_published":"2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/26d06cdc-88a3-4b09-bfad-ec97a79bf507.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":61459363,"duration_in_seconds":3924}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1396","title":"086: Culture Is A Community Growing Together with Jesse Oliver Sanford","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/culture-is-a-community-growing-together","content_text":"01:18 – Oliver’s Superpower: The Ability to Read\n\n01:54 – Cognitive Science and Emotional Cognition\n\nGeorge Lakehoff\n\nRestylane Injections\n\nThe effects of BOTOX injections on emotional experience.\n\n11:24 – How People Think When They Code and the Intersection Between Mind and Body\n\nfMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)\n\nBrodmann Area\n\n15:38 – The Importance of Cultural Capital\n\n14:42 – Flow\n\nMihaly Csikszentmihalyi: All About Flow & Positive Psychology\n\nFlow Genome Project\n\nThe Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler \n\nStealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal\n\nHow to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan\n\n21:33 – Ritual in Developer and Engineer Culture\n\n29:24 – Achieving Flow During Pair Programming / Hedonic Balance\n\nDr. John Gottman: Bids for Connection\n\n42:29 – Emotional Intelligence and Progress\n\nPolitics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy by Bruno Latour\n\n57:00 – Culture. What is Culture?\n\n*More from Oliver: *\n\n\nDebunking Three Myths About How We Think When We Code\n\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: One’s ability to solve problems as a technical person depends as much on one’s social network and social skills as it does on technical knowledge.\n\nJamey: You can affect things about yourself by being mindful of facts about your body.\n\nJohn: Teams and effectiveness: People you work with are important.\n\nRein: In the future, we’ll realize that the code we wrote was a very small and unimportant artifact of what we’re doing as communities and cultures.\n\nOliver: Engaging with others who think about these things and who realize how high the stakes are.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jesse Oliver Sanford.","content_html":"01:18 – Oliver’s Superpower: The Ability to Read
\n\n01:54 – Cognitive Science and Emotional Cognition
\n\n\n\n\n\nThe effects of BOTOX injections on emotional experience.
\n\n11:24 – How People Think When They Code and the Intersection Between Mind and Body
\n\nfMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
\n\n\n\n15:38 – The Importance of Cultural Capital
\n\n14:42 – Flow
\n\nMihaly Csikszentmihalyi: All About Flow & Positive Psychology
\n\n\n\nThe Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler
\n\n\n\n\n\n21:33 – Ritual in Developer and Engineer Culture
\n\n29:24 – Achieving Flow During Pair Programming / Hedonic Balance
\n\nDr. John Gottman: Bids for Connection
\n\n42:29 – Emotional Intelligence and Progress
\n\nPolitics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy by Bruno Latour
\n\n57:00 – Culture. What is Culture?
\n\n*More from Oliver: *
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: One’s ability to solve problems as a technical person depends as much on one’s social network and social skills as it does on technical knowledge.
\n\nJamey: You can affect things about yourself by being mindful of facts about your body.
\n\nJohn: Teams and effectiveness: People you work with are important.
\n\nRein: In the future, we’ll realize that the code we wrote was a very small and unimportant artifact of what we’re doing as communities and cultures.
\n\nOliver: Engaging with others who think about these things and who realize how high the stakes are.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jesse Oliver Sanford.
","summary":"In this episode, we are joined by Jesse Oliver Sanford, who talks about cognitive science, the importance of cultural capital, flow, and the way people think when they write code.","date_published":"2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/a9f0c970-e0ca-4df3-bf2c-4a4345b14b97.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":41703704,"duration_in_seconds":4170}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1388","title":"085: BOOK CLUB! Technically Wrong with Sara Wachter-Boettcher","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/technically-wrong","content_text":"Buy the book! Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech\n\n01:02 – Sara’s Superpower: Communication and Connecting the Dots\n\n03:43 – The Process of Writing, Editing, and Communicating the Book\n\n06:17 – A Summary of Technically Wrong\n\n11:13 – The Harms and Risk of Data Sharing on Social Media\n\n14:42 – Bias and Algorithms\n\nAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble\n\n23:50 – Machine Learning and Image Recognition\n\n28:48 – Ethics Training and Responsibility\n\nRubyConf 2017: Finding Responsibility by Caleb Thompson\n\n35:45 – Paternalizm / Parochialism\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: How we can get people to start making changes based off what we basically know.\n\nJohn: Stress cases: Thinking about the ideal user and what are the qualities of other users that may be affected by the way something is presented?\n\nJamey: The importance of having cultures in tech and workplaces that are not homogenized.\n\nSara: We don’t get better at anything if we don’t talk about it and practice it.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Sara Wachter-Boettcher.","content_html":"Buy the book! Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
\n\n01:02 – Sara’s Superpower: Communication and Connecting the Dots
\n\n03:43 – The Process of Writing, Editing, and Communicating the Book
\n\n06:17 – A Summary of Technically Wrong
\n\n11:13 – The Harms and Risk of Data Sharing on Social Media
\n\n14:42 – Bias and Algorithms
\n\nAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
\n\n23:50 – Machine Learning and Image Recognition
\n\n28:48 – Ethics Training and Responsibility
\n\nRubyConf 2017: Finding Responsibility by Caleb Thompson
\n\n35:45 – Paternalizm / Parochialism
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: How we can get people to start making changes based off what we basically know.
\n\nJohn: Stress cases: Thinking about the ideal user and what are the qualities of other users that may be affected by the way something is presented?
\n\nJamey: The importance of having cultures in tech and workplaces that are not homogenized.
\n\nSara: We don’t get better at anything if we don’t talk about it and practice it.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
","summary":"For our second Book Club episode, Sara Wachter-Boettcher joins us to talk about her book, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.","date_published":"2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/83860c4f-00c3-490d-ab33-7955fbf1082b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44887089,"duration_in_seconds":2901}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1383","title":"084: Federation Is Bad with Aurynn Shaw","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/federation-is-bad","content_text":"01:30 – Federation and Your Internet Identity\n\nMastodon\n\nStayin’ Alive in Technology: Who Are You? Coraline Ada Ehmke and Identity on the Internet\n\n05:59 – Flaws of Federated Identity\n\nUsenet\n\n10:18 – Onboarding\n\nEternal September\n\n28:51 – All Technology is Political & Speech At All Costs\n\nThe Californian Ideology\n\nSurvivor Bias\n\n15:45 – Mastodon Vs. Twitter and The Social Cost of Running an Instance\n\n21:56 – When People React: Internet Backlash and Defensiveness\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto\n\nPoe’s Law\n\n30:58 – Service Lock-in\n\n37:48 – Losing Your Identity: The Failure of witches.town\n\n39:32 – Creating Sub/Micro Federations/Communities\n\nMetcalfe’s Law\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Aurynn Shaw.","content_html":"01:30 – Federation and Your Internet Identity
\n\n\n\nStayin’ Alive in Technology: Who Are You? Coraline Ada Ehmke and Identity on the Internet
\n\n05:59 – Flaws of Federated Identity
\n\n\n\n10:18 – Onboarding
\n\n\n\n28:51 – All Technology is Political & Speech At All Costs
\n\n\n\n\n\n15:45 – Mastodon Vs. Twitter and The Social Cost of Running an Instance
\n\n21:56 – When People React: Internet Backlash and Defensiveness
\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
\n\n\n\n30:58 – Service Lock-in
\n\n37:48 – Losing Your Identity: The Failure of witches.town
\n\n39:32 – Creating Sub/Micro Federations/Communities
\n\nMetcalfe’s Law
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Aurynn Shaw.
","summary":"After a particularly compelling conversation after Auyrnn Shaw’s last episode, we invited her back on the show to talk about why federation is problematic in Internet society.","date_published":"2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/55334573-b3f6-46d5-9682-8e48f1f540b0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53852038,"duration_in_seconds":3235}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1376","title":"083: Programming As An Identity with Tim Chevalier","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/programming-as-an-identity","content_text":"01:10 – Tim’s Superpower: Keeping Himself From Laughing / Improv\n\n04:19 – Tim’s Journey as a Programmer\n\n09:12 – The Collision of Values Within the Programming Industry and The Meaning and Measurement of “Intelligence”\n\n22:39 – Using Programming to Satisfy Emotional Needs and Form Identity\n\n37:30 – Merit and Identity as a Zero-Sum Game\n\n40:49 – The Struggle of Giving Up / Embracing Labels\n\n49:34 – Collectively Creating an Emotionally Healthy Atmosphere Within the Software Industry\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: What are the countervalues that go against meritocracy?\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto \n\nJessica: Read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.\n\nJohn: The emotional need for people to belong to various groups and things we can do to help people get into healthier spaces.\n\nTim: Listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen. Also, how to talk about the inner struggle people have to belong in a positive way.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Tim Chevalier.","content_html":"01:10 – Tim’s Superpower: Keeping Himself From Laughing / Improv
\n\n04:19 – Tim’s Journey as a Programmer
\n\n09:12 – The Collision of Values Within the Programming Industry and The Meaning and Measurement of “Intelligence”
\n\n22:39 – Using Programming to Satisfy Emotional Needs and Form Identity
\n\n37:30 – Merit and Identity as a Zero-Sum Game
\n\n40:49 – The Struggle of Giving Up / Embracing Labels
\n\n49:34 – Collectively Creating an Emotionally Healthy Atmosphere Within the Software Industry
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: What are the countervalues that go against meritocracy?
\n\nThe Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
\n\nJessica: Read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
\n\nJohn: The emotional need for people to belong to various groups and things we can do to help people get into healthier spaces.
\n\nTim: Listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen. Also, how to talk about the inner struggle people have to belong in a positive way.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Tim Chevalier.
","summary":"Tim Chevalier talks about the collision of values within the programming industry and the meaning and measurement of intelligence, using programming to satisfy emotional needs and form identity, and merit and identity as a zero-sum game.","date_published":"2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/559147d2-37aa-433c-9f70-d33525d8223b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57835062,"duration_in_seconds":3695}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1368","title":"082: Effective Change in Communities and Cultures with Aurynn Shaw","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/effective-change-in-communities-and-cultures","content_text":"01:44 – Contempt Culture: An Overview\n\nAurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture\n\n12:40 – Calling Others Out For Things and Distributing That Labor\n\n17:16 – Technical Superiority (Technology is political)\n\n21:24 – The Cultural Impact of DevOps\n\n28:51 – Introducing Organizational Changes in DevOps\n\n32:11 – Outcome Focus Vs Procedural Focus\n\n35:02 – Siloing and Process: “How does this help you?”\n\nJenny Bramble: Risk Based Testing: Creating a Language Around Risk\n\n47:56 – Context\n\nReflections:\n\nJohn: Smuggling ideas into spaces without bringing historical baggage along.\n\nCoraline: Knowing that technolgy choices are political, paving the way for making the right technology choices.\n\nSam: Understanding your own context so you can explain it to others.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Aurynn Shaw.Sponsored By:O'Reilly Media: Support for the Greater Than Code podcast comes from O’Reilly Fluent and Velocity conferences, coming to San Jose, California, June 11-14. Join us for hands-on training to help you improve performance, resilience, and user experience. Learn from the experts – like Lin Clark, Sarah Federman, Seth Vargo, and Julia Grace. Register now with code GTC20 to save up to $519 on your pass. Learn more at oreilly.com/bettertogether. Promo Code: GTC20","content_html":"01:44 – Contempt Culture: An Overview
\n\n\n\n12:40 – Calling Others Out For Things and Distributing That Labor
\n\n17:16 – Technical Superiority (Technology is political)
\n\n21:24 – The Cultural Impact of DevOps
\n\n28:51 – Introducing Organizational Changes in DevOps
\n\n32:11 – Outcome Focus Vs Procedural Focus
\n\n35:02 – Siloing and Process: “How does this help you?”
\n\nJenny Bramble: Risk Based Testing: Creating a Language Around Risk
\n\n47:56 – Context
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJohn: Smuggling ideas into spaces without bringing historical baggage along.
\n\nCoraline: Knowing that technolgy choices are political, paving the way for making the right technology choices.
\n\nSam: Understanding your own context so you can explain it to others.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Aurynn Shaw.
Sponsored By:
02:14 – John’s Superpower: Talking About Feelings in Public
\n\n04:57 – Programmers and Feelings
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines
\n\n09:39 – Being Educated About Your Emotions
\n\n
image via https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DcSyorTUwAA5UOx.jpg
\n\n16:12 – Feelings As Addictions, Comparing Your Experiences to Others’ Experiences, and Setting Boundaries
\n\n24:05 – Emotional API
\n\n28:53 – Cognitive Deficits of Not Handling Emotions and Cognitive Benefits of Developing Fluency with Emotions
\n\n\n\n34:02 – Doing Work to Understand Your Emotions
\n\n\n\n\n“Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.” ~ Katrina Owen
\n
36:34 – Getting Paid/Getting Further for Having and Learning About Emotional Intelligence
\n\n41:18 – Negative Effects on Teams When Individuals Refuse to Acknowledge Emotions
\n\n43:59 – Influencing Emotions and Emotional Responses
\n\n\n\nTIP: Temperature Change, Intense Exercise, Progressive Relaxation
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
02:05 – Knitting and Computing
\n\nSoftware Art Thou: Knit One, Compute One with Kris Howard
\n\n\n\n06:17 – The Knitting Community Vs The Software Community
\n\n09:38 – Moderation and Clear Communication of Expectations
\n\n12:50 – Welcoming New People
\n\n14:45 – Muscle Memory and Workflow; Teaching Others
\n\n19:09 – Information Exchange and Spreading Knowledge
\n\n\n\n\n\n25:16 – User Focus Vs Creator Focus
\n\n27:07 – Kris’ Superpower: Being a Social Extrovert
\n\n35:39 – Hard Work Vs Reframing
\n\n40:51 – Gender Differences in “Crafting”
\n\n\n\n\n"Read a comment this morning stating that Maker culture is 80% male and had to laugh. Only if you discount the millions of women sewing, knitting, weaving, and more. But oh right, they're just "crafters." That artificial distinction enrages me. 😡" ~ Kris Howard
\n
25:16 – The “Craftsman” Gender Controversy
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nKris: Thinking about your environment.
\n\nJohn: Onboarding community members and the importance of making that ramp as shallow as possible.
\n\nJessica: Choosing a tribe based on inclusivity.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kris Howard.
Sponsored By:
02:05 – Schneems’ Superpower: Not being grossed out by baby poop! And, debugging.
\n\n06:03 – The Skill and The Art of Troubleshooting
\n\n18:12 – Interviewing and Evaluating People
\n\n32:07 – Working in Open Source
\n\n37:17 – The Tension Between Structure and Agency
\n\n40:32 – The Role of Empathy in Open Source
\n\n50:52 – Bringing Open Source Values Into Companies
\n\n57:33 – Putting Machines in the Middle of People
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Gut feelings vs objective data.
\n\nJohn: Dealing with unfriendly support cases and still having empathy.
\n\nRein: Being able to stay centered when things pull you off balance.
\n\nJanelle: Respect as currency.
\n\nRichard: Leaving emotions behind in pull requests.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Richard Schneeman.
Sponsored By:
02:01 – Superpowers: Kenzi = Consensus Building; Laurie: Confuging Apache Quickly
\n\n\n\n03:35 – Trans-Inclusive Policy at npm and Cloud City
\n\n\n\n\n\n12:41 – Determining Whether Insurance is Trans-Friendly
\n\n“Transgender insurance benefits employer guide” Google Search
\n\n\n\n15:16 – Biases Exist in Healthcare
\n\n\n\n20:54 – The Problem with Primary Care Physicians and Care
\n\n26:44 – Feedback from Doctors
\n\n32:00 – Why This Topic is Becoming More Commonplace and Important in Society
\n\n37:39 – Trans-Inclusive Healthcare as a Business Advantage for Companies
\n\n42:22 – How To Be an Ally in the Fight for Trans-Inclusive Healthcare
\n\n46:37 – What can primary care doctors do to signal they care about these issues?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nLaurie: Do the legwork for your trans employees.
\n\nJohn: Once you cover the edge cases, it makes the happy path even happier.
\n\nCoraline: The additional challenges of non binary people.
\n\nKenzi: We have a responsibility as tech workers when we are building the system to be better about it.
\n\nCarina C. Zona: Schemas for the Real World
\n\nJessica: You can’t come out as something you don’t know exists.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Kenzi Connor and Laurie Voss.
Sponsored By:
RubyConf 2017: Lending Privilege by Anjuan Simmons
\n\n01:18 – Anjuan’s Superpower: Flexibility
\n\n04:55 – Cultivating Variety on Teams
\n\n08:22 – What makes a great team?
\n\n13:46 – Empowering Others
\n\n19:21 – Culture Fit
\n\n21:24 – The Tension Between Structure and Agency
\n\n24:35 – Creating Space for People to Shine
\n\n33:46 – Responses to “Weirdness”
\n\n38:27 – Building Constructive and Authentic Relationships with People
\n\n41:12 – Having Visible Differences on Teams
\n\n43:53 – “Othering”
\n\n49:29 – Earning Trust by Listening to People
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Safety can improve teams and lead to wonderful harmonies.
\n\nRein: Building caring and genuine relationships with other people and valuing them for who they are.
\n\nJanelle: Getting to know people and giving them space to take off their masks to be their unique selves.
\n\nAnjuan: Safety is a foundational aspect of life.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Anjuan Simmons.
Sponsored By:
In this special episode of Greater Than Code, the panelists and guest panelists talk to an audience live from RailsConf 2018 about our relationship with our code, and the ways we have emotional ties with what we do, but also how there’s more to it than that.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Dinah Shi, Nick Quaranto, and Vaidehi Joshi.
","summary":"In this special episode of Greater Than Code, the panelists and guest panelists talk to an audience live from RailsConf 2018 about our relationship with our code, and the ways we have emotional ties with what we do, but also how there’s more to it than that.","date_published":"2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/eeb6d41a-8b90-45b7-ac76-c0985f7a7a2e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":52145202,"duration_in_seconds":3259}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?p=1231","title":"076: Changing Lanes","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/changing-lanes","content_text":"This episode touches on the topics of privilege and having tough conversations when not feeling it’s your place to have those conversations.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"This episode touches on the topics of privilege and having tough conversations when not feeling it’s your place to have those conversations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"This panelist-only episode touches on the topics of privilege and having tough conversations when not feeling it’s your place to have those conversations.","date_published":"2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/6e00fff1-e9fc-49b1-a23c-ba801d6d0819.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53066777,"duration_in_seconds":3316}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1221","title":"075: Code and Witchcraft with Coraline Ada Ehmke","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/code-and-witchcraft","content_text":"02:40 – Coraline’s Superpower: Boundless Energy\n\n06:16 – Practicing Self-Care and Outsourcing\n\n12:20 – Being a “Code Witch” and Perceiving the Construct of Reality\n\n17:25 – Evocation and Invocation\n\n20:52 – Being Deliberate: Refactoring Your Code and Refactoring Your Life\n\n32:13 – Documentation and Naming Things\n\n38:48 – Writing Magic and Writing Code; Thoughtforms\n\nDrood by Dan Simmons \n\n43:20 – Impressions and Personas; Sympathy and Empathy\n\nBrené Brown on Empathy\n\n51:58 – Acquiring Boundless Energy and Badassery\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Sponsored By:Cloud City Development: Cloud City Development is happy to support our coding community and especially Greater than Code. The Cloud City team are expert software programmers and designers with a strong desire to see more diversity in tech, more kindness on teams, and better tools. Please let them know if you’d like their hard work, mentorship, or sense of humor. They’re a B-Corporation because they believe in sustainability and they’d like to build with you. Please reach out by emailing hello@cloudcity.io.O'Reilly Media: Support for the Greater Than Code podcast comes from the O’Reilly Velocity Conference. Join over 2000 developers and engineers in San Jose from June 11 to 14 to learn how to make your distributed systems more scalable, resilient and secure. Get the latest on microservices, cloud, DevOps, security, and more. Use discount code GTC20 to save 20% on most passes. Learn more at velocityconf.com. Promo Code: GTC20","content_html":"02:40 – Coraline’s Superpower: Boundless Energy
\n\n06:16 – Practicing Self-Care and Outsourcing
\n\n12:20 – Being a “Code Witch” and Perceiving the Construct of Reality
\n\n17:25 – Evocation and Invocation
\n\n20:52 – Being Deliberate: Refactoring Your Code and Refactoring Your Life
\n\n32:13 – Documentation and Naming Things
\n\n38:48 – Writing Magic and Writing Code; Thoughtforms
\n\n\n\n43:20 – Impressions and Personas; Sympathy and Empathy
\n\n\n\n51:58 – Acquiring Boundless Energy and Badassery
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:41 – Astrid’s Superpower: Being Analytical and Logical
\n\n04:33 – Social Scientists and Technology
\n\n12:47 – Professionalization
\n\nThe Code of Ethics Project: Data For Democracy
\n\n20:00 – A Day in the Life of a Social Scientist
\n\n25:39 – Social Science and Design
\n\n32:13 – Working in Numbers-based Environments
\n\nObliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
\n\n46:41 – Influence and Control
\n\n55:05 – Social Media
\n\n58:59 – Work/Life Balance and Prioritization
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:41 – Dan’s Superpower: Optimization
\n\n03:26 – Are “Improve” and “Optimize” the same thing?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n17:20 – How is cost accounting affected by demographics and privilege?
\n\n33:34 – Team Alignment, Collectiveness, and Camaraderie
\n\n37:42 – Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) vs Test-Driven Development (TDD)
\n\n\n\n\nWrite the executable specifications to guide development.
\n\n
\nThen, delete most of them to optimize for documentation.
\nDon’t pretend that the code is tested; that’s quite different.from @tastapod on @greaterthancode
\n
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) March 14, 2018
\n\n58:00 – Customer Empathy
\n\nGrowing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Meeting a customer need = congressive.
\n\nDan: Collaboration is how you get work done.
\n\nJamey: Replacing “responsibility” with “duty of care”.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Dan North.
Sponsored By:
01:53 – Kerri’s Superpower: Looking ahead to the future.
\n\n08:33 – Community Gatekeeping and Contempt Culture
\n\nLiz Baillie: The Illustrated Adventure Survival Guide for New Rustaceans @ RustConf 2016
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n16:03 – The Contextual Framing of Storytelling
\n\nStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
\n\n\n\n\n\n31:50 – Retaining Information and Explaining Things to Others
\n\n44:05 – Technical Jargon: Tactical and Strategic
\n\n47:39 – Storytelling is Everywhere
\n\nTalk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
\n\n52:50 – Telling Stories Over and Over and Over and Over and Over …
\n\n55:53 – Crafting the Elements of a Story
\n\nAvdi Grimm: Confident Code at Cascadia Ruby 2011
\n\n01:01:39 – What the heck is a Lackwit Gadabout?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: The distinction between behavior and identity.
\n\nChristina: Storytelling is super important.
\n\nJamey: It’s helpful to care about something before you learn it.
\n\nKerri: Next time you do a Git commit, don’t do -m.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kerri Miller.
Sponsored By:
02:41 – Rein’s Superpower: Perceiving and Being Aware of Connections Between Things and People
\n\n03:49 – Power Dynamics in Companies
\n\n05:41 – Inherent Value and Self-Esteem; Recovering From Failure
\n\nVirginia Satir: Communication and Congruence
\n\n11:35 – Modeling Behavior and Controlling Outcomes as a Person in a Position of Power
\n\nThe Virginia Satir Model of Family Therapy
\n\n17:58 – Hierarchical Organization vs Growth-Oriented Organization
\n\n\n\n\n\n24:33 – The Problem with Labeling Teams as “Family”
\n\n32:04 – Making Choices That Are Right for Yourself; Experimentation
\n\n\n\n[Ikigai](Ikigai)
\n\n39:01 – Haskell and Strategies for Learning and Reading Papers
\n\n44:51 – Being Present and Truly Seeing Others; Being OK with Not Being OK
\n\n\n\nWhat Do You Do With the Mad You Feel? Mr. Rogers
\n\n48:20 – Intentions Matter
\n\n50:31 – Advice for Perceiving and Being Aware of Connections Between Things and People
\n\nCognitive Dissonance
\n\n“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.” ~ Maya Angelou
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
02:10 – Kale’s Origin Story
\n\n05:10 – Connecting Through Story and Voice
\n\n\n\n08:17 – Communicating Through Text vs Communicating Through Speech
\n\n\n\n\n\n12:43 – Kale’s Superpower: Facilitating the Voices of Other People
\n\n\n\n\n\n17:28 – Running Unconventional Events and Conferences; Trust and Taking Risks
\n\n25:10 – Creating Opportunities and Accepting Offerings
\n\n27:49 – Encouraging Diverse Attendance and Making People Feel Welcome
\n\n\n\n38:45 – Interpreting Intentions, Actions, and Reactions; Centering Yourself and Being Vulnerable
\n\nReflections:
\n\nKale: People matter.
