00:44 - Pandemic Life
13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment
29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic
Reflections:
Mandy: Everyone should journal. Reflect on the past and bring it to the present.
Damien: Bringing magic into non-magical environments.
Aaron: Ritual, intention, reflection, alignment.
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Transcript:
DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 277 of Greater Than Code. I am Damien Burke and I'm joined with Aaron Aldrich.
AARON: Hi, I am Aaron and I am here with Mandy.
MANDY: Hello, everybody. I'm Mandy Moore and today, it's just the three of us!
So if you came expecting more than that, I'm sorry.
[laughter]
We’re what you get today, but hopefully, we can have a great conversation and we were thinking that we would talk about all the things. I'm doing big hand gestures right now because there's been so many things happening since 2020 that are still happening and how our perspectives have changed.
For one, I, myself, can tell you I have grown so much as a person in 2 years. And I'm curious to hear how the two of you have been living your lives since the pandemic.
DAMIEN: [chuckles] Where to begin.
AARON: I know. It's such a good topic because I feel like everyone's had so much to change, but at the same time, it's like, okay, so 2 million years ago at the beginning of this pandemic.
I'm now my third place, third job since the beginning of the pandemic as well and wow, I came out as non-binary in the middle of the pandemic [laughs]. So that was a whole thing, too.
I think the question I asked earlier is how much have you radicalized your politics over the course of the past 2 years? [laughs]
DAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. That's been bouncing around in my head since you said it off mic.
Every time I hear the word pandemic now, I think about, “Oh man,” I hesitate on how far to go into this. [laughs] Because I look at the techno-anarchist crypto bros and I can I say that disparagingly and I will say that disparagingly because I was like them. [laughs] I filled out a survey today and they asked like, “How do you rate yourself as on a conservative and liberal scale?” I'm like, “Well, I think I'm super conservative.” And I still do and every time I align with any political policy, it's always an alignment with people who call themselves socialists and leftists and why is that? [laughs] Hmm.
[laughter]
But anyway, that was the part I was trying not to go back into. [laughs]
One of the big realizations in living in a pandemic is that healthcare is not an exclusive good.
MANDY: What?
[laughter]
DAMIEN: That is to say that I cannot, as an individual, take care of my own health outside of the health of the community and society I live in. Didn't know that. In my defense, I hadn't thought about it, [laughs] but that was an amazing realization.
AARON: No, I think that was a big thing. I think so much of the pandemic exposed the way our systems are all interconnected. Exposed the societal things. Like so much we rely on is part of the society that we've built and when things don't work, it's like, well, now what? I don't have any mechanism to do anything on my own. What do we do?
DAMIEN: Yeah. It's so fundamental in humanity that we are in society. We are in community. We only survive as a group. That's a fundamental aspect of the species and as much as we would like to stake our own claim and move out to a homestead and depend on no one other than ourselves, that is not a viable option for human beings.
AARON: Right, yeah. Even out here in rural Vermont with animals and things, we're still pretty dependent on all of the services that are [chuckles] provided around. I'm still on municipal electric service and everything else. There's still dependence and we still rely on our neighbors and everyone else to keep us sane in other ways.
DAMIEN: Yeah, and I feel like people in rural areas—and correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't lived in a rural area in maybe ever—have a better understanding of their independence. You know your neighbors because you need to depend on them. In the city—I live in Los Angeles—we depend on faceless institutions and systems.
AARON: Yeah.
DAMIEN: And so, we can easily be blind to them.
AARON: Yeah. I think it mixes in other ways. I get to travel a bit for work and visit cities, and then I end up coming back out into the rural America to live. So I enjoy seeing both of it because in what I've seen in city spaces is so much has to be formalized because it's such a big deal. There are so many people involved in the system. We need a formal system with someone in charge to run it so that the average everyday person doesn't have to figure out how do I move trash from inside the city outside the city.
[laughter]
We can make that a group of people's job to deal with.
Here, it's much more like, “Well, you can pay this service to do it, or that's where the dump is so can just take care of it yourself if you want.” “Well, this farm will take your food scraps for you so you can just bring this stuff over there if you want.” It's just very funny. It just pops up in these individual pockets and things that need group answers are sometimes like pushed to the town. You get small town drama because like everyone gets to know about what's happening with the road and have an opinion on the town budget as opposed to like, I don't know, isn't that why we hire a whole department to deal with this? [laughs]
DAMIEN: Yeah, but small town drama is way better than big town drama. The fact that half of LA's budget goes to policing is a secret. People don't know that.
AARON: Yeah.
DAMIEN: Between the LA Police Department and LA Sheriff's Department, they have a larger budget than the military of Ukraine. That's the sort of thing that wouldn't happen – [overtalk]
AARON: Don't look at the NYPD budget then.
DAMIEN: Which is bigger still, yeah.
[laughter]
That's not the sort thing that would happen in a small town where everybody's involved and in that business.
AARON: Yeah. It happens in other weird ways, but it's interesting. This is stuff that I don't know how has, if it's changed during pandemic times. Although, I guess I've started to pay attention more to local politics and trying to be like, “Oh, this is where real people affecting decisions get made every day are at the municipal levels, the city level.” These are things that if we pass a policy to take care of unhoused, or to change police budget, this affects people right now.
It's not like, “Oh, wow, that takes time to go into effect and set up a department to eventually go do things.” It's like, “No, we're going to go change something materially.” It's hard to compare the two because the town I'm in rents a police officer part-time from the next [laughs] municipality over. So the comparison to doesn't really work.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: Everybody knows exactly how much that costs, too.
AARON: We do. I just had to vote on it a couple Tuesdays ago.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: So then I think back to how that has impacted – I'm always trying to bring this podcast more into tech because I feel guilty about that. [laughs] About just wandering off into other things.
But I think about how that impacts how I work in the organizations I work in. Hmm. I recognize I'm learning more about myself and how much I can love just sitting down with an editor and churn out awesome code, awesome features, and awesome products. That brings me so much joy and I don't want to do anything else.
And what we do has impact and so, it's so beneficial to be aware of the organization I'm in what it's doing, what the product is doing, how that’s impacting people. Sometimes, that involves a lot of management—I do a lot of product management with my main client now.
But also, in other places, you would look at, “Well, okay, I don't need to manage the client's finances”. Not because that's not as important, it's because other people are doing it and I trust how they're doing it. That's something I haven't had elsewhere. The advantage of being with a very small organization is that I have these personal relationships and this personal trust that I couldn't get at one of the vampire companies. What'd they call them? FAANG?
AARON: Yeah, FAANG. We've been talking about this because FAANG, but Facebook and Google changed their name. So now, is it just MAAN?
DAMIEN: Yeah.
AARON: I mean Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, right?
DAMIEN: I'm all for the right of individuals to choose what they're called; I don't know if I'm willing to extend that to Facebook and Google.
AARON: [laughs] Yeah.
DAMIEN: Remember, was it Altria?
AARON: Oh, Philip Morris.
DAMIEN: Philip Morris, right?
AARON: Yeah.
DAMIEN: They were just like, “Oh, everything we've been doing is so horrible and harming to society for the past several decades, we'll just change our names and people will forget about it.”
AARON: That was Philip Morris. Altria didn't do any of that.
DAMIEN: Yeah. Altria didn't do any of that.
[chuckles]
Yeah, I remember that.
AARON: Yeah. I'm curious because I think it's changed for me a bit over this time, too. But I'm curious for folks that have had a sensitivity change to the types of company, not necessarily types of companies, but like, I'm more sensitive to who I'm working for. I think my list of no, I won't work for the X company [chuckles] has probably grown throughout the pandemic and I'm definitely much more critical.
Part of it's probably because as in tech we're sort of at an advantage, it is high demand right now and we can be a bit picky about where we work, but I definitely have been [laughs] lately. Much more careful about I'm not just willing to work with anyone. I want someone that's got reasonable values. I interview other companies a lot more and I want to make sure product is not causing harm generally speaking and make sure I get a lot more value alignment out of leadership team and things like that. I don't know if other people have had a similar experience.
MANDY: Unfortunately, I haven't had that experience. I'm still working for whoever will give me money.
[laughter]
But I wish I could do that and I'm currently looking. I mean, I've been trying to break into a full-time DevRel career for I guess, 2 years now and I guess, I'm actively looking. Oh, here we go. If you’re hiring, let me know.
[laughter]
I guess I am. I'm looking for that job that I'm really feeling fulfilled in is right now I'm not feeling that and I think it's because of the pandemic, I've really stopped to think about what I want in my life and how I want to feel. I want to be happy, I want to be passionate about my job, and I want to wake up and not feel scared to open my computer because – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Wow.
MANDY: Are they going to tell me they no longer need my service?
DAMIEN: Right.
MANDY: And it's been demoralizing really, for me recently, especially because I tried to join a developer relations Slack group just a few months ago and they rejected me flat out and they're like, “You do not work in dev full time. You cannot be a part of our group,” and I'm like, “Oh.” So now I'm like, “Hmm, what do I do in tech?”
[laughter]
I thought I'd been doing DevRel before DevRel was cool. I'm going to humble brag for a minute, but I have single-handedly put this podcast together and put you people together that you didn't even know and you love each other. You get that vibe. I can tell who's going to get – you're going to love this person and you're going to like – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Oh man, you not only put this podcast together, but you are the sustaining force. You are the heart of it. You are the thing where that all the panelists that are connected to. You are one who gets all of the mechanical, everything besides talking in mics. You do everything else and you're maintaining all these relations with these developers.
[laughter]
MANDY: I never even wanted to be on mic. I just started doing it because everybody was busy and I was like, “I guess I have to step up.” [laughs]
DAMIEN: Whatever it takes to get it done, right?
MANDY: Well, yeah. I feel like the topics on this show that we talk about are important and they're even important outside of tech that hence, the whole name: Greater Than Code. There are more things out there than our jobs and our work and I just want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled and I want to be passionate about something and so does my dog.
AARON: That was a shift for me, too. That was definitely one of the roles I was in during the pandemic and realized my struggle with it so much was it was clashing with that. It wasn't fulfilling for me, it was clashing with my core values, and it was just like, “You know what, I can't do this anymore.” [chuckles] I'm no longer in a place where I have the energy to do a thing I don't like doing, or don't have some care for.
There's always something you don't like doing. There's always some crap around every job that like don't like to do or you have to deal with something, but I'm no longer at a place where I can have a whole job that rubs me the wrong way.
MANDY: Yeah. It's hard for me. I should feel great about this, but I'm known as the podcast girl. If you have a tech podcast, you should talk to Mandy, but I'm not just a podcast editor! I do so much more than that. I do operation, I do product management, I do writing; there's so much more that encompasses who I am in tech than the podcast girl.
I feel like not a lot of people know that and maybe that's my fault because I guess, I haven't really done a good job of putting myself out there to be like, “Hey wait. But I'm –” because for me, it's still a hustle as a single mom. I have to pay the bills. So it's like, I wish I could be more discerning with the jobs that I take and who I work for, but I don't know. I'm just one of those people of the universe. What will be, will be and if it's meant to be, it'll come to me. [laughs] So I don't ever really actively seek and that's probably half of my problem.
DAMIEN: Mm. That's funny because I didn't know all those things about you. I pitch you as a podcast producer and again, I live in a LA, I'm involved in the entertainment industry at a slight level, and the word producer there is very, very powerful and very important. A producer is an executive. A producer is person who gets things done, who makes it happen. I'm not entirely sure what a producer does, even though I've done it.
MANDY: I'm not even sure what a – [laughs]
DAMIEN: Right, because it's never the same thing.
MANDY: No.
DAMIEN: It's whatever it takes and that skill.
AARON: Yeah.
DAMIEN: That being able to be know enough about a movie, or theatrical production, or a podcast, to know what it takes, to be able to manage, and sustain and get it done. That's really what it comes down to: get it done.
MANDY: That's why it's so hard for me. Everyone's like, “Do you have a resume?” And I'm like, “I don't know what to put on it!” Like, you tell me you need this done, I'll get it done. If I don’t know how to do it, I'll figure it out because that's what I've done for 13 years. Like I got hired as Avdi Grimm’s virtual assistant because an Indeed.com ad came out and was like, “I need somebody to answer emails for me,” and I'm like, “Don’t know why you can't do that yourself, but sure.”
[laughter]
And then from there, he had a podcast and was like, “Can you edit my podcast?” And I was like, “Sure,” and then I'm Googling what is a podcast.
[laughter]
I had no clue. So I got here, I think a lot out of luck from being at the right place and talking to the right person at the right time. But I have busted my ass to just learn what people need me to learn and do what people need me to do. I guess, that's maybe what I should just put on the resume. I'll do what you need me to do. I make it happen.
DAMIEN: No, no, no. You put on the resume what your next job is going to be doing.
MANDY: [laughs] Yeah, so, it's hard when people ask me for my resume. I have like three resumes and I'm like, “This does not, no.”
AARON: It's almost more a portfolio at this point, right. I made this thing happen. I made this thing happen. Here's this other thing that I did. Here's another thing I made happen.
DAMIEN: Resumes are horrific. They're not good for anybody and the only people who use them are people who need to filter quickly out of large groups and they're not even good for that. I've long aspired to be at a place in my career where I don't need a resume and I might be there. Steve Jobs didn't have a resume. Didn't need a resume. He didn't send his resume to the board to get that job at Apple back. It's ridiculous.
MANDY: Well, that's the thing for me. I get most of my work from word to mouth.
DAMIEN: Right.
MANDY: So until I really lost a big client and I was like, “Oh, I don't have a resume. Don't you know who I am?”
[laughter]
DAMIEN: But like, they should.
[laughter]
AARON: Just say the portfolios level. I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right? This is...
MANDY: Yeah.
AARON: [laughs] Kind of the same thing. It’s sort of how my resume is morphed in DevRel proper. It's gone from I still kind of have the resume that's like, “Yeah, I worked into these things internally that might not surface otherwise, but also, here's my speaking portfolio and all the things that I have done over the past 3 years. [laughs] You might know me from all of this stuff instead of what's on this resume.”
[laughter]
MANDY: Yeah. Of course, once I was getting comfortable enough to want to speak, that's when the whole world shut down.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
MANDY: So I have no videos of myself speaking anywhere whatsoever.
DAMIEN: Well, I think there might be a few podcasts that you appear on.
MANDY: There's a few episodes as of late that I have ventured to be on out of keeping the show alive.
DAMIEN: And every episode of this podcast, and I think several others, are shits near portfolio, right?
[laughter]
MANDY: Then I'd have a really wrong resume. [laughs]
AARON: We'll figure it out.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
AARON: You just need the highlights.
MANDY: But I don’t know, a lot of other things have changed for me over the course of the past 2 years. Just in my personal life, I've gotten sober and that was a really hard thing to do during a pandemic.
AARON: Yeah.
MANDY: When everybody else was out hoarding toilet paper, I was like, “Oh my God, I need beer,” [laughs] and actually, I did. While everybody was stocking up on those other necessities, I was buying cases of beer and putting them in my garage because I was like, “Oh great, the world's ending and I guess, if that's going to happen, I might as well be drunk.” And then – [overtalk]
AARON: I mean, it's a fair argument in your defense.
MANDY: But then it became a bad problem because when you're home all day and I was home, I worked from home before this. But everything is so damn depressing and you keep the news on the television and next thing you know, it's lunch time and cracking a beer and I'm like, “Whoa, this is… [laughs] where did this come from?”
So no, I got sober and I don't drink anymore and honestly, I have never felt better. I've also become a runner. I got a treadmill and I run a 4, or 5 miles a day and I've lost a good amount of weight, probably a lot from alcohol bloat.
DAMIEN: [chuckles] Yeah.
MANDY: But it's more for me. It's not even about losing a weight because I don't even own a scale because it's more about how I feel.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
MANDY: It's what is about how I feel. So when I went to the doctor's office for my yearly checkup on Monday and I got on the scale because they make you, I said, “Whoa,” [laughs] because I didn't even know.
For me, it's about how I feel and I think that that's really, what's brought a lot of things into perspective for me is that at our time here on earth is fine. I want to be here for my daughter especially. She's 13 and I want to be healthy for her. I want to be here for my friends. I ask myself why I'm still in York, Pennsylvania and I haven't left because I do have people around here that I care about.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
MANDY: And other than that, I could take it, or leave it. But because the people who I love are here, that's why I haven't left.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
MANDY: So that's another thing, the things like the pandemic has just really set me into a lot of personal development work and self-discovery. I journal every day. I read self-help books, which is so weird to me because I was one of those people that were like, “Who are those people that read self-help books?” and now I'm one of them.
[chuckles]
I want to be Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle’s best friend.
[laughter]
Those two women are my people. Elizabeth Gilbert. I can give you so many names of people and great authors that just inspire the hell out of me and 2 years ago, I was not that at all.
AARON: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for getting at our time on earth is finite and so, in refocusing on what matters to us. Another way I had a friend put it to me, it's like optimistic nihilism. Look, at the end of the day, we're all going to be dead and none of this matters. So you might as well do what makes you happy, right? [laughs] You might as well do the things that are fulfilling and meaningful and try to make other people have a good time, too. You might as well.
DAMIEN: I always thought it was ridiculous that nihilism had such a negative connotation. It was like, “No. Okay. I can believe that and be –” [overtalk]
AARON: No pressure. At the end of the day, we're all going to die so, no pressure. Do what do what you need to do. Doesn't matter if you succeed, or fail.
MANDY: That's like, I'm one of those people that would rather spend their money on experiences.
AARON: Yeah.
MANDY: Because I don't care how much money I die with.
[laughter]
I'd rather use it now and take my kid Disney world, which I did 3 years ago.
DAMIEN: Nice.
MANDY: And enjoy those experiences rather than have a bank account full of dollars that I can't use.
DAMIEN: High score.
MANDY: Yeah, high score.
DAMIEN: Shout out to thriving in hand wavy.
I feel embarrassed about this and I don't talk about it much because so many people are suffering. People I love are suffering. People I work with and deal with on a daily basis are suffering, and bad things are happening. This is the best year of my life. This is better than last year and last year was better than the year before. I just keep getting better and my life just keeps getting more awesome. I don't know if I was going anywhere with that, but solidarity with Mandy, I guess. You bought a treadmill. I bought a rower.
MANDY: I feel like honestly, the universe gives back what you put out and I guess, I’ve become real – a lot of people are like, “You're like, woo-woo witchy now,” and I'm like, “Aha, yeah.” I kind of like that. So I feel like if you manifest things, you can make that happen and yes, there's things happening. Yes, yes, there are so many bad things happening, but sometimes out of self-preservation, you just have to tune all of that out and just be in your immediate dwell. For me, sometimes I'll go a week without watching news and I feel guilty about that a lot, but it's just like, you know what, if something's going to happen, it's going to happen.
AARON: I think the best way someone put that to me was anxiety is not activism.
MANDY: Yeah.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
AARON: Right, so just sitting around making yourself anxious and stressed out about everything and whatever emotion you have, making yourself feel bad doesn't improve the situation, it just also makes you feel bad. So it's okay to take a step back and do the self-care that you need to do because just feeling bad isn't fixing the problem either. So step back, find what you can do. Maybe there's stuff you can do here, in your immediate space that you can take action on.
MANDY: Exactly. And also, for drinking other people's problems away, – [overtalk]
[laughter]
AARON: You can’t drink other people’s – disassociating from other people's problems isn't effective.
[laughter]
MANDY: No. Let me tell you, I tried.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: That's such a great statement. Anxiety is not activism, but also the opposite is true. Joy is activism, rest is activism, thriving in a world that doesn't want you to thrive is an act of resistance and activism. Shout out, living a good life.
AARON: That's been a good conversation. I think that's easy to forget and I've seen it come up a couple times over the past couple years of what they have been of taking those moments for joy are really important. They can be radical in and of themselves.
MANDY: Keep a gratitude journal. There are so many great apps that every day before I go to sleep, I just write one sentence and it gives you an option even to have a picture. So you can snap a picture. Even if it's just like this candle, this candle is burning right here and it smells so good and it's making me happy today. So I'm grateful for the candle.
DAMIEN: Yeah, I'm up to approximately 2 years of daily journaling.
A buddy of mine got together. We built a daily journaling app based on Morning Pages from The Artist's Way. It's called Early Words. Shout out earlywords.io if you want to join and journal with me. But every day, 750 words. I do it first thing in the morning most days. Stream of consciousness. It has absolutely changed my life. It makes me feel good. It made me a better writer. Not because the writing is good, but because it's taught me to turn off the editor. Writing does have to be good for me to write it.
MANDY: Yeah. Big proponent of journaling.
AARON: I believe in it. I just don't remember to do it. But that's my own problem.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: Can we go back? Can we talk about witchcraft?
AARON: All right, I’m in.
DAMIEN: A friend of mine asked me oh my God, maybe it was a year ago. Maybe it was several months ago. I have no idea. She asked me like, “Do you actually believe in witchcraft? Those magic woo-woo stuff?” It's like, “Well, let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up in the morning, I make a potion with dried leaves that energizes me. At night, I make a different potion with dried flowers that calm me down and helps me sleep. My literal job is making sand think. Do I believe in witchcraft? I mean, yeah.” [chuckles]
MANDY: I mean, it's a full moon today so I have a whole jug of water out charging. I do. I literally have a jug of water on my deck charging for full moon water energy and I use it like, I'll put a little bit in my bath water. I'll put it a little bit of it – I'll cook with it. When I boil some water, put it in there. Does it help? I don't know, but it makes me feel better!
DAMIEN: Okay. Wait. It makes you feel better?
AARON: Sounds like it’s helping.
DAMIEN: Doesn’t that means it helps?
MANDY: Yeah. It does.
AARON: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I believe in the power of intention and ritual. There's a reason why humans developed rituals over time and sometimes, it's just for us to feel the right thing. But like, feelings are important?
DAMIEN: [laughs] But like, feelings are important.
AARON: I don’t want to say something controversial on the Greater Than Code podcast such as feelings are important. But they are. Sometimes, while you go through a certain step and it centers you, or you go through a certain set of steps and it makes you feel better, or it helps you process the anxiety you're feeling, or it's like, nope, I need to get centered in my five senses again so I can come back into my body and be here instead of going off on an anxiety spiral.
MANDY: Absolutely.
AARON: What is witchcraft? I actually love this from Terry Pratchett, one of my all-time favorite authors who does the Discworld series of novels, as a very specific approach to witchcraft, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, magic and whatever. But their daily thing is checking on all the people of the village and doing all the work that nobody wants to do. So it's like, how are the elderly doing? Do they need help with anything? Making sure and so takes their bath, making sure this person's animals are taken care of, making sure this sort of thing.
Sometimes, it's about appearances and going through the ritual to make sure the community is coming along. Sitting with the dead, all that kind of stuff. And that's witchcraft, that's the bread and butter of witchcraft is knowing the right herbs and poultices to put together, being the heart and soul of the community and being able to get people and helping each other, and move the resources around as needed and that sort of thing. So yeah, I believe in that. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Yeah. There was there's a great story and about Anton Mesmer, I learned this shout out to Mary Elizabeth Raines who taught me hypnosis. I learned this when she told me this story when I was doing my hypnosis training about Anton Mesmer, who's considered the [31:10] of hypnotism. He introduced hypnotism to the to the white people.
The word mesmerism and magnetic person, magnetic personality, all this comes from Mesmer. He had salons where people would hold onto metal rod that he had “magnetized” and be healed and fall out and screaming have spirit and all that. But Mesmer was very popular and very powerful and the king of France did not like this. The king of France put together a blue-ribbon commission. I don't know if he called it a blue-ribbon commission. Probably not because he spoke French, but put together a commission of scientists to discredit Mesmer. One of these scientists was Ben Franklin, by the way.
So they did a double-blind study. They did a proper double-blind test. They had Mesmer come out and magnetize a tree. That was a thing he did. He would magnetize trees, people would come out and hug the trees and then they'd be healed. So they did a study. They had to magnetize the tree and they brought people out who were sick and they said, “Hug that tree. That’s magnetized and you'll be healed.” Some of the trees Mesmer had magnetized, some he hadn't and it turns out it didn't matter. People were still healed and so, they all came to conclusion, “All right. See, Mesmer’s not doing anything. It's all placebo effect.”
Mesmer was run out of town and lived in exile for the rest of his days. Nobody bothered to ask why were the people healed? Everybody knows placebo effect is a real effect. Nobody's like, “How do we make it more effective? Why is it working this way? What do we do it? What do we do with that? How can we use that?”
MANDY: Yeah.
AARON: No, I think it's a super interesting thought. The placebo effect is a powerful and interesting concept overall. We did ourselves a disservice to not understand it.
DAMIEN: Yeah. To dismiss it as if it doesn't exist. Not only does it exist, it's increasing.
AARON: Hmm.
DAMIEN: Because people are getting more powerful.
MANDY: Yeah. I'm drinking this Zenify Stress Relief Drink.
[chuckles]
And does it work? I don't know, but it's delicious and you know what? It makes me happy. You know why? Because it's not alcohol.
[laughter]
So it's not having a negative effect on me. I'm not getting drunk and doing stupid things. Is it taking away? My stress? Eh. I mean, but I love it. I love it and it makes me feel good. It's a treat. It's a special drink. I have one a day and it's one of those things that instead of missing my case of White Claw Seltzer. I know, I know, I wasn't even a bougie – well, I wasn't even a good drinker. That's what made it a problem. [laughs]
AARON: This is far too affordable.
MANDY: I was not a discerning drinker, so. [laughs] No, I have my one bougie drink that I have and it makes me feel good. Does it relieve my stress? I don't know, but I don't care either.
DAMIEN: Yeah. If it works, it works.
One of the great things about placebos is they don't – well, I was going to say they don't have to be expensive, but sometimes it works better when they're expensive. [laughs]
MANDY: Moon water is free.
DAMIEN: Moon water is, yeah. But, well, it's not free actually. You had to put an effort and intention.
MANDY: True.
DAMIEN: And I think if you didn't, it wouldn't be as effective.
AARON: Effort and intention go a long way.
DAMIEN: [laughs] That's a root of magic, isn't it?
MANDY: Why can't I just get paid for effort and intention? [laughs]
AARON: I mean, if I put my effort and intention into this money tree.
[laughter]
I've always thought it would be nice if real world jobs worked like Animal Crossing. Like, “Oh, so I can just go pick some stuff up and then you're just going to give money and then we can just move on? Great.” “Now look, I dug up a bag of money. If I just plant this bag of money, I'll get more money. It's fine.” [laughs]
DAMIEN: I'm trying to bridge that gap. That's such a great question like when effort and intention is so well, literally magical, why does it seem to not have the impact we want in nonmagical environments, I'll call them?
AARON: Mm.
DAMIEN: I asked that question because I want to know what to do about that. I want to bring magic to nonmagical environment, to city council, to retail stores. I almost named an online retail store; I don't want to name it. [laughs] But it's a city council to corporate interactions. And there's no reason you can't. Corporations are people. Governments are people. I think requires dealing with them in individually in ways that we're not used to.
AARON: Yeah. It's a good question. You've got to be really thinking about…
MANDY: My wheels are turning.
AARON: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is effort and intention are always going to make the most effect for you because most of it is about aligning your thought processes. It's about taking the, I don't know, I'm just taking this into making the best decision I can to like, okay, if I can focus on this is my goal and my aim and what I'm after, suddenly all of the patterns emerge around that. Oh, now I'm ready for that opportunity, or oh, now this thing is working out, and oh, now this is what is working out because I've focused on my intentions and where I want to put my efforts.
I think there's room for these things in other groups. Gets back to what I was thinking about ritual, about how humans are tuned for ritual to tell themselves story. We’re tuned for storytelling and ritual and all this sort of thing. So I think there's room from a tech perspective, I'm thinking about what comes to mind quickly is incident management stuff. Sorry, I'm coming off of SRECon this week so, everything's going to be around that.
DAMIEN: Our apologies.
[laughter]
It’s all right.
AARON: It was fantastic, but it's a different podcast. [laughs] But think about that, right? When you're coming in and doing instant reports, it’s so powerful is it to set the intention of the meeting, or any meeting that you have and say, “We are here for this purpose. This is what we're looking to find. We're not looking to do –” Back when Chef had lots to say about this, they'd have those things like we're not here to determine what could have, or should have happened. We're here to find out what did and move the thing.
So it's all about setting the intent of that gathering and what outcomes you're after and it focuses the whole conversation can make that meeting more powerful because you've set the focus right off the bat. I think there's room for that other places, too.
DAMIEN: That's such a beautiful way of saying it. You described it as setting an attention.
AARON: Yeah.
S: Whereas, in corporate speak, I would describe it as setting an agenda.
AARON: Right, and an agenda is one thing. It's kind of like, “Hey, here's kind of the stuff we're going to do,” but to be like, “We are gathered for this purpose to [laughs] cover this thing.”
DAMIEN: No, no.
AARON: Right.
DAMIEN: Dearly beloved, dear colleague.
AARON: Right? Yeah, right.
DAMIEN: We are gathered here for this purpose.
AARON: Yeah. I mean, we say it this way in personal stuff, why don't we –? Like, it's useful. [laughs]
MANDY: It really is.
DAMIEN: Because how are you ever going to get something done if you don't know what you're there for?
AARON: Right.
DAMIEN: Well, you're going to get something done. If you don't have a destination, any road you take is fine.
AARON: If you don't have any intention set, it's a series of meetings that could have been emails.
[laughter]
And then maybe that's the power of it, in a nonmagical space, is forcing yourself to go through this thought process of why am I doing this? Why are we here? What do we want to accomplish? Can probably trim so much of the cruft from all of our meetings and engagements.
DAMIEN: That was my favorite sentence as a product manager: what is it you're trying to accomplish? [chuckles]
AARON: I say that a lot,
DAMIEN: But it is a very, very powerful question.
AARON: Especially when you have children asking to use dangerous tools.
[laughter]
What is it you're trying to accomplish? Maybe we don't need to bust out razor blades. [laughs]
DAMIEN: So from an SRE standpoint, when you get together for – what do you call that meeting? An incident review postmortem? Postmortem is a bit – [overtalk]
AARON: Yeah, yeah. Post-incident report. There's a handful of names for that reason, but post-incident review.
MANDY: Retrospective.
DAMIEN: Retrospective, yeah. So the question is, what is it you are trying to accomplish?
AARON: Right.
DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame.
AARON: And not blaming.
DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame so that I look good in my next performance review.
AARON: Well, that's what was so important about doing that because that's the shift we're, largely as an industry, trying to make. Finding a person to blame doesn't learn anything about what happened and will teach us nothing for next time.
So if we set the intention of like, we're trying to learn from this incident and how we can improve or what we can do better, or maybe there's nothing. Maybe this was just a fluke and let's find that out. That's what we're here to learn. But we're not here to point fingers, or find a root cause because root causes are for plants.
[laughter]
AARON: Again, that's a whole other podcast. [laughs]
MANDY: At the beginning of the pandemic, I owned zero plants. Now, I think I'm the proud plant mother of 20? [laughs]
DAMIEN: Wow.
AARON: That's amazing.
MANDY: I know.
AARON: My problem is I can't keep things alive.
MANDY: Well, mostly they're all thriving because I set the intention that I was not going to mess this up.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: There you go. Do you give them moon water?
MANDY: I do.
DAMIEN: Apparently, it's working.
MANDY: I do.
Do we want to do some reflections?
DAMIEN: Sure. Let's do it.
MANDY: I'll start us off.
With this conversation, we were just having about the intention and stuff. This is why I think everybody should journal, including CEOs and leaders. Get out a journal, what do you want, and then look back at some of the stuff. I don't it often, but I go back and I'm like, “Oh yeah.” Just reflecting on what you've written in the past and bringing that to the present can really help you put stock in all the things that you want and should be accomplishing.
DAMIEN: Yeah. This bringing magic into nonmagical environments and journaling is part of that. A shout out to journaling. Another plug for earlywords.io that I own. Come journal with me because it is a magical thing. It is a ritual I do daily. That clears my mind. That is a practice of the listening to myself. It is a practice of letting go and not controlling what's coming out.
Along with that and all the other sort of ways I know of being that I can call magic, I can call hypnotism, I can call NLP, I can call ontological coaching I've done a lot, bringing that into environments where I haven't because they're so useful there and we talked about some of the ways they are and so, we really confirmed more ways of doing that.
AARON: I think the things I'm thinking about after this conversation are ritual, intention, and reflection are the big things that are standing up. I think this pandemic, for instance, and how things have changed is because I've had just so much time to have to sit alone by myself and reflect on what's going on externally and internally. But yeah.
Anyway, just about setting intentions, of understanding the directions you want to go before going, making sure you're aligned with your goals, and you're not just accidentally wandering down paths that you don't want to be down and turning around and finding out your miserable 10 months later.
I think I've thought a lot about the power of even small rituals just to interrupt our standard thought processes and align ourselves with those kind of things. There's been a lot from basic health stuff of here are the rituals I can go through when I'm feeling anxious and I know they'll calm me down to writing in a journal, or directing a group to [laughs] let's align our thought processes. It can be super useful.
DAMIEN: Absolutely.
MANDY: Awesome.
Well, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we just had a panel only episode and I'd love to do more of these in the future. They're really cool. We didn't come to the show with much of an agenda and hopefully, you dear listener, appreciate it. If you would like to give us some feedback, we'd appreciate it. Tweet at us. Join our Slack.
AARON: Hire Mandy.
DAMIEN: Tell your friends.
MANDY: DM me. [chuckles] Tell your friends.
DAMIEN: Tell your enemies.
MANDY: Tell your enemies, too! [chuckles] We’ll see you all next week.
01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech
04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User
09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing)
23:15 - Working With ADHD
Reflections:
John: Being a super human.
Jacob: Forgetting how to mask.
Jamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code.
Jenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers!
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
JAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.
JACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers.
JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton.
Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr.
Welcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles]
JENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s.
[laughter]
JAMEY: We're so excited to have you.
JOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
JENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!”
[laughter]
JAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs]
JENNA: I wish I could take credit for that.
[laughter]
Bob is definitely the one responsible.
JAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it.
JENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde.
[laughter]
I also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling.
JAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes.
[laughter]
JENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything.
I'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them.
JAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career?
JENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life.
So I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me.
But I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change.
JAMEY: That's amazing.
JENNA: Thank you. [laughs]
JACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails.
[laughter]
As work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus?
JENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference.
I feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example.
She's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up.
But I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today.
I always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them.
So I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it.
JAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually.
[laughter]
It's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs]
JENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses.
JAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs]
JENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs]
JAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something.
[laughter]
So I'm so happy. [chuckles]
JENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles]
JOHN: Aw.
JAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs]
JENNA: Oh, thank you.
[laughter]
Big warm hugs. [laughs]
JOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else.
So do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for them?
JENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I’ve answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over.
Now, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is.
There have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation.
JAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening.
JENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold?
JAMEY: Mm.
JENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea.
I know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red.
JOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you’ve got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever.
JENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them.
JOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview?
JENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs]
So I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation.
JOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on?
JENNA: Oh, absolutely.
When I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders’ need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors’ needs.
And when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs]
JAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it.
JENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats?
JAMEY: Elaborate.
JACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs]
JENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about.
JAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs]
JENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job.
Cats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation.
So what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse.
So testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I’ve got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again.
Dogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things.
JOHN: Yeah.
JAMEY: I think that's really insightful.
JOHN: Yeah.
[laughter]
JAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person.
[laughter]
JACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree.
JENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste.
[laughter]
JOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.”
JENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she’ll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles]
JACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake.
[laughter]
JENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter.
For some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs]
JAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that.
JOHN: Yeah.
JENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you.
JACOB: Yeah.
JENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs]
JAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people.
[laughter]
JOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that?
JENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it.
[laughter]
Most of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again.
So I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those.
The most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing.
Also, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs]
So all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We’ve got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs]
JOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way.
JENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.”
So it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth.
JOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it’s the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy.
JENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still.
So there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different.
I guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs]
So let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don’t know.
[laughter]
It didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age.
Most people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term.
JACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life.
So when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense.
JENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs]
JACOB: Yeah, me too.
JENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs]
JAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel.
JENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face.
[laughter]
For those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4’ 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable.
[laughter]
But I can’t reach them any better than they can!
[laughter]
Sometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning.
[laughter]
JAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be.
That got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs]
JENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great.
[laughter]
Especially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.”
[laughter]
But I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay.
I've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way.
JAMEY: Definitely.
JOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be.
JENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces.
JAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back.
[laughter]
I did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults.
I think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently.
So I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it?
JENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits.
So finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate.
I know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge.
It is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different.
Like I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.”
I have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard.
So I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt.
JAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks.
JOHN: Yeah.
JENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right?
JACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly.
JENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child.
JACOB: Yeah, I know.
JENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now.
JAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think.
JOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that?
They said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that.
JENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don’t know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking.
But my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked.
One of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition.
I said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong.
JAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.”
[laughter]
JENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor.
JAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do.
[chuckles]
So I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare.
JENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations.
I think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I’m 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there.
No offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die.
JAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles]
JENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right?
JAMEY: Yeah. Totally.
JENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles]
JOHN: Yeah.
JAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff.
JENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty.
[laughter]
That whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs]
JAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think?
JOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term.
JACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that.
JAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show.
[chuckles]
JENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss.
All of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me.
If you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full.
JAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug?
JENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That’s my big plug. Support your testers!
[laughter]
JAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people.
[laughter]
JENNA: Yes!
[laughter]
JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great!
JOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful.
JENNA: Aw, thank you.
Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.
01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable!
07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony
10:35 - News & Social Media
18:54 - The Impact of AI
23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens
40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency
Reflections:
Casey & John: “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths.” – Nyota
Damien: You can be the expert. You can be the journalist. You can be the first mover/leader. Applying that conscientiously.
Nyota: Leaving breadcrumbs.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 275 of Greater Than Code. I'm Damien Burke and I'm here with John Sawers.
JOHN: Thanks, Damien. And I'm here with Casey Watts.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're all here with our guest today, Nyota Gordon.
Nyota is a technologist in cybersecurity and Army retiree with over 22 years of Active Federal Leadership Service. She is the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 a Cyber Resiliency Training Firm that thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness.
Welcome, Nyota! So glad to have you.
NYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.
CASEY: Yay! All right. Our first question—we warned you about this—what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
NYOTA: My superpower is to hear, pull out people's ideas, and make them more clear, more actionable, and more profitable.
DAMIEN: Ooh.
NYOTA: Yeah, that's one of my friends told me that.
And how did I get it? I'm a words person. So I listen to what people say, but I also listen to what they don't say.
CASEY: What they don't say.
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: Can you think of an example?
NYOTA: Like that. Like when you did that quiet thing you just did, I saw that mind blown emoji because there's a lot in unspoken. There's a lot in body language. There's a lot in silence. When the silence happens, there's a lot when someone changes the topic, like that stuff is a lot. [chuckles] So I listen and I acknowledge all of that. Maybe we all hear it, or don't hear it depending on how you're processing what I'm saying, but we don't always acknowledge it and respect it in other people,
DAMIEN: You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing.
[laughter]
Do you ever have an experience where things that are not said do not want to be heard?
NYOTA: Absolutely. But that's part of acknowledging and so, you can tell when people are like, “I do not want to talk about that.” So then I would do a gentle topic change and not a hard left all the time, because you don't want to make it all the way weird, but it may be like, “Oh, okay so you were talking about your hair, like you were saying something about your hair there.” I try to be very mindful because I will get in your business. Like, I will ask you a million questions. I'm very inquisitive and maybe that's one of my superpowers too, but I'm also aware and I feel like I'm respectful of people's space most times.
CASEY: I really like that in people when people notice a lot about me and they can call it out. When I was a kid, my family would call me blunt, not necessarily in a bad way, but I would just say whatever I'm thinking and not everyone likes it right away. But I really appreciate that kind of transparency, honesty, especially if I trust the person. That helps a lot, too.
NYOTA: I was just saying that to my mom, actually, I was like, “You know, mom, I feel like I need a different quality of friend,” and what I mean by that is my friends just let me wild out. Like I ask them anything, I say anything, but they don't kind of check me. They're like, “Well, is that right, Nyota?” Like, Tell me, why are you saying it like that?” But they just let me be like ah and I'm like, “Mom, I need to be checked.” Like I need a hard check sometimes. So now you're just letting me run wild so now I'm just seeing how wild I can get. Sometime I just want maybe like a little check, a little body check every now and then, but I try to be mindful when it comes to other people, though. It's the check I want is not always the check that other people want.
CASEY: Right, right.
DAMIEN: What is it like when you're being checked? What happens?
NYOTA: It's hard to come by these days so I'm not really sure [chuckles] when I'm getting my own, but I'll ask a question. I'll just kind of ask a question like, “Well, is that true?” people are like, “This world is falling apart,” and you know how people are because we are in a shaky space right now and I'm like, “But is that absolutely true for your life?” How is everything really infecting, impacting what have you being exposed to in your own life?
So as we have the conversation about COVID. COVID was one of my best years as far as learning about myself, connecting with people better and more intimately than I ever really have before and we're talking virtually. So things are going on in the world, but is it going on personally, or are you just watching the news and repeating what other people are saying?
JOHN: That's such a fascinating thing to do to interrupt that cycle of someone who's just riding along with something they’ve heard, or they're just getting caught up in the of that everything's going to hell and the world is in a terrible place. Certainly, there are terrible things going on, but that's such a great question to ask because it's not saying there's nothing bad going on. You're not trying to be toxically positive, but you're saying, “Let's get a clear view of that and look at what's actually in your life right now.”
NYOTA: That part, that part because people are like, nobody's looking for crazy Pollyanna, but sometimes people do need to kind of get back to are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?
DAMIEN: That's such a great way of framing it: are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: It reminds me of boundaries. The boundary, literally the definition of who I am and who I care about. It might include my family, my partner, me. It’s may be a gradient even. [chuckles] We can draw the boundary somewhere on that.
NYOTA: Yeah, and I think we also get to speak even more than boundaries about is it in harmony? Because I feel like there are going to be some levels that are big, like my feelings are heard, or I'm feeling like I just need to be by myself. But then there are these little supporting roles of what that is. I think it's as you see, some parts are up and some parts are down because sometimes when it comes to boundaries, it's a little challenging because sometimes there has to be this give and take, and your boundaries get to be a little bit more fluid when they have to engage with other people. It's those darn other people. [chuckles]
DAMIEN: But being conscientious and aware of how you do that. It's a big planet with a lot of people on it and if you go looking for tragedy, we're very well connected, we can find it all and you can internalize as much of it as you can take and that's bad. That is an unpleasant experience.
NYOTA: Yeah.
DAMIEN: And that's not to say that it's not happening out there and that's not to say that it's not tragic, but you get to decide if it's happening to you, or not.
NYOTA: Right.
DAMIEN: And that’s separate from things that are directly in our physical space, our locus of control, or inside of the boundaries that we set with ourselves and loved ones, et cetera.
NYOTA: Because it's so easy to – I say this sometimes, guilt is a hell of a drug because sometimes people are addicted to guilt, addicted to trauma, addicted to a good time and not even thinking of all the things that come with those different levels of addiction. So I think we get fed into this news and this narrative, like we were speaking of earlier a of everything's bad, this is a terrible place, everyone's going to hell. Whatever the narrative is the flavor of the moment and there's so many other things. It's a whole world, like you said. It's a whole world and I think the world is kind of exactly what we're looking for. When I was in the military, every town is exactly what you need it to be.
[laughter]
Because if you're looking for the club, you're looking for the party people in little small towns. But I could tell you where every library was. Don't call me nerdy because I am, but I don't care. All right. I could tell you where every library was. I could tell you where every place to eat. I could tell you all of those things, but then you'll ask me like, “Where's the club?” And I was like, “There's a club here?” Because that's not what I'm looking for. That's not the experience that I'm looking for. So I would dare say every place is exactly what you're looking for, what you want it, what you need it to be.
CASEY: We're talking about the news a little bit here and it reminds me of social media, like the addiction to news, the addiction to social media. In a way, it is an addiction. Like you keep going to it when you're bored, you just reach for it. That's the stimulus, that’s your dopamine.
I think of both of those, news and social media, as a cheap form of being connected to other humans. A bad, low quality, not a deep connection kind of thing. But what we all would thrive if we had more of is more connections to others, which like community, authentic relationships with people. But that's harder. Even if you know that and you say that's your goal, it takes more work to do that than to pick up Facebook app on your phone. I deleted it from my phone six months ago and I've been happier for it.
[laughter]
NYOTA: Like delete, delete? Like delete?
CASEY: Well, it is on my iPad in case I have to post a shirt design into a Facebook group. I'm not gone gone, but I'm basically gone and I know that I don't interact on it and it's boring. I don't post anything. I don't get any likes. I don't even want to like anyone's post and they'll say, “Oh, you're on.” I don't do anything. Like once every three months, I'll post a design.
NYOTA: Is that for every social media channel?
CASEY: I'm still on Twitter.
NYOTA: Twitter.
CASEY: I'm still on Twitter and LinkedIn kind of for business reasons. But if I could drop them, I think I would, too.
NYOTA: Did you say if you could?
CASEY: If I could drop them and not have business repercussions.
NYOTA: Mm.
DAMIEN: This sounds like a great idea to make more profitable.
NYOTA: [laughs] I'm thinking does a lot of your business come from –? I feel like LinkedIn is social, but.
CASEY: I wouldn't say that I get new business from these necessarily, but I do end up with clients and potential clients and people I've talked to before saying, “Ph, I saw that thing and now that I saw you wrote a blog post about doing surveys for an engineering org, now I want to talk to you.”
NYOTA: Mm, okay.
CASEY: Like that is pretty valuable and when I'm writing something like a blog post, I want to put that somewhere. But anyway, I am happier that I'm off of Facebook and Instagram, which I wasn't getting as much value out of. Other than connection to people, the shallow connection to people and instead I switched to messaging people. I have text message threads and group chats and those are much more intimate, much more stuff being shared, more connection to those individuals.
NYOTA: I agree with that. What about you John? Like what is your relationship with social media right now?
JOHN: So I've always been sort of arm’s length with Facebook. So it's been just like eh, I check in every week, maybe just sort of see. I scroll until I lose interest, which is 10 minutes the most and then those are my updates. That's all I see and then occasionally, I'll post a meme, or something. I don't really do a lot there. Usually, I keep it around just for the people that I'm in touch with that are only on Facebook and I only have connection to them.
But you bring up an interesting point about there's a positive and a negative to being able to filter your social media. For example, with Reddit and Twitter, you only see the stuff for people you're following and/or the subreddits that you're subscribed to. So you can very much customize that experience into something that isn't full of most of the crap people experience on Twitter, or Reddit.
So there's that positive there because you can craft a world that's maybe it's all kitten pictures, maybe whatever, and post about programming, whatever it is. But you do have the problem of filter bubbles so that if you are in something that's a little bit more controversial, you do end up with that echo chamber effect and lots of people jumping in, or if you're in a sub that's interesting to you, that's also very contentious and the threads go off the rails all the time, but you can control that. You can see like, “Well, no, get it out of here. I don't need to deal with that static.”
I rely on that a lot to sort of focus in on what I'm using it for, whether it's keeping up with specific friends, or specific topics and then trying to filter out as much of the things I don't want as possible.
NYOTA: Is Facebook's your only social media channel?
JOHN: No, I'm on Twitter. I don't usually post a lot, usually just retweet stuff and read it.
NYOTA: That's kind of lame a little bit. I'm not saying, I’m just saying that your social media choices –
[laughter]
DAMIEN: Wow.
NYOTA: But I think you're are right, though. I'm a lot better off for it because I did find myself going down a social media rabbit. It was easy for me to cut off the news. I actually stopped watching the news in 2007 when I became an officer. They were like, “As an officer, you have to watch the news. You have to be aware of what's going on in the world,” and I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then I walked away from that lady and I was like, “I'm not watching the news anymore.”
DAMIEN: Hmm.
NYOTA: Because I felt like she was trying to trick me in some kind of a way, but you get what you need. If it's something that I need to know, it comes to me it. It comes to me like. Believe me, it'll come to you. She was a little bit too adamant about what I needed and how the news was a part of it. It just felt a little not right and so, I actually stopped.
DAMIEN: The news is a very specific thing like that word, the news [chuckles] Is anything new about it? [chuckles] The news is a group of organizations, a group of media organizations that are all very much alike. The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC. These are all organizations that operate the same, they cover the same things, and they do them in largely the same way along of course, some political partisan differences. But it's not new and for most people, it does not serve them, or inform them.
NYOTA: Yeah. It's very divisive.
DAMIEN: I used to get my news from Jay Leno. [laughter] That was better than CNN more and funnier, too.
NYOTA: That part. [laughs] I think it's just interesting how it's such a whole world with a whole bunch of people with various levels of experiencing, bumping into each other, and like you're saying, this is what everyone's reporting on. Nothing else happens? Nothing good happens anywhere else?
CASEY: Yeah.
NYOTA: Nothing? See, that's not true.
[laughter]
Like that can't be real for me and so, I'm not going to be able to include that in where I spend my time.
JOHN: Yeah. I used to have NPR on in the car whenever I was in the car, I was like, “Oh, it'll keep me inform,” blah, blah, blah. But eventually, I was like, “You know what? They still talk about the same crap. They're just from a perspective I agree with slightly more.” But even when they do human interest stuff, or stuff that isn't about a war, or some sort of crisis in Washington, it's still so negatively biased. Even the stuff that's theoretically positive, it still has this weird you should be concerned about this vibe to it and eventually, I was realizing that there's no room for that in my life.
DAMIEN: Yeah. We talk about how harmed full Facebook is to society and individuals. But this is not again, new. [chuckles] Facebook optimizes for engagement, which causes harm as a byproduct. It's the AI-fication of what media has been doing ever since there has been mass media.
NYOTA: Yeah. It's interesting because there was a moment in there. So I even got on social media because I was always gone. I lived wherever I lived while I was in the military and so, it was a way to let my family know, “Okay, I'm here. Look, I ate this.” [chuckles] All of those things. So there was a part where Facebook made a drastic turn on my feed and I was like, “Ohm this is so bad!” And then I was like, “Okay, wait, wait. Who's bad? Who is this coming from?”
So I cleaned up my whole Facebook feed and then it became a happy place again and then now where it is, it's a place where it's only seven people out of the thousand Facebook friends I have. I was like, “Okay, well that's not it either. That's not it.” So it's just interesting how AI has such a impact of what we listen to, or what we talk about.
So now it's these days I'm like new shoes, new shoes, new shoes. Because I want that to come up on my – I don't even – you know what I'm saying? Because I know that you're listening, so I'll get it later. So now I almost treat it like an administrative assistant so I can look it up later.
[laughter]
CASEY: Hilarious.
NYOTA: Yeah.
JOHN: Please target some ads around shoes to me.
NYOTA: I did. Yeah, because they're listening.
CASEY: And it works, doesn't it? I know.
NYOTA: Yes.
CASEY: I know it works.
NYOTA: Yes.
CASEY: That still blows some people's minds. If you could say the name of a product and you'll see it the next day. If you have your ads on, it's listening and your phone is listening. Everyone’s phone is listening.
NYOTA: Yes, yes. Because you're looking at something like – I don't even really listen to the music. What is it? Spotify! And then it's like, you're listening to Spotify, but why is my mic on? You want to hear me sing the song? Why does my mic have to be on? I don't understand that part. Like why? They'll be like, “Oh, she has a great voice on her.” Is that why you're listening?
[laughter]
Why are you listening? I don't understand that part. So I don’t know.
DAMIEN: There’s a deal coming your way.
NYOTA: [laughs] Come on. Let's go.
JOHN: I assume the public reason for it is so that you can do voice searches and like, “Hey, play me some more Rebecca Black,” or whatever. But who knows what else they're doing with it once you've got it turned on, right? It could be whatever.
DAMIEN: Actually listening in on people is not the technically most effective way of getting those results. If you say the brand name of a shoe, it's probably because the people around you are talking about it and what do they search on Google? What ads have they seen? It's easier to say, “Oh, you're in the room with these people who are interested in these things,” or “You're in conversation with these people who are interested in these things. Let me show you these things without honing through massive amounts of audio data.”
CASEY: Yeah. Both are possible and that one's easier. I'm sure they both happen and at what frequency, that's hard to study from beyond outside, but we know it's all possible and we know it's happening.
If this is news to anyone listening, you can look this up. There are a million articles about it and they explain why and how, and some people did some empirical tests and I don't have any handy, but I've read it over and over and over on the internet and the internet's always right.
NYOTA: That's what I heard [laughs] and not from the news.
CASEY: I have these Google Home Minis in my house and all of them, the mics are off. So if ever the power cable gets jingled, it says, ‘Just so you know, the mic's off and I have to say it for a really long time. This is a very long recorded message. So that you'll want to turn your mic back on,” and it says that. Can you believe it?
[laughter]
DAMIEN: That's not the actual text of the message, right? I have to check.
NYOTA: These little home speakers are cool in all the worst ways, but the best ways, too. So my Alexa, I'll be asking her whatever and then I'll say, “Thank you, Alexa,” and she'll say, “You're very, very, very, very welcome,” like she's singing, yes. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Wow. You people have corporate spying devices in your homes. It’s unbelievable.
NYOTA: But you have one, too. It's just your phone. So we all have them.
DAMIEN: Yeah. She promises me she doesn't listen unless I ask.
NYOTA: That's what mine said!
CASEY: Mine said it!
[laughter]
I don’t trust them either. I don't even trust that the mic off necessarily works. Part of me is tempted to go in and solder the mic off. I never want the speakers to have the mic. I will not use that feature at my house. But I do want speakers in every room enough that I'm willing to take the risk of the switch not working.
NYOTA: Yeah. At this point, I think I've just big brothers watching, or at least listening, [chuckles] Big brother really like, “Oh, I need to turn that off. She's talking about the big brother. We’ll blush over here.” [laughs]
CASEY: I want to go back to something I was thinking on the news. Sometimes I hear, or I know about things in the world because I'm someone who's in the world sometimes and the topics I want to hear in the news don't always come up. Like, DC Rank the Vote is happening and there was eventually an article about it and another article. I wrote one, eventually. Anyone can be a freelance journalist. So if the news isn't covering stuff you want it to.
NYOTA: I like that.
CASEY: You can literally write the news, too.
NYOTA: Mm.
CASEY: They might even pay you for it.
DAMIEN: [chuckles] You can write the news, too. Say it again, Casey.
CASEY: You can write the news, too.
There's a really cool freelance journalism guide, that I'll put in the show notes, by someone in D.C. Chelsea Cirruzzo, I think. I didn't pronounce check that, but she wrote an awesome guide and it led me to getting an article published in Greater Greater Washington, a D.C. publication about ranked choice voting. I was like, “Why is no one talking about this? It's happening here. It's a big problem.” So I wrote about it. Other people write about it, too and they have since then, but you can be the change you want in the world. You can. Journalism is not as guarded and gated as it might seem.
NYOTA: That's so interesting because I think what's interesting is we know that. We know that we can contribute, we know that we can write, but then you're like, “Wait, I can contribute! I can write!”
CASEY: Mm.
NYOTA: So I think that’s, thank you for that reminder.
CASEY: Yeah. But the how is hard and without a guide like Chelsea's, I'm not sure I would have broken in to do it. I needed her to go through it and tell me this is the process, here's the person in the org, what they do, what they expect and how you can make it easy for them, and you need the pitch to have this and that, has to be timely and like –. All that made sense. I'm like, “Oh sure, sure, sure.” But I couldn't have come up with that on my own, no way.
NYOTA: But she bundled it together like that.
CASEY: Yeah.
DAMIEN: I would have never imagined that's a thing you can do because that's an entire degree program. That's a post-graduate degree program, if you'd like, and I see people who've been doing this for 20 years and do it poorly and they seem like smart people. [chuckles] So what makes me think I could do it?
NYOTA: Because we can do whatever we want.
CASEY: I mean, these publications do have editors and it's their job to help make the quality, at least meet the low bar at minimum that the publication expects. But if you are really nerded out on ranked choice voting, or something, you might be the local expert. If you're thinking about writing an article, you might be the best person to do it actually.
NYOTA: Mm, that's good. That's the quota right there.
CASEY: So what are you nerding out about lately? Anyone listening to this, think about that to yourself and is there an article about it you can just share? I like that. I don't have to write every article ever. If not, you can think about writing it.
NYOTA: I like that.
DAMIEN: And what strikes me is like where the bar is for local expert. Like I believe a 100% that you're the local expert on ranked choice voting because I know enough about ranked choice voting to know that people don't understand it. [chuckles]
CASEY: Yeah.
And after I wrote the article, I found a group of people and so, now there's like 10 of us at this level where we get it and we're advocating for it. But I'm one of the top 10 at that point still, sure. And there are details of it that I know, details other people know that I don't know, and we're all specialists in different nuanced details and together we're stronger and that's a community, too. It's been a lot of fun advocating for that in D.C.
JOHN: That's awesome.
NYOTA: It's interesting the visual that I'm getting in my head, like you're over here dancing by yourself and then you back up and they're like, “Oh shoot. Other people are dancing to this same song,” and then you look and you'd be like, “Look, y'all, we're all dancing,” but you're still the lead dancer and they're the backup.
[laughter]
I don't know why I got that visual.
CASEY: I like this image.
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: I want to give the other organizers some credit. I think they're the lead. But I found them eventually. I couldn't have found them if I didn't write the article probably. I looked it up. I Googled it once, or twice. They have a website, but I don't know, it didn't come up for me right away, or it did, but I didn't know how to contact them and getting into breaking into that community is its own barrier.
NYOTA: That's unfortunate. But you're the lead to me. I mean, you're Casey. I mean [laughter] they're okay.
CASEY: Thank you.
NYOTA: I mean they're okay for what they're doing, but they're not you, so. No shade on what they're doing.
CASEY: Sure.
JOHN: I just posted a link to a talk by Derek Sivers about how the first followers are actually more important than the first leader and it's a fantastic talk. It's pretty short, but really amusing and it makes such a fantastic point. Like Casey, you were out there, you posted the article and then all these other people show up. So now I've got this like group of 10 and then those people – you and they are all doing outreach and they are expanding that group of people that are up to speed on this stuff and are advocating for it. So there's this nucleus and it's expanding and expanding.
CASEY: Yeah, and each person we get, then they can bring in more people, too and it's a movement, it's growing. I think we'll have it soon. There's literally already a bill passed in D.C. It's passed a committee and now it's gone to the bigger committee, the whole process, but there's a real bill that's been passed some steps.
NYOTA: You might as well do a TEDx. I mean, you might as well.
JOHN: Yeah.
CASEY: Good idea. Yeah, yeah.
NYOTA: But they just let anybody do them. I have one. They just give them out. They're like, “Let Nyota do it.” “Okay. I'll just – let me do it.” You can do it. You have something to talk about, it’s the same. It's like the news. Why not you?
CASEY: Yeah.
NYOTA: You're already talking about it.
CASEY: True.
NYOTA: I mean, you get a TEDx, you get a TEDx.
[laughter]
CASEY: Look at this, Nyota inspiring us.
DAMIEN: I'm inspired. Why not me?
NYOTA: No, really.
DAMIEN: I'm serious. That is not sarcasm. I mean that very sincerely. I'm thinking about all the things I want. I'm going to call Casey later on and go, “Okay. You know how to bring ranked choice voting to a government. How are we going to bring it to another one?” And I think about all the other –
CASEY: Yeah.
DAMIEN: I'm actually trying to bring ranked choice voting to my neighborhood council. I pushed to an amendment to our bylaws, which has to be approved by another organization, which I can't seem to get ahold of. [laughs] But we're doing it and why shouldn't we be doing it? Why not us?
NYOTA: Why not?
CASEY: Yeah. Oh, I've got resources to share with you. We'll talk later, Damien.
JOHN: Well, that's also great because that again, is going to spread. Once the local organization is doing it, people start getting experience with it. They're like, “Oh yeah, we did it for this thing and it worked out great. Now I sort of understand how it works in practice. Why the heck aren't we doing it for the city council and for the governor?” And like, boom, boom, boom.
DAMIEN: Yeah. Ranked choice voting is interesting because as much as people don't understand it, it's really simple [chuckles] and I think overwhelmingly, people need experience with something to understand it.
CASEY: Yeah. Yeah.
DAMIEN: And we have a lot of experience with plurality voting in this country, in my country at least. We have almost none with ranked choice voting.
NYOTA: I think it's interesting how people get so excited about presidential elections and that sort of thing, but your life really happens at your local elections.
CASEY: So true.
NYOTA: Your quality of life is your local elections, like you're talking about these roads being trashed. Well, that's at the local. Biden and Kamala, they have nothing to do with those potholes all along this road. I think so people miss that. You're like, “Those elections are great. Presidential election, awesome.” But your local elections? Those are what matter for where you live and I'm like, “Why are people missing that?”
CASEY: Yeah.
DAMIEN: I think it goes back to the news.
CASEY: Sure. That's a part.
NYOTA: Darn you, news. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Right, because national news is leveraged.
NYOTA: Mm.
DAMIEN: The national broadcast is made once and broadcast to 300 million people in the country. Local news does not have that leverage.
CASEY: True.
NYOTA: Mm. They need to get their social media presence together then because people are listening to Instagram.
CASEY: I'm thinking about everyone's mental model of how change happens, too and I don't think a lot of people have a very developed mental model of what it takes to make change happen.
I do a workshop on this actually and one of the examples I use is for gay marriage in the US. You can see the graph; you can look it up. We'll include in the show notes, a picture of gay marriage over time and it's like one’s place, one’s at another place, like very small amount. Just maybe not even states like counties, or some lower level, a little bit of traction, a little bit of traction, a little traction. Eventually, it's so popular that it just spikes and it's a national thing.
But along the way, you might look here from the news that when it became a national thing, that's the first time, that's the first thing you heard about it. But along the way, there was all these little steps. So many little steps, so many groups advocating for it, and the change happened over time.
I also think about the curve of adoption. It's a bell curve. For the iPhone, for example, some people got it really early and they were really into this thing. Like PalmPilots were really the earlier edge of smart devices. Some people had that; they're really nerdy.
Some people are still holding out on the other end of the bell curve. Like my mom's best friend, she still has a flip phone and she doesn't have any interest in a smartphone. I don't blame her. She doesn't need it. But she's the lagger, the very far end lagger of on this model and to get change to happen, you’ve got to start on whoever is going to adopt it sooner and actually like get them involved. Like the smaller states, the smaller counties that are going to support gay marriage or whatever the issue is, get them to do it and then over time you can get more of the bell curve.
But a lot of people think change happens when you get the national change all of a sudden, but there's so much earlier than that. So, so, so much. Like years. 30, 40, 50, a 100 years sometimes. [chuckles]
NYOTA: Yeah. This is the dance that John was talking about that he posted about this.
CASEY: The first follower, yeah.
NYOTA: Yeah, first followers. But you get to be the first leader if you allow it. If you really want change like you're saying. Instead of looking for someone to follow, [chuckles] we get to decide how we want to live.
DAMIEN: Yeah. This seems true at work. If there's a cultural norm you don't like, you can change it by getting your allies on board and aware of it, socializing it and more and more people and gradually over time and eventually, that thing's not happening anymore.
Like, I don't know. An example is eating at your desk over lunch. Not the best social norm. I don't want that at places I work. I want people to take a break, rest, and be better off afterwards. But you can get it to happen gradually by getting more people to go to lunch room, or go out of the office and you can change the culture in the office with enough dedication and time if you put your mind it.
NYOTA: Yeah. But what we don't get to do is complain about it. Right? [chuckles]
CASEY: Mm.
Whenever I have some kind of conflict, I think about do I want to accept it and stop complaining, or do something about it?
NYOTA: Mm.
CASEY: Or I guess the third option is neither and then I'm just frustrated. I don't like to choose that one if I can ever avoid it. [chuckles] Do something, figure out that I can do something like work on it, or accept it, which is kind of giving up. But you can't do every change you ever think of.
NYOTA: No.
CASEY: It's not really giving up. Acceptance does not mean giving up, but it does mean you can put your mind down and focus on other stuff.
NYOTA: Yeah. That's triage. That's what that is. [laughs]
CASEY: Triage. Yeah, yeah.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: That third option is really important because I choose that a lot. It's important to know that and acknowledge it. [chuckles] It's like, oh no, I've chosen to be frustrated. Okay.
NYOTA: Yeah. Good.
CASEY: And you can, yeah. Sometimes when I choose to be frustrated, it’s that I'm still working on it. I'm working on figuring out if I can do anything, or not. I don't know yet.
DAMIEN: For me, it's I'm not willing to do, or figure out what it is to do, but I'm also not yet willing to accept it so I just shouldn't to be frustrated.
CASEY: Sure, yeah, yeah.
DAMIEN: And the frustration. If I acknowledge that and recognize that, the frustration can better lead me to go, “Okay, no.” Making the change stinks. But [chuckles] the frustration is worse and lasts longer, so.
NYOTA: And then you start speaking from your frustration, which is even worse [laughs] and then it bleeds over.
CASEY: Not effective.
NYOTA: Yeah, it bleeds over into other things and because now you're saying stuff like, “See, this is what I'm talking about.”
[laughter]
No, I don’t. No, I don't see what you’re – no. Are we talking about the same thing? Because now you're just frustrated all over the place.
CASEY: Yeah.
[laughter]
NYOTA: What are you talking about again? Are you talking about work?
CASEY: When someone's in that situation, I have to ask them, “Would you like to be effective at this?”
DAMIEN: Ooh.
[laughter]
NYOTA: Oh, that's a shank.
[laughter]
CASEY: They might not want to be. They might just want to vent. That's fine. It helps me set my standards, too. Like, do they want support, or do they want to vent?
NYOTA: I'm going to write that down.
CASEY: I mean, it sounds pointy. Here's my blunt side showing. I meant it. You can answer yes, or no. It’s why it's a question. I'm not going to give you obvious answer question. I expect one.
NYOTA: Yeah. That's good right there because I'm just getting to the part where I'm like, “Do you want me to help, or you just want me to listen?” Because I'll be like, “Oh, I know the answer to this!” And they'll be like, “Oh, I don't. You always trying to help!” First of all, stop talking to me then.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: Can you tell my friends that?
NYOTA: Right?
CASEY: Yeah.
NYOTA: Like don't come to me because I just want to help. I’ve got a solution and if you don't want a solution, don't talk to me.
CASEY: Sure, sure. That's the kind of support you're offering.
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: You're offering that support and if they want it, great. If they don't, sounds like you're setting the boundary. Good.
NYOTA: Right, right. Oh, I don't have a – no, I have no problems setting a boundary. Yeah, no problems because the thing is this is your third time. Like at some point, you need to either want to do something, or quit talking to me about this.
CASEY: Yeah.
NYOTA: Like that part.
CASEY: I'm pretty patient supporting friends like that, but there is a limit to the patience. Yeah, three. That sounds like pretty good. I might even go to six for some people before I start telling them no.
NYOTA: Mm.
CASEY: [laughs] I mean, “You have to do something, or complain to someone else.”
NYOTA: Yeah. Like, are you going to do something – are we still talking about this like?
CASEY: Yeah. Some people need the support, but it's not necessarily me they're going to get it from because I don't have that much energy and time to put toward that.
NYOTA: Yeah. I just think that's important to, but my friends know that already. Like, don't talk to me about your allergies, or don't talk to me about your fitness, or you can't fit your clothes. For me, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit them. I won't allow myself to do that.
CASEY: Some people do.
NYOTA: Yeah, so – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: I'm sorry. Buy clothes you can't fit?
NYOTA: No, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit my old ones.
DAMIEN: Ah, okay.
NYOTA: Right.
DAMIEN: I know that one.
NYOTA: I only buy new clothes because I want new clothes.
DAMIEN: Mm.
NYOTA: I put that around myself like, it's not because I don't want to go outside and walk, or you know. But then I don't allow myself to get too thin in the other direction either, because that means I'm doing something that's probably not that healthy, like not eating real food. I will just eat potato chips and that's it. [chuckles]
So I have to – like, if it's too far to the left, or to the right, then I know that I'm doing something that's not healthy. I’ve got to reel myself in. I don't have any other checkers. I'm my own self-checker. I don't have a spouse that's going to be like, “Hmm, those jeans look a little snug.” [chuckles] I don't have it. [laughs] It's just – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Well, what I'm hearing, though is it's going to be, you set a high bar for checking people. So for somebody to check you, they're going to have to be really insightful and not candy-coated.
NYOTA: I don't like candy.
CASEY: Yeah.
[laughter]
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: Like direct.
NYOTA: Yeah, because I don't need a bunch of like, “Oh, Nyota. How are you today?!” You don't really have to be like, “Oh, so I heard what you said about that.” I don't think that – that's not right, or however the check comes, like however it comes.
CASEY: Yeah.
NYOTA: But I want that because I know I'm not right about everything. I know that and I don't pretend to be all-knowing. I just want somebody to kind of reel me in sometimes like reel me in. Please reel me in.
[laughter]
Because I'll just keep – I'm a habitual line stepper. You know what I'm saying because now I'm just going to keep on seeing what you're going to let me slide with. Even as a kid, my mom was like, “You're always everywhere.” Like, “You're always – like, “We could never find –” I was the kid that why they came out with those harnesses for kids.
[laughter]
That's –
CASEY: What an image.
NYOTA: Yeah. I'm that kid because I just want to see, I want to go look, I want to go what's over here. Like what's around. Are you going to let me slide? Are you going to let me say that one? What else you’re going to let me slide with? It's that so that's why they created those harnesses for kids like me. [chuckles]
DAMIEN: Your bio says your firm thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. What's the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness?
JOHN: I was just going to ask that. I want to know!
NYOTA: I think it's resiliency.
DAMIEN: Mm?
NYOTA: Yeah. So cybersecurity is that resiliency within organizations and then that wellness of people is that resiliency that's within humans. When those two come together, it's a healthier—I can't say fully healthy. It's a healthier work environment because when we get to show up to work healthy, resilient, drinking water, getting rest, being able to have emotional intelligence, social intelligence; all of those things are what I count as being resilient. And then when you can show up to work that way, then you're not showing up to negatively impact the network because you're not focused. You're not paying attention. You're clicking on every link because it looked like it – it seemed fine. But had you been like you had one moment of awareness to pause, you would see oh, this is not right. When I put my mouse over that, I see that the link at the bottom is not where I'm supposed to be going. So that place is resiliency at work.
DAMIEN: That is an extremely advanced view of security, maybe it's from your time as an officer, but the general view of security is it's this wall you put up and you make the wall really secure, you make the wall really strong and really tall, and that way you keep everything out. It's like, well, no. Anybody who has gone to office training school knows about defense in depth.
NYOTA: Right.
DAMIEN: Knows you can't maintain any particular perimeter indefinitely. The French found that out to much of their chagrin. [laughs]
NYOTA: Oopsie.
DAMIEN: That's a Emmanuel line reference. That's not news.
[laughter]
To go all the way to like – and I see where you're going with this. Phishing emails don't work on people who are calm and relaxed when nothing's urgent.
NYOTA: Yes.
DAMIEN: Where they can go, where they can stop and think, and have that wherewithal and that energy and that reserve.
NYOTA: Right, even at home. Especially how all of these scams are on the rise, Navy, federal, IRS, all kinds of people. If you're just one moment aware, you'd be like, “Wait, have I ever engaged my bank in this way?”
DAMIEN: Hm mm.
NYOTA: Like ever? Have they ever called me and asked me for my six digit? They called me and I didn't call them? Like, I just think if you just take a breath and then think part of being resilient is being able to take more breaths.
DAMIEN: Wow. Yeah. Wow.
CASEY: Ooh, I like that line.
NYOTA: Yeah. We know that one of the biggest vulnerability to cybersecurity posture of anything that happens is people because we are normally that vulnerability, we're normally that weakness in the network because we are human. So anything that we get to do to reinforce ourselves, guard ourselves up, it's always going to have a positive second, third, fourth order of effects.
DAMIEN: How does upper management react to that when you come in and say, “We're going to improve your cybersecurity, give your employees more days off”?
NYOTA: So I'm actually new having this conversation within leadership, but they already have leadership corporations, they already have this structure in place. Just haven't heard anyone tie it together specifically to their cybersecurity posture.
So there's already a lot of wellness initiatives, you can talk to counselors. I think we already have these initiatives in place, but they're just kind of ethereal, they're kind of out here, but to say, “Now tie that not just to our bottom line, because employees are less willing to have turnover, but let's tie it to the security of the network because our employees are aware and they're more vigilant.” So it's just kind of helping them to see the work that we're already doing within corporations. We get to laser focus that into a place.
CASEY: Hmm. I like it that this gives way to measuring the outcome of those programs, too. You can correlate it, too.
NYOTA: Yeah, instead of like, “Oh, we're happy at work. We're skipping and holding hands down the hallway.” Well, that may not necessarily be what you want, but you do want less infractions on the network. More opportunities to be successful but not having to spend so many manhours undoing cybersecurity risk.
CASEY: I want to zoom out. I want to go meta with you. You're helping them become more resilient. How do you make sure your changes there are resilient? When you leave, they persist? You can Mary Poppins out and they're still the way they were before you arrive.
NYOTA: Mm, that's a good question. So during the time that we work together, they also buy a bundle of coaching. They have opportunity to come back for where I can do, like, “Hey, y'all it's time for the refresh,” and not in a lame way. I'm actually creating on workshops now and it involves coloring books. Because when we were in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the places we colored, and I just feel like coloring saves lives and when I'm saying people, I'm talking about mine, because it is very calming and not those crazy ones that are really small and you have to have a pen. So I'm talking about a 5th-grade coloring book with big pictures where it's relaxing and you're talking amongst your peers. It involves that.
Setting them up with skills to be able to well, if you do nothing else, make sure you're playing the gratitude game in the mornings. What is the gratitude game? I play this game with myself. Every morning when I wake up, I say three things that I'm grateful for, but it can't be anything that I've ever said ever before.
DAMIEN: Mm hm.
NYOTA: I play this game. It's always making you search for the gratitude, always looking for that shiny light. There's always a better today, a better tomorrow, and so, even if there's something as that and drink water, because there's a lot of things that happens when you're dehydrated. There's a lot of clarity that doesn't happen when you're thirsty and so, even if it's just those two things and reminding people, just those two things have even had an impact on my life. Do you see my skin popping? Do you?
[laughter]
I'm just saying. Water is your friend. [laughs] So just those, just kind of even a pop in, a retraining. Hey, remember. Remember sleep, remember relaxing, remember get up and walk around your cube, and the filter water is so much better. It tastes so much better than bottled water. I'm just, it's better. I'm holding up my filtered water. Picture here, I keep it at my desk while I work if I'm on a lot of calls in a row.
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: I can go through water.
NYOTA: And that's why you're alert. I don't think people understand that being dehydrated really makes you lethargic and you're like, “Are they talking? I see their mouth moving. I can't pay attention. What is happening. What is that?” And being dehydrated is not good. Don't do that. Just take a little sip of water. We’re talking about water, just take a little sip of your water. Go get some water. [chuckles] If you're listening, get some water. [laughs]
CASEY: Reminders help. I'm going to post one of my favorite Twitter accounts, @selfcare_tech.
NYOTA: Ooh. Please.
CASEY: And they do a water reminder probably every day. Something like that. So I'll just be on Twitter and I'm like, “Oh yeah. Thanks.”
DAMIEN: [laughs] See, we can turn social media even to our good.
CASEY: Yeah. We can find some benefit.
NYOTA: But we get to decide and I think that's another thing that people don't. Like, they negate the fact that you get to decide. You get to decide where your life is, or isn't. You get to decide where you're going to accept, or not accept. You're going to decide if I work at this job, it's for my greater good, or not. We get to decide that. You've already created your life up to this point. So what does it look like later? We've created this life that we have and people take responsibility for that. Who do you get to be tomorrow? Who do you get to be today?
The thing is we always get what we ask for. So I've been asking for a bold community, I've been asking for a community that pushes and pulls me and here comes Casey, here comes Andrea, here comes you guys and I'm like, “I think that's so interesting.” We do get what we ask for you.
CASEY: It sounds like you're manifesting the world around you. I like that word.
NYOTA: Yeah.
CASEY: I don't even mean it in a metaphysical spiritual sense, but even just saying. Back when I was an engineering manager and I wanted to become a PM, I told people I wanted to be a product manager and by telling a lot of people, I got a lot more opportunities than I would have.
NYOTA: Yes.
CASEY: Telling people was very powerful for that.
NYOTA: And in my Christian Nyota way, that's what happens. Miracles come through people. So give people an opportunity to be your miracle.
JOHN: So we've come to the time on our show where we do reflections, which is each of us is going to talk about the things that struck us about this conversation, maybe the things will be thinking about afterwards, or the ideas we're going to take forward.
Casey, do you want to start us off?
CASEY: Yeah.
I wrote down a quote from Nyota. She said earlier in this episode, “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths,” and I just think that applies anywhere the word resilience applies and I want to meditate on that for over the week.
JOHN: I’m right there with you. That is really sinking in and applicable in so many ways. I love it.
DAMIEN: Yeah, and involving taking some breaths while you do that, huh?
[laughter]
I am really inspired by this conversation. The ideas of you can be the expert, you can be the journalist, you can be the first mover, the first leader. Realizing that in my life, I’m going to be looking for ways I want to apply that conscientiously. How to make sure not to try apply it everywhere. [laughs] But I get to decide. I get to decide who I am and who I'm going to be in this world and what this world is going to be like for me, so that's awesome.
NYOTA: That is good. I like that one, too.
And along those lines for me, it's like when Casey's like, “I mean, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, but when someone had created this bundle for you to be able to follow, I really heard when we do things, leave breadcrumbs so someone can come behind us and also be able to support. Because if you don't – leave some breadcrumbs.
So I thought that was – she was like, “I knew these things but she had created this framework for you to be able to do it, too,” and I heard leave some breadcrumbs. So I really like that.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
John, do you have a reflection for us?
JOHN: No, I mean, really, it's the same as Casey's. [laughs] Yeah, that statement is really going to sit with me for a while. I like it a lot.
CASEY: I'm going to make a t-shirt of it.
NYOTA: [laughs] I love a good t-shirt.
DAMIEN: Well, Nyota. Thank you so much for joining us today.
NYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be amongst such caring, intelligent, thoughtful people and so, I appreciate you all for having me.
Special Guest: Nyota Gordon.
Sponsored By:
02:03 - Arpit’s Superpower: Tenacity
05:03 - Managing People vs Servers
Reflections:
John: Meeting minutes and clear communication is a form of active listening.
Mae: Thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime.
Arpit: Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr
Mandy: Tenacity.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale.
MAE: Also here with us is our show creator, Mandy Moore.
MANDY: Thanks, Mae! I’m Mandy and today, I’m here with our guest, Arpit Mohan.
From unscrewing his childhood Tamagotchi to taking apart a computer, Arpit has always tinkered with technology. But while working on a mobile game that went viral seemingly overnight, Arpit realized he was on to something big: a way to put customizable app tools directly into developers’ hands. So he and two co-founders created Appsmith, an open-source project built by engineers for engineers. With Appsmith, Arpit can do what he loves most: using technology to help people accomplish more.
Welcome to the show, Arpit.
ARPIT: Thank you so much for having me. Super glad.
MANDY: We like to kick off the show by asking all of our guests: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
ARPIT: One of my superpowers is I am tenacious. I am really, really tenacious. You give me a problem to work on, you give me something, especially a measurable problem to work on, and I will ensure that it'll get done. I'll keep thinking about it. I'll keep chipping away at it. At some point of time, it'll get done.
Maybe because I'm a little competitive by nature and to me, it seems that most problems, or most things are accomplishable if you just kind of stick with the problem, you continue to work on it, and that's what I've done right from childhood.
So yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've always excelled at.
JOHN: You say that you've always had that from childhood. When did you realize that that was the thing that you were doing that was different from maybe how other people approach problems?
ARPIT: Well, once I graduated from university from my undergrad, that's when I started up our first company back in 2010 and while every startup founder hopes and wishes that you only have to ever start up once in your life and that's the one startup that becomes a unicorn, a billion-dollar company, gives you the exit so you can retire on a beach. Unfortunately, that did not pan out for us.
While the first startup was a mild success, lukewarm success, I would call it at best, me and my other co-founder, we kind of kept at it for about 12 years now and so, Appsmith is actually officially the third company that we are working on and maybe I think the 30th, or 40th product. I just lost count of number of products that we've built, we've launched, we've failed at miserably for a large part of them and seen a lot of success with some of them like the mobile game in the past.
So a lot of startup founders tend to start up once, or twice and then give up and maybe move on to a corporate job. But that's when I realized that if you keep at something, if you keep continue to do something, you start to fractured luck and at some point, lady luck does smile at you. So I think just the startup journey is when I realize that tenacity is something that a lot of people lack.
MAE: I love it. Arpit, I keep – are you familiar with Tenacious D?
Yeah, absolutely. Tenacious D, a fantastic movie. Love the music especially at the end where he kind of sings with the devil, I think. It's a really, really good song.
[laughter]
Although, I wouldn't probably tattoo on myself, but yeah, I love the movie and the actor. Jack Black, right?
MAE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kept wanting to call you Tenacious A so, that's your name for me now.
ARPIT: Absolutely.
MANDY: So Arpit, we invited you on the show today because you wanted to talk about managing people versus servers and I'm interested in this topic because, because I want to figure out what do you mean by that?
ARPIT: Yeah. So as engineers, there's always a lot of mind space and thought that goes into how we write, or manage a code, manage our infrastructure, and manage our server. But managing servers is actually the easy part of up because if a server does not work, or it's not to your liking, you can always reboot the server. You can get a different server and with AWS, or Azure, or any other cloud, it happens with the click of a button.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, people are much trickier. You can't just reboot a person and that's what actually makes managing people, working with people, leading people a much more interesting experience and it also is a lot of learning that happens with everybody that you work with because the same person evolves over time.
So even if I'm working with you, Mandy, over here, we may be working together for 5 years, but the Mandy of 5 years ago is a very different person from what she is today. An Ubuntu system 16.04, you keep it on for the next 30 years, that is exactly what you will have.
So the amount of learning that you have when you're managing a server is constant, or it plateaus up after a while. But the interesting part about people is that there's always something new to learn about your colleague, your partner, or just humans in general. That's what I find very, very interesting about the difference between servers and people and why they might be two slightly different sides of the coin.
But I think there is a lot to be learned, or a lot to be derived from engineering principles when we deal with people. For example, there's a lot of literature around how to manage a distributed system. A distributed system is nothing but a cluster of servers, or a lot of servers that form a cohesive unit and operate as one. So when you do a google.com search, you are actually hitting some large cluster of servers posted by Google, but is presented to you as a single Google search. All these servers are operating as a cohesive unit.
We can derive a lot of learnings from how a company, or engineers manage these large clusters of servers and how we can cohesively manage a large group of people to act as one towards a common goal, towards a common outcome, and that is something that I find very fascinating.
MAE: I agree completely. I love and am fascinated people. And I would add to your list of always new things to learn as also about one's self. Like we too are changing and/or most people don't have a good lock on exactly [chuckles] who they're, what they're doing. So a lot of constantly changing variables is super fun place to be.
Have you, Arpit, taken this analogy any steps further of like – and so, there's this system upgrade that we apply, or I don't know, have you explored any deeper into this analogy?
ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. This is something I've thought about a lot and something that I try to practice in our day-to-day job.
Appsmith is an open source project. We deal with a lot of people, a lot of contributors, and a lot of community users as well on a daily basis and we are globally distributed across the planet. So a lot of learnings that I've had as a distributed systems engineer, I've tried to apply it to Appsmith the project and to the work that we do on a day-to-day basis.
One of the immediate examples is that whenever you have a distributed system, a very important aspect of it is having a consistent language, or an interface where two microservices can talk to each other. So if I have a service, a microservice A and a microservice B, for them to communicate with each other, there is a predefined interface that is well defined. This applies to people as well, that whenever you are interacting with multiple other folks in the team, if you don't have a shared language, you don't have a shared understanding of the topic at hand, the problem at hand, that's when things start to go awry.
So one of the first things to actually do, whenever you start working with anybody for that matter, is establish a level, a consistent language and a consistent interface so that both the parties are always on the same page. They're always if I say X, you understand exactly what I mean and it’s not like you have a different version of X in your head as compared to what I have.
A lot of times, for humans especially, the illusion of communication is that it has happened and that's what I do whenever a new contributor, or a new person joins the team, that's the first thing that we kind of sit and do is, “Oh, what's our terminology. What's the level of understanding that we have with each other?” And we just spent the first few days, or weeks just establishing the shared level of understanding with anybody new in the team. It begins with something as basic as having a consistent language. So that's one of the principles.
MAE: I suspected that you are going to have some more detail on that.
[laughter]
I'm so glad I asked and honestly, I would love to hear the outline of how to translate distributed server management to very human focused, human serving management practices. This is super cool.
JOHN: Yeah. Actually, before we dive into that, there's one follow-up I'd love to get before we jump off is you have any techniques, or things that you do on a basis to verify that everyone's gotten onto that same page, that the two either individuals, or teams, or groups, or whatever have gotten to that point, or have maintained that sync on their understanding of what they're working on?
ARPIT: Yeah, actually, there are a few tactical things, or signals that you pick up on. The first is going back to the basis of all human knowledge, which is the written word. At the end of a particular discussion, or a meeting that you have with somebody, if you share the meeting notes, or minutes of the meeting with the other person. Immediately, the words that are used in the minutes are typically a translation of what the writer has understood, or what the writer is taking away.
If there are differences, or discrepancies in the keywords that are being used. For example, let's say, we are talking about an authentication system. In an authentication system, a user role, or a user policy in different systems might be interchangeably used. They might mean the same thing, or different things to you, or me, or whatever, but inherently, if wherever we are talking about roles—like in Google Drive, you have an editor role and a commentator role, and a viewer—versus a policy like a commenter policy, or a viewer policy.
So immediately, if the writer is using the word policy, then you know that oh, the keywords that are being used are not the same. That means we're not yet on the same page. That means the writer is probably thinking of something else. They may, or may not be on the same page. We don't know yet. You kind of have to dig deeper and be like, “Oh, why did you use the word policy? What did you actually understand when we talked about the roles when we were talking about?”
So the written word is the first thing that I would probably look out for.
JOHN: Hmm.
ARPIT: The other one is following up where you constantly have, again, it goes back a little bit with distributed systems.
So a TCP handshake, the HTTP protocol that we have, a TCP handshake, it's literally a handshake. So there's a SYN and then there's an ACK. The client establishes a connection and the server then acknowledges that the connection has happened.
During a conversation, you always try to get an acknowledgement from the other person that, did you understand what I just said, or am I making sense to you, or is this too complicated? So on and so forth. So you look for other signals like a head nod, a confused expression, wide eyes, or just a verbal confirmation that hey, am I making sense? Like right now, did this make sense to you guys?
JOHN: Yeah. It immediately struck me that you're talking about an active listening behavior there that's verifying that the right things are being communicated. But it also struck me that meeting minutes are a larger form of active listening for the meeting and not just for an individual set of exchanges and in between two people. Thinking about it that way is actually really helpful to me because it's something I'm practicing to get better at and lumping that meeting summary under that category makes it feel better to me as a thing that I can do.
ARPIT: Yeah. Meeting minutes are typically treated with a little bit of – are given, for lack of a better word, a very step treatment, step sisterly sort of treatment where it's just like, oh, this is what we talked about. But I think just if you go through a bunch of the past X meetings, you'll start to see your trend show up and overall, it represents the shared understanding of the entire group and how that understanding has evolved over a period of time. So we go back and read a lot of fast reviews just to see that oh, how have we evolved in our thought, or in our language.
MAE: Another one on the initial and maybe this is going to show up in some of your later examples. I apologize if [chuckles] that's the case, but one thing I've tried to adopt, or encourage to some success is a user manual. Even though a lot of people are still figuring themselves out, generally do have an awareness of here are some ticks I have, here are some things that I respond well to, when I hear this, it makes me think that. Those sorts of translations also can go a long way. So it's very similar to your suggestion, just instead of an interpretation of what just got said, a meta level of it.
ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's still the beauty of interacting with other people is that nobody gives you that user manual and with every person, it's an investigative exercise to figure your version of that person's user manual, or the persona that you are to me, like what me is to Arpit is very different from what me would be to her partner, or to her colleague, or to her parent, for example.
So everybody has very different user manuals of me, or of a person and they're very different persons and for everybody that you meet, it's literally an investigation. It's a detective investigation to figure this person out and that's why I absolutely love meeting new people because it presents a new challenge. It presents like oh, what do I know of this person, or what side of this person do I know of, or are being presented to, and how can I deeper that understanding of this persona, or this person?
JOHN: Yeah. That's fantastic.
So you were about to go into of your overall schema for this. I'd love to hear about the rest of it.
MAE: Yeah, yeah. We want to hear! We want to hear!
[laughter]
ARPIT: Okay. So the other one is whenever you have a group of services together, you have something called a consensus algorithm that is at play. For example, you have the Raft consensus algorithm, or the Paxos algorithm that is used. Different systems like Redis, or Zookeeper, or et cetera. Depending on the system, they choose a consensus algorithm.
The one thing that is common across all these consensus algorithms is that there is basically, a leader and a follower, or a main, a node and you have other backup nodes, or follower nodes, which basically translates to, there is always a single source of truth in the system. So regardless of how many people that you are organizing, or working with, there needs to be a single source of truth.
That's why I am very anti-anarchy as a governance model because I don't think that works. What works really, really well is a democracy where the backup nodes, or the followers, they elect a leader and when the leader no longer exists, maybe at the end of their term, or et cetera, the backup nodes, or the follower nodes choose to elect another leader from amongst themselves. So one of the followers gets promoted to the post of a leader and this happens in literally every single organization and every single governance model, if you will.
The leader plays very critical role because the leader is literally answerable to the external system about the happenings that are happening inside the cluster. So if you try to persist data into a cluster of servers and one of the backup nodes does not perform well, or let's say, it's a rogue server, or a rogue person. You don't hold the server, or the follower node responsible. You actually hold the leader responsible and you say that, “Oh, as a leader, you didn't do your job and ensure that the data got persisted correctly. So I'm going to replace you as a leader because you no longer a good leader.”
That is true of teams as well that regardless of what everybody else is doing in the team, if you are leading a team, you are responsible for their outcome. You need to take responsibility for their output and their outcome and act like that. And you are the interface for the team to the external world, because the external world will only talk to you. They're not going to talk to a hundred other people that stand beside you; they'll only talk to you.
So that's the other consensus algorithms and how we elect a new leader and that's why democracy rocks. Most successful nations have democracy because it's literally the best consensus that we've come up with.
The third one is the concept of independent failures. In a distributed system when you have multiple services doing different parts of the workflow. For example, if I try to initiate a refund flow. Now a refund flow needs to go to the order system, cancel the order, go to my payment system, initiate a payment refund, and then maybe talk to the notification system and notify the user that the refund is complete. So there are three different subsystems that are at play in order for the refund to actually successfully happen and this is where the concept of independent failures in a distributed system crop up.
Wherein, an order system will actually be focused on accomplishing its job and it relies on the notification system to have done its job. It's not like if the notification system fails, we are going to not cancel the order. The order is canceled. So there's this shared sense of trust that a distributed system must take doing its services so that each server does its job properly and independently without necessarily having to rely on another server.
This is true of people as well and this is what I tell a lot of folks within the team. The top priority is to get your job done first, without worrying about what somebody else is doing. So once you've got your job done, you've delivered what you needed to deliver, then focus on what everybody else is doing. Don't try to unnecessarily distract yourself and focus on what is X doing, or what is Y doing unless you've completed what your deliverable is, because there are other people in this shared trust model who are relying on you to do your job well.
This is again, why high trust teams operate a lot more efficiently and are able to move a lot faster rather than a trustless system, or a trustless team, because of the shared sense of trust and the corollary to this obviously is the independent failure is the concept of failing early. For example, if I expect somebody else to do their job and I'm dependent on their output for me to complete my job successfully, I better have a backup plan. What happens if the other person does not, or the other team does not deliver on time? Do we have a backup?
In the engineering world, people use mock data, or mock APIs so that they can get their job done and while they wait for somebody else, or some other team to deliver. Similarly for teams, or human teams as well is invariably most software projects, I think a ridiculously large number of software projects are delayed, which means that there are some teams which are almost always behind schedule.
The way to kind of move forward is to always have, or formulate a backup plan for yourself, your team so that even if the other team does not deliver on time, you are still able to move forward and still have your team's output, or your personal output ready and deliverable so that you can then quickly integrate with the other team once they've given, or they've delivered their output. So you shouldn't be beholden to them and say that, “Oh, team X and delivered. So therefore, I'm stuck.” That's not an excuse. That's how we, again, large teams work well with each other.
By the way, as an interesting aside, little bit tangential is something that I learned from airplane engines, or seeing how airplane engines are maintained. It's a different engineering discipline. The beauty of an airplane engine, if you ever kind of look at it, is they're geared for quick maintenance.
When a flight lands, because there's a dollar cost attached to how long the aircraft is parked in the bay and the maintenance needs to happen really, really quickly, every part that can potentially fail is literally within one arm's length inside the engine of a human. So they can literally put their arm in, reach for a part, take it out, and replace it for maintenance. The deep maintenance only happens every once in a while.
My learning from this was for teams is that part, or everything that can potentially fail in the entire ecosystem should literally be within one arm's length of us as a team being able to change it, or fix it.
So instead of having deep processes and deep overarching fixes, as a team, always try to focus on, it's called inversion of control, or dependency, is inverting that control and saying that, “Oh, if there's something that's changing a lot, how do we ensure that we can actually change something really, really quickly and adapt to the situation versus having to necessarily fall back to large overarching code refactors, or large overarching processes that need to be hauled over versus, “Hey, what's the quick thing that we can do, what's the smallest unit of work that we can do in order to actually improve our entire system, or our process as a team”?
So that was my takeaway from literally sitting in tons of flights and seeing the maintenance happen outside.
JOHN: So it sounds to me like microservices are a part of that because you've got sort of smaller pieces of code that you don't have to go 15 class layers deep in defined where the thing is going wrong on You have the small encapsulated service that it's easy to get to in metaphorically.
ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why if you look at frameworks like Spring, or I think React also, I think does some parts of this is the whole dependency injection and in version of control where it surfaces. Even if there is a class that is like 15 layers deep, they actually allow you to expose it at the top level so you can just swap out your class at the top which again, sort of maps to what you're seeing in the microservices also. That you can have a cluster of lots of microservices talking in a mesh network to each other a lot, but you’re literally one git push away from changing, or improving something in one microservice, or one workflow.
JOHN: Do you have anything in the same toolbox that helps manage once you have a large collection of microservices with their complex interactions, then you get that sort of next order complexity arises out of the system with emergent behavior and whatnot? Do you have anything that helps you, or the team deal with that layer of complexity?
ARPIT: Sort-ish of, yes. I think this is something that was actually popularized by Spotify, the Spotify Squads, which is essentially a source code, or as an Appsmith, we call them quads, is a self-contained unit of frontend engineers, mobile engineers, backend engineers, product managers, designers, and QAs put together so that they are able to accomplish a unit of work, or they're able to take a feature from idea to production largely on their own without necessarily having to talk to other people.
So if you have a lot of microservices, or a lot of different services that are talking to each other in a complex mesh network, one of the ways basically follow Conway’s law and divide the entire team, or your group of people as well to be responsible for a smaller set of microservices.
Sorry, you're familiar with Conway law, right?
MAE: I was going to say, I know a lot of people have done Conway's game of life and that, but in case there are people who didn't, I was going to ask if you'd be willing to go into it more.
ARPIT: Yeah. Okay. So Conway’s law is actually very interesting. What Conway’s law states is that if you want to find out about the organization hierarchy, or the organization structure of a company, you actually don't need to talk to the people. You actually go look at the code that they've written, or produced because the code is a representation of the organization structure.
So if you see a code base that has a lot of microservices with a lot of interfaces between them, then you can be rest assured that the entire, this company, or this organization is organized into a set of smaller teams that are communicating with each other through a shared interface, or through a shared understanding, again.
On the other hand, if you see a very monolithic code base with classes randomly talking to each other, or randomly imported, or pulled into each other, then you can be rest assured that this is a much more fluid organization. It's a more cohesive large block where people are just talking to each other a lot more.
A very good example of this is Jeff Bezos back in the day. This is early, early days of AWS. There's this famous memo of his wherein he went in and he is literally told everybody in AWS, or Amazon, the two large pizza rule and he said, “No team is going to be larger than what two large pieces can feed,” which essentially limited it to anywhere between 10 to 20 people, depending on their appetite.
So this ended up with AWS where now every service in AWS, whether it's EC2, IAM, S3, et cetera, they are actually smaller teams that communicate with each other only via the API and he said that, “Oh, don't you dare talk to this other team without an API.”
Eventually, the organization reformed itself in order to meet that code structure that Jeff Bezos wanted. So Jeff Bezos didn't say, “Oh, I'm going to change the organization structure.” He basically wanted the code, or the services in such a manner and he basically sort of – you move one lever and the other one will automatically move.
So if you want to make a code change, change your teams, or you change your teams and you'll change the code, whichever you think is the lesser of the evil, or easier thing to do and just do that because the other one will automatically happen. That's the Conway’s law.
So to your point about the microservices is again, organize the people and the services will automatically happen where one team handles two, or three services and just get those two, three services running with their uptime with 5 nines, 6 nines, whatever you want.
MAE: I have to admit, Arpit when I read some of this description, I have this very visceral reaction to people trying to treat humans like systems and vice versa like, there's certainly things to be learned and applied across, but this is the best most humane human application of these things that I have ever heard and I'm very excited about it. Especially for how you opened up in saying your opener, I should say it more clearly, was about how people are complex and it's hard and it's more of a complexity than figuring out code and for many reasons and layers. So seeing a self-learning algorithm application of how to deal with human systems, love it.
ARPIT: Yeah. No, no, absolutely and most of these things are cross-disciplinary in nature and this basically stems from the idea that the history of software is the history of teams. There is no good, or great software that is ever built by a single person, it's always built by teams of people. So it's important that the code, or the server is just the tool and you never hear, I don't know, like da Vinci ever praise his paint brush for Mona Lisa, right? The paint brush is just a tool.
That's why I think focusing on the team and how teams collaborate, or how people collaborate with each other is how we will get to better and better software, to better abstraction level, layers, et cetera. Better team organization, or better people organization is how we are going to get to better software.
But that in no way means that we can't learn from our engineering disciplines, or what other people have done, whether it's the aircraft industry, or what F-1 is doing to make their cars faster, or what surgeons are doing to make surgeon be safer and apply them and their processes and principles to actually running our own software teams, or tech teams itself.
MAE: I have thought often about how the energy with which we build things, it does show up not only structurally, but just where it finds itself directionally. So to put that into practice is pretty cool.
You're reminding me also of Jess Kerr’s RubyConf keynote, I think it's 2019. It's a collective problem solving and she's come up with this term “somathesis” and I think that you would really love her work and anybody enjoying hearing about innovation and team dynamics, and how to apply our own discipline to the human aspects back so that there really is two-way communication. We really do have an API with what we're building to ourselves.
ARPIT: Nice. That sounds like a very interesting – I haven't heard her keynote yet, but I'm definitely going to give it a watch after this show. So thank you so much for the pointer.
The last thing that I wanted to mention as well was when we look at again distributed systems and clusters of server, the reliability and uptime is almost always given a higher preference to simply speed, or speed of response, or speed of your SLA on how quickly did the service respond to my ACP request, or TCP request.
That correlates again, very, very highly with teams and people as well, is that regardless of how good coder you are, a good an artist you are, or et cetera, if you are unreliable, or your uptime so to speak is not really there, it's very hard again, to establish that human trust.
There's this this book I was reading about how SEAL teams operate because the Navy SEALs are literally the highest functioning team that exists out there and they operate in some very, very adverse conditions and there was this book about how do seals organize themselves and how do they operate.
The way the SEAL team members select who's going to be on their team is where they basically draw a quadrant. If you have performance on one axis and trust on the other axis, how much do I trust this person in the middle of a firefight versus performance wise how good of a sharpshooter are you, or something like that. They'll prefer somebody who is of mediocre performance, but higher trust over somebody who is of higher performance and mediocre trust, or low trust.
Because at the end of the day, when you're in an adverse situation, or when things go south, what you really want next to you is not the best sharpshooter, but what you want is somebody you can actually trust and software teams are a far cry from what the Navy SEALs do.
We have very, very cushy jobs and thank God for it. But you don't want to go into a meeting with a customer, or you're presenting to your CEO in the all-hands and you have your partner who throws you under the bus when something doesn't work. There's a demo effect and things don't work and you don't want to be thrown under the bus in front of everybody.
So what you'd rather do is work with somebody who is more reliable, who has “greater uptime”, again for a person, it's how quickly are they responding to you, do they communicate back that hey, I'm getting delayed on X, can we push this meeting forward? Even something as small as, “Hey, I'm running late by 5 minutes on this meeting. Can we push the meeting by 5 minutes, or 10 minutes?”
That's a very, very, a small signal of reliability and trust and are invariably the people, correlation, or causation, who will actually end up getting much better performance reviews. They're the ones actually get promoted because again, consensus algorithm, they are the ones who will get elected to be the next leader. They're the people that the team trusts.
So what do you want to do in any team is, if you are an engineer in a team, or a new engineer in a team, the first thing to do is not show off how good a coder you are, or how good your code is, but what you want to actually do when you're a new person in a group is establish trust. Like, can you trust me as a human? We have a lizard brain right from Neanderthals to homo sapiens to whatever is that we'd much rather be with people that we trust more than anything else in this world. Reliability and uptime and how do you be the reliable person that, “Oh, I've told Arpit to do X, we know that X will be delivered” so they can then move on and live their lives. So you want to be that person in the team.
MAE: Yes! Everyone who's about to be, or is new to a team. We'll hear you say that one again. Arpit, what would you do? What would you want?
ARPIT: Build trust, establish trust, forget everything else.
JOHN: Definitely.
MANDY: This seems like a great time to move on to reflections. Who'd like to start us off?
JOHN: I can go first. I've got two things that are takeaways.
One is the realization I had earlier about how meeting minutes and clear communication after some group conversation is a form of active listening and ensuring that communication has happened the way you thought it did, which is great in increasing the fidelity of the understanding throughout the team. I love that.
And then the other one was, I've been familiar with Conway's law for a long time, of course. It's been around for since 70s, I think at least, maybe even the 60s. But the way you phrased it, where you were saying that you can start with the structure of the code and have that influence the teams, or you could start with the teams and have that influence the structure of the code.
Just that idea that you could say, “Okay, well, I kind of think the architecture's going to end up looking like this. That means I'm going to build these teams that do these things and then that will just naturally flow out of the fact that the teams are structured that way is such a fascinating flip to the normal way of thinking about how software is going to get built in multi-team environment. So that's definitely going to stick with me for a while.
ARPIT: Awesome.
MAE: John, you stole mine!
[laughter]
Those are definitely on my list, but so many of them. I'm definitely going to re-listen to this and Arpit, I want you to write a book, or I don't know, make a movie. This is great! I love it.
So I think the only thing I could add to what you were saying, John, is I loved thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime.
[laughter]
That was really well done.
ARPIT: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I really, really want to write a book at some point. That's on my bucket list to kind of do short eBook someday. I hope I can do that.
For me, the takeaway is literally this RubyConf talk that you shared because to be honest, I haven't heard a lot about people speaking about the confluence between engineering disciplines and team management principles and human disciplines itself. So I think that's definitely a takeaway for me is to listen to what she said and learn from what she's talking about in the keynote.
MAE: And I've been saving up a reading list, too. So I’ll write you after this and we can compare some notes. Also, when you write the book, Arpit, you need to sign it as Tenacious A.
[laughter]
ARPIT: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. At that point, I'll probably tattoo it.
[laughter]
Not just sign it. [laughs]
MANDY: And then you'll have to come back on the show to talk about it again.
JOHN: Yes, yes.
ARPIT: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
This has been a really, really fun, very free-flowing, very casual conversation. So thank you so much to all of you for doing that and for having me on the show. It has been a true pleasure.
MANDY: Thank you.
I just want to say my reflection was just in the beginning when you described your superpower being tenacity, I haven’t thought of that word in such a long time.
[laughter]
And it’s such a great word. Determination and tenacity, I love the words so that was a great takeaway for me. But again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was wonderful to have you and we will see everyone next week.
Special Guest: Arpit Mohan.
Sponsored By:
02:28 - Kerri’s Superpower: Having an Iron Butt
06:39 - On The Road Entertainment
15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography
25:42 - Working On The Road
27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts
30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases
35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties
38:40 - Recording Adventures
41:46 - Focus / Music
42:22 - Directed Riding vs Wandering/Drifting
Reflections:
Mandy: Taking time to enjoy yourself is SO important.
Jamey: Get started! Create a map, now.
Coraline: Permission to go down rabbit holes: wander aimlessly, and explore.
Aaron: If I’m not having fun, why am I doing this? Resetting expectations to your purpose.
Chelsea: Making “it didn’t always look like this!” stories accessible to folks.
Kerri: It’s a marathon. You can’t do a lot of things in a single step. We have traveled far from where we began.
Greater Than Code Episode 072: Story Time with Kerri Miller
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Transcript:
CORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 273 of Greater Than Code. You may remember me, my name is Coraline and I’m very, very happy to be with y'all today and to be with my friend, Jamey Hampton.
JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm also excited to introduce my good friend, Aaron Aldrich, and it's our first time co-hosting together so I'm excited about that, too.
AARON: Oh, Hey, it's me, Aaron Aldrich. I'm also excited. I'm so excited to host with all these people and I will introduce you to Chelsea.
CHELSEA: Him folks. I'm Chelsea Troy and I am pleased to introduce Mandy Moore.
MANDY: Hey, everybody. It's Mandy. And today, I am here with one of my favorite people! It's Kerri Miller, and you may know Kerri as an engineer, a glass artist, a public speaker, a motorcyclist, and a lackwit gadabout based in the Pacific Northwest.
Generally, she's on an epic adventure on her motorcycle somewhere in North America. Will she meet Sasquatch? That's what I want to know and that's why she's here today because we're not going to talk about tech, or code today. We're going to catch up with Kerri. If you're not following Kerri on these epic adventures, you need to be because I live vicariously through her all the time and you need to, too. Kerri is a prime example of living your best life.
So without further ado, Kerri, how are you?!
KERRI: Oh my gosh. With an intro like that, how can I be anything but amazing today? Can I just hire you, Mandy just to call me every morning and tell me how exciting I am?
MANDY: Absolutely.
[laughter]
KERRI: No. I'm doing really, really well. The sun actually came out today in the Pacific Northwest. I've been telling people lately that if you want to know what living in Seattle is like, first go stand in the shower for about 4 months [laughs] and then get back to me. So to have the sun bright and it’s 53 outside, it’s amazing.
AARON: 53 does sound amazing. It's been like so far below freezing for so long here that I've lost track. Every once in a while, I go outside and it's like 30 and I'm like, “Oh, this is nice!”
[laughter]
JAMEY: Are we going to ask Kerri the superpower question? Because I feel like she's come on and answered it a bunch of times already. [laughs] We could ask her about Sasquatch instead.
MANDY: I mean, I thought her superpowers were having epicly awesome adventures, but maybe she has a different answer.
KERRI: Well, in the context of this conversation, I think that my superpower is being able to sit on a motorcycle for ridiculously long amounts of time.
CORALINE: Kerri, would you say you have an iron butt? Is that what you call that?
KERRI: Yes. I mean, of course, the joke being that I belong to a group called the Iron Butt Association, which is dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding. So the only requirement to join, besides having the defective gene that makes you want to sit on a motorcycle for hours and hours on end, is to be able to ride a 1,000 miles on a motorcycle in 24 hours, which once you do it once, you very quickly decide if you ever want to do it again and if you do decide you want to do it again, you are one of the ingroup.
AARON: What's a reference point for a 1,000 miles? That's a number that I only know conceptually.
KERRI: Let's see. It is a 1,000 miles almost exactly from Seattle to Anaheim to the front door of Disneyland. It's a 1,100 miles from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida.
CORALINE: Oh, wow.
KERRI: It's 2,000 miles from my house in Seattle to Chicago.
JAMEY: What made you feel like you wanted to sit on a motorcycle for that long?
KERRI: I don't really have a short answer for that, but I'll give you an honest answer. I mean the short answer is the jokey one to say, “Oh, I've got a defective gene. Ha, ha, ha.”
But when I was in – I grew up in the country and had a lot of a lot of struggles as a teenager and the way that I escaped from that was to go get in my car and drive around the back roads of New England. Dirt roads, finding old farmsteads and farm fields and abandoned logging roads and that gave me this real sort of sense of freedom.
When I moved out to Pacific Northwest—no real friends, no family out here—I spent a lot of time in my car exploring Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of those same vibes of being by myself and listening to my good music and just driving around late nights.
When I got into to motorcycling, I rediscovered that joy of being by myself, exploring things, seeing new things, and if I wasn't seeing something new, I was seeing how had changed this week, or since last month, or since last few years since I've been through a particular region. And my motorcycling is basically an extension of that, it's this sort of urge to travel. A desire to be by myself under my own control, my own power, and to learn and discover new stories that I'm not learning just by sitting in my apartment all day.
I work from home. I've worked remotely for 8, or 9 years now, so anytime I get to leave the apartment is a joy and adventure, but doing so for longest ended periods of time just lets me see more of the world, expand my own story, and learn the story of others as I travel.
Being a single solo lady on a motorcycle, I'm instantly the object of interest wherever I stop and it doesn't help that I have rainbow stickers and all sorts of stuff all over my bikes. My motorcycle helmets are crazy pink, rainbow reflective, got unicorn horns, and things all over my bike, so people see me as being super approachable.
Every time I stop for gas, or to get a burger, or a soda, or something, people come up to me and they want to tell me their stories. It's usually about the motorcycle, they're really interested about. It's usually middle aged and old men come up to me to say, “Oh, I had a motorcycle when I was in college and then I got married and had a kid.” You can kind of see them deflate a little bit.
Or I've had lots of kids come up because it's covered with stickers and a lot of the stickers, they're all kind of at a kid eye level. They see them and they get really excited, they want to come over and talk to me. With rainbow bandanas and everything, I think I look safe as a biker. I'm not dressed in black and skulls and so, people see me as approachable and they want to come up and talk. So there's a lot of those great interactions that I get to have with people along the way.
CORALINE: And you said at the beginning, when you were driving around the Pacific Northwest, you were listening to your good music. Do you also listen to music on the motorcycle and some of those have fancy speakers in the helmet and all that sort of stuff where you just go quiet and just listen to the road?