\n\nJamey: Helping people be heard both physically and metaphorically.
\n\nAstrid: Trust fall into the universe.
\n\nRein: Building the stage so that other people can speak from it makes a great ally.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kale Kaposhilin.
Sponsored By:
Greater Than Code Episode 002: Neutralizing Impostor Syndrome with Avdi Grimm
\n\n01:52 – Avdi’s Superpower: The Power of Inspiration, RubyConf India, and International Conferences vs Domestic
\n\n04:28 – The Pursuit of a Fixed Life: Achieving or Avoiding Stasis
\n\nBlog Post: I was trying to end my life
\n\n08:40 – Living in the Future and Having Goals
\n\n16:36 – Hitting Career Stasis vs Identity Stasis
\n\n25:23 – Becoming a Visible Person in Tech
\n\n31:27 – Encouraging and Inspiring People to Find Their Potential and Value
\n\n44:23 – Being Authentic and Transparent to the World
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Identity matters.
\n\nRein: How identity and society interact: Symbolic Interactionism. Also, having therapeutic relationships.
\n\nJessica: Two energies, internally, of being ‘grounded’ and ‘inspired’ and those feeding into ‘connection’, together. Also, we have identity in the now and in the future.
\n\nThe Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
\n\nJanelle: Being present and listening, connecting, and internalizing to form new thoughts you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
\n\nAvdi: Identity in the now and identity in the future forms an arrow.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
01:28 – Gerry’s Superpower: Building Resilience
\n\n02:51 – What is Resilience?
\n\n08:59 – Creating an Atmosphere of Psychological Safety
\n\n11:04 – Having Tough Conversations: Resilience on the Societal Level
\n\n18:41 – Moving Other People Forward and Leading Others as a Senior Dev
\n\n27:07 – Code Chitakwas
\n\n33:10 – Devaluing the Notion of Intellect
\n\nReflections:
\n\nGerry: What is “smart”, really and how are we smart enough to make the room of smart people bigger?
\n\nCoraline: Thinking of myself as a leader in my company and think about it can use the influence that I have to make sure that we’re creating and fostering a culture where we do face down the big problems.
\n\nJamey: Being right, being new, and making process. Also, valuing intellect and having uncomfortable conversations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Gerry Valentine.
Sponsored By:
01:09 – Ashanti’s Superpower: People say they’re funny on Twitter!
\n\n02:37 – Having Dialogue and Engaging with Others on Twitter
\n\n07:42 – Finding Safe Online Community Networks via Social Media Platforms
\n\n16:13 – Making Platforms Safer
\n\n18:06 – Perspectives on Blocking
\n\nhttps://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/listen_to_yourself.png
\n\n25:05 – Perspectives on Real Name Policies
\n\n29:59 – Gender Identity Education
\n\n36:57 – Transitioning in While Working in Tech
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Listening and learning about trans experiences.
\n\nCoraline: Taking care of how we are presenting ourselves to the world.
\n\nJamey: The act of sharing and receiving information as a give and take.
\n\nAshanti: Conversation flows much more freely when people are in safe spaces.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ashanti-Mutinta.
","summary":"In this episode, Ashanti-Mutinta joins the panel to talk about finding safe online community networks, perspectives on blocking and real name policies, and transitioning in while working in tech.","date_published":"2018-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b0b336e4-3593-4f00-96f9-f861db84bff1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48269885,"duration_in_seconds":3016}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1133","title":"066: Growing a Culture with Allison Kopf","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/growing-a-culture","content_text":"01:15 – Allison’s Superpower: Making Unplanned and Hectic Situations Work Out\n\nThe Stockdale Paradox\n\n06:43 – Getting Into Agriculture\n\n08:54 – Building a Company Culture\n\n13:19 – Transmitting Culture and Core Values When Hiring New People\n\n20:02 – Disagreeing Respectfully and Maintaining Strong Opinions\n\n25:19 – Clear Boundaries Between Work and Home Life\n\n32:34 – What Tech Look Looks Like in the Context of a Working Farm\n\n40:27 – Writing Code for Non-Technical People\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Practicing empathy for the user when writing software.\n\nJamey: Consciously make space for people who don’t speak as loudly as other people.\n\nSam: Learn something new every day.\n\nAllison: How different people want to work remotely and how we can create an open way to actually do that.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Allison Kopf.","content_html":"01:15 – Allison’s Superpower: Making Unplanned and Hectic Situations Work Out
\n\n\n\n06:43 – Getting Into Agriculture
\n\n08:54 – Building a Company Culture
\n\n13:19 – Transmitting Culture and Core Values When Hiring New People
\n\n20:02 – Disagreeing Respectfully and Maintaining Strong Opinions
\n\n25:19 – Clear Boundaries Between Work and Home Life
\n\n32:34 – What Tech Look Looks Like in the Context of a Working Farm
\n\n40:27 – Writing Code for Non-Technical People
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Practicing empathy for the user when writing software.
\n\nJamey: Consciously make space for people who don’t speak as loudly as other people.
\n\nSam: Learn something new every day.
\n\nAllison: How different people want to work remotely and how we can create an open way to actually do that.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Allison Kopf.
","summary":"In this episode, Allison Kopf talks about what tech looks like in the context of a working farm, building a good remote company culture, and disagreeing respectfully while maintaining strong opinions.","date_published":"2018-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/4594897b-f052-447c-8bf5-9c8d08f13128.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49525848,"duration_in_seconds":3095}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1125","title":"065: Radical Design with Marian Petre and André van der Hoek","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/radical-design","content_text":"Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think (The MIT Press) by Marian Petre and André van der Hoek\n\n01:39 – Marian’s Superpower: Picking Brains\n\nSurfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter\n\n03:28 – André’s Superpower: Identifying Patterns\n\n04:23 – Design Thinking Within Companies and The Error by Proxy Phenomenon\n\n09:19 – The Notion that Design Has Gone Away\n\n12:18 – Radical vs Normal Design: What drives the need for radical design? When does normal design stop being effective?\n\n19:55 – The Democratization of Software Development\n\n24:45 – Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think\n\n27:45 – The Disconnect Between Academic Research and Actual Practice\n\n29:25 – Why “Decoded”?\n\n32:59 – How People Deal with Systems That Are Too Big\n\n39:19 – Problem Solving and Problem Solving in the Context of Complex Software Systems\n\n44:29 – The Notion of the Toolbox and Breaking Down Big Problems Into Smaller Problems\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: There are two types of gurus.\n\nRein: The democratization of software development and steering organizations.\n\nJessica: Studying the bug rather than squashing the bug and experts are in the room twice.\n\nJamey: Designers saying that, “My job IS hard!” and being kind to themselves.\n\nAndré and Marian: Having these conversations and interacting with people in this industry.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: André van der Hoek and Marian Petre .","content_html":"\n\n01:39 – Marian’s Superpower: Picking Brains
\n\nSurfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter
\n\n03:28 – André’s Superpower: Identifying Patterns
\n\n04:23 – Design Thinking Within Companies and The Error by Proxy Phenomenon
\n\n09:19 – The Notion that Design Has Gone Away
\n\n12:18 – Radical vs Normal Design: What drives the need for radical design? When does normal design stop being effective?
\n\n19:55 – The Democratization of Software Development
\n\n24:45 – Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think
\n\n27:45 – The Disconnect Between Academic Research and Actual Practice
\n\n29:25 – Why “Decoded”?
\n\n32:59 – How People Deal with Systems That Are Too Big
\n\n39:19 – Problem Solving and Problem Solving in the Context of Complex Software Systems
\n\n44:29 – The Notion of the Toolbox and Breaking Down Big Problems Into Smaller Problems
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: There are two types of gurus.
\n\nRein: The democratization of software development and steering organizations.
\n\nJessica: Studying the bug rather than squashing the bug and experts are in the room twice.
\n\nJamey: Designers saying that, “My job IS hard!” and being kind to themselves.
\n\nAndré and Marian: Having these conversations and interacting with people in this industry.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: André van der Hoek and Marian Petre .
","summary":"In this episode, Marian Petre and André van der Hoek join the show to talk about their book, “Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think”. They explore the ideas of the democratization of software development, problem solving, and radical design.","date_published":"2018-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/493fc9fe-f284-46a2-837e-d3e7e58e5a77.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60636548,"duration_in_seconds":3789}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1117","title":"064: Stories, Bias and AI with Aditya Mukerjee","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/stories-bias-and-ai","content_text":"00:58 – Aditya’s Superpower: Parking Karma\n\n03:18 – Algorithmic Decision Making in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence\n\n09:06 – Recognizing the Effects of Bias\n\nThe Bias Blind Spot\n\nThe Babadook\n\n18:07 – Health and Technology: How can technology have a meaningful impact on care delivery?\n\n23:54 – Why are people frightened of automation?\n\n33:33 – Storytelling in Software and Engineering\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: Be a little bit more aware of how stories are told.\n\nAditya: Thinking of yourself as an editor for the story.\n\nJamey: The difference between can we build this and should we build this?\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Aditya Mukerjee.","content_html":"00:58 – Aditya’s Superpower: Parking Karma
\n\n03:18 – Algorithmic Decision Making in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
\n\n09:06 – Recognizing the Effects of Bias
\n\n\n\n\n\n18:07 – Health and Technology: How can technology have a meaningful impact on care delivery?
\n\n23:54 – Why are people frightened of automation?
\n\n33:33 – Storytelling in Software and Engineering
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Be a little bit more aware of how stories are told.
\n\nAditya: Thinking of yourself as an editor for the story.
\n\nJamey: The difference between can we build this and should we build this?
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Aditya Mukerjee.
","summary":"In this episode, Aditya Mukerjee talks about algorithmic decision making in machine learning and AI, recognizing the effects of bias, and storytelling in software and engineering.","date_published":"2018-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b8e390e7-398b-4f30-9adb-9481be9f2ef7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52480826,"duration_in_seconds":3280}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1111","title":"063: The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity with Rehema Wachira","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-distribution-of-brilliance-and-opportunity","content_text":"01:22 – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy\n\n02:53 – Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story\n\n07:20 – Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It\n\n11:21 – Creating a “Culture of Saving”\n\n14:52 – “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes\n\n22:20 – Being Creators and Makers\n\nIndie Hackers\n\n30:28 – How Technology Empowers People\n\n38:27 – The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity\n\n47:01 – Freedom of Creative Expression\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.\n\nJessica: We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!\n\nSam: Fixed vs growth mindset.\n\nRein: Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent.\n\nJanelle: Celebrating beautiful.\n\nRehema: A fundamental right to freedom.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Rehema Wachira.","content_html":"01:22 – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy
\n\n02:53 – Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story
\n\n07:20 – Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It
\n\n11:21 – Creating a “Culture of Saving”
\n\n14:52 – “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes
\n\n22:20 – Being Creators and Makers
\n\n\n\n30:28 – How Technology Empowers People
\n\n38:27 – The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity
\n\n47:01 – Freedom of Creative Expression
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.
\n\nJessica: We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!
\n\nSam: Fixed vs growth mindset.
\n\nRein: Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent.
\n\nJanelle: Celebrating beautiful.
\n\nRehema: A fundamental right to freedom.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Rehema Wachira.
","summary":"In this episode, Rehema Wachira joins us to talk about being a software developer in Nairobi, Kenya, creating a Culture of Saving, diversity of thought, and how technology empowers people.","date_published":"2018-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/680eb3b9-07f2-41dd-bf9c-41579712a9ea.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58519525,"duration_in_seconds":3657}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1100","title":"062: The Beauty of Art and Technology with Jamey Hampton","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-beauty-of-art-and-technology","content_text":"01:22 – Jamey’s Superpower: “The Fharlanghn Sense”\n\n02:40 – Working in Agriculture\n\n04:03 – Theories on Automation\n\n05:56 – Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development\n\n10:35 – Feeling Like You Need to Know Everything\n\nStella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity\n\n15:47 – ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian\n\n27:50 – The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things\n\nFloppy Music DUO – Imperial March\n\n35:26 – The Death Star => Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code\n\nMalcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite\n\n\n@greaterthancode:\n “I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ @jameybash on Greater Than Code\n\n\n49:42 – Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent\n\n54:49 – Advice for Channeling Your Own Inner Fharlanghn Sense\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"01:22 – Jamey’s Superpower: “The Fharlanghn Sense”
\n\n02:40 – Working in Agriculture
\n\n04:03 – Theories on Automation
\n\n05:56 – Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development
\n\n10:35 – Feeling Like You Need to Know Everything
\n\nStella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity
\n\n15:47 – ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian
\n\n27:50 – The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things
\n\nFloppy Music DUO – Imperial March
\n\n35:26 – The Death Star => Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code
\n\nMalcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite
\n\n\n\n\n@greaterthancode:
\n
\n “I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ @jameybash on Greater Than Code
49:42 – Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent
\n\n54:49 – Advice for Channeling Your Own Inner Fharlanghn Sense
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"Panelist Jamey Hampton shares their thoughts on feeling like you have to know everything, ‘zines and being a ‘zine librarian, and why The Death Star led to some intense feelings on ethics in technology.","date_published":"2018-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/3955799a-fe65-4129-a457-7572f7a109be.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56392516,"duration_in_seconds":3524}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1083","title":"061: Destruction-Focused Development with Safia Abdalla","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/destruction-focused-development","content_text":"00:53 – Safia’s Superpower: Sight\n\n03:04 – Learning Languages — Both Human and Programming\n\nThe Sapir Whorf Hypothesis\n\n07:56 – Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech\n\n11:19 – What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized\n\nAdmiral Grace Hopper\n\n21:59 – Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)\n\n24:07 – Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions\n\n30:46 – Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More\n\n37:02 – Destruction-Focused Development\n\n\n@jessitron\n Destruction-Focused Development: write it, delete it, repeat.\n\n\"I don't become obsessed with the code.\nI think it's more important to be obsessed with the problem.\" \n\n@captainsafia on @greaterthancode.\n\n\n43:58 – Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.\n\n\n@jessitron\n \"I often feel like I don't do enough and I haven't defined what 'enough' is.\"\n\n@CoralineAda on @greaterthancode\n\n\nJasmine: Exploring feelings about being represented at events.\n\nJessica: Broadening perspectives that most of us were born into.\n\nSafia: Talking about the Silicon Valley monoculture, being content vs happy, and tokenism.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Safia Abdalla.","content_html":"00:53 – Safia’s Superpower: Sight
\n\n03:04 – Learning Languages — Both Human and Programming
\n\n\n\n07:56 – Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech
\n\n11:19 – What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized
\n\n\n\n21:59 – Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)
\n\n24:07 – Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions
\n\n30:46 – Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More
\n\n37:02 – Destruction-Focused Development
\n\n\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n Destruction-Focused Development: write it, delete it, repeat."I don't become obsessed with the code.
\n\n
\nI think it's more important to be obsessed with the problem."@captainsafia on @greaterthancode.
\n
43:58 – Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.
\n\n\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n "I often feel like I don't do enough and I haven't defined what 'enough' is."@CoralineAda on @greaterthancode
\n
Jasmine: Exploring feelings about being represented at events.
\n\nJessica: Broadening perspectives that most of us were born into.
\n\nSafia: Talking about the Silicon Valley monoculture, being content vs happy, and tokenism.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Safia Abdalla.
","summary":"In this episode, Safia Abdalla joins us to talk about the Silicon Valley monoculture, tokenism, and being content vs happy. She also introduces the idea of Destruction-Focused Development.","date_published":"2018-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d906ea02-f1fa-41f3-984d-5a14e7ec748e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51807920,"duration_in_seconds":3237}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1073","title":"060: Coping with Complexity with Kent Beck","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/coping-with-complexity","content_text":"01:19 – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together\n\nSurfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander\n\n04:01 – Metaphors in Software Development\n\n07:32 – Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal\n\n\n@jessitron\n The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”\n\n@KentBeck on @greaterthancode\n\n\n10:58 – Complexity Partitioning\n\nOne Bite At A Time: Partitioning Complexity\n\nKent’s musings on the topic of unit versus integration testing after the show.\n\n21:59 – The Way Systems Change Over Time as an Important Part of How We Design Software\n\n27:20 – Changing Culture Vs Code and Storytelling and Succession\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Thinking about the reasons why we do things.\n\nRein: How computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems.\n\nCoraline: The concept of lumpers vs splitters.\n\nSam: How strategies for dealing with complexity don’t just have to be about the problem itself, they can be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done.\n\nJessica: The for-allers vs the for-eachers; universalist vs existentialist.\n\nKent: Not being bothered by culture change and helping people feel the same.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Kent Beck.Sponsored By:Cohere: This episode is sponsored by Cohere! Cohere believes better teams make better products. Visit [wecohere.com/greaterthancode](https://www.wecohere.com/greater-than-code) to learn how your team can become greater than code.","content_html":"01:19 – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together
\n\n\n\n04:01 – Metaphors in Software Development
\n\n07:32 – Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal
\n\n\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”@KentBeck on @greaterthancode
\n
10:58 – Complexity Partitioning
\n\nOne Bite At A Time: Partitioning Complexity
\n\nKent’s musings on the topic of unit versus integration testing after the show.
\n\n21:59 – The Way Systems Change Over Time as an Important Part of How We Design Software
\n\n27:20 – Changing Culture Vs Code and Storytelling and Succession
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Thinking about the reasons why we do things.
\n\nRein: How computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems.
\n\nCoraline: The concept of lumpers vs splitters.
\n\nSam: How strategies for dealing with complexity don’t just have to be about the problem itself, they can be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done.
\n\nJessica: The for-allers vs the for-eachers; universalist vs existentialist.
\n\nKent: Not being bothered by culture change and helping people feel the same.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kent Beck.
Sponsored By:
01:13 – Pamela Podcasting, Since…well, FOREVER!
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n02:19 – Pamela’s Superpower: Solving Random Problems with Software
\n\n05:19 – Becoming a “Reluctant Coder” i.e. Coding Out of Necessity
\n\n10:58 – Battlestar Galactica => Greek Mythology => Space => Astrophysics
\n\n14:52 – Doing What You Have To Do vs Doing What You Love To Do
\n\n20:27 – The Goal of Podcasting and Target Audience
\n\n23:57 – Understanding and Knowing Everything: Good? Bad?
\n\n26:03 – Outsourcing Work as a Personal Loss and The Internet’s Graveyard of Abandoned Projects
\n\n32:06 – Open Sourcing Work Yourself for the Benefit of Others
\n\n36:58 – Writing Software to Engage People
\n\n\n\n44:22 – Crowdsourcing Requires Trust but Garners Better Results
\n\n48:02 – The Motivation of Citizen Scientists
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: The layers of people in software and people in software and how we’re all learning. It gets hard to separate the people from the technology.
\n\nAlso, having goals you DON’T want to achieve.
\n\nCoraline: Seeing crowdsourcing being successful.
\n\nJamey: Curiosity isn’t necessarily about finding out the answer. It’s the pursuit of the magic.
\n\nThe tenuous path we all take in life, and what decisions cause us to be on the right path to the right here, right now.
\n\nPamela: If we collaborate with the technology, maybe we won’t get silenced.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Pamela Gay.
","summary":"In this astronomic episode, we talk to Pamela Gay about coding out of necessity, why understanding and knowing everything isn’t necessarily a good thing, and being a citizen scientist.","date_published":"2017-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/335c60fd-b2c0-40da-9b6a-d1d0d1ab552f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56666267,"duration_in_seconds":3541}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1057","title":"058: Kindness and Patience with Tara Scherner de la Fuente","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/kindness-and-patience","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!\n\n02:09 – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience\n\n04:56 – Conflating Patience with Kindness\n\n07:39 – Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace\n\nThe Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (The Doherty Threshold)\n\n16:22 – Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?\n\n22:59 – Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment\n\n33:20 – What does it mean to be a developer?\n\n36:33 – Interviewing and Privilege\n\n39:35 – Advice for Early Career Developers\n\n44:10 – Remote Work Culture\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Being patient and kind.\n\nAstrid: Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.\n\nTara: People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.\n\nSam: Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.Special Guest: Tara Scherner de la Fuente.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!
\n\n02:09 – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience
\n\n04:56 – Conflating Patience with Kindness
\n\n07:39 – Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace
\n\nThe Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (The Doherty Threshold)
\n\n16:22 – Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?
\n\n22:59 – Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment
\n\n33:20 – What does it mean to be a developer?
\n\n36:33 – Interviewing and Privilege
\n\n39:35 – Advice for Early Career Developers
\n\n44:10 – Remote Work Culture
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Being patient and kind.
\n\nAstrid: Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.
\n\nTara: People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.
\n\nSam: Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.
Special Guest: Tara Scherner de la Fuente.
","summary":"Tara Scherner de la Fuente joins us to talk about conflating patience with kindness, company culture, advice for early career developers, and remote working.","date_published":"2017-12-13T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c42954a8-b98f-4dcb-8ee0-e1babab1dd2d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55669030,"duration_in_seconds":3479}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1049","title":"057: Everything is UI with Christina Morillo","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/everything-is-ui","content_text":"01:08 – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation\n\nSee Also: GTC 056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair\n\n04:42 – Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary\n\n10:03 – Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching\n\n16:39 – Decision-making Functions\n\n23:28 – Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do\n\nWe’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union\n\n32:03 – Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement\n\nFor more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also: GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng\n\nOperant Conditioning Chamber (Skinner Box)\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you’re feeling about it, and then being able to say no, which is really saying yes to what YOU want to do, what YOU want to spend time on, and how YOU want to live YOUR life.\n\nJanelle: Taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time.\n\nJessica: Choosing the group that you’re being generative with.\n\nChristina: UX is everything and everywhere.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Sponsored By:Upside: Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.","content_html":"01:08 – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation
\n\nSee Also: GTC 056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair
\n\n04:42 – Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary
\n\n10:03 – Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching
\n\n16:39 – Decision-making Functions
\n\n23:28 – Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do
\n\nWe’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union
\n\n32:03 – Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement
\n\nFor more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also: GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng
\n\nOperant Conditioning Chamber (Skinner Box)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you’re feeling about it, and then being able to say no, which is really saying yes to what YOU want to do, what YOU want to spend time on, and how YOU want to live YOUR life.
\n\nJanelle: Taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time.
\n\nJessica: Choosing the group that you’re being generative with.