KERRI: Honestly, over the course of the day, because I will ride 18, 20 hours a day if you just let me go and if I'm trying to make distance, I'll do that. It's kind of a mix, but for the most part, I actually do listen to something.
The last few years, I've really embraced and tried to understand and integrate into my personal identity, having ADHD and how does that manifest for me and I found that if I'm riding my motorcycle and I'm not listening to something, my mind wanders. But weirdly, if I'm listening to something, then I'm paying attention and focused, patrolling the motorcycle and being safe and then whatnot, which seems paradoxical. But that's just how my brain works. So I pretty much always have something going.
Until recently, I had a Spotify playlist with about 1,800 songs on it that was rotating through. I tried to do audiobooks and podcasts, but that's a little tricky with all the wind noise and whatnot. I'm trying to protect my hearing.
Other than that, I also listen to a lot of FM radio, which is great. So I have opinions on country music now, which I never thought I was going to have opinions on that at before. Yes, country music is great. It's all over. Even in Seattle, we have country music, bars, and whatnot, but you don't just walk down the street in Seattle and hear country music. You’ve got to kind of seek it out and so, I haven't been exposed to it.
So listen to a lot of FM country as I cross the vast planes of America and I've also used that to discover a lot of this rebirth that's happened in the last decade of community radio. A lot of small communities have their own low power, super local FM radio you can only pick up for 20 miles at a stretch.
So if I'm passing through a town and I see a sign for K, B, C, or whatever it is for some small town, I immediately tune to it. it’s always somebody who's just like, they're not a trained professional. They never went to broadcasting school. They don't have that trained radio voice. They're just talking about sheep that got out, or here's a problem with the town water supply, or whatever it is, what local road is closed. That's just an amazing way of even as I'm passing through a place, if I'm not stopping, I kind of get a little bit of a flavor for that.
AARON: Well, just thinking that FM radios generally got to give you more of a flavor for the local area that you're at. I always thought of that as the frustration of FM radio when traveling, like, “All my radio stations keep changing. I don't know where to tune!” But at the same time, that's pretty cool. I love that as a positive of what do they listen to over here? What do they listen to over this part of the country? I would imagine even just where different musical genres are on the dial would probably shift around. Or maybe not. Maybe that's just my…coming up with things, but.
KERRI: Yeah. You do learn that there are some patterns, like all of the NPR stations, they're all down in the 800s and also, a lot of the religious radio and the top end of the dial seems to be a lot of rock. The big rock stations seem like 107, whatever the end, or something.
The best ones, though are the ones that have local commercials because you get a lot of the same like, law firms and drugs that I don't know if I have even the condition, but I should really talk to my doctor, see if it's right for me. But then you'll get local car places, or I got one when I was down south, somewhere in Louisiana and it was for a combination, an airboat rental and barbecue joint? It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing and the guy had this amazing regional accent, which I never hear up here in the Northwest. We have our own accent, but I got a little taste of this real Southern accent and it was the owner. It was clearly the owner just reading a little script that he wrote, “Come on down and rent a jet boat, bring your dog and your dog can go on it and then we'll have barbecue waiting for you when we get off the dock,” and I'm like, “I'm sold.” Like, “I'm going to turn around, go see this guy right now. This is amazing,” and I actually have that business.
I keep a map of every interesting place I hear about as I travel and I put a pin there I'm like, “Someday, I'm going to be coming back by this place and I'm going to be hungry for lunch and I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop here.” So advertising works, I guess, is what I'm saying.
JAMEY: Will you share that map with us?
[laughter]
KERRI: I really should. I really should. It's a lot of fun actually because you read these websites, or roadside attractions, or you hear about some abandoned theme park, or something and it's like, that's kind of a cool thing. You read the article and you move on your day, but I add it to my maps and those maps are my GPS unit. As I'm writing, I've got this old screen in front of me and if I see a little pin appearing on the map in front of me, I can say, “Oh, there's this old waterpark over here,” or “Oh, there's that resort over there that I always wanted to see,” or a particular weird statue, or the birthplace of James Kirk, or whatever it is. So I don't have to remember if the computer could do it for me.
JAMEY: I was going to ask if you go to things like the world's largest ball of twine and like –?
KERRI: Every time.
JAMEY: Okay, cool.
KERRI: Every time.
JAMEY: I'm glad that I understand you enough to know that you would do that.
[laughter]
CORALINE: Kerri, have you been in the Mystery Spot?
KERRI: I have been in Mystery Spot.
MANDY: What is Mystery Spot?!
CORALINE: I remember Mystery Spot is some kind of a place where they say gravity is out of whack and everything feels sideways and you're super disoriented. They have this whole mythology around it. I've never been myself, but I did pretend that I'd been there by putting a bumper sticker on my car 15 years ago.
[laughter]
There's this amazing song called Mystery Spot Polka. Can't remember where I read that, but I think that's how I learned about it.
MANDY: I will put that in the show notes.
CORALINE: I will find Mystery Spot Polka. It is incredible.
MANDY: So Kerri, what are some of the coolest places you have visited? Can you give us a top three rundown?
CORALINE: And I really hope that cracker barrel is in that top three, Kerri.
JAMEY: But which cracker barrel?
CORALINE: Oh, cracker barrels are the same everywhere you go. I really believe there's only actually one cracker barrel, the canonical cracker barrel, and it's multidimensional, so.
JAMEY: Yeah. You teleport into it?
CORALINE: Yeah.
[laughter]
KERRI: Well, interestingly enough, I won't call this a danger, but one of the side effects of traveling as much I have in the last 4, or 5 years is strange, random flashbacks to stretches of road and you can't remember where they are. So you were just asking about this and I'm thinking about, “Okay, two places I could talk about,” and then I suddenly, unbidden, had this memory of a stretch of road. I can't remember where that is. I don't even know what state that's in. It was an amazing piece of pavement that I really enjoyed riding and, in that moment, I had this amazing moment.
If I skip way ahead to the end of the conversation where I sum everything up and tell you why I ride, or what I get out of doing this is that it's cemented for me, this concept of the impermanence of everything because if I'm having a great day on the bike, it's beautiful afternoon, the temperature's perfect. It's not going to last. The sun is going to go down, the pavement is going to be bad, traffic is going to pick up, it's going to start raining. So I need to enjoy this moment, this curve, this hour, this half hour, this 5 minutes, whatever it is. Something, conversely, if it's bad, if it's raining, or it's dark, or heck, if it's snowing, it's like, this is not going to last. I'll go through this and everything will be great.
But once every six weeks, or so, I make a really bad decision on the motorcycle, for instance, like that rain's probably going to clear up, that's not going to be a rainstorm. Nah, this wind is going to die down, it'll be fine. I'll be riding through something and it makes me just completely miserable. 110 degrees, or sideways rain, or whatever, and I think, “Yes, this is it. This is the moment. This is the thing that I'm going to be remembered for. This is the dumb thing that I did,” but it never lasts. I always survive and I walk away with this just amazing memory and this amazing about that time I rode through a rainstorm, or illegally parked my motorcycle in front of the Alamo to just get a photo, [laughs] things like that if it happened.
CHELSEA: Kerri, do you collect souvenirs of any kind from some of these travels, or is it specifically photos? Do you post about them specifically anywhere? Maybe you do a whole bunch of things. I've certainly seen a number of your posts, but I guess I'm wondering, I'm imagining myself in these situations collecting stickers, or something like that. Do you have things like that that you look for in these places?
KERRI: One of the neat things that I enjoy about traveling my motorcycle is that I just simply can't, I can't buy anything. It's not any space for it. My gear is all pretty well packed tightly. Souvenirs are kind of out unless I'm willing to pay extra ship from home. So it's kind of rare. Although, I have occasionally gotten, if I know that I'm going to be visiting a friend in a day, or two, I'll stop and pick something up and usually, it's a food item that I haven't seen before. In fact, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see I'm always posting about weird foods, or energy drinks. 90% of the time it's weird stuff I found in a weird gas station on the side of the road, especially when it comes to energy drinks.
And it's much more about having that experience of a place at the end of the day. I don't take as many photos as I'd like, or I think that I should. Although, certainly, I do take more than I used to. I've been working on landscape photography with my iPhone because again, I choose not to travel with a full camera rig. Well, I’ve got my iPhone, how can I take photos with that? That turns out to be much more about composition and seeing a moment and grabbing it than having the right lens, or light conditions being just right, or whatever.
CHELSEA: Ooh. So I'd be very interested to hear some of your tips for phone photography, because this is a thing. We all have our phones on us and I imagine if I just a little more about how to frame my photos sometimes, I could get something a lot better.
KERRI: Some of the basic tips are just photography one-on-one, like how do you compose a shot in terms of the rule of three where you break it up, and you'll see in phones, a lot of times you have the option turn on a grid. So you're looking at a grid and then help you understand how much space something is going to take up in the final shot. You want to line up your horizon, for example, if I'm taking a picture of say, like a harbor. I've taken a lot of photos of lighthouses for reasons I can get into later. So I'm trying to take really nice photos of lighthouses, the sea kind of wants to be right around and take up the lower third of the shot and then two-thirds is the sky.
It's about how much of the frame gets filled with different elements will psychologically suggest the viewer, what their importance is, or how they relate to the person who's taken the photograph. So just some basic rules around that. I try to do things where, especially when doing landscape photography, because the iPhone lens is just horrible for this. It’s really meant to take photos of your friends at parties, or your car in the driveway. It's not meant to take landscaping vistas, but you can do some tricks.
Actually, I found that zooming in a little bit, not a lot, but just a little tiny bit just brings it a little bit closer and the final result just feels a little different. And then if also, you continue to follow those rules of composition, you can get some good landscape.
Putting something in the foreground is really great. So my motorcycle is in a lot of my shots because of that, because it gives some depth to the photo. It helps to not just be like, especially if you're doing a wide-open plane like you do, it's like, oh yes, here's some bars of color. It's like, oh, now here's something to give me perspective and humanize the scale of a landscape. It's just little things like that and that's all stuff that I've learn just because I'm just a naturally curious person. So I'm like, “Well, how do I take better photos of that?” So I went off and did 4 hours of research and audited a class online somewhere.
CORALINE: Have all, or most of your travels been continental US, or have you ever gone on a motorcycle trip on another continent, or?
KERRI: It depends. Is New Zealand a continent?
JAMEY: Well, it's not in the continental US.
[laughs]
KERRI: Yes. Starting closer to home, though. North America, I've done. So I've done US, Mexico, and Canada. Right when COVID hit, I was actually in Baja, California down at the Southern tip at the Tropic of Cancer on my motorcycle. I rode there all the way from Long Beach, California and I've been up to Alaska through Canada twice now.
JAMEY: I'm sorry. I was going to tell a Jerri Alaska story actually, because I was in Alaska – [overtalk]
KERRI: Oh, please.
JAMEY: Not too long ago and I posted a landscape photo from our rental car on Twitter and I did not label where I was and Kerri was like, “Where are you in Alaska?!” And then we were talking about this and she recommended that I eat fireweed ice cream, which I did and it was wonderful.
KERRI: Oh, was it great?
JAMEY: [laughs] It was great. So I was going to suggest that your superpower could be recommendations.
KERRI: Oh, thank you. That's super flattering, actually. I sometimes think when I finally get tired of tech, I just want to be a tour guide, or something, or write a travel novel, or something.
JAMEY: Oh yeah. You’d be great at that.
KERRI: Yeah. I love being a hostess and I love – whenever somebody's like, “Oh, I'm traveling,” or “I'm going here,” or I see somebody post photos from someplace I've been, I'm like, “Wait, here's this restaurant, you should go here and make sure you talk to this person and do this.”
A year after I got my first bike, no, not even a year. Oh my gosh, it was 5 months after I got my first motorcycle, I went to New Zealand for a conference and said, “Well, hassle in traveling to New Zealand is actually traveling to New Zealand. So I might as well take some time.” I took two weeks and rented a motorcycle and just did a couple thousand kilometers all over the South Island in New Zealand.
So those are the four countries I've ridden in.
I was going to rent one – I'd been to Berlin a few times and I thought, “Oh, I'll rent a BMW when I'm in Germany, that'd be cool and ride around.” But unfortunately, I got sick while I was in Germany, the one time I was going to do that. So I stayed my hotel and felt bad.
JAMEY: How different is motorcycle on the other side of the road in New Zealand? [chuckles]
KERRI: I only rode on the wrong side of the road twice.
[laughter]
Yeah, the shop I rented from actually, they rent to a lot of Americans, I guess. So they put arrows on the windscreen to say, “Drive pass” to help remind us. But it's funny because every single rental car down there, the left side of the car is the one that's completely trashed because when you're riding, we start driving on the wrong side of the road. The side you're not used to. Now, it's like your entire concept as a driver of the opposite side of the car is now completely inverted and so, it's like trying to do something with your left hand when you're right-handed. It's just like, how do left-handed people survive?! Like, what are you doing? [laughs]
CORALINE: I was in South Africa a number of years ago and we drove out to this wildlife preserve and the only car I was able a rental, that was not a stick shift because I don't know how to drive stick shift, [chuckles] was this giant club van. So not only I had driven the wrong side of the road, but I was in the largest vehicle I had ever driven. [laughs] Had no idea where the other side of the car might be was, just terrified of exactly that the whole time.
KERRI: See, you called it a Clubvan, but all I can imagine, the image that popped in my brain was a party bus.
[laughter]
So imagine you driving around South Africa in a party bus.
[laughter]
CORALINE: That would have been amazing. Yeah.
KERRI: Very different trip.
AARON: I just want to bring it back to lighthouse pictures because as a native New Englander, I need to know why you're taking pictures of all these lighthouses.
KERRI: Well, as another native New Englander, hi.
AARON: Hi.
KERRI: How are you?
[laughter]
No. So why am I taking photos of lighthouses? One of the things about the Iron Butt Association, which again, is this group dedicated to promoting this, is not just the pure endurance of can you ride a 1,000 miles in 24 hours? Can you ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours? What are the limits of safe endurance events?
We also do a number of collection style things. We call them tours. I'm doing a lighthouse tour. So you go to lighthouses and I've got this little passport, my lighthouse passport I got from the United States Lighthouse Society. When they're open, you can get a little rubberstamp in your book to prove that you were there. When they're not open, I take a photo of my motorcycle next to the lighthouse and that's the proof that I've been there.
The challenge is I have to visit 60 in 12 months.
AARON: Okay.
KERRI: And that's the bare minimum. So there's advancing levels of difficulty and they're merit badges for adults, really.
[laughter]
60 in 12 months I'm at 25, or 30 now and I scoured the West Coast. I'm going to also hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic next month when I'm down there in Florida. There are other challenges like go to 120, or 180 again, over the course of different time periods. You have different difficulty levels.
I've also done one which is visiting national parks because national parks have a similar passports stamp program where you can go get these timestamped little cancellations to say I was in the Redwood National Forest, or I was at Wounded Knee, or not Wounded Knee, Little Bighorn, or Devils Tower, or whatever. The challenge there is to visit say, 50 of them, but now you have to do 25 different states.
Of course, I've upped the ante and we have the silver level, which is you also have to combine that visiting one park in Washington, California, Florida, and Maine, in addition to those 50 and 25 states. So I did two of those last year and then year before that, I added Alaska just for fun, which is the gold, or insanity level. So it's just these little different ways of encouraging people to go out and travel and see more in the country on their motorcycle.
CORALINE: You work from the road, right?
KERRI: Yeah, I do actually.
CORALINE: I would love hear about how that works with such an aggressive travel schedule.
KERRI: That takes a lot of discipline and balance, which I am surprised I managed to pull off [chuckles] given how much I can normally do it without adding to traveling. Usually, what I do is I have days where I am in one place and days when I'm traveling. So for example, on February 28th, I'm going to be heading out for 2 months on the road and my first stops going to be San Diego. I will take that weekend and ride down to San Diego, which again, only 1,300 miles so that's a day and I've rented a little place down in Ocean Beach, a block from the shore and they have Wi-Fi in this little tiny one-bedroom studio. I'll work there and I'll kind of explore San Diego. I'll work all day and, in the evenings, I'll go over ride on the hills, or go up to Legoland, or whatever I want to do in that part of the world. And then Friday night, Saturday, I'll hit the road again for a couple days.
This is actually how I initially started traveling these long, long distances was trying to say like, “Okay, I really want to go to Austin, Texas, but it's going to take me four riding days, or whatever to get to Austin, Texas. How do I manage do that and still work from the road?” So well, 2 days away is Denver, Colorado. So why don't I go to Denver? I'll work there for a few days and then next weekend, then I'll skip on. So it's like setting up a series of base camps as if I was attacking Everest so I can break up these big trips.
But as I wanted to travel further and further distances overall, I had to actually physically travel, or do longer distances in the same amount of time. Speeding isn't going to do that safely and it actually really doesn't get you there that much faster in the end. So the only way to do that was to figure out how to ride longer more hours in the day, figure that out.
JAMEY: Can you talk about these motorcycle scavenger hunt things that you do?
KERRI: Yeah. Thanks for asking. I assume you noticed the trophies on the wall behind me.
So these are competitive scavenger hunt style rallies. We call them rallies. A lot of people, when you say motorcycle rally, they think about Bike Week in Daytona, or Sturgis out in South Dakota. That's none of this. It is a scavenger hunt and there's a timer on it say, 36, or 60 hours where the night before you get a list of here's all the different places that you could possibly go, you call them bonus locations and at 4:00 in the morning, everyone's released and you're like, “Okay, go, be back in a day and a half.”
You go and you take photos of these different places to prove that you went there and every place gets you a certain number of points. The harder it is to get there, or the further away it is, the more points that you would get for going there. You can do combinations for visiting certain places, visit three clown theme places and get the clown bonus, or whatnot. Like a pinball machine, if you will, where you score the right combination, you get more points.
So it's a timed competitive thing to who can the most amount of points because you can't visit all of the – they'll give you 80, or a 100 places you could possibly go. You can't go to all of them in the time allotted. So can you construct an efficient route that is also one that you have that you the physical capability to travel in the allotted time and earn enough points to place well? They typically last, 36 hours is one level. We have a few that do 60.
I'm doing one this summer that is 9 days long. So we'll be leaving Cheyenne, Wyoming and four days later, we have to be in State College, Pennsylvania where we'll all stop for 10 hours and then we'll turn around and head back to Cheyenne. I actually just put in my application for the Olympics of the Iron Butt Association is called the Iron Butt Rally, which is an 11-day version of the countrywide scavenger hunt – [overtalk]
CORALINE: Oh, wow.
KERRI: With locations all over North America and Canada. We call it, it’s sort of the Olympics. It happens every 2 years. You actually have to apply to be accepted to enter because otherwise, you'd have a lot of folks that say, “Oh, I could do that,” and they don't really know what they're getting into and it's a little bit unsafe if you haven't done it before and you don't really understand what it takes to do.
That's what's coming up my horizon for those and they're very competitive events, although at the end of the day, it's made-up internet points. There are no sponsorships, there's no recognition besides outside of this group of 300, or 400 similarly weirdo people who like riding their motorcycles longways. But no, I've had quite a bit of success competitively in that and that just scratch all the right itches because it's riding a motorcycle. Plus, it's basically a traveling salesman problem. It's a directed graph problem and you work with GitHub all day long and like, “Oh, I understand how to traverse a graph, this is easy.”
CORALINE: Speaking of that, Kerri as a long-time software engineer, do you do anything, do you have any software, any kind of tools that you develop for keeping track of all this?
KERRI: Yeah, I do a lot with spreadsheets, believe it, or not. The tooling, it’s tricky because at the end of the day, you still have to ride the motorcycle and you can't really automate that. So a lot of the stuff I'm able to do with software is really around using software for planning and analysis.
For example, there's a number of different databases around you asked about the collection of the lighthouses and one of the things that I'm around the country collecting this year is pressed pennies. Now a pressed penny machine, actually I think they're fascinating because a pressed penny machine is the only machine still in active production that interacts with the penny in any way, shape, or form. There's no vending machines. There's nothing who deals with the penny besides coin counting machine. Besides the penny smasher, you put a penny, 2 quarters and it smashes a little design in.
Again, I've got to go collect a 100 of these from 20 states and 5 of them have to be on the other side of the Mississippi, all these weird rules, but how do you find them? There's one at every cracker barrel. There's eight at Disney, one at SeaWorld. There's some obvious things like that, but it turns out, there's almost 4,000 of these machines in the United States and there's a database for these on this weird creaky, old website written in ASP. It's actually an IP address. It doesn't have a domain name.
JAMEY: That's legit.
CORALINE: Dark web got pennies. That's amazing.
[laughter]
KERRI: If only there was crypto involved here, it'd be perfect.
So I got to break out some scripting the other day and actually write a little script that went into kind of scrape these old web pages and then parse CHTML and kind of strip out, look, here's the address for the place and store them because you want the name of the place and the address so you can find it. You’ve got to take that and ship it over to Google API, actually get an actual latitude, longitude, and then reform it into the XML format that my GPS device – it's this whole chain of Rube Goldberg machine of how to get this data into a place that I can actually use it.
CORALINE: I think the story of the entire internet is made. [laughs]
KERRI: Right.
CORALINE: Yeah.
KERRI: So fast forward to the end of that and now I happen to be the maintainer for a website that maps pressed penny machines across the United States, based on this data that I'm scraping from somebody else's website.
AARON: All because you have a DNS name.
KERRI: Exactly, exactly. But this actually turned to be really, really crucial because a whole bunch of people in my riding community said, “I really wanted to do that penny collecting hunt and you have 12 months to do it and I'm going to go out to the West Coast.” So I was like, I thought, “I have plenty of places to stop, but I could never find the machines.” It's just like, “Oh, okay. So my putting this information into a format that other people could actually easily digest, that's the value that I'm adding here.” It's inspired at least a dozen people to go out and start collecting smashed pennies. So I've got to be responsible for some uptick in sales on these vending machines.
JAMEY: They should sponsor you.
AARON: I love the weirdness of these machines that interact with a coin that's so bad at being currency, we just sort of toss them out to the extent that I was at Disney World not too long ago and the machines have their own supply of pennies because people just don't have pennies. So [chuckles] this machine just has a stock of pennies and you can swipe a credit card and be like, “Give me the smashed pennies,” and it charges you a dollar in 1 cent and then goes through and does it.
KERRI: God, it's fabulous. A lot of people have heard the story that pennies are actually – it costs more to make a penny than a penny is actually worth in terms of currency. It's wild. But every time I start thinking, “We should get rid of the penny,” I'm like, “That sounds like the craziest, insane conspiracy theory position to ever take.”
AARON: But also, the penny is real bad at being currency. [laughs]
KERRI: Yeah. Yeah.
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KERRI: Way back at the beginning of this conversation, somebody asked me and sorry, I forgot who asked me about some of the best places I've been and the strangest things I've seen. I kind of got derailed on some poet nonsense, but I realize that I really am a sucker for world's largest ball twine kinds of things. I had this great opportunity.
So collecting pennies, lighthouses, and national parks, I'm always just getting off the main roads and things. I see a lot of stuff. I found out that I'm a sucker basically for weird local foods like the fireweed ice cream. Anytime I see something advertised on a menu that I've never heard of before, that's the thing I'm going to order.
Cinnamon rolls because when you travel up the Alaskan highway from Dawson Creek, BC up to Alaska, every 60 miles, or so, there's a gas station and a little bakery. So you can get your gas, you can get coffee, and you can get a cinnamon roll and they all claim to have the best cinnamon roll on the Alaskan highway. I stop every 60 miles and get a cinnamon rolls. After about 5 hours, I really just want to fall over and vomit because I'm sick of cinnamon rolls. But now when I travel, if I see some place advertising cinnamon rolls, I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to stop because that's my thing because I like cinnamon rolls because that's reminds me of Alaska.”
So I get to go to a lot of these really great small towns and just seeing a lot of how, especially in the central part of the country, so many towns are struggling with just having jobs for people and keeping local economies going that a lot of them will do these sorts of things. They'll have interesting, strange festivals, or hold the film festival about corn, or soy, or they'll paint their water tower, or something.
Last year, as I was traveling across North Dakota one time, I saw off on the horizon on a hill—first of all, yes, a hill in North Dakota so that was notable—a giant cow. A giant Holstein cow. This a 100-foot-tall fiberglass cow and so, I said to my riding partner, I'm like, “We're going the cow, right?” And she's like, “Yeah, we're going the cow.”
So get off the highway and we rode this little windy dirt road at the top of this hill. It was just this huge giant fiberglass cow that they put on top of the hill 20, 30 years ago and now it's like the 4-H Club with the FFA kids take care of it and repaint it every few years. They collect like, they ask for donations. $5 each and the little two because we're passing through and that's part of our job. That's how I'm interacting with the community and plus man, I got a ton of pictures of this giant cow.
It was right at sunset, we were on this hill, and it was actually really beautiful, the prairie, it was spread out for us and it was about an hour east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. So it's right where the planes start to break up into the what's called Missouri Breaks where the rivers have really broken up the land quite a bit. So it was just gorgeous. It was just absolutely beautiful and I never would've seen that if I didn't stop because there was a giant cow. That's my giant cow story.
CORALINE: Kerri, have you ever considered writing down your stories and the stories of the people that you meet along the way and the amazing places you've been? I hate to say the B word, but it would make a pretty interesting book.
KERRI: Well, I'll throw back another B word at you, which is blog. I keep a travel blog at motozor.com. Lately, I've been writing more about, because I haven't been doing as much non-directed travel, so a lot of my travel lately has been around these sort of competitive rallies that I've been riding in, which are interesting in themselves because they're like, “Go take your photo with the giant cow,” or “Go to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada, or whatnot, take a photo there.”
I've been writing quite a bit about those sorts of travels, but I also have a huge backlog of articles that I've written for that over the years of all the different trips I've taken to New Zealand, Alaska down into Baja, and the multiple times I've been across the country.
The one that I'm working on, that I haven't finished yet because I'm trying a new thing, which is incorporating a series of interview video interviews with my riding partner, is trying to tell the story in written form of the trip that she and I did last summer, where we rode to all 48 states in 10 days starting in New England ending in Washington.
JAMEY: Kerri, I have an important question to ask you, but I'm contractually obligated to ask you. How many miles at a time would you say that you live your life? [laughs]
KERRI: Well, I guess, I supposed to say one quarter of a mile at a time. [chuckles]
JAMEY: Well, Kerri was also a guest on my Greater Than Code spinoff, fast and furious show, Stationary & Sassy, so.
KERRI: Which I love.
JAMEY: I had to pull it back. [laughs]
KERRI: I'll answer that in an obliviously serious way.
[laughter]
I can go an entire take of gas without putting my foot down. That's kind of fun. One of my current challenges right now is can I ride through the entire state of Oregon, north to south, without getting gas? Because it's 304 miles from the Washington-Oregon border to the California-Oregon border and Oregon doesn't let you pump your own gas and it irritates me. They usually, if they see you're on a motorcycle, they're like, “You got it?” I'm like, “Yeah, I got it. I'm not from here. I pump gas.”
So the challenge right now is can I cross Oregon without having to stop for gas and then actually weirdly, mentally breaks up my day. It's kind of weird motorcycle Pomodoro of like, “Okay, I can go 3 hours before I need to stop.” So my day gets broken up into these chunks of where are the stops that I have to make versus the ones I want to make, or excuse me, the ones I want to make versus the ones I have to make.
JAMEY: You heard it here, folks. Kerri lives her life 304 miles at a time.
[laughter]
KERRI: I live my life a quarter tank at a time.
[laughter]
CHELSEA: Kerri, you mentioned earlier that you listen to music while you're riding because you find that it helps you focus on riding. I find a similar thing with work, whether it's fulltime job work, or side work, I have a much easier time focusing—for the audience, I'm a programmer as well—if I've got something on. I like to listen to Boston Nova, or I also go on turntable.fm, I'm in a heavy metal room there that's kind of fun.
I'm curious as to whether you find that music helps you focus anywhere off the motorcycle as well.
KERRI: Yes. I am very susceptible to the emotional resonance of music, if that makes any sense whatsoever. There are kinds of music that I just can't listen to before I go to bed, like heavy metal gets me going, jam music. I'm a really huge Phish fan, which surprise, from Vermont, and I wear a lot of tie dye. Of course, I'm in the Phish.
But that's the music I like to listen to when I'm riding and when I'm working. But I do a lot of chill hop stuff now. I've gotten into that and I'm finding my way back to a lot of again, country music. But there's this entire alt Nashville scene that's happened in the last 10 years. I completely missed that. I'm kind of getting caught up on these days. My Bandcamp catalog, I think I'm keeping at least three of their engineers paid for; I buy so much stuff on Bandcamp these days.
CORALINE: I definitely get what you said about sensitivity to the emotional music definitely resonates with me as a musician. It's kind of weird to admit, but when I'm doing writing, I listen to Steely Dan [laughs] and I actually learned from a friend of mine that William Gibson listened to Steely Dan while he was writing all the seminal cyberpunk novels and thought that's kind of interesting, maybe good company, right?
KERRI: Hey, Fagen and Becker, great albums.
It's the stereotypical thing that Rush is this big band in programming circles and fun fact, the drummer for Rush was a huge motorcycle guy to the point that they actually had a trailer on their tour bus that he would carry two bikes on the trailer. So he would ride between concert stops. The band do their show and they'd leave on the bus and he got on his motorcycle and like, “See you in Chicago, guys,” “See you in Milwaukee,” “See you in Madison.” The band went along.
He had some personal and his wife passed away and his daughter fairly tragically and he wrote an entire book about it, where he didn't really quit the band. Although, they basically shut Rush down for a period of time so the band could work through that. But he took that time and went on the road just writing his motorcycle around. He wrote several books about dealing with grief through riding his motorcycle. I found that to be a really fascinating book and it's one of those touchstones, the Canada motorcycle riders. What little we read, that's definitely a book that everyone recommends to me at some point like, “Oh, have you read this book?” I’m like, “Yes, I’ve read that book.”
AARON: It's Neil Peart for anyone who needs to look that up.
I relate to the music as a distraction preventative [laughs] as someone who also deals with ADHD. It just makes sense to me. It's like, “Oh yeah, without it, there's so many places for my brain to go,” but if you have music on the back and it's like, “Oh, great. All right. That's where my brain is going to go when it gets distracted, it's just going to listen to this, then I'll go back to riding the bike.” [chuckles]
KERRI: Exactly. Exactly.
CORALINE: Kerri, you said a word earlier when you were contrasting the way you were riding when you started out and being kind of exploratory versus, I think the word you used is directive there, or a sweet spot for you between directed activity, directed riding versus wandering, maybe even drifting—not a car movie reference. But is there a balance that rejuvenates you, or that energizes you?
KERRI: Yes. I've talked to other motorcycle riders about this, where you say, “My gosh, there's so many great things that we see along the way,” and we say, “I would love to stop here.”
So for example, when we're doing these rallies where we're collecting things, for example, you stop to take a picture, or something, and then you’ve got to go. You only really stop for 5 minutes because you have this timetable and a schedule that you're trying to execute, or if you're trying to ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours, you can't stop. Your gas stops, you’re timed down to like oh, 5 minutes. So you'll see things. You're like, “Man, I wish I could stop,” or “I wish I had come back here and take this in and give something,” the respect that you want to give it, or really, really dive deep and taste a place, if you will.
It's a really common thing in the long-distance thing. Other motorcycles will sometimes say like, “Well, you don't see anything that way.” It's like, “Well, actually, I see a lot. I see way lot more in my days than you see,” but you don't get to stop so you have to kind of try and balance that.
That's one thing that I really like about these collection things that I do is, collection challenges, I carry satellite tracker, of course so I can plot out everywhere that I've been. I've been looking at the one for my lighthouse trip so far up and down the West Coast. It's just amazing, I'm going out to every little inlet, point, and little peninsula sticks out into the ocean because that's where the lighthouses are and the things that I've gotten to see through doing that.
So one of the reasons that I've gotten into those sort of challenges rather than the pure and endurance is just because it does reward that exploration. While, at the same time, being fairly directed because the directed part of it is researching and planning at home, like finding where are the lighthouses, where are the national parks I need to go visit? What are the hours are things open? Making that plan versus executing on the plan and the execution plan, getting to explore things, I think it's really a lot about the framing of the trip for me.
In February, I'm going down to San Diego and then I'm going to, what's called a 50cc, which is coast to coast in 50 hours. So I'll be leading San Diego and within 50 hours, I'm going to be in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Aha. Somehow, I'll do that. I'm not going to be able to stop and see anything along the way, but because I know that's the kind ride I'm embarking on, it becomes okay. It's this weird personal permission structure to give a pass to things that I would really like to see along the way versus say, if I'm doing a lighthouse trip –
I did one several months ago down to Disneyland, but I went down the California coast and I found myself like, “Oh, I'm not making any miles. This is so slow. Why is this taking me 3 days to get down to Los Angeles when it normally takes me 1 and a half at most?” So I had to stop and I ended up stopping in this little tiny town. I can't even remember the name of the place, but it's somewhere in Northern coast, California, and there's a little tiny coffee shop there. It's like Two Girls Coffee, or something like that. I just stopped, I got a coffee, and I sat outside. They had a table, it was a nice day, and I was just like, “I'm just going to sit here for 30 minutes and I'm just going to recenter myself and really think about what am I doing here? What do I want to be accomplishing and what set of skills do I need to bring to this moment to maximize how much fun I'm going to have? If I'm not having fun, then why am I doing it?”
So just being able to sit there in sunshine for a little bit and just say, “The point of what I'm doing here is to explore and it's to have this experience. It's not get someplace fast. It's not to get someplace far away. It's to explore and see things.” I was so much happier after that and I had a great conversation with a hippie in the parking lot so that was pretty great.
MANDY: Bonus. [laughs]
Well, we usually end this conversation with reflections.
I know, for me, I just want to say that everything you described just makes me feel so happy. I've been on a really big journey to improve my life and just what you said in the last few minutes about just taking time to enjoy, not being in a hurry, slowing down, and recentering yourself. That is all just so important to remember the whole cliché of stopping and smelling the roses. Like just enjoying your life even if it's a quarter tank at a time.
JAMEY: I keep thinking about this map that Kerri says that she has, which I actually legitimately would really like to see. But a lot of what Kerri was talking about was resonating with me. I also like to explore and I think about keeping track of places, but I don't have a map and I've been thinking about it for a while. I think it's one of these sunk cost things where I'm like, “Well, if I wanted to do a map, I should have been like doing it already,” but that's not how that works in real life. So if I want to have a map, I should start it now and I think that's my call-to-action. [chuckles]
KERRI: When people ask my advice like, “Oh, what motorcycle should I get,” or “What's the best motorcycle to do this, or that?” I always say like, “Oh, well the best motorcycle to do the ride you want to do is the one you have.” I think that's really true of so many things in life is that the trick is just to get started and it's not about the fancy equipment. It's not about the gear. You could just do it. If you just give yourself permission to go do a thing, you can just go do it.
CORALINE: I was thinking about how that kind of philosophy relates to how my life circumstances, job situation has changed so much for the past year since I retired from software engineering and the relief of not having to be productive, not having to hit goal, not having to have constraints that I'm not in control of, governing things, and permission to go down rabbit holes.
So when you were talking about the giant cow, I was liking that to well, if you were in a hurry to get somewhere, you wouldn't have stopped there. But because you weren't, you had a richer experience. You saw something you hadn't seen before. You hadn't experienced before. I really think that's a lesson we can take all over the place and give ourselves permission, like you said, to wander aimlessly and to explore. That's something that I definitely intend to do in my life and your story of doing that is very inspirational so thank you, Kerri.
AARON: I was just latching onto two bits that I really liked.
First off, if I'm not having fun, then why am I doing this is probably life lessons to live by. [chuckles] But I also appreciated the moment of resetting your expectations to your purpose. Like, why am I doing this thing? Let me remember, because I had a reason I'm doing it and if I'm not enjoying it right now, where's the mismatch? I like that.
Because so often, it's easy, for me anyway, to stumble into doing something and finding yourself like, “Why am I doing this?” and then stepping back and be like, “Okay. All right. I chose to do this because of this and if this is my purpose, then I can let go of this other pressure that I'm putting on myself to go further every day when that's not the reason I'm here.” It doesn't make sense to put that pressure on myself then.
KERRI: I feel like that chain, that returning to the beginning point is also a good career skill. You have to get serious about it, or bring this into work realm. But as a senior engineer, staff engineer, and principal, blah, blah, blah, so often, it's not how efficient can I make this loop. It's also going back, is this doing the right thing to do? Like, “Why are we doing this? Is there a better way to solve this sort of problem?” So it's that lesson of what I learned on the road coming back into work, but it's also because work is life as well and if work isn't fun and whatever, then why am I doing it? But that skill comes back into my personal life so there's this free flow of influence going back and forth.
AARON: Yeah. That purpose revisit thing is something that I've just been thinking about from events standpoint from doing conferences over the past couple years, like so much had to go back to first principles because it was like, okay, well what was the reason for us doing this? Just recreating the same motion in a different environment isn't necessarily going to get us the same results. What is the reason we're doing this? Let's revisit that and make sure we're still in alignment with it all. I think we can do that more often in our lives, too. Like, “What is the reason I'm doing this thing?” [chuckles] “Okay, it's not accomplishing that anymore. Let's get rid of this practice and try something else,” or not. Maybe the answer is to keep it.
CHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I think about apropos of what a couple of other folks were mentioning about how easy it is to get caught up in the details when trying to start something as opposed to just picking early anything and getting started. Occasionally, folks will ask me questions like that about blogging and one of the things that I like to do is keep some URLs on hand of some of my earlier pieces, just because it makes it really clear that it didn't always look like this. I just started and it wasn't what people see. I think folks sometimes see someone who's several years down the road of having started something and feeling like they can't start because it won't look like that immediately and it won't. [laughs]
But I imagine that having those kinds of stories on hand, what I'm thinking about is how to make those sorts of stories more accessible to folks. Because a lot of what we see understandably about how to do something is from the folks who have mastered it to some degree and it's not as clear where to look to find folks who also are just starting and what to expect your journey to look like right at the beginning.
MANDY: Kerri, do you want to leave a us with any parting thoughts?
KERRI: A lot of people, when I tell them I rode a 1,000 miles in a day, they're like, “You can't do that.” It’s like, “I’ve done it 12 times.” It’s like, “What are you talking about?” But to kind of carry on to Aaron and to what Chelsea just said, it's a marathon. You can't do a lot of big things in a single step. You have to make that first step and then the second step and then the third step and then you're walking and you're doing the thing.
I don't really talk about motorcycling with people who don't motorcycle and everybody who I motorcycle would talk about this. We all do it and so, it's not remarkable. Sometimes I think it's important to realize that what we do accomplish in our lives is fairly remarkable and magic to a lot of people. As software engineers, what we do is frankly, astounding some days and it's important to remember that we have traveled far from where we began when we first started doing this sort of stuff and we may return to that when we change careers, or jobs, or languages, or technologies.
Return to that place of not knowing and that can be uncomfortable, but there is so much joy and discovery you can have if you just take that time, and stop and understand and pay attention to your story of where you started, where you're going, and how far along you've actually come. You can't look up the mountain and be intimidated by that. You should turn around and look back down the mountain to see how far you've come.
MANDY: That was lovely. Thank you so much and thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us yet another few stories. The first time you were on the show, I distinctly remember the title being Story Time with Kerri Miller and you never disappoint. I'm so glad that you took time to join us and talk about your motorcycling adventures with us [chuckles] non-motorcycling people. It is super fascinating and it's definitely an awesome topic outside of – that we can relate a lot of the concepts to the tech field, software engineering, development, and all that.
So dear listener, if you have a cool hobby like Kerri that you want to come on the show and talk about, we’d love to talk to you because this has frankly been amazing and I really enjoyed this episode. So thank you again and we’ll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Kerri Miller.
02:14 - Ashleigh’s Superpower: Ability To See “The Vision”
03:35 - Intentionality: “People First”
10:55 - Listen
15:10 - Building Trust – Why is vulnerability not professional?
21:02 - Personal Growth and Development
27:24 - Intersexuality and Identity: How do you show up?
36:37 - Making and Dealing With Mistakes
40:05 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
45:52 - Fundraising & Venture Capital (VC)
Reflections:
Mandy: Eating a shame sandwich in order to learn and grow.
Chanté: North Star = Being excellent to each other.
Ashleigh: Celebrating intersections of identity.
Aaron: The “This Doesn’t Make Sense” log.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
MANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm here with our new panelist, Aaron Aldrich.
Welcome, Aaron!
AARON: Thanks! And hey, I'm Aaron. I use they/them pronouns and I am also here with Chanté Martínez Thurmond.
CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone, Chanté here. I use she/her/ella pronouns and I am so glad to introduce our guest today, Ashleigh Wilson.
Welcome, Ashleigh.
AARON: Thank you for having me!
Hello, Ashleigh here and I use she/her pronouns.
CHANTÉ: Ashleigh is the Founder and CEO of Auditmate, the world's first elevator and escalator auditing system.
After discovering that customers were an afterthought to most companies, Ashleigh left the corporate world and founded Auditmate under a "people first" mentality. Ashleigh knows discrimination first-hand as a queer woman working in the tech industry and she aims to create a space where everyone has permission to be human.
What a great bio.
ASHLEIGH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
CHANTÉ: It's a pleasure.
Ashleigh, the first question we ask our is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
ASHLEIGH: My superpower is my ability to see the vision and it's a bit of a witchy. I don't know where it comes from, but the best visual representation I've ever seen of it as if anyone has seen The Queen’s Gambit and when she can move the chess pieces on the ceiling? When I'm in the zone, and it's often when I'm half sleep, it just connects and I'm like, “Oh, this is how it works,” and I can just see the path forward. I can't force it. [chuckles] I don't get to choose when it happens. It just happens, or it doesn't. But when I get those deep downloads on the vision and the path forward, and then I think the skill that's been learned to couple with that is then how to make a plan to execute it because the vision can be one, but that execution does not work alone. [chuckles]
AARON: That's awesome. I like that and I like that you mentioned the skill that gets paired with that. I can relate to a superpower can't exist in a vacuum; it needs some way to be harness and used. [chuckles]
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely.
CHANTÉ: I love that, too. Aaron, where you're going with that, because what it makes me think about Ashleigh, just reading your bio and kind of getting a preview of some of the things you care about, how have you been intentional about building a people first organization, or a startup in this space and using that superpower and maybe either finding people who compliment you there, or who are distinctly different? But I'd love to hear how you've been intentional about that.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think it starts with first of all, when you feel othered in any organization, like coming in and being able to set the culture is like, “Oh, I'm going to do all of these things.” But as Aaron mentioned earlier, it's not in a vacuum and so, I think the intentionality has been, what is the mission? What is the north star? How do we treat each other? And then at every new hire at every new customer acquisition, it then iterates, iterates, iterates, and iterates. You have to be willing to learn, to take feedback, and to eat a shame sandwich every once in a while, when you screw it all up and you have to admit it [chuckles] because it happens every single time. I've been called to the carpet.
I think one of the biggest ways that I've been intentional is being communicative about call me out, call me out. I'm never going to know all of the things all the time and I think that my team knows me well enough to know my intentions, but it comes in intentions versus impact conversation. I can only know my intentions unless you tell me how this impacts you. I can't know and so, creating a culture of my team being able to call me out and be like, “Hey, your intention was good. The impact sucked. Let's talk about it.” [chuckles]
AARON: What's that like practically to get folks like on that side and able to call you out because I know for – I'm thinking about it and I know I can to jump into any corporate culture, even startup and be like, “Yeah, I feel comfortable calling out my boss on this.” [chuckles]
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't think we feel like we have a corporate culture at least yet.
AARON: Yeah.
ASHLEIGH: But that also took time in creating. So one way that we did it was we have something called that this doesn't make sense log so that people can just document either things in the system, or things in the culture, or things in policies that just are kind of dumb. Like why do we do this this way? This doesn't make sense. This makes my job harder than it should be. The we need to get X done, but you're making us do Y and Z that don't go toward the greater mission.
And then also we created an emotional fitness survey for every employee so that each person – and it's left in one place so each person says, “I want to receive praise publicly, or privately,” or “If I need to get feedback, I want to receive it like this,” or these just different questions on how people to be communicated to. I think setting up those conversations as people log in and it's okay to speak up, it's okay to push back, I expect you to push back on me makes people feel more comfortable, but it takes a while. It does.
CHANTÉ: I love that. I use something very similar to that for my own consulting business in my firm and it's been something that we really lean into helpful to just make sure that it's transparent and it's a nice reminder as a leader that your answers to questions can change. Giving people permission to say, “You know what, how I'm showing up today is different than how I showed up yesterday, because life.” [chuckles]
ASHLEIGH: Totally.
CHANTÉ: So I really love that.
The other sort of burning thing that I have for you is, because I read that you had been in this business so I'm guessing that you had learned from people and maybe it was a family business. I might have missed that part. I'm curious how doing it your way this time with these sort of principles is different than the way maybe you were mentored to do it, or what you've seen in the past and why that's important.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't know that I had ever seen it modeled before. I was raised in the elevator industry and before that, my stepdad was in the elevator industry and my dad was salesman of any type, door-to-door salesman selling vacuums to cleaners, to cars, to whatever the case may be and I've never fallen in line.
I was always the kid in school that was like, “Why do you do it that way? When you can do it this way? Why are we doing this? That doesn't make sense and that doesn't feel good?” And people are like, “Well, we don't really care how you feel,” and I'm like, “But why it doesn't feel good?” Like why do people want to work where it doesn't feel good? This doesn't make sense to me.” That feeling in my tummy has always been so wrong that it's either a hard yes, or a hard no and I'm like, “How do you operate in a hard no all the time?” Why do we expect people to operate in these visceral responses to this?
Just watching how teams have responded and how you almost want to beat the individuality out of people to get performance to a certain standard, or something, like that somehow makes it better for everybody to be like that whole homogeny equals happiness saying? It was never true to me and so, I think I always had this if I feel like this, there has to be someone else that feels like this. I cannot be the only one that wants to show up as my true self and talk about feelings in business meetings! I cannot be the only one. This has to exist.
I started a Dare to Lead book club at the Elevator office, which [chuckles] I'm sure you can imagine how that went over. Everybody showed up and I was like, “Oh, so y'all want to act like this is okay and that everyone seems okay. But then look at all of these white cis men in my Dare to Lead book club. Huh.” So it just kind of gave me the affirmation that I needed to say, “People do want to feel good. People do want to talk about and this does actually help the bottom line.”
CHANTÉ: I personally love it. What I do for my day-to-day is focus on culture and focus on diversity, equity, inclusion accessibility, and organizations, whether it's on teams, products, services, and offerings. I think that people underestimate what it takes to build something that's special, especially there's not a culture budget. There's a budget for recruiting. There's a budget for performance stuff and for growth. But I'm like, “But what is the fascia? What is the stuff that keeps it together?” And it is the culture.
I often like to say, as we're thinking about the future of work and building the next iteration of what work should be in decentralized teams working from home, we do need to lean into the sort of the soft skills that are actually aren't that soft, but they're those emotional intelligence stuff. That makes a huge difference.
So is there any advice you might have to leaders like you who are like, “Okay, I guess I might read a Dare to Lead book,” or “I might start to prioritize this”? Where can they start, or what are practical things that you've learned along the way in leading your company in this fashion?
ASHLEIGH: Listen. Listen is the first one. Listen when you get defensive, because those moments when your team says something to you that seems so small, insignificant, and annoying because you have all of these big things to do and all of the – you're pushing the company forward and there's this little voice that someone was brave enough to say this little thing that you're like, “Ugh.”
That defensiveness, that feeling, whatever that small thing is, is probably a big thing, or will become a big thing and being able to own up to whatever it is that's making you defensive, or uncomfortable and truly listening in and digging into what is the root cause of that? Because it's generally, I don't know if you know the saying like something about the wrapper, it's never the wrapper. You get into a fight about the wrapper on the counter, that's never the wrapper. It's not throwing away the wrapper. It's the underlining way of how we are making people feel and for me, it's been about being able to truly dig into those things.
The doesn't make sense log came from one of those experiences. My team, we were in these meetings and they would bring up these little things and be like, “Hey Ashleigh, well, what about this?” And I'm like, “It's not the time for that. We're talking about Z. Why are you bringing up A? We're in this super deep meeting about Z and you're talking about A,” and then they were like, “You're not listening to us. You say that you are people first, but you're not hearing us,” which is like a dagger to the heart. It's gutting and I had to sit with it for days because I was like, “I know I'm people first. I know my intention is right. How am I not translating it? How are my actions not matching my intentions?”
When I boiled down to it, it was people didn't have an easy way to bring up little things to me and so, those little things would start to get bigger and then they would bring them up in big meetings because my schedule is booked. We don't have water cooler talk. We don't have walking by someone's desk and being like, “Hey, what's happening with blah, blah, blah?” That stuff doesn't exist and so, these little things were starting to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because there wasn't an easy place to just discuss them. So creating one log alleviated so much pain and made people feel heard about, “Hey, this one email has a misspelling and no one's paid attention to it.” Just little stuff.
And then the second thing is that we've been starting is more personal time. We started what I call an AuditMate lounge, which is on Fridays and it's just meant to be logging on and just hanging out with each other. It's water cooler time. You can be working, you can be doing other things, but this is not a business meeting. This is not meant to get things done. It's meant to just hang out.
AARON: I like that. I just started working at a new company this month and similar to the team I'm on at least, the DevRel has similar like, “Oh, we're just going to hang out for a bit because I'm around,” [chuckles] and whatever. I've really appreciated it because it's something that I feel like when you're in an office, it's easy to lose track of all the time that you spend just being around those people and building those relationships because it's just rolled into, “Oh, I was getting a coffee,” or “Oh, we went to get lunch,” or “Oh, we went to do this,” and “Oh, I walked by a desk and said ‘Hey’ for a few minutes.”
But especially with COVID with everyone remote and at home, or remote companies, it's so easy to forget about that stuff and forget about building those connections that are more than just, “Hey, we work on this thing together.” It's like, “Oh yeah, also, we're people. We should hang out and talk about what people do,” [chuckles] which is sometimes just nothing.
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely and it's how we build trust!
AARON: Hmm. Yeah. I think that's a big thing, too.
MANDY: What are your favorite ways to build trust?
ASHLEIGH: Oh, well, I never really thought about it like that.
I'm a Scorpio moon and rising so I like all of the deep things like, “Hi, I'm Ashleigh. Tell me about your trauma.” So I think the biggest way [chuckles] that I like to build trust is just in deep conversation, really getting to know each other, being vulnerable, and being able to just take the mask off.
MANDY: Do you think you can do that too much, though with coworkers? Where do you find that balance? Because I struggle with that myself. Like how do you be open and completely vulnerable, but professional at the same time?
ASHLEIGH: Why is vulnerability not professional?
MANDY: That's a great question.
ASHLEIGH: I think that's where – and I don't have an answer to it. It's kind of what I'm rambling. But why is vulnerability pegged with femininity and why is vulnerability loaded into being unprofessional, or too much, or too whatever? I think that the vulnerability that I don't want to expose too much is if it's loaded with fear because feelings aren't facts and I don't want to unload fear onto my team if there's something that I'm nervous about. I feel like it's my responsibility to hold those things and to alleviate some fear.
But I think unpacking with my team that we can be vulnerable and that is actually more professional because it does make us more efficient. It does make us more trusting, I guess, would be the proper word there. The personal things that I don't share as far as vulnerability is there's some personal life stuff that I don't share, but not because it's not professional, but because it's sacred more.
AARON: I think you mentioned something interesting about fear that gets at an interesting balance. From a leadership perspective, you have some responsibility about the vulnerability that you share and what you're able to be vulnerable with your team that maybe different than you want from an individual contributor on that team.
You probably want to hear the fears of your team like, “Tell me what you're worried about so I can either alleviate those, or we can work to be in a good place.” But at the same time, sounds like you have some responsibility that I can't unload that on you because I'm the one who's supposed to be [laughs] taking care of that. How does that play out me besides just that one generic scenario? Are there ways you find that balance difficult to walk, or?
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, like fundraising. My team needs to trust that I'm going to pay the bills. I don't want them to be worried about having money for payroll, or that we're going to be set up for our next raise, or that, right? There's some basic survival stuff that can be so linked to trauma of if we don't feel like we're going to have food on our tables for our family, if we don't feel like we're going to have continual pay, if we don't – those sort of things that are just human nature. We can't think and we can't perform because it is my duty to take care of my family and if I can't take care of my family with this company, I need to go do what I need to go do.
So that's where it's my responsibility to those fears – especially when you are rational, if I'm having imposter syndrome about raising money as a queer woman and it's irrational because, maybe not irrational but loaded because of statistics, I shouldn't unload that on them, or I need to have someone, a mentor, someone that I can go to because they need to be expressed, but that could get bigger and bigger and bigger when shared with my team.
So I really think about our north star is being excellent to each other. When my vulnerability is serving to them is when I share and not just when it's serving to me, because it'll make me feel better to express that I'm scared about funding, but it will not make my team feel better. It will, in fact, make them feel worse.
CHANTÉ: What I hear is this dance we have to do as folks who have founded companies, or leaders of those companies to have what I consider again, that emotional intelligence. It's like – [overtalk]
ASHLEIGH: Totally.
CHANTÉ: Because self-awareness is huge and when you get a chance to – when you know your traps, or the traumas and the triggers that keep you stuck, or actually help to get you to another place, you can notice them in others and then the regulation is really important as well to really build relationships that are trusting and then discern it. It's like timing is everything to be like, you have to be able to read the room. You have to be able to be perceptive, read people's faces, and understand that they may have disassociation. They might be smiling, but they actually might be scared shitless [laughs] as you're like, “Oh, we're raising around.”
I love how you how you kind of introduce this thought around Maslow's hierarchies of needs. People want to be able to put food on the table and be able to take care of their responsibilities whether that's a family, or a spouse, significant other, friend, or community and that is why we work. [chuckles] We need the money because we're in this capitalistic system.
So I just love how you're doing that and where my mind takes me is how did you have the wisdom to do that? Who has been either an example that you admire, do you have a coach, do you have a community? Where are you learning these awesome things? Because I feel like you're so in touch with this emotional intelligence piece that so many people are missing.
ASHLEIGH: Thank you. I appreciate that.
I did not used to be, [chuckles] to be quite honest and I learned about emotions getting freshly sober at like 24 from Brené Brown. I had no idea. I had no idea. I quit drinking and remember starting to read one of her books and saying that an emotionally intelligent person knew 30 emotions and I was like, “Wait, there's more than happy and sad? You're telling me there's 30? That I should be able to name 30 and know what they feel like in my body?”
CHANTÉ: Right, and according to her new book, she has even more stuff.
ASHLEIGH: [laughs] Yeah.
CHANTÉ: I think there's like 80 plus.
ASHLEIGH: I'm like, “Wait, what?”
[laughter]
“This is a thing?” And that's when it kind of dawned on me, when people would say to me, “You don't get it. You don't get it,” and I'm like, “I don't get what?” And then I was like, “Oh, I'm not going to be able to know what you're feeling until I know what I'm feeling. Cool, great. I have a lot of work to do.” [chuckles]
So that's when I think I started unpacking and learning. I was raised by an alcoholic and then became one and then getting sober at a young age was like, “Oh, this is mine and that's yours and I didn't know that I ended and you started.” So really learning and starting to place those things for me and then just reading a lot, a lot of Eastern spirituality, I read a lot of Buddhism books, a lot of yoga books, a lot of Brené Brown vulnerability, shame, rumbling type books. And then I think it's just kind of been like I'll take this from that and really, it just leads from what feels good and what doesn't.
MANDY: Personal growth is essential. I'm in the same boat almost. I, too, am sober and it has changed my life. Over the past 2 years, I have done so much work on myself that sometimes I'm doing too much, but I learned – [overtalk]
ASHLEIGH: Totally. That’s a thing. [overtalk]
MANDY: Brené Brown is one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle, too.
ASHLEIGH: I was just going to mention her. Yes, oh my God!
MANDY: I love Glennon. Yeah. So personal growth is, I mean, journaling. Every day, I make it a habit and a practice to sit down and just write out my thoughts and my feelings. I highly, highly suggest to anybody who will listen to me to do the same thing.
ASHLEIGH: Same. [chuckles]
MANDY: Morning Pages are a wonderful thing. If you can do it in the morning, just get everything out of your head. Even the dumbest little thoughts, “dumbest little thoughts.” I mean, there are no dumb thoughts, but just getting all the, I call it taking the trash out.
ASHLEIGH: Oh, I like that.
MANDY: And just even snippets of any weird dreams, or just little nagging thoughts that are in the back of my head. Getting all those things out is just so essential.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. And do you know The Holistic Psychologist?
MANDY: I do.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, and her future self-journaling has also been really helpful at times, like sitting down in the morning and saying, “My future self will feel like this and this is how my future self will take care of me today” has also been really powerful along those same lines.
CHANTÉ: Mandy, I loved your question earlier when you were like, “How do you know? Some people are not comfortable in doing that.” So I feel like what's also really true about organizations and teams is just you can have somebody who's kind of the sage, or most wise elder on the team who's like, “I've been through this, I've walked this path,” and then there's people who are like, “Huh, vulnerability.” And then the magic of that leader in the room is finding, or recognizing the spectrum of that and being all these things are actually welcomed and everybody's experience matters.
So how do you do that for your team? I'm imagining you have people who are newbies on this journey with you, or people who are like, “This is the best.” Maybe they gravitated and wanted to join you because they recognize parts of themselves in you, but how do you manage that part for your team and kind of carry and make room for the full spectrum of folk?
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think I'm still learning that one. I think we're always learning that one as our teams constantly change and evolve. The emotional fitness survey helps. I definitely call people out and I'm like, “Okay, how does this feel to everyone? Everyone has to talk, I'm waiting and I will for you to talk,” which I know can be jarring for folks that don't want to share in a group.
So really making sure to get everyone's input, that everyone gets used to speaking up in front of the group, and that it is just around Robin mentality, but then also developing those one-on-one relationships so people feel kind being like, “Hey, I'd rather share with you my idea after the call,” or whatever the case may be. But I think it's my job to hold space, it's my job to shut up sometimes and pass the mic, and it's my job to push and to pull.
So to really, really look at those levers of who's ready for more and who has the potential to and wants to develop that potential. Maybe it's fear, or maybe it's something that's blocking them that I can help them see. And then for other folks they're like, “Hey, I'm good. I'm chilling. I want to be right here. I don't want to be the big boss. I want to be your right-hand human and let me stay where I'm at.” I'm in my lane. Go away.” So I think it's just really listening to folks and then also help to see what may blocking our views.
CHANTÉ: I think I shared that the work I do is diversity, equity, and inclusion accessibility stuff and I often lead a lot and facilitate a lot of conversation around helping leaders and their teams recognize their identities, or intersectionality and recognizing social location and how that plays out with power privilege.
One of the things we read about you is that you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I'm guessing that that's a very prominent identity for you because you shared it online openly. Thank you. But I know there's other parts to you. So what are the identities that you lead with? We could start with the most obvious and kind of learn more about you from there.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. So I lead with queer always. Queer is through and through who I am. I realize the privilege I have with the way that I present to the world. In most instances, I will always be safe and I think that it's my responsibility as a VC-backed founder to take that space and I don't really own that for me. I have the privilege of being safe and so, let's make this known and let's make room for more folks while I'm here. I can elbow folks out of the way so that we can keep some more space.
But the other parts of me. Gender, I don't really know right now, I'm kind of at the point that I think it's really garbage shit right now. So I don't really know. [laughs] I struggle. I've been in the dance with gender for a while and it's like, I feel like I would be taking up too much space to come out as non-binary and I know that non-binary, you don't have to look a certain way. I realize I have a lot of cis presenting privilege and it's not about that for me. I finally have landed on the conclusion that I don't give a crap about gender at all. It's more genderless and even non-binary feels too boxy for me. I don’t know, I'm kind of ambiguous on that right now. [chuckles]
AARON: Actually, I'm just generally agnostic you.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I feel that.
[laughter]
CHANTÉ: Yeah. And I loved your response. I'm really into somatics and noticing bodies because bodies show up in space. [chuckles]
ASHLEIGH: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: People are triggered by bodies sometimes and recognizing it could be that your race, your ethnicity, it could be your age, or your ability, or where you grew up and accent. Are there any other parts of you that you feel like are prominent, or that you lead with, or maybe don't lead with? I’m curious just to hear more about it.
ASHLEIGH: I'm pretty heavily tattooed and I also dress kind of funky in most instances. You can't tell right now, but half my hair is orange and half my hair is red. I'm loud, I'm vocal, and I'm very little, but I'm big in spaces. [laughs] I think that makes me different because most of the spaces that I operate in, I've been in this. Oh, the elevator world, it is 98% white men and I'm joking kind of about the industry, but I'm not going to shrink myself anymore. You will be uncomfortable by me. Don't let the crop top fool you. I am a CEO [chuckles] and I'm not going to change my crop top. Like, sorry.
CHANTÉ: Yes. See, this is why I'm asking. I mean, I love it. You just naturally went to like, “Okay.” So those are the things that that's how you're showing up.
ASHLEIGH: Mm hm.
CHANTÉ: Right, and what's true for the industry and what you're in and you kind of already went there, I think it's dope and I think the context matters because you're like, “Yeah. Am I in a room with other queer people who are leading tech companies, or am I in a predominantly male, cis, able-bodied, privileged, born and educated in United States industry where I'm blending elevator technology,” whatever? So thank you for that.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely.
[chuckles]
A lot of times I walk into the room and it's like, either I'm uncomfortable, or they're uncomfortable. So I'm like, “You're going to be uncomfortable today. I'm sorry. I'm going to make you feel things and I'm going to make you recognize your privilege because guess what, we all must be painfully aware of our privilege and if I am in a room all full of white people, all of able-bodied people, all of privileged people in some sense, let's talk about this. Why are we not? Why are we not talking about the humans that are impacted by the work that we're doing? Hello.”
AARON: It sounds like that was a big influence for your people-centric company, too.
ASHLEIGH: Mm hm.
AARON: I don't want to put that experience on you, [chuckles] but – [overtalk]
ASHLEIGH: Totally.
AARON: I don't want to ask it from a place of naivety and say like, “Oh, did this affect it?” It sounds very obviously your identity and being counterculture to the elevator and escalator world has influenced your company and where you want to go with that and how you want to show up.
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely, a 100% being in that space and being different and just being like, “You know what, if I don't own this, I'm going to feel terrible forever and I don't want to because that's great.” It's great and I can walk into the sun in San Francisco and feel fantastic and so, why do I not feel that same confidence level in this boardroom?
AARON: Right.
ASHLEIGH: You're not going to make me feel small. I'm sorry, you're not.
AARON: I think that's a big – I don’t know if I'm seeing so much of a shift. It's a big portion of… I don’t know I want to go with that, but I really like that. You're not going to make me feel small. I like the idea of showing up and you know what, this is me and just because you are uncomfortable, I’m not going to diminish myself.
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely and the reason that I do that is me doing that shows other people that it's safe. At least if I'm in the room, you're safe to be who you are if I'm here.
AARON: Mm.
ASHLEIGH: And so that's why I put queer on my LinkedIn, that's why I lead with that because I know I'm safe and so, if I have – I feel responsible to it.
AARON: I know you mentioned you can show up and be safe and create that safety in that environment. Has that been something you had, or had modeled for you, or is that something you had to go out and create this space where you could be that beacon of safety?
ASHLEIGH: I think it's been modeled in my queer community. I don't think it had been modeled in corporate culture. I'm also not lost on how privileged I am to be safe and I'm not the bearer of safety and realize that there's many more intersections that go into that and that I'm here to listen and to learn and I don't know everything. [chuckles] Absolutely not.
So it's important to just be really vulnerable about what we don't know and to say, “Hey, I'm going to fuck it up and there's going to be ways that I am not aware of my unconscious bias yet. So please teach me and if you don't have emotional capacity to teach me, I'm not saying that it's your responsibility, but if you can call me out, please do.”
CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a really important thing. I feel like being in solidarity with others who are othered. For me, it's like oh shit, we have Black history month coming up around the corner and I have some friends who are Black and queer, or Black, queer, and disabled and they're just like, “Oh, which one should I lead with first?” And I'm like, “All of them.” You shouldn't have to choose any of them over the other parts of yourself, because they're all valid and they all inform your lived experience in this particular body that you're in.
I want people to see the complexity and the wholeness of others and just be like, “That is dope.” I love how you said when people have the capacity to teach you, you invite it, but you're not demanding it because so many times we've – I think we all can speak to this on this call. We're all in community.
But it is, some of us have more resource and more ability to show up for each other at other points in time because we're going through something [chuckles] that the whole world doesn't know. It is likely because of our identity, our social location, our privilege, and the unique things we're kind of going through as we navigate life. It's really important to just constantly communicate that as well, that you're inviting this kind of calling out, or calling in and that people don't have to educate you. But I hear the willingness to want to show up and learn, which I think is literally a key. [laughs] The willingness. Yeah, awesome.
AARON: It's at least half of the battle, right?
CHANTÉ: Yes.
ASHLEIGH: Totally.
My friends and I were having a discussion about community here and it was like, you cannot have a community space that never once is going to screw up, or have an issue, or be called out, or called in. How you move through that, or what, I don't know. If you continue to be a safe space, it’s not in not getting called out. It's how you deal with it. It's how you take that feedback from someone, or the community group and say, “One, thank you for telling me, let's be grateful that someone had the bravery to even speak up and two, then you get to say, is this mine, or not?”
Don't lead with the buts, or the whys I did it, or the here's my intent. Don't lead with that. Lead with gratitude that someone felt safe enough to come forward. Someone felt that you were worth getting their feedback, because guess what, if they didn't believe that you would change, they probably wouldn't even tell you. They would just leave. They would just deem the space as unsafe and go. So that in itself, how you take feedback will determine how your community and your company thrives, both.
MANDY: And then apologize and move on.
ASHLEIGH: Bingo. Yes.
AARON: And make material changes to show that you've learned.
[laughter]
ASHLEIGH: Oh, yeah.
[laughter]
ASHLEIGH: Good pointer. And then act also important. But [laughs] yes.
AARON: That lesson of taking feedback, I think and understanding the value of that is so huge and it's a hard lesson. This is probably the hardest lesson I'm dealing with my kids for instance, is like, “Hey, that first call out, I wasn't really upset with you, but then when you acted super defensive and flipped out, that's the problem that I have. That's not okay.”
ASHLEIGH: Totally.
AARON: The initial action was just like, “Hey, we need to change this. Let's alter our behavior. Move on. But all the other stuff, that was not good that. That, we need to work on.”
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely.
AARON: Yeah. It’s a tough lesson. I think it requires an ego check. Like decentering and recognizing oh, this call, it’s not about me. [laughs]
ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. Yes, and it's not easy work. You’ve got to eat it. It's not fun.
AARON: Right.
MANDY: Yeah. I've had to learn not everything's about me.
[laughter]
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AARON: A thing I wanted to get back to a little bit. I loved when Chanté was talking about folks who said that were Black, queer, and disabled and this multiple identities and leading with all of them. I think especially industry wise, or big corp wise anyway, we create these interest groups of this is the Black community interest group. This is the pride interest group. This is the disabled workers' interest group.
I feel like it misses so much of the you of intersectionality. I'm wondering if you've seen that both, in your space and your identity and being able to create that space of vulnerability yourself, if you've noticed a benefit of that.
ASHLEIGH: No, I think that's interesting and I like the note here that employee resources groups can be really great and really crappy. I totally agree.
AARON: Yeah.
ASHLEIGH: Often, it feels to me that the goal is visibility and understanding at the end of the day. We get great visibility in employee resource groups. We feel seen with people that are like us in some way, or another. But really, we want to have this intersectionality so how do we get both? My gosh.
How do we have the representation, which is so important? How do we have the understanding, which is so important? And then how do we move past the feelings of not feeling seen so that we can see others? Because if we don't think it's possible to be seen, we're probably not able to see others and we need an on-staff therapist, really. Let's just be honest.
[laughter]
CHANTÉ: Yes.
ASHLEIGH: Put them on payroll.
[laughter]
CHANTÉ: I’ve got to get that idea. Now you're talking my language. I'm telling you, I'm telling you if I had it my way, all organizations would offer that as their employee health and wellness benefit is to have somebody who's like on-site and depending on the ratio of people, if you have too many, you got to get several organizational psychologists and folks who are well-versed in trauma.
ASHLEIGH: Totally. Yeah.
CHANTÉ: But it makes me think of the conversation I often talk about, which is the difference between sacred space and safe space.
AARON: Ooh.
CHANTÉ: The sacred space is like those ERGs. It's like, yeah, we're going to have our unique identities where we can show up, talk to each other, see each other, and be like, “Oh my God, that really sucked,” or “That was really good. Good job in there.”
The places where we're like – the safe spaces are harder because we have to make sure that everyone, when we say psychological safety, they're like, “Yes, I know what that means,” and that people are committed to doing some kind of work, which is why I'm like, “Organizations need to focus more on culture.”
ASHLEIGH: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: And this is where the like magic can happen, or where it can all fall apart. The sacred versus space is so huge. So, so huge because we can't have enough of people like you, Ashleigh. The world needs so many CEOs like you, then the world would be better and different and I wouldn't mind going to corporate work. [chuckles] But the reality is that you are few and far between. It's based on your identities, based on your lived experience, which is why it is so important to talk about it and to spend time with this episode getting into it.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I also really like the idea of what's the difference between a safe space and a brave space, which plays into that a bit, too. I think in order to be safe, we have to be brave and it's kind of like what comes first vulnerability, or the courage? All the nuance in that, that ends up being this mushy gushy and I completely agree, we need it all and it's possible and I'm a firm believer in it's possible.
The people that keep telling me that people first companies can't be profitable. I think it's bullshit. I think it's absolute bullshit. When we focus on people, the profits will come. If we're all safe, if we all believe in the mission, if we're all there because we want to be there, guess what? It will happen in and it will continue to happen and the foundation will be more sturdy and we'll be able to pivot easier because guess what? We move as a pack and I don't know, I guess, I'm just here to prove them all wrong.
CHANTÉ: I feel like I love that and I'm also really sad that we have to work really hard to prove that people matter over productivity, [chuckles] that people matter over profits.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: My favorite, well, one of my favorite people to follow is Dan Price. He's the CEO of Gravity Payments and he's the guy who went viral when he basically gave up parts of his salary and paid everyone a livable wage. He tweets every day and of brings attention to this. It's just like you're right, Ashleigh that people first companies are rare and I can't believe that that's still happening in 2022, but the ones who are, stick out. There are definitely folks who people fall in line to submit their resume and want to work for you and you have no issue with hiring great talent and probably keeping it. It's the organizations and corporations that are literally extracting people's best parts of themselves in hope of getting a profit for their shareholders.
ASHLEIGH: That just sounds so icky, doesn't it? [chuckles]
CHANTÉ: Yeah. Yeah. It does.
I haven't looked to see who your community is in terms of being venture backed, but when you went out, fundraised, started your company, and you said you were going to be people first, what were the reactions? Did it take you many tries to find folks to fill your cap table who believed in that, too?
ASHLEIGH: So our first funding round, it was mostly retired elevator people that want to see the industry turn around, that believe in the industry and feel really crummy about where it's at now and how lost it is. Our entire first round was completely private and then after that, the next round was mostly those people coming in again.
I wanted to go non-VC for as long as possible because I know I'm niche, I know I'm different, and if you don't get the vision, I don't want to waste my time trying to explain to you what we're doing, because we're too different. So if you're not with me, I don't have the time to sit here and convince you. The industry is a $100 plus billion a year industry and if you don't see that and don't get it, then bye.
But then we ended up taking on some VC funding this round because I got tagged in a LinkedIn post that someone was like, “Where are all the PropTech women?” 98% of the people pitching this VC were all men.
We ended up getting a meeting because I've always turned down any VC meeting. We just hit it off and then we went out to lunch and we were very similar. He was a founder himself and so, he understood what I was doing. I was like, “Hey, I'm not building this company to report to venture capitalists and so, if you're someone that expects me to work for you and not to work for my employees, we're not the right fit.” He was like, “No, that's what I expect you to do. Call me if you need me. Otherwise, I'm out of your hair.” I was like, “Great, okay! We can do this.”
And then we ended up getting a couple more folks. I think it was really because I got on the phone with them and I was like, “I'm not taking your money,” and they were like, “Excuse me?” I was like, “I'm not taking your money. My round is full. I'll talk to you only because Zane wants me to talk to you. Otherwise, I don't have a conversation with you,” and they were like, “Please extend your round,” and I was like, “Okay, I guess.” So how could this happen?
CHANTÉ: Wow, that’s – [overtalk]
ASHLEIGH: Is it because I’m being a jerk? [laughs]
CHANTÉ: No, it sounds like it happened because you were more aware of who you were and you were sticking to your values and principles, actually. That's what it sounds like from my seat. So speaking of that, are your values of the company reflections of your personal values, or are they collective –? [overtalk]
ASHLEIGH: Oh, a 100%.
CHANTÉ: To the folks who work with you?
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, I think both and we found each other. But building out the values and the mission and the vision was something that I spent a lot of money doing with The House of Who, who is a great organization and the East Bay. They're a branding company and they really helped me articulate the vision, the values, and the mission in a really eloquent way right in the beginning.
I think everyone probably looked at me like I was bonkers for spending money on branding before I had any sort of software, or [chuckles] any sort of anything. But for me, it was so important that we had a way to articulate this to the team in an eloquent way that got people on board and really said, “This is who we are and this is who we're going to be.” How do we know what we do before we know who we are? It's not possible. So at that point, the people that align and that gravitate to what our values and vision are, I think we just kind of find each other.
MANDY: That's awesome. I loved hearing a little bit about your journey, especially when it comes to venture capital, because I think lot of us just get a weird icky feeling from even hearing about venture capital. So it's always good to hear the good stories.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah.
MANDY: But since we are coming up on the hour, I was hoping that we could go into reflections and this is where we talk about something that stood out to us, maybe a call-to-action for ourselves, or the listeners. I can start.
There was something at the beginning of the show that you said, that I had to write down, was just eating a shame sandwich once in a while. I'm not going to try to say that ten times fast.
[laughter]
You invited people to call you out and I love that. That's something I always try to do and model. It's the best way to learn, when invited, saying, “If we're talking, I'm going to ask you this. If I'm wrong, can you please let me know? Because I want to learn. I want to grow.” I think that's something that's super important and something that I try to do, especially with children that I'm around. My child, other children that are friends with her, just be like, “I was wrong. I was wrong. I'm sorry and it's just such a good thing to do, just to be humble in that ability to say I was wrong and I learned.” Thank you for that.
CHANTÉ: The thing I really love that you said, and I haven't really heard this often, is you said your north star is being excellent to each other and I feel like most people have a north star of growing, or making an X number of profit, or whatever. I just love that. It is because it really does, I think eliminate your value of being people first and demonstrates that that's where you're going to put your time and money.
Not only if I had the money, I'd be like, “Okay, Ashleigh, when you're having your next route, I want to invest in you.” But I feel like leading with that and saying that often tells people who might be interested in a job what you're about, tells your clients what you're about, and obviously, the communities in what you're serving. I just love that. So thank you for sharing it.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely.
Chanté, my favorite part of today was you talking about the intersections and celebrating the intersections of identity and I've had so many conversations with friends about the different lanes into the intersection, but I really like that you focused on the intersection. So that intersection as a whole was very cool to me.
AARON: I think one of the things I'm going to take with me was your this doesn't make sense log. I love this concept. This speaks to me on so many different levels.
One is the way to raise all these little things that get missed without having to work up all of the energy to try and give someone feedback in a one-on-one meeting, or whatever else. But also, as someone who deals with ADHD and from an engineering mindset, just this place to be like, “Hey, I ran across this and it makes no sense. Can we revisit this?” Because the answer might be, “Oh, here's this explanation for why we do it that way,” and you're like, “Oh, now it makes sense to me,” or it might be like, “You're right. Let's figure out a different way to do that.” I just love that there's just this running place that anyone can just dump these thoughts as they run across them is really cool.
MANDY: Awesome.
Well, Chanté, Aaron, Ashleigh, it's been such a great conversation and thank you all so much for showing up and being vulnerable and having this discussion. It's been great. So with that, I just want to thank you again, thank the audience, and we'll see next week.
Special Guest: Ashleigh Wilson.
Sponsored By:
00:58 - Paul’s Superpower: Participating in Scary Things
02:19 - EventStorming
08:35 - Regulation: Avoiding Overspecifics
15:32 - Facilitation and Knowledge Sharing
24:20 - Key Events
34:22 - Collaboration & Teamwork
39:29 - Remote EventStorming and Facilitation
47:38 - EventStorming vs Event Sourcing
51:14 - Resources
Reflections:
Mandy: Eventstorming and its adjacence to Technical Writing.
Damien: You can do this on a small and iterative scale.
Jess: Shared understanding.
Paul: Being aware of the limitations of ideas you can hold in your head. With visualization, you can hold it in more easily and meaningfully.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
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Transcript:
MANDY: Welcome to Episode 271 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here today with a guest, but returning panelist. I'm happy to see Jessica Kerr.
JESSICA: Thanks, Mandy. It's great to see you. I'm also excited to be here today with Damien Burke!
DAMIEN: And I am excited to be here with both of you and our guest today, Paul Rayner.
Paul Rayner is one of the leading practitioners of EventStorming and domain-driven design. He's the author of The EventStorming Handbook, co-author of Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, and the founder and chair of the Explore DDD conference.
Welcome to the show, Paul.
PAUL: Thanks, Damien. Great to be here.
DAMIEN: Great to have you.
And so you know, you are prepared, you are ready for our first and most famous question here on Greater Than Code?
PAUL: I don't know if I'm ready, or prepared, but I can answer it, I think.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: I know you have prepared, so I don’t know if you are prepared.
PAUL: Right.
DAMIEN: Either way, here it comes. [chuckles] What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
PAUL: Okay. So a couple of weeks ago, there's a lake near my house, and the neighbors organized a polar plunge. They cut a big hole in the ice and everyone lines up and you basically take turns jumping into the water and then swimming to the other side and climbing out the ladder.
So my superpower is participating in a polar plunge and I acquired that by participating with my neighbors. There was barbecue, there was a hot tub, and stuff like that there, too. So it was very, very cool. It's maybe not a superpower, though because there were little kids doing this also. So it's not like it was only me doing it.
JESSICA: I'll argue that your superpower is participating in scary things because you're also on this podcast today!
PAUL: [chuckles] Yeah, there we go.
DAMIEN: Yeah, that is very scary. Nobody had to be fished out of the water? No hospital, hypothermia, any of that?
PAUL: No, there was none of that. It was actually a really good time. I mean, being in Denver, blue skies, it was actually quite a nice day to jump into frozen.
MANDY: So Paul, you're here today to talk about EventStorming. I want to know what your definition of that is, what it is, and why it's a cool topic to be talking about on Greater Than Code.
PAUL: Okay. Well, there's a few things there.
So firstly, what is EventStorming? I've been consulting, working with teams for a long time, coaching them and a big part of what I try and do is to try and bridge the gap between what the engineers, the developers, the technical people are trying to build in terms of the software, and what the actual problem is they're trying to solve.
EventStorming is a technique for just mapping out a process using sticky notes where you're trying to describe the story of what it is that you're building, how that fits into the business process, and use the sticky notes to layer in variety of information and do it in a collaborative kind of way.
So it's really about trying to bridge that communication gap and uncover assumptions that people might have, expose complexity and risk through the process, and with the goal of the software that you write actually being something that solves the real problem that you're trying to solve.
I think it's a good topic for Greater Than Code based on what I understand about the podcast, because it certainly impacts the code that you write, touches on that, and connects with the design. But it's really optimized for collaboration, it's optimized for people with different perspectives being able to work together and approach it as visualizing processes that people create, and then working together to be able to do that.
So there's a lot of techniques out there that are very much optimized from a developer perspective—UML diagrams, flow charts, and things like that. But EventStorming really, it sacrifices some of that rigor to try and draw people in and provide a structured conversation.
I think with the podcast where you're trying to move beyond just the code and dig into the people aspects of this a lot more, I think it really touches on that in a meaningful way.
JESSICA: You mentioned that with a bunch of stickies, a bunch of different people, and their perspectives, EventStorming layers in different kinds of information.
PAUL: Mm hm.
JESSICA: Like what?
PAUL: Yeah. So the way that usually approach it is, let's say, we're modeling, visualizing some kind of process like somebody registering for a certain thing, or even somebody, maybe a more common example, purchasing something online and let's say, that we have the development team that's responsible for implementing how somebody might return a product to a merchant, something like that.
The way it would work is you describe that process as events where each sticky note represents something that happened in the story of returning a product and then you can layer on questions. So if people have questions, use a different colored sticky note for highlighting things that people might be unsure of, what assumptions they might be making, differences in terminology, exposing those types of unknowns and then once you've sort of laid out that timeline, you can then layer in things like key events, what you might call emergent structures. So as you look at that timeline, what might be some events that are more important than others?
JESSICA: Can you make that concrete for me? Give me an example of some events in the return process and then…?
PAUL: Yeah. So let's say, the customer receives a product that they want to return. You could have an event like customer receive product and then an event that is customer reported need for return. And then you would have a shift in actor, like a shift in the person doing the work where maybe the merchant has to then merchant sent return package to customer.
So we're mapping out each one of these as an event in the process and then the customer receives, or maybe it's a shipping label. The customer receives the shipping label and then they put the items in the package with the shipping label and they return it.
And then there would be a bunch of events that the merchant would have to take care of. So the merchant would have to receive that package and then probably have to update the system to record that it's been returned. And then, I imagine there would be processing another order, or something like that.
A key event in there might be something like sending out the shipping label and the customer receiving the shipping label because that's a point where the responsibility transfers from the merchant, who is preparing the shipping label and dispatching that, to the customer that's actually receiving it and then having to do something.
That's just one, I guess, small example of you can use that to divide that story up into what you might think of as chapters where there's different responsibilities and changes in the narrative. Part of that maybe layering in sticky notes that represent who's doing the work. Like who's the actor, whether it's the merchant, or the customer, and then layering in other information, like the systems that are involved in that such as maybe there's email as a system, maybe there's the actual e-commerce platform, a payment gateway, these kinds of things could be reflected and so on, like there's – [overtalk]
JESSICA: Probably integration with the shipper.
PAUL: Integration with the shipper, right. So potentially, if you're designing this, you would have some kind of event to go out to the shipper to then know to actually pick up the package and that type of thing. And then once the package is actually delivered back to the merchant, then there would be some kind of event letting the merchant know.
It's very hard to describe because I'm trying to picture this in my mind, which is an inherently visual thing. It's probably not that interesting to hear me describing something that's usually done on some kind of either mirror board, like some kind of electronic space, or on a piece of butcher's paper, or – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Something with a lot of sticky notes.
PAUL: Something with a lot of sticky notes, right.
DAMIEN: Which, I believe for our American listeners, sticky notes are the little square pieces of brightly colored paper with self-adhesive strip on the back.
PAUL: Yeah. The stickies.
DAMIEN: Stickies. [chuckles]
I have a question about this process. I've been involved in very similar processes and it sounds incredibly useful. But as you describe it, one of the concerns I have is how do you avoid getting over specific, or over described? Like you can describe systems until you're talking about the particles in the sun, how do you know when to stop?
PAUL: So I think there's a couple of things.
Number one is at the start of whatever kind of this activity, this EventStorming is laying out what's the goal? What are we trying to accomplish in terms of the process? With returns, for example, it would be maybe from this event to this event, we're trying to map out what that process looks like and you start with what you might call the happy path. What does it look like when everything goes well? And then you can use pink stickies to represent alternate paths, or things going wrong and capture those. If they're not tied back to this goal, then you can say, “Okay, I think we've got enough level of detail here.”
The other thing is time boxing is saying, “Okay, well, we've only got half an hour, or we've only got an hour so let's see how much we can do in that time period,” and then at the end of that, if you still have a lot of questions, then you can – or you feel like, “Oh, we need to dig into some of these areas more.” Then you could schedule a follow up session to dig into that a little bit more.
So it's a combination of the people that are participating in this deciding how much level of detail they want to go down to. What I find is it typically is something that as you're going through the activity, you start to see. “Oh, maybe this is too far down in the weeds versus this is the right level.” As a facilitator, I don't typically prescribe that ahead of time, because it's much easier to add sticky notes and then talk about them than it is to have a conversation when there's nothing visualized.
I like to visualize it first and lay it out and then it's very easy to say, “Oh, well, this looks like too much detail. So we'll just put a placeholder for that and not worry about out it right now.” It's a little bit of the facilitation technique of having a parking lot where you can say, “Okay, this is a good topic, but maybe we don't need to get down in that right now. Maybe let's refocus back on what it is that we're trying to accomplish.”
JESSICA: So there's some regulation that happens naturally during the meeting, during interactions and you can have that regulation in the context of the visual representation, which is the EventStorming, the long row of stickies from one event to the other.
PAUL: Right, the timeline that you're building up.
So it's a little bit in my mind, I watched last year, I think it was on Netflix. There was a documentary about Pixar and how they do their storyboarding process for their movies and it is exactly that. They storyboard out the movie and iterate over that again and again and again telling that story. What's powerful about that is it's a visual medium so you have someone that is sketching out the main beats of the story and then they're talking it through.
Not to say that EventStorming is at that level of rigor, but it has that kind of feel to it of we're laying out these events to tell the story and then we're talking through the story and seeing what we've missed and where we need to add more detail, maybe where we've added too much detail. And then like you said, Jess, there's a certain amount of self-regulation in there in terms of, do we have enough time to go down into this? Is this important right now?
JESSICA: And I imagine that when I have questions that go further into detail than we were able to go in the meeting, if I've been in that EventStorming session, I know who to ask.
PAUL: That's the idea, yeah. So the pink stickies that we said represent questions, what I like about those is, well, several things. Number one, it democratizes the idea that it's okay to ask questions, which I think is a really powerful technique. I think there's a tendency in meetings for some people to hold back and other people to do all the talking. We've all experienced that. What this tries to do is to democratize that and actually make it not only okay and not only accepted, but encourage that you're expected to ask questions and you're expected to put these sticky notes on here when there's things that you don't understand.
JESSICA: Putting the questions on a sticky note, along with the events, the actors, and the things that we do know go on sticky notes, the questions also go on sticky notes. All of these are contributions.
PAUL: Exactly. They value contributions and what I love about that is that even people that are new to this process, it's a way for them to ask questions in a way that is kind of friendly to them. I've seen this work really well, for example, with onboarding new team members and also, it encourages the idea that we have different areas of expertise.
So in any given process, or any business story, whatever you want to characterize it as, some people are going to know more about some parts of it than others. What typically happens is nobody knows the whole story, but when we work together, we can actually build up an approximation of that whole story and help each other fill in the gaps.
So you may have the person that's more on the business, or the product side explaining some terminology. You can capture those explanations on sticky notes as a glossary that you're building up as you go. You can have engineers asking questions about the sequence of events in terms of well, does this one come before that one?
And then the other thing that's nice about the questions is it actually as you're going, it's mapping out your ignorance and I see that as a positive thing.
JESSICA: The known unknowns.
PAUL: Known unknowns. It takes unknown unknowns, which the kind of elephant in the room, and at least gets them up as known unknowns that you can then have a conversation around. Because there's often this situation of a question that somebody's afraid to ask and maybe they're new to the team, or maybe they're just not comfortable asking that type of question.
But it gives you actually a map of that ignorance so you can kind of see oh, there's this whole area here that just has a bunch of pink stickies. So that's probably not an area we're ready to work on and we should prioritize. Actually, if this is an area that we need to be working on soon, we should prioritize getting answers to these questions by maybe we need to do a proof of concept, or some UX work, or maybe some kind of prototyping around this area, or like you said, Jess, maybe the person that knows the answers to these questions is just not in this session right now and so, we need to follow up with them, get whatever answers we need, and then come back and revisit things.
JESSICA: So you identify areas of risk.
PAUL: Yes. Areas of risk, both from a product perspective and also from a technical perspective as well.
DAMIEN: So what does it take to have one of these events, or to facilitate one of these events? How do you know when you're ready and you can do it?
PAUL: So I've done EventStorming [chuckles] as a conference activity in a hallway with sticky notes and we say, “Okay, let's as a little bit of an icebreaker here –” I usually you do the story of Cinderella. “Let’s pick the Disney story of Cinderella and we'll just EventStorm this out. Just everyone, here are some orange sticky notes and a Sharpie, just write down some things that you remember happening in that story,” and then everyone writes a few. We post it up on the hallway wall and then we sequence them as a timeline and then we can basically build up that story in about 5, or 10 minutes from scratch.
With a business process, it's not that different. It's like, okay, we're going to do returns, or something like that and if people are already familiar with the technique, then just give them a minute, or so to think of some things that they know that would happen in that process. And then they do that individually and then we just post them up on the timeline and then sequence them as a group and it can happen really quickly. And then everything from there is refinement. Iteration and refinement over what you've put up as that initial skeleton.
DAMIEN: Do you ever find that a team comes back a week, or a day, or a month later and goes, “Oh, there is this big gap in our narrative because nobody in this room understood the warehouse needed to be reordered in order to send this thing down”?
PAUL: Oh, for sure. Sometimes it's big gaps. Sometimes it's a huge cluster of pink sticky notes that represents an area where there's just a lot of risk and unknowns that the team maybe hasn't thought about all that much. Like you said, it could be there’s this third-party thing that it wasn't until everyone got in a room and kind of started to map it out, that they realized that there was this gap in their knowledge.
JESSICA: Yeah. Although, you could completely miss it if there's nobody from the warehouse in the room and nobody has any idea that you need to tell the warehouse to expect this return.
PAUL: Right and so, part of that is putting a little bit of thought into who would need to be part of this and in a certain way, playing devil's advocate in terms of what don't we know, what haven't we thought of. So it encourages that sense of curiosity with this and it's a little bit different from –
Some of the listeners maybe have experienced user story mapping and other techniques like that. Those tend to be focused on understanding a process, but they're very much geared towards okay, how do we then figure out how we're going to code up this feature and how do we slice it up into stories and prioritize that. So it's similar in terms of sticky notes, but the emphasis in EventStorming is more on understanding together, the problem that we're trying to address from a business perspective.
JESSICA: Knowledge pulling.
PAUL: Yeah. Knowledge pulling, knowledge distillation, those types of idea years, and that kind of mindset. So not just jumping straight to code, but trying to get a little bit of a shared understanding of what all is the thing that we're trying to actually work on here.
JESSICA: Eric Evans calls it knowledge crunching.
PAUL: Yes, Eric called it knowledge crunching.
DAMIEN: I love that phrase, that shared understanding. That's what we, as product teams, are generating is a shared understanding both, captured in our documentation, in our code, and before that, I guess on large sheets of butcher paper. [laughs]
PAUL: Well, and it could be a quick exercise of okay, we're going to be working on some new feature and let's just spend 15 minutes just mapping it out to get a sense of, are we on the same page with this?
JESSICA: Right, because sometimes it's not even about we think we need to know something, it's do we know enough? Let's find out.
PAUL: Right.
JESSICA: And is that knowledge shared among us?
PAUL: Right, and maybe exposing, like it could be as simple as slightly different terminology, or slightly different understanding of terminology between people that can have a big impact in terms of that.
I was teaching a workshop last night where we were talking about this, where somebody had written the event. So there was a repair process that a third-party repair company would handle and then the event that closed that process off, they called case closed. So then the question becomes well, what does case closed mean? Because the word case – [overtalk]
JESSICA: [laughs] It’s like what's the definition of done?
PAUL: Right, exactly.
[laughter]
Because that word case didn't show up anywhere earlier in the process. So is this like a new concept? Because the thing that kicks off the process is repair purchase order created and at the end of the process, it's said case closed. So then the question becomes well, is case closed really, is that a new concept that we actually need to implement here? Or is this another way of saying that we are getting a copy of that repair purchase order back that and it's been updated with details about what the repair involved? Or maybe it's something like repair purchase order closed.
So it's kind of forcing us to clarify terminology, which may seem a little bit pedantic, but that's what's going to end up in the code. If you can get some of those things exposed a little earlier before you actually jump to code and get people on the same page and surface any sort of differences in terminology and misunderstandings, I think that can be super helpful for everyone.
JESSICA: Yeah. Some people say it's just semantics. Semantics’ meaning, its only meaning, this is only about out what this step actually means because when you put it in the code, the code is crystal clear. It is going to do exactly what it does and whether that clarity matches the shared understanding that we think we have oh, that's the difference between a bug and a working system.
DAMIEN: [laughs] That's beautiful. It's only meaning. [laughs]
JESSICA: Right? Yeah. But this is what makes programming hard is that pedanticness. The computer is the ultimate pedant.
DAMIEN: Pedant. You're going to be pedantic about it.
[laughter]
PAUL: I see what you did there.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: And that is the occupation, right? That is what we do is look at and create systems and then make them precise.
JESSICA: Yeah.
DAMIEN: In a way that actually well, is precise. [laughs]
JESSICA: Right, and the power of our human language is that it's not precise, that it allows for ambiguity, and therefore, a much broader range of meaning. But as developers, it's our job to be precise. We have to be precise to the computers. It helps tremendously to be precise with each other.
DAMIEN: Yeah, and I think that's actually the power of human cognition is that it's not precise. We are very, very fuzzy machines and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise will be greatly disappointed. Ask me how I know.
[laughter]
PAUL: Well, and I think what I'm trying to do with something like EventStorming is to embrace the fuzziness, is to say that that's actually an asset and we want to embrace that and expose that fuzziness, that messiness. Because the processes we have and work with are often inherently complex. We are trying to provide some visual representation of that so we can actually get our head around, or our minds around the language complexities, the meanings, and drive in a little bit to that meaning.
JESSICA: So when the sticky notes pile on top of each other, that's a feature.
PAUL: It is. Going back to that example I was just talking about, let's say, there's a bunch of, like we do the initial part of this for a minute, or so where people are creating sticky notes and let's say, we end up with four, or five sticky notes written by different people on top of each other that end up on the timeline that all say pretty much the same thing with slight variations.
JESSICA: Let’s say, case closed, request closed.
PAUL: Case closed, repair purchase order closed, repair purchase order updated, repair purchase order sent. So from a meaning perspective, I look at that and I say, “That's gold in terms of information,” because that's showing us that there's a richness here.
Firstly, that's a very memorable thing that's happening in the timeline – [overtalk]
JESSICA: Oh and it has multiple things.
PAUL: That maybe means it's a key event. Right, and then what is the meaning? Are these the same things? Are they different things? Maybe we don't have enough time in that session to dig into that, but if we're going to implement something around that, or work with something around that, then we’re going to at some point need some clarity around the language, the terminology, and what these concepts mean. Also, the sequence as well, because it might be that there's actually multiple events being expressed there that need to be teased apart.
DAMIEN: You used this phrase a couple times, “key event,” and since you've used it a couple times, I think it might be key.
[laughter]
Can you tell us a little bit about what a key event is? What makes something a key event?
PAUL: Yeah, the example I like to use is from the Cinderella story. So if you think about the story of Cinderella, one of the things, when people are doing that as an icebreaker, they always end up being multiple copies of the event that usually is something like shoe lost, or slipper lost, or glass slipper lost. There's something about that event that makes it memorable, firstly and then there's something about that event that makes it pivotal in the story.
For those that are not familiar with the story [chuckles]—I am because I've EventStormed this thing maybe a hundred times—but there's this part. Another key event is the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic at the start and she actually describes a business policy. She says, “The magic is going to run out at midnight,” and like all business policies, it's vague [laughter] and it’s unclear as to what it means because – [overtalk]
JESSICA: The carriage disappears, the dress disappears, but not the slipper that fell off.
PAUL: Exactly. There's this exception that for some bizarre reason, to move the plot forward, the slipper stays. But then the definition of midnight is very hazy because what she's actually describing, in software terms, is a long running process of the clock banging 12 times, which is what midnight means is the time between the first and the twelfth and during that time, the magic is slowly unraveling.
JESSICA: So midnight is a duration, not an instant.
PAUL: Exactly. Yes, it's a process, not an event.
So coming back to the question that Damien asked about key events. That slipper being lost is a key event in that story, I think because it actually is a shift in narrative. Up until that point in the story, it's the story of Cinderella and then after that, once the slipper is lost, it becomes the story of the prince looking for Cinderella. And then at the end, you get the day tomorrow, the stuff that happens with that slipper at the end of the story.
Another key event would be like the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic.
DAMIEN: [chuckles] It seems like these are necessary events, right? If the slipper is not lost, if the fairy godmother doesn't do magic, you don't have the story of Cinderella.
PAUL: Right. These are narrative turns, right?
DAMIEN: Yeah.
PAUL: These are points of the story shifts and so, key events can sometimes be a narrative shift where it's driving the story forward in a business process. Something like, let's say, you're working on an e-commerce system, like order submitted is a key event because you are adding items to a shopping cart and then at some point, you make a decision to submit the order and then at that point, it transitions from order being a draft thing that is in a state of flux to it actually becomes essentially immutable and gets passed over to fulfilment. So there's a shift in responsibility and actor between these two as well just like between Cinderella and the prince.
JESSICA: A shift in who is driving the story forward.
PAUL: Right. Yeah. So it's who is driving the story forward. So these key events often function as a shift in actor, a shift in who's driving the story forward, or who has responsibility. They also often indicate a handoff because of that from one group to another in an organization. Something like a sales process that terminates in contract signed. That key event is also the goal of the sales process.
The goal is to get to contract signed and then once that happens, there's usually a transition to say, an onboarding group that actually onboards the new customer in the case of a sales process for a new customer, or in e-commerce, it would be the fulfillment part, the warehousing part that Jess was talking about earlier. That's actually responsible for the fulfillment piece, which is they take that order, they create a package, they put all the items in the package, create the shipping label, and ship it out to the customer.
JESSICA: And in domain-driven design, you talked about the shift from order being a fluid thing that's changing as people add stuff to their cart to order being immutable. The word order has different meanings for the web site where you're buying stuff and the fulfillment system, there's a shift in that term.
PAUL: Right, and that often happens around a key event, or a pivotal event is that there's a shift from one, you might think of it as context, or language over to another. So preorder submission, it’s functioning as a draft order, but what it's actually typically called is a shopping cart and a shopping cart is not the same as an order. It's a great metaphor because there is no physical cart, but we all know what that means as a metaphor.
A shopping cart is a completely different metaphor from an order, but we're able to understand that thread of continuity between I have this interactive process of taking items, or products, putting them in the shopping cart, or out again. And then at some point that shopping cart, which is functioning as a draft order, actually it becomes an order that has been submitted and then it gets – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Yeah, the metaphor doesn't really work until that transition. You have a shopping cart and then you click purchase and now what? [laughs] You're not going to the register and ringing it up, that doesn't make any sense. [chuckles] The metaphor kind of has to end there.
JESSICA: You’re not leaving the cart in the corral in the parking lot.
[laughter]
PAUL: Well, I think what they're trying to do is when you think about going through the purchase process at a store, you take your items up in the shopping cart and then at that point, you transition into a financial transaction that has to occur that then if you were at a big box electronic store, or something, eventually, you would make the payment. You would submit payment. That would be the key events and that payment is accepted and then you receive a receipt, which is kind of the in-person version of a record of your order that you've made because you have to bring the receipt back.
DAMIEN: It sort of works if the thing you're putting in the shopping cart are those little cards. When they don't want to put things on the shelf, they have a card, you pick it up, and you take it to register. They ring it up, they give you a receipt, and hopefully, the thing shows up in the mail someday, or someone goes to the warehouse and goes gets it.
PAUL: We've all done that. [chuckles] Sometimes it shows up. Sometimes it doesn't.
JESSICA: That's an interesting point that at key events, there can be a shift in metaphor.
PAUL: Yes. Often, there is.
So for example, I mentioned earlier, a sales process ending in a contract and then once the contract is signed, the team – let's say, you're signing on a new customer, for a SaaS service, or something like that. Once they've signed the contract, the conversation isn't really about the contract anymore. It's about what do we need to do to onboard this customer. Up until that point, the emphasis is maybe on payment, legal disclosures, and things like that. But then the focus shifts after the contract is signed to more of an operational focus of how do we get the data in, how do we set up their accounts correctly, that type of thing.
JESSICA: The contract is an input to that process.
PAUL: Yes.
JESSICA: Whereas, it was the output, the big goal of the sales process.
PAUL: Yes, exactly. So these key events also function from a systems perspective, when you think about moving this to code that event then becomes almost like a message potentially. Could be implemented as say, a message that's being passed from the sales system through to the onboarding system, or something like that. So it functions as the integration point between those two, where the language has to be translated from one context to another.
JESSICA: And it's an integration point we can define carefully so that makes it a strong boundary and a good place to divide the system.
DAMIEN: Nice.
PAUL: Right. So that's where it starts to connect to some of the things that people really care about these days in terms of system decomposition and things like that. Because you can start thinking about based on a process view of this, based on a behavior view of this, if we treat these key events as potential emergent boundaries in a process, like we've been describing, that we discover through mapping out the process, then that can give us some clues as to hmm maybe these boundaries don't exist in the system right now, but they could. These could be places where we start to tease things apart.
JESSICA: Right. Where you start breaking out separate services and then when you get down to the user story level, the user stories expect a consistent language within themselves. You're not going to go from cart to return purchase in a case.
PAUL: [laughs] Right.
JESSICA: In a single user story. User stories are smaller scope and work within a single language.
PAUL: Right and so, I think the connection there in my mind is user stories have to be written in some kind of language, within some language context and mapping out the process can help you understand where you are in that context and then also understand, like if you think about a process that maybe has a sales part of the process and then an onboarding part, it'll often be the case that there's different development teams that are focusing on different parts of that process.
So it provides a way of them seeing what their integration point is and what might need to happen across that integration point. If they were to either integrate to different systems, or if they're trying to tease apart an existing system. To use Michael Feathers’ term, what might be a “scene” that we could put in here that would allow us to start teasing these things apart. And doing it with the knowledge of the product people that are part of the visualization, too is that this isn't something typically that engineers do exclusively from a technical perspective.
The idea with EventStorming is you are also bringing in other perspectives like product, business, stakeholders, and anyone that might have more of that business perspective in terms of what the goals of the process are and what the steps are in the process.
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JESSICA: As a developer, it's so important to understand what those goals are, because that lets us make good decisions when we're down in the weeds and getting super precise.
PAUL: Right, I think so. I think often, I see teams that are implementing stories, but not really understanding the why behind that in terms of maybe they get here's the functionality on delivering and how that fits into the system. But like I talked about before, when you're driving a process towards a key event, that becomes the goal of that subprocess. So the question then becomes how does the functionality that I'm going to implement that's described in this user story actually move people towards that goal and maybe there's a better way of implementing it to actually get them there.
DAMIEN: Yeah, it's always important to keep that in mind, because there's always going to be ambiguity until you have a running system, or ran system, honestly.
JESSICA: Yeah!
DAMIEN: There's always going to be ambiguity, which it is our job as people writing code to manage and we need to know. Nobody's going to tell us exactly what's going to happen because that's our job.
PAUL: Right.
JESSICA: It's like if the developer had a user story that Cinderella’s slipper fell off, but they do didn't realize that the goal of that was that the prince picked it up, then they might be like, “Oh, slipper broke. That's fine.”
PAUL: Yeah.
JESSICA: It’s off the foot. Check the box.
PAUL: Let's create a glass slipper factory implementer object [laughter] so that we can just create more of those.
JESSICA: Oh, yeah. What, you wanted a method slip off in one piece? You didn't say that. I've created crush!
PAUL: Right.
[laughter]
Yeah. So I think sometimes there's this potential to get lost in the weeds of the everyday development work that is happening and I like to tie it back to what is the actual story that we're supporting. And then sometimes what people think of as exception cases, like an example might be going back to that merchant return example is what if they issue the shipper label, but the buyer never receives it. We may say, “Well, that's never going to happen,” or “That's unlikely.” But visualizing that case, you may say, “That's actually a strong possibility. How do we handle that case and bake that into the design so that it actually reflects what we're trying to do?”
JESSICA: And then you make an event that just triggers two weeks later that says, “Check whether customer received label.”
PAUL: Yes, exactly.
One thing you can do as well is like – so that's one possibility of solving it. The idea what EventStorming can let you do is say, “Well, that's one way of doing it. Are there any other options in terms of how we could handle this, let's visualize.” With any exception case, or something, you could say, “Well, let's try solving this a few different ways. Just quickly come up with some different ideas and then we can pull the best of those ideas into that.” So the idea when you're modeling is to say, “Okay, well, there's probably more than one way to address this. So maybe let's get a few ideas on the table and then pick the best out of these.”
JESSICA: Or address it at multiple levels.
PAUL: Yes.
JESSICA: A fallback for the entire process is customer contact support again.
PAUL: Right, and that may be the simple answer in that kind of case. What we're trying to do, though is to visualize that case as an option and then talk about it, have a structured conversation around it, say, “Well, how would we handle that?” Which I think from a product management perspective is a key thing to do is to engage the engineers in saying, “Well, what are some different ways that we could handle this and solve this?” If you have people that are doing responsibility primarily for testing in that, then having them weigh in on, well, how would we test this? What kind of test cases might we need to handle for this? So it's getting – [overtalk]
JESSICA: How will we know it worked?
PAUL: Different perspectives and opinions on the table earlier rather than later.
JESSICA: And it's cheap. It's cheap, people. It's a couple hours and a lot of post-its. You can even buy the generic post-its. We went to Office Depot yesterday, it's $10 for 5 little Post-it pads, [laughter] or 25 Office Depot brand post-it pads. They don't have to stay on the wall very long; the cheap ones will work.
PAUL: [laughs] So those all work and then it depends if you have shares in 3M, I guess, with you.
[laughter]
Or Office Depot, depending which road you want to go down.
[laughter]
JESSICA: Or if you really care about that shade of pale purple, which I do.
PAUL: Right. I mean, what's been fascinating to me is in the last 2 years with switching to remote work and that is so much of, 95% of the EventStorming I do these days is on a collaborative whiteboard tool like Miro, or MURAL, which I don't know why those two product names are almost exactly the same. But then it's even cheaper because you can sign up for a free account, invite a few people, and then just start adding sticky notes to some virtual whiteboard and do it from home. There's a bunch of things that you can do on tool like that with copy pasting, moving groups of sticky notes around, rearranging things, and ordering things much – [overtalk]
JESSICA: And you never run out of wall.
PAUL: Yeah. The idea with the butcher’s paper in a physical workshop, in-person workshop is you're trying to create a sense of unending modeling space that you can use. That you get for free when you use online collaborative whiteboarding tool. It’s just there out of – [overtalk]
JESSICA: And you can zoom in.
PAUL: And you zoom in and out. Yeah. There's a – [overtalk]
JESSICA: Stickies on your stickies on your stickies.
[laughter]
I'm not necessarily recommending that, but you can do it.
PAUL: Right. The group I was working with last night, they'd actually gone to town using Miro emojis. They had something bad happen in the project and they've got the horror emoji [laughter] and then they've got all kinds of and then copy pasting images off the internet for things.
JESSICA: Nice.
PAUL: So yeah, can make it even more fun.
JESSICA: Okay. So it's less physical, but in a lot of ways it can be more expressive,
PAUL: I think so. More expressive and just as engaging and it can break down the geographical barriers. I've done sessions where we've had people simultaneously spread in multiple occasions across the US and Europe in the same session, all participating in real-time. If you're doing it remote, I like to keep it short. So maybe we do like a 2-hour session with a 10- or 15-minute break in the middle, because you're trying to manage people's energy and keep them focused and it's hard to do that when you just keep going.
MANDY: I kind of want to talk a little bit about facilitation and how you facilitate these kind of workshops and what you do, engage people and keep them interested.
PAUL: Yeah. So I think that it depends a little bit on the level of detail we're working at. If it's at the level of a few team members trying to figure out a feature, then it can be very informal. Not a lot of facilitation required. Let's just write down what the goal is and then go through the process of brainstorming a few stickies, laying it out, and then sequencing it as a timeline, adding questions. It doesn't require a lot of facilitation hand.
I think the key thing is just making sure that people are writing down their questions and that it's time boxed. So quitting while people are still interested and then [laughter] at the end, before you finish, having a little bit of a conversation around what might the next steps be. Like what did we learn? You could do a couple of minutes retrospective, add a sticky note for something you learned in this session, and then what do you see as our next steps and then move on from there with whatever action items come out of that.
So that one doesn't require, I think a lot of facilitation and people can get up and running with that pretty quickly.
I also facilitate workshops that are a lot more involved where it's at the other end of the spectrum, where it's a big picture workshop where we're mapping out maybe an entire value stream for an organization. We may have a dozen, 20 people involved in a session like that representing different departments, different organizational silos and in that case, it requires a lot more planning, a lot more thinking through what the goal of the workshop is, who would you need to invite? Because there's a lot more detail involved and a lot more people involved, that could be four, or five multi-hour sessions spread over multiple days to be able to map out an entire value stream from soup to nuts.
And then usually the goal of something like that is some kind of system modernization effort, or maybe spinning up a new project, or decomposing a legacy system, or even understanding what a legacy system does, or process improvement that will result inevitably in some software development in certain places.
I did a workshop like that, I think last August and out of that, we identified a major bottleneck in the process that everyone in the workshop, I think it was just a bunch of pink stickies in one area that it got called the hot mess.
[laughter]
It was one area and what was happening was there were several major business concerns that were all coupled together in this system. They actually ended up spinning up a development team to focus on teasing apart the hot mess to figure out how do we decompose that down?
JESSICA: Yes.
PAUL: As far as I know, that effort was still ongoing as of December. I'm assuming that's still running because it was prioritized as we need to be able to decompose this part of this system to be able to grow and scale to where we want to get to.
JESSICA: Yeah. That's a major business risk that they’ve got. They at least got clarity about where it is.
PAUL: Right. Yeah, and what we did from there is I coached the developers through that process over several months. So we actually EventStormed it out at a much lower level. Once we figured out what the hot mess was, let's map it out and then they combined that with some flow charting and a bunch of other more engineering, kind of oriented visualization techniques, state machines, things like that to try and get a handle on what was going on.
DAMIEN: We'll get UML in there eventually, right?
PAUL: Eventually.
[laughter]
You can't do software development without some kind of state machine, sequence diagram.
JESSICA: And it’s approximating UML. You can't do it. You can't do it.
[laughter]
You will either use it, or you will derive a pigeon form of it.
PAUL: Right. Well, I still use it for state diagrams and sequence diagrams when I'm down at that technical level. What I find is that there's a certain level of rigor that UML requires for a sequence diagram, or something like that that seems to get in the way of collaboration. So EventStorming sacrifices some of that rigor to be able to draw in everyone and have a low bar of entry to having people participate.