\n\nChristina: UX is everything and everywhere.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Sponsored By:
","summary":"Christina Morillo talks about automation processes: discovery and reconnaissance, multitasking and context switching, and being kind to your busy self.","date_published":"2017-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/eef7787f-23e6-47e8-bc8d-044ec01a4ddb.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50777640,"duration_in_seconds":3173}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1022","title":"056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/systematize-your-hustle","content_text":"01:26 – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation\n\nWork the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter\n\n09:28 – Strategies for Implementation\n\n12:18 – Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive\n\nWork the System (Online)\n\nTraction: Get a Grip on Your Business\n\nEntrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://www.pyragraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpgnull\n\n\n@jessitron\n Solopreneurship: \"It's never just you. There's present-you and future-you\" \n\n@kronda on @greaterthancode\n\n\n23:20 – Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis\n\n\n@jessitron\n If you don't have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.\n\n@geeksam on @greaterthancode with @kronda\n\nme: or worse, don't\n\n\n28:44 – Successful Use Cases\n\nActive Campaign\n\nsystemHUB\n\n35:33 – Iterating and Changing Processes\n\n42:31 – Kronda’s Superpowers\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: As developers, and as we’re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level, and automate the parts of our jobs so then we can spend more thinking time thinking about the interesting part of code, like how to achieve the results that we want.\n\nKronda: Things that are easy vs things that are effective.\n\nSam: Executive Dysfunction and the idea of making decision rules.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Kronda Adair.","content_html":"01:26 – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation
\n\nWork the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter
\n\n09:28 – Strategies for Implementation
\n\n12:18 – Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive
\n\n\n\nTraction: Get a Grip on Your Business
\n\nEntrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)
\n\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://www.pyragraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg
null
\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n Solopreneurship: "It's never just you. There's present-you and future-you"@kronda on @greaterthancode
\n
23:20 – Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis
\n\n\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n If you don't have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.@geeksam on @greaterthancode with @kronda
\n\nme: or worse, don't
\n
28:44 – Successful Use Cases
\n\n\n\n\n\n35:33 – Iterating and Changing Processes
\n\n42:31 – Kronda’s Superpowers
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: As developers, and as we’re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level, and automate the parts of our jobs so then we can spend more thinking time thinking about the interesting part of code, like how to achieve the results that we want.
\n\nKronda: Things that are easy vs things that are effective.
\n\nSam: Executive Dysfunction and the idea of making decision rules.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Kronda Adair.
","summary":"Kronda Adair joins the panel to talk about why you should strive to systematize all the things within your business to reclaim your time, life, and to successfully allow others to help you.","date_published":"2017-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c181cdc1-faf8-4a13-a2fd-fd6d7ad6510d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50235131,"duration_in_seconds":3139}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1010","title":"055: Change Ourselves a Little, Many Times with Keith Bennett","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/change-ourselves-a-little-many-times","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:47 – Keith’s Background and Superpower\n\n10:03 – Conflict Resolution\n\nOpen Spaces session on Conflict Resolution this summer at DevOpsDays D.C. (and the precursor to this conversation)\n\nDifficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most\n\n12:01 – Opinions on Mediators/Mediation\n\n14:21 – Approaching Conflict\n\nNews Story Re: Portland Murders\n\n17:31 – Radical Helpfulness/Kindness\n\nKeith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness\n\nThe Smoke Filled Room\n\n20:49 – Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up\n\nTriumph Over Fear: A Book of Help and Hope for People with Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Phobias\n\nCongressive/Ingressive Chat with Dr. Eugenia Cheng\n\n31:17 – Fire Alarms and Radical Helpfulness (Cont’d)\n\n35:50 – Knowing When to Step Back or to Step Forward\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: The way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little, many times.\n\nSam: Decide that you’re okay with being different and training yourself to be bold.\n\nJasmine: Be mindful of yourself and your actions.\n\nJessica: There’s a lot of conscious thought and choice in both being helpful and resolving conflict.\n\nKeith: Working together to create a safer and happier world.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Keith Bennett.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:47 – Keith’s Background and Superpower
\n\n10:03 – Conflict Resolution
\n\n\n\nDifficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most
\n\n12:01 – Opinions on Mediators/Mediation
\n\n14:21 – Approaching Conflict
\n\nNews Story Re: Portland Murders
\n\n17:31 – Radical Helpfulness/Kindness
\n\nKeith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness
\n\n\n\n20:49 – Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up
\n\nTriumph Over Fear: A Book of Help and Hope for People with Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Phobias
\n\nCongressive/Ingressive Chat with Dr. Eugenia Cheng
\n\n31:17 – Fire Alarms and Radical Helpfulness (Cont’d)
\n\n35:50 – Knowing When to Step Back or to Step Forward
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: The way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little, many times.
\n\nSam: Decide that you’re okay with being different and training yourself to be bold.
\n\nJasmine: Be mindful of yourself and your actions.
\n\nJessica: There’s a lot of conscious thought and choice in both being helpful and resolving conflict.
\n\nKeith: Working together to create a safer and happier world.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Keith Bennett.
","summary":"Keith Bennett talks about conflict resolution, radical helpfulness and kindness, and being okay with being different.","date_published":"2017-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ccffcaa5-a159-4b0d-9df2-488c8b6a6a3b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42342823,"duration_in_seconds":2646}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=1001","title":"054: Code Hospitality with Nadia Odunayo","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/code-hospitality","content_text":"01:19 – Nadia’s Superpower\n\n02:01 – Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host\n\nNadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016\n\nDaniel Dennett’s “Intuition Pump”\n\n10:22 – People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm\n\n17:00 – Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement\n\n22:16 – Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context\n\nCode Hospitality Guide App\n\n27:27 – Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing\n\nRapoport’s Rule\n\n32:27 – Thinking About the “Why”\n\n36:44 – Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way\n\n39:09 – Host Responsibilities for Hospitality\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.\n\nJacob: Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.\n\nRein: Recognizing emotional labor.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Jacob Stoebel and Nadia Odunayo.","content_html":"01:19 – Nadia’s Superpower
\n\n02:01 – Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host
\n\nNadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016
\n\nDaniel Dennett’s “Intuition Pump”
\n\n10:22 – People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm
\n\n17:00 – Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement
\n\n22:16 – Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context
\n\n\n\n27:27 – Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing
\n\n\n\n32:27 – Thinking About the “Why”
\n\n36:44 – Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way
\n\n39:09 – Host Responsibilities for Hospitality
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.
\n\nJacob: Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.
\n\nRein: Recognizing emotional labor.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Jacob Stoebel and Nadia Odunayo.
","summary":"Nadia Odunayo talks about the idea of \"code hospitality\": What you can do to be a good host, asking questions rather than passing judgement, and using READMEs to give context.","date_published":"2017-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/f53031e7-d8ff-4575-b045-98eb11463fc7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55424924,"duration_in_seconds":3464}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=966","title":"053: BOOK CLUB! The Responsible Communication Style Guide","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-responsible-communication-style-guide","content_text":"01:33 – Superpowers and Acquisition\n\n02:50 – Reflective Listening\n\n05:27 – The Responsible Communication Style Guide\n\n11:54 – Asking Content-Related Questions\n\n15:10 – Who is the target audience for this book?\n\n17:45 – The Evolution of Writing the Book\n\n19:39 – People-first Language\n\nKronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism\n\n23:40 – What if you get it wrong?\n\n\n@kronda\n\n\nTry to do good.\nFuck it up.\nApologize\nTry not to make the same mistake again. \n\n\nThat’s the job.\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/thumbitem/Character-Building-Four-Part-Apology-1397830518/original-1018935-1.jpgnull\n\n29:40 – Fearing Shame\n\n34:22 – Political Correctness and Language Evolution\n\n44:11 – “Use with Caution” Words\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know.\n\nSam: Learning something from a joke!\n\nJamey: People who don’t want to learn new things are boring. Also, not being self-reflective.\n\nAudrey: It’s amazing to pay people for their work.\n\nThursday: Pride for the contributors of this project.\n\nThe Recompiler: Year 3 Kickstarter\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Audrey Eschright and Thursday Bram.Sponsored By:Upside: Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.","content_html":"01:33 – Superpowers and Acquisition
\n\n02:50 – Reflective Listening
\n\n05:27 – The Responsible Communication Style Guide
\n\n11:54 – Asking Content-Related Questions
\n\n15:10 – Who is the target audience for this book?
\n\n17:45 – The Evolution of Writing the Book
\n\n19:39 – People-first Language
\n\nKronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism
\n\n23:40 – What if you get it wrong?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n- Try to do good.
\n- Fuck it up.
\n- Apologize
\n- Try not to make the same mistake again.
\nThat’s the job.
\n
\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/thumbitem/Character-Building-Four-Part-Apology-1397830518/original-1018935-1.jpg
null
29:40 – Fearing Shame
\n\n34:22 – Political Correctness and Language Evolution
\n\n44:11 – “Use with Caution” Words
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know.
\n\nSam: Learning something from a joke!
\n\nJamey: People who don’t want to learn new things are boring. Also, not being self-reflective.
\n\nAudrey: It’s amazing to pay people for their work.
\n\nThursday: Pride for the contributors of this project.
\n\nThe Recompiler: Year 3 Kickstarter
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Audrey Eschright and Thursday Bram.
Sponsored By:
","summary":"We kick off our first Book Club episode with Thursday Bram and Audrey Eschright of The Responsible Communication Style Guide!","date_published":"2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/8fe7ae44-fe5a-42ed-8e1f-db70f2d73f74.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49864870,"duration_in_seconds":3116}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=954","title":"052: Master’s Degrees, Double Binds, and Data Science with Emily Dresner","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/masters-degrees-double-binds-and-data-science","content_text":"01:06 – Emily’s Background and Superpower\n\n02:49 – Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?\n\n08:08 – Struggles After Retaining a Master’s\n\n10:31 – Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story\n\n12:11 – “The Double Bind”\n\n14:47 – Experiences Working at a Gaming Company\n\nShipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace\n\n18:33 – Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture\n\n21:50 – Engineering Vs Management\n\n29:09 – Data Science\n\n32:50 – Self-Selecting for Privilege\n\n36:38 – Data Science and Security/Privacy\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil\n\n46:55 – Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases\n\n51:35 – The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.\n\nSam: Research cognitive biases.\n\nJamey: Computers aren’t people.\n\nEmily: I really do enjoy teaching.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Emily Dresner.","content_html":"01:06 – Emily’s Background and Superpower
\n\n02:49 – Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?
\n\n08:08 – Struggles After Retaining a Master’s
\n\n10:31 – Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story
\n\n12:11 – “The Double Bind”
\n\n14:47 – Experiences Working at a Gaming Company
\n\nShipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace
\n\n18:33 – Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture
\n\n21:50 – Engineering Vs Management
\n\n29:09 – Data Science
\n\n32:50 – Self-Selecting for Privilege
\n\n36:38 – Data Science and Security/Privacy
\n\n\n\n46:55 – Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases
\n\n51:35 – The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.
\n\nSam: Research cognitive biases.
\n\nJamey: Computers aren’t people.
\n\nEmily: I really do enjoy teaching.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Emily Dresner.
","summary":"Emily Dresner joins the show to talk about on why she felt getting a master's degree was worth it, her experiences working at a gaming company, and data science.","date_published":"2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e4e9e4ac-8ec3-418b-b1c1-bb1f9ba54915.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56246747,"duration_in_seconds":3515}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=946","title":"051: Creating Safer Spaces with Soo Choi","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/creating-safer-spaces","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:09 – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower\n\n06:01 – Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong\n\nSoo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017\n\n16:10 – Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces\n\n21:29 – Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary\n\n24:12 – Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces\n\n28:16 – Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)\n\n38:28 – Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools\n\nAja Hammerly: We Don’t Do That Here\n\nReflections:\n\nSoo: Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.\n\nSam: Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.\n\nJessica: Learning from other’s experiences.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Soo Choi.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:09 – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower
\n\n06:01 – Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong
\n\nSoo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017
\n\n16:10 – Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces
\n\n21:29 – Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary
\n\n24:12 – Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces
\n\n28:16 – Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)
\n\n38:28 – Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools
\n\nAja Hammerly: We Don’t Do That Here
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSoo: Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.
\n\nSam: Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.
\n\nJessica: Learning from other’s experiences.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Soo Choi.
","summary":"Soo Choi talks about creating safer spaces at conferences and in workspaces, forgiving people without negatively labeling them, and having fierce conversations.","date_published":"2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/60386e35-df8e-4f02-adae-c0be20913b41.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46148320,"duration_in_seconds":2884}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=928","title":"050: Open Source Anarchism with Steve Klabnik","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/open-source-anachism","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:02 – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!\n\nSkrillex\n\n06:00 – Contributing to Open Source\n\nwhy the lucky stiff\n\nHackety Hack\n\nWhy’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby\n\n11:07 – Succession Planning\n\nThe Meme Hustler\n\n20:12 – Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way\n\nMikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?\n\nThe RFC Process in Rust\n\nSyndicalism\n\n36:23 – Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation\n\nWant to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,\nand bring us to conferences near you?\nSupport us via Patreon!\n\nSponsors Needed: Please download our Sponsorship Prospectus\nand share it with your employers!\n\n39:46 – Is anarchy equally accessible to everyone or is it only accessible/available to a privileged class?\n\n43:11 – Problems with One-upmanship and “Shittalking” in Communities\n\nAurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture\n\n50:39 – Seeking Out Different Environments and Building Environments People Want\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people.\n\nRein: How do you build systems of governance that don’t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers?\n\nLorena: How do we learn to speak with others in ways that are inviting and create a safe space for us all?\n\nCoraline: The notion of intentionality.\n\nSteve: Jargon and exclusion.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Steve Klabnik.Sponsored By:Expected Behavior: This episode is sponsored by Instrumental application and server monitoring!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nInstrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions FASTER, with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface, and automatic metric collection.\r\n\r\nSign up for a free developer account at InstrumentalApp.com!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:02 – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!
\n\n\n\n06:00 – Contributing to Open Source
\n\n\n\n\n\nWhy’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
\n\n11:07 – Succession Planning
\n\n\n\n20:12 – Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way
\n\nMikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?
\n\n\n\n\n\n36:23 – Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation
\n\nWant to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
\nand bring us to conferences near you?
\nSupport us via Patreon!
Sponsors Needed: Please download our Sponsorship Prospectus
\nand share it with your employers!
39:46 – Is anarchy equally accessible to everyone or is it only accessible/available to a privileged class?
\n\n43:11 – Problems with One-upmanship and “Shittalking” in Communities
\n\n\n\n50:39 – Seeking Out Different Environments and Building Environments People Want
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJamey: Leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people.
\n\nRein: How do you build systems of governance that don’t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers?
\n\nLorena: How do we learn to speak with others in ways that are inviting and create a safe space for us all?
\n\nCoraline: The notion of intentionality.
\n\nSteve: Jargon and exclusion.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Steve Klabnik.
Sponsored By:
Guest Starring:
\n\nReyn Aubrey: @ReynAubrey | PocketChange | reyn@pocketchange.social
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “For Good or For Awesome?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:18 – Reyn Aubrey’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpower!
\n\n06:04 – Culture of a Company and Tolerance
\n\nTribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
\n\n08:12 – Becoming an Entrepreneur at 19-years-old and PocketChange
\n\n10:40 – Charity Evaluation Criteria; “Wicked Problems”
\n\n\n\n14:33 – Habitizing Donation
\n\n16:22 – Analyzing and Collecting Charity Data
\n\n\n\n\n\n19:02 – How PocketChange is Structured
\n\n20:34 – The Ideation of “Technology For the Greater Good”
\n\n24:28 – Reyn’s Path Into Business and Entrepreneurship
\n\nStart It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay by Kenrya Rankin
\n\n28:33 – Good Business Beliefs, Virtues, and Values
\n\n34:00 – Bringing Anarchist Organizing Principles Into Business
\n\nColin Ward: Anarchism as a Theory of Organization
\n\nThe ‘Two Pizza Rule’ Is Jeff Bezos’ Secret To Productive Meetings
\n\n37:23 – Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship
\n\n42:00 – Launching PocketChange and Reserve Your Launch Day Invite
\n\n44:51 – Gathering and Raising Venture Capital
\n\n47:35 – Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship (Cont’d)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Check out Stafford Beer.
\n\nCoraline: A culture being defined by the least of something you’ll tolerate and entrepreneurs should solve for “Wicked Problems” — not pain points.
\n\nJamey: All charities are not created equal.
\n\nReyn: A value that isn’t acted on is at best an inspiration and at worst a pretense. Also, non-dominance based work relationships.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Reyn Aubrey.
Sponsored By:
","summary":"We are joined by 19-year-old entrepreneur Reyn Aubrey to talk about building technology for the greater good, his startup PocketChange, habitizing donation, analyzing and collecting charity data, and anarchist organizing principles.","date_published":"2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/dc5d6bcb-0471-4e7c-8900-2da8c0a5c96b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53843797,"duration_in_seconds":3365}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=871","title":"048: Finding Our Lane with Marco Rogers","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/finding-our-lane","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n02:04 – Background and Superpower\n\n03:03 – Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter\n\n04:41 – “Staying in Your Lane”\n\n11:12 – To Engage, or Not to Engage?\n\n16:10 – Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career\n\n20:49 – Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion\n\n23:16 – Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture\n\n35:56 – Educating Others — But Not on Demand\n\n38:28 – What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces\n\n43:59 – Starting/Organizing Working Groups\n\n45:34 – Advocating for D&I as Leaders\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: Diversity and inclusion is hard because it’s more than just one thing.\n\nSam: Don’t have conversations or be in them to not just be wrong.\n\nJanelle: Training, teaching, and educating, versus putting together a working group to get things done.\n\nJamey: It’s okay to be wrong and sincerely apologizing.\n\nAstrid: It’s hard to be who you want to be in a world where people are constantly picking sides.\n\nMarco: How dynamics pay out for people who aren’t fully engaged in the D&I conversation yet.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Marco Rogers.Sponsored By:VelocityConf: We are proud to be partnering with O’Reilly Media. Be sure to check out velocityconf.com for all of the dates and cities coming this Fall.\r\n\r\nThe O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations, make plans to attend Velocity in New York, NY (October 1-4) or London, UK (October 17-20). Register with code PCGTC to save 25% on your Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass. Promo Code: PCGTC","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:04 – Background and Superpower
\n\n03:03 – Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter
\n\n04:41 – “Staying in Your Lane”
\n\n11:12 – To Engage, or Not to Engage?
\n\n16:10 – Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career
\n\n20:49 – Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion
\n\n23:16 – Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture
\n\n35:56 – Educating Others — But Not on Demand
\n\n38:28 – What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces
\n\n43:59 – Starting/Organizing Working Groups
\n\n45:34 – Advocating for D&I as Leaders
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Diversity and inclusion is hard because it’s more than just one thing.
\n\nSam: Don’t have conversations or be in them to not just be wrong.
\n\nJanelle: Training, teaching, and educating, versus putting together a working group to get things done.
\n\nJamey: It’s okay to be wrong and sincerely apologizing.
\n\nAstrid: It’s hard to be who you want to be in a world where people are constantly picking sides.
\n\nMarco: How dynamics pay out for people who aren’t fully engaged in the D&I conversation yet.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Marco Rogers.
Sponsored By:
00:16 – Welcome to “I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:31 – Background and Superpower; Empathy
\n\n09:08 – Cross-Cultural Communication Dynamics
\n\n\n\n15:48 – Biases, Understanding Dynamics, and Facilitating as an Ally
\n\n\n\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n "To have biases is to be human. It's not a bad thing."@dwhelan @greaterthancode
\n
21:02 – Being Authentic
\n\n25:31 – Is Agile something that you are or something that you do?
\n\n35:37 – Adopting Practices Across Teams
\n\n\n\n\n“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
\n\n@jessitron
\n\n
\n People love consistency. Ask, what are the benefits? then strive for common outcomes, not common practices.@dwhelan@greaterthancode
\n
41:57 – Technical Debt and Technical Health: How do we amplify what we want?
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Strive for common outcomes; not common practices.
\n\nCoraline: Some situations should be taken as a promise for a conversation.
\n\nJanelle: Ask for permission.
\n\nSam: Identifying and clarifying outcomes that we want.
\n\nDeclan: Figure out how you can have effective conversations with your teams.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Declan Whelan.
","summary":"Declan Whelan joins us to talk about communicating across boundaries: cross-cultural communication dynamics, adopting practices across teams, and technical debt vs technical health.","date_published":"2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/fe5c36b6-22d5-4b38-860a-84fbdff7cb26.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63508268,"duration_in_seconds":3969}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=831","title":"046: Specialization vs Collaboration with Aria Stewart","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/specialization-vs-collaboration","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:07 – Background and Superpowers\n\n09:22 – Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”\n\n14:23 – Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area\n\n17:15 – Isolation Leading to Contempt\n\n28:42 – The DevOps Movement and Culture Change\n\n34:45 – Contempt Towards Processes\n\nJanelle Klein: A Programmer’s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.\n\nCoraline: Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.\n\nJanelle: Inside of us, we all have a soul.\n\nAria: Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Aria Stewart.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:07 – Background and Superpowers
\n\n09:22 – Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”
\n\n14:23 – Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area
\n\n17:15 – Isolation Leading to Contempt
\n\n28:42 – The DevOps Movement and Culture Change
\n\n34:45 – Contempt Towards Processes
\n\nJanelle Klein: A Programmer’s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.
\n\nCoraline: Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.
\n\nJanelle: Inside of us, we all have a soul.
\n\nAria: Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Aria Stewart.
","summary":"In this episode, Aria Stewart reflects on how specializing in one area of software development can lead to contemptuous behavior between people, teams, and company culture.","date_published":"2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/ac153248-e78d-49b3-9ff6-270c9c735ca3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44369083,"duration_in_seconds":2773}]},{"id":"9733b723-8190-4877-bf56-8b757bc5be85","title":"Special Edition: Innovation Amidst a Disaster with Jeff Reichman","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/innovation-amidst-a-disaster","content_text":"This episode stars, Jeff Reichman, who talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jeff Reichman.","content_html":"This episode stars, Jeff Reichman, who talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jeff Reichman.
","summary":"This episode stars, Jeff Reichman, who talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.","date_published":"2017-09-06T08:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9733b723-8190-4877-bf56-8b757bc5be85.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mp3","size_in_bytes":44891095,"duration_in_seconds":2805}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=830","title":"045: Sexual Assault and Project Callisto with Lynn Cyrin","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/sexual-assault-and-project-callisto","content_text":"Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:22 – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers\n\nFIRST LEGO League\n\n11:34 – Project Callisto: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System\n\n17:57 – Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private\n\n20:49 – The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works\n\n22:17 – Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault\n\n26:04 – “Staying in Your Lane”\n\n27:56 – Matching Reports\n\n29:33 – The Technology Behind the App\n\n34:14 – Evaluating Features\n\n38:16 – Contributing to Project Callisto\n\nFund Club\n\nDonate to Project Callisto\n\n41:54 – Open Sourcing the Project\n\n44:00 – Code Sharing\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Empathy and developers putting the psychological safety of their users first.\n\nBrené Brown on Empathy\n\nAstrid: Building technology for the greater good.\n\nJamey: If you don’t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and make it happen.\n\nSam: Believe survivors.\n\nAshe Dryden: The Risk In Speaking Up\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Lynn Cyrin.Sponsored By:Upside: Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.","content_html":"Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:22 – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers
\n\n\n\n11:34 – Project Callisto: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System
\n\n17:57 – Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private
\n\n20:49 – The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works
\n\n22:17 – Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault
\n\n26:04 – “Staying in Your Lane”
\n\n27:56 – Matching Reports
\n\n29:33 – The Technology Behind the App
\n\n34:14 – Evaluating Features
\n\n38:16 – Contributing to Project Callisto
\n\n\n\n\n\n41:54 – Open Sourcing the Project
\n\n44:00 – Code Sharing
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Empathy and developers putting the psychological safety of their users first.
\n\n\n\nAstrid: Building technology for the greater good.
\n\nJamey: If you don’t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and make it happen.
\n\nSam: Believe survivors.
\n\nAshe Dryden: The Risk In Speaking Up
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Lynn Cyrin.