DAMIEN: That's a huge insight. Why do you think that is? Is it the inability to hold that much information at a high level of rigor, or just people not used to working at that sort of precision and rigor?
PAUL: I think that when I'm working with people that are not hands-on coders, they are in the everyday, like say, product managers, or stakeholders, to use those terms. They're in the everyday details of how the business process works and they tend to think of that process more as a series of steps that they're going through in a very specific kind of way. Like, I'm shipping a certain product, or supporting the shipping. or returning of certain types of products, those kinds of things.
Whereas, as developers, we tend to think of it more in terms of the abstractions of the system and what we're trying to implement in the code. So the idea of being able to tell the story of a process in terms of the events that happen is a very natural thing, I find for people from a business perspective to do because that's how they tend to think about it.
Whereas, I think as programmers, we're often taught not so much to think about behavior as a sequence of things happening, but more as the structure we've been taught to design in terms of structures and relationships rather than flow.
JESSICA: Yet that's changing with event sourcing.
PAUL: I think so. EventStorming and event sourcing become a very natural complement for each other and even event-driven architecture, or any event-driven messaging, whatever it happens to be. The gap between modeling using EventStorming and then designing some kind of event-driven distributed system, or even not distributed, but still event-driven is much more natural than trying to do something like an entity relationship diagram and they'd get from that to some kind of meaningful understanding of what's the story of how these functions and features are going to work.
JESSICA: On the topic of sacrificing rigor for collaboration, I think you have to sacrifice rigor to work across content texts because you will find contradictions between them. The language does have different meaning before and after the order is submitted and you have to allow for that in the collaboration. It's not that you're not going to have the rigor. It's more that you're postponing it, you're scoping it as separately. This meeting is about the higher level and you need completeness over consistency.
DAMIEN: Yeah. I feel like almost you have to sacrifice rigor to be effective in most roles and in that way, sacrifice is even the wrong word. Most of the things that we do as human beings do not allow for the sort of rigor of the things that we do as software engineers and things that computers do.
JESSICA: Yeah.
DAMIEN: And it's just, the world doesn't work that way.
PAUL: Right. Well, and it's the focus in EventStorming on exploration, discovery, and urgent ideas versus rigor is more about not so much exploring and discovery, but about converging on certain things. So when someone says pedant and the other person says pedant, or vice versa, that tends to shut down the conversation because now you are trying to converge on some agreed upon term versus saying, “Well, let's explore a bunch of different ways this could be expressed and temporarily defer trying converge on.”
JESSICA: Later in Slack, we’ll vote.
PAUL: Yes.
JESSICA: Okay. So standardize later.
PAUL: Yes. Standardize, converge later, and for now, let's kind of hold that at arm’s length so that we can uncover and discover different perspectives on this in terms of how the story works and then add regulator when we go to code and then you may discover things in code where there are implicit concepts that you then need to take back to the modeling to try and figure out well, how do we express this? Coming up with some kind of term in the code and being able to go from there.
JESSICA: Right. Some sort of potential return because it hasn't happened yet.
PAUL: Exactly. So maybe it's a potential, maybe it's some other kind of potential return, like pending return, maybe we don't call it a return at all.
JESSICA: Or disliked item because we could – or unsatisfactory item because we could intercept that and try to like, “Hey, how about we send you the screws that we're missing?”
PAUL: Right. Yeah, maybe the answer is not a return at all.
JESSICA: Yeah.
PAUL: But maybe the case is that the customer says they want to return it, but you actually find a way to get them to buy more stuff by sending them something else that they would be happy with. So the idea is we're trying to promote discovery thinking when we are talking about how to understand certain problems and how to solve them rather than closing off options too soon.
MANDY: So, Paul, I know you do give these workshops. Is there anything? Where can people find you? How can people learn more? How can people hire you to facilitate a workshop and get in touch with you?
PAUL: Okay. Well, in terms of resources, Damien had mentioned at the beginning, I have an eBook up on Leanpub, The EventStorming Handbook, so if people are interested in learning more, they can get that. And then I do workshop facilitation and training through my company, Virtual Genius. They can go to virtualgenius.com and look at what training is available. It's all online these days, so they can participate from anywhere. We have some public workshops coming up in the coming months. And then they can find me, I'm @ThePaulRayner on Twitter, just to differentiate me from all the indefinite articles that are out there.
[laughter]
MANDY: Sounds good. Well, let's head into reflections. I can start.
I just was thinking while we were talking about this episode, about how closely this ties into my background in professional writing, technical writing to be exact, and just how you have this process to lay out exactly what steps need to be taken and to differentiate when people say the same things and thinking about, “Well, they're saying the same things, but the words matter,” and to get pedantic, that can be a good thing, especially when you are writing technical documents and how-tos. I remember still, my first job being a technical writer and looking at people in a machine shop who it was like, first, you do this, then you do this, then you do this and to me, I was like, “This is so boring.” But it makes sense and it matters. So this has been a really good way for me to think about it as a newbie just likening it to technical writing.
JESSICA: Yeah. Technical writing has to tell that story.
DAMIEN: I'm going to be reflecting on this has been such a great conversation and I feel like I have a lot of familiarity with at least a very similar process. I brought up all my fears that come from them, which is like, what if we don't have the right person in the room? What if there's something we didn't discover? And you said something about how you can do this in 5 minutes and how you can do this in 15 minutes and I realized, “Oh, this process doesn't have to be the 6-hour things that I've participated in and facilitated in. It can also be done more smaller and more iteratively and I can bring this sort of same process and thought process into more of the daily work.” So that's super helpful for me.
JESSICA: I want to reflect on a phrase that Paul said and then Damien emphasized, which is shared understanding. It's what we're trying to get to in EventStorming across teams and across functions. I think it's also like what we're constantly trying to get to as humans. We value shared understanding so much because we're trapped in our heads and my experience in my head is never going to be the same as your experience in your head.
But at some point, we share the same physical world. So if we can get that visual representation, if we can be talking together about something in that visual world, we can pass ideas back and forth more meaningfully. We can achieve this shared understanding. We can build something together. And that feels so good.
I think that that constant building of shared understanding is a lot of what it means to be human and I get really excited when I get to do that at work.
PAUL: I think I would just add to that as well is being human, I'm very much aware of limitations in terms of how many ideas I can hold in my head at any one time. I know the times where I've been in the experience that many describe where someone's giving me a list of steps to follow and things like that, inevitably I'm like, “Well, I remember like the first two, maybe three,” and then everything after that is kind of Charlie Brown. What, what, why? [laughter] I don't remember anything they said from that point on.
But when I can visualize something, then I can take it in one go. I can see it and we're building it together. So for me, it's a little bit of a mind hack in terms of getting over the limitations of how many things I can keep in my mind at one time. Also, like you said, Jess, getting those things out of my mind and out of other people's minds into a shared space where we can actually collaborate on them together, I think that's really important to be able to do that in a meaningful way.
MANDY: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Paul. We really enjoyed this discussion. And if you, as listeners, would like to continue this conversation, please head over to Patreon.com/greaterthancode. We have a Slack channel. You can pledge and donate to sponsor us as little as a dollar and you can come in, hang out, talk with us about these episodes. If not, give me a DM on Twitter and let me know, and I'll let you in anyway because [laughter] that’s what we do here at Greater Than Code.
PAUL: Because Mandy’s awesome.
MANDY: [laughs] Thank you, Paul.
With that, thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you again next week.
Special Guest: Paul Rayner.
Sponsored By:
How to Trust Again – Justin Searls
Why has trust become so rare in the software industry? Developers don't trust their own ability to program, teammates don't trust each other to write quality code, and organizations don't trust that people are working hard enough to deliver on time.
This talk by Justin Searls is a reflection on the far-reaching consequences distrust can have for individuals, teams, and organizations and an exploration of what we stand to gain by adopting a more trustful orientation towards ourselves and each other.
01:57 - Justin’s Superpower: Having Bad Luck and Exposing Software Problems
04:05 - Breaking Down Software & Teams
12:49 - Trust Building
29:14 - Power Politics & Privilege
42:06 - Personal Growth & “Bring Your Whole/True Self”
How to Trust Again – Justin Searls
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers based in the United States and Canada. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 270 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-panelist, Mae Beale.
MAE: And I'm joined with another panelist, Chelsea Troy.
CHELSEA: Hi, I'm Chelsea and I'm here with our guest, Justin Searls.
He's a co-founder and CTO at Test Double, a consulting agency on a mission to improve how the work writes software. His life's work is figuring out why so many apps are buggy and hard to use, why teams struggle to foster collaboration and trust, and why it's so hard for organizations to get traction building great software. The Test Double Agents work with clients to improve in all of these ways and more.
Hi, Justin! How are you today?
JUSTIN: Hello. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.
CHELSEA: Of course.
So we like to kick off our sessions by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
JUSTIN: Well, one superpower might be that I like to give counterintuitive answers to questions and [laughs] my answer to this would be that I have really, really bad luck software and hardware. My entire life has just fallen over for me left and right. Bugs come and seek me out. In college, I was in the computer science program and so, I was around a lot of computers, like Linux data centers and stuff, and I think I went through either personally, or in the labs that I used 20 hard drive failure years in 4 years. People started joking that I had an EMP around me.
So I started to just decide to lean into that not so much as an identity necessarily, but as a specialty of root cause analysis of like, why do things fail? When I see a bug, what does that mean? And to dig in to how to improve quality in software and that then extended to later in my career, when I was working on delivery teams, like building software for companies and institutions. That meant identifying more root causes about what's leading to project failure, or for teams to break down.
Now I'm kind of moving, I guess, popping the stack another layer further. I'm starting to ask what are the second and third order consequences of software failing for people having for others? I see this in my family who are non-software industry family members, when they encounter a bug and I'm watching them encounter a bug, their reaction is usually to think that they're the ones who screwed up, that they're stupid, that they just can't figure it out. I'm literally watching software that somebody else wrote far away just fail and that's just no good, right?
So I think that the fact that I just so easily expose problems with software and sometimes the teams that make it almost effortlessly, it's really given me a passion and a purpose to improve and find opportunities to just make it a little bit better.
MAE: When you talk about software and/or teams breaking down and you're mentioning bugs. So I'm assuming that that's mostly what you mean by breaking down? I'm curious if you have kind of a mental model of software always breaks down these four ways. Teams always break down these three ways. I don't know if you have any reference texts, or things that you've come across as far as like a mental model for what is the world of breaking down? How do we characterize it?
JUSTIN: That's a great question and I feel like having been basically doing this for 15 years now, I should be prepared with a better answer.
I've always resisted building I guess, the communicative version of an abstraction, or a framework for categorizing, simplifying, and compartmentalizing the sort of stuff that I experience. In some ways, my approach [laughs] is the human version of machine learning where I have been so fortunate, because I've been a consultant my entire career, to be exposed to so many companies and so many teams that that has developed in me a pattern recognition system that even I don't necessarily understand—it's kind of a black box to me—where I will pick up on little smells and seemingly incidental cues and it'll prompt me to develop a concern, or ask a pointed question about something seemingly unrelated, but that I've come to see as being associated with that kind of failure.
I think your question's great. I should probably spend some time coming up with quadrants, or a system that distills down some of this. But really, when I talk about bugs, that is a lagging indicator of so many things upstream that are not necessarily code related. One of the reasons I want to be on the show here and talk to you all the day is because I've been thinking a lot about trust and interpersonal relationships starting with us as individuals and whether we trust the work that we're doing ourselves, or trust ourselves to really dive in and truly understand the stuff that we're building versus feel like we need to go and follow some other pattern, or instructions that are handed to us.
To kind of try to answer your question more directly, when I see teams fail, it usually comes down to a lack of authentic, empathetic, and logical targeted relationships where you have strong alignment about like, why are we in this room? Why are we working together? How do we best normalize on an approach so that when any person in any role is operating that is consistent with if somebody else on the team had been taking the same action that they would operate in the same way so that we're all marching in the same direction?
That requires shared values and that requires so many foundational things that are so often lacking in teams as software is developed today, where companies grow really fast. The pay right now is really, really high, which is great, but it results in, I think a little bit of a gold rush mentality to just always be shipping, always be hustling, always be pushing. As there's less time for the kind of slack that we need to think about—baking in quality, or coming back to something that we built a couple weeks ago and that maybe we've got second considerations about. Because there's that kind of time, there's even less time sometimes for the care and feeding that goes into just healthy relationships that build trust between people who are going to be spending a third of their life working together.
CHELSEA: You mentioned picking up on little smells that then lead you to ask pointed questions. I think that's really interesting because that kind of intuition, I've found is really essential to being a consultant and figuring out how to ask those questions as well. Can you provide some examples of situations like that?
JUSTIN: Yeah. I'll try to think of a few.
I had a client once that was undergoing—this is 10 years ago now—what we called at the time, an agile transformation. They were going from a Waterfall process of procuring 2 year, $2 million contracts and teams to build big design upfront systems that are just thrown over a fence, then a team would go and work on it, and then it would go through a proper user acceptance testing onto something more agile, I guess. Adopting Scrum and extreme programming, interpersonal process, and engineering practices. That was just meant to be more, I guess, iterative of course, innovative, collaborative, more dynamic, and able to let the team drive its own destiny.
All that sounds great and you walk into the team room and they just invested millions of dollars into this beautiful newly restored historic building. I sit down with everyone and I look at them and they've got the cool desks at the time and cool open office because those were still considered cool. I sat down and I couldn't help, but—[chuckles] this is real silly. I couldn't help but notice that there was a pretty strong smell, [laughs] body odor throughout the whole room and it wasn't one person. I'm not picking on somebody here.
It was that the interpersonal relationships were so afraid, the fear of failure was so strong, and the deadline pressure that had been exerted from on high was so overwhelming that there was no safety in the room. People were just scared at their job all day long and it was having a material impact that only an outsider who's walking in at 2:00 PM on a Friday detect because everyone else had acclimated.
So I walked in and I was like, “Well, what do I –?” [laughs] Obviously, I'm not going to be like, “Hey, it stinks in here.” I’ve got to figure out a way to understand why do people feel unsafe and maybe I didn't have that sentence go through the voice in my head, but it definitely put me on a path towards to maybe the less privileged people in the room, the people who are not the managers to understand what's really going on, what pressures are they under?
MAE: I love that the example includes legit real smell. So many times, especially in our industry and part of what this podcast is counteracting, is getting in touch with the fact that we are people and humans. Anyway, I love that you brought [chuckles] that home that way.
Also, I wanted to say from earlier, I wasn't trying to corner you into expecting to have a philosophy. I thought you might and it was worth asking. But I recently got asked a similar question about my management philosophy and which authors do I appreciate most, or something. I've been a manager for 25 years and I'm like, “Uh. I don't know. I figure out what is needed and then I deal with that.” I don't understand how to answer. So I just want to give some – pay you back and apologize. I didn't mean to get you – [overtalk]
JUSTIN: Not at all and it becomes one of those you know it when you see it.
I struggle with this a lot because somebody introduced the concept years ago of beginner's mindset to me where sometimes if I'm a beginner at something, the best person to help me is not the expert—the person who's been doing it for 20 years. It’s somebody who's just a few hours, or a few days, or a year, or two ahead of me because they can still remember what it felt like to be where I am right now.
Because I talk a lot, because I tweet a lot, because I show up in a lot of places, and I have an outward facing sales role to potential clients and candidates, I meet a lot of people who come to me and they're like, “How do I learn how to code?” And I'm like, “I can tell you the 15-year version of this story, but it's probably going to be really depressing.” I've taken as a responsibility to like try to—and I need to do a much better job of this—be armed with either resources, or people that I trust, that I can refer folks to so that I'm not totally leaving them hanging.
MAE: I love that and yes. Speaking of teaching people how to code and what you said, there's a name for it that I'm forgetting about being a teacher. If you are closer to the student, you actually are a more effective teacher.
So there's just two comments.
The first one is I'm a part of RailsBridge I helped found the Southeast regional chapter. So if anybody, any listeners out there still want to learn how to code, or are having that same, I don't know how to tell you about my [chuckles] zigzag story and ideally, they wouldn't all be depressing, [laughs] but I'm sure they all include some real low moments. But RailsBridge, which is bridgetroll.org, has recurring events where people can go all over the country and obviously, in pandemic times it's not as much in person, but yeah.
And on the comment about teaching and when you mention talking to the people with the least privilege in the room, I'm just really sensitive and appreciative of your sensitivity to power politics and how much they impact so much of what is happening and trust. So for anybody out there who's being asked to help new people and you feel like you're still the new person, you're probably in a better position to help. So just want to offer some encouragement there. I have personally found a lot more confidence in helping people who are just behind me and that anytime you're teaching, you're learning. So just want to put those in.
I love that actually your answer, instead of a quadrant, is really just the one word of trust and I appreciated the ways in which you were mentioning trust can be different things. Trust in what you're building. Trust in who's asking you to do it.
Chelsea asked for a couple examples and I interrupted. So I apologize, but what are some trust building exercises that you have encouraged, or examples? Maybe even continuing that same story. Six months later, was it a fresher air in there and what are some things they did to make that happen?
JUSTIN: Yeah, that story, like so many teams and companies in our industry, didn't undertake the redemption arc that I wish I could convey. I think in fact, to see a big picture problem and the desire to connect that with a big picture tidy solution, a future state where it's all rainbows and unicorns and everyone really getting along well.
Sometimes that sets, for me personally and when I see consultants who are less experienced, who can see that end state in mind and they know maybe the top three hit list of stuff that needs to happen to help that organization get to where they need to be. We can sometimes set the bar so high for ourselves in terms of expectations of like, what does it mean to help them become better, that we can't help, but lose sight of the value of just incremental improvement.
If I can just help restore relationship between two people on a team. I had one client years and years ago, [laughs] they were also undergoing a pretty big transition and they brought me in a – I think that what they thought they were hiring me for was to be a test-driven development coach to teach them that particular practice of TDD.
They got, instead on day one, there was a room of 30 interdisciplinary cross-functional teams—some developers, some non-developers, and stuff—and I could just tell that they were like, it was a big epic rewrite from a Perl codebase that, I think they were moving to no JS and Angular as well as a chewing of cloud infrastructure at the same time, as well as Agile software practices at the same time.
They were overwhelmed, they've seen this fail before, they felt a ton of pressure from the business, and they didn't even really understand, I don't think, the future business model. Even if they were successful, it wasn't clear this was going to solve systemic problems for the company. And I'm like, “Well, I can teach you all TDD. [laughs] But instead what my commitment to you all will be is that six months from now, you'll either have been successful and learned all of these things and built the thing as the business has asked you to do and then the business takes off, or I will have helped equip you with skills and ways of thinking about this industry and our work that will set you up to get much better jobs next time.”
Again, the company didn't totally come together. It didn't take off like a rocket ship. The team was successful in the rewrite, which doesn't happen very often. But then you saw almost a diaspora of dozens of highly skilled people—and this was in Central Ohio—who then went to venture backed startups, some went to big, established enterprise-y kind of companies, some left the region and went elsewhere.
That turned into, if I had to count, probably eight, nine additional Test Double clients [laughs] down the road where they came in and they could spot in a minute, this is a way that an outside perspective, who is here to help us at a moment of tremendous need, can move the needle just a little bit. By setting expectations realistically, being humane about it, and focused on what's best for the people involved because at the end of the day, all companies are is collections of humans. That was, I guess, more my orientation.
CHELSEA: So Justin, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. I appreciate what you just shared.
I worked at Pivotal Labs for a while—original labs when it was sort of a generalist’s enablement.
JUSTIN: Sure.
CHELSEA: Very heavy on that kind of thing.
One of the things that we ran into relatively frequently was similar to what you've just described wherein one of two things would happen. Either the clients were successful and there was a vastly improved, I guess, software delivery culture among the people that we were working with, or if that didn't work out, then there were individuals who took to it very well and had gained variety of skills that allowed them to go elsewhere.
It happened enough times that then we would have to establish trust with potential new clients around this whole additional access, which was effectively, is this going to cause a diaspora of all of these engineers, designers, and PMs that I've managed to scrape together for this project?
Do you find Test Double ever facing that, or how do you address either beforehand if product owners are aware of it, or after it happens, how do you address that with clients?
JUSTIN: That's a fantastic question. Pivotal Labs was one of the companies that we looked at.
We started Test Double 10 years ago. I was at the time, just starting to speak at user groups and conferences and I spent a lot of time with the people at the Boulder office at Pivotal Labs. Great people. I really appreciated the focus and the rigor and in fact, made to answer a question earlier about process, or abstraction about like, “Hey, boil it down for me.”
Pivotal Labs sold a very branded, very discreet process for like, this is the way to build software and, in a sense, some of the decisions that we made when we started Test Double were a response against that. Just to say we trust the people closest to the work to make the right decisions based on tremendous experience and skills. Frankly, as we get bigger and more successful, having some somebody like me at the top of an organization who only talks at the beginning of a client relationship, which is the moment that we know the least and I've got the least amount of context, for me to go and say, “Well, this is the way that we got a test,” or whatever it is would just be ineffective and inappropriate.
So to answer your question, Chelsea. Fortunately, our brand power, isn't nearly as strong as Pivotal Labs so no client has ever come to us in advance with that as a question to say, “Hey, I'm worried that you're going to train our people in this particular methodology and then they're going to leave for higher paying jobs,” or something. That's never come up in advance.
In fact, one of the things that we talk a lot about is that because our consultants join client engineering teams to work with them inside of their own process, using their own tools, and their own system is we just try to be model citizens of somebody on that team. We trust our clients like, “Whatever your process is, it's apparently working for you. So let's just try it and if we have ideas for how to make that better, we will listen, we'll write them down.” But then only once we've built trust and rapport with the people on that team, will we start to share, “Hey, I've got a rainy-day list of a few things that you might want to try.”
What that's actually done is has a detoxifying effect where from a context of high trust, the incongruity, the distrust, the kind of backchannel frustrations that our people pick up on because we're kind of “in the trenches” with our client folks, we're able to have multiple pathways into that client organization to help make it a better place to work.
We got one of the best poll quotes that I've ever seen on our website recently. One of our clients is Betterment. They're a great financial management firm in New York where it's kind of an autopilot savings vehicle. The director of engineering, Katelyn, there said that she saw on the teams where testable people were deployed, attrition actually went down and I think it's because we help those teams to perform better.
An old friend of mine named Leon Gersing, he used to have a thing he’d say. He'd said, “You can either change where you work, or you can change where you work.” Meaning you can either make the place that you're at better, or you can go find gainful employment elsewhere and we're in the make the place where people work better business, wherever possible as a first avenue.
MAE: You're reminding me of a book that I'm reading right now called What Got You Here Isn't Going to Get You There. Are you all familiar with it?
JUSTIN: I was so proud of my wife, because she asked for that on Audible earlier this week because I'm the person with the Audible credit and I'm like, “Oh, this is quoted in business leadership contexts left and right and all over the place. So it'll give us a touchstone to talk about.”
MAE: Yeah. Well, the TLDR is so much of especially management focused and leadership focused thought is about things that you should do and this book is probably along your lines, Justin of giving the counterintuitive answer. This is here's 20 things that you might want to consider not doing and then replace it with the good behavior because that is such a stretch in real life to actually do that. It's how about you just pick a couple of these that you're a repeat offender and just stop. Just try to not do it. That's the main first thing and I've found that, a refreshing take on how to think about how to guide in ways that are building more trust and offering more safety. So definitely recommend that book.
I don't know that it came out of this book, but the person who recommended it to me, my VP Scott Turnquist, who is amazing, shared that there are really four categories of things that can help build trust and it's definitely all done incrementally. So picking up on that word you said earlier, Justin, too. But the four kind of axes are credibility, reliability, intimacy, and selfless motivation. If you can demonstrate those recurringly, that is how to establish and/or course correct into a state of increased trust.
So anyway, that was partly why my original statement was like, do you have this down? Because I've heard some things lately that I've been thinking about.
JUSTIN: I really appreciate your perspective there and it makes me feel better because one of my commitments in life is to never write a book. But if I were to write a book, I'd probably have to come up with a tidy quadrant, a Harvard Business Review two by two, or something like that to I guess, support the good work at the people at CliffsNotes and Blinkist to boil down years’ worth of work into a 13-minute podcast.
I think that the advice as you expressed, it is completely valid and there's one thing that I think is a core ingredient to trust. Trust of ourselves, trust of people that we work with directly, and then trust of leadership and the people who run the organizations that we're a part of.
The hardest, in my opinion, is authenticity. If you're not, I think you said credible. If you combine credible, intimacy, vulnerability, those are really useful words to prompt what I mean when I say authenticity. If I'm talking to somebody and I can lock eyes with them and I believe that what they're saying is what they actually feel and it's their true self and they believe it, then all sorts of other background processes in my head of trying to read the tea leaves of what's going on here, all the passive analysis I might do to try to understand what's the subtext that this person's operating from. That's just the form of kind of armor, or a guard that it depletes my cognitive ability to talk to the person.
Authenticity is a signal that we pick up on as humans and this is why it's a miracle that we have video chat in this era and it's why I really relish one-on-one in-person interactions when I can have them. Authenticity is a signal that I can drop that guard a little bit. It's that I can really look and really listen to what the person's saying and take it at face value. The problem with just saying, “Oh, okay, well just be authentic. Just be your true self,” is that that is useless advice and way more likely to trigger somebody's defenses, or their self-doubt.
When I think about authenticity in the context of a team, or an organization is that the people who are maybe not in a position of power, people who report up the chain, if they don't come across as authentic to their leaders, the leaders should not look at that as a failing of the person, but as a failure of their ability to figure out how to promote and draw out authenticity from the people who report to them. Maybe they don't have safety in the room to speak their true mind. Maybe they feel like the things that make them different from the other people that they work with are a liability, or a risk and so, they can't really bring their true self to work.
It's the leader's job, when they spot inauthenticity, rather than go on a hunt like a political backchannels to try to figure out why is this person lying. What's under here? Figuring out what is it about the person's context, the environment, kind of the system that they are operating in. What could possibly be an explanation for why I can't develop an authentic connection with this person? And until you run out of every single possible explanation in that investigation, including self-reflection of what is it that I'm individually doing and how I communicate to this person that's getting in the way. Only then is it really useful to start thinking about maybe this person's not a good actor, maybe they're being duplicitous, or something. Because once you've hit that button, it is really hard to go back.
So when we talk about authenticity, we often talk about the individual's responsibility to present it, to be it. If you can fake authenticity, then you can do anything, right? That is advice. It's fine. I hope that everyone feels the safety. Like I'm a cishet white dude who's pretty powerful in my little corner of the small pond. I have no problem just spouting off and being my true self and so, I should just tell other people to do that too. That's not fair.
I think that what is better advice for people who are maybe not in positions of power is to be really good at detecting authenticity. When you detect authenticity and people are making their true selves known to you and you're feeling a connection with them, whether they're peers, or managers, spend more time with them, invest into those relationships, and use those people as anchors of trust. So that when you're failing to make that connection elsewhere, when you have doubts about others in the organization, you can have more points of perspective on how to best address it.
MAE: I read an article yesterday that says, “Laziness Doesn't Exist.” That's the title of it and it essentially says that that same thing of what's the context in which this is happening. People don't procrastinate for fun. In fact, it usually takes more work and starting from a place of what shoes are you in, but I especially love the in what way am I impacting that person's ability to be themselves?
Also, I must have said the word authenticity, because this list is credibility, reliability, intimacy, selfless motivation, but authenticity and credibility in all of these things do also have to do with the thing that I loved you bringing up about identity, power politics, and what happens and your environment is not allowing you to be credible. So another way in which people can as good peers, mentors, managers, and above can do is in what way am I bolstering these people's credibility?
So always flipping it back to how are we the perp [laughs] and that's very similar to social justice, racial justice. The more we see how we are perpetuating and disenfranchising, regardless of our identity, that's where there's some hope for the humans in my mind.
CHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I appreciate that you've both brought up, Justin and Mae, is the degree to which power gradients play a role in the way that we deal with these things. There are demographic power gradients with regard to race, with regard to gender. There are also power gradients with regards to our position in the company, with regard to technical privilege, with regard to our level of skill, with regard to the size of our network.
We also, I think live in this individualist culture that has a tendency to place the responsibility on individuals to do what they can to resolve. For example, what you were saying, Justin, about how we effectively coach people to just be authentic. Maybe that coaching works fine in some context, but that's a subset of the context in which we're asking people to apply it and asking individuals to resolve this from the bottom up sometimes as opposed to looking for the systemic reasons why this is a thing that has to be solved in the first place.
I'm curious as to whether you have thoughts on what a person can do, who finds themselves in a position of power, in a position of leadership in a company, for example, to address those sorts of questions with other folks who are working there.
JUSTIN: I think one thing that can be helpful – and I realize your question is about what can a leader do. One thing that can be helpful is for those leaders to empathize and put themselves in the shoes of people who might not have the same privileges as you described and what would it take to—I'm waiting outside my area of expertise here—would be to think about what are the things that are in a given person's sphere of direct control, what isn't, what am I setting up, and what am I communicating in terms of expectations that I have of them?
An example that came up a lot in our industry was the number of drink up events in tech in the early 2010s where there was sort of an assumption that everyone likes alcohol and when people in public drink alcohol, good things happen, which turns out isn't true, but it can also be the case.
There are invisible expectations that we communicate because I'm a big fan of granting people autonomy to solve problems in their own way, to approach work the way that they feel is best. Our company has been remote from day one and a big part of that was we want people in control of everything from where they work to their home network, to the computers that they use. Because when I had that control pulled away from me in the role as developer, it just sapped my motivation, my drive, my engagement, my sense of control over the stuff that's right in front of me.
When I now in a role of influence over other people, whenever I speak, I have to think about the negative space of what are the expectations that I might be conveying that are not explicit. I need to be careful of even expressing something like hobbies, or shows that I like, or stuff – especially in this remote world, we want to develop connectedness.
But a challenge that I keep running into is that our ability to find mutual connection with people about stuff other than work, it rides the line really closely of communicating some other allegiance, or affiliation whether that's we talk about sports a lot because that's an obvious one, but even just interest in hobbies.
So I find myself – and I realize Chelsea, I'm doing a really poor job, I think of answering the question as you asked it. I find myself only really able to even grapple with like what can leaders do to set the tone for the kind of environment that's going to be inclusive and safe for other people by really digging in, empathizing with, calling up, and dredging up what their own experience was when they were not in a position of power.
If I have a secondary superpower, is I had a real rough start to my career. I was in really, really, really rough client environments that were super hostile. I had a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company scream at me until his face was red in a room one-on-one with a closed door on a regular basis. The sorts of stuff that developed callus on me, that I look back at a lot of those experiences and I'm like, “I learned a bunch.” It's supercharged my career as an individual because it strengthened me.
So the challenge that I have is what can I take from those really, really harsh experiences and translate them for people who are coming up in a way that they don't have to go through the same trials and tribulations, but that they can take away from it the lessons that I learned. And for me, it's all about not just safety for the sake of safety, but safety by which myself and others can convey the useful growth that people want to see in themselves, their skills, and their abilities that isn't diluted. That can convey the truth, the difficulty, and the challenge and how hard –
Programming is really, really hard for me and I've been doing it for a long time. A lot of stuff about this is just not easy. The relationships are not easy. Like you're going to run into situations where there's massive differences between where people stand on stuff and what those perspectives look like. Navigating that is hard enough without adding a whole layer of toxicity and hostile work environment.
So what's a way to promote that learning environment without just totally insulating somebody from reality. That's been, I think a challenge and attention that I see a lot of other like-minded leaders in tech trying to figure out how to create.
MAE: You reminded me of a meme that someone shared with me that says, “What doesn't kill you can just regulate your nervous system, trap itself in your body, steal your sense of self, make you wish it did.” I don't know what makes you stronger means, but let's stop glorifying trauma as a life lesson we've been blessed with. [chuckles] Definitely along the same lines.
JUSTIN: Yeah. Relatable.
MAE: There's a thing, too about putting oneself in another's shoes and this is a place where I'm someone that can read people really well, but that makes that tricky. Because I start to trust my sense of it and I have a similar architecture going if I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. So what's the read between the lines thing.
But without a lot of exposure to a lot of very different people, and most people have not had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people, when they put themselves in the other person's shoes, they come up with a different conclusion. So I will feel hurt by people who do things that were I to put myself in their shoes would not have done that to me, or if they did, it's because of X, Y, Z about who they are, or what they think, or what is their whole context and environment.
All of that is there's a tactic that we use at True Link Financial called “don't cross the net.” So you say and claim the story I tell myself about that is dot, dot. When leaders, who haven't had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people and a lot of different ideas, try to empathize and find themselves limited in that, there are other options which include one of the things you said earlier. Making it so that people can say the things on their mind so whether, or not that's persons being their authentic self this is a whole another level, but creating a place where we expect that we're all messing up and that it's okay to talk about uncomfortable things is one of my real soapboxes.
It's totally okay. Yes, we are all racist. We are all sexist. We are all homophobic. There is no way to not be as a result of being in the culture we're in. We could do things to mitigate it. We can do things to name it. But if we just start from yes, we're all failing. This for me, it lowers the stakes because so many people feel that if someone brings up, “Hey, that's kind of sexist,” or “This is not supporting me in this way,” or “My credibility is not being seen because of this.” In the absence of already, yo, we're going to talk about some negative stuff sometimes, that's an introduction of negativity to the “positive, happy rainbow unicorn workplace” that you were talking about before.
So one of my hopes and dreams is that we get some clouds to rain on the land to allow things to actually grow [chuckles] and this includes, yo, we are not perfect. And we are definitely doing things we don't intend all the time.
JACOB: That made me think about authenticity again, because sopen about imperfection. I'm a neurodiverse person so I probably am autistic. If someone were to say to me at work, “We really want you to bring your authentic self,” probably the thing I would think is you don't want that person, [laughs] or at least without getting to know me a lot better.
There's a concept called masking where it's basically, there are behaviors and traits that are exhibited by neurotypical people that just come naturally to them. By learning the hard way, I've sort of learned to do them, even if they don't feel natural at all like making eye contact, smiling at people when talking, things like that. So I think that complicates authenticity for me, which is that I'm intentionally not hiding, but choosing what parts of myself to show and what parts I just don't want to bring to work. [laughs] I don't have a clean answer for that, or a solution to that, but I think that just complicates things for me.
JUSTIN: I thank you so much for sharing that and I think it's a really important perspective to bring, which is I talked earlier about sure, plenty of people's true, authentic selves, even if they were to bring them, they might be in a job, or in a space, or in a team where that wouldn't be understood as such, or appreciated, or literally safe. It's hard to tell people, “Hey, you should feel safe” when the truth when spoken would be an unsafe thing. That would be setting people up for risk, for danger, and it would be a seed of distrust, which is what we're all here to talk about avoiding. So I really appreciate you sharing that.
When I talked about empathy earlier, Mae, in my brain, all that really comes through it is the E-M part of that word, like the root for emotion. I never really have been able to assume that I can get somebody's context, their perspective, and the moment that they're in into my brain well enough to role play and do a re-dramatization in black and white, sepia tones and slow motion, like this is what Justin would do if he was here.
That's one reason why we trust people at our company to just do the work, because we know that they're going to have such a richer amount of data and context than we'll ever have. But one thing that I'm grateful for is that I've been able to experience what I feel like is a pretty broad range of emotion. [laughs] I'm a real emotionally volatile person. I go super high highs, super low lows and I'm just like, it's how I've been. I can't help it. So when I'm empathizing with people, I'm just trying to get in the mindset of how do they likely feel right now so that I can understand and try to do a better job, meeting them where they are.
A big part of that is learning there are differences and so Jacob, of course, it’s like if I worked with you, I understand that it might not be productive to bring all of yourself to work all the time. But I would hope to develop a trusting relationship with you where you can share enough so that I can know what are the boundaries that are going to be productive for you, productive for me so that we can make a connection and it's something –
To make this a little bit more personal. I don't know where my career is going to go next. I founded Test Double with my partner, Todd. I was only 26 years old and we've been doing this for 10 years now. 2 years ago, we embarked on a journey of transferring a 100% of the equity of the company to our employees. So we're on an employee stock ownership plan now, it's ESOP, or any of the stuff, it is complicated because it's well regulated. We have to have outside auditors, a valuation firm, we have a third-party trustee to make sure that our people and the value of the company is transferred appropriately, treated right, and managed well.
So it's naturally raised, especially in my circle of friends and family who realize that, this means that there's not an end date, but there's a moment at which I can start thinking about what my life is going to be next. The people who knew me when I was 25, 26, who look at me now, it's not that I've changed radically, or my identities are radically different, or anything. It's like, I am a very different kind of person than I was at 26, than I was at 20 before I got into this industry.
I have changed in healthy ways and in maladaptive ones and in response to maybe drama and stress such that the ideal retirement that I would've imagined earlier in my life looks a lot different now where I've just kind of become habituated. I'm a really, really different person than I used to be and I'm grateful for that in almost every way. I feel like I've grown a lot as a person, but the thing about me that I really look at as an area of change is that I just work too much. [chuckles] I'm online all the time. I'm very focused on – I've optimized productivity so much that it's become ingrained in me.
I understand that whatever I do next, or even if it's just changing my role inside my company, I need to find a way to create more space for slower paced asynchronous thought and learning how to, in the context of a career, not just bring your true self – I'm kind of curious Chelsea, Mae, and Jacob's perspectives. That true self might be changing [laughs] intentionally. There's a directionality and the growth isn't just learning new skills necessarily, but it might be changing core things about ourselves that will alter the dynamic of the relationships that we bring to work.
CHELSEA: Yeah. I have two thoughts on that, that I can share.
The first is the extent to which bringing my true self is a productive thing to do at work. So for example, my career prior to tech, I did a variety of different things to make ends meet, really a wide variety of things. I graduated directly into one of the bigger recessions. I won't tell you the exact one, because I don't feel like being aged right now, but [chuckles] it wouldn't take too much research to figure it out. I was trained to do a government job that was not hiring for the next 18 months at a minimum. I needed to figure out what to do and was trying to make ends meet.
In my first year of employment, I got laid off/my job ended/something like that on four separate occasions in my first year of work and that resulted in, I do not trust when managers tell me that everything is fine. I have not ever effectively and that is something that I don't foreground that in work discussions for a variety of reasons. I don't want to scare other people. I don't want them to think I know something that they don't know about what's going to happen because I don't usually.
When managers tell me, “Oh, everything's great, we're doing great,” all that kind of stuff, I just don't listen. I don't. My decisions do not take that's statement into account and I find that that's the kind of thing that I think about when I'm asked to bring my whole self, my authentic self to a place is that there are things that just sort of similar to what Jacob is saying. I'm like, “Trust me, trust me on this you don't want that.” So that's kind of the first thought in that realm.
The second thought that I have around this is the degree to which work should really encompass enough of our lives to require, or demand our authenticity. So I had a variety of full-time jobs in tech and then I quit one of those full-time jobs and I was an independent consultant for a while bolstered chiefly, and I was lucky for this, by folks who had read my blog and then folks who had worked with me when I was at Pivotal. So the consulting effect of people knowing what it's like to work with you is real.
That experience felt very different from a full-time position insofar as at the external validation of my work was naturally distributed in a way that it's not in a full-time position and I found that distribution is extremely comforting. Such that even though I now have a full-time job, I also continue client work, I continue teaching, and I continue writing and doing workshops and those kinds of things.
This is not the chief reason that I do that, but one of the nice things about it is the diversification of investment in the feedback that I'm receiving and validation that I'm receiving. In order to do that, I have an amount of energy that I put to each of the things in my life and part of it is work, of course. But another reason that I think it works for me is that I no longer have to expect all of my career fulfillment from any one position, from any one employer, from any one place, which has worked out very well because I think that we pedal this notion implicitly that you bring your whole self to work and in return, work provides for your whole career fulfillment.
But most places really kind of can't and it's not because they're terrible places to work. It's just because the goals of a company are not actually to fulfill the employees, they’re just not. That's not the way that that works. So it has allowed me and I think would allow others to approach the role that a given employment situation plays in their life, from what I think is a more realistic perspective that ends up helping keep me more satisfied in any given work relationship. But it doesn't necessitate that I – I guess, for lack of a better term, it limits the degree of emotional investment that I have in any one thing, because I'm not expecting all of my fulfillment out of any one thing.
But I think that to say that explicitly sometimes runs at best, orthogonal and at worst, maybe contraindicates a lot of what we talk about when we talk about bringing our whole selves to work and looking for those personal connections at work. I think there is pragmatic limit past which we maybe impose more guilt than we need to on ourselves for not doing that.
JUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that.
I think Mae used the phrase “lower the stakes” earlier and I think that one of the problems with authenticity, the phrase “bring your whole self-trust” is that the stakes are super high because it seems like these are bullion contracts between parties. For example, you said that you don't trust managers. If I was filling out a form, like a personality inventory, or something, it's like, “Do you trust managers?” I'd say no and I think 90% of people would say no.
It’s sort of the economy right now. I think the economy approval rating of is the economy good, or bad is at 23%. But individuals are saying at roughly 60% levels, that they are individually doing okay in this economy. I would say the same. Like, do I trust my manager? Oh, hell yeah. I completely trust my manager right now.
And to lower the stakes even further, when I've been talking about trust, it's not so much about where do I find fulfillment, or who what's my identity, or who am I being, it's about a snap orientation. It's the most immediate sphere. “Oh man, this PostgreSQL query is really slow and I can't figure it out.” Is my snap reaction, or my orientation to think, “I believe in myself enough to dig into this to figure it out”, or is it doubt myself and just kind of get lost in a sea of a thousand Stack Overflow tabs and just slowly lose my whole evening?
When in a team, maybe working with them and we were in planning, or something, or maybe we're in a higher stake, let's say, a code review session and somebody makes a comment about something that I did. Is my snap reaction to doubt their motivations and think “Ah, they're just trying to passive aggressively shoehorn in their favorite architecture here,” or this is politics and gamesmanship, or is my snap reaction is to be like, “Nope, let's try to interpret the words that they're saying as literal words and take it on its face”?
Like I said, I'm a highly emotionally volatile person, the weather vane shifts with me all the time and sometimes I can control it and sometimes I can just merely observe it. But the awareness of the out has been really helpful to understand [chuckles] when I hear a leader say something about the company, my reaction is I think that they've got ulterior motives and that they are probably not speaking in literal truth.
If that's my snap reaction, I'm just trying to communicate that as that's a potential blind spot. Because I have a long rut of past companies that I worked for that had mission statements and vision statements that were kind of bullshit and that no one really believed in, that were just in a bronze plaque on a wall, or whatever. That's baggage that I carry. I just have to acknowledge that baggage and try to move forward. The best I can do is just be present in every moment that I'm in and to understand when I have a snap reaction, am I oriented towards what might lead me to a good outcome, or a bad one?
MAE: Holy moly, so many amazing things have been shared today and Jacob, especially kudos to you for walking us into a deeper level of authenticity. Love it. Thank you.
I'm, to answer some of your questions, Justin very similar to Chelsea in that tech was not my first rodeo. I didn't become a programmer until I was 37 years old and I am now 45. I'm totally fine with aging myself. Prior to tech, I did put a lot more of my identity in my job and I would usually do that job pretty much all of the hours possible and I've always worked for mission driven organizations.
A lot of the things that we're talking about as far as job fulfillment and whether, or not it's a good environment, or if it's a toxic environment, there's a lot of privilege in what we're talking. My parents were paper mill workers and it was not pretty. They had me when they were 19, so they didn't have another option. That was the highest paying gig in our region and they had no education. So it was never an option to even change that.
So I am someone who wants to put my whole self into what I do. It's a very working-class mode and gaining identity through what it is I'm able to do. It's also a pretty capitalist [laughs] mentality that I work to move around. But as a manager, when I am a manager, or in management, or managing managers, I'm never encouraging this everybody needs to bring their whole self to work.
Although, I had this really instructive experience where one person truly did not want to have any of their self at work, that they truly only wanted to talk about work at work. We're not a family, nicely nice. I don't want to crochet together, or whatever. That is the most challenged I've ever been as a manager because my natural things are always to figure out what people need and want, and then amalgamate that across the group and see how we can do some utilitarian math and get it so that people are being encouraged in ways they would like, they are not being disadvantaged, and they have space to say when that's happening.
But even still, I'm always going with the let's be buddies plan and it's not for everyone. So figuring out how to not have all of your eggs in any basket, no matter how many hours the job is, is definitely a tactic that has been successful for me. But what happens is I then am involved in so many things [chuckles] in all of the moments of life. So I still do that, but I do it by working more, which isn't necessarily the best option.
The thing about the mission that I just wanted to pivot for a second and say is, we are no longer in a world where we allow failure. This is a little bit back to my earlier soapbox. The energetic reality is whatever anybody's mission statement is, that is the thing they are going to fail at, like the seamstress never has the best hemmed clothes. So when we write off anyone, or any company based their flawed attempt at the mission, we're discounting that flaws exist, [chuckles] contradictions exist. It's about where are we orienting and are we incrementally moving toward that, or away from it and not in this moment, are we this thing that we have declared because it's more of a path is how I see it than the declaration of success.
JUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, too. Because I think that one thing we didn't touch on is the universe – and we're talking a Greater Than Code podcast so it's software industry adjacent at least. The universe of people who got to stay home during this whole pandemic. The universe of people who are “knowledge workers”, or “white collar”, especially if you look at the population of the world, is vanishingly small.
There was a season in my life where I was the person that you just described managing, where I just viewed myself as I was burnt out. I always wanted to be a mercenary. I had this mindset of I show up at work. “You want some great code? I'll sling you some great code.” Like I was a short-order cook for story points and feature development and that was the terms, right?
I didn't want to bring my feelings to work. I didn't want to make friends with people because then God forbid, it would be harder to leave. I didn't have that available to me as a capacity at that time, but I went long enough and I realized it's not that I was missing something, or not being fed in some way by not having this emotional need filled at work. It was that I was failing to acknowledge when you say privilege, the literal privilege, that I get to wake up in the morning and think for a job [laughs] and the impact that I can have when I apply all of the skills, capabilities, and background asynchronous thoughts that are not literally in my job description.
When I can bring those things to bear, I'm going to have a much, much bigger impact because what am I except for one person thinking and staring at a matted piece of glass all day, but somebody who is in a small community, or a group of a bunch of people who are in the same mode.
So when I'm in a meeting, I can just be the mercenary jerk who's just like, “Hey, I'm just doing this,” and feeling like that's an emotionally neutral thing. When in fact, that negativity can be in an emotional contagion that could affect other work negatively, or and I'm not exactly –
My friends who know me, I'm a stick in a mud, I'm a curmudgeon, I'm super negative. I complain constantly and I have taken it upon myself to strive to be a net increase in joy in the people that I talk to and that I interact with at work. Because it is a resource that is draining all of us all day long on its own and it needs to be filled up somehow. I have the capacity right now to take it upon myself to try to fill that tank up for the people that I interact with.
So I want to touch on that because I just think it's super lucky that I get to work on a computer and talk out of a screen all day long. If I didn't have that, we wouldn't be having this conversation, I suppose, but I'm just here to make the most of it, I guess.
MAE: I love that. And you reminded me of Sandi Metz’s closer, Lucky You.
JACOB: Tell us about it.
MAE: She gave the closing talk a couple years ago and it's called Lucky You and it goes through how did we all come to be sitting in this room right now and what about redlining? What about the districting? What about all of these things that led to us to experience being here as lucky? I know you weren't saying it in that way, Justin, but it reminded me of that piece, too, which is relevant, but the talk is completely amazing and I definitely recommend it.
JUSTIN: I think I mentioned it once before. The thing that brought me and our marketing director, Cathy, to think that this would be a great forum to talk a little bit about trust at work is that we're about out to – and I think that actually the day that this podcast publishes is the day that we're going to publish a new conference talk that I've prepared called How to Trust Again and we're going to post it to Test Double’s YouTube channel. So we might not have a direct link for the show notes necessarily, but it'll probably be at the top of that as well as the top of our blog when the show goes live.
I hope that anyone [laughs] who enjoyed this conversation will also enjoy the kind of high paced, frenetic, lots of keynote slide style that I bring to communicating about a lot of these topics while still understanding that it's just like n equals one. I'm sharing my experience and hopefully, as food for thought to maybe help you look back at your own experience and understand what connects from my experiences, my perspectives, and my context that might be useful and I hope that you'll find something.
Special Guest: Justin Searls.
Sponsored By:
00:51 - Nikema’s Superpower: Connecting To People Through Authenticity & Vulnerability
28:02 - Seeing People For Their Whole Selves; Facilitating Safe Spaces
51:38 - Impostor Syndrome Isn’t Natural; The Tech Underclass
Reflections:
Damien: Connecting through authenticity.
Arty: Even when you’re scared, stand up and speak.
Chanté: Our youth is our future.
Nikema: Making real connections with other people.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 269 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Martínez Thurmond.
CHANTÉ: Hello, everyone, and I'm here with our fabulous friend and co-host, Damien Burke.
DAMIEN: Hi, and we are here with our guest, today, Nikema Prophet.
Nikema Prophet is a software developer and a community builder based in California. Her current projects are a book to be released in 2022 and hosting conversations on Twitter that highlight Black and neural diversion perspectives in the tech industry.
Welcome to the show, Nikema.
NIKEMA: Thank you for having me.
DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how does you acquire it?
NIKEMA: My superpower is connecting to people through authenticity. I acquired it by practicing standing up and speaking—speaking from my heart in front of others—and I had to overcome very painful, debilitating shyness to do that.
CHANTÉ: I love that you started with that because Nikema, it doesn't seem like you're shy and I think even on your Twitter account, you're louder on Twitter than you are in person. I find your presence to be really lovely and a voice that our community so very much needs.
When I found out you were going to be on the show, I got excited and did my research and did all the things we normally do and found a whole bunch of stuff about you. But before we get into those exciting parts, I am a person who loves to orient people to who you actually are to bring you into the room and just tell us a little bit more like, who are you besides the titles? Where are you living? Where are you from? The things that you do for joy, and if your job is one of those things, tell us about those.
So just curious, who you are and then we can get into the things that you're doing now.
NIKEMA: I really do need to sit down at some point and write down the story that I want to tell about myself because I tend to make it very long. So I'm going to try to keep it brief. [chuckles]
But I am Nikema Prophet. I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. So I'm definitely a California girl. Sacramento is the capital city, but it's not super exciting [chuckles] as a place to grow up. There's a lot of government jobs. People say, “Get that state job, get those benefits, you're good.” Government jobs, healthcare, a lot of that.
But I grew up and probably starting when I was a preteen, like 12, 13, I decided that I wanted to be a professional dancer. So that was my life goal. No plan B. I'm going to be a dancer. I'm going to get out of this small town and I'm going to go dance, which is funny because I did say that I am very shy [laughs] so I always struggled with being self-conscious and I never felt like I was really dancing full out, as we say. I always felt like I was holding back, but I think looking back it was the dance that saved me in a way. It gave me something to look forward to. It got me moving.
Also, my parents were really cool about this, looking back on it, because we didn't have money for daily dance classes, or anything like that. They allowed me to go to schools that had arts program. So there were some magnet schools, or something like that that had these art programs.
So actually, through elementary school, I was in the so-called gifted and talented program, which is a term that I really dislike [chuckles] because even at the time, it felt like it was segregation. [chuckles] It felt like it was money kind of rerouted to mostly white kids. The way that my program worked, it was we were our own class in a school that had gifted classes and regular classes. So it was very segregated, like we were in our own class, we would go from grade to grade with mostly the same kid, and my class was mostly white kids. I was always one of less than a handful of Black children in the classroom and the surrounding school, the so-called regular kids, were not that demographic. They were busing in the GATE kids to go to this school.
So I left the GATE program in middle school to go to a school that had an arts program. I'm a December baby so I was kind of always older than most of the kids, because my birthday was, I don't know where the cutoff was, but if you weren't 5 by a certain day, then you would go the next year to kindergarten, or something like that. So I was always kind of older. I went to this school, left the gate program because I wanted to dance and ended up having just 1 year of middle school because I had one semester of 7th grade, then one semester of 8th grade because I had already had like those gifted classes. The classes were too easy once I got to the regular program.
So I decided back then and my parents supported me in going to these schools where I could dance and I could take daily classes for free. I said that I think it saved me because it was regular physical activity. I always struggled with depression and I was even starting to be medicated for it in high school and thinking back, if I didn't have that dance practice, I think I'd probably be in much worse shape than I was and it wasn't good. [laughs]
So I think now as an adult, I'm grateful that I did have that one thing that I was holding onto, which was like, I'm going to go dance. Also, it was that one thing where I kind of had to force myself to, even if it wasn't full out, even if it wasn't what I felt was my best effort, it was still performance. It was still putting yourself out there and I still deep down inside knew that I wanted the attention of other people. I didn't want to be hidden and yeah, I didn't want to be hidden away. I wanted to be noticed. I do look back at that as dance is what saved me in my adolescence [chuckles] because I was a bit troubled.
So I did have a major accomplishment when after high school, I was accepted to two dance programs. One was Cal Arts in California, California Institute of the Arts, and the other was The Ailey School in New York. Of course, I took The Ailey School because it's Ailey. I don't know if there are dance people who are listening to this, but Alvin Ailey was a very influential Black choreographer and the company, the Alvin Ailey dance company is amazing. So I was super excited to number one, get out of Sacramento and go to where the real dancers are like New York and Ailey School.
I actually graduated high school early, too. I graduated in January of that year. I didn't even attend my graduation because I hated school so much. Took the rest of that year off and I went to that summer program at The Ailey School, the Summer Dance Intensive. That was cool. I'd never been around so many Black dancers in my life. So many people of color. It was so amazing to me to be in a ballet class and almost everyone was Black. That was not my experience in Sacramento.
And then I was going to start the regular semester in school in that fall and that was fall of 2001 and in fall of 2001, 9/11 happened in New York. So that rocked my world. I was living in New Jersey at the time and getting to school became very difficult and I eventually dropped out. I didn't even finish that first semester of dance school and at the time, I kind of thought, “I'm not giving up on my dream. This is just too hard, but I'm going to go back to dancing. I'll keep it up. I'll dance outside of school.”
And I tried that for a while, but it's really hard to do that just on your own without the support, the structure, and the financial aid because it was a post-secondary program. I took out loans and things like that to attend. So doing that all on your own is pretty hard and that was pretty much the beginning of the end as far as dance was concerned.
After leaving The Ailey School, I never danced full-time again. I came back to it like taking classes here, or there, but I never went back to full-time professional dance career aspirations. So that was a turning point in my life. I didn't want to leave New York. So I tried to struggle through it, tried to make it there. [laughs] Didn't actually work.
I haven't talked to anything about my tech background, but that was always in the background. Like my no plan, B plan was to be a professional dancer, but I also always really loved computers. We had a computer in the house when I was in elementary school, which looking back that was a privilege. Most people didn't. I think we had internet, AOL. [chuckles] I remember those discs they would send in the mail, we had that.
CHANTÉ: [chuckles] I remember those, too. Those were fun. [laughs]
NIKEMA: Yeah. I was in a Twitter Space yesterday and Gen Z folks were in there and they were like, “Yo, you used to dial to the internet?” Like, “You actually made a phone call to connect to the internet?” And then – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: I still remember the sound.
NIKEMA: Yeah, and then they were like – two of them were talking and they were like, “Girl, Google it, it's crazy.” [laughs] So it's wild to think we used to measure internet in hours and if you had 10 hours and that was up, then you were off the internet. So I thought that was – [overtalk]
CHANTÉ: I remember before somebody would, at your house, they would pick up the phone and then disrupt the connection.