Sponsored By:
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Lynn Cyrin, a developer on the Project Callisto sexual assault reporting application. In this episode, we talk about institutional betrayal, the importance of keeping survivor information private and the technology behind th...","date_published":"2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c59d5d7b-939b-4404-a383-92b0c54ffeb8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51321835,"duration_in_seconds":3207}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=821","title":"044: Lazy Perfectionism and Performative Diversity and Inclusion with Shanise Barona","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/lazy-perfectionism-and-diversity-and-inclusion","content_text":"Come to Catskills Conf and meet Mandy & Jamey! Stay for the experience.\n\nShanise Barona: @shanisebarona | shanisebarona.com\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n02:19 – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower\n\nGirl Develop It\n\n03:08 – “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”\n\nThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson\n\nYou Are a Badass by Jen Sincero\n\n12:49 – Improving Self-Directed Learning\n\n100 Days of Code\n\n15:35 – Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone\n\n\n“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various “-ilities” of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It’s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.” – Nathaniel Knight\n\n\nThank you to our latest $50 Patron, Josh Schmelzle!\n\n21:50 – “Performative Diversity” and Community Building\n\nEla Conf\n\n28:33 – Words and Actions: Influencing Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)\n\n34:25 – Being Angry on Social Media But Feeling the Need to be Perceived as Positive (All the Time)\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: Lazy perfection is a thing with a label and something to pay attention to.\n\nJanelle: How shallow efforts can be to create change (i.e. conference diversity).\n\nMandy: Stop giving lip service! Step up and prove that you care about diversity and inclusion by supporting groups and missions like Greater Than Code.\n\nJamey: Having connections with people to prove to yourself you’re not alone.\n\nJessica: If you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team.\n\nShanise: 1. Seeking a balance between wanting and not wanting explosions of dissonance.\n\n\nFind opportunities to highlight people that wouldn’t normally get opportunities to be highlighted.\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Shanise Barona.","content_html":"Come to Catskills Conf and meet Mandy & Jamey! Stay for the experience.
\n\nShanise Barona: @shanisebarona | shanisebarona.com
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:19 – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower
\n\n\n\n03:08 – “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”
\n\n\n\nYou Are a Badass by Jen Sincero
\n\n12:49 – Improving Self-Directed Learning
\n\n\n\n15:35 – Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone
\n\n\n\n\n“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various “-ilities” of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It’s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.” – Nathaniel Knight
\n
Thank you to our latest $50 Patron, Josh Schmelzle!
\n\n21:50 – “Performative Diversity” and Community Building
\n\n\n\n28:33 – Words and Actions: Influencing Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)
\n\n34:25 – Being Angry on Social Media But Feeling the Need to be Perceived as Positive (All the Time)
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Lazy perfection is a thing with a label and something to pay attention to.
\n\nJanelle: How shallow efforts can be to create change (i.e. conference diversity).
\n\nMandy: Stop giving lip service! Step up and prove that you care about diversity and inclusion by supporting groups and missions like Greater Than Code.
\n\nJamey: Having connections with people to prove to yourself you’re not alone.
\n\nJessica: If you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team.
\n\nShanise: 1. Seeking a balance between wanting and not wanting explosions of dissonance.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Shanise Barona.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Shanise Barona about the terms \"lazy perfectionism\" and \"performative diversity\".","date_published":"2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e5abf688-20fb-4ad6-a02a-72c3c673e9c8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47216667,"duration_in_seconds":2951}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=796","title":"043: The Accessibility of Board Games with Mischa Lewis-Norelle and James Edward Gray","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-accessibility-of-board-games","content_text":"James Edward Gray: @JEG2\n\n\"Purchase\" links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:58 – Backgrounds and Superpowers\n\nHilary Stohs-Krause: We’ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017\n\n04:44 – Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games\n\n07:00 – Games and Challenges\n\nEscape: The Curse of the Temple (Purchase)\n\nMillennium Blades (Purchase)\n\n11:49 – The Power of House Rules\n\nRoboRally (Purchase)\n\nSmall World (Purchase)\n\n14:41 – German-style/Eurogames vs American Games\n\nTicket to Ride (Purchase)\n\nPuerto Rico (Purchase)\n\nSettlers of Catan (Purchase\n\nGreat Western Trail (Purchase)\n\n16:45 – Video Games; Real-time vs Turn Based Games\n\nMaster of Orion (Purchase)\n\nDon’t Starve Together (Purchase)\n\nRogue\n\n19:35 – Tabletop Role-Playing Games (RPGs)\n\nDungeons and Dragons (D&D)\n\n22:45 – Cooperative Games vs Competitive Games\n\nSpace Cadets (Purchase)\n\nDeception: Murder in Hong Kong (Purchase)\n\n22:45 – Bluffing Games, The Autism Spectrum, and Player Elimination\n\nMascarade (Purchase)\n\nSheriff of Nottingham (Purchase)\n\nWerewolf (Purchase)\n\nOne Night Werewolf (Purchase)\n\nResistance (Purchase)\n\nSentinels of the Universe (Purchase)\n\nGoblin Quest (Purchase)\n\nShut Up & Sit Down: Sean Bean Quest\n\n35:14 – The Cost of Board Games: Time and Money\n\nHow to Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10!\n\nPandemic Legacy (Purchase)\n\nGloomhaven (Purchase)\n\nCheapass Games\n\nFiasco (Purchase)\n\nThe Open Game License\n\nSpyfall (Purchase)\n\nMafia (Purchase)\n\n43:02 – The History of Monopoly; Leftist Board Games\n\nSuffragetto\n\nClass Struggle\n\n45:56 – Resources\n\nMeeple Like Us\n\n64 Ounce Games\n\nMaxiAids\n\nThe Dice Tower\n\nBoardGameGeek\n\nTableTop\n\nFavorite Games:\n\nSam: Repello (Purchase)\n\nCoraline: Tales of the Arabian Nights (Purchase)\n\nRein: Dungeons and Dragons: Second Edition and Lords of Waterdeep (Purchase)\n\nJames: Exalted (Purchase)\n\nJamey: Betrayal at House on the Hill (Purchase)\n\nMischa: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Purchase)\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: James Edward Gray and Mischa Lewis-Norelle.","content_html":"James Edward Gray: @JEG2
\n\n"Purchase" links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:58 – Backgrounds and Superpowers
\n\nHilary Stohs-Krause: We’ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017
\n\n04:44 – Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games
\n\n07:00 – Games and Challenges
\n\nEscape: The Curse of the Temple (Purchase)
\n\n\n\n11:49 – The Power of House Rules
\n\n\n\n\n\n14:41 – German-style/Eurogames vs American Games
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGreat Western Trail (Purchase)
\n\n16:45 – Video Games; Real-time vs Turn Based Games
\n\n\n\nDon’t Starve Together (Purchase)
\n\n\n\n19:35 – Tabletop Role-Playing Games (RPGs)
\n\n\n\n22:45 – Cooperative Games vs Competitive Games
\n\n\n\nDeception: Murder in Hong Kong (Purchase)
\n\n22:45 – Bluffing Games, The Autism Spectrum, and Player Elimination
\n\n\n\nSheriff of Nottingham (Purchase)
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSentinels of the Universe (Purchase)
\n\n\n\nShut Up & Sit Down: Sean Bean Quest
\n\n35:14 – The Cost of Board Games: Time and Money
\n\nHow to Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10!
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n43:02 – The History of Monopoly; Leftist Board Games
\n\n\n\n\n\n45:56 – Resources
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFavorite Games:
\n\n\n\nCoraline: Tales of the Arabian Nights (Purchase)
\n\nRein: Dungeons and Dragons: Second Edition and Lords of Waterdeep (Purchase)
\n\n\n\nJamey: Betrayal at House on the Hill (Purchase)
\n\nMischa: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Purchase)
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: James Edward Gray and Mischa Lewis-Norelle.
","summary":"In this episode, James Edward Gray and Mischa Lewis-Norelle join us to talk about the accessibility of board games, talk about the various different kind of games and particular challenges of each category,","date_published":"2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e3d36a8d-530f-4cd5-9f44-c3d58d3f61e6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58519537,"duration_in_seconds":3657}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=787","title":"042: @CallbackWomen and Organizing Conferences for Diversity and Inclusion with Carina C. Zona","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/callbackwomen-and-organizing-companies-for-diversity-and-inclusion","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:13 – Carina’s Background and Superpower\n\n02:58 – @CallbackWomen and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included\n\nAshe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference\n\n12:13 – Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference\n\nI hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) June 3, 2017\n\n23:10 – Conference Outreach\n\n27:56 – Accessibility at Conferences\n\n34:19 – Conferences “Competing” for Speakers\n\nCall For Proposals (CFP)\n\n40:26 – Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement\n\nThis is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) July 22, 2017\n\n49:05 – Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct\n\n#cocpledge\n\nAshe Dryden: Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ\n\nFund Club\n\nDonate to @CallbackWomen!\n\nPledge via Patreon!\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://quotespictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/never-doubt-that-a-small-group-of-thoughtful-committed-citizens-can-change-the-world-indeed-it-is-the-only-thing-that-ever-has-margaret-mead.pngnull\n\nReflections:\n\nJamey: Having travel and accommodation expenses covered is important for speakers.\n\nSam: Flipping the paradigm.\n\nCoraline: Using influence to affect change.\n\nCarina: Having speaker mentors: both experienced and newbies.\n\nRein: How conferences have evolved in a positive way around diversity and inclusion.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Carina C. Zona.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:13 – Carina’s Background and Superpower
\n\n02:58 – @CallbackWomen and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included
\n\nAshe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference
\n\n12:13 – Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference
\n\n\n\nI hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP
— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) June 3, 2017
23:10 – Conference Outreach
\n\n27:56 – Accessibility at Conferences
\n\n34:19 – Conferences “Competing” for Speakers
\n\nCall For Proposals (CFP)
\n\n40:26 – Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement
\n\n\n\nThis is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I
— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) July 22, 2017
49:05 – Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct
\n\n\n\nAshe Dryden: Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://quotespictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/never-doubt-that-a-small-group-of-thoughtful-committed-citizens-can-change-the-world-indeed-it-is-the-only-thing-that-ever-has-margaret-mead.png
null
Reflections:
\n\nJamey: Having travel and accommodation expenses covered is important for speakers.
\n\nSam: Flipping the paradigm.
\n\nCoraline: Using influence to affect change.
\n\nCarina: Having speaker mentors: both experienced and newbies.
\n\nRein: How conferences have evolved in a positive way around diversity and inclusion.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Carina C. Zona.
","summary":"In this episode, Carina C. Zona joins us to talk about making a difference with her organization, @CallbackWomen, why diversity and inclusion is so important to have at conferences, and sending signals and/or indicators that encourage people to apply to speak at your conference.","date_published":"2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/57f50b03-7b7c-408e-aff8-18458b40e4e8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":34485704,"duration_in_seconds":4310}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=774","title":"041: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mind Manipulation with Casey Watts!","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-and-mind-manipulation","content_text":"caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation\n\nA Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation [slides]\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:18 – Empathy Development\n\n03:25 – Training for Customer Support\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski\n\nA Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017\n\n06:53 – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines (from the GTC blog!)\n\n10:48 – Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality\n\n14:23 – Inner vs Outer Brain\n\nvia GIPHY\n\nThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman\n\n16:22 – Empathetic vs Empathic; Empathy vs Sympathy\n\nPavneet Singh Saund: Practical Empathy: Unlock the Super Power @ NDC Oslo\n\n21:32 – The Earned Dogmatism Effect [Video]\n\n26:10 – Maladaptive Thought Patterns\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://connfitzgibboncounselling.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/CBT-Dundrum.jpgnull\n\n31:34 – The “Woop” State and Psychological Safety\n\nAmy Edmondson: Psychological Safety\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub\n\n38:09 – Leading with Vulnerability\n\nReflections:\n\nJanelle: Choose your presence.\n\nJessica: Feel feelings in the moment, and then act on them.\n\nSam: Rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited.\n\nCoraline: Understanding empathy over only performing empathy.\n\nCasey: Making responding with empathy a habit.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Casey Watts!.Sponsored By:Upside: Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.","content_html":"caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation
\n\nA Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation [slides]
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:18 – Empathy Development
\n\n03:25 – Training for Customer Support
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski
\n\nA Neurobiologist’s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017
\n\n06:53 – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines (from the GTC blog!)
\n\n10:48 – Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality
\n\n14:23 – Inner vs Outer Brain
\n\n\n\nThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
\n\n16:22 – Empathetic vs Empathic; Empathy vs Sympathy
\n\nPavneet Singh Saund: Practical Empathy: Unlock the Super Power @ NDC Oslo
\n\n21:32 – The Earned Dogmatism Effect [Video]
\n\n26:10 – Maladaptive Thought Patterns
\n\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for http://connfitzgibboncounselling.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/CBT-Dundrum.jpg
null
31:34 – The “Woop” State and Psychological Safety
\n\nAmy Edmondson: Psychological Safety
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub
\n\n38:09 – Leading with Vulnerability
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJanelle: Choose your presence.
\n\nJessica: Feel feelings in the moment, and then act on them.
\n\nSam: Rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited.
\n\nCoraline: Understanding empathy over only performing empathy.
\n\nCasey: Making responding with empathy a habit.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Casey Watts!.
Sponsored By:
","summary":"In this episode, we talk with Casey Watts about cognitive behavioral therapy and mind manipulation.","date_published":"2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/072015d2-07b7-49db-a706-bb126fe746a6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51364064,"duration_in_seconds":3210}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=764","title":"040: F*ck It And Be Nice","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/f-it-and-be-nice","content_text":"Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:36 – The Tweetstorm that Started it All\n\n04:29 – Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery\n\n“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” - @jennschiffer— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) July 15, 2017\n\nGreater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman\n\n11:33 – Arguing on the Internet\n\nWant to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,\nand bring us to conferences near you?\nSupport us via Patreon!\n\nOr tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.\n\n16:55 – Dealing with the Jerks\n\npsa: all of your code is ephemeral & will one day not even matter. it probably doesn't even matter now. how you treat your peers matters 💫— jenn schiffer (@jennschiffer) May 18, 2015\n\n36:28 – Reacting with Meanness and Failed Attempts at Banter\n\n29:08 – Teaching by Example\n\n31:52 – Practicing Restraint\n\n37:45 – Defense Mechanisms; Empathy for Offenders and the Offended\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica L.: You are way more evolved and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.\n\nJenn: We have to actively be learning how to interact with people in the industry and people entering the industry.\n\nJamey: When you’re mad, approach it offline.\n\nJessica K.: Tell people they’re great publicly, not privately! Make it normal to tell each other we’re awesome.\n\nMandy: Just be f*cking nice.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Jenn Schiffer and Jessica Lord.","content_html":"Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:36 – The Tweetstorm that Started it All
\n\n04:29 – Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery
\n\n\n\n“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” - @jennschiffer
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) July 15, 2017
Greater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman
\n\n11:33 – Arguing on the Internet
\n\nWant to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,
\nand bring us to conferences near you?
\nSupport us via Patreon!
Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to mandy@greaterthancode.com.
\n\n16:55 – Dealing with the Jerks
\n\n\n\npsa: all of your code is ephemeral & will one day not even matter. it probably doesn't even matter now. how you treat your peers matters 💫
— jenn schiffer (@jennschiffer) May 18, 2015
36:28 – Reacting with Meanness and Failed Attempts at Banter
\n\n29:08 – Teaching by Example
\n\n31:52 – Practicing Restraint
\n\n37:45 – Defense Mechanisms; Empathy for Offenders and the Offended
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica L.: You are way more evolved and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.
\n\nJenn: We have to actively be learning how to interact with people in the industry and people entering the industry.
\n\nJamey: When you’re mad, approach it offline.
\n\nJessica K.: Tell people they’re great publicly, not privately! Make it normal to tell each other we’re awesome.
\n\nMandy: Just be f*cking nice.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Jenn Schiffer and Jessica Lord.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk about communication on the Internet and especially in social media. Topics covered include dealing with jerks, teaching by example and practicing restraint.","date_published":"2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9e3989eb-65ad-4bd1-bc5b-e1a23e2a5741.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48229775,"duration_in_seconds":3014}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=696","title":"Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-b-side-of-software-development","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Hanselminutes!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:57 – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing\n\n\n“The struggle is part of the journey.” – Scott Hanselman\n\n\n13:51 – Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids\n\n19:11 – There is Value in Suffering\n\nAntifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb\n\n21:39 – Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others\n\nWe RISE Women in Tech Conference\n\nJessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development\n\nAmanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.\n\n36:28 – Being Nice Online\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (1)\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (2)\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (3)\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (4)\n\n42:29 – Teaching (Cont’d)\n\nScott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017\n\nAwesomely Luvvie\n\nReflections:\n\nScott: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb\n\nJessica: This show’s Slack community!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Scott Hanselman.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Hanselminutes!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:57 – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing
\n\n\n\n\n“The struggle is part of the journey.” – Scott Hanselman
\n
13:51 – Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids
\n\n19:11 – There is Value in Suffering
\n\nAntifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
\n\n21:39 – Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others
\n\nWe RISE Women in Tech Conference
\n\nJessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development
\n\nAmanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.
\n\n36:28 – Being Nice Online
\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (1)
\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (2)
\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (3)
\n\nScott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (4)
\n\n42:29 – Teaching (Cont’d)
\n\nScott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017
\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nScott: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
\n\nJessica: This show’s Slack community!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Scott Hanselman.
","summary":"We talk to Scott Hanselman, about struggling and prevailing, instilling systems thinking values on children, and being a teacher.","date_published":"2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9713a1d4-4b8a-45e8-8e47-eb94d455e638.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46705895,"duration_in_seconds":2919}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=677","title":"Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/category-theory-for-normal-humans","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction\n\nBooks:\n\n\nHow to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics\nBeyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics\n\n\nYouTube Channels:\n\n\nTheCatsters\nTheMathsters\n\n\nArticles:\n\n\nEugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake\nEveryday Math\n\n\n01:54 – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?\n\nA Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart\n\n20:17 – Category Theory\n\nTextbooks:\n\n\nCategories for the Working Mathematician\nCategory Theory (Oxford Logic Guides)\nConceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories\n\n\n38:17 – Changing the Terminology Around Gender to Focus on Character Traits Instead: Congressive and Ingressive Behavior\n\nThe Prisoner’s Dilemma\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Dr. Eugenia Cheng.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction
\n\nBooks:
\n\nYouTube Channels:
\n\nArticles:
\n\n\n\n01:54 – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?
\n\nA Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart
\n\n20:17 – Category Theory
\n\nTextbooks:
\n\n38:17 – Changing the Terminology Around Gender to Focus on Character Traits Instead: Congressive and Ingressive Behavior
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Dr. Eugenia Cheng.
","summary":"Dr. Eugenia Cheng joins us to talk about math, and even more specifically, category theory. Then we talk about changing the terminology around gender to focus on character traits instead.","date_published":"2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d7db0641-0a05-48af-85e8-59a5f7620c30.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":66590700,"duration_in_seconds":4161}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=654","title":"Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/failure-mode","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Diamonds Are For Gender” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:56 – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Data Science\n\n04:20 – Diversity and Career Paths in Data Science\n\n10:51 – Ethical Debates Within the Data Science Field\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy\n\nTherac-25\n\nFMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)\n\n17:21 – Software Development and Engineering; Failure Modes in Software\n\n21:44 – Failure Modes in Democracy; Voting Machine Software\n\n33:37 – Working for a Government Contractor\n\n36:21 – Data Patterns and Tampering\n\n39:00 – Open Data and Open Science\n\n45:59 – Falsifying Data\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Considering all the ways something can fail.\n\nSam: The world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted are extraordinary niche.\n\nEmily: Tech conferences and their decadence vs academic/corporate conferences.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Emily Gorcenski.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Diamonds Are For Gender” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:56 – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Data Science
\n\n04:20 – Diversity and Career Paths in Data Science
\n\n10:51 – Ethical Debates Within the Data Science Field
\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
\n\n\n\nFMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)
\n\n17:21 – Software Development and Engineering; Failure Modes in Software
\n\n21:44 – Failure Modes in Democracy; Voting Machine Software
\n\n33:37 – Working for a Government Contractor
\n\n36:21 – Data Patterns and Tampering
\n\n39:00 – Open Data and Open Science
\n\n45:59 – Falsifying Data
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Considering all the ways something can fail.
\n\nSam: The world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted are extraordinary niche.
\n\nEmily: Tech conferences and their decadence vs academic/corporate conferences.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Emily Gorcenski.
","summary":"Emily Gorcenski talks about data science, failure modes in software and in democracy, and open data and open science.","date_published":"2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/2ff87c6e-e347-4bf1-82d2-ab10f9375bfc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52186154,"duration_in_seconds":3261}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=636","title":"Episode 036: Metaphors and Microservices with Matt Stine","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/metaphors-and-microservices","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas…All The Time…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n03:10 – Matt’s Origin Story in Software Development\n\n09:04 – The Business of Consulting\n\n16:24 – Empathy in Consulting\n\n20:07 – Rigorous Communication and Shared Language; Microservices\n\nLudwig Wittgenstein\n\n[Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis](Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) \n\nMetaphors We Live By\n\n39:05 – Ubiquitous Language\n\nSurfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter \n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors.\n\nWittgenstein’s Ladder\n\nPerformance of Genetic Algorithms For Data Classification by Matthew Stine\n\nReflections:\n\nMatt: Ludwig Wittgenstein and language games.\n\nCoraline: The shortcomings of pattern-matching.\n\nAstrid: Using evolution as a model.\n\nRein: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World\n\nJanelle: Language as a mechanism of control.\n\nSam: Building a bridge of understanding with progressively less incorrect metaphors.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Matt Stine.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas…All The Time…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n03:10 – Matt’s Origin Story in Software Development
\n\n09:04 – The Business of Consulting
\n\n16:24 – Empathy in Consulting
\n\n20:07 – Rigorous Communication and Shared Language; Microservices
\n\n\n\n[Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis](Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
\n\n\n\n39:05 – Ubiquitous Language
\n\nSurfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors.
\n\n\n\nPerformance of Genetic Algorithms For Data Classification by Matthew Stine
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMatt: Ludwig Wittgenstein and language games.
\n\nCoraline: The shortcomings of pattern-matching.
\n\nAstrid: Using evolution as a model.
\n\nRein: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
\n\nJanelle: Language as a mechanism of control.
\n\nSam: Building a bridge of understanding with progressively less incorrect metaphors.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Matt Stine.
","summary":"Matt Stine joins us for a conversation that starts out about consulting and morphs into a meta-conversation about rigorous communication, ubiquitous language, metaphors, and microservices.","date_published":"2017-06-07T20:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/be104d95-8b2e-462f-a63f-d7a82a3c1d84.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35572616,"duration_in_seconds":4446}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=628","title":"Episode 035: Behind the Scenes at npm with Laurie Voss","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/behind-the-scenes-at-npm","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Yes, SJWs Do Actually Code” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:22 – Superpower Origin Story\n\n06:00 – “Real Programming”\n\n08:45 – Being Gay in the Tech Industry; Micro Activism\n\n16:17 – Setting Workplace Culture\n\n21:20 – Working in Open Source While Working in a Company like npm\n\n25:50 – Monetizing npm\n\nnpm Enterprise\n\n32:55 – npm@5\n\n42:00 – The 10x Engineer\n\n44:19 – Technical Hiring\n\n49:53 – Why Whiteboarding and Code Exercises Don’t Work\n\n51:51 – Organizing Engineers\n\nTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Not being concerned with how other people view you as a programmer.\n\nCoraline: Remembering good hiring practices to influence others.\n\nSam: Making your interview process focus on having people talk to each other about software.\n\nRein: Becoming a Change Artist by Gerald Weinberg\n\nLaurie: Organizing large groups of people to get stuff done.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Laurie Voss.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Yes, SJWs Do Actually Code” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:22 – Superpower Origin Story
\n\n06:00 – “Real Programming”
\n\n08:45 – Being Gay in the Tech Industry; Micro Activism
\n\n16:17 – Setting Workplace Culture
\n\n21:20 – Working in Open Source While Working in a Company like npm
\n\n25:50 – Monetizing npm
\n\n\n\n32:55 – npm@5
\n\n42:00 – The 10x Engineer
\n\n44:19 – Technical Hiring
\n\n49:53 – Why Whiteboarding and Code Exercises Don’t Work
\n\n51:51 – Organizing Engineers
\n\nTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Not being concerned with how other people view you as a programmer.
\n\nCoraline: Remembering good hiring practices to influence others.
\n\nSam: Making your interview process focus on having people talk to each other about software.
\n\nRein: Becoming a Change Artist by Gerald Weinberg
\n\nLaurie: Organizing large groups of people to get stuff done.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Laurie Voss.
","summary":"Laurie Voss joins us to talk about what goes on behind the scenes at npm, including setting workplace culture, technical hiring, and organizing engineers.","date_published":"2017-05-31T22:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/cae1cc53-6ccd-40b4-8e5f-858192613048.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60762487,"duration_in_seconds":3797}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=598","title":"Episode 034: Systems Thinking in the Real World","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/systems-thinking-in-the-real-world","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:20 – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers\n\nTragedy of the Commons\n\n06:53 – Why We Do What We Do\n\n09:03 – Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support\n\n16:20 – Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole\n\n19:54 – “The Cycle of Safety”\n\nThe Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson\n\n25:21 – Scarcity\n\n30:15 – Where are we focusing?\n\n33:25 – Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping\n\nThe Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke\n\n37:56 – Organizations as Business AND Schools\n\nThe Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge\n\n40:25 – Abundance and Barter Systems\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Access to technology as a human right.\n\nJanelle: Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows?\n\nAstrid: What would you do if money wasn’t a factor?\n\nJessica: Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had.\n\nThe Open Mastery Community\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:20 – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers
\n\n\n\n06:53 – Why We Do What We Do
\n\n09:03 – Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support
\n\n16:20 – Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole
\n\n19:54 – “The Cycle of Safety”
\n\nThe Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
\n\n25:21 – Scarcity
\n\n30:15 – Where are we focusing?
\n\n33:25 – Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping
\n\nThe Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke
\n\n37:56 – Organizations as Business AND Schools
\n\nThe Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
\n\n40:25 – Abundance and Barter Systems
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCoraline: Access to technology as a human right.
\n\nJanelle: Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows?
\n\nAstrid: What would you do if money wasn’t a factor?
\n\nJessica: Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had.
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"In this episode, we talk about new ways to organize society around a culture of plenty rather than a culture of scarcity. Along the way we discuss the intersection of corporations and open source and the gatekeeping that prevents marginalized people from participating in open culture.","date_published":"2017-05-24T20:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c8ec2c8f-43fc-4791-ad9e-383fa9d03027.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":58763161,"duration_in_seconds":3672}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=588","title":"Episode 033: Mental Illness with Greg Baugues","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/mental-illness","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “What is your favorite color?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\nHow to teach your dog to take selfies… and text them to you\n\n01:34 – Superpower Origin Story; Mental Illness in College\n\nDriven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder\n\n10:13 – Disclaimer: We Are Not Doctors and a Message on Self-Diagnosis\n\n13:03 – Panel Experiences with Mental Illness: Rock Bottom, Shame, Stigma, and Fear\n\nDBT Therapy\n\n25:54 – How Mental Illness Seems to Uniquely Affect the Tech Community\n\n31:06 – Coping Mechanisms\n\n34:17 – Creating an Environment That is Beneficial to People with Mental Health Issues; Work-Life Balance\n\n[Open Sourcing Mental Illness](Open Sourcing Mental Illness)\n\nMental Health First Aid\n\nWhy Fidget Spinners Might Be Helpful for the Brain\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Allie Brosh: Adventures in Depression \n\nSam: Depression can feel like nothing.\n\nMandy: Reach out: [mandy@greaterthancode.com](mandy@greaterthancode.com); or @therubyrep\n\nGreg: [gb@twilio.com](gb@twilio.com); or @greggyb. Sharing your story is powerful.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Greg Baugues.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “What is your favorite color?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\nHow to teach your dog to take selfies… and text them to you
\n\n01:34 – Superpower Origin Story; Mental Illness in College
\n\nDriven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder
\n\n10:13 – Disclaimer: We Are Not Doctors and a Message on Self-Diagnosis
\n\n13:03 – Panel Experiences with Mental Illness: Rock Bottom, Shame, Stigma, and Fear
\n\n\n\n25:54 – How Mental Illness Seems to Uniquely Affect the Tech Community
\n\n31:06 – Coping Mechanisms
\n\n34:17 – Creating an Environment That is Beneficial to People with Mental Health Issues; Work-Life Balance
\n\n[Open Sourcing Mental Illness](Open Sourcing Mental Illness)
\n\n\n\nWhy Fidget Spinners Might Be Helpful for the Brain
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Allie Brosh: Adventures in Depression
\n\nSam: Depression can feel like nothing.
\n\nMandy: Reach out: [mandy@greaterthancode.com](mandy@greaterthancode.com); or @therubyrep
\n\nGreg: [gb@twilio.com](gb@twilio.com); or @greggyb. Sharing your story is powerful.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Greg Baugues.
","summary":"Greg Baugues talks about how mental illness affected his life and early career as a software developer. Collectively, we discuss stigma, shame, fear, our personal experiences, and individual coping mechanisms.","date_published":"2017-05-17T18:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/bae5e0d7-58cb-4244-b318-9a0ae8c60d43.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47804687,"duration_in_seconds":2987}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=578","title":"Episode 032: Curation vs Algorithms: Who Is Writing Our History? with Amy Unger","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/curation-vs-algorithms","content_text":"Amy Unger: @cdwort | Heroku\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:05 – Superpower Origin Story, Growing Up with a Computer in the Family, and Being a Teenager\n\nUnlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher\n\n08:30 – Humanities and History\n\n10:39 – Access to and Preservation of Literacy (Who is writing our history?)\n\n15:03 – Categorizing Information and Making it Accessible…But, Also Privacy?\n\n17:21 – Reliance on Google as the “Defacto Archive”?\n\n19:49 – Digital Records (Algorithms) vs Human Curation\n\n24:10 – What can librarians and library science offer a company?: Information Architecture\n\n27:32 – Algorithm Manipulation, Social Engineering, and Information Security\n\n32:24 – Whose stories are we collecting, archiving, and making available to the public?\n\nTragedy of the Commons\n\n41:09 – “Meme Hacking”, Getting Involved, and Owning Your Own Story\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media \n\nSam: How economics and politics rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.\n\nCoraline: Who is responsible for our history?\n\nJessica: The vast amounts of data we have and what we choose to preserve.\n\nAmy: Consider the possibility of working in the public sector.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Amy Unger.","content_html":"Amy Unger: @cdwort | Heroku
\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:05 – Superpower Origin Story, Growing Up with a Computer in the Family, and Being a Teenager
\n\nUnlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher
\n\n08:30 – Humanities and History
\n\n10:39 – Access to and Preservation of Literacy (Who is writing our history?)
\n\n15:03 – Categorizing Information and Making it Accessible…But, Also Privacy?
\n\n17:21 – Reliance on Google as the “Defacto Archive”?
\n\n19:49 – Digital Records (Algorithms) vs Human Curation
\n\n24:10 – What can librarians and library science offer a company?: Information Architecture
\n\n27:32 – Algorithm Manipulation, Social Engineering, and Information Security
\n\n32:24 – Whose stories are we collecting, archiving, and making available to the public?
\n\n\n\n41:09 – “Meme Hacking”, Getting Involved, and Owning Your Own Story
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
\n\nSam: How economics and politics rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.
\n\nCoraline: Who is responsible for our history?
\n\nJessica: The vast amounts of data we have and what we choose to preserve.
\n\nAmy: Consider the possibility of working in the public sector.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amy Unger.
","summary":"Amy Unger joins us to talk about accessing and preserving history, categorizing information, and digital vs human curation.","date_published":"2017-05-10T20:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/23395098-bbcd-4157-b1b1-bb067fa2c204.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52974458,"duration_in_seconds":3310}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=569","title":"Episode 031: Retrospectives and Agile Fluency with Diana Larsen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/retrospectives-and-agile-fluency","content_text":"** This conversation stems from an earlier episode when Janelle joined the panel: Episode 028: Brains, Feedback Systems, Demons, and Goats. \n\n02:03 – Retrospectives **\n\n“Software work is learning work.” @DianaOfPortland— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) May 3, 2017\n\nOODA Loop\n\n11:07 – Documenting Feelings and Emotions\n\n17:40 – Following Through With and Solving Action Plans\n\n20:08 – Focusing, Lists of Action, and “Best Practices”\n\n30:27 – What is value in the context of software development? / Measuring Waste\n\n33:39 – Taking Things in Small, Bite-sized Pieces: Refactoring\n\nMob Programming\n\n55:58 – Agile Fluency **\n\nYour Path through Agile Fluency on Martin Fowler’s Blog\n\nReflections:\n\nJanelle: Thinking about the focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. Taking human emotions into consideration.\n\nDiana: Managing learning and collecting data, and issues around value.\n\nSam: Different forms and cycles of feedback.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Diana Larsen.","content_html":"** This conversation stems from an earlier episode when Janelle joined the panel: Episode 028: Brains, Feedback Systems, Demons, and Goats.
\n\n02:03 – Retrospectives **
\n\n\n\n\n\n“Software work is learning work.” @DianaOfPortland
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) May 3, 2017
11:07 – Documenting Feelings and Emotions
\n\n17:40 – Following Through With and Solving Action Plans
\n\n20:08 – Focusing, Lists of Action, and “Best Practices”
\n\n30:27 – What is value in the context of software development? / Measuring Waste
\n\n33:39 – Taking Things in Small, Bite-sized Pieces: Refactoring
\n\n\n\n55:58 – Agile Fluency **
\n\nYour Path through Agile Fluency on Martin Fowler’s Blog
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJanelle: Thinking about the focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. Taking human emotions into consideration.
\n\nDiana: Managing learning and collecting data, and issues around value.
\n\nSam: Different forms and cycles of feedback.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Diana Larsen.
","summary":"Diana Larsen joins us to talk about an earlier episode (#28) that we did where we touched on retrospectives and Agile Fluency.","date_published":"2017-05-03T18:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/75ba71c8-1cff-4037-b48e-6b5237eb16ad.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48396953,"duration_in_seconds":3024}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=557","title":"Episode 030: Essential Developer Skills with Tom Stuart","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/essential-devloper-tools","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names & Reference” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:47 – Superhero Origin Story\n\nBBC BASIC\n\n04:45 – Nomenclature: “Junior” and “Senior” Developers; Differences Between “Early Career” Developers and “Experienced” Developers\n\n13:56 – Solving the Skill Assessment Problem; Learning Methodically\n\n20:55 – Software Development Now vs Then\n\n29:51 – Do Programming Languages Create Certain Biases?\n\n44:16 – Good Mentorship and Telling People What’s Next to Level Up\n\n55:58 – Cohorting/Teaching Classes with Sandi Metz; Object-Oriented Design and Object-Oriented Programming\n\nReflections:\n\nJanelle: Looking at things as multidimensional problems.\n\nRein: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg\n\nSam: The importance of the skill of metacognition.\n\nTom: How the work as changed as being a developer. Nonviolent Communication: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Tom Stuart.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names & Reference” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:47 – Superhero Origin Story
\n\n\n\n04:45 – Nomenclature: “Junior” and “Senior” Developers; Differences Between “Early Career” Developers and “Experienced” Developers
\n\n13:56 – Solving the Skill Assessment Problem; Learning Methodically
\n\n20:55 – Software Development Now vs Then
\n\n29:51 – Do Programming Languages Create Certain Biases?
\n\n44:16 – Good Mentorship and Telling People What’s Next to Level Up
\n\n55:58 – Cohorting/Teaching Classes with Sandi Metz; Object-Oriented Design and Object-Oriented Programming
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJanelle: Looking at things as multidimensional problems.
\n\nRein: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg
\n\nSam: The importance of the skill of metacognition.
\n\nTom: How the work as changed as being a developer. Nonviolent Communication: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Tom Stuart.
","summary":"Tom Stuart stopped by to talk about software development over the years, “junior” and “senior” developer nomenclature, good mentorship, and OOP.","date_published":"2017-04-28T16:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/23e52e1b-4074-4213-9214-af90362b69c7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44106753,"duration_in_seconds":4856}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=525","title":"Episode 029: p=eMPathy with Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/pempathy","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Tale of Space Cat Burritos” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n02:26 – Space Technology and the Cultural Portrayal of Science\n\nNASA Explorers Program\n\n08:24 – The Influence of Science Fiction on the Current Developments in Science\n\nNASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC)\n\nThe Comet Hitchhiker\n\nSupernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft\n\n14:47 – What is sci-fi telling us about the world we live in now?\n\nThe Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu\n\nThe Expanse Series\n\n18:34 – “Hard” vs “Soft” Science Fiction; “Hard” Conference Talks vs “Soft” Talks\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors @ Rubyfuza 2017\n\n24:43 – Understanding How People Work to Build Better Technology; Fighting for Accessibility in Science\n\nHenrietta Lacks\n\nThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks\n\n33:11 – Machine Learning\n\n“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park\n\n37:52 – Scarcity and Exploitation: Looking at Power Dynamics and Relationships Between Groups and People\n\nConway’s Law\n\n41:34 – Reasons We Prefer to Focus on Technology; Siloing and Specialization\n\n50:16 – Control: Who is the manager? Treating People Equally\n\n52:46 – Congruency and Being Congruent: It’s a People Problem!\n\nGerald Weinberg\n\n[The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg]((https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Successfully/dp/0932633013)\n\n“Emotions are valid inputs to every thought process.” – Coraline Ada Ehmke\n\nThe Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black\n\nAshe’s Tweets\n\n01:01:44 – How do we know we are right?\n\nThe Orange Juice Test\n\nThe Art of Negotiating the Best Deal by Seth Freeman\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: These issues go straight up to the top in terms of the philosophical ladder we’re trying to climb of what do we value? How do we get other people to share our values? It doesn’t get easier by ignoring that the problem is that difficult and pretending that it’s just technical.\n\nCoraline: It’s the responsibility of technologists to think about the social impact of the technical solutions they are making, whether that means by being better informed and striving to be generalists, or by making sure we are being inclusive and giving voice to people with different perspectives and levels of expertise on our teams to make sure we are addressing problems deeply and not just from one particular silo.\n\nAshe: Understanding how we are looking at a problem ethically, how we’re looking at it technically, and how we’re looking at it from a human point of view? What are the potential effects?\n\nBrad: The laws of nature still exist in the absence of humans. Humans are the reason things are messy and complicated.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Tale of Space Cat Burritos” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:26 – Space Technology and the Cultural Portrayal of Science
\n\n\n\n08:24 – The Influence of Science Fiction on the Current Developments in Science
\n\nNASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC)
\n\n\n\nSupernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft
\n\n14:47 – What is sci-fi telling us about the world we live in now?
\n\nThe Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
\n\n\n\n18:34 – “Hard” vs “Soft” Science Fiction; “Hard” Conference Talks vs “Soft” Talks
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors @ Rubyfuza 2017
\n\n24:43 – Understanding How People Work to Build Better Technology; Fighting for Accessibility in Science
\n\n\n\nThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
\n\n33:11 – Machine Learning
\n\n“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
\n\n37:52 – Scarcity and Exploitation: Looking at Power Dynamics and Relationships Between Groups and People
\n\n\n\n41:34 – Reasons We Prefer to Focus on Technology; Siloing and Specialization
\n\n50:16 – Control: Who is the manager? Treating People Equally
\n\n52:46 – Congruency and Being Congruent: It’s a People Problem!
\n\n\n\n[The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg]((https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Successfully/dp/0932633013)
\n\n“Emotions are valid inputs to every thought process.” – Coraline Ada Ehmke
\n\n\n\n\n\n01:01:44 – How do we know we are right?
\n\n\n\nThe Art of Negotiating the Best Deal by Seth Freeman
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: These issues go straight up to the top in terms of the philosophical ladder we’re trying to climb of what do we value? How do we get other people to share our values? It doesn’t get easier by ignoring that the problem is that difficult and pretending that it’s just technical.
\n\nCoraline: It’s the responsibility of technologists to think about the social impact of the technical solutions they are making, whether that means by being better informed and striving to be generalists, or by making sure we are being inclusive and giving voice to people with different perspectives and levels of expertise on our teams to make sure we are addressing problems deeply and not just from one particular silo.
\n\nAshe: Understanding how we are looking at a problem ethically, how we’re looking at it technically, and how we’re looking at it from a human point of view? What are the potential effects?
\n\nBrad: The laws of nature still exist in the absence of humans. Humans are the reason things are messy and complicated.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak.
","summary":"Science technology, the influence of science fiction, machine learning, and congruency with guests Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak.","date_published":"2017-04-19T19:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/2db5da5d-3f4e-42b0-857f-a7a974772c70.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":39156918,"duration_in_seconds":4393}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=486","title":"Episode 028: Brains, Feedback Systems, Demons, and Goats with Janelle Klein","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/brains-feedback-systems-demons-and-goats","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Goats On Podcasts” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:19 – Origin Story\n\n04:36 – The Development of Development\n\n06:58 – Automated Tests and Mistake Detection\n\n09:21 – Designing Releases and Best Practices\n\n20:13 – “The Code is Better”\n\nThere is no \"the code is better.\"There is only \"our experience is better.\" (users and developers)@greaterthancode with @janellekz— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) April 12, 2017\n\n15:08 – Measuring Effort, #CollaborativePain, and The Error Handling Process\n\nabstraction: great when it works.when something breaks it's like an egg cracking and all its guts spill out.@janellekz @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) April 12, 2017\n\nWhy Software Gets In Trouble by Gerald M. Weinberg\n\n33:24 – Discovery and Documentation\n\n37:44 – Agile Fluency\n\nAgile Fluency Project: Chart Your Agile Pathway\n\nQuality Management Maturity Grid \n\n40:42 – Building a Conceptual Model of our Brains with Code\n\nHindsight Bias\n\n51:56 – Identifying Project Pain: Slicing and Dicing\n\n57:23 – Change Sizing\n\nReflections:\n\nRein: Gerald M. Weinberg’s Quality Software Management Series\n\nJanelle: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge\n\nSam: The pain that we experience in software development is really cognitive dissonance.\n\nJessica: Programming is like summoning a demon.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Goats On Podcasts” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:19 – Origin Story
\n\n04:36 – The Development of Development
\n\n06:58 – Automated Tests and Mistake Detection
\n\n09:21 – Designing Releases and Best Practices
\n\n20:13 – “The Code is Better”
\n\n\n\nThere is no "the code is better."
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) April 12, 2017
There is only "our experience is better." (users and developers)@greaterthancode with @janellekz
15:08 – Measuring Effort, #CollaborativePain, and The Error Handling Process
\n\n\n\nabstraction: great when it works.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) April 12, 2017
when something breaks it's like an egg cracking and all its guts spill out.@janellekz @greaterthancode
Why Software Gets In Trouble by Gerald M. Weinberg
\n\n33:24 – Discovery and Documentation
\n\n37:44 – Agile Fluency
\n\nAgile Fluency Project: Chart Your Agile Pathway
\n\nQuality Management Maturity Grid
\n\n40:42 – Building a Conceptual Model of our Brains with Code
\n\n\n\n51:56 – Identifying Project Pain: Slicing and Dicing
\n\n57:23 – Change Sizing
\n\nReflections:
\n\nRein: Gerald M. Weinberg’s Quality Software Management Series
\n\nJanelle: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
\n\nSam: The pain that we experience in software development is really cognitive dissonance.
\n\nJessica: Programming is like summoning a demon.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"In this episode, Janelle Klein, author of Idea Flow, talks about designing releases and best practices, measuring effort, and Agile Fluency.","date_published":"2017-04-14T11:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/06676249-bdd0-4022-935f-f8556dc46206.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62844142,"duration_in_seconds":3927}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=475","title":"Episode 027: Hackathons and Flirting with Failure with Rachel Katz","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/hackathons-and-flirting-with-failure","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Plotting the Rebellion” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:39 – Origin Story and Superpowers\n\n03:05 – Getting Hooked on Hackathons\n\n04:42 – Corporate Hackathons; Making Hackathons Accessible and Inclusive\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons\n\nDataHack4FI\n\n09:38 – Organizing Hackathons\n\n12:21 – Non-programmers and Hackathons; Bringing in Diverse Perspectives\n\n“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” ~Jamie Zawinski\n\nCode: Debugging the Gender Gap\n\n22:46 – Building Things for Others, Leadership Roles, Group Dynamics, and Men vs Women\n\nCtrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon\n\nLady Problems Hackathon\n\n35:28 – Overnight Hackathons vs Non-Overnight Hackathons\n\n36:38 – The Value of Celebrating Glorious Failure and Responding to Stress and Pressure\n\nBenjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music [TED Talk]\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Talking about hackathons is talking about all kinds of other issues.\n\nSam: Make room and seek out non-developers.\n\nRein: Benjamen Zander: Leadership on Display\n\nRachel: Show up, contribute, and listen.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Rachel Katz.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Plotting the Rebellion” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:39 – Origin Story and Superpowers
\n\n03:05 – Getting Hooked on Hackathons
\n\n04:42 – Corporate Hackathons; Making Hackathons Accessible and Inclusive
\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons
\n\n\n\n09:38 – Organizing Hackathons
\n\n12:21 – Non-programmers and Hackathons; Bringing in Diverse Perspectives
\n\n“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” ~Jamie Zawinski
\n\nCode: Debugging the Gender Gap
\n\n22:46 – Building Things for Others, Leadership Roles, Group Dynamics, and Men vs Women
\n\nCtrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon
\n\n\n\n35:28 – Overnight Hackathons vs Non-Overnight Hackathons
\n\n36:38 – The Value of Celebrating Glorious Failure and Responding to Stress and Pressure
\n\nBenjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music [TED Talk]
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Talking about hackathons is talking about all kinds of other issues.
\n\nSam: Make room and seek out non-developers.
\n\nRein: Benjamen Zander: Leadership on Display
\n\nRachel: Show up, contribute, and listen.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Rachel Katz.
","summary":"Rachel Katz, of AngelHack, talks about hackathons and the value of celebrating glorious failure and responding stress and pressure.","date_published":"2017-04-07T16:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e075bad7-77c6-4014-9a7b-a5a31dd7fe49.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53880580,"duration_in_seconds":3367}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=462","title":"Episode 026: Codeland, Capitalism, and Creating Inclusive Spaces with Saron Yitbarek","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/codeland-capitalism-and-creating-inclusive-spaces","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:28 – Codeland Conference\n\n02:02 – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for People\n\n13:00 – Ticket Prices and Structure\n\n15:01 – Creating an Immersive Experience and Community With and For People You Care About\n\n25:11 – Leading by Example and Maintaining a Positive Persona\n\n29:49 – The Importance of Money and Financial Freedom\n\nTech Done Right Episode 002: Career Development with Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks\n\n39:52 – Ethics as Automatic Technology Scales and Capitalism\n\nGive and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant\n\n49:45 – In summary: Codeland Conference\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: Thank you for the book recommendation for Give and Take.\n\nAstrid: People first.\n\nRein: Support worker-owned cooperative organizations. Leadership is doing things, not being given a title.\n\nSaron: The principles and values that led to what people will experience as a really great conference.\n\nCodeNewbie References:\n\n\n@CodeNewbies\nTwitter Chat\nSlack Community\nPodcast\nEpisode 118: Truck Driver with George Moore\nCodeland\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Saron Yitbarek.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:28 – Codeland Conference
\n\n02:02 – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for People
\n\n13:00 – Ticket Prices and Structure
\n\n15:01 – Creating an Immersive Experience and Community With and For People You Care About
\n\n25:11 – Leading by Example and Maintaining a Positive Persona
\n\n29:49 – The Importance of Money and Financial Freedom
\n\nTech Done Right Episode 002: Career Development with Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks
\n\n39:52 – Ethics as Automatic Technology Scales and Capitalism
\n\nGive and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant
\n\n49:45 – In summary: Codeland Conference
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Thank you for the book recommendation for Give and Take.
\n\nAstrid: People first.
\n\nRein: Support worker-owned cooperative organizations. Leadership is doing things, not being given a title.
\n\nSaron: The principles and values that led to what people will experience as a really great conference.
\n\nCodeNewbie References:
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Saron Yitbarek.