NIKEMA: Oh, oh, right, right, right. Or you have the one phone line for calls and internet so you can't. Yeah. So it was just funny, the generational difference of always knowing high speed broadband and all that. It's like, we measured this in hours [laughs] and we had to dial a number to get on.
So we had a computer and internet access when I was pretty young and I would make webpages and stuff back then. Even through middle school and high school, I would take computer classes, but that was not the thing I wanted to do as a career and I was also looking at it more from a visual arts perspective, because I'm also a visual artist.
Back when I was making webpages, I think the class I was in was web design and I think back then, my web design class in high school was on the colorful IMAX. I think it was the first version of IMAX. So it was web design and back then when I was looking at careers where I could use those skills, I thought it was graphic designer. I didn't know anything about a web developer. I don't even know if they were calling it that back then, but I thought graphic designers were the people who made websites. But I also took a programming class in high school, which was in the math department.
So I always had an interest and even in New York, when I left dance school, I wanted to major in computer science, which I turns out, I didn't have the math prerequisites to even get into that major. I ended at pre-calculus. That's all to say that while I wanted to be a dancer and that was my only goal, I always had an interest in tech and I always had an interest in programming. I used to make my own websites back when we did have that home computer and the dial-up internet. So it was always something that in the background I enjoyed doing. It wasn't I want to do this as a career because I was going to be a dancer.
So 9/11 was one of those life changing moments and then the next one came. While living in New York, I got pregnant. I was actually in school when I got pregnant and life in New York was kind of almost stabilizing because I had a job as a pharmacy tech. I was in school. My parents—here's another privilege alert. My parents had bought me a co-op, something like a condo. I don't think they call it that out here; I never heard the term until I got to New York. I had a co-op studio apartment where I could walk to my classes at Brooklyn College.
Things were starting to stabilize and then I got pregnant and I decided okay, I'm pregnant and I'm going to have this baby. So that was another life-changing moment and I was pregnant for a while [laughs] and I decided that I needed to go home. I needed to go be where my loved ones were and I needed that support from my family.
So left the apartment vacant [laughs] and went home and while I was pregnant, I started my web developer certificate at the junior college because I was like, “Okay, the dance thing is probably not going to happen and I'm going to have to support a baby now. This is a career that I could do and I could be a mother and I can work from home.” My child was born in 2007 so I was thinking about remote work in 2007 and almost banking on it, like this is what I'm going to do.
I was enrolled in that web developer program, which was something like a 1-year certificate. You could do the associate’s degree, if you wanted to. But I didn't, I did the certificate and it took me 4, or 5 years to complete that certificate, that 1 year certificate because I was primarily a mom.
I had a baby in 2007 and then I had a baby in 2008. So for several years, it was chaos and two babies and I don't know. I almost want to say it was almost – I don't know what it's like to have twins, but I felt like it was probably worse to have one a year apart because it's like they're both babies, but they're at slightly different developmental levels and you just have just all babies. [laughs]
CHANTÉ: I can relate, Nikema because I do have twin boys and it is really hard. Like you're describing here, I had to be with my family and I needed to take time off to be a mom first and it was really humbling. I have a sibling who I’m really close with in age and my mom always says, “I don't know what was worse: having the two of you so close in age, or you having twins.” [laughs] So it's debatable. I don't know. But either way, it is very tough.
NIKEMA: Yeah. So I was depending on – and that's part of why it took so long because I was a mom and online classes were not as widely available as they are in 2022 back in 2007. I just took all the online classes I could and the ones that weren't online were hybrids so it was a few hours. My mom would watch the kids, or something while I go to school for a couple hours a week.
There was a lot of privilege in my story, but there's also a lot of struggle [chuckles] because I was not diagnosed with ADHD until last year [chuckles] and that's not something that you just catch. It's been with me my whole life. Having to go through school, go through jobs, and all these things with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, it makes the late diagnosis bittersweet. Because you've built up this idea of yourself and oh gosh, I'm going to start crying. But you built up this idea of yourself and it's always been hard, but you didn't know that it wasn't supposed to be that hard, you know?
CHANTÉ: Right.
NIKEMA: So I'm going to – [overtalk]
CHANTÉ: I can relate, too. I'm another late ADHD diagnosed person. I was in my early 20s, but it was like, are you kidding me that I have been unnoticed by all these adults? That no wonder I was struggling to do my homework and get it turned in, literally doing 50 versions of the homework. [chuckles] Staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning as a kid to do you my homework and always struggling with feeling like I wasn't perfect.
Just, I can really relate and understand, too and I think the tears are welcomed because I know it to be true about our listeners, that folks in our community identify with neurodivergence and where you feel society tells you, it's like this bad thing, it's a label, and it's shaming, but I also feel it could be very liberating. And once you know what is going on in the background of your [laughs] of your life, you can make connections and start to really get into your brilliance. So just want to say thank you for being so honest.
NIKEMA: That's my superpower, right? It's a double-edged sword because I can't turn it off. Actually, okay, so superpower. Another jump. [laughs]
I was in some program and they asked what's your mutant superpower, which is that superpower that you can't turn off, I guess. That's probably not the best way to it, but it's a double-edged sword because it's like, I am vulnerable and I am authentic and I can't turn it off. [laughs]
So it's pretty much what you see is what you get. Fake until you make it never was good advice for me, because I can't like, if I’m trying to present myself in a way that doesn't align with what I think is true, it just doesn't work. It's going to come off really strange, but I've learned to embrace the tears because I used to fight it so hard. [chuckles] That was also recently that I learned that tears have a function, like you're releasing some endorphins and [laughs] there's an actual physiological reason why it's okay to cry and it's actually helpful. But I used to fight it so hard and I would be so because I couldn't control it and I would just cry in front of everybody and that's why it's a mutant superpower. So it's like, it's not all good. [laughs] There's some downsides to it.
DAMIEN: So I can speak from the other side of that. As a person who, for decades, successfully repressed my emotions and feelings, it's not better on that side.
[laughter]
And so, the mutant superpower that you can't turn off is a thing that I am actively learning currently and [laughs] it's not easy and it is very, very useful.
NIKEMA: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, though.
I did also learn that this is how I connect with people, which is weird. I learned that people appreciate it when you're authentic and raw. I always thought that was so weird. I'm like, “I am such a mess and you're thanking me [laughs] for this.” Like, “Why?”
So the ADHD being late diagnosed, I relate to everything that Chanté said. I was always a perfectionist, I was always a procrastinator, and it's like, I would do excellent work, but it would all be done the day before it was due and it would kill me to get it done. Now as an adult and knowing what executive dysfunction is, I'm like, “Oh, okay. I didn't start because I couldn't start [chuckles] and it wasn't my fault.”
There's so much kind of shame that you can build up when you're thinking that I should be able to do these things that I can't do. Why can't I do these things and I don't like the high functioning label, but I know it's one that people know. But people who are masking their symptoms in a way, which I think gets girls turn out to end up masking because they're not identified. They weren't looking for that.
I've said to people before, there was no way in the 80s and 90s, they were going to look at this quiet Black girl and say, “She has ADHD.” No way. No way anybody would've identified that. Girls tend to end up masking. So people are looking at you from the outside and thinking, “This is a so-called normal child.” [laughs]
CHANTÉ: [inaudible].
NIKEMA: Oh, yeah. That's another thing, other people's expectations of you. If you're capable of doing harder schoolwork and all of these things, why aren't you capable of just getting started on this assignment? Like you can do it, are you just not trying hard enough? So you start to kind of internalize that judgment of I should be able to do this and that's why an adult, it's so painful to look back at all of those years where it's like I really wasn't getting what I needed. I wasn't getting the support I needed. I wasn't getting the recognition of what's going on that I needed and you think it didn't have to be this hard and it's not supposed to be this hard right now.
I think I'm also a bit teary because I'm currently undermedicated [laughs] and I'm dealing with that. Even if I can tell myself it's not supposed to be this hard, it's hard to believe that I do deserve that grace, I do deserve to have the support that I need, and that it's okay when you come up against things that you're physically unable to do, because I don't think we think enough of mental struggles as physical struggles, too. But the brain is part of the body, right? We could go on about – see, my brain goes all over the place.
Now I'm thinking about, [chuckles] how our health insurance works and how I'm paying hundreds of outside of my health coverage to get therapy and how I'm paying thousands of dollars outside of my health coverage to get my teeth taken care of. Teeth are part of the body, right? Isn't your brain part of your body?
[laughter]
Why is that not covered? Modern dentistry again, it's a gift, but it's out of pocket for [chuckles] most of us, if we want to say things like, “The treatments that could save your teeth are cosmetic and not covered for the poorest of people.” That makes me so angry. [laughs] I'm liking that this is a demonstration of an ADHD mind at work because I'm all over the place.
CHANTÉ: I like it. I welcome it. [laughs] It's completely fine.
ARTY: One thing I'm thinking just listening to this and you talking about authenticity, masking, this pressure in society to wear a mask. In a world that becomes increasingly more fake, propagandized, and all of these things where people become almost not real to us, that seeing you being yourself, being in tune with what's going on with you, with your struggles, being will to cry, being willing to stand up and say what you really feel, and stand up for what you believe in. It's refreshing in a way that you look around where everything kind of becomes not real and you stand out as a beacon of light just by being in alignment with yourself and other people connecting with you. You give them permission to take their own masks off. You give them permission to admit their own struggles. Because we all have struggles, right? We all have these things that are hard for us, but it's easy to fall under that same pressure of having to wear a mask all the time. You being in tune with your authenticity is so powerful in terms of the weight that you influence the world and there's no reason you need to change. You just keep on being your beautiful self.
CHANTÉ: Yes! [laughs]
DAMIEN: Yes.
NIKEMA: Man. Now I'm crying again, but thank you so much for that. It took so much to step out into the world and say, “Here I am, this is me,” because like I said, I was so shy. I would get butterflies every time I had to raise my hand in class and I would cry. [chuckles] Like I said, when I would do any kind of public speaking, I would be sweating, shaking, crying. It has been a hard road
DAMIEN: And in a world are emotions are forgotten, making them visible and feeling them and allowing people to see them is a revolutionary act like when you do that, you are setting a path. You're blazing a path for people to follow, to get us to a place where there isn't so. It's not because it's not like people don't have emotions. It's not like you're the only one feeling things. It's just that other people don't have the courage to be seen, to not hide it.
NIKEMA: I want to thank you for bringing that up because it reminded me of something that I used to say, which is for Black women, we're not seen as soft. [chuckles]] We're not seen as being in need of comforting and protecting. So I used to say that I'm radically soft [chuckles] and again, it's the mutant superpower. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off and just not let it all out. [chuckles]
But I do appreciate what Arty said about giving other people permission to be themselves because I've been running a lot of Twitter Spaces lately and I always feel so honored with people say, “Yeah, this is my first time speaking in a space.” Because to me, that means that I have facilitated a safe space for people and I always celebrate them and I always just feel so honored when people are willing to step up and be seen that way because I know how hard it is. But being radically soft, maybe I should put that back in my bio [chuckles] because – [overtalk]
CHANTÉ: I love that. Yes.
NIKEMA: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: I love that and I can relate, too. I like where you were going with the whole conversation, which I think is worth noting and talking about a minute because I grew up – Nikema, I'm half Black, I'm half Mexican. My mom's an immigrant. So on both sides of my family, I always felt like there was no time to be sensitive, soft, and to be in my feelings. I actually got called out a lot as a kid because I was very emotional and I was like, “I just thought I was highly empathetic and intuitive and what the hell's wrong with y'all?” [laughs]
But it was something that I got made fun of and ridiculed for and eventually, tried to suppress, which I felt really impacted my image of myself and what I felt like I should be projecting into the world. And ultimately, my self-confidence to the point where, like you said, you hit a breaking point because I was masking all the time and trying to basically posture myself to be something. I was highly gifted and talented and was in these advanced classes, just like you, and it's interesting.
I never thought anything about technology. I loved it just like you're describing it and I find myself interwoven into the community, not a technologist, but somebody who's recruiting and focusing on the culture and the talent of those organizations.
So one of the things that as I was reading about you and just hoping that we can weave into the conversation is your approach to seeing people for their whole selves. I really appreciated when I read that about you and saw that you had been taking effort, once you got into technology, to build it seemed like a community, or spaces where you were going to allow people to show up and be their full selves, which in my mind and from my point of view, I'm assuming that's like okay, then if we're going to do that, we need to know who you are, the unique identities and intersectionalities that you bring to the conversation, or to the space.
I'm just curious if we could go down that path a little bit, because I want to know how you've turned these, I put in air quotes, “adversities” into a power, into something that's really great.
So tell us about that. How you've used all this stuff about yourself and your experiences thus far to do what you're doing right now, which is you've built a few different products and I'll let you talk about that in technology.
NIKEMA: I will talk a little bit about my founder journey, I guess, because I did start a company. This was also a part of my coming out because even through college I was always overlooked and pushed aside by stronger personalities. Whenever I had a group project, it was just always a bad time [chuckles] because I never felt insecure about my skills, or my ability to contribute. But I did have a problem with like standing up and like making sure that my contribution was included.
So I finished my web developer certificate and I was like, “I'm going to go get a job now,” and I was again, thinking I can get a job as a developer and I can work from home. I could still take care of my babies; still take care of my kids and I could do this job from home. Back then, remote work was not widely available like that. It was almost more of a perk [chuckles] and reserved for more senior people, people who had more career experience than someone who had just be coming in from junior college. But still, that's what I thought I was going to do. I'm going to work from home.
I was having a hard time finding that kind of job [chuckles] and I was also feeling like I didn't get enough practical hands-on experience in my program. So I started going into the community. I started going to meetups. I volunteered for some nonprofits helping kids, teaching kids tech classes. I joined a startup weekend and I joined this startup weekend as a developer because I'm like, “I'm going to practice these skills.
I need to get hands-on skills to get a job.” Didn't actually get to do any development work. But this was important because I'd never taken that much time away from my kids before and I took a whole weekend to build a startup. That's what the point of startup weekend was to start with an idea and build a product and pitch it.
My team won, which was like, wow. The entrepreneur switch turned on in my brain, it was like, “Oh, my contributions matter, my work matters, and I can start solving these problems that I care about because no one else seems to be working on them.” And when that happened okay yeah, we won.
Very quickly after we won, the person who came up with the idea for our startup decided that she was CEO. She also decided that she was going to fire the rest of the team, take our prizes, and go off and build a startup for real with a friend of hers and I was like, “That's not going to happen.” [chuckles] I was so angry. I was like, “This is the first weekend I took away from my kids. This was the first time I felt like my work was being recognized and that my work mattered and you're going to try to take that from me? Hell no.” Like, “No, that's not going to happen.”
I could go on about that story. I don't really want to, but I will say that I alerted the organizers of the startup weekend. We ended up being disqualified, but that was also my origin story as a founder. So I decided to go and try to build something to solve my problems and my company that I ended up forming is called PopSchools. It's still a company. I'm still paying taxes on it. That started my founder journey.
My company was eventually called PopSchools and in the first iterations, it was like a school alternative, an alternative school. I was homeschooling my kids at the time. Didn't really feel like they were getting the best experience out of that and I didn't want to put them back in school because I didn't feel like they were getting a good experience in regular school either.
At first, it was a school alternative program. Then the later iterations, were a co-working space that is family friendly and age inclusive. So students would be first class citizen in this co-working space. They would have a homeschooling program and an afterschool program for kids who weren't homeschooling and also, a workspace for parents. So kids are taken care of, kids are doing their thing in a rich environment that is accommodating to them, and parents also have a place to do their remote work because I'm still on this remote work thing. I don't want to go sit in an office.
That was a later iteration. Then I kind of played with, well, I had ideas about education, school choice, and all of those things. But also, I learned over time that if you are not financially stable, or somewhat financially well off, you don't really have school choice. You could have the best programs in the world, but not everybody is able to homeschool and not everybody was able to give up the services that they're going to get by having their kids in public school.
It's really interesting that I felt very vindicated when this pandemic hit, because I'm like, “All of you people who did not understand what I was doing [chuckles] a couple years ago, were just kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, sucks to be you’ when it came to the options for school and homeschooling,” and how homeschooling was not the experience that I thought it should be. All those people who didn't understand got firsthand experience and what it's like to have to homeschool [laughs] and what it's like to not have that support in place for a family that's not in a public school.
So I felt vindicated because I'm like, “Now you all understand, you understand what I've been going through,” and I kind of feel like it's a good time to pick up [laughs] that project. Because like I said, a lot of people understand why there's a need for it now and a lot of people also found that school can be damaging this to some kids. Some people found that their kids were better when they didn't have to go to school. They were better mentally. They felt safer. I've heard things about the racial trauma. A lot of schools that are – the school to prison pipeline is a thing I don't want to get into that, but some schools are great and a lot of schools look just like prisons. So being home was a relief for some of these kids.
DAMIEN: I want to repeat something you said: school can be damaging for children and that there's a trope in this country of children hate going to school, right? Like, “Oh, they're pretending to be sick to not go to school. They’re ditching school. They don't want to be at school.” So the question is why. Nobody stops to ask why are we doing this to our children, putting them environments that they don't want to be in? What harm is that causing? Why don't they want to be in these environments and why are we not asking those questions?
CHANTÉ: Yes. The question I've been grappling with, and I feel like this is appropriate group of folks to talk to and pose the questions, what is the purpose of school? Is the purpose of school to be childcare because we live in an industrialized society that demands adults to be awake [chuckles] and at work, at their attention at desk at dawn and then to dusk? Is that the purpose of school to be a holding place for those children and/or is it to allow for children to have a social and emotional experience with one another, to learn how to be friends, to learn about people who are their neighbors, and then to build a community? Is it to prepare children for a job that they're going to take in this industrialized world? And if our industrialized world is changing because of the applications of technology and where we're going with the future of work, do they need to be at school all those hours, or is there a new version of what education should look like?
I think I'm just really frustrated, Nikema because I could really appreciate you saying now people understand. I felt the same way because I was a person who had to stay home with my kids for a while and not have an income. I so much dreamed and longed of a place where I could take my children that was healthy, welcoming, supportive communal while I was working for a few hours to hustle, or do whatever and it could possibly be a stimulating, positive, welcoming, loving experience for my children. But there wasn't one that existed.
So I do think timing is everything. Maybe this is the right time to resurrect those efforts. But I love the question of what is the purpose of school and maybe we don't get to answer that question today, but I think it's worth just pinning and asking to you and to the listeners today.
NIKEMA: I love that because that was exactly what I was pitching [chuckles] back when I was trying to be the WeWork of homeschooling [chuckles] and I could also get into VC, tech startups, and my beats with that because I was watching, I was like, “These white men have very ordinary ideas. They're not really reimagining anything, but they are being funded in the millions.” And I could see – I like to call out that tech claims to be tech leaders and VCs claim to be data-driven. But if we're all data driven, I can look and see that as a Black woman, my chances of being venture funded at the level that I would need to be are slim to none. My chances are slim to none. Black people as a whole get a fraction of a percent of all venture capital.
So why should I put out this energy to pitch my ideas and ask for funding when chances are, I won't get the funding that I need going down that road?
But that was exactly what I was pitching and back then, I would try to get people to imagine if your kids weren't in school, where would they be? Okay, home [chuckles] is an option, but you quickly find out if you start homeschooling after being in school, the world is not set up for children. Children are not welcome everywhere and you might think, “Okay, well, what about the library?” The library is the library. It's not a place for children to be children so much, like you're supposed to be quiet. [laughs] They have children areas. It's not a place where you could be instead of being at school. You could go to a park. You could do that, but it's a park.
So if you think about it, if school didn't exist, where in the world, where in your world are kids going to be accommodated? There aren't really places to go and so, that's why I was like, “Homeschooling is very exclusive.” It's not something everybody can do and there are a lot of subgroups and not even subgroups, but maybe the dominating narrative of what a homeschooler is that I did not align with. I don't want to be aligned with religious fundamentalists. I don't want to be aligned with child abusers and people who want to keep their kids home because they want to shelter them from the world and they want to teach them their own worldview. I don't want to be aligned with that.
It probably is a good time to look at this again and it's sad in a way because when I needed it the most is when I was really trying to go hard [chuckles] to start this and get backing for it. But my kids are old now. They're teens now and it was really that age group when they were 7, 8, 9, pre-teen where it's like, where do these kids go if they're not in school? What can they do? Because I don't necessarily want to put them in just classes. I want them to have a rich experience and back then, I was really into self-directed education. So I was like, “If it's not a class, if it's not school, there's literally nothing.” [laughs] There's nothing they could do, but go play at the park, or hang out in the library for a few hours, or stay home.
So PopSchools was very homeschool, alternative school and it always had that aspect of like, “I need a place where I can go with my kids [chuckles] and I could do my work.” We had some things happen where even outside of being in school, my kids still weren't safe. [chuckles] So I was like, “I need to be somewhere where I know my kids are safe,” but I didn't have any money. I had less than $0 all the time [chuckles] and it's not really a position to start a business from. I did have a network and I did meet some great people in tech, VC, and all that and they were like, “Nikema, go get a job.” [chuckles] Like, “You need to get yourself stable, take care of your needs, and then once you're okay, then you can start working on that business. You can start putting your energy, time, and money into building the business that you want to build.” So I did that. I went out and got a job.
There's a lot of extra to story, too that I don't want to get into. But I think it was 2019 when I started this public Twitter job campaign where I was like, “Watch me get this job.” I think I was documenting my job search, documenting my interviews, and counting my rejections and I did finally get a group of offers in, I think it was 2019. Two were for solve engineering. One was for a community manager role. I took the community manager role because I was very much wanting to be in tech and in community. I don't want to be heads down in code because like I said, my superpower is connecting to people. So it's probably not the best use of if we're talking about, like Chanté said, the whole person [laughs] to sit me in front of a computer to code. I want to be in the community with people.
So I took that community manager role—it was also the highest base pay out of all my offers—and I connected with the hiring manager. So that was my choice and that was the last offer to come through. I took that and I worked there for a year. I just left in October of 2021. I was there for a year and a couple months and oh, I skipped over a lot. But talking about the whole person and I feel very strongly about equity and inclusion, I will say in tech, but specifically for people who are career switchers and so-called non-traditional technologists. I care a lot about that because I see things from this unique perspective, because I have experience as a student, I have experience as a founder, I have experience as just a parent, a single parent, someone coming from not a lot of money.
I have this unique way of seeing things and I can see very clearly when things are set up to exploit people and it pisses me off. It makes me angry and I had to learn how to that energy towards something productive. Because just throwing it out there and trying to scream into the void, it seems like no one's hearing you and it seems like the things that you're calling out are just being ignored. That's a waste of energy.
So I had to learn how to direct it and I started directing it by helping individuals and again, by showing up. Showing up and speaking, even if nobody's listening. I told myself, “When you're in these rooms with people that you admire and people who are influential, stand up and say something because nobody else has that perspective. Nobody else is going to say what you're going to say.” And it's not even possible. It's not possible for someone to speak your perspective and I had to learn that you need perspective is valuable.
There's a quote, and I really need to find out who said it first, [chuckles] but it's, “You're an expert in your own experience,” and I latched onto that because there's a lot of – it's another one of my pet peeves is this imposter syndrome thing. But there's a lot of people who are being made to feel like they're always going to be – I call it the tech underclass. You're always going to be lesser [chuckles] than the people who have degrees, or the people who've been in this for years, and the people who are already in the industry. Here you are coming from your non-traditional background and you're always going to be lesser than those folks, and you are going to have imposter syndrome, get used to it.
So I latched onto that idea of I'm an expert in my own experience and my experience is value. Bringing that up and speaking it out is adding value. It is doing a service and it's a service that nobody else can do. That's when I started kind of committing to myself that even if I'm scared, I'm going to stand up and speak. I'm going to let people know that I was in the room.
But I do want to talk about imposter syndrome. So my beef with imposter syndrome is not that it's not a thing. I'm sure it is, [chuckles] but I feel like it's being thrust upon us. I feel like people are saying, “You're a woman in tech. You're a person of color in tech. You have no degree and you're trying to get into tech and you're going to feel like a fraud,” and I don't feel like a fraud. Why are you introducing that to me?
I feel like another part that bugs me about it is that it's shifting the blame onto the individual for some actual, rational reactions to a hostile environment. If you're telling me, “Hey, it's natural, it's normal, it's okay to feel like you don't belong here,” you're kind of saying it's a me thing, but it shouldn't be natural and okay for me to feel like I don't belong here. Like, why is this environment not including me? I'm actually reacting to people pushing me out of this space, discriminating against me, and showing their bias against me. So what's wrong with me for noticing that? What's wrong with me for feeling that?
Why aren't we talking about the folks that are making this an unwelcome place? That are making people feel bad? Who are saying out loud, “We don't want you here”? It's putting the attention in the wrong place. Instead of saying, “It should not be okay, that should not be a normal thing to feel like you're not good enough and you don't belong.” I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. This is how I think of it. The actual definition is you are capable and skilled, but you feel like you're a fraud and someone's going to find you out. I don't think that should be normalized and encouraged, and I feel like it is being normalized and encouraged that it's normal to feel like you don't belong here.
DAMIEN: Yeah, it's rampant and it's something that a lot of people go through. The question is why? What is it about those environments that's causing that and why is it some people experience it and some people don't? I've seen the opposite of imposter syndrome. It is mindboggling.
ARTY: Well, there's this general first principle of whatever we focus on and grows and when we have these concepts, like imposter syndrome, that we learn about as these psychological concepts that then we internalize into ourself. Does that end up amplifying the experience of like if now I'm thinking about, “Oh, I have imposter syndrome and now I'm having all these feelings where I feel this certain way, too.” Do we end up amplifying those things even more by creating that frame and then as you said, normalizing it? It's like, “Oh, it's totally okay that you feel that way. You're supposed to feel that way. That's a normal thing.” Then we end up not dealing with the fundamental problems that we're actually creating these sort of tech, underclass, second class boundaries with the way we sort of create our group collective and we are pushing people out and then normalizing the fact that they feel unincluded.
I totally agree. It's putting attention on the wrong aspect of things such that as opposed to focusing on the things that are potentially corrective, that might improve the inclusivity of the culture and us thinking about how we're creating mental groups and how we can create more inclusive mental groups, instead we're normalizing the exclusion.
NIKEMA: Yeah. I almost titled my book, The Underclass, [chuckles] and I decided against that because again, I want to be positive [chuckles] and I'm probably still going to say some of the same things that I plan to say in that book. But this whole thing about – and this is part of the rage [laughs] that I have to redirect is because I went through a coding bootcamp that cost $30,000, up to $30,000 of potential future income for a lot of the students that attended that school and I saw the messages coming from the leadership and the people who were really gathering these people up and funneling them into bootcamps.
First off, I saw a lot of just wrong, [ chuckles] like wrong advice being given out and I saw a lot of cultural incompetency because a lot of these bootcamps are run by white men and a lot of the students are not that. So I'm like, “Here I am with this perspective, I'm a founder, I've talked to investors, I've been a student. I know how to code.” [chuckles] From that perspective of, I have a viewpoint that most students don't. So I'm seeing absolute wrong advice being given out. Like when we're talking about looking for that first job, your first job at tech, you're so-called breaking into tech, which I hate that term. We're not breaking in, let us in. [chuckles] Why should we have to break in?
DAMIEN: Open the door.
NIKEMA: Yeah. There are so many jobs that are not being filled. Why? Why are we gatekeeping? But wrong advice, like, “It's a numbers game. You might have to do hundreds of applications.” That's giving people wrong advice [chuckles] and it's giving people advice that you yourself never did. I know for a fact. These are people who have strong networks –
Oh, most egregious wrong advice. Part of the problem is these people were better marketers than people who could run a school. But there was a thread on Twitter. I remember seeing it. It was a young Black woman. She was graduating high school, she was going to college, and I think trying to decide about what college to go to and someone comes into this thread and recommends Lambda School to her and I'm like, “Absolutely fucking not. How could you?” Like, “How could you?” [chuckles] Like, “How could you tell a Black woman with all of this going for herself, who's going to be on a path to like –” I don't know.
I'm just saying you're suggesting something very low value and especially low value to a Black woman because the people who ran that school did not have the cultural competency to give advice to anyone other than white men, I'd say. Maybe abled white men. [laughs] I don't know, but just wrong advice. A lot of anti-intellectualism anti-degrees like, “Oh, this is better than a degree education.” Absolutely not. Credentials matter more for people of color, for people who are minoritized in tech. Your certificate from an unaccredited school means absolutely nothing compared to a degree in computer science.
So it's rage-inducing for me to see that people are being exploited and pointed towards these programs that are not going to do what they're advertised to do for them and they're not even capable of knowing that they're giving the wrong advice. I opted out of career services when I was in a bootcamp because I saw the kind of advice they were giving and that's part of my, I guess, I'm going to call it activism today is I really want people to know what's really up. I want them to not devalue themselves and not allow others to devalue them. Because these people who know good and well what's up, they know good and well how things work, are leading them astray and they're leading them into jobs that are going to underpay them and they're not going to be satisfying and they are misleading. Misleading in what it takes to get to where we're all trying to go.
I would just like to say to whoever's listening to this and you're maybe getting into tech, don't be discouraged, but also, do your due diligence. Before you start agreeing to pay anything that's tens of thousands of dollars, even thousands of dollars, see who these people are, see what the outcomes are, and talk to the students who have gone through that program. Talk to the students who weren't successful. Talk to the ones who were successful because a lot of these success stories are skewed.
When I went to bootcamp, it was better than free for me. I never had an income share agreement. I had a scholarship. I had a stipend. So I was actually getting paid to attend. I always like to say that you could take my story and make it look like a bootcamp success story, but you would not be seeing the 20 years before that when I started to learn how to code. You could tell that story in a way that doesn't show that part. You could say, “Nikema was this single mom with no job who joined Lambda school did 15 weeks, then got a six-figure job the next year.” That would be true, [chuckles] but that would not be a Lambda success story. That is, Nikema worked her ass off [chuckles] for decades before Lambda was even thought of to get to where she is today and I feel like that story is left out.
CHANTÉ: Nikema, that is such an amazing point to make and I want to run the balance of the time we have left, but I just want to say – I think we have a few minutes to get into reflections, but I just want to say before we do that, that having conversations about diversity and inclusion in tech doesn’t means really nothing to me. We need to have conversations about equity and accessibility because equity is actually what you're kind of describing here.
We have to be able to see the whole person and this is why sometimes it's important to call out the institutional and systemic racism that's widely pervasive in the industry and beyond that is happening all over our country, all over our world. and it is such, I hope a deeper conversation that needs to be had. I'm here for it if you want to come back, or we can continue the conversation on Twitter Spaces, or something. I'm there for that, invite me. But there's a lot here and I really appreciate you giving that advice because we do need to have open, honest, authentic conversations show who you really are.
I'm looking forward to getting folks' reaction, but I really want to move us into reflection, if that's okay, just to respect everyone's time.
NIKEMA: That's okay with me.
CHANTÉ: Anybody want to go first? Anybody, Arty, Damien, you have a reflection?
DAMIEN: I can go first.
Really, the thing I'm going to be taking away from this—and Nikema, thank you so much for joining us here—is that connecting through authenticity and the power of that. It's not the first time I've heard words of that nature, or that idea, but getting to witness it in-person has been a really powerful experience and that's going to be something that sticks with me for a while. So thank you.
ARTY: Yeah, I think you gave a very good demonstration of your superpower here, though of just being yourself, standing up, and saying what you believe and what you think and stuff. I can even see how those things just affected me and affected people in this room and being able to connect with you so that we could have a very real conversation.
I think the thing that I'm going to be taking away from this conversation is you talked about even when you're scared, you stand up and speak and you're going to let people know that you're in the room and that you are an expert in your own experience and nobody else has your unique perspective. I feel like that's something that all of us have so much power in ourselves to stand up and speak in our own authenticity for our own experiences and be in the room. Even when we're scared, to go after and do it anyway because by doing so, too it gives other people permission to do the same. It creates opportunity for other people to take their mask off and create space for them to be themselves and for them to stand up. It's kind of like a chain reaction that happens. So if we can all start to do that and all start to create space for people to do that, that's the kind of stuff that one person at a time changes the world.
CHANTÉ: Thank you for those. I'm really appreciating, Nikema your authenticity and your rawness. I think it's beautiful. It just really resonated with me. So I felt like I was listening to a version of myself, just listening to your story.
What I think I wrote down, the aspiration that you had about children and making sure that they feel like where in our world are they first class citizens. That really stuck out to me because I think that our youth is our future and I'm really committed in this portion of my life to building and doing whatever I can to make sure we build a future that is inclusive, equitable, and accessible to everyone. I think we’ve got to lean in and look at our youth and I hope that they're learning from some of our – not necessarily failures, but some of our places in our lives as adults where we fall short of kind of build world that's fair and awesome.
So I really want to take that and do something with it and I'm really inspired. Thank you.
NIKEMA: Thank you for letting me speak like, I can go on and on, so. [chuckles] I appreciate it.
CHANTÉ: Thank you. Do you have any reflections before we close off the conversation?
NIKEMA: Yeah, just last thing. I just wanted to say thank you again and I really appreciate and I have come to enjoy my story. It’s because of the things you told and it’s because I recognize that it is how I connect with others and that is the good side of the mutant superpower is that I do get to make real connections with other people.
DAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.
01:56 - Episode Intro: Who is Casey Watts?
02:25 - “Gay” vs “Queer”
06:11 - Pronoun Usage & Normalization
16:36 - Asking Questions & Sharing
28:16 - Effective Allyship
Reflections:
Mannah: The people on this show are all willing to start and have conversations.
Casey: I will make mistakes. I will find more support.
Mandy: Reflection is always a work in progress. It’s never done. Keep doing the work. People are always evolving and changing.
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Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
CASEY: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 268. I'm Casey, and I'm here with co-host, Mannah.
MANNAH: How's it going? I'm Mannah and I'm here with Mandy Moore.
MANDY: Hey, everybody. It’s Mandy and today, I'm excited because we are doing a panelist only episode. So our host and panelist, beloved Casey Watts, is going to take us through Casey did a LGBTQ panel for Women Who Code Philly a couple weeks ago and it went really great. He offered to do a show to talk about the subject in more depth on the show. So we're here to do that today.
So without further ado, why don't you give us a little intro, Casey?
CASEY: Sure. I'm going to start by talking about who I am a little bit and why I'm comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. My name's Casey, I'm a gay man, or a queer man. We can get into the difference between gay and queer [chuckles] in the episode. I live in D.C. and I really like my community groups that I'm in to be super inclusive, inclusive of people of all kinds of backgrounds and all the letters in LGBTQIA especially.
MANDY: That's awesome. So right there, you just gave us an in. Can we get into the difference between gay and queer?
CASEY: Yeah. I love it.
People lately use the term “queer” as an umbrella term that represents all the letters in LGBTQIA especially younger people are comfortable with that term, but it is reclaimed. Older people, it used to be a slur and so, like my cousin, for example, who's older than me hesitates to use the word queer on me because she knows that it used to be used to hurt people.
But queer people like this as an umbrella term now because it is just saying we're not the norm in gender identity, or sexual, romantic orientation, that kind of stuff. We're not the norm. We're something else. Don't assume that we're the norm and then it's not describing all the little nuances of it. It's just like the umbrella term. So I'm definitely queer and I'm gay.
Another distinction that I really like to make and that's cultural versus specifically what the term means. So I'm gay and that I'm attracted to other men, but I don't hang out at gay bars and watch RuPaul's Drag Race like the mainstream gay man does in media and in life. I know a lot of people who love that I'm not comfortable there. I don't like it. I think drag queens are fun I guess, but they're also really catty and mean and I don't like that, and I don't want that to rub off on me personally. Instead, I hang out in groups like the queer marching band which has a ton of lesbian women, bisexual, biromantic people, asexual people, intersex people, and trans people and has all the letters in LGBTQIA and I love that inclusive community. That's the kind of group I like to be in.
Some of the gay men there talk about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it's like a minority of that large group. I love being in the super inclusive cultures. So I'm culturally queer, but I'm sexually romantically gay. So depending on what we're talking about, the one is more important than the other.
I have a story for this. Before the pandemic, I got a haircut at a gay barber shop. It's gay because D.C. has a lot of gay people and there's a gym above the barber shop that's pretty explicitly gay. They cater to gay people. They have rainbows everywhere.
I got my hair cut and this woman just kept making RuPaul’s Drag Race references to me that I didn't get, I don't get it. I don't know what she's saying, but I know the shape of it and I told her I don't like that and I'm not interested in it. Please stop. She didn't because she was assuming I'm culturally gay, like most of her clientele and it was really annoying and she wasn't seeing me, or listening to what I was saying and I was not seen. But she's right I was gay, but I'm not gay culturally in that way.
Does that make sense? That's kind of a complex idea to throw out at the beginning of the episode here. A lot of people take some time to get your head around the cultural versus sexual terms.
MANNAH: Yeah. That is interesting especially because with so many identities, I guess that’s true for every identity where there's a cultural element and then there's some other thing. For instance, I’m a Black man and no matter where I hang out, or what I’m interested in, I’ll always be a Black man, but there is associated with both masculinity and specifically, Black masculinity.
CASEY: Yeah, and I like the – lately, I've been seeing lowercase B black to mean a description of your skin color and uppercase B Black to mean a description of the culture and I like that distinction a lot. It's visual.
Deaf people have been using that for years. My aunt’s deaf so my family has a deaf culture. I'm a little bit deaf culture myself just by proxy, but I'm not deaf. I'm capital D Deaf culturally in amount. Her daughter, who she raised, my deaf aunt, is culturally Deaf way, way more than the average person, but not fully because she's not deaf herself.
So there's all spectrum here of cultural to experiencing the phenomenon and I was happy to see, on Twitter at least, a lot of people are reclaiming capital B black. And for me, it's capital Q Queer and lowercase G gay. That's how I distinguish into my head—culturally queer and I'm sexually gay.
MANNAH: So one of the things, I've been thinking about this since our intro and for those of you listening, our intro is scripted and as simple as it was like, “Hey, my name is Mannah,” and passing it off to Mandy. Generally, when I introduce myself – I just started a new job. I introduced myself with my pronouns, he/him, because I think it's more inclusive and I want to model that behavior and make sure that people around me are comfortable if they want to share their pronouns. I do think that this is championed by the queer community and as a member of that community, I'd just love to hear your take on people being more explicit with that aspect of their identity.
CASEY: I love the segment. Pronouns is a huge, huge topic in this space lately especially. I like to start from here, especially with older audiences that we used to have mister and miss in our signatures and in the way we address letters and emails, and that's gone away. So including pronouns is a lot like just saying mister, or miss, but we've dropped the formality. I'm glad to be gone with the formality, but we still need to know which pronouns to use and it's nice to have that upfront. I like and appreciate it. I try to include pronouns when I remember it and when I'm in spaces where that's a norm. I like to follow that for sure every time there.
But I'm not always the first person to introduce it. Like if I was giving a talk and there were 30 older white men in the audience who've never heard of this idea, I might not start with he/him because I want to meet them where they're at and bring them to the point where they get it. So I'm not always a frontrunner of this idea, but I love to support it, I love to push it forward, and help people understand it and get on board.
It's like there's different stages of allyship, I guess you could say and I really like helping people get from a further backstage to a middle stage because I don't think enough people are in that space and there are plenty of people getting people who are in the middle stage to the more proactive stage. Like, “We should use pronouns!” You hear that all the time in spaces I'm in.
It's possible I can get pushback for that kind of thing, like even meeting people where they're at, and that frustrates because I want to be effective. I don't want to just signal that I'm very progressive and doing the right things. I want to actually be effective. I give workshops on this kind of thing, too. That's where we're coming from for the today's talk.
MANDY: I think on the last show, it might have been Kate Marshall who said that normalizing pronouns is really important to do, but not just when there's an obvious person in the room who you're not sure. Maybe we even started off on the wrong foot on the show by not saying, “Hi, I'm Mandy, my pronouns are she and her.” Just adding that in to normalize it would be a really good step, I think.
CASEY: Yeah, love it. Here's where I like to come with my role. Say, “Plus one, I love that idea. Let's do it now.” I like to activate the idea once it's in the room, but it takes someone brave to bring it up in the first place and it's a different amount of social energy, maybe in a different head space you have to be in to be that first person. But being the second is also very important and I like to help people understand that, too. If you're the second person, that's still being helpful. Maybe you can become the first person in some groups, but I want to celebrate that you're the second person even. That's great.
Yeah, I think that's a good change we could do.
MANNAH: You mentioned allyship and I think that that is why am so proactive in introducing myself with pronouns because I do present as a traditional man. Well, maybe not traditional, but I present as a man and I have the ability to deal with some of that pushback.
We talk about superpowers on the show. I feel like one of my superpowers is I am willing to engage in those conversations, even if they are difficult.
CASEY: Mm hm.
MANNAH: So I can use my powers for good by starting that conversation perhaps, or starting to build that norm. Whether, or not I am doing it for anyone in particular, it is important for me to do it wherever we are. So I think that just wherever we can make spaces more inclusive with the way we can conduct ourselves and our language, it's important.
CASEY: I have a framework to share that's kind of related to that.
So there's a spectrum of allyship—that's my title for it anyway—that goes from an active detractor all the way over to an active supporter of an idea. In this case, the active supporter would be getting pronouns to happen in a space where they're not happening. And then in the middle, maybe you're neutral, not doing anything. In the middle on either side, there's a passive – like you're not doing anything, but you kind of support the idea. You're kind of against the idea, but you're not taking any action. And then on the active part, there's even a split between and being proactive and reactive.
So for pronouns, I guess the way I'm self-describing here is I'm a reactive pronoun person. For better, or worse, that's where I'm at on that spectrum and that's where I like to help move things along. So I can talk to people who are more maybe passively against the idea because I'm not so far on the right.
I like to use the spectrum for another purpose, which is moving people from one space to the next is valuable and often invisible. If you can get someone to be loudly against pronouns to just be quiet, that's a step forward. You've persuaded them a little bit to go in that direction, or if they’re there to neutral, or neutral to passively supportive, but quiet about it. A lot of this kind of progress with people who aren't active supporters is invisible and that can be really frustrating for people; it feels like you're not making any progress.
So for people who are allies and want to be allies, there's a step forward you can do for yourself, which is getting yourself from being reactive to being proactive. But you're not just helping the people in the room, but helping people who could be in the room, or might be in the future. Reactive to proactive.
MANDY: I've been doing that a lot with just actually referring to everybody as they/them no matter if I already know how they present, or not. That, to me, is just the most inclusive way to refer to people in general.
CASEY: Yeah, that's generally a safe practice, but there are people who don't want to be called they/them.
MANDY: Hmm.
CASEY: For example, I have some friends who… Let's imagine a trans man who wants to be considered he/him, they are very invested in this and they want the – If you keep calling them, they/them, even if they correct you, “He/him is my pronouns,” then they're going to be upset about that, pf course. But it is a safe, starting point because the ambiguous they is just generally, it’s good grammar, the APA endorses it even. You're allowed to use they when it's ambiguous by grammar rules. But if you know someone's pronouns and it isn't they/them, it's generally better to use those because they prefer it.
MANDY: Yeah. That's what I meant. If somebody says to me, “I would prefer you call me she/her, he/him.: But when I'm first, like if I'm even talking to say my dad and I'm talking about work, I would be like, “I have a friend, they did this.”
CASEY: Yeah. That's ambiguous day and that's perfectly appropriate there.
MANDY: Yeah. But as far as like addressing somebody on a regular basis who wants to be referred to as one, or the other, I have no problem doing that. I've just been training myself to use ambiguous terms because I see and I think it's wonderful. My daughter's 12 and almost all of her friends are non-binary. So when I meet them, or I'm talking about her friends for me, it's just more, I don't want to say easy. I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing it, like taking the easy way out, but I'll just be like, do the they/them stuff to have the conversation and then once I find out more, we can transfer over to the he/him, she/her as I'm corrected, or being asked to do one, or the other.
CASEY: Right, right. It's definitely safer to assume you don't know than to assume someone's gender based on how they looked, for sure and the ambiguous they is perfect for that. Even for people who use they/them as pronouns, there's a switch in my head at least—you probably feel it, too—from ambiguous to specific. Like now I know they/them is their pronouns.
MANDY: Yeah. I've had no problem. When my daughter has brought new people over, who I know are non-binary, I will say to them even if I already know, because she's told me, I'll be like, “What pronouns do you prefer?” And every single time these are 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, they're like, “Thank you for asking.”
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: Because a lot of times, I feel it's not very accepted yet. So when I hear, or when they hear me say, “How would you like me to refer to you?” They smile so big.
CASEY: Yeah, you’re treating them like the individual person they are.
MANDY: Exactly, and they're like, “Thank you,” and now I'm known as the cool mom. [laughs]
CASEY: Ah. Great. [laughs]
Yeah. If I could snap my fingers and change a behavior of mine, that would be one. I would consider everyone's pronouns unknown until they tell me and it also varies by context. I don't even want to trust secondhand. Like if Mandy, you said he for Mannah before I met him, I wouldn't assume that's his pronouns. If maybe you are assuming, or maybe you heard it from someone and they were assuming, or maybe based on context, it's different. I want to hear it from the person, ideally.
MANDY: Yes.
CASEY: I also don't necessarily want to go around asking for pronouns actively all the time. I'd rather us offer them upfront, or have them in our usernames, or something so it's less verbiage in the air about it. I like it to be normalized. We don't have to think about it. That's a dream state.
But for now, I'd rather ask people directly than assume anything. But it's a hard habit because I've been trained from school and everything, since a young age, to assume someone’s gender and not to use they at first. That's what we've been trained and I love this trend of untraining that. Ambiguous they is accepted and we should start with that.
MANDY: I love seeing people proactively put pronouns in their Zoom profiles, or their Zoom names and at conferences, I love the conferences having badges, or stickers.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: I love that.
CASEY: It's helpful.
MANNAH: I want to change directions slightly and go back to something you said about the spectrum and how we move people – I don't remember the exact words you used, the two polar opposites.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANNAH: But how to move people towards a more inclusive mindset, let's say and wherever you are on that spectrum, you might not know how to move forward and the way to kind of deal with that, you might have questions. I just want to hear from you how you would like to be approached with questions around how do you feel about pronouns, or whatever it might be relating to your culture, or your, I guess, I'm going to say sexual identity.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANNAH: People are unsure how can they approach you with questions in a way that's respectful and a way that will allow them to learn more about you?
CASEY: Good question. I feel like you're reading my mind a bit here.
I want to start with another framework that you might have heard of. It's the circles of grief Ring Theory. Like if someone just lost their parent, then you need to pour support into that person who's closest to them and if you're outside like a more distant family member, or a friend, pour support in and then the grief gets stumped out. That's the framework, generally. So there's a lot of rings. People who are closer to it are affected more directly and people who are outside are affected more indirectly.
That applies to asking people personal things, too. So I'm directly affected by being queer and I've been discriminated against and people have said bad things to me before. To ask me about it and to bring up those feelings could harm me in some way so you can't just assume everybody's comfortable talking about their experience. Like, “Tell me about how you feel about your dead mother.” It wouldn't be sensitive either because they're experiencing the pain directly, but sometimes people do want to talk about that and they're comfortable, they processed it, and they want to help spread the word.
So I'm one of those people; you can ask me anything. Even if you don't know me, you can DM me on Twitter. Anyone listening, ask me a question about queer things. I'll point you to a resource, or answer it myself. I'm offering because I'm comfortable at this point. But a lot of people aren't and, in that case, you could ask if someone's comfortable, that's not a bad idea, or you could ask people who are in further circles out.
Like you don't need to ask a queer person about queer experiences if you can read about it in an article online, or watch a documentary, or talk to friends who have other queer friends and they know some things about it. It's not as good as secondhand experience hearing from someone with firsthand experience, but you're causing less harm by making the ideas come up again.
So you have a range of ways you can find out more about what it's like to be queer and I encourage you to think about all the different ways you can learn about a thing. You don't have to depend on the person who has [chuckles] this negative experience to do it.
Another way you can learn more is by doing workshops, like the ones that I facilitate. So I was thrilled to have a good audience at Women Who Code Philly, actively asking question and learning things, and that's a space where you're supposed to ask questions and learn.
I've heard of some people have peers they can talk to like peer support; people you can go to, to ask questions like that. Like my cousin asks me questions sometimes about her kids and that's like peers. Some companies actually have support groups like a weekly, or monthly meeting for people in the company to ask these questions that they have [laughs] and they don't know where to ask them and they can all learn from it.
I've seen in some Slacks, there's a Diversity 101 channel in one of the Slacks I'm in people can ask questions like when would you, or would you not use this word? That's a space dedicated to asking questions like that and if someone like me wants to go in and contribute, I can answer questions there, but I don't have to. I know I'm welcome to, and I know I'm not pressured to, and that's a great middle ground and that's a lot of options. You’ve got to figure out what works for you, who you have around, who you can offer the support to, and who you can ask for the support from. Both directions.
MANDY: It's great to have someone like you offering to do that and take on because it is of emotional labor and sometimes when people are curious, I know for me as being bisexual, some people are just like trying to – they're asking out of curiosity, but it's more like, “Give me the dirty details,” or something like that.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: Sometimes it's like, “We just want to know because I don't – so I want to know what it's like for you,” and I'm like, “I'm not going to share just because –” right now, I am in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Normally, if I was in a single state, a lot of people just try to ask questions that sometimes can be, I find it more inappropriate and they want to know because they're interested in the salacious details, or something like that.
CASEY: Right.
MANDY: That rubs me the wrong way and I can usually tell when somebody is asking, because they're genuine, or not.
CASEY: There's a big difference between asking to get to know you as a person in the context you're in with the background you have versus asking for salacious gossip. [laughs]
MANDY: Yeah.
CASEY: And the one is much more kind than the other. It sounds like you've done a good job setting boundaries in these situations saying, “That's not appropriate. I'm not answering that. Sorry about it,” or something like that.
MANNAH: Not sorry.
CASEY: Not sorry.
MANDY: Well, in the same token, it's something that bothers me, too because I feel like a lot of times, I just don't even tell people that I'm bisexual.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: Because it's easier to not answer the questions because once you open that can of worms, then everybody comes at you and wants to know this and wants to know details. “Have you ever done this?” Or, “Have you ever done that?” It rubs me the wrong way again.
CASEY: Right.
MANDY: So sometimes I feel almost resentful. I feel resentful that I can't be my full self because it causes people to just ask and the whole conversation, or the whole time I spend with them is focused on this one thing and it's like for me, it's just not a big deal.
CASEY: Right, right, right. Like on my Twitter profile—I like to use this as an example—I list out like 10, 15 things about myself on my Twitter profile and there is one little rainbow flag emoji in there at the end and I'd rather you talk about any of the other things probably. I'm willing to share that I'm queer and rainbow I affiliate with, but so much more to me, [chuckles] I'd rather you learn about me before that.
MANDY: Yeah.
CASEY: But it's the newest, novelist thing to those people who don't otherwise get exposed to it. They fixate on it sometimes and that, they might not realize, can be harmful. It can hurt people like you. It does hurt people. [chuckles]
MANDY: It absolutely does. It makes me uncomfortable. So it's not an aspect that I talk about much, especially living in rural/suburban Pennsylvania. It's something that I just kind of, aside from my internet friends and tech community, that a lot of people still don't know about me.
CASEY: Right. I can imagine not wanting to share. I used to not share my sexuality either in a lot of contexts and still when I go somewhere like the south, if I go to a place that has more bigotry around, I'm not holding my partner's hand there. I might get attacked even, that happens still in certain environments, they don't get it.
Okay, I want to acknowledge that people asking these questions might have good intentions and they're making a mistake and I want to explain what I think the mistake is.
MANDY: Yes.
CASEY: People want to be treated as individuals, but you can go too far in that extreme and treat someone like an individual and ignore their background. Like it doesn't matter that you've been queer. It doesn't matter that you're Black. It doesn't matter, I'm just going to treat you like an individual. Ignoring all this background is its own kind of overgeneralization in a way is ignoring that background and context. And then there's another way you can do an exaggeration, which is only focusing on that background in context and ignoring the person's individual traits and their individual experiences.
The best thing to do is to treat them like an individual who has this context and background putting them both together. So maybe these people are trying to understand you better by understanding this context. Maybe—I'm being very generous— [chuckles] some of these people are probably not this, but some people honestly want to know more about your context to understand you and that's thoughtful. They're just going about it in a way that's not the most helpful, or kind to you and I appreciate those people. But then there are other people who want to use the background and context to overgeneralize and just treat you as a member of this group, a token member, and that is a problem, too.
So it's like two ingredients and if you put them together, that's the best and a lot of people focus on one, or the other too much. The individual experience versus the group background context experience.
MANNAH: Yeah. That was really well put. I do think that as I said earlier, I'm someone who is very willing to have these. However, the downside of that is that becomes who you're and instead of the entire human being and the other – to take it a step further, some people are uncomfortable with that identity, or uncomfortable thinking about those things. Think about the discrimination that you might face and rather than confront it, or address it, they would rather just not deal with you, or limit their interact.
CASEY: Right, yeah.
MANNAH: So this is not a question for Casey, this is just something to the group. How can we navigate that and wanting to being willing to share of ourselves, but recognizing that there is some social backlash that can come from that?
CASEY: I think my number one thing I want allies to understand is they can support each other in being allies and it can take work to be comfortable talking to each other, to support each other. You don't have to just depend on the queer people to learn queer about things. If one of you learns and one ally learns, they can teach another ally the concept, or the idea, or share how to navigate it.
I did a Twitter poll for this, actually. Not a huge sample size, but still. A lot of people only have 1 to 3 people they can talk to about things like this. That's very few and they might not cover all the different situations.
So that's my number one thing to help people navigate it is get so support, find support, be support for other people and you'll get support in return for that, too. That's your homework. Everyone, write this down. Find 10 people you can talk to about inclusivity related topics, 10 people.
MANDY: And Google exists for a reason. So always, when things come up, I like to Google and I've gotten push back about that several times. “Well, I don't want to put that stuff into my search engine because then all of a sudden, I start getting gay targeted ads,” or something.
CASEY: That's true. That's a real concern. [overtalk]
MANDY: And I’m, “It’s not –” Well, hello, incognito mode.
CASEY: Right.
MANDY: Thank you, everyone. That's a thing. Use it. [laughs]
CASEY: Yeah, and you don't have to feel icky using incognito mode. You can use it because you don't want to ads tracking you.
MANDY: Exactly.
CASEY: Some people use it for everything. They never use the regular browser mode because they don't want the tracking. It's work to learn things about other people and so, that's why I like to focus on the support part. If you get support from people, maybe you can both be looking up stuff and sharing articles with each other, and that's really multiplying the effects here.
MANDY: Absolutely.
MANNAH: So we started homework for allies. I think now it might be a good time to talk about what makes good ally. We talked a little bit about how it can feel voyeuristic. Mandy, you talked about how people asking questions can sometimes feel a little picky and we talked about some better ways to asking questions. But are there any other ways that either both, all of us would like to see people be more effective ally?
CASEY: Yeah. I want to call back to an earlier point. I want to see more people switch from being reactive to being proactive. To being the first voice. Me included, honestly. Whenever you can get away with it and whatever helps you be proactive, do those things, which might be the support thing I keep talking about. Getting support to be more proactive, becoming accountable to people.