","summary":"Saron Yitbarek talks about Codeland Conference, making conferences, accessible, affordable, and unintimidating for people, leading by example and maintaining a positive personal, and ethics as technology scales.","date_published":"2017-04-04T15:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/22efec69-f0d2-4e2e-af54-56c769c7e356.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59550633,"duration_in_seconds":3721}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=456","title":"Episode 025: MotherCoders with Tina Lee","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/mothercoders","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Not Your Mother’s Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:55 – Origin Story and Getting Involved in Coding\n\n03:17 – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children\n\n08:19 – Work/Life Balance\n\n11:32 – Changing Culture Around Gender Roles and Caregiving\n\n“Culture is like water in that it flows from the top down.”\n\nNev Schulman Wants to Erase Gender Stereotypes for Parents\n\n18:18 – The MotherCoders Organization\n\nWhat to expect when you’re done expecting\n\n24:27 – Teaching Frontend Development and The Stereotype that Women are Better at Frontend than Backend Work\n\nWe can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem\n\n30:00 – Silicon Valley Elitism, Sexism, and Defining Cultural Norms; “The Ideal Worker”\n\nThe Motherhood Penalty\n\n35:38 – Why do we not have many of women CEOs?\n\n37:42 – Tactical Help for Cultural Changes \n\nReflections:\n\nMandy: Donate to MotherCoders and/or support them via AmazonSmile.\n\nRein: The empowerment of women and the challenges they face are a global problem.\n\n@manwhohasitall\n\nCoraline: Fostering entrepreneurship and empowering women worldwide. Also, thinking about role models and how to amplify voices.\n\nTina: Including moms as a kind of marginalized group as well.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Tina Lee.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Not Your Mother’s Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:55 – Origin Story and Getting Involved in Coding
\n\n03:17 – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children
\n\n08:19 – Work/Life Balance
\n\n11:32 – Changing Culture Around Gender Roles and Caregiving
\n\n“Culture is like water in that it flows from the top down.”
\n\nNev Schulman Wants to Erase Gender Stereotypes for Parents
\n\n18:18 – The MotherCoders Organization
\n\nWhat to expect when you’re done expecting
\n\n24:27 – Teaching Frontend Development and The Stereotype that Women are Better at Frontend than Backend Work
\n\nWe can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem
\n\n30:00 – Silicon Valley Elitism, Sexism, and Defining Cultural Norms; “The Ideal Worker”
\n\n\n\n35:38 – Why do we not have many of women CEOs?
\n\n37:42 – Tactical Help for Cultural Changes
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Donate to MotherCoders and/or support them via AmazonSmile.
\n\nRein: The empowerment of women and the challenges they face are a global problem.
\n\n\n\nCoraline: Fostering entrepreneurship and empowering women worldwide. Also, thinking about role models and how to amplify voices.
\n\nTina: Including moms as a kind of marginalized group as well.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Tina Lee.
","summary":"We talk to Tina Lee, CEO of MotherCoders, about changing the culture around gender roles and caregiving, as well as challenging Silicon Valley elitism, sexism, and defining cultural norms.","date_published":"2017-03-29T17:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c576ed47-320c-4b11-a8c5-e0f42e1b6c8d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51965047,"duration_in_seconds":3247}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=441","title":"Episode 024: Seeing Programming Where Other People Don’t with Felienne Hermans","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/seeing-programming-where-other-people-dont","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:28 – Origin Story\n\n03:17 – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children\n\n06:12 – Teaching Programming as a Language; Aha! Moments\n\nScratch Programming\n\nGoldieBlox\n\n12:26 – Identity and why do we so often use the phrase “not real programming”? What do we define as software? Tooling\n\nMicrosoft Excel\n\nExpector\n\n20:13 – Should everyone know programming? Why? What should they know/be able to do? (Digital Literacy)\n\n28:27 – What is the programming equivalent of a library/librarian?\n\n33:06 – Does STEM education make other forms of education obsolete? Why not?\n\n35:15 – Things to Get Better at Programming Other Than Programming\n\nCodeKata\n\n48:58 – Fighting Against “Real” Programming and Being Hesitant to Let in Newcomers\n\n50:40 – What can we do to help spread the knowledge?\n\nReflections:\n\nFelienne: If people say they are programming, they are. Limit belittling and surprise. Do not contaminate others with what your own idea of programming is.\n\nJessica: Value on reading through code and forming a model of it.\n\nAstrid: Thinking about programming as in thinking about writing.\n\nRein: Some programming does involved math, but it is not (for the most part) the math you hated in high school.\n\nA Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form by Paul Lockhart\n\nSam: You can be fluent at a very low level of proficiency and still be fluent.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Felienne Hermans.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:28 – Origin Story
\n\n03:17 – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children
\n\n06:12 – Teaching Programming as a Language; Aha! Moments
\n\n\n\n\n\n12:26 – Identity and why do we so often use the phrase “not real programming”? What do we define as software? Tooling
\n\n\n\n\n\n20:13 – Should everyone know programming? Why? What should they know/be able to do? (Digital Literacy)
\n\n28:27 – What is the programming equivalent of a library/librarian?
\n\n33:06 – Does STEM education make other forms of education obsolete? Why not?
\n\n35:15 – Things to Get Better at Programming Other Than Programming
\n\n\n\n48:58 – Fighting Against “Real” Programming and Being Hesitant to Let in Newcomers
\n\n50:40 – What can we do to help spread the knowledge?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nFelienne: If people say they are programming, they are. Limit belittling and surprise. Do not contaminate others with what your own idea of programming is.
\n\nJessica: Value on reading through code and forming a model of it.
\n\nAstrid: Thinking about programming as in thinking about writing.
\n\nRein: Some programming does involved math, but it is not (for the most part) the math you hated in high school.
\n\nA Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form by Paul Lockhart
\n\nSam: You can be fluent at a very low level of proficiency and still be fluent.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Felienne Hermans.
","summary":"We discuss teaching programming as a language, what constitutes “real” programming, and digital literacy with Felienne Hermans.","date_published":"2017-03-22T20:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d477a392-2f66-4259-bbbd-2ebf7e2e9711.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55849181,"duration_in_seconds":3490}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=434","title":"Episode 023: Politics and Software with Lorena Mesa","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/politics-and-software","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:26 – Origin Story\n\nObama For America Campaign\n\n05:46 – Politics and Software; Data Collection\n\nDanah Boyd: Be Careful What You Code For\n\n16:43 – Working in Python for Data Collection\n\nDjango Girls\n\n19:46 – The Python Software Foundation (PSF)\n\n23:55 – Communication and Organization Within Communities\n\nMINSWAN: Matz is Nice So We Are Nice\n\nSocial Encounter Party\n\n33:49 – Power Structures and Forming Relationships\n\n36:39 – PSF Funding\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: Each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language.\n\nSam: Needs more sleep\n\nAstrid: Code can and should touch everything: What is it not doing that it should be doing?\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy\n\nCoraline: Software is not neutral.\n\nRein: Software is inherently political. It is made for people by people. There’s no way it can’t be political.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:26 – Origin Story
\n\n\n\n05:46 – Politics and Software; Data Collection
\n\nDanah Boyd: Be Careful What You Code For
\n\n16:43 – Working in Python for Data Collection
\n\n\n\n19:46 – The Python Software Foundation (PSF)
\n\n23:55 – Communication and Organization Within Communities
\n\nMINSWAN: Matz is Nice So We Are Nice
\n\n\n\n33:49 – Power Structures and Forming Relationships
\n\n36:39 – PSF Funding
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language.
\n\nSam: Needs more sleep
\n\nAstrid: Code can and should touch everything: What is it not doing that it should be doing?
\n\nWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
\n\nCoraline: Software is not neutral.
\n\nRein: Software is inherently political. It is made for people by people. There’s no way it can’t be political.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"In this episode, Lorena Mesa joins us to talk about politics and software, using Python for data collection, and communication and organization within communities.","date_published":"2017-03-15T19:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/9484cc91-f4d9-41df-8214-63da4e57f3f2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50047435,"duration_in_seconds":3127}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=417","title":"Episode 022: You Are An Asset","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/you-are-an-asset","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Mob Programming” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n02:39 – Origin Stories From All!\n\nTim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek\n\n12:37 – Work/Life Balance and Ideal Work Environments\n\nStockholm Syndrome\n\n16:50 – Technical Interviews\n\n20:41 – Computer Science Degrees: Are they worth it?\n\n27:42 – Compulsions to Know: Contempt Culture\n\nAurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture\n\nThe Zens of Python and Ruby\n\n34:12 – Gatekeeping in Tech\n\n37:11 – Technical Interviews (Cont’d)\n\nPair Programming\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Jacob Stoebel and Ryder Timberlake.Sponsored By:Soft Skills Engineering: If you’re looking for a hilarious podcast that focuses on issues that software developers face, such as getting fired, pay raises, strategies for pushing back on bad ideas, and even stock options, check out Soft Skills Engineering!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Mob Programming” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:39 – Origin Stories From All!
\n\nTim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek
\n\n12:37 – Work/Life Balance and Ideal Work Environments
\n\n\n\n16:50 – Technical Interviews
\n\n20:41 – Computer Science Degrees: Are they worth it?
\n\n27:42 – Compulsions to Know: Contempt Culture
\n\n\n\n\n\n34:12 – Gatekeeping in Tech
\n\n37:11 – Technical Interviews (Cont’d)
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Jacob Stoebel and Ryder Timberlake.
Sponsored By:
00:28 – Welcome to Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover
\n\n00:53 – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Bike Messengering
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHad pesto chicken pasta for dinner, in honor of @philsturgeon’s interview on @greaterthancode today. 😋
— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) February 23, 2017
07:59 – Long-form Blogging (aka Rants)
\n\n08:50 – Codes of Conduct: Adoption, Enforcing, Conspiracy Theories
\n\n\n\n\n\n“Codes of Conducts are so full of slippery slope arguments, they could open a waterslide park.” @philsturgeon
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) February 23, 2017
17:40 – What it means to be a “Social Justice Warrior”, Tolerance, and “Being Nice”
\n\nTolerance is not a moral precept
\n\nCoraline Ada Ehmke: On Opalgate
\n\n27:46 – False Reports vs Genuine Issues; Dogmatic Logic vs Empathy
\n\nSusan J. Fowler: Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
\n\nPhil Sturgeon: Talking About Diversity: Marginalization
\n\n39:40 – Transitioning From a Men’s Rights Activist and Being a Good Ally
\n\nI Was a Men’s Rights Activist: One man’s journey from misogyny to feminism
\n\n\n\n\n\n“Being an ally isn’t a badge that you earn. Being an ally is a process and you’re going to fuck it up.” @CoralineAda
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) February 23, 2017
47:56 – PHP vs Ruby
\n\n\n\nGreater Than Code Episode 002: Avdi Grimm
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Turning confusion into something that assuages everyone else’s. Also, failing upwards: When something doesn’t work out, something better will.
\n\n\n\n“Being an ally isn’t a badge that you earn. Being an ally is a process and you’re going to fuck it up.” @CoralineAda
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) February 23, 2017
Sam: In tech we have tools for doing root cause analysis, and we’re really used to using those to figure out technical issues, but those very same tools can work for social issues as well. Try The 5 Whys on something that isn’t technical.
\n\nCoraline: Thinking about how to get past people’s visceral reactions against social justice issues and think about how to create better allies.
\n\nPhil: Start bookmarking things that are helpful.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Phil Sturgeon.
","summary":"Phil Sturgeon joins us to talk about codes of conduct, contempt culture, and what it means to be a Social Justice Warrior.","date_published":"2017-02-23T16:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/e2009c96-be74-4376-9a89-8df0150634c4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":63017547,"duration_in_seconds":3938}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=391","title":"Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/sexuality-in-tech","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:15 – Origin Story\n\nBocoup\n\n03:05 – Art\n\n06:37 – Viewing Source and Learning How to Code\n\n11:02 – Getting a Computer Science Degree\n\n13:56 – Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence\n\n@aphyr (Kyle Kingsbury)\n\nAshley Madison Data Breach\n\n26:54 – How do potential employers react to your satire?\n\n28:41 – CSS Perverts\n\n36:03 – Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People\n\nTakeaways:\n\nJessica: Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences.\n\nCoraline: Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are.\n\nAstrid: You don’t have to separate your passions.\n\nJenn: We all need a space to feel uninhibited.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:15 – Origin Story
\n\n\n\n03:05 – Art
\n\n06:37 – Viewing Source and Learning How to Code
\n\n11:02 – Getting a Computer Science Degree
\n\n13:56 – Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence
\n\n@aphyr (Kyle Kingsbury)
\n\n\n\n26:54 – How do potential employers react to your satire?
\n\n28:41 – CSS Perverts
\n\n36:03 – Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People
\n\nTakeaways:
\n\nJessica: Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences.
\n\nCoraline: Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are.
\n\nAstrid: You don’t have to separate your passions.
\n\nJenn: We all need a space to feel uninhibited.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.
","summary":"In this powerful episode, we talk to Jenn Schiffer about pixel art, sexuality in tech, and online presence.","date_published":"2017-02-16T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c107fdae-f321-4178-8360-a79aa16b1069.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53865493,"duration_in_seconds":3366}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=382","title":"Episode 019: It’s Made of People!","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/its-made-of-people","content_text":"01:11 – What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management\n\n05:07 – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you.\n\nGregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation\n\n13:46 – The Job of An Architect\n\n22:09 – What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?”\n\nSam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer\n\nEverything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing.\n\nSam: Everything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.\n\nCoraline: I’m going to read ^ book.\n\nJessica: More surprise episodes!\n\nDarin: Think less about me and more about the team around me. And I’m looking for a mentor!\n\nCheryl: Greater Than Code > Mission Taco\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!_TSpecial Guests: Cheryl Shaefer and Darin Wilson.","content_html":"01:11 – What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management
\n\n05:07 – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you.
\n\nGregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation
\n\n13:46 – The Job of An Architect
\n\n22:09 – What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?”
\n\nSam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
\n\nEverything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing.
\n\nSam: Everything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.
\n\nCoraline: I’m going to read ^ book.
\n\nJessica: More surprise episodes!
\n\nDarin: Think less about me and more about the team around me. And I’m looking for a mentor!
\n\nCheryl: Greater Than Code > Mission Taco
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!_T
Special Guests: Cheryl Shaefer and Darin Wilson.
","summary":"Cheryl Schaefer and Darin Wilson join that panelists to talk about what it means to be a Senior Engineer when you don't want to go into management, generativity, and what the job of an architect is.","date_published":"2017-02-09T19:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/82d86bb0-41b3-42dd-9ec2-7ff80c236fb9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49884858,"duration_in_seconds":3117}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=366","title":"Episode 018: Growing Your Team and Mentorship with Cheryl Schaefer","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/growing-your-team-and-mentorship","content_text":"Posted another patrons-only outtake from today's precall with @CherylGSchaefer! https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) February 1, 2017\n\n00:16 – Welcome to “Let’s Get this Ship on the Road!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:06 – Origin Story and Mentorship\n\nCheryl Gore Schaefer: Grow Your Team In 90 Days @ RubyConf 2016\n\nEmpowerment Through Mentorship\n\n11:38 – Avoiding Burnout: \n\n\n“How can I show up better as a Mentee? How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out? When you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?” ~ Ariel Spear\n\n\nSpot2Fish\n\n23:41 – The Future of Tech Education\n\nSarah Mei Computer Science Education Tweetstorm\n\nSarah Mei People Who Apply for Opportunity Scholarships Tweetstorm\n\nReflections:\n\nCheryl: It’s valuable to have different viewpoints represented. Also, exposing people to fundamentals of tech is valuable as well.\n\nAstrid: The RubyConf/RailsConf Opportunity Scholarships exist! Also, advice for mentees and mentors is the same.\n\nSam: Making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor and giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Cheryl Shaefer.","content_html":"\n\nPosted another patrons-only outtake from today's precall with @CherylGSchaefer! https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) February 1, 2017
00:16 – Welcome to “Let’s Get this Ship on the Road!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:06 – Origin Story and Mentorship
\n\nCheryl Gore Schaefer: Grow Your Team In 90 Days @ RubyConf 2016
\n\nEmpowerment Through Mentorship
\n\n11:38 – Avoiding Burnout:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“How can I show up better as a Mentee? How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out? When you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?” ~ Ariel Spear
\n
23:41 – The Future of Tech Education
\n\nSarah Mei Computer Science Education Tweetstorm
\n\nSarah Mei People Who Apply for Opportunity Scholarships Tweetstorm
\n\nReflections:
\n\nCheryl: It’s valuable to have different viewpoints represented. Also, exposing people to fundamentals of tech is valuable as well.
\n\nAstrid: The RubyConf/RailsConf Opportunity Scholarships exist! Also, advice for mentees and mentors is the same.
\n\nSam: Making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor and giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Cheryl Shaefer.
","summary":"An awesome conversation with Cheryl Schaefer, of LaunchCode, about growing your team and mentorship.","date_published":"2017-02-06T10:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/15ce4f98-70ff-4125-8f37-71da5bdc393d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42749454,"duration_in_seconds":2671}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=355","title":"Episode 017: Ruby Together with André Arko and Carina C. Zona","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/ruby-together","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Cyberpunk Dystopia” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:45 – Origin Stories\n\nGay marriage: the database engineering perspective\n\nAndré Arko: Falsehoods programmers believe\n\n11:38 – Ruby Together; Membership and Benefits\n\n501(C)(6)\n\n22:06 – Ensuring the Future of Ruby\n\n27:39 – Fair Pay and Getting Developers/Companies to Pay for Stuff\n\nRethinkDB: why we failed\n\n39:46 – How Does Bundler Work, Anyway? [blog post]\n\nAndre Arko: How does Bundler work, anyway? @ RubyConf 2015\n\n44:16 – Sharing and Reusing Code\n\n52:26 – gemstash vs geminabox\n\nOpenSSL\n\nHeartbleed\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: Be a member-friend of Ruby Together!\n\nJessica: Ruby Together is an advancement in the software industry as a whole to form a trade organization that is a business related to supporting all businesses and people and making our software infrastructure maintainable.\n\nCarina: OpenSSL is back to being insufficiently funded. Support other projects like Ruby Together too. See: Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.\n\nAndré: Hope that devs and companies that listen to this show with join Ruby Together.\n\nJay: It’s smart business for businesses to support organizations like Ruby Together. Software companies have large profit margins. Monies that would be spent on taxes can be put back into our community to support key infrastructure & tooling. My call to action is that our listeners support Ruby Together and get their companies to support Ruby Together and similar organizations.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: André Arko and Carina C. Zona.Sponsored By:Atomist: Atomist is a platform purpose-built for delivering modern cloud-native applications. See atomist.com for more information!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Cyberpunk Dystopia” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:45 – Origin Stories
\n\nGay marriage: the database engineering perspective
\n\nAndré Arko: Falsehoods programmers believe
\n\n11:38 – Ruby Together; Membership and Benefits
\n\n\n\n22:06 – Ensuring the Future of Ruby
\n\n27:39 – Fair Pay and Getting Developers/Companies to Pay for Stuff
\n\n\n\n39:46 – How Does Bundler Work, Anyway? [blog post]
\n\nAndre Arko: How does Bundler work, anyway? @ RubyConf 2015
\n\n44:16 – Sharing and Reusing Code
\n\n52:26 – gemstash vs geminabox
\n\n\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Be a member-friend of Ruby Together!
\n\nJessica: Ruby Together is an advancement in the software industry as a whole to form a trade organization that is a business related to supporting all businesses and people and making our software infrastructure maintainable.
\n\nCarina: OpenSSL is back to being insufficiently funded. Support other projects like Ruby Together too. See: Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.
\n\nAndré: Hope that devs and companies that listen to this show with join Ruby Together.
\n\nJay: It’s smart business for businesses to support organizations like Ruby Together. Software companies have large profit margins. Monies that would be spent on taxes can be put back into our community to support key infrastructure & tooling. My call to action is that our listeners support Ruby Together and get their companies to support Ruby Together and similar organizations.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: André Arko and Carina C. Zona.
Sponsored By:
Intro music by Rod Johnson: Prelude in C# minor, commonly known as The Bells of Moscow.
\n\n01:07 – Welcome to “Anarcho-Suyndicalist Tech!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:03 – Writing Blog Posts: “Blogging is shipping.”
\n\n\n\nAdam Perry: Baby Steps: Slowly Porting musl to Rust
\n\n07:17 – How to Ask Good Questions
\n\nEric Steven Raymond: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
\n\n\n\n20:26 – Operations (Ops); Testing in Ops
\n\n\n\n"There's this exciting thing that happens when you run software, which is that stuff goes wrong in unexpected ways!" @b0rk @greaterthancode
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) January 18, 2017
Ryan Kennedy: Fear Driven Development @ OSB 2015
\n\n\n\n\n\n38:42 – Zines & Drawings
\n\nReflections:
\n\nSam: Having concrete strategies for asking question more effectively.
\n\nJulia: If something is painful, then do it more often.
\n\nJessica: If asking questions is scary, put some work into the question and then you can ask it with confidence and know you’re not wasting someone’s time.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Julia Evans.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Julia Evans about writing blog posts, asking good questions, and DevOps.","date_published":"2017-01-23T16:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0ae3daa9-1aa1-4ac4-882e-7ed56a453611.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45904206,"duration_in_seconds":2869}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=332","title":"Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/queen-of-hackathons","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Snowpocalypse!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:50 – Zuri’s Background and Origin Story\n\n04:19 – Hackathons\n\nMeet Zuri. The Queen of Hackathons.\n\nColor Coded\n\n16:37 – Overcoming Shyness\n\n20:47 – Navigating the Channels of Your Career\n\nGraphical User Interface (GUI)\n\n27:07 – Developing Skills and Keeping up with New Technologies\n\nAWS Certified Solutions Architect\n\n33:31 – Hiring Practices; Culture Fit\n\nResearch: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume (“No Silver Bullet” for D&I)\n\nFacebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce\n\nAn Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women (“Dave-to-Girl Ratio”)\n\n50:23 – Leading While Learning\n\nReflections:\n\nJessica: Helping others in small ways. #Micromentoring!\n\n#micromentoring https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) January 11, 2017\n\nCoraline: Senior developers need to create opportunities for micromentorship.\n\nZuri: Periodically check in with new developers.\n\nAstrid: Use hackathons as a way to try new things and to meet others who are already good at them.\n\nSam: Hang out at hackathons and the power of post-its!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Zuri Hunter.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Snowpocalypse!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:50 – Zuri’s Background and Origin Story
\n\n04:19 – Hackathons
\n\nMeet Zuri. The Queen of Hackathons.
\n\n\n\n16:37 – Overcoming Shyness
\n\n20:47 – Navigating the Channels of Your Career
\n\nGraphical User Interface (GUI)
\n\n27:07 – Developing Skills and Keeping up with New Technologies
\n\nAWS Certified Solutions Architect
\n\n33:31 – Hiring Practices; Culture Fit
\n\nResearch: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume (“No Silver Bullet” for D&I)
\n\nFacebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce
\n\nAn Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women (“Dave-to-Girl Ratio”)
\n\n50:23 – Leading While Learning
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJessica: Helping others in small ways. #Micromentoring!
\n\n\n\n#micromentoring https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) January 11, 2017
Coraline: Senior developers need to create opportunities for micromentorship.
\n\nZuri: Periodically check in with new developers.
\n\nAstrid: Use hackathons as a way to try new things and to meet others who are already good at them.
\n\nSam: Hang out at hackathons and the power of post-its!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Zuri Hunter.
","summary":"In this episode, Zuri Hunter talks about Hackathons, navigating the channels of your career, and hiring practices.","date_published":"2017-01-11T18:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/709fb376-2cf3-4e3d-b78e-21761921cc68.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":57467465,"duration_in_seconds":3591}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=318","title":"Episode 014: Cancel All Negativity with Ra’Shaun Stovall (Snuggs)","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/cancel-all-negativity","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “DevPunks!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:42 – Snuggs’ Background and Origin Story\n\nNYC.rb\n\nRuby on Rails Link Slack Community\n\nRa’Shaun Stovall: Why Is Open Source So Closed? @ RubyConf 2016 \n\n04:41 – Getting Involved in Meetups and Building the Ruby Community\n\n09:08 – Teaching/Mentoring New Developers\n\nOH: In order to make Rails jobs be a thing in the future, you develop Rails people.— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) January 4, 2017\n\n12:13 – Hurdling the Massive Casm that is Between “Junior” and “Senior” Developers\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c6bc90e4b050924635d114/t/59d7def4f5e231512a015838/1507319545508/marketoonist-content.pngnull\n\n\nIn-person Mentorship\nTeaching from Jr. Dev Mistakes\nIncentivize Hiring Jr. Devs\nPair Programming Nights and on Open Source\nPull Request Review — Closely\nCloser Connections Between Junior and Senior Developers\n\n\n33:09 – Teaching How to be a Developer: Are “seniors” really the “juniors”?\n\nId, Ego and Super-ego\n\nOccam’s Razor\n\n38:11 – The Best Ways for Juniors and Seniors to Work Together\n\nC.A.N.: Cancel All Negativity\n\n43:13 – What can hiring managers do?\n\n48:34 – What can senior developers do?\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Being accountable is paying homage to those who helped you get where you are.\n\nJessica: Your students can make you a good teacher by showing you the solutions you never would have thought of.\n\nSnuggs: Check out Ruby Together and grab yourself some Bitcoins!\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Ra’Shaun Stovall.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “DevPunks!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:42 – Snuggs’ Background and Origin Story
\n\n\n\nRuby on Rails Link Slack Community
\n\nRa’Shaun Stovall: Why Is Open Source So Closed? @ RubyConf 2016
\n\n04:41 – Getting Involved in Meetups and Building the Ruby Community
\n\n09:08 – Teaching/Mentoring New Developers
\n\n\n\nOH: In order to make Rails jobs be a thing in the future, you develop Rails people.
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) January 4, 2017
12:13 – Hurdling the Massive Casm that is Between “Junior” and “Senior” Developers
\n\n\n\nGoogle Image Result for https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c6bc90e4b050924635d114/t/59d7def4f5e231512a015838/1507319545508/marketoonist-content.png
null
33:09 – Teaching How to be a Developer: Are “seniors” really the “juniors”?
\n\n\n\n\n\n38:11 – The Best Ways for Juniors and Seniors to Work Together
\n\nC.A.N.: Cancel All Negativity
\n\n43:13 – What can hiring managers do?
\n\n48:34 – What can senior developers do?
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Being accountable is paying homage to those who helped you get where you are.
\n\nJessica: Your students can make you a good teacher by showing you the solutions you never would have thought of.
\n\nSnuggs: Check out Ruby Together and grab yourself some Bitcoins!
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Ra’Shaun Stovall.
","summary":"Snuggs joins us for a discussion about the differences between junior and senior developers and how everyone can work together to get where we need to be in our careers.","date_published":"2017-01-04T18:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/931d7faf-c9d2-444f-973a-28130a5db426.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60003237,"duration_in_seconds":3750}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=307","title":"Episode 013: Religion in Tech with Audrey Eschright of The Recompiler Mag","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/religion-in-tech","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Lucky Episode 13!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:10 – Audrey’s Background and Origin Story\n\nStumptown Syndicate\n\nCitizen Code of Conduct\n\nFree Geek\n\n10:37 – The Recompiler\n\nThe Responsible Communication Style Guide\n\n16:24 – Community Organization; Tech Community Biases\n\nCalagator\n\nThe Agile Manifesto\n\nThe Overton Window\n\n25:55 – Accessibility in Community Spaces\n\nOpen Source Bridge\n\n28:49 – Religion and Social Justice in Tech\n\nUnitarianism\n\n34:37 – Labor Organization\n\n#talkpay by Lauren Voswinkel\n\nDistributed Denial of Women\n\nNational General Strike\n\nFight for $15\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Making space for others.\n\nCoraline: Tech workers face the same challenges that workers in other industries have.\n\nSam: Importance of spiritual awareness in communities.\n\nAudrey: Go talk to a coworker. Ask a question about work environment and how things get done at your company.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Audrey Eschright.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Lucky Episode 13!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:10 – Audrey’s Background and Origin Story
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n10:37 – The Recompiler
\n\nThe Responsible Communication Style Guide
\n\n16:24 – Community Organization; Tech Community Biases
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n25:55 – Accessibility in Community Spaces
\n\n\n\n28:49 – Religion and Social Justice in Tech
\n\n\n\n34:37 – Labor Organization
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Making space for others.
\n\nCoraline: Tech workers face the same challenges that workers in other industries have.
\n\nSam: Importance of spiritual awareness in communities.
\n\nAudrey: Go talk to a coworker. Ask a question about work environment and how things get done at your company.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Audrey Eschright.
","summary":"Audrey Eschright, editor and publisher of The Recompiler Mag, talks to us about writing, religion in tech, and community and labor organization.","date_published":"2016-12-30T19:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c04e0924-6008-4e26-9459-99c21325ab88.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50863296,"duration_in_seconds":3178}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=279","title":"Episode 012: Vets Who Code with Jerome Hardaway","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/vets-who-code","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “It’s Made of People!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n02:17 – Jerome’s Background and Origin Story\n\nGeneral Assembly\n\n09:30 – Vets Who Code: Funding, Technology Stack, Curriculum, and Students\n\n18:19 – Vets Who Code Student Experience\n\n20:00 – Obstacles Veterans Face Getting Into Tech\n\n\nLocation\nNetwork\n\n\n“Your goal is to only get 1% better every day and the funny thing about 1% is that your 1% changes every day.” @JeromeHardaway— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) December 21, 2016\n\nJacob Oakley: Learning Code with Kids\n\n29:04 – Making the Tech Community More Welcoming to Veterans\n\n33:37 – What should people in the tech community NOT do?\n\n\nDon’t Assume\nRecognize Women Veterans\n\n\n36:55 – Getting Involved with Vets Who Code\n\n38:09 – Evaluating Opportunities\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Addressing emotional intelligence and increasing 1% each day.\n\nJessica: Using Ruby on Rails is a valuable resource for teaching people how to code.\n\nCoraline: Time is life and life is also time. Don’t be married to the tool, be married to the problem.\n\nJerome: Be “Greater Than Code” and ask questions about people.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jerome Hardaway.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “It’s Made of People!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n02:17 – Jerome’s Background and Origin Story
\n\n\n\n09:30 – Vets Who Code: Funding, Technology Stack, Curriculum, and Students
\n\n18:19 – Vets Who Code Student Experience
\n\n20:00 – Obstacles Veterans Face Getting Into Tech
\n\n\n\n“Your goal is to only get 1% better every day and the funny thing about 1% is that your 1% changes every day.” @JeromeHardaway
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) December 21, 2016
Jacob Oakley: Learning Code with Kids
\n\n29:04 – Making the Tech Community More Welcoming to Veterans
\n\n33:37 – What should people in the tech community NOT do?
\n\n36:55 – Getting Involved with Vets Who Code
\n\n38:09 – Evaluating Opportunities
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Addressing emotional intelligence and increasing 1% each day.
\n\nJessica: Using Ruby on Rails is a valuable resource for teaching people how to code.
\n\nCoraline: Time is life and life is also time. Don’t be married to the tool, be married to the problem.
\n\nJerome: Be “Greater Than Code” and ask questions about people.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jerome Hardaway.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Jerome Hardaway, the Executive Director of Vets Who Code: a nonprofit dedicated to closing the digital talent gap and easing career transition for military veterans.","date_published":"2016-12-21T17:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b1e4ec14-b92c-47fe-b492-a1f10fe692f1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49357389,"duration_in_seconds":3084}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=271","title":"Episode 011: Introducing Art Into STEM Education with Amy Wibowo","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/introducing-art-into-stem-education","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Trapped in a BinarySort!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:21 – “STEAM” Education\n\n02:36 – Getting Involved in Technology and Being a Maker\n\n05:33 – Making a Zine and Making it (and other things) Inclusive\n\nBooks With Pictures\n\n[Kickstarter] BubbleSort Zines 2.0: moar computer science zines!\n\n14:03 – Passion for Sailor Moon and How it Relates to Teams and Friendship\n\n18:21 – Introducing Art Into STEM\n\nAmy Wibowo: Sweaters as a Service – Adventures in Machine Knitting @ Madison+ Ruby\n\nThis Long-Lost Nintendo Knitting Machine Would Have Let You Make Sweaters With Your NES\n\n25:36 – Making Websites as a Full-time Career\n\n28:22 – Human-computer Interaction (HCI) Research\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Pay more attention to the hobbies that you have. You might be able to build a career out of it!\n\nSam: Seeking inspiration in other forms of art.\n\nCoraline: Art gives us empathy for other people’s experiences.\n\nJessica: Art is not an alternative to technology. It is an integral part to doing technology well.\n\nAmy: Art as admitting you don’t know everything and wanting to create a little bit of alternate reality that other people can look into and understand.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Amy Wibowo.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Trapped in a BinarySort!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:21 – “STEAM” Education
\n\n02:36 – Getting Involved in Technology and Being a Maker
\n\n05:33 – Making a Zine and Making it (and other things) Inclusive
\n\n\n\n[Kickstarter] BubbleSort Zines 2.0: moar computer science zines!
\n\n14:03 – Passion for Sailor Moon and How it Relates to Teams and Friendship
\n\n18:21 – Introducing Art Into STEM
\n\nAmy Wibowo: Sweaters as a Service – Adventures in Machine Knitting @ Madison+ Ruby
\n\nThis Long-Lost Nintendo Knitting Machine Would Have Let You Make Sweaters With Your NES
\n\n25:36 – Making Websites as a Full-time Career
\n\n28:22 – Human-computer Interaction (HCI) Research
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Pay more attention to the hobbies that you have. You might be able to build a career out of it!
\n\nSam: Seeking inspiration in other forms of art.
\n\nCoraline: Art gives us empathy for other people’s experiences.
\n\nJessica: Art is not an alternative to technology. It is an integral part to doing technology well.
\n\nAmy: Art as admitting you don’t know everything and wanting to create a little bit of alternate reality that other people can look into and understand.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Amy Wibowo.
","summary":"In this episode we talk to Amy Wibowo, of BubbleSort Zines, about zine making, introducing art into STEM education, and making websites as a full-time career.","date_published":"2016-12-14T17:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/8bfdad2d-de8d-4af7-bf25-270e3a704470.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38061619,"duration_in_seconds":2378}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=261","title":"Episode 010: Citizen Cybersecurity with Jesse Pollak","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/citizen-cybersecurity","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Who’s Line of Code is it Anywhere?…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:37 – Getting Started with Computer-ing & Security\n\nPGP = Pretty Good Privacy\n\nFilippo Valsorda: I’m giving up on PGP\n\n09:28 – Clef and Two-factor Authentication (2FA)\n\n12:33 – Citizen Cybersecurity Due to the Rise of Mass Surveillance\n\nQuincy Larson: How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour\n\nSignal by Whisper Systems\n\n17:27 – Evaluating Service Providers\n\nTor\n\nAs devs, we have the opportunity to make software and tools more secure and more private or less secure and less private.” - @jessepollak— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) December 8, 2016\n\n22:29 – Password Managers and Encrypting Data at Rest (Security by Default)\n\n1Password\n\nLastPass\n\nNoah Zoschke: Encryption at Rest (Convox Article)\n\n25:30 – Tools and Resources\n\nNaCl: Networking and Cryptography library (“Salt”)\n\nBouncy Castle\n\nAmazon Web Services (AWS)\n\n28:20 – Two-factor Authentication, Yubico\n\n32:58 – Putting Trust in Security and the Organizations That Provide It; Centralization\n\n38:06 – Developer Unions\n\n42:58 – “Citizens are buying a lot of IoT devices that are being used for DDoS attacks. As citizens, are we responsible to some extent for them occurring regardless of our technical ability at the time of purchase?” – Yiorgos (George) Adamopoulos; What about retailers?\n\n47:56 – “What are your thoughts on “benevolent” malware that looks for vulnerable devices and patches them without asking for permission from the device’s owner?” – Wesley Ellis\n\nReflections:\n\nJesse: We as a society have a responsibility to look after the people on the edges, and look after the people who don’t have the tools or don’t have the resources to do security themselves.\n\nMandy: Learning about security is important, even for a newbie.\n\nJay: We can’t just build the thing, we have to make sure that it’s usable and we have to make sure that beyond the fact that it works, that it’s going to be adopted by people and that it’s meaningful and helpful.\n\nSam: “Stop calling me a consumer. I am neither a gaping a mouth nor an open wallet. I am a citizen interacting in a community.” – Jeme Brelin\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Jesse Pollak.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Who’s Line of Code is it Anywhere?…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:37 – Getting Started with Computer-ing & Security
\n\n\n\nFilippo Valsorda: I’m giving up on PGP
\n\n09:28 – Clef and Two-factor Authentication (2FA)
\n\n12:33 – Citizen Cybersecurity Due to the Rise of Mass Surveillance
\n\nQuincy Larson: How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour
\n\n\n\n17:27 – Evaluating Service Providers
\n\n\n\n\n\nAs devs, we have the opportunity to make software and tools more secure and more private or less secure and less private.” - @jessepollak
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) December 8, 2016
22:29 – Password Managers and Encrypting Data at Rest (Security by Default)
\n\n\n\n\n\nNoah Zoschke: Encryption at Rest (Convox Article)
\n\n25:30 – Tools and Resources
\n\nNaCl: Networking and Cryptography library (“Salt”)
\n\n\n\n\n\n28:20 – Two-factor Authentication, Yubico
\n\n32:58 – Putting Trust in Security and the Organizations That Provide It; Centralization
\n\n38:06 – Developer Unions
\n\n42:58 – “Citizens are buying a lot of IoT devices that are being used for DDoS attacks. As citizens, are we responsible to some extent for them occurring regardless of our technical ability at the time of purchase?” – Yiorgos (George) Adamopoulos; What about retailers?
\n\n47:56 – “What are your thoughts on “benevolent” malware that looks for vulnerable devices and patches them without asking for permission from the device’s owner?” – Wesley Ellis
\n\nReflections:
\n\nJesse: We as a society have a responsibility to look after the people on the edges, and look after the people who don’t have the tools or don’t have the resources to do security themselves.
\n\nMandy: Learning about security is important, even for a newbie.
\n\nJay: We can’t just build the thing, we have to make sure that it’s usable and we have to make sure that beyond the fact that it works, that it’s going to be adopted by people and that it’s meaningful and helpful.
\n\nSam: “Stop calling me a consumer. I am neither a gaping a mouth nor an open wallet. I am a citizen interacting in a community.” – Jeme Brelin
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Jesse Pollak.
","summary":"We talk to Jesse Pollak of Clef, about citizen cybersecurity, encryption, 2FA, and putting trust into organizations who provide it.","date_published":"2016-12-07T20:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/965da765-078a-4cad-902e-465d659f138c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":54079070,"duration_in_seconds":3379}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=255","title":"Episode 009: Living with Disability with Travis B. Hartwell","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/living-with-disability","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Software Eats Human…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:25 – Travis’ Superhero Origin Story\n\nRetinitis Pigmentosa\n\nAchondroplasia\n\n09:00 – Explaining a Disability and Limitations to Others\n\nThe Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino\n\n14:25 – Supporting Someone with a Disability\n\n19:56 – “Are you noticing your disabilities misrepresenting you in some ways?” – James Edward Gray II / Accessibility\n\nre: Accessibility “We need to have diverse people working for us so we can bring up, ‘Hey! This thing is an issue!’” @travisbhartwell— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 30, 2016\n\nDo they all look like me? Do they all think like me? If they do, you’re probably not getting the perspective that you need @travisbhartwell— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 30, 2016\n\n30:29 – “I have a Buddhist friend with Marfan syndrome who has told me that the knowledge he could die at any time has been tremendously beneficial to his practice, and I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be a shallow asshole if I didn’t have my own stuff I’m dealing with. On that note, I’d be curious if you have any thoughts on how your disability and health challenges have positively impacted your life?” – Ryder Timberlake\n\n32:10 – Coping Mechanisms and Defining Yourself By Your Work (Question from Craig Buchek)\n\n34:20 – “What’s a non-programming hobby you’re into?” – Ben Hamill\n\n36:10 – “What’s one thing you wish unknown strangers you encounter in public knew about you?” – James Edward Gray II\n\nStella Young: I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Being cognizant if there’s a way to make your own code and applications more accessible to others.\n\nCoraline: Thinking about The Spoon Theory and how it’s been appropriated by the activist community.\n\nMandy: Have empathy for both yourself and others, find your community, and disability is different for everyone.\n\nTravis: Gaining empathy for other people to help other people gain empathy for other people.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Travis B. Hartwell.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Software Eats Human…” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:25 – Travis’ Superhero Origin Story
\n\n\n\n\n\n09:00 – Explaining a Disability and Limitations to Others
\n\nThe Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino
\n\n14:25 – Supporting Someone with a Disability
\n\n19:56 – “Are you noticing your disabilities misrepresenting you in some ways?” – James Edward Gray II / Accessibility
\n\n\n\nre: Accessibility “We need to have diverse people working for us so we can bring up, ‘Hey! This thing is an issue!’” @travisbhartwell
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 30, 2016
\n\nDo they all look like me? Do they all think like me? If they do, you’re probably not getting the perspective that you need @travisbhartwell
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 30, 2016
30:29 – “I have a Buddhist friend with Marfan syndrome who has told me that the knowledge he could die at any time has been tremendously beneficial to his practice, and I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be a shallow asshole if I didn’t have my own stuff I’m dealing with. On that note, I’d be curious if you have any thoughts on how your disability and health challenges have positively impacted your life?” – Ryder Timberlake
\n\n32:10 – Coping Mechanisms and Defining Yourself By Your Work (Question from Craig Buchek)
\n\n34:20 – “What’s a non-programming hobby you’re into?” – Ben Hamill
\n\n36:10 – “What’s one thing you wish unknown strangers you encounter in public knew about you?” – James Edward Gray II
\n\nStella Young: I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Being cognizant if there’s a way to make your own code and applications more accessible to others.
\n\nCoraline: Thinking about The Spoon Theory and how it’s been appropriated by the activist community.
\n\nMandy: Have empathy for both yourself and others, find your community, and disability is different for everyone.
\n\nTravis: Gaining empathy for other people to help other people gain empathy for other people.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Travis B. Hartwell.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Travis B. Hartwell about what it's like to live with multiple disabilities and why accessibility is important.","date_published":"2016-11-30T19:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/b5a21f00-220f-44ea-b6cb-74a8d105562a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42511638,"duration_in_seconds":2656}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=245","title":"Episode 008: 99 Bottles of OOP with Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/99-bottles-of-oop","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “99 Bottles of Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen\n\n01:31 – Collaboration on the Book\n\nPractical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz\n\nPeople who like me call me disciplined & meticulousPeople who don't call me anal & pedanticIt's the same thing. @kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016\n\n14:56 – Audience: Who is this book for?\n\n99 Bottles of Beer Exercise\n\n21:06 – The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Principle; Duplication and Replication\n\nDRYing too hard: \"people encapsulate the pieces that are identical, though they don't represent a complete idea.\" @kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016\n\n29:21 – Code Review and Naming Things\n\n30:40 – “In what ways is it 99 Bottles a richer kata than fizz buzz?” – Benjamin Fleischer\n\n32:53 – “The 99 Bottles book seems to document all the trade-offs we’ve been implicitly making. Could this possibly be a first step in automating those decisions? i.e.: Might we take those now-explicit rules and partially automate the process of programming?” – Craig Buchek\n\n34:47 – Llewellyn Falco: “Sparrow Decks”\n\nKathy Sierra\nPhilip Kellman\n\n39:57 – “what non-Ruby technologies are you interested in right now?” – Darin Wilson\n\nThe more people involved in a projectthe less important the code becomesand more important the interactions.@kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016\n\n“Code is easy; people are hard. If you want to get things done, you have to get good at people.” - @sandimetz— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 21, 2016\n\n45:00 – Sandi’s Unique Approach to Teaching\n\n47:53 – Speaking at Conferences\n\nListening is not how people learn.We learn by doing.To help someone learn-by-doing, ask them questions.@sandimetz @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016\n\nReflections:\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to return to work on her book about empathy. Also, exploring whether that visual interpretation of code is the shape of code in the abstract or the shape of the code that’s written on-screen.\n\nSandi: Controversy around the notion that duplication is better than the wrong abstraction.\n\nKatrina: We are humans and we have ideas and sharing those ideas makes us visible to other humans. It is also incredibly important and impactful to speak.\n\nJessica: Development of relationships and partnerships with someone who will push you.\n\nSam: Helping people realize things on their own is greater than telling them the answer. Also, practicing better self-control in coding and mentoring.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guests: Katrina Owen and Sandi Metz.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “99 Bottles of Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen
\n\n01:31 – Collaboration on the Book
\n\nPractical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
\n\n\n\nPeople who like me call me disciplined & meticulous
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016
People who don't call me anal & pedantic
It's the same thing. @kytrinyx @greaterthancode
14:56 – Audience: Who is this book for?
\n\n\n\n21:06 – The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Principle; Duplication and Replication
\n\n\n\nDRYing too hard: "people encapsulate the pieces that are identical, though they don't represent a complete idea." @kytrinyx @greaterthancode
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016
29:21 – Code Review and Naming Things
\n\n30:40 – “In what ways is it 99 Bottles a richer kata than fizz buzz?” – Benjamin Fleischer
\n\n32:53 – “The 99 Bottles book seems to document all the trade-offs we’ve been implicitly making. Could this possibly be a first step in automating those decisions? i.e.: Might we take those now-explicit rules and partially automate the process of programming?” – Craig Buchek
\n\n34:47 – Llewellyn Falco: “Sparrow Decks”
\n\n\n\n39:57 – “what non-Ruby technologies are you interested in right now?” – Darin Wilson
\n\n\n\nThe more people involved in a project
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016
the less important the code becomes
and more important the interactions.@kytrinyx @greaterthancode
\n\n“Code is easy; people are hard. If you want to get things done, you have to get good at people.” - @sandimetz
— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 21, 2016
45:00 – Sandi’s Unique Approach to Teaching
\n\n47:53 – Speaking at Conferences
\n\n\n\nListening is not how people learn.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016
We learn by doing.
To help someone learn-by-doing, ask them questions.@sandimetz @greaterthancode
Reflections:
\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to return to work on her book about empathy. Also, exploring whether that visual interpretation of code is the shape of code in the abstract or the shape of the code that’s written on-screen.
\n\nSandi: Controversy around the notion that duplication is better than the wrong abstraction.
\n\nKatrina: We are humans and we have ideas and sharing those ideas makes us visible to other humans. It is also incredibly important and impactful to speak.
\n\nJessica: Development of relationships and partnerships with someone who will push you.