If you're already an ally, I'm assuming you're being reactively supportive some of the times. A lot of the people I talk to, who consider themselves allies, would agree, but taking that next step. And there's a different spectrum for each issue, like pronouns is one. Pronouns being shared in meetings. How proactive, or reactive are you for that? I don't even know. There are thousands of things [chuckles] that you can do to become more proactive.
MANDY: I would like to say for allies, teaching our children love and not hate. I see a lot of nastiness coming from children and that comes from parents. It's really sad to see sometimes the amount of people who don't – they just spew hate and they're like, “I'm not referring to this person as a pronoun.” Like, “They/them, no. They're a this, or they're –”
It saddens me to no end when you are around children to model nasty behavior and I think if you are not the person doing that yourself and you're around it, and you see somebody say something and say, “That's not okay, don't. Do you understand how you sound? Do you understand what you're saying? Do you understand that you're having an effect on everyone around you by giving your nasty opinions and that kind of thing?”
CASEY: Yeah. I've got a one word, one liner thing that I like to pull out and I'm proud every time I say it. “Rude,” and I can walk away. It can happen in the grocery store. Someone can say something. It doesn't matter the nuance, what's going on and how I might explain it to them in fuller language. I can at least pull that one word out, rude, and walk away and they are called out for it. I'm proud whenever I can call someone out.
MANDY: Yeah.
CASEY: I don't always do it, though. The stakes can seem high and it takes practice.
So this is homework, too. If you see someone and saying something hurtful to another person, it's your responsibility if you dare claim this to defend the other person and call the person rude, or however you would say the same thing. Say something.
MANDY: Yeah, say something.
MANNAH: I think that that can be really hard for allies.
CASEY: Yeah.
MANNAH: And if I had one piece of advice for allies, it would be that sometimes allyship is uncomfortable and that is something that you have to navigate. You can't pick and choose when you're going to… Well, that's not true. There's some discretion, but recognize that being a part-time ally, or a tourist in that space has an effect on people and not confronting your own insecurities, or your own feelings limits your effectiveness in allyship.
CASEY: Yeah. It can be a deep question to ask yourself what made me hesitate that one time and what can I do to not hesitate helping next time? You can journal about it. You can talk to friends about it. You can think about it. Doing something more than thinking is definitely more helpful, though. Thinking alone is not the most powerful tool you have to change your own behavior.
Yeah, it is uncomfortable. One thing that helps me speak up is instead of focusing on my discomfort, which is natural and I do it, for sure, I try to focus on the discomfort of the other person, or the person directly affected by this and I really want to help that person feel seen, protected, heard, defended. If you think about how they're feeling even more, that's very motivating for me and honestly, it helps in some ways that I am a queer man, that I have been discriminated against and people have been hateful toward me that I can relate when other people get similar experiences.
If you haven't had experiences like that, it might be hard to rally up the empathy for it. But I'm sure you have something like that in your background, or if not, you know people who've been affected and that can be fuel for you, too. People you care about telling you stories like this and it is uncomfortable. [chuckles] Getting comfortable with that discomfort is critical here.
MANNAH: One of the things that is very uncomfortable is, I think that as we go through life, we all grow is being reflective on the times when maybe we’re not inclusive, or maybe were insensitive. At least being able to those situations, I feel like is a great first step.
CASEY: Mm hm.
MANNAH: Saying, “Hey, I said this about this group of people,” or “I use this word.” Maybe you didn't fully know what it meant and recognized the impact at the time, but being able to go back and be reflective about your behavior, I feel like is a very important skill to help become a more well-rounded individual.
CASEY: Yeah. Agreed. And it's a practice. You have to do it. The more you do it, the easier it gets to process these and learn from them. It's a habit also, so any of the books that talk about learning habits, you can apply to this kind of problem, too. Like a weekly calendar event, or talking to a friend once a month and this is a topic that comes up. I don’t know, there are a ton of ways you can try to make this habit, grow and stick for yourself, and it varies by person what's effective. But if you don't put it into your schedule, if you don't make room and space for it, it's really easy to skip doing it, too.
MANDY: Yeah. It's amazing to look back. Even myself, I'm not the same person. I was 10, 15 years ago. I'm sure. Even as being a bisexual person that back in high school, I called something gay at one point just referring to, “Oh, that's gay.”
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: I’m sure I – [overtalk]
CASEY: I’m sure I did it, too.
MANDY: I'm sure I've said that. Knowing that I'm not that person anymore, recognizing that, and looking back at how much I've grown really helps me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't always woke on this subject. We do a lot of growing over our lives. I'm in my 30s now and I've done so much growing and to look back on the person who I used to be versus the person I am now, I get very proud of how far I've come. Even though it can suck to look back at maybe a specific instance that you always remember and you're like, “Oh my God, that's so cringy. I can't believe I did that.” Having those moments to be like, “Well, you know what, that might have happened in 2003, but this is 2022 and look how far you've come.”
CASEY: Love it! Yeah, growth.
MANDY: Like that just makes me feel so good.
CASEY: Yeah. We need the growth mindset.
MANDY: And having discussions like this is what has gotten me to this place. Entering tech. I entered tech 12 years ago. I know this because my daughter's 12 and I always like, I'm like, “Okay so when my daughter was born, I got into tech. That's when I started actually becoming a decent person.” [laughs] So I measure a lot of my timeline by my daughter's age and it's just amazing to go back and see how much you've grown. Honestly, you should – another piece of homework, if you can just sit back and think about who you were before and who you are now and reflect on that a bit.
MANNAH: We talked about normalizing pronouns, but I think it's also important to normalize sharing that story that you just told. I know I had a similar story where wherever I am on the wokeness scale, I was definitely much less so a couple years ago. I just did not have the same – I did not have enough experiences. I did not think about things in the same way. I did not challenge myself to be empathetic as much as I do now. It is a process and we're all somewhere on that journey.
Who you are, like you said, 10 years ago is not necessarily who you are now. If it is, I don't know. I hope I'm not the same person in 10 years. I hope I'm always growing. So to make sure to share with others that it is a process and you don't wake up one day being woke. It is something that takes work and a skill that is developed.
MANDY: Oh, you definitely have to do the work.
Every year, I do a program. It's an actually a wonderful program. It's called Stratejoy. I can put the link in the show notes. But every year there's this woman who you sit down, you take stock of the last year and she asks a lot of deep questions. You journal them, you write them down, and then you think about what do I want to see? What can I improve? What do I want to do? How can I do so? And then we have quarterly calls throughout the year and really sit down, write it down, talk about it, and reflect on it because it is work.
A lot of people make fun of people who read self-help books and I love fiction books just as much as the next person, I want to get away and read before bed at the end of the night, too. But it's really important for me to read books that make me feel uncomfortable, or make me learn, or make me think.
I read a lot of books on race. So You Want to Talk About Race was one I read and it had a profound effect on me to read that book and take stock of myself and my own actions. It can be hard sometimes and it can cause anxiety. But I think in order to grow as a person, that's where you need to be vulnerable and you need to say, “No, I'm not perfect. I've done this thing wrong in the past and I don't know this, so I'm going to do what I can to educate myself.”
CASEY: Another thing I hear a lot is some people say, “You should not celebrate any progress you make. You should always just feel bad and work harder forever.” Do you ever hear that kind of sentiment? Not in those words.
MANDY: Yeah.
CASEY: But if you ever say, “I learned a thing and I'm proud of it, here's what I learned,” there's someone on the internet who's going to tell you, “You are terrible and wrong and should do even better. Forget any progress you've made. You're not perfect yet,” and that is so frustrating to me.
So here's something I'd like to see from more woke allies is less language policing, more celebrating of people who make progress. A lot of it's invisible, like we talked about on the spectrum. I do like when people get called out for making mistakes, like there's an opportunity for learning and growth, but you don't have to shame people in public, make them feel really bad about it, and embarrassed in front of the whole company.
You could maybe do it privately and send a message to the companies talking about the policy in general like, “Don't use this word, don't do this thing.” You can do it very tactfully and you can be very effective. You don't have to just be PC police to the extreme. But if you are PC police to the extreme, I'm glad you’re doing something. That's good. But you can be more effective. Please think about how you can be really effective, that's my request for all my woke friends. It can go overboard. It can definitely go overboard, being a language police.
MANDY: Yeah, and it can make people who are trying to quit.
CASEY: Right. That's a huge risk. I want to give all this a caveat, though, because if – here's an example from a friend's company.
There was a presentation and there ended up being a slide with Blackface on it, which if you don't know is a terrible, awful thing that makes Black people feel really bad and it makes the person showing it seem like they are malicious, or oblivious and it shouldn't happen. And then we were wondering like, “What should someone have done in that situation?” Call it out, for sure and move on publicly is a good call there to protect any Black people in the room feel like they're being protected and heard, but not necessarily shaming the person and giving them a 5-minute lecture during that. You can be effective at getting the person not to do it again in private later calling it out to defend the people in the room.
Protecting is goal number one for me, but what can you do to change the company culture effectively is a piece that I see a lot of people skipping. If you are just 5 minutes yelling at a person that might make them shut down, you're not being your most effective. So it's a hard walk to balance protecting people, calling people out, and changing the culture. But it's possible and it's work.
I guess, it's really two things you're balancing, protecting the person, making them feel part of the group included and cared for versus changing the culture of the group and of the individual. We want both outcomes, ideally. But if I had to pick one, I'm going to pick protecting the person first and then the larger change can happen afterwards.
MANDY: Yeah. And if you do mess up, which I've done. I've accidentally misgendered somebody and I felt terrible. All night, I kept apologizing to this person and finally, this person took me aside and said, “You're making it worse by keeping apologizing. Let it go.”
CASEY: Yeah.
MANDY: So also, not rehashing and banging your head against the wall multiple, multiple times. Apologize and move on.
MANNAH: Yeah. If your apology is sincere, then you shouldn't need to repeat it multiple times. Make sure that the person you're apologizing to hears it and make whatever amend need be made. But I do think if you over apologizing, it's more for you so you feel better than it is more for the person that you potentially offended.
CASEY: Right and I don't expect you to know that without having thought about it like you are right now. Take this moment and think about it deeper. This is intriguing to you. It is natural to want to apologize forever, but it is also harmful and you can do better than that.
I offer a lot of workshops in this vein. Like there's one called Bystander to Upstander. There's another LGBTQIA inclusion where I go through a whole bunch of charts and graphs. There's one called preventing and recovering from microaggressions where you can practice making a mistake and recovering from it in a group. The practice is the key here, like really making a mistake and recovering from it, getting that the muscles, the reactions, the things you say to people, it does take work to get that to be a practice. Even if you already agree you want to, it's hard to put it into practice a lot of the time.
I give workshops, including these, for community groups a couple times a month and if you want to get updates on that, that's at happyandeffective.com/updates. Also, I do these for companies so if you think your company would benefit from having these kinds of discussions, feel free to reach out to Happy and Effective, too. That's my company.
MANNAH: Well, with that, I think it'd be a great time to move to reflections. What do y'all think?
I think this whole episode has been one big reflection to be quite honest, but does anybody want to share anything in particular that has stood out to them throughout the hour we've just spent together?
MANNAH: I'm happy to kick it off.
I think that we've made some really good suggestions around how people can create more through their own actions. Create more inclusive environments. I do want to say that these are not things that are kind of stone. There are a lot of ways. Everybody's an individual, every situation is different, and I don't want to be prescriptive in saying you have to do certain things.
I do want to say that when I'm speaking, this is my experience and these are things that I think can help. So please don't take what I say to be gospel. They are suggestions and if you disagree with them, then I'm happy to have that conversation. But recognize that the people speaking on this panel don't necessarily have the answers, but they are people who are willing to start this conversation.
CASEY: The thing I want people to take away is—and you can repeat after me, everyone—I will make mistakes. Good, good. I heard it. I will find more support. Awesome. You're great. Okay. You're on the right path for this now.
Mandy, over to you.
MANDY: This is not something that you do once and you're done. This kind of reflection and this kind of work is always going to be a work in progress until the day you're no longer here. It's not something you can read a book and be like, “Okay, I did that. I'm good now. I know things.” It's constantly changing and evolving and you need to do the work. You need to have empathy for others and realize that everybody is constantly changing and just because somebody isn’t one ting one day, they might be something the other day.
I tell my daughter all the time because she’s very unsure about who is she and I’m like, “You don’t have to know right now. Just because you think you’re this, or you’re this right now, in 2 years, you might feel differently and you might be this.” So people are always evolving, always changing, and that doesn’t just go for how you present either your gender identity, or sexual identity but it also just goes for who you are. I always try to grow as a person and the work is never done.
CASEY: No one has all the answers, no one knows everything, and anyone who says they do is lying because it’s going to change. It will change.
MANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mannah and Casey for having this conversation today. I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it’s a hard thing to talk about, and I’m so grateful that you both showed up to have it.
If we want to continue these conversations, I invite anybody who’s listening to reach out to us. If you’d like to come on the show to talk about it, reach out to us. We have a Slack channel that we can have private conversations in. You can find that at Patreon.com/greaterthancode and donate as little as a dollar to get in. We do that so we keep the trolls out and if you cannot afford a dollar, please DM any one of us and we will get you in there for free.
So with that, thank you again for listening and we will see you all next week.
Sponsored By:
00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds
10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices
28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread - Impact Consulting
38:43 - Management & Mentorship
52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings
55:08 - Ideal Clients
Reflections:
Mae: The phrase “indie”.
Casey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself.
Chelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person’s needs.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae.
MAE: And also with us is Casey.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey.
And today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting.
To get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level?
Chelsea, would you mind going first?
CHELSEA: Sure.
So I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization.
My job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers.
So that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs’ umbrella.
After I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while.
So in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job.
After I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks’ notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client.
I still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout.
And then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story.
Is anyone feeling a penchant for going next?
MAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me.
Specifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things.
Anyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning.
So I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them.
I think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work.
CASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them.
All right, I'll share about me now.
So I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both.
So after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever, I got to go. I can't deal with caring so much anymore, and I'm not willing to care less either.”
So most recently, I took a sabbatical and I finished my book, Debugging Your Brain, which takes together psychology ideas, like cognitive behavioral therapy and programming ideas and that, I'm so proud of. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out.
Then I went back to my job and I gave them another month where I was like, “All right, look, these are things need to change for me to be happy to work here.” Nothing changed, then I left. Maybe it's changing very slowly, but too slowly for me to be happy there, or most of these past companies. [laughs]
After I left, this last sabbatical, I spent three to six months working on a board game version of my book. That's a lot of fun. And then I decided I needed more income, I needed to pay the bills, and I can totally be a tech consultant if I just deal with learning marketing and sales. That's been my… probably six months now, I've been working on the marketing in sales part, thinking a lot about it. I have a lot of support from a lot of friends.
Now I consult on ways to make teams happier and more effective and that's my company name, Happy and Effective. I found it really easy to sell workshops, like diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops to HR departments. They're pretty hungry for those kinds of workshops and it's hard to find good, effective facilitators. It's a little bit harder to get companies to pay for coaching for their employees, even though a new EM would love coaching and how to be a good leader.
Companies don't always have the budget for that set aside and I wish they would. I'm working with a lot of companies. I have a couple, but not as many as I'd like. And then the hardest, my favorite kind of client is when I get to embed with the team and really work on seeing what's going on me on the ground with them, and help understand what's going on to tell the executives what's happening and what needs to change and really make a big change. I've done that once, or twice and I'd love to do that more, but it's the hardest. So I'm thinking about easy, medium, hard difficulty of selling things to clients. I would actually make plenty of money is doing workshops, honestly, but I want the impact of embedding. That's my bigger goal is the impact.
MAE: Yeah. I basically have used my software as a Trojan horse for [laughs] offering the consulting and change management services to help them get there because that is something that people already expect to spend some money on. That, though has been a little problematic because a few years in, they start to think that the line item in the budget is only for software and then it looks very expensive to them. Whereas, if they were looking at it as a consultant gig, it's incredibly inexpensive to them.
CASEY: Yeah. It's maybe so inexpensive that it must not be a quality product that they're buying.
MAE: Yes.
CASEY: Put it that way implicitly.
MAE: Definitely, there's also that.
CASEY: When setting prices, this is a good general rule of thumb. It could be too low it looks like it'll be junk, like a dollar store purchase, or it can be too high and they just can't afford it, and then there's the middle sweet spot where it seems very valuable. They barely can afford it, but they know it'll be worth it, and that's a really good range to be in.
MAE: Yeah. Honestly, for the work that I do, it's more of a passion project. I would do it totally for free, but that doesn't work for this reason you're talking about.
CASEY: Yeah.
MAE: Like, it needs to hurt a little bit because it's definitely going to be lots and lots of my time and it's going to be some of their time and it needs to be an investment that not hurt bad [laughs] but just be noticeable as opposed to here's a Kenny’s Candy, or something.
CASEY: I found that works on another scale, on another level. I do career coaching for friends, and friends of friends, and I'm willing to career coach my friends anyway. I've always been. For 10 years, I've reviewed hundreds, thousands of resumes. I've done so many interviews. I'm down to be a career coach, but no one was taking me up on it until I started charging and now friends are coming to me to pay me money to coach them. I think on their side, it feels more equitable. They're more willing to do it now that I'm willing to take money in exchange for it. I felt really bad charging friends until I had the sliding skill. So people who make less, I charge less for, for this personal service. It's kind of weird having a personal service like that, but it works out really well. I'm so happy for so many friends that have gotten jobs they're happy with now from the support. So even charging friends, like charging them nothing means they're not going to sign up for it.
MAE: Yes, and often, there is a bias of like, “Oh, well, that's my friend.” [laughs] so they must not be a BFD.”
CASEY: Yeah. But we are all BFDs.
MAE: Exactly!
How about you Chelsea? How did you start to get to the do the pricing thing?
CHELSEA: Yeah, I think it's interesting to hear y'all's approaches to the marketing and the pricing because mine has been pretty different from that.
But before I get off on that, one thing I do want to mention around getting started with offering personal services at price is that if it seems too large a step to offer a personal service to one person for an amount of money, one thing that I have witnessed folks have success with in starting out in this vein is to set up a Patreon and then have office hours for patrons wherein they spend 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that and anyone who is a patron is welcome to join. What often ends up happening for folks in that situation is that people who are friends of theirs support their Patreon and then the friends can show up.
So effectively, folks are paying a monthly fee for access to this office hours, which they might attend, or they might not attend. But there are two nice things about it.
The first thing about it is that you're not – from a psychological perspective, it doesn’t feel like charging your friends for your time with them. It feels more indirect than that in a way that can be helpful for folks who are very new to charging for things and uncomfortable with the idea.
The second thing is that the friends are often much more willing to pay than somebody who's new to charging is willing to charge. So the friends are putting this money into this Patreon, usually not because they're trying to get access to your office hours, but because they want to support you and one of the nice things about Patreon is that it is a monthly amount.
So having a monthly email from Patreon that's like, “Hey, you we're sending you—” it doesn't even have to be a lot. “We're sending you 40 bucks this month.” It is a helpful conditioning exercise for folks who are not used to charging because they are getting this regular monthly income and the amount is not as important as receiving the regular income, which is helpful psychological preparation for charging for things on your own, I think.
That's not the way that I did it, but I have seen people be effective that way. So there's that.
For me, marketing was something that I was very worried about having to do when I started my business. In fact, it was one of those things where my conviction, when I started my consulting business, was I do not want to have to sell my services. I will coast on what clients I can find and when it is no longer easy, I will just get a full-time job because selling traditionally conceptualized is not something that I enjoyed.
I had a head start on the marketing element of things, that is sort of the brand awareness element of things, my reputation and the reason for that is that first of all, I had consulted at Labs for several years, which meant that every client team that I had ever worked with there, the director remembered me, the product owner remember me. So a lot of people who had been clients of Labs – I didn't actually get anybody to be a client of mine who was a client of Labs, but the individuals I had worked with on those projects who had then changed jobs to go to different companies, reached out to me on some occasions. So that was one place that I got clients from.
The other place that I gotten clients from has been my blog. Before I started my business, I had already been writing a tech blog for like 4, or 5 years and my goal with the tech blog has never actually been to get clientele, or make money. My goals for the blog when I started it were to write down what I was learning so that I would remember it and then after that, it was to figure out how to communicate my ideas so that I would have an easier time communicating them in the workplace. After that, it became an external validation source so that I would no longer depend on my individual manager's opinion of me to decide how good I was at programming.
Only very recently has it changed to something like, okay, now I'm good enough at communicating and good enough at tech that I actually have something to teach anybody else. So honestly, for many years, I would see the viewership on my blog and I would be like, “Who are all these people? Why are they in my house?” Like, this is weird, but I would get some credibility from that.
CASEY: They don't expect any tea from me.
CHELSEA: Yeah. I really hope. I don't have enough to go around, [laughs] but it did help and that's where a lot of folks have kind of come from. Such that when I posted on my blog a post about how I'm going to be going indie. I've quit my job. I didn't really expect that to go anywhere, but a few people did reach out from that and I've been lucky insofar is that that has helped me sustain a client load in a way that I didn't really expect to.
There's also, I would be remiss not to mention that what I do is I sling code for money for the majority of my consulting business, at least historically and especially in the beginning was exclusively that, and there's enough of a demand to have somebody come in and write code that that helped. It also helped that as I was taking on clients, I started to niche down specifically what I wanted to work on to a specific type of client and to a specific type problem. So I quickly got to the point where I had enough of a client load that I was going to have to make a choice about which clients to accept, or I was going to have to work over time.
Now, the conventional wisdom in this circumstance is to raise your rates. Vast majority of business development resources will tell you that that's what you're supposed to do in this situation. But part of my goal in creating my consulting business had been to get out of burnout and part of the reason for the burnout was that I did not feel that the work that I was doing was contributing to a cause that made me feel good about what I was doing. It wasn't morally reprehensible, but I just didn't feel like I was contributing to a better future in the way that my self-identity sort of mandated that I did. It was making me irritable and all these kinds of things.
MAE: I had the same thing, yeah.
CHELSEA: Yeah. So it's interesting to hear that that's a common experience, but if I were to raise my rates, the companies that were still going to be able to afford me were going to be companies whose products were not morally reprehensible, but not things that coincided with what I was trying to get out of my consulting business.
So what I did instead was I said, “I'm specifically looking to work with organizations that are contributing to basic scientific research, improving access for underserved communities, and combating the effects of climate change,” and kept my rates effectively the same, but niche down the clientele to that.
That ended up being kind of how I did it. I find that rates vary from client to client in part, because of what you were talking about, Casey, wherein you have to hit the right price in order to even get clients board in certain circumstances.
CASEY: Right.
CHELSEA: I don't know a good way to guess it. My technique for this, which I don't know if this is kosher to say, but my technique for this has been whoever reached out to me, interested in bringing me on as a consultant for that organization, I ask that person to do some research and figure out what rate I'm supposed to pitch. That has helped a lot because a lot of times my expectations have been wildly off in those circumstances.
One time I had somebody say to me, this was for a custom workshop they wanted. I was like, “What should I charge?” And they were like, “I don't know, a few thousand.” I was like, “Is that $1,200? Is that $9,000? I don't know how much money that is,” and so they went back and then they came back and they were able to tell me more specifically a band. There was absolutely no way I would've hit that number accurately without that information.
CASEY: Yeah, and different clients have different numbers. You setting your price standard flat across all customers is not a good strategy either. That's why prices aren't on websites so often.
CHELSEA: Yeah. I find that it does depend a lot. There's similarly, like I said, a lot of my clients are clients who are contributing to basic scientific research are very often grant funded and grants funding is a very particular kind of funding. It can be intermittent. There has to be a skillset on the team for getting the grant funding. A lot of times, to be frank, it doesn't support the kinds of rates that somebody could charge hourly in a for-profit institution.
So for me, it was worth it to make the choice that this is who I want to work with. I know that my rate is effectively capped at this, if I'm going to do that and that was fine by me. Although, I'm lying to say it was completely fine by me. I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror, while I was still in that last full-time job, and realize that I had become a person who gauged her self-worth by the salary that she commanded more than I was comfortable with. More than I wanted to. I had to figure out how to weaken that dependency before I was really able to go off and do my own thing. That was my experience with it.
I'm curious whether y'all, well, in particular, Casey, did you find the same thing?
CASEY: The self-worth by salary?
CHELSEA: Yeah.
CASEY: I felt that over time, yeah. Like I went from private sector big tech to government and I got a pay cut and I was like, “Ugh.” It kind of hurt a little and it wasn't even as much as I was promised. Once I got through the hiring process, it was lower than that and now I'm making way less. When I do my favorite impact thing, the board game, like if I made a board game about mental health for middle schoolers, which is something I really want to do, that makes less than anything else I could with my time. I'll be lucky to make money on that at all. So it's actually inverse. My salary is inversely proportional to how much impact I can have if I'm working anyway.
So my dream is to have enough corporate clients that I can do half-time, or game impact, whatever other impact things I'm thinking about doing. I think of my impact a lot. Impact is my biggest goal, but the thing is salary hurts. If I don't have the salary and I want to live where I'm living and the lifestyle I have, I don't want to cut back on that and I don't need to, hopefully.
CHELSEA: Right.
CASEY: I'm hoping eventually, I'll have a steady stream of clients, I don't need to do the marketing and sales outreach as much and all those hours I kind of recoup. I can invest those in the impact things. I've heard people can do that. I think I'll get there.
CHELSEA: No, I think you absolutely will.
Mae, I'm curious as to your experience, because I know that you have a lot of experience with a similar calculation of determining which things are going to provide more income, which things are probably going to provide less income, and then balancing across a bunch of factors like money, but also impact, time spent, emotional drain, and all that stuff.
MAE: Well, Chelsea.
[laughter]
I am a real merry go round in this arena. So before I became a programmer, I had a state job, I was well paid, and I was pretty set. Then I was a programmer and I took huge pay cut because I quit. I became a programmer when I was 37 years old. So I already had a whole career and to start at the beginning and be parallel with 20-year-old so it's not just like my salary, but also my level and my level of impact on my – and level of the amount of people who wanted to ask me for my advice [laughs] was significantly different.
So like the ego's joking stopped and so when you mentioned the thing about identity. Doing any kind of consulting in your own deal is a major identity reorganization and having the money, the title, the clout, and the engagement. Like a couple years, I have spent largely alone and that is very different than working at a place where I have colleagues, or when I live somewhere and have roommates. But I have found signing up for lots and lots of different social justice and passion project things, and supporting nonprofits that I believe in.
So from my perspective, I'm really offering a capacity building grant out of my own pocket, my own time, and my own heart and that has been deeply rewarding and maybe not feel much about my identity around salary. Except it does make me question myself as an adult. Like these aren't the best financial decisions to be making, [chuckles] but I get enough out of having made them that it's worth it to me.
One of the things probably you were thinking of, Chelsea, we worked together a little bit on this mutual aid project that I took on when the pandemic started and I didn't get paid any dollars for that and I was working 18 hours a day on it, [chuckles] or something.
So I like to really jump in a wholeheartedly and then once I really, really do need some dollars, then I figure something else out. That is kind of how I've ebbed and flowed with it. But mostly, I've done it by reducing my personal overhead so that I'm not wigged about the money and lowering whatever my quality-of-life spending goals [chuckles] are. But that also has had to happen because I have not wanted to and I couldn't get myself to get excited about marketing of myself and my whole deal. Like I legit still don't have a website and I've been in operation now since 2014 so that's a while.
I meet people and I can demonstrate what it is and I get clients and for me, having only a few clients, there's dozens of people that work for each one. So it's more of an organization client than a bunch of individuals and I can't actually handle a ton. I was in a YCombinator thing that wanted me to really be reporting on income, growth rates, and all of these number of new acquisition things, and it just wasn't for me. Those are not my goals. I want to make sure that this nonprofit can help more people this year and that they can get more grant money because they know how many people they helped and that those people are more efficient at their job every day. So those are harder to measure. It's not quite an answer to your question, [laughs] but I took it and ran a little.
CHELSEA: No, I appreciate that. There is a software engineer and a teacher that I follow on Twitter. His name is GeePawHill. Are y'all familiar with GeePawHill?
MAE: No.
CHELSEA: And he did a thread a couple of days ago that this conversation reminds me of and I found it. Is that all right if I read like a piece of it and paraphrase part of it?
MAE: Yes, please.
CHELSEA: Okay.
So this is what he says. He says, “The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things…that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do.
The young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me.
The problem they're going to face when they get to The Show isn't technical, or intellectual at all. No language, or framework, or OS, or library, or algorithm is going to daunt them, not for long.
No, the problem they're going to face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it.
It is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it; many are doing it today.
But it is very hard.
Very hard.
Far harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or, dart, or SQL, or even Haskell.
How do you tell people you've watched “become” as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, 5 years or more, they must…navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development?
The best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work.
It is a lousy answer.
I feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.”
CASEY: I just saw this thread and I really liked it, too. I'm glad you found it.
MAE: Oh, yeah. I find it honestly pretty inspiring, like people generally who get involved in the kinds of consulting gigs that we three are talking about, which is a little different than just any random consulting, or any random freelancing.
CASEY: Like impact consulting, I might call that.
MAE: Yeah. It's awesome if the money comes, but it's almost irrelevant [chuckles] provided that basic needs are meant. So that's kind of been my angle. We'll see how – talk to me in 20 more years when I'm [chuckles] trying to retire and made a lot of choices that I was happy with at the time.
CASEY: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who's an executive director of an orchestra in the nonprofit space and he was telling me that so many nonprofits shoot themselves in the foot by not doing enough fundraising, by not raising money, and that comes from not wanting to make money in a way because they're a nonprofit, money is not a motive, and everybody's very clear about that.
That's noble and all, but it ends up hurting them because they don't have the money to do the impactful things they would as a nonprofit. Money is a necessary evil here and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it. Including me a lot of the time. Honestly, I have to tell myself not to. What would I tell a friend? “No, charge more money.” Okay, I guess I'll tell myself to do that now. I have this conversation with myself a lot.
MAE: Yeah. I've been very aware that when I become anti-money, the well dries up. The money well. [laughs]
CASEY: Yeah.
MAE: And when I am respectful of and appreciative of money in the world, more comes my way. There is an internal dousing, I think that happens that one needs to be very careful about for sure.
CASEY: One of the techniques I use with myself and with clients is a matrix where I write out for this approach, this thing that I'm thinking about how much money will it make, how much impact will it have on this goal, and all the different heuristics I would use to make the decision, or columns and all the options arose. I put numbers in it and I might weight my columns because money is less important than impact, but it's still important. It's there. I do all this math.
In the end, the summary column with the averages roughly matches what's in my head, which is the things that are similar in my head are similar on paper, but I can see why and that's very clarifying for me. I really like being able to see it in this matrix form and being able to see that you have to focus on the money some amount. If you just did the high impact one, it wouldn't be on the top of the list. It's like, it's hard to think about so many variables at once, but seeing it helps me.
CHELSEA: It is. GeePaw speaks to that some later in the thread. He says, “You’ve got to feed your family. You’ve got to. That's not negotiable. But you don't got to forget the well. To be any good at all, you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours, or after hours. Matters whether you get to it.
The thing you’ve got to watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process.
You’ve got to watch whether, or how you're getting to the well.
If you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.”
I think I'm curious as to y'all's thoughts on this, but like I mentioned earlier, I have a full-time job and I also do this consulting on the side. I also teach. I teach at the Master's program in computer science at University of Chicago. I do some mentoring with an organization called Emergent Works, which trains formerly incarcerated technologists.
The work situation that I have pieced together for myself, I think manages to get me the income I need and also, the impact that I'm looking for and the ability to work with people and those kinds of things. I think my perspective at this point is that it's probably difficult, if it's realistic at all, to expect any one position to be able to meet all of those needs simultaneously. Maybe they exist, but I suspect that they're relatively few and far between and I think that we probably do ourselves a disservice by propagating this idea that what you need to do is just make yourself so supremely interview-able that everybody wants to hire you and then you get to pick the one position where you get to do that because there's only one in the entirety of tech, it's that rare.
Sure, maybe that's an individualist way to look at it. But when we step back and look more closely, or when we step back and look more broadly at that, it's like, all right, so we have to become hypercompetitive in order to be able to get the position where we can make enough while helping people. Like, the means there seem kind of cutthroat for the ends, right? [laughs]
CASEY: This reminds me of relationships, too and I think there's a lot of great parallels here. Like you shouldn't expect your partner to meet all of your needs, all of them.
MAE: I was thinking the same thing!
CASEY: Uh huh. Social, emotional, spiritual, physical, all your needs cannot possibly by one person and that is so much pressure to put on that person,
CHELSEA: Right.
CASEY: It's like not healthy.
CHELSEA: Right.
CASEY: You can choose some to prioritize over others for your partner, but you're not going to get a 100% of it and you shouldn't.
CHELSEA: Well, and I find that being a conversation fairly regularly in monogamous versus polyamorous circles as well. Like, how much is it appropriate to expect of a partner? But I think it is a valid conversation to have in those circles. But I think that even in the context of a monogamous relationship, a person has other relationships—familial relationships, friend relationships—outside of that single romantic relationship.
CASEY: Co-workers, community people, yeah.
CHELSEA: Right. But even within that monogamous context, it's most realistic and I would argue, the most healthy to not expect any one person to provide for all of your needs and rather to rely on a community. That's what we're supposed to be able to do.
CASEY: Yeah.
MAE: Interdependence, not independence.
CHELSEA: Right.
CASEY: It's more resilient in the face of catastrophe, or change in general, mild, more mild change and you want to be that kind of resilient person for yourself, too. Just like you would do a computer system, or an organization. They should be resilient, too.
MAE: Yes.
CASEY: Your relationship with your job is another one.
MAE: Totally.
CHELSEA: Right. And I think that part of the reason the burnout is so quick – like the amount of time, the median amount of time that somebody spends at a company in tech is 2.2 years.
MAE: I know, it's so weird.
CHELSEA: Very few companies in tech have a large number of lifers, for example, or something like that. There are a number of reasons for that. We don't necessarily have to get into all of them, although, we can if you want. But I think one of them is definitely that we expect to get so much out of a full-time position. Tech is prone. due to circumstances of its origin, to an amount of idealism. We are saving the world. We, as technologists, are saving the world and also, we, as technologists, can expect this salary and we, as technologists, are a family and we play ping pong, and all of these things –
[laughter]
That contribute to an unrealistic expectation of a work environment, which if that is the only place that we are getting fulfillment as programmers, then people become unsatisfied very quickly because how could an organization that's simultaneously trying to accomplish a goal, meet all of these expect for everybody? I think it's rare at best.
CASEY: I want to bring up another example of this kind of thing. Imagine you're an engineer and you have an engineering manager. What's their main job? Is it to get the organization's priorities to be done by the team, like top-down kind of thing? We do need that to happen. Or is it to mentor each individual and coach them and help them grow as an engineer? We need that somewhere, too, yeah. Or is it to make the team – like the team to come together as a team and be very effective together and to represent their needs to the org? That, too, but we don't need one person to do all three of those necessarily. If the person's not technical, you can get someone else in the company to do technical mentorship, like an architect, or just a more senior person on, or off the team somewhere else. But we put a lot of pressure on the engineering managers to do that and this applies to so many roles. That's just one I know that I can define pretty well.
There's an article that explains that pretty well. We'll put in the show notes.
MAE: Yes!
So what I am currently doing is I have a not 40 hours a week job as an engineering manager and especially when I took the gig, I was still doing all of these pandemic charity things and I'm like, “These are more important to me right now and I only have so many hours in the day. So do you need me to code at this place? I can, but do you need me to because all those hours are hours I can go code for all these other things that I'm doing,” and [laughs] it worked. I have been able to do all three of the things that you're talking about, Casey, but certainly able to defer in different places and it's made me – this whole thing of not working full-time makes you optimize in very different ways.
So I sprinkle my Slack check-ins all day, but I didn't have to work all day to be present all day. There's a lot that has been awesome. It's not for everyone, but I also have leaned heavily on technical mentorship happening from tech leads as well.
CASEY: Sounds good.
MAE: But I'm still involved. But this thing about management, especially in tech being whichever programmer seems like the most dominant programmer is probably going to be a good needs to be promoted into management. Just P.S. management is its own discipline, has its own trajectory and when I talk to hiring managers and they only care about my management experience in tech, which is 6 years, right? 8, but I have 25 years of experience in managing. So there's a preciousness of what it is that we are asking for the employees and what the employees are asking of the employer, like you were talking about Chelsea, that is very interesting. It's very privileged, and does lead a lot of people to burnout and disappointment because their ideas got so lofty.
I just want to tie this back a little bit too, something you read in that quote about – I forget the last quote, but it was something about having enough to be able to change the world and it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown, pleasure activism, emergent strategy, and all of her work, and largely, generations of Black women have been saying, “Yo, you’ve got to take care [chuckles] of yourself to be able to affect change.” Those people have been the most effective and powerful change makers. So definitely, if you're curious about this topic, I urge you to go listen to some brilliant Black women about it.
CASEY: We'll link that in the show notes, too.
I think a lot about engineering managers and one way that doesn't come up a lot is you can get training for engineering managers to be stronger managers and for some reason, that is not usually an option people reach for. It could happen through HR, or it could happen if you have a training budget and you're a new EM, you could use your training budget to hire coaching from someone. I'm an example. But there's a ton of people out there that offer this kind of thing. If you don't learn the leadership skills when you switch roles, if you don't take time to learn those skills that are totally learnable, you're not going to have them and it's hard to apply them. There's a lot of pressure to magically know them now that you’ve switched hats.
MAE: And how I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have a therapist, [laughs] I don't understand why everyone in life doesn't have multiple job coaches at any time. Like why are we not sourcing more ideas and problem-solving strategies, and thinking we need to be the repository of how to handle X, Y, Z situation?
CASEY: For some reason, a lot of people I've talked to think their manager is supposed to do that for them. Their manager is supposed to be their everything; their boss. They think the boss that if they're bad, you quit your job. If they're good, you'll stay. That boss ends up being their career coach for people, unless they're a bad career coach and then you're just stuck. Because we expect it so strongly and that is an assumption I want everyone listening to question. Do you need your manager at work to be that person for you? If they are, that's great. You're very fortunate. If not, how can you find someone? Someone in the community, a friend, family member, a professional coach, there's other options, other mentors in the company. You don't have to depend on that manager who doesn't have time for you to give you that kind of support.
CHELSEA: So to that end, my thinking around management and mentorship changed about the time I hit – hmm. It was a while ago now, I don't know, maybe 6 years as a programmer, or something like that. Because before that, I was very bought into this idea that your manager is your mentor and all these types of things.
There was something that I realized. There were two things that I realized. The first one was that, for me, most of my managers were not well set up to be mentors to me and this is why. Well, the truth is I level up quickly and for many people who are managers in a tech organization, they were technologists for 3 to 5 years before they became managers. They were often early enough in their career that they didn't necessarily know what management entailed, or whether they should say no based on what they were interested in. Many managers in tech figure out what the job is and then try to find as many surreptitious ways as possible to get back into the code.
MAE: Yeah.
CHELSEA: Additionally, many of those managers feel somewhat insecure about their weakening connection to the code base of the company that they manage.
MAE: Yeah.
CHELSEA: And so it can be an emotionally fraught experience for them to be mentor to someone whose knowledge of the code base that they are no longer in makes them feel insecure. So I learned that the most effective mentors for me – well, I learned something about the most effective mentors for me and I learned something of the most effective managers for me.
I learned that the most effective managers for me either got way out ahead of me experience wise before they became managers, I mean 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, because those are not people who got promoted to management because they didn't know to say no. Those are people who got promoted to management after they got tired of writing code and they no longer staked their self-image on whether they're better coders than the people that they manage. That's very, very important.
The other type of person who was a good manager for me was somebody who had never been a software engineer and there are two reasons for that. First of all, they trended higher on raw management experience. Second of all, they were not comparing their technical skillset to my technical skillset in a competitive capacity and that made them better managers for me, honestly. It made things much, much easier.
And then in terms of mentors, I found that I had a lot more luck going outside of the organization I was working for mentors and that's again, for two reasons. The first one is that a lot of people, as they gain experience, go indie. Just a lot of people, like all kinds. Some of my sort of most trusted mentors. Avdi Grimm is somebody I've learned a lot from, indie effectively at this point. GeePawHill, like I mentioned, indie effectively at this point. Kenneth Mayer, indie effectively at this point. And these are all people who had decades of experience and the particular style of programming that I was doing very early in my career for many years. So that's the first reason.
And then the second reason is that at your job, it is in your interest to succeed at everything you try—at most jobs. And jobs will tell you it's okay to fail. Jobs will tell you it's okay to like whatever, not be good at things and to be learning. But because if I'm drawing a paycheck from an organization, I do not feel comfortable not being good at the thing that I am drawing the paycheck for.
MAE: Same.
CHELSEA: And honestly, even if they say that that's the case, when the push comes to shove and there's a deadline, they don't actually want you to be bad at things. Come on! That doesn't make any sense. But I've been able to find ambitious projects that I can contribute to not for pay and in those situations, I'm much more comfortable failing because I can be like, “You know what, if they don't like my work, they can have all their money back.”
And I work on a couple projects like that right now where I get to work with very experienced programmers on projects that are interesting and challenging, and a lot of times, I just absolutely eat dirt. My first PR doesn't work and I don't know what's wrong and the whole description is like somebody please help and I don't feel comfortable doing that on – if I had to do it at work, I would do it, but I'm not comfortable doing it.
I firmly believe that for people to accelerate their learning to their full capacity for accelerating their learning, they must place themselves in situations where they not only might fail, but it's pretty likely. Because that's what's stretching your capacity to the degree that you need to get better and that's just not a comfortable situation for somewhere that you depend on to make a living.
And that ended up being, I ended up approaching my management and my mentorship as effectively mutually exclusive things and it ended up working out really well for me. At this particular point in time, I happened to have a manager who happened to get way out ahead of me technically, and is willing to review PRs and so, that's very nice. But it's a nice-to-have. It's not something that I expect of a manager and it's ended up making me much more happy and manage relationships.
MAE: I agree with all of that. So well said, Chelsea.
CHELSEA: I try, I try. [laughs]
Casey, are there things that you look for specifically in a manager?
CASEY: Hmm. I guess for that question, I want to take the perspective inward, into myself. What do I need support on and who can I get that from? And this is true as also an independent worker as a consultant freelancer, too. I need support for when things are hard and I can be validated from people who have similar experiences, that kind of like emotional support. I need technical support and skills, like the sales I don't have yet and I have support for that, thank goodness. Individuals, I need ideally communities and individuals, both.
They're both really important to me and some of these could be in a manager, but lately, I'm my own manager and I can be none of those things, really. I'm myself. I can't do this external support for myself. Even when I'm typing into a spreadsheet and the computer's trying to be a mirror, it's not as good as talking to another person.
Another perspective that I need support on is how do I know what I'm doing is important and so, I do use spreadsheets as a mirror for that a lot of the time for myself. Like this impact is having this kind of magnitude of impact on this many people and then that calculates to this thing, maybe. Does that match my gut? That's literally what I want to know, too. The numbers aren't telling me, but talking to other people about impact on their projects really kind of solidifies that for me. And it's not always the client directly. It could be someone else who sees the impact I'm having on a client.
Kind of like the manager, I don't want to expect clients to tell me the impact I'm having. In fact, for business reasons, I should know what the impact is myself, to tell them, to upsell them and continue it going anyway. So it really helps me to have peers to talk through about impact. Like that, too types of support.
What other kinds of support do you need as consultants that I didn't just cover?
MAE: I still need – and I have [laughs] hired Casey to help me. I still need a way to explain what it is that I am offering and what the value of that really is in a way that is clear and succinct. Every time I've gone to make a website, or a list of what it is that I offer, I end up in the hundreds of bullet points [laughs] and I just don't – [overtalk]
CASEY: Yeah, yeah.
MAE: Have a way to capture it yet. So often when people go indie, they do have a unique idea, a unique offering so finding a way to summarize what that is can be really challenging.
I loved hearing you two when you were talking about knowing what kinds of work you want to do and who your ideal customer is. Those are things I have a clearer sense of, but how to make that connection is still a little bit of a gap for me.
But you reminded me in that and I just want to mention here this book, The Pumpkin Plan, like a very bro business book situation, [chuckles] but what is in there is so good. I don't want to give it away and also, open up another topic [laughs] that I'll talk too long about. So I won't go into it right now, but definitely recommend it. One of the things is how to call your client list and figure out what is the most optimal situation that's going to lead toward the most impact for everybody.
CASEY: One of the things I think back to a lot is user research and how can we apply that this business discovery process. I basically used the same techniques that were in my human computer interaction class I took 10, or 15 years ago. Like asking open ended questions, trying to get them to say what their problems are, remembering how they said it in their own words and saying it back to them—that's a big, big step.
But then there's a whole lot of techniques I didn't learn from human computer interaction, that are sales techniques, and my favorite resource for that so far is called SPIN selling where SPIN is an acronym and it sounds like a wonky technique that wouldn't work because it's just like a random technique to pull out. I don't know, but it's not.
This book is based on studies and it shows what you need to do to make big ticket sales go through, which is very different than selling those plastic things with the poppy bubbles in the mall stand in the middle of the hallway. Those low-key things they can manipulate people into buying and people aren't going to return it probably. But big-ticket things need a different approach than traditional sales and marketing knowledge and I really like the ideas in SPIN selling. I don't want to go into them today. We'll talk about it later. But those are two of the perspectives I bring to this kind of problem, user research and the SPIN selling techniques.
I want to share what my ideal client would be. I think that's interesting, too. So I really want to help companies be happier and more effective. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective, and that has the impact on the users of the company, or whoever their clients are. It definitely impacts that, which makes it a thing I can sell, thankfully. So an organization usually knows when they're not the most happy, or the most effective. They know it, but my ideal client isn't just one that knows that, but they also have leadership buy-in; they have some leader who really cares and can advocate for making it better and they just don't know how. They don't have enough resources to make it happen in their org. Maybe they have, or don't have experience with it, but they need support. That's where I come in and then my impact really is on the employees. I want to help the employees be happier and more effective. That's the direct impact I want, and then it has the really strong, indirect impact on the business outcomes.
So in that vein, I'm willing to help even large tech companies because if I can help their employees be happier, that is a positive impact. Even if I don't care about large tech companies’ [chuckles] business outcomes, I'm okay with that because my focus is specifically on the employees. That's different than a lot of people I talk to; they really just want to support like nonprofit type, stronger impact of the mission and that totally makes sense to me, too.
MAE: Also, it is possible to have a large and ever growing equitably run company. It is possible. I do want to contribute toward that existing in the world and as much as there's focus on what the ultimate looking out impact is, I care about the experience of employees and individuals on the way to get there. I'm not a utilitarian thinker.
CASEY: Yeah, but we can even frame it in a utilitarian way if we need to. If we're like a stakeholder presentation, if someone leaves the company and it takes six months to replace them and their work is in the meantime off board to other people, what's the financial impact of all that. I saw a paper about it. Maybe I can dig it up and I'll link to it. It's like to replace a person in tech it costs a $100K. So if they can hire a consultant for less than a $100K to save one person from leaving, it pays for itself. If that number is right, or whatever. Maybe it was ten employees for that number. The paper will say much better than I will.
CHELSEA: I think that in mentioning that Casey, you bring up something that businesses I think sometimes don't think about, which is some of the hidden costs that can easily be difficult to predict, or difficult to measure those kinds of things. One of the hidden costs is the turnover costs is the churn cost because there's how much it takes to hire another person and then there's the amount of ramp time before that person gets to where the person who left was.
CASEY: Right, right, right.
CHELSEA: And that's also a thing. There's all the time that developers are spending on forensic software analysis in order to find out all of the context that got dropped when a person left.
CASEY: Yeah. The one person who knew that part of the code base, the last one is gone, uh oh.
CHELSEA: Right.
CASEY: It's a huge trust. And then engineering team is often really interested in conveying that risk. But if they're not empowered enough and don't have enough bandwidth time and energy to make the case, the executive team, or whoever will never hear it and they won't be able to safeguard against it.
MAE: Or using the right language to communicate it.
CASEY: Right, right. And that’s its own skill. That's trainable, too thankfully. But we don't usually train engineers in that, traditionally. Engineers don't receive that training unless they go out of their way for it. PMs and designers, too, honestly. Like the stakeholder communication, everybody can work on.
MAE: Yeah.
CASEY: That's true.
MAE: Communication. Everyone can, or not. Yes. [laughs]
I learned the phrase indie today. I have never heard it and I really like it! It makes me feel cool inside and so love and – [overtalk]
CASEY: Yeah, I have no record label, or I am my own record label, perhaps.
MAE: Yo!
CASEY: I've got one. I like the idea of having a Patreon, not to make money, but to have to help inspire yourself and I know a lot of friends have had Patreons with low income from it and they were actually upset about it. So I want to go back to those friends and say, “Look, this prove some people find value in what you're doing.” Like the social impact. I might make my own even. Thank you.
MAE: I know I might do it too. It's good. That's good.
CHELSEA: Absolutely. Highly recommended.
One thing that I want to take away is the exercise, Casey, that you were talking about of tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes in terms of a person's needs. Because I think that an exercise like that would be extremely helpful for, for example, some of my students who are getting their very first tech jobs. Students receive a very one-dimensional message about the way that tech employment goes. It tends to put set of five companies that show remain unnamed front and center, which whatever, but I would like them to be aware of the other options. And there is a very particular way of gauging the value of a tech position that I believe includes fewer dimensions than people should probably consider for the health of their career long-term and not only the health of their career, but also their health in their career.
CASEY: One more parting thought I want to share for anyone is you need support for your career growth, for your happiness. If you're going to be a consultant, you need support for that. Find support in individuals and communities, you deserve that support and you can be that support for the people who are supporting you! It can be mutual. They need that, too.
01:48 - Kate’s Superpower: Empathy
10:46 - Words and Narratives Carry Power; Approaching Inclusive Language
21:27 - Approaching Inclusive Language in the Written Word
29:18 - Creating Safe Places, Communities, and Environments
42:34 - Building Kula While Working in Tech
Reflections:
John: The dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity.
Arty: Words carry power.
Kate: Having an open heart is how you can put any of this into action.
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Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Arty Starr.
ARTY: Thanks, John. And I'm here with our guest today, Kate Marshall.
Kate is a copywriter and inclusivity activist living in Denver. Since entering tech 4 years ago, she's toured the marketing org from paid efforts to podcast host, eventually falling in love with the world of copy. With this work, she hopes to make the web a more welcoming place using the power of words. Outside of Webflow, you'll find Kate opening Kula, a donation-based yoga studio, and bopping around the Mile High City with her partner, Leah.
Welcome to the show, Kate.
KATE: Hi, thank you so much!
ARTY: So we always start our shows with our famous first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
KATE: My superpower, I've been thinking about this. My superpower is empathy. It can also be one of my biggest downfalls [laughs], which I actually think happens more often than not with any superpower. I once heard from a child, actually, they always seem to know best that too much of the good, good is bad, bad.
[laughter]
So it turns out sometimes too much empathy can be too overwhelming for my system, but it has really driven everything that I've done in my career and my personal life.
As for how I acquired it, I don't know that you can really acquire empathy. I think it's just something you have, or you don't. I've always been extremely intuitive and if you're going through something, it's likely that I can feel it. So I think I'm just [laughs] I hate to steal Maybelline's line, but I think I was born with it.
JOHN: You talked about having a downside there and I've heard – and I'm curious, because most people talk about empathy as a positive thing and wanting more people to develop more empathy, but I'd to love hear you talk a little bit more about what you see the downsides are.
KATE: Yeah. As someone who struggles with her own mental health issues, it can be really overwhelming for me to really take on whatever it is you're going through. Especially if it's a loved one, you tend to care more about what they're feeling, or what they're going through and an empath truly does absorb the energy of what's happening around them.
So although, it does influence a lot of the work that I do, both in my full-time career and opening my yoga studio and everything in between, it's also hard sometimes to set those boundaries, to set healthy, really energetic boundaries. It's hard enough to voice your boundaries to people, but setting energetic boundaries is a whole other ballgame. So it can tend to feel overwhelming at times and bring you down if the energy around you is lower than what you want it to be.
ARTY: So what kind of things do you do to try and set healthy, energetic boundaries?
KATE: Ah. I do a lot of what some people would call, including myself, woo-woo practices. [chuckles] Obviously, I practice yoga. I teach yoga. I'm super passionate about holistic, or energetic healing so I go to Reiki regularly. I'm in therapy, talk therapy. All of those things combined help me build this essentially an energetic shield that I can psych myself up to use any time I'm leaving the apartment. If it feels a high energy day, or if I'm meeting up with a friend who I know is going through something, I really have to set those boundaries is.
Same thing kind of at work, too. So much of the time that we spend in our lives is spent at work, or interacting with coworkers or colleagues and same thing. Everyone's going through their own journey and battles, and you have to carry that energetic shield around you wherever you go.
JOHN: One way I've often thought about having those sort of boundaries is the more I know who I am, the more what the limits of me are and the barrier between me and the universe is. So the work that I do, which includes therapy and other things, to understand myself better and to feel like I know what's me and what's not me, helps me have those boundaries. Because then I know if there's something going on with someone else and I can relate to it, but not get swept up by it.
KATE: Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I was actually just having a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago that has really stuck with me. I was kind of feeling like I was messing up, essentially. Like I was not fully able to honor, or notice all of the triggers of the people around me. I think especially at the end of the year and as a queer person who is surrounded by queer community, it can be really tough around the holidays.
So that energy can just be generally more charged and I was finding it difficult to reconcile with my idea of perfection in that I really want to honor every person around me who has triggers, who has boundaries that maybe haven't been communicated, and it almost feels like you're almost always crossing some sort of line, especially when you're putting those perfectionism expectations on yourself.
My friend was like, “I don't think it's as much about being perfect at it as much as it is feeling like you're being authentically yourself and really authentically interacting with those people.” I don't know if I can really voice what the connection is between being able to honor triggers and boundaries of the people around you and feeling like your authentic self, but there's something about it that feels really connected to me. As long as you're trying your best and feeling like you're coming from a place of love, or connection, or compassion, or empathy whatever feels most to you, that's really all we can do, right?
JOHN: Yeah. I feel like that authenticity is such a tricky concept because the thoughts that you're having about wanting to be perfect and take care of everyone and make sure you're not triggering anybody and not stepping on any of your own things, that's also part of you that is authentically you. You may not want it to be that way, but it still is. [laughs].
ARTY: Yeah.
JOHN: So I still don't have a really clear sense in my mind what authenticity really is. I think probably it settles down to being a little bit more in the moment, rather than up in the thinking, the judging, the worrying, and being able to be present rather than – [overtalk]
ARTY: Totally.
JOHN: Those other things, but it is tricky.
KATE: Yeah. It can be tricky. Humans, man.
[laughter]
It really is like being a human and part of the human experience is going to be triggering other people. It’s going to be causing harm. It’s going to be causing trauma to other humans. That's just part of it.
I think the more you can get comfy with that idea and then also just really feeling like you're doing everything you can to stay connected to your core, which usually is in humans is a place of love. You're rooted in love for the people around you. How could you criticize yourself too much when you know that you're coming from that place?
ARTY: I feel like things change, too as you get feedback. In the context of any intimate relationship where you've got emotionally connected relationship with another person where you are more unguarded and you're having conversations about things that are more personal, that have at least the potential to hurt and cause harm. Like sometimes we do things not meaning to and we end up hurting someone else accidentally, but once that happens—and hopefully, you have an open dialogue where you have a conversation about these things and learn about these things and adapt—then I think the thing to do is honor each person as an individual of we're all peoples and then figure out well, what can we do to adapt how we operate in this relationship and look out for both people's best interests and strive for a win-win.