\n\nSam: Helping people realize things on their own is greater than telling them the answer. Also, practicing better self-control in coding and mentoring.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guests: Katrina Owen and Sandi Metz.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen: authors of 99 Bottles of OOP.","date_published":"2016-11-21T18:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/331952a8-e543-440d-b51b-d93dc7e84925.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59622028,"duration_in_seconds":3726}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=230","title":"Episode 007: Overcoming Adversity and Battling Unconscious Bias with Neem Serra","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/overcoming-adversity-and-battling-unconcious-bias","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to Greater Than Code\n\n02:02 – Neem Serra Introduction\n\nNeem Serra: “From Babies to Software Development”\n\n03:23 – 2016 Election Thoughts, Fears, and Aspirations; Importance of Ally Support\n\nRev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The Other America”\n\n14:51 – Overcoming Adversity and Getting Into Science\n\nGenomics\n\n26:27 – Switching from Science to Programming and Getting a Job\n\nSoftware Carpentry\n\nNational Society of Black Engineers\n\nHandsUp United\n\nProject Euler\n\n33:53 – Volunteering and Being Empathetic and Inclusive\n\n\"I feel like most of my job some days is helping people try to be empathetic. Nobody gives me a raise for that.\"@TeamNeem @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 9, 2016\n\n47:36 – Battling Unconscious Bias\n\n55:17 – Programming in Swift\n\nSwift Playgrounds Demo with a Twist\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: Push through.\n\nJessica: Programming gives you power. Also, we love you, David Brady.\n\nCoraline: Individual actions matter. Be allies to people who are facing discrimination or oppression.\n\nNeem: Small acts of kindness matter.\n\nThe Techies Project\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Neem Serra.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to Greater Than Code
\n\n02:02 – Neem Serra Introduction
\n\nNeem Serra: “From Babies to Software Development”
\n\n03:23 – 2016 Election Thoughts, Fears, and Aspirations; Importance of Ally Support
\n\nRev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The Other America”
\n\n14:51 – Overcoming Adversity and Getting Into Science
\n\n\n\n26:27 – Switching from Science to Programming and Getting a Job
\n\n\n\nNational Society of Black Engineers
\n\n\n\n\n\n33:53 – Volunteering and Being Empathetic and Inclusive
\n\n\n\n"I feel like most of my job some days is helping people try to be empathetic. Nobody gives me a raise for that."@TeamNeem @greaterthancode
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 9, 2016
47:36 – Battling Unconscious Bias
\n\n55:17 – Programming in Swift
\n\nSwift Playgrounds Demo with a Twist
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: Push through.
\n\nJessica: Programming gives you power. Also, we love you, David Brady.
\n\nCoraline: Individual actions matter. Be allies to people who are facing discrimination or oppression.
\n\nNeem: Small acts of kindness matter.
\n\n\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Neem Serra.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to Neem Serra about overcoming adversity and battling unconscious bias.","date_published":"2016-11-09T19:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/0b51a1de-788d-4bb8-b72b-7d3fb550c617.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":62980345,"duration_in_seconds":3936}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=222","title":"Episode 006: Getting Technology Into the Hands of Children with David Bock","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/getting-technology-into-the-hands-of-children","content_text":"00:17 – Welcome to “PC Principal Shit!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:35 – David Bock Introduction and “Smoked Pork” Discussion\n\n04:56 – Teaching Kids Computer Science Concepts\n\nWatch D.O.G.S.\n\nCode.org\n\nHour of Code\n\nBlockly\n\nKarel the Robot\n\nTEALS: Computer Science in Every High School\n\n12:50 – Being Scientifically Literate\n\nNeil deGrasse Tyson YouTube Video\n\n14:13 – Gender and Peer Pressure Dynamics\n\nOn @greaterthancode with @bokmann. He had a student who realized \"Oh! Computers aren't smart! They're just dumb, really really fast!\" :D— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) November 2, 2016\n\n22:13 – Curriculum and Good Teaching Languages\n\nC.A.M.S: Coding at Middle School\n\nScratch\n\n23:16 – Games as an Entry Point for Programming\n\nMinecraft\n\n34:00 – “K-12 is pretty broad age range. How do you tailor the curriculum for different ages? Do you find that there are things you can teach to older kids that definitely don’t work with younger kids?” — Darin Wilson\n\n36:17 – Understanding Abstract Thought\n\nWhat’s Going on in There? by Lise Eliot\n\n37:19 – “How do you handle multiple skill levels? Specifically, what can you do to set a culture where kids who know a little more won’t intimidate those who are completely new?” — Jacob Stoebel\n\nProject Euler\n\nCodingBat\n\n40:51 – Getting Equipment and Resources Into the Hands of Students; “How do you deal with equipment? Not every kid rolls up with Arch Linux installed on their Macbook Air, presumably.” — Ben Hamill\n\nCode Virginia\n\n45:12 – Tablets vs Computer Learning and Resources; Computer Science vs Computational Thinking\n\nRobozzle\n\nROBLOX\n\nMove The Turtle\n\nDragonBox\n\n35:56 – Getting Involved with Teaching Kids Technology … but Taking Care to Avoid Burnout\n\nReflections:\n\nMandy: Sharing today’s resources with kids who are interested. If you’re in South Central Pennsylvania, please reach out!\n\nSam: Resources for where to go and where to get started.\n\nCoraline: Reflecting on privilege and thinking about how to get equipment into underprivileged kids’ hands.\n\nDave: One of the best ways to learn is to teach.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Dave Bock.","content_html":"00:17 – Welcome to “PC Principal Shit!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:35 – David Bock Introduction and “Smoked Pork” Discussion
\n\n04:56 – Teaching Kids Computer Science Concepts
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTEALS: Computer Science in Every High School
\n\n12:50 – Being Scientifically Literate
\n\nNeil deGrasse Tyson YouTube Video
\n\n14:13 – Gender and Peer Pressure Dynamics
\n\n\n\nOn @greaterthancode with @bokmann. He had a student who realized "Oh! Computers aren't smart! They're just dumb, really really fast!" :D
— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) November 2, 2016
22:13 – Curriculum and Good Teaching Languages
\n\nC.A.M.S: Coding at Middle School
\n\n\n\n23:16 – Games as an Entry Point for Programming
\n\n\n\n34:00 – “K-12 is pretty broad age range. How do you tailor the curriculum for different ages? Do you find that there are things you can teach to older kids that definitely don’t work with younger kids?” — Darin Wilson
\n\n36:17 – Understanding Abstract Thought
\n\nWhat’s Going on in There? by Lise Eliot
\n\n37:19 – “How do you handle multiple skill levels? Specifically, what can you do to set a culture where kids who know a little more won’t intimidate those who are completely new?” — Jacob Stoebel
\n\n\n\n\n\n40:51 – Getting Equipment and Resources Into the Hands of Students; “How do you deal with equipment? Not every kid rolls up with Arch Linux installed on their Macbook Air, presumably.” — Ben Hamill
\n\n\n\n45:12 – Tablets vs Computer Learning and Resources; Computer Science vs Computational Thinking
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n35:56 – Getting Involved with Teaching Kids Technology … but Taking Care to Avoid Burnout
\n\nReflections:
\n\nMandy: Sharing today’s resources with kids who are interested. If you’re in South Central Pennsylvania, please reach out!
\n\nSam: Resources for where to go and where to get started.
\n\nCoraline: Reflecting on privilege and thinking about how to get equipment into underprivileged kids’ hands.
\n\nDave: One of the best ways to learn is to teach.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Dave Bock.
","summary":"In this episode, we talk to David Bock of Loudoun Codes and LivingSocial about getting technology into the hands of children.","date_published":"2016-11-02T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/3bb302cc-cc2e-46d1-8a40-bc9e01cb00ae.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":56211078,"duration_in_seconds":3513}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=212","title":"Episode 005: Learning New Languages with James Edward Gray II","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/learning-new-languages","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “PodcasTRON...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:00 – James Edward Gray II’s Introduction\n\n02:03 – #CastleGraySkull\n\n\n“It’s hard to find a castle in a good school district.” ~ David Brady\n\n\n07:59 – Interviewing\n\nJames Edward Gray II: Implementing the LHC on a Whiteboard @ RailsConf 2016\n\n(Slides) ^\n\nEngineering Interviews: Grading Rubric\n\n15:14 – Transparency; Giving Honest Feedback\n\nJoe Mastey: Hiring Developers, with Science! @ RailsConf 2016\n\n20:08 – Working with Elixir\n\nJames Edward Gray II: The Most Object-Oriented Language\n\n28:13 – Functional Programming vs Object-Oriented Programming\n\n32:47 – Learning New Languages\n\nThe Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt\n\n37:33 – “What is the best way to approach learning a new language?” ~ Nate Vick\n\nexercism.io\n\n41:39 – “What's going on with Codalyzed? Are any new videos on the way? Related: the first video discussed \"less code\"; has your focus on it changed as you've moved into new languages and their ecosystems?” ~ Trevor Bramble\n\nGreg Young: The Art of Destroying Software\n \nReflections:\n\nDavid: Read the core documentation. (Module: Enumerable)\n\nJay: Next steps for beginners: Barry Swartz: The Paradox of Choice TED Talk; Get social.\n\nSam: It’s time to expand my brain again and learn a new language(s)!\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to go learn a new language as well. ^\n\nJames: I am privileged to have the best friends on the Internet and have these discussions.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: James Edward Gray.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “PodcasTRON...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:00 – James Edward Gray II’s Introduction
\n\n02:03 – #CastleGraySkull
\n\n\n\n\n“It’s hard to find a castle in a good school district.” ~ David Brady
\n
07:59 – Interviewing
\n\nJames Edward Gray II: Implementing the LHC on a Whiteboard @ RailsConf 2016
\n\n\n\nEngineering Interviews: Grading Rubric
\n\n15:14 – Transparency; Giving Honest Feedback
\n\nJoe Mastey: Hiring Developers, with Science! @ RailsConf 2016
\n\n20:08 – Working with Elixir
\n\nJames Edward Gray II: The Most Object-Oriented Language
\n\n28:13 – Functional Programming vs Object-Oriented Programming
\n\n32:47 – Learning New Languages
\n\nThe Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
\n\n37:33 – “What is the best way to approach learning a new language?” ~ Nate Vick
\n\n\n\n41:39 – “What's going on with Codalyzed? Are any new videos on the way? Related: the first video discussed "less code"; has your focus on it changed as you've moved into new languages and their ecosystems?” ~ Trevor Bramble
\n\nGreg Young: The Art of Destroying Software
\n
\nReflections:
David: Read the core documentation. (Module: Enumerable)
\n\nJay: Next steps for beginners: Barry Swartz: The Paradox of Choice TED Talk; Get social.
\n\nSam: It’s time to expand my brain again and learn a new language(s)!
\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to go learn a new language as well. ^
\n\nJames: I am privileged to have the best friends on the Internet and have these discussions.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: James Edward Gray.
","summary":"","date_published":"2016-10-27T20:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/169e6c8d-0005-42e2-a29b-33e1e67f2f97.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":60469671,"duration_in_seconds":3779}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=195","title":"Episode 004: DevOps and Creativity with Charity Majors","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/devops-and-creativity","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Hot Mess Podcast...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n00:54 – Charity Majors’ Introduction / Listener Question: “What is your superhero origin story?” ~Donald Plummer\n\n02:54 – Operations and Creativity\n\n06:37 – Hiring People for Operations\n\nCommandos, Infantry, and Police\n\n07:35 – Looking Back on Chaos\n\n10:00 – “Problems of Success”\n\nJessica Kerr: Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No (Spectrum of Risk Article)\n\n11:32 – Bootcamp Graduates and Startup Culture\n\n15:44 – “Cult-y Companies”\n\nDunbar's Number\n\n19:19 – Microservices\n\nConway’s Law\n\n26:41 – “Serverless\"\n\n29:55 – What should software engineers should be doing to learn more about operations?\n\n\n“Put yourself in rotation...Expose yourself to the consequences!” ~ Charity Majors\n\n\n39:01 – Misogyny in Tech\n\nReflections:\n\nAstrid: It’s really important to understand operations.\n\nSam: Actually understanding your dependencies still applies in a serverless architecture.\n\nCoraline: We are all trying to work to make tech better in our own ways.\n\nDave: The system is the source of the power that we have to use to break the system because the system is broken.\n\nCharity: The intersection of tech and human issues.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Charity Majors.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Hot Mess Podcast...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n00:54 – Charity Majors’ Introduction / Listener Question: “What is your superhero origin story?” ~Donald Plummer
\n\n02:54 – Operations and Creativity
\n\n06:37 – Hiring People for Operations
\n\nCommandos, Infantry, and Police
\n\n07:35 – Looking Back on Chaos
\n\n10:00 – “Problems of Success”
\n\nJessica Kerr: Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No (Spectrum of Risk Article)
\n\n11:32 – Bootcamp Graduates and Startup Culture
\n\n15:44 – “Cult-y Companies”
\n\n\n\n19:19 – Microservices
\n\n\n\n26:41 – “Serverless"
\n\n29:55 – What should software engineers should be doing to learn more about operations?
\n\n\n\n\n“Put yourself in rotation...Expose yourself to the consequences!” ~ Charity Majors
\n
39:01 – Misogyny in Tech
\n\nReflections:
\n\nAstrid: It’s really important to understand operations.
\n\nSam: Actually understanding your dependencies still applies in a serverless architecture.
\n\nCoraline: We are all trying to work to make tech better in our own ways.
\n\nDave: The system is the source of the power that we have to use to break the system because the system is broken.
\n\nCharity: The intersection of tech and human issues.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Charity Majors.
","summary":"","date_published":"2016-10-20T22:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/a3c66716-9f93-4972-98bf-a20e649f4750.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48604225,"duration_in_seconds":3037}]},{"id":"http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=186","title":"Episode 003: Hiring People For Diversity with LaToya Allen of SheNomads","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/hiring-people-for-diversity","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “Well, Technically...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:34 – LaToya Allen’s Introduction\n\n03:18 – Dear Tech Companies: Focus on Diversity, Not Foosball\n\n08:14 – How does “the team photo” reflect on you and your company?\n\n10:33 – Article Backlash; Interviewing/Hiring People for Diversity\n\nMental health Bechdel test for women in male-dominated fields: Have *I* talked to another woman today about something related to my work?— amy nguyen (@amyngyn) October 10, 2016\n\n15:11 – The Talking-Over-People Culture\n\nRuby DCamp\n\n17:37 – Improving Job Postings; How do you find a company to work for that’s good?\n\n\n“Save your ninja moves for the alley!” ~ Jessica Kerr\n\n\n23:16 – What is something that your company or coworkers or someone at work did that made you feel included?\n\n26:18 – “Signaling”\n\n30:54 – The SheNomads Job Board and the Vetting Process\n\n\n Commitment to diversity inclusion\n Provide meaningful work\n Offer reasonable pay\n\n\n33:33 – #talkpay\n\nSalary Negotiation with Ashley Powell\n\n\n Use Google / Indeed.com\n Talk to recruiters\n Talk to your peers\n\n\n35:56 – SheNomads and Remote Work\n \nReflections:\n\nDave: Thinking more about signaling.\n\nAstrid: I’m not the only person turned off by ninja-stuff.\n\nCoraline: Bringing marketing personas into the recruiting process.\n\nSam: Recognizing the impulse to interrupt and taking a step back.\n\nLaToya: Thank you for Greater Than Code!\n\nJessica: Gratitude for remote work and diversity and inclusion in the workplace.\n\nListener Call to Action:\n\nIf you are not a remote worker, talk to management and see if you can work from home one day per week to introduce the idea of remote work and prove that you are effective and efficient even if you are not present in the office.\n\nIf you are in a management position, go work from home yourself at least one day per week, so you can build some empathy for what it’s like to be on the other side of those tools and that divide, so you can more effectively incorporate your more distributed teammates.\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: LaToya Allen.","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “Well, Technically...” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:34 – LaToya Allen’s Introduction
\n\n03:18 – Dear Tech Companies: Focus on Diversity, Not Foosball
\n\n08:14 – How does “the team photo” reflect on you and your company?
\n\n10:33 – Article Backlash; Interviewing/Hiring People for Diversity
\n\n\n\nMental health Bechdel test for women in male-dominated fields: Have *I* talked to another woman today about something related to my work?
— amy nguyen (@amyngyn) October 10, 2016
15:11 – The Talking-Over-People Culture
\n\n\n\n17:37 – Improving Job Postings; How do you find a company to work for that’s good?
\n\n\n\n\n“Save your ninja moves for the alley!” ~ Jessica Kerr
\n
23:16 – What is something that your company or coworkers or someone at work did that made you feel included?
\n\n26:18 – “Signaling”
\n\n30:54 – The SheNomads Job Board and the Vetting Process
\n\n33:33 – #talkpay
\n\nSalary Negotiation with Ashley Powell
\n\n35:56 – SheNomads and Remote Work
\n
\nReflections:
Dave: Thinking more about signaling.
\n\nAstrid: I’m not the only person turned off by ninja-stuff.
\n\nCoraline: Bringing marketing personas into the recruiting process.
\n\nSam: Recognizing the impulse to interrupt and taking a step back.
\n\nLaToya: Thank you for Greater Than Code!
\n\nJessica: Gratitude for remote work and diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
\n\nListener Call to Action:
\n\nIf you are not a remote worker, talk to management and see if you can work from home one day per week to introduce the idea of remote work and prove that you are effective and efficient even if you are not present in the office.
\n\nIf you are in a management position, go work from home yourself at least one day per week, so you can build some empathy for what it’s like to be on the other side of those tools and that divide, so you can more effectively incorporate your more distributed teammates.
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: LaToya Allen.
","summary":"","date_published":"2016-10-12T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/c46aad7b-fde6-43d7-82c6-20c8028a9470.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46028759,"duration_in_seconds":2876}]},{"id":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=143","title":"Episode 002: Neutralizing Imposter Syndrome with Avdi Grimm","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/neutralizing-imposter-syndrome","content_text":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Meta Four!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”\n\n01:30 – Chef Avdi Grimm’s Introduction\n\n02:19 – RubyTapas; Production, Typing, and Editing\n\n10:52 – Real World Programming: Episode #346: User; LiveCoding.tv\n\n12:24 – Neutralizing Impostor Syndrome\n\n13:32 – Break time and getting to know our new panelist, Astrid Countee!\n\n\"I've never met a junior who wasn't extremely senior in some area of life I know nothing about\" @dbrady @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) October 5, 2016\n\n24:15 – Neutralizing Imposter Syndrome (Cont’d)\n\n25:42 – Live Coding\n\n28:29 – What non-Ruby technologies have you been exploring lately? ~ Darin Wilson\n\n29:05 – PHP\n\n35:56 – Should a screencast series like RubyTapas also go beyond code? Talk about topics like dealing with frustration when programming, for example? \n~Lucas Dohman\n\n\n“Programming can be an incredibly judgmental culture and environments can be really poisonous.” ~ Avdi Grimm\n\n\n\n Bias in Computer Systems\n Carina C. Zona: Schemas for the Real World @ SCNA 2013\n Carina C. Zona: Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm @ JSConf EU 2015\n\n\nReflections:\n\nSam: You can use your ego and your attachment to the code, but make it not about yourself. Instead, try to focus on what your code is bringing to other people and maybe that can help you try to figure out how to make it better without getting stuck.\n\nCoraline: We got to see a glimpse into the whole person behind a persona. Even heroes are people with vulnerability, human flaws, anxieties, and weaknesses.\n\nAstrid: Bring your whole self to everything.\n\nJessica: What we show matters.\n\nJay: Don’t be too quick to compare yourself to others.\n\nDavid: Put your ideas out there and get them in front of other people. That is how you manufacture authority.\n\nAvdi: Hidden Figures\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!","content_html":"00:16 – Welcome to “The Meta Four!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”
\n\n01:30 – Chef Avdi Grimm’s Introduction
\n\n02:19 – RubyTapas; Production, Typing, and Editing
\n\n10:52 – Real World Programming: Episode #346: User; LiveCoding.tv
\n\n12:24 – Neutralizing Impostor Syndrome
\n\n13:32 – Break time and getting to know our new panelist, Astrid Countee!
\n\n\n\n"I've never met a junior who wasn't extremely senior in some area of life I know nothing about" @dbrady @greaterthancode
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) October 5, 2016
24:15 – Neutralizing Imposter Syndrome (Cont’d)
\n\n25:42 – Live Coding
\n\n28:29 – What non-Ruby technologies have you been exploring lately? ~ Darin Wilson
\n\n29:05 – PHP
\n\n35:56 – Should a screencast series like RubyTapas also go beyond code? Talk about topics like dealing with frustration when programming, for example?
\n~Lucas Dohman
\n\n\n“Programming can be an incredibly judgmental culture and environments can be really poisonous.” ~ Avdi Grimm
\n
Reflections:
\n\nSam: You can use your ego and your attachment to the code, but make it not about yourself. Instead, try to focus on what your code is bringing to other people and maybe that can help you try to figure out how to make it better without getting stuck.
\n\nCoraline: We got to see a glimpse into the whole person behind a persona. Even heroes are people with vulnerability, human flaws, anxieties, and weaknesses.
\n\nAstrid: Bring your whole self to everything.
\n\nJessica: What we show matters.
\n\nJay: Don’t be too quick to compare yourself to others.
\n\nDavid: Put your ideas out there and get them in front of other people. That is how you manufacture authority.
\n\nAvdi: Hidden Figures
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
","summary":"","date_published":"2016-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://chtbl.com/track/GC548E/aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/79118de2-5b5b-439a-84b3-d9942b407117/d7f25513-0654-45e2-bf8f-bae285cbe985.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52795516,"duration_in_seconds":3299}]},{"id":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&p=87","title":"Episode 001: Taking Payments on the Web with Noel Rappin","url":"https://www.greaterthancode.com/taking-payments-on-the-web","content_text":"00:18 - Welcome to \"Dread Coder Roberts!\" ...we mean, \"Greater Than Code!\"\n\n01:30 - Noel Rappin's Introduction (Spoiler alert! He's got a Ph.D.!)\n\n04:31 - Take My Money: Accepting Payments on the Web\n\n08:30 - Code Paths and Tracking Failures\n\n10:59 - What is the quickest path to accepting payments online? Are there drawbacks to getting something up fast? (~ David Bock)\n\n13:17 - Testing Payment Issues\n\n14:29 - Design Patterns and Missing Layers Between Controllers and Models\n\n17:49 - Business Logic and Database Constraints (aka, \"Why did he write the book?!\")\n\n20:14 - I Was A Developer Running HR For A Year: AMA by Noel Rappin at Madison+ Ruby: Epilogue 2016\n\n24:02 - Practices, Problems, and Potential Solutions for Human Resources\n\n29:34 - Team Diversity and Inclusion\n\n*Listener Call to Action: *\n\nTeam retrospectives and demonstrating that it is safe to fail.\n\nNoel: The impact of our applications and how they work in real-world context.\n\nDavid: How can we help introverts feel comfortable?\n\nQuiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to look at teams, meetings, and discussions and see if they are leaving room for everyone to participate equally.\n\nJessica: We started out talking about accepting payments on the web and we found something greater than code.\n\nJay: If we want to try to work with the hard stuff, the hardest problems to solve are the things that are greater than code.\n\nSam: Being, as Jay said, \"not just allies, but accomplices.\"\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!Special Guest: Noel Rappin.","content_html":"00:18 - Welcome to "Dread Coder Roberts!" ...we mean, "Greater Than Code!"
\n\n01:30 - Noel Rappin's Introduction (Spoiler alert! He's got a Ph.D.!)
\n\n04:31 - Take My Money: Accepting Payments on the Web
\n\n08:30 - Code Paths and Tracking Failures
\n\n10:59 - What is the quickest path to accepting payments online? Are there drawbacks to getting something up fast? (~ David Bock)
\n\n13:17 - Testing Payment Issues
\n\n14:29 - Design Patterns and Missing Layers Between Controllers and Models
\n\n17:49 - Business Logic and Database Constraints (aka, "Why did he write the book?!")
\n\n20:14 - I Was A Developer Running HR For A Year: AMA by Noel Rappin at Madison+ Ruby: Epilogue 2016
\n\n24:02 - Practices, Problems, and Potential Solutions for Human Resources
\n\n29:34 - Team Diversity and Inclusion
\n\n*Listener Call to Action: *
\n\nTeam retrospectives and demonstrating that it is safe to fail.
\n\nNoel: The impact of our applications and how they work in real-world context.
\n\nDavid: How can we help introverts feel comfortable?
\n\nQuiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
\n\nCoraline: Inspiration to look at teams, meetings, and discussions and see if they are leaving room for everyone to participate equally.
\n\nJessica: We started out talking about accepting payments on the web and we found something greater than code.
\n\nJay: If we want to try to work with the hard stuff, the hardest problems to solve are the things that are greater than code.
\n\nSam: Being, as Jay said, "not just allies, but accomplices."
\n\nThis episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode.
\n\nTo make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
\n\nAmazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!
Special Guest: Noel Rappin.
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