If we don't try and do that, like if we do things that we know we're harming someone else and we're just like, “Well, you should just put up with that,” [laughs], or whatever. I think that's where it becomes problematic is at the same time, we all have our own limitations and sometimes, the best thing to do is this relationship doesn't work. The way that we interact causes mutual harm and we can't this a win-win relationship and the best thing to do sometimes is to separate, even though it hurts because it's not working.
KATE: Yeah. I feel like sometimes it's a classic case of intent versus impact, too. Like what's your intention going into a conversation and then how does that end up actually impacting that person and how can you honor that and learn from that?
That's actually one thing that I love so much about being a writer is that words do carry so much power—written word, spoken word, whatever it is. They hold so much power and they can cause harm whether we want them to, or not. Part of being an empath is caring a lot about people's lived experiences and I really see it as more than putting – being a writer and doing this every day, I see it so much more than just putting words on a page and hoping signs up for the beta, or watches the thing registers, or the conference. It's words can foster connection, words can build worlds for people; they can make people feel like they belong and I believe that I'm on this planet to foster that connection with each other and with ourselves.
So it all connects for me. It all comes back around whether we're talking about being in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our parents, or our caregivers, or the work that I do every day it all comes back to that connection and really wanting to make people feel more connected to themselves, to each other, and like they have a place with words.
ARTY: Yeah. It's very powerful. Words and narratives, I would say too, just thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we tell one another that become foundational in our culture. It's all built upon were words. Words shape the ideas in our head. They shape our thoughts. They shape how we reflect on things, how we feel about things, and then when people give us their words, we absorb those and then those become part of our own reflections.
KATE: Yeah.
ARTY: We affect one another a lot. I think that's one of the things I'm just seeing and talking to you is just thinking about how much we affect one another through our everyday interactions.
KATE: Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to – there's something you said earlier that resonated in that it's really about the action you take after you cause the harm, or after you say the thing that hurts the other person and it's less about – and that's what made me say intent versus impact because you see the impact, you acknowledge it, and you make a decision to lessen that next time, or to be aware, more aware next time.
This is really at the core of all the work I do for inclusive language as well. It's just the core principle of the words we use carry a lot of power.
And I was actually just chatting with someone in the No-Code space. We connected through Webflow a couple weeks ago and he said, “I think people are so scared to get it wrong when it comes to inclusive language,” and I experience this all the time. People freeze in their tracks because they don't know how address someone and then they're so scared to get it wrong and they're like, “Oh, so sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” and they're so apologetic. And then that makes it worse and it's just a whole thing.
In this conversation, we were talking specifically about misgendering people. My partner is non-binary. They're misgendered every single day when we go to restaurants, when we are just out and about. So this is something that is a part of my life every day. I told him that fear is so real and I carry that fear, too because I don't want to hurt people because I want to like get it right. It comes back to that perfectionism, that expectation that I put on myself, especially as a queer person to get it right all the time.
But so much of the good stuff lies in how you approach it and then how you fix it when you mess it up. Like, it's not so much about the thing, it's about the way that you approach it. If you approach inclusive language with an open mind, an open heart, and a real willingness, like true willingness to learn, that's what's important going into it and then you're already doing the work. You're already an ally. You're already however you want to put it.
And then when you use an ableist word, or you use a racist word, or you misgender someone, your actions for following that speak volumes. I think we can really get caught up in the action itself and it's more about how you go into it and then how you try to fix it.
ARTY: So I'm thinking for listeners that might identify with being in a situation of being in the headlights and not knowing how to respond, or what to do. Other than what you were just talking about with coming at it with an open heart, are there any specific recommendations you might have for how to approach inclusive language?
KATE: Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple really, really good ones. So often, the way to speak more inclusively, or to write more inclusively is just to get more specific about what you're trying to say. So instead of saying, “Oh, that's so crazy,” which is ableist, you can say, “Oh, that's so unheard of.” That's a good example. Or instead of unnecessarily gendering something you're saying like, “Oh, I'm out of wine, call the waitress over.” It's server instead of waiter, or waitress.
You kind of start to essentially practice replacing these words and these concepts that are so ingrained into who we are, into society at large, and really starting to disrupt those systems within us with challenging the way that we've described things in the past. So just essentially getting more specific when we're speaking.
When it comes to misgendering people specifically, it's really important to not be overly apologetic when you misgender someone. I can give an example. If a server, for example, comes up to me and my partner and says, “Can I get you ladies anything else?” And I say, “Oh, actually my partner uses they/them pronouns. They are not a lady,” and they say, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh shit!” And then that makes my partner feel bad [chuckles] for putting them in that position and then it's kind of this like ping pong back and forth of just bad feelings.
The ideal scenario, the server would say, “Oh, excuse me, can I get you all anything else?” Or, “Can I get you folks anything else?” Or just, if you're speaking about someone who uses they/them pronouns and you say, “Yeah, and I heard she, I mean, they did this thing.” You just quickly correct it and move on. Don't make it into a production. It's okay. We get it. Moving on. Just try not to overthink it, basically. [laughs] Get more specific, but don't overthink it. Isn't that like, what a dichotomy.
[laughter]
JOHN: That ties back to what you were saying about perfectionism also, right? Like you said, you freeze up if you try and be perfect about it all the time, because you can't always know what someone's pronouns are and so, you have to make a guess at some point and maybe you're going to guess wrong. But it's how you deal with it by not making everybody uncomfortable with the situation. [laughs]
KATE: Yeah.
JOHN: And like you said, ping pong of bad feelings just amplifies, the whole thing blows out of proportion. You can just be like, “Oh, my apologies.” Her, they, whatever it is and then very quickly move on and then it's forgotten the next minute. Everything moves on from that, but you're not weeping and gnashing and –
[laughter]
KATE: Yeah.
JOHN: Well, it means you don't have to keep feeling bad about it for the next 3 days either, like everyone can move on from that point.
KATE: Right. Yeah, and just doing your best to not do it again.
JOHN: Yeah.
KATE: Once you learn, it's important to really let that try to stick. If you're having trouble, I have a friend who really has trouble with they/them pronouns and they practice with their dog. They talk to their dog about this person and they use they/them pronouns in that. Practice really does make perfect in this – not perfect, okay. Practice really does make progress in this kind of scenario and also, normalize sharing pronouns.
JOHN: Yeah.
KATE: It's more than just putting it in your Zoom name. It's more than just putting it in your Instagram bio. A good example of really starting this conversation was during Webflow's No-Code Conf, our yearly conference. It was mostly online and we had a live portion of it and every single time we introduced someone new, or introduced ourselves, we said, “My name is Kate Marshall, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm so happy to be here with you today.” Or just asking if you don't know, or if you're in a space with someone new, you say, “What are your pronouns?” It's really is that easy.
Webflow made some year-round pride mech that we launched over the summer and we have a cute beanie that says “Ask me my pronouns.” It's like, it's cool to ask. It's fine to ask and that's so much better than unintentionally misgendering someone. It's going to take some time to get there, but normalize it.
JOHN: Yeah, and I think there's one key to that that has always stuck out of my mind, which is don't ask pronouns just for the people you think might have different pronouns than you would expect.
KATE: Yes.
JOHN: Make it part of all the conversations so it's not just singling somebody out of a group and saying, “I want to know your pronouns because they're probably different.” That's not good.
KATE: Right, because gender expression does not always equal gender identity.
JOHN: Yeah.
KATE: You can't know someone's gender identity from the way that they express their gender and that's also another huge misconception that I think it's time we talk more about.
JOHN: So we've been talking a lot about conversations and person-to-person interactions and inclusive language there. But a lot of what you do is it on the writing level and I imagine there's some differences there. So I'm curious as to what you see as far as the things that you do to work on that in the written form.
KATE: Yeah. So this is actually a really great resource that I was planning on sharing with whoever's listening, or whoever's following along this podcast. There is a really wonderful inclusive language guidelines that we have published externally at Webflow and I own it, I update it regularly as different things come in and inclusive language is constantly evolving. It will never be at a final resting point and that's also part of why I love it so much because you truly are always growing. I'm always learning something new about inclusive language, or to make someone feel more included with the words that I'm writing.
This table has, or this resource has ableist language, racist language, and sexist language tables with words to avoid, why to avoid them, and some alternatives and just some general principles. I reference it constantly. Like I said, it's always evolving. I actually don't know how many words are on there, but it's a good amount and it's a lot of things have been surfaced to me that I had no idea were racist. For instance, the word gypped. Like if you say, “Oh, they gypped me” is actually racist. It's rooted in the belief that gypsy people are thieves. [chuckles] So it's things like that we really kind of go deep in there and I reference this constantly.
Also, ALS language is a really big consideration, especially in the tech space. So instead of – and this can be avoided most of the time, not all of the time. We do work with a really wonderful accessibility consultant who I run things by constantly. Shout out to Michele. Oh, she was actually on the podcast at one point. Michele Williams, shout out. Lovely human.
So a good example is instead of “watch now,” or “listen now,” it's “explore this thing,” “browse this thing,” “learn more”. Just try not to get so specific about the way that someone might be consuming the information that I'm putting down on the page. Stuff like that. It truly does come down to just getting more specific as just a general principle.
JOHN: So it sounds to me some of the first steps you take are obviously being aware that you have to mold your language to be more accessible and inclusive, then it's informing yourself of what the common pitfalls are. As you said, you have consultants, you've got guides, you've got places where you can gather this information and then once you have that, then you build that into your mental process for writing what you're writing.
KATE: Yeah, and truly just asking questions and this goes for everyone. No one would ever – if I reached out to our head of DEI, Mariah, and said, “Mariah, is this thing offensive?” Or, “How should I phrase this thing to feel more inclusive to more people?” She would never come back at me and say, “Why are you asking me this? You should already know this,” and that is the attitude across the board. I would never fault someone for coming to me and asking me how to phrase something, or how to write something to make it feel better for more people. So it's really a humbling experience [laughs] to be in this position.
Again, words carry so much power and I just never take for granted, the power essentially that I have, even if it is just for a tech company. A lot of people are consuming that and I want to make them feel included.
JOHN: Yeah. The written face of a company is going to tell readers a lot about the culture of the company, the culture of the community around the product.
KATE: Yeah.
JOHN: Whether they're going to be welcome there, like what their experience is going to be like if they invest their time to learn about it. So it's really important to have that language there and woven into everything that's written, not just off the corner on the DEI page.
KATE: Yeah. That's what I was just about to say is especially if you're a company that claims to prioritize DEI, you better be paying close attention to the words that you're using in your product, on your homepage, whatever it is, your customer support. I've worked with the customer support team at Webflow to make sure that the phrasing feels good for people.
It truly does trickle into every single asset of a business and it's ongoing work that does not just end at, like you said, putting it on a DEI page. Like, “We care about this,” and then not actually caring about it. That sucks. [laughs]
JOHN: Oh, the other thing before we move too far on from last topic, you’re talking about asking for advice. I think one of the keys there, a, being humble and just saying, “I would like to know,” and you're very unlikely to get criticized for simply asking how something can be better. But I feel like one of the keys to doing that well is also not arguing with the person you've asked after they give you an answer.
KATE: Right. Yes. Especially if that person is a part of the community that your words are affecting, or that your question is affecting. It's such a tricky balance because it's really not the queer community's job to educate people who are not queer about inclusive language. But when that person is willing to share their knowledge with the you, or willing to share their experience with you, you’ve got to listen. Your opinions about their lived experience don't come into that conversation, or shouldn't come into that conversation.
It's not questioning the information that you're given, but then it's also taking that and doing your own research and asking more people and having conversations with your friends and family trying to widen this breadth of information and knowledge as a community. Like I said, kind of dismantling the things that we're taught growing up by capitalism, by society, everything that kind of unnecessarily separates and then doing better next time.
I've actually had conversations with people who are very curious, who come to me with questions and then the next time I interact with them, they're just back to factory settings. That's so disappointing and just makes me feel like my energy could have been better spent having that conversation with someone who is more receptive. So I think it really is just about being open to hearing someone's experience, not questioning it, and then really taking that in and doing the work on your own.
JOHN: Yeah, and part of that doing the work is also for the things that you can Google for the things where you can look at it from the guide, do that first before asking for someone's time.
KATE: Yeah.
JOHN: So that they're not answering the same 101 questions every time that are just written in 15 different blog posts.
KATE: Yes. Especially if you're asking a marginalized person to do the work for you.
JOHN: Yeah.
KATE: Intersectionality matters and putting more work on the shoulders of people who are already weighed down by so much ain't it. [laughs]
ARTY: Well, I was wanting to go back to your original superpower that you talked about with empathy. We talked a lot about some of these factors that make empathy of a difficult thing of over empathizing and what kind of factors make that hard. But as a superpower, what kind of superpowers does that give you?
KATE: Ah, just being able to really connect to a lot of different people. I mentioned earlier that I believe it's my purpose, it's my life's work on this planet at this time to connect people to themselves and to each other. The more asking I can do and the more absorbing I can do of other people's experiences, the better I am at being able to connect with them and being able to make them feel like they belong in whatever space I'm in. I can't connect with someone if I don't try and get it. Try and get what they're going through, or what their experiences are.
That's why I do so much time just talking to people, and that's why I love yoga and why I want to start this studio and open this space. Because we live in a world where we don't have a lot of spaces, especially marginalized communities don't have a lot of spaces that feel like they're being understood, or they're truly being heard, or seen. Me being an empath, I'm able to access that in people more and therefore, bringing them closer to safer spaces, or safer people, safer communities where they really feel like they can exist and be their full, whole, and complete selves. It's really special.
ARTY: We also touched this concept of authenticity and it seems like that also comes up in this context of creating these safe spaces and safe communities where people can be their whole selves. So when you think about authenticity, we talked about this being a difficult and fuzzy word, but at the same time, it does have some meaning as to what that means, and these challenges with regards to boundaries and things. But I'm curious, what does authenticity mean to you? How does that come into play with this idea of safety and creating these safe spaces for others as well?
KATE: Yeah. I feel like there's so much in there. I think one of the biggest things to accept about the word authenticity, or the concept of authenticity is that it's always changing and it means something different to everyone. We are all authentic to ourselves in different ways and at different times in our lives and I think it's so important to honor the real evolution of feeling authentic.
There are times and days where I'm like who even am. It's like what even, but there's always this sort of core, root part of me that I don't lose, which is what we've been talking about. This ability to connect, this feeling of empathy, of compassion, of wanting to really be a part of the human experience. That, to me, kind of always stays and I feel like that's the authentic, like the real, real, authentic parts of me.
There are layers to it that are always changing and as people, we are also always evolving and always changing. So those different parts of authenticity could be what you wear that make you feel like your most authentic self. It can be how you interact with your friends, or how you interact with the person, getting your popcorn at the movies, or whatever it is. Those can all feel like parts of your authentic self.
That means something different to everyone. But I think that's such a beautiful part about it and about just being human is just how often these things are changing for us and how important it is to honor someone's authenticity, whatever that means for them at that time. Even if it's completely different from what you knew about them, or how you knew them before. It's this constant curiosity of yourself and of others, really getting deeply curious about what feels like you.
ARTY: I was wondering about safety because you were talking about the importance of creating these safe communities and safe environments where people could be their whole, complete selves, which sounds a lot like the authenticity thing, but you trying to create space for that for others.
KATE: Yeah. Well, the reality of safety is that there's no one space that will ever be a “safe space for everyone,” and that's why I like to say safer spaces, or a safer space for people because you can never – I feel like it's all coming full circle where you can never meet every single person exactly where they need to be met in any given moment. You can just do your best to create spaces that feel safer to them and you do that with authentic connection, with getting curious about who they are and what they love, and just making sure that your heart's really in it. [chuckles] Same with inclusive language.
It's all about the way you approach it to make someone feel safer. But I do think it's an I distinction to remember. You're never going to be safe for everyone. A space you create is never going to be safe for everyone. The best you can do is just make it safer for more people.
ARTY: When I think about just the opposite of that, of times that I've gone into a group where I haven't felt safe being myself and then when you talk of about being your complete whole self, it's like bringing a whole another level of yourself to a space that may not really fit that space and that seems like it's okay, too. Like we don't necessarily have to bring our full self to all these different spaces, but whatever space we're a part of, we kind of sync up and adapt to it.
So if I'm in one space and I feel the kind of vibe, energy, context of what's going on, how people are interacting, the energy they put forth when they speak with whatever sorts of words that they use. I'm going to feel that and adapt to that context of what feels safe and then as more people start adapting to that, it creates a norm that other people that then come and see what's going on in this group come to an understanding about what the energy in the room is like.
KATE: Yeah.
ARTY: And all it takes is one person to bring a different energy into that to shift the whole dynamic of things.
KATE: Yeah. The reality is you'll never be able to change every space and I think that's such a good point. It makes me feel like saying you have to be protective of your energy. If you go into a space and it just doesn't feel right, or there's someone who is in the room that doesn't feel safe to you, or that doesn't feel like they're on the same page as you, it's okay to not feel like you need to change the world in that space. Like you don't always have to go into a space and say, “I'm going to change it.” That is how change is made when you feel safe enough. That's why it's so important to foster that energy from the jump.
That's just a foundational thing at a company in a yoga studio, in a home, at a restaurant. It can be changed, but it really should be part of the foundation of making a safer space, or a more inclusive space. Because otherwise, you're asking the people who don't feel safe, who are usually marginalized people, or intersectionally marginalized in some way. You're asking them essentially to put in the work to change what you should have done as the foundation of your space.
So it's a such a delicate balance of being protective of your energy and really being able to feel out the places where you feel okay saying something, or making a change, or just saying, “No, this isn't worth it for me. I'm going to go find a space that actually feels a little bit better, or that I feel more community in.”
ARTY: And it seems like the other people that are in the group, how those people respond to you. If you shift your energy, a lot of times the people that are in the group will shift their energy in kind. Other times, in a different space, you might try to shift energy and then there's a lot of resistance to that where people are going a different way and so, you get pushed out of the group energy wise. These sorts of dynamics, you can feel this stuff going on of just, I just got outcast out of this group.
Those are the kinds of things, though that you need to protect your own energy of even if I'm not included in this group, I can still have a good relationship with me and I can still like me and I can think I'm still pretty awesome and I can find other groups of folks that like me.
It definitely, at least for me, I tend to be someone who's like, I don't know, I get out grouped a lot. [laughs] But at the same time, I've gotten used to that and then I find other places where I've got friends that love me and care about me and stuff. So those are recharge places where I can go and get back to a place where I feel solid and okay with myself, and then I'm much more resilient then going into these other spaces and stuff where I might not be accepted, where I might have to be kind of shielded and guarded and just put up a front, and operate in a way that makes everyone else feel more comfortable.
KATE: Yeah, and isn't it so powerful to feel cared for?
ARTY: I love that.
KATE: Like just to feel cared for by the people around you is everything. It's everything. That's it. Just to feel like you are wanted, or you belong. To feel cared for. It can exist everywhere is the thing. In your Slack group, or whatever, you can make people feel cared for. I have never regretted reaching out to a coworker, or a friend, or whoever an acquaintance and saying, “Hey, I love this thing about you,” or “Congratulations on this rad thing you just launched,” or whatever. It's the care that's so powerful.
ARTY: I feel like this is one of those things where we can learn things from our own pain and these social interactions and stuff. One of the things that I've experienced is you're in a group and you say something and nobody responds. [laughs]
KATE: Yeah.
ARTY: And after doing that for a while, you feel like you're just shouting into the void and nobody hears you and it's just this feeling of like invisibility. In feeling that way myself, one of the things I go out of my way to do is if somebody says something, I at least try and respond, acknowledge them, let them know that they're heard, they're cared about, and that there's somebody there on the other side [chuckles] and they're not shouting into the wind because I hate that feeling. It's an awful feeling to feel invisible like that.
KATE: Awful, yeah.
ARTY: But we can learn from those experiences and then we can use those as opportunities to understand how we can give in ways that are subtle, that are often little things that are kind of ignored, but they're little things that actually make a really big difference.
KATE: Yeah, the little things. It really is the little things, isn't it? [laughs] Like and it’s just, you can learn from your experiences, but you can also say, “I'm not doing this right now.” You can also check out. If you are giving and giving. and find that you're in the void essentially, more often than not, you can decide that that's no longer are worth your time, your energy, your care, and you can redirect that care to somewhere else that's going to reciprocate, or that's going to give you back that same care and that's so important, too.
JOHN: Yeah, and it sounds like starting a yoga studio is not a trivial undertaking and obviously, you're highly motivated to create this kind of an environment in the world. So is there anything more you'd like to say about that because that ties in very closely with what we're talking about?
KATE: Yeah. It’s so weird to work full-time and be so passionate about my tech job and then turn around and be like, “I'm opening a yoga studio.” It's such a weird, but again, it's all connected at the root, at the core of what I'm trying to do in this world.
The thing about Kula is that it's really built on this foundational mutual aid model. So being donation-based, it's really pay what you can, if you can. And what you pay, if you're able to give an extra $10 for the class that you take, that's going to pay for someone else's experience, who is unable to financially contribute to take that class. That's the basis of community care, of mutual aid and it's really this heart-based business model that is really tricky. I’m trying to get a loan right now and [chuckles] it's really hard to prove business financials when you have a donation-based model and you say, “Well, I'm going to guess what people might donate per class on average.”
So it's been a real journey, [laughs] especially with today's famous supply chain issues that you hear about constantly in every single industry. I have an empty space right now. It needs to be completely built out. Construction costs are about triple what they should be.
Again, coming from this real mutual aid community care centered model, it's really hard, but I have to keep coming back. I was just telling my partner about this the other day, I have to keep coming back to this core idea, or this real feeling that I don't need to have a beautifully designed space to create what I'm trying to create.
When I started this, I envisioned just a literal empty room [chuckles] with some people in it and a bathroom and that's it. So of course, once I saw the designs, I was like, “Oh, I love this can lighting that's shining down in front of the bathroom door.” It's like so whatever, stereotypical. Not stereotypical, but surface level stuff.
I really have had to time and time again, return to this longing almost for a space that feels safer for me, for my community, for Black people, for disabled people, for trans people, for Asian people; we don't have a lot of spaces that feel that way and that's just the reality.
So it's a real delicate balance of how do I like – this is a business and I need money, [laughs] but then I really want this to be rooted in mutual aid and community care. It comes back to that car and that inclusivity, creating authentic connections. It's tricky out there for a queer woman entrepreneur with no collateral. [laughs] It's a tricky world out there, but I think we'll flip it someday.
I really think pioneering this idea, or this business model at least where I'm at in Denver, I think it's going to start the conversation in more communities and with more people who want to do similar things and my hope is that that will foster those conversations and make it more accessible to more people.
JOHN: Yeah, and I think every time someone manages to muster up the energy, the capital, and the community effort to put something like this together, it makes it just slightly easier for someone else a, they can learn the lessons and b, they're more examples of this thing operating in the world. So it becomes more possible in people's minds and you can build some of that momentum there.
KATE: Yeah. And of course, it's really important to note and to remember that I come from a place of immense privilege. I have a great job in tech. I'm white. I am upper middle class. Technically, I'm “straight passing,” which is a whole other concept, but it is a thing and this is the way that I'm choosing to use my privilege to hopefully pave the way for more people. I do not take for granted the opportunity that I'm given and like I said, intersectionality matters and all of that, but I still have a lot of privilege going into this that I hope turns into something good for more people.
ARTY: It also takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur because you really have to just keep on going. No matter any obstacle that's in your way, you’ve just got to keep on going and have that drive, desire, and dream to go and build something and make it happen and your superpowers probably going to help you out with that, too. It sounds like we've got multiple superpowers because I think you got to have superpowers to be an entrepreneur in itself.
KATE: Yeah. I don't know, man. It's such a weird feeling to have because it just feels like it's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's it. It doesn't feel like I'm like – yes, it's a calling and all of that, but it just feels like the path and that, it feels more, more natural than anything I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
The more people follow that feeling, the more authentic of a world, the more connected of a world we're going to have. I see a lot of people doing this work, similar things, and it makes me so happy to see.
The words of one of my therapists, one of my past therapists told me, “Always stick with me,” and it was right around the time I was kind of – so I'd started planning before COVID hit and then COVID hit and I had to pause for about a year, a little bit less than a year. It was right around the time I was filing my LLC and really starting to move forward. It was actually December 17th of last year that I filed my LLC paperwork. So it's been a little over a year now.
He told me, “How much longer are you willing to wait to give the community this thing that you want to give them? How much are you willing to make them wait for this space?” And I was like, “Yesterday. Yesterday.” Like, “I want to give people this space immediately,” and that has truly carried me through. This supply chain stuff is no joke. [laughs] and it has really carried me through some of the more doubtful moments in this journey. Yeah, and I feel like, man, what powerful words. Like, I just want to keep saying them because they are such powerful words to me. How much longer are you willing to make them wait? And it's like, I don't want to. [chuckles] So I guess I'm going to go do it.
[laughter]
Throw caution to the wind. [laughs]
JOHN: Well, I think that ties back into what you were talking about is as you were thinking about designing the space and what kind of buildout you're going to need, and that can be a guide star for what actually needs to be there. What's the actual MVP for this space? Does it need a perfect coat of paint, or is what's there good enough? Does it need all the things arranged just so in the perfect lighting, or does it just need to exist and have people in the room and you can really focus in on what's going to get you there? And then of course, you iterate like everything else, you improve over time, but.
KATE: Right.
JOHN: I love that concept of just cut out everything that's in the way of this happening right now as much as possible.
KATE: Yeah, and what a concept, I think that can be applied to so many things. Who am I trying to serve with this thing and what do I need to do to get there? It doesn't have to be this shiny, beautiful well-designed creation. It just needs to serve people. The people that you want to serve in the best way possible, and for me, that's getting this space open and actually having it in action.
ARTY: I think once you find something that feels in alignment with you, you seem to have lots of clarity around just your sense of purpose, of what you want to move toward of a deep connection with yourself. One thing I found with that is no matter how much you get rejected by various groups in the world, if you can be congruent and authentic with yourself and follow that arrow, that once you start doing that, you find other people that are in resonance with you. They're out there, but you don't find them until you align with yourself.
KATE: Yeah. Community. Community is so powerful and I love that you just said alignment because that really is truly what it is. It's finding the thing that makes you feel like you're doing something good and that feels authentic to your core, to those core principles of you that never really change. The things that are rooted in love, the things that are rooted in compassion, or whatever it is you care about. Community, that alignment is absolutely key.
It's also, when I say I was born with my superpower of being an empath, this desire to create this space feels, it feels like I was also born with this desire, or born with this alignment. So I feel like so many times it's just going back to the basics of who you are.
ARTY: Like you're actualizing who you are.
KATE: Yeah. Like full alignment, enlightenment, that all kind of falls into place when you're really making the effort to be connected to your core.
ARTY: It seems like a good place to do reflections. So at the end of the show, we usually go around and do final reflections and takeaways, final thoughts that you have and you get to go last, Kate.
JOHN: There are a whole lot of different things that I've been thinking about here, but I think one of the ones that's sticking with me is the dichotomy between perfectionism and authenticity, and how I feel like they really are pulling against one another and that, which isn't to say things can't be perfect and authentic at the same time. But I think perfectionism is usually a negative feeling. Like you should do something, you're putting a lot of pressure, there's a lot of anxiety around perfectionism and that is pretty much an opposition to being authentically yourself. It's hard to be in touch with yourself when you're wrapped up in all those anxieties and so, thinking about the two of them together, I hadn't made that connection before, but I think that's something that's interesting that I'll be thinking about for a while.
ARTY: I think the thing that's going to stick with me, Kate is you said, “Our words carry so much power,” and I think about our conversation today out just vibes in the room and how that shifts with the energy that we bring to the room, all of these subtle undercurrent conversations that we're having, and then how a sort of energy vibe becomes established. And how powerful even these really little tiny things we do are.
We had this conversation around inclusive language and you gave so many great details and specifics around what that means and how we can make little, small alterations to some of these things that are just baked into us because of our culture and the words that we hear, phrasing and things that we hear, that we're just unaware of the impact of things. Just by paying attention and those little subtle details of things and coming at things with an open heart, regardless of how we might stumble, or mess things up, how much of a difference that can make because our words, though carry so much power.
KATE: Yeah. And the thing you just said about having an open heart is truly how you can put any of this into action, how you can remain open to learning about authenticity, or what it feels like to not fall into a trap of perfectionism, or how to speak, or write, or interact more inclusively with other human beings.
I feel like being open, being openminded, being open-hearted, whatever it is, is just really a superpower on its own. Remaining open and vulnerable in today's world is hard work. It does not come naturally to so many people, especially when you're dealing with your own traumas and your own individual interactions and maybe being forced into spaces where you don't feel safe. To remain open is such a tool for making other people feel cared for. So if that's the goal, I would say just being open is truly your superpower.
JOHN: I think that's the quote I'm going to take with me: being open is the key to making people feel cared for.
KATE: Yes. I love that.
ARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Kate. It's been a pleasure to have you here.
KATE: Thank you so much. This has been just the energy boost I needed.
Special Guest: Kate Marshall.
Sponsored By:
00:54 - Emily’s Superpower: Being a Good Teacher
06:24 - Online College Courses vs In-Person Learning / Emily’s Community College Path
11:58 - Computer Science Curriculums
19:28 - Being A Good Mentor / Mentor, Student Relationships
38:24 - Dungeons & Dragons
Reflections:
Dave: College is what you make of it, not where you went.
Arty: Teaching people better who don’t have a lot of experience yet.
Mandy: “Empowered women, empower women.” Empowered men also empower women.
Emily: Your mentor should have different skills from you and you should seek them out for that reason.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
MANDY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 265 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest panelist, Dave Bock.
DAVE: Hi, I'm David Bock and I am here with our usual co-host, Arty Starr.
ARTY: Thank you, Dave. And I'm here today with our guest, Emily Haggard.
Emily is graduating from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science this past December so, congratulations. She has a wide variety of experience in technology from web development to kernel programming, and even network engineering and cybersecurity. She is an active member of her community, having founded a cybersecurity club for middle schoolers. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing novels.
Welcome to the show, Emily.
EMILY: Thank you.
ARTY: So our first question we always ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
EMILY: So I spent some time thinking about this and I would say that my superpower is that I'm a good teacher and what that means is that the people who come to me with questions wanting to learn something number one, my goal is to help them understand and number two, I think it's very important to make sure that whatever gap we have in our experience doesn't matter and that they don't feel that. So that they could be my 6-year-old brother and I'm trying to teach him algebra, or something and he doesn't feel like he is the 6-year-old trying to learn algebra.
DAVE: I'll echo that sentiment about being a good teacher actually on two fronts, Emily. First of all, I am teaching your brother now in high school and just the other day, he credited you towards giving him a lot of background knowledge about the course and the curriculum before we ever started the class. So he seconds that you're a good teacher.
And then listeners might remember, I was on a few weeks ago talking about my nonprofit and Emily was there at the beginning of me starting to volunteer in high schools. In fact, the way I met Emily, it was the fall of 2014.
The first time I was volunteering at Loudoun Valley High School and one morning prior to class, there was going to be a meeting of a cybersecurity club. There were a bunch to the students milling about and there was this sophomore girl sitting in front of a computer, looking at a PowerPoint presentation of networking IP addresses, how the /24 of an IP address resolves and just all that kind of detail. Like very low-level detail about networking stuff and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I wouldn't have expected a sophomore girl to be so interested in the low-level type of details of IP. And then the club started and she got up and started giving that presentation. That was not a slide deck she was reading; it was a slide deck she was creating.
EMILY: Thank you. I actually remember that. [laughs]
ARTY: So how did you acquire that superpower?
EMILY: I think it was out of necessity. So going back to the story that David mentioned in high school, there was a cybersecurity competition called CyberPatriot that I competed in with friends and one year, all of a sudden, they just introduced network engineering to the competition. We had to configure and troubleshoot a simulated network and no one knew how to do that.
So I took it upon myself to just figure it out so that my team could be competitive and win, but then part of the way that I learn actually is being able to teach something like that's how I grasp. I know that I've understood something and I'm ready to move on to the next topic is like, if I could teach this thing.
So actually, I started out building all of that as a way to kind of condense my notes and condense my knowledge so that it’d stick in my head for the competition and I just realized it's already here, I should share this. So that's how I started there. Teaching network engineering to high schoolers that don't have any background knowledge is really hard. It forced me to put it in terms that would make sense and take away the really technical aspects of it and I think that built the teaching skill.
DAVE: That relates to the club you started at the middle school for a CyberPatriot. How did that start?
EMILY: That was initially a desire to have a capstone project and get out of high school a few weeks early. But I was sitting there with my friend and thinking about, “Okay, well, we need to do something that actually helps people. What should we do?” Like some people are going out and they're painting murals in schools, or gardening. It was like, well, we don't really like being outside and we're not really artistic. [chuckles] But what we do have is a lot of technical knowledge from all this work with CyberPatriot and we know that CyberPatriot has a middle school competition.
So we actually approached the middle school. We had a sit down with, I think the dean at our local middle school. We talked about what CyberPatriot was and what we wanted to do with the students, which was have them bust over to the high school so we could teach them as an afterschool program. I guess we convinced him and so, a couple months later they're busing students over for us to teach.
DAVE: Wow. And did they ever participate in competitions as middle schoolers?
EMILY: Yes, they did.
DAVE: Very cool.
EMILY: Yeah.
DAVE: Can you go into what those competitions are like? I don't think most of the audience even knows that exists.
EMILY: Yeah, sure.
So CyberPatriot, it's a cybersecurity competition for predominantly high schoolers that's run by the Air Force and you have a couple rounds throughout the year, I think it’s like five, or so, and at each round you have 6 hours and you're given some virtual machines, which you have to secure and remove viruses from and things, and you get points for doing all of that.
They added on network simulation, which was with some Cisco proprietary software, which would simulate your routers, your firewalls, and everything. So you'd have to configure and troubleshoot that as well and you would get points for the same thing.
It builds a lot of comradery with all of us having to sit there for 6 hours after school and like, we're getting tired. It's a Friday night, everyone's a little bit loopy and all we've eaten is pizza for 6 hours. [laughs]
DAVE: Well, that's a good jumpstart to your career, I think. [laughs]
EMILY: Yes, for sure.
MANDY: So while in college, I'm guessing that – well, I'm assuming that you've been pretty impacted by COVID and doing in-person learning versus online learning. How's that been for you?
EMILY: I've actually found it pushes me to challenge the status quo. Online college classes, for the most part, the lectures aren't that helpful. They're not that great. So I had to pick up a lot of skills, like learning to teach myself, reading books, and figuring out ways to discern if I needed to research something further, if I really understood it yet, or not. That's a really hard question to ask actually is if you don't have the knowledge, how do you know that you don't have that knowledge? That's something I kind of had – it's a skill that you have to work on.
So that is something I developed over the time when we were online and I've actually also done – I worked time for a year after high school and I took mostly online classes at the community college. Those skills started there, too and then I just built on them when I came to Virginia Tech and we had COVID happen.
DAVE: Actually, I'd like to ask about that community college time. I know you had an interesting path into Virginia Tech, one that I'm really interested in for my own kids as well. Can you talk about that?
EMILY: Yeah. So I, out of high school, always thought I'm going to – I'm a first-generation student. My parents did not go to college. They went to the military and grandparents before them. So I had always had it in my head that I am going to go and get that 4-year degree. That's what I want for myself.
At the end of high school, I applied to Virginia Tech. I had a dream school. I wanted to go to Georgia Tech. They rejected me. Oh, well, that dream shot. I need to find something new. So I applied to Virginia Tech thinking it was going to be a safe bet. It's an in-state school, I was a very good student; they would never reject me and so, I applied for the engineering program and I was rejected. They did admit me for the neuroscience program, but it wasn't going to be what I wanted and I was realizing that I did not like either chemistry, or biology, so that would never work.
And then at the same time, because of my work with CyberPatriot, I was able to get an internship in network engineering at a college not too far from where I lived. After I graduated high school, they offered me a job as a network engineer, which I took because my team was fantastic, I really liked my manager, and I was comfortable there. I took this job and I said, “Okay, I'm going to keep working on the college thing because it's what I always wanted for myself.” So I just signed up for community college and that was pretty tough working a full-time and doing community college until 11 o'clock at night and getting up the next day and doing it all over again.
And from there, I decided that Virginia Tech was going to be the best option for me, just from a very logical perspective. I kind of thought Virginia Tech was a bit cult-y. I was never really gung-ho about going, but it made the most sense being an in-state school that's very well-known. I worked through community college and I applied to Virginia Tech again after 1 year at community college and they rejected me again. so I was like, “Oh no, now what do I do I?” And I realized I needed to make use of the guaranteed transfer program.
One of the really cool things in Virginia at least is that a lot of the state schools have agreements with the community college, where if you get an associates with a specific GPA, you can transfer into that program and the university and your transfer's guaranteed, they can't reject you. So I was like, “Aha, they can't get rid of me this time.” Yeah, I did it and it's kind of a messy process.
I actually went into that in a blog post on David has a nonprofit called Loudoun Codes. I wrote a blog post for his website and detailed that entire – being a transfer student is hard because there's a lot of credits that may not get transferred over because Virginia Tech is a little bit – all 4-year colleges are a little bit elitist in their attitude towards community college and they didn't take some of the credits that I had, which put me behind quite far, even though I had that knowledge, they said I didn't. So that added on some extra time and some extra summer semesters while I was at Tech.
ARTY: Yeah. I did something similar with doing community college and then what you're talking about with the whole elitist attitude with the transfer and having a whole bunch of your credits not transferring and I'm definitely familiar with that whole experience.
DAVE: Yeah.
EMILY: And even now that I think about it, I remember community college, too. It's built for one specific type of student, which is great. I think they're really good at helping people who just weren't present, or weren't able to do the work and make the progress in high school. They're really good at helping those types of students. But as someone who did a whole bunch of AP classes, had a crazy GPA, they just didn't really know how to handle me. They said, “Okay, you've tested out of pretty much all of our math classes, but you are still lacking some credits.” So I had to take multi-variable calculus in community college in order to get credit to replace the fact that I tested out of pre-cal and which was kind of silly, but in the long run, it was great because I hear multi-variable calculus at Tech is pretty hard.
But definitely, there's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense about college. Education is important. It's great. I've learned a lot of things, but there's still all these old ways of thinking and people are just not ready for change in college a lot of the time. The people who make decisions that is.
DAVE: Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about the computer science curriculum that you've had and the angle I'm asking from when I worked at LivingSocial, I worked with one of the first group of people that had graduated from our bootcamp program and had transferred from other careers, spent 12 weeks learning software engineering skills, and then were integrated with a group of software engineers at LivingSocial.
We would occasionally get into conversations about, well, if I learned to be a software engineer in 12 weeks, what do you learn in 4 years of college? So we started to do these internal brown bags that were kind of the Discovery Channel version of computer science. A lot of that material I've since recycled into the presentations I do at high school.
But for your typical person who might have sidelined into this career from a different perspective, what's been your curriculum like?
EMILY: I really like the parts of the curriculum that had technical depth because coming into it at my level, that's what I was lacking in certain areas. I had built the foundation really strong, but the details of it, I didn't have.
The classes that Virginia Tech, like the notorious systems class and a cybersecurity class I have taken this semester, that have gone in detail with technology and pushed what I understood, those were my most valuable classes. There was a lot of it that I would've been happy without [laughs] because I'm not sure it will apply so much to my life going forward. I'm a very practical person. Engineer mindset; I don't want to worry about things that can actually be applied to the real world so much.
So for me this semester, actually, it's been really challenging because I've taken a data structures and algorithms class where we're talking about NP complete versus NP hard, and what it would mean if we could solve an NP complete problem in polynomial time. It's really hard to care. It's really hard to see how that [laughs] helps. It's interesting from a pure math perspective, but coming into it as someone who was already in the adult world and very grounded, it feels like bloat.
DAVE: Yeah. That stuff is interesting if you're are designing databases, but most of us are just using databases and that – [overtalk]
EMILY: Right.
DAVE: Stuff is all kind of baked in.
EMILY: Yeah.
DAVE: For the average person on a technical career path, we're far more interested in the business problems than the math problems.
ARTY: I'm curious, too. There's also lots of stuff that seems like it's missing in college curriculum from just really fundamental things that you need to know as a software engineer. So did you have things like source control and continuous integration? I think back to my own college experience and I didn't learn about source control until I got out of college. [laughs] And why is that? Why is that? It seems so backwards because there's these fundamental things that we need to learn and within 4 years, can we not somehow get that in the curriculum?
I'm wondering what your experience has been like.
EMILY: So Virginia Tech, I think the CS department head is actually really good at being reflective because he requires every senior to take a seminar class as they exit. It's a one credit class; it's mostly just feedback for the school and I think it's really cool because he asks all of us to make a presentation, just record ourselves talking over some slides about our experience and the things we would change.
That really impressed me that this guy who gets to make so many decisions is listening to the people who are just kind of peons of the system and what I said was that there are certain classes that they give background knowledge. Like there's one in particular where it's essentially the closest crossover we have with the electrical engineering department and it's really painful, as someone who works with software, to try and put myself in a hardware mindset working with AND gates, OR gates, and all that, and trying to deal with these simulated chips. It's awful and then it never comes back. We never talk about again in the curriculum and it's a prerequisite for the systems class, which has nothing at all to do with that, really.
This segues into another thing. I've had an internship while I've been at Virginia Tech that's a web consultant role, or a development consultant role with a company called Acceleration. They run just a small office in Blacksburg and they have a really cool business model. They take students at Virginia Tech and at Radford, a neighboring school, and they have us work with clients on real software development projects. They pair us with mentors who have 5, 10 years of experiences, software consultants, and we get to learn all those things that school doesn't teach us.
So that's actually how I learned Git, Scrum, and all that stuff that isn't taught in college even now and I went back to the CS department head and I said, “Replace that class with the class that teaches us Git, Scrum, Kanban, and even just a brief overview of Docker, AWS, and the concepts so that people have a foundation when they try to go to work and they're trying to read all this documentation, or they're asked to build a container image and they have no idea what it's talking about, or what it's for.”
Yeah, going back to the original question, no, I didn't learn version control in college, but the weird thing is that I was expected to know it in my classes without ever being taught it because, especially in the upper level like 3,004 level, or 1,000 level classes, they have you work on group projects where Git is essential and some of them, especially the capstone project, are long-term projects and you really need to use Scrum, or use some sort of methodology rather than just the how you would treat a two-week project.
Actually, it's interesting because David was my sponsor on my capstone project in college and he really helped my team with the whole project planning, sprint planning, and just understanding how Scrum and all that works and what it's for.
DAVE: Yeah. I just shared a link that is a series of videos from MIT called The Missing Semester of Your Computer Science Education that talks about Git, version control and command line, using the back shell, stuff about using a database, how to use a debugger; just all that kind of stuff is stuff that you're expected to know, but never formally taught.
ARTY: What about unit testing?
EMILY: Okay. So that's an interesting exception to the rule, but I don't think they really carried it through, through my entire experience at Tech. So in the earlier classes, we were actually forced to write unit tests that was part of our assignments and they would look to see that we had – I think we had to have a 100% testing coverage, or very close to it.
So that was good, but then it kind of dropped away as we went to the upper-level classes and you just had to be a good programmer and you had to know to test small chunks of your code because we'd have these massive projects and there would be a testing framework to see if the entire thing worked, but there was no unit testing, really. Whereas, at work in my internship, unit tests are paramount, like [laughs], we put a huge emphasis on that.
ARTY: So earlier Emily, you had had mentioned teaching people that had no experience at all and the challenge of trying to be able to help and support people and learning to understand regardless of what their gap was in existing experience. So what are some of the ideas, principles, things that you've learned on how to do that effectively?
EMILY: That's a really tough question because I've worked on building intuition rather than a set of rules. But I think a few of the major things probably are thinking about it long enough beforehand, because there's always a lot of background context that they need. Usually, you don't present a solution before you’ve presented the problem and so, it's important to spend time thinking about that and especially how you're going to order concepts.
I've noticed, too with some of the best teachers I've had in college is they were very careful with the order in which they introduced topics to build the necessary context and that's something that's really important with complete beginners.
The thing is sometimes you have to build that context very quickly, which the best trick I have for that is just to create an analogy that has nothing to do with technology at all, create it out of a shared experience that you have, or something that they've probably experienced. Like a lot of times analogies for IP addressing use the mailing service, houses on a street and things like that, things that are common to our experience. I guess, maybe that's the foundation of it is you're trying to figure out what you have in common with this person that can take them from where they are to where you are currently and that requires a lot of social skills, intuition, and practice, so.
DAVE: That’s a really good observation because one of the things I find teaching high school, and this has been a skill I've had to learn, is being able to put my mindset in the point of view of the student that I need to go to where they are and use a good metaphor analogy to bring them up a step. That's a real challenge to be able to strip away all the knowledge I have and be like, “Oh, this must be the understanding of the problem they have” and try to figure out how to walk them forward.
EMILY: Yeah.
DAVE: That's a valuable skill.
EMILY: I think that's really rewarding, though because when I see in their eyes that they've understood it, or I watch them solve the problem, then I know that I did it well and that's really rewarding. It's like, okay, cool. I got them to where I wanted them to be.
ARTY: Reminds me. I was helping out mentoring college students for a while and I hadn’t really been involved with college for a really long time. I was working with folks that knew very, very little and it was just astounding to me one, just realizing how much I actually knew. That's easy to take for granted.
But also, just that if you can dial back and be patient, it's really rewarding I found to just be able to help people, to see that little light go on where they start connecting the dots and they're able to make something appear on the screen for the first time. That experience of “I made that! I made that happen.” I feel like that's one of the most exciting things about software and in programming is that experience of being able to create and make something come to life in that way.
Just mentoring as an experience is something, I think is valuable in a lot of ways beyond just the immediate being able to help someone things, like it's a cool experience being a mentor as well.
EMILY: And I think it's really important, too as a mentor to have good mentors yourself. I was really lucky to have David just show up in my high school one day [laughs] and I've been really lucky consistently with the mentors in my life. In my internship that I mentioned, I worked with fantastic engineers who are really good teachers.
It's difficult to figure out how to good teacher without having first had good teachers yourself and regardless of the level of experience I have, I think I will always want to have that mentor relationship so that I can keep learning. One of the things, too is a lot of my mentors are quite different from mine. Like I am a very quiet introvert person. I would not say I'm very charismatic. I would say David is the opposite of all those things. So wanting to build those skills myself, it's good to have a role model who has them.
DAVE: Well, thank you for that compliment.
EMILY: Yeah.
MANDY: That's really interesting that you said to find mentor that's the opposite of yourself. I literally just heard the same thing said by a different person last week that was like, “Yeah, you should totally find someone who you want to be, or emulate,” and I thought that was really good advice.
EMILY: I agree with that completely.
There's a lot of conversation around diversity in computer science and that's definitely a problem. Women do not have the representation they should, like I've always gone through classes and been 1 of 3 women in the class. [chuckles]
But I think one of the ways in which we can approach this, besides just increasing the enrollment number, is focusing on commonalities—kind of what I mentioned before— from the perspective of mentors who are different than their students. Maybe a male mentor trying to mentor a female student. Focusing on your commonalities rather than naturally gravitating towards people who are like you; trying to find commonalities with people who are different from you. I think that's important.
From the student perspective, it's less about finding commonalities more about, like you said, finding the things you want to emulate. Looking at other groups of people and figuring out what they're good at and what things you would like to take from them. [laughs] So.
DAVE: Yeah, that's been an interesting challenge I've noticed in the school system is that in the elementary school years, boys and girls are equally competent and interested in this material. By the time they get to high school, we have that 70/30 split of males versus females. In the middle school, the numbers are all over place, but in the formal classes, it seems to be at 70/30 split by 7th grade and I can't really find any single root cause that causes that.
Unfortunately, I think I saw some stuff this week with Computer Science Education Week where students as young as first grade are working with small robots in small groups and there always seems to be the extrovert boy that is like, “It's a robot. I'm going to be the one that plays with it,” and he gatekeeps access to girls who are like, “It's my turn.” It's really discouraging to see that behavior ingrained at such a young age.
Any attempt I try to address it at the high school level – well, not any attempt, but I feel like a lot of times I can come off as the creepy old guy trying to encourage high school age girls to be more interested in computer science. It's a hard place for me to be.
EMILY: Yeah. I don't think you're the creepy old guy.
[laughter]
I think this is a larger topic in society right now is it's ingrained in women to be meek and to not be as confident, and that's really hard to overcome. That sounds terrible. I don't think people consciously do that all the time. I don't think men are consciously trying to speak over women all the time, but it it's definitely happened to me all over the place—it's happened at work, it's happened in interviews.
I think getting over that is definitely really tough, but some of the things that have helped me are to see and celebrate women's accomplishments. Like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it makes me so happy. I know one time in high school, David took a few other female students and I to a celebration of women's accomplishments and the whole thing, there were male allies there, but the topic of the night was women bragging loudly about the things that they've accomplished. Because that's not something that's encouraged for us to do, but it's something that it builds our confidence and also changes how other people see us.
Because the thing is, it's easy to brag and it's saddening that people will just implicitly believe that the more you say you did. So the more frequently you brag about how smart you are, the more inclined people are to believe it because we're pretty suggestible as humans. When women don't do that, that subtly over time changes the perspective of us. We have to, very intently – I can't think of a word I'm trying to say, but be very intentional about bragging about ourselves regardless of how uncomfortable it is, regardless of whether we think we deserve it, or not.
MANDY: I also think it's really important for women to also amplify other women, like empowered women empower women. So when we step up and say, “Look at this thing Emily did, isn't that cool?”
EMILY: Yeah.
MANDY: That's something that we should be doing to highlight and amplify others' accomplishments.
EMILY: For sure. I've been to the Grace Hopper conference virtually because it was during COVID times, but that was a huge component of it was there would be these networking circles where women just talk about the amazing things that they've done and you just meet all these strangers who have done really cool things. It goes in both directions, like you said, you get to raise them up and also be encouraged yourself and have something to look forward to.
ARTY: It sounds like just being exposed to that culture was a powerful experience for you.
EMILY: For sure.
ARTY: I was thinking about our conversation earlier about role models and finding someone to look up to that you're like, “You're a really cool person. I admire you.” Having strong women as role models makes it much easier for us to operate a certain way when we interact with other people, and stay solid within ourself and confident within ourself and not cave in. When all the examples around us of women are backing off, caving in, and just being submissive in the way that they interact with the world, those are the sort of patterns we pick up and learn.
Likewise, the mixed gender conversations and things that happen. We pick up on those play of dynamics, the things that we see, and if we have strong role models, then it helps us shift those other conversations. So if we have exp more experience with these things, like the Grace Hopper conference and being able to go into these other that have a culture built around strong women and supporting being a strong woman, then you can take some of those things back with you in these other environments and then also be a role model for others. Because people see you being strong and standing up for yourself, being confident and they might have the same reaction to you of like, “Wow, I really admire her. She's really cool.” And then they start to emulate those things too.
So these cultural dynamics, they spread and it's this subconscious spreading thing that happens. But maybe if we can get more experiences in these positive environments, we can iteratively take some of those things back with us and influence our other environments that, that maybe aren't so healthy.
EMILY: Yeah. I agree. And I think also, it's important to be honest and open about where you started because it's easy, if you're a really confident woman walking into the room, for people to think you've always been that way. I think it's important to tell the stories about when you weren't, because that's how other people are going to connect with you and see a path forward for themselves. Definitely.
I'll start by telling a story. I think it's just a million small experiences. I was a strong student in high school. I was very good at math. We had study halls where we'd sit in the auditorium and we'd all be doing homework, and students would often go to the guy in my math class who knew less than I did and ask for help. I would just sit there and listen to him poorly help the other students and mostly just brag about himself, and just be quiet and think about how angry it made me, but not really be able to speak up, or say anything.
I'm very different now. Because of the exposure that I've had, I am much more quick to shut that down and to give a different perspective when someone's acting that way.
MANDY: But how cool would it have been if that guy would've been like, “Don't ask me, ask Emily”?
DAVE: That's a really important point because I hear women talk about this problem all the time and I don't think the solution is a 100% in the women's hands. I think that it's men in the room.
My own personal experience, most of my career has been spent in government contracting space and, in that space, the percentage of women to men is much higher. It's still not great, but I think there's a better attempt at inclusion during recruiting. I think that there's a lot of just forces in that environment that are more amenable to that as a career path for women.
And then when I started consultancy with my two business partners, Kim and Karen, that was an unheard-of thing that I had two women business partners and at the time we started it, I didn't think it was that big of a deal at all. But then we were suddenly in the commercial space and people thought it was some scam I was running to be a minority owned company and my partner was my wife, or I'd go into a meeting and somebody thought I brought a secretary and I was like, “No, she's an engineer and she's good, if not better than me.”
It opened my eyes to the assumptions that people make about what the consulting rates even should be for men versus women and it's in that environment I learned that I had to speak up. I had to represent to be a solution to that problem. I think you can get in an argument with other guys where they aren't even convinced there's a problem to solve. They'll start talking about, “Oh, well, women just aren't as interested in this career path.” It's like, I've known plenty that are and end up leaving.
EMILY: I think definitely having support from both sides has been really important because it is typically men in places of authority and to have them be encouraging and not necessarily forcing you into the spotlight, but definitely trying to raise you up and encourage you to speak out means a lot.
ARTY: Yeah. I found most of the teams I've been on, I was the only woman on the team, or one of two maybe and early on, when nobody knows you, people make a lot of assumptions about things. The typical thing I've seen happen is when you've got a woman programmer is often, the bit is flipped pretty early on of that oh, she doesn't know what she's doing and stuff, we don't need to listen to what she says kind of thing and then it becomes those initial conversations and how things are framed, tend to affect a lot of how the relationships on the team are moving forward.
One of the things that I learn as just an adaptive thing is I was really smart. So what I do, the first thing on the team I'd find out what the hardest problem was, that none of the guys could solve and figure it out, and then I would go after that one. My first thing on the team, I would go and tackle the hardest thing. I found that once you kick the ass of the biggest baddy on the yard, respect.
[laughter]
So I ended up not having problems moving forward and that the guys would be more submissive toward me, even as opposed to the other way around. But it's like you come into a culture that is dominated by certain ways of thinking in this masculine hierarchy, alpha male thing going on and if that's the dominant culture, you have to learn to play that game and stake yourself in that game. Generally speaking, in this engineering world, intelligence is fairly respected. So I've at least found that that's been a way for me to operate and be able to reset that playing field anyway.
MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
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ARTY: Well, speaking of games, Arty, one of the things that Emily mentions in her bio is playing Dungeons and Dragons and this is an area where as well as I know Emily from her high school years, this is not something I know much about Emily at all. So I'd like to talk about that. Play, or DM, Emily?
EMILY: Both. But I really enjoy DMing because it's all about creating problems to solve, in my opinion, like you throw out a bunch of story threads. The way I approach things is I try actually, unlike a lot of DMs, I do not do a lot of world building for places my players haven't been. I pretty much, there are bright light at the center of the world and anything the light doesn't touch doesn't exist. I haven't written it and I don't really look at it that often.
So I'm constantly throwing out story threads to try and see what they latch onto and I'll dive into their character backstory to see what they are more predisposed to be interested in. It's like writing a weekly web comic. You don't have necessarily a set beginning and end and you don't really know where you're going to end up in between, but you end up with all these cool threads and you can tie them together in new and interesting ways. Just seeing the connections between those and being able to change what you want something to be on the fly is really cool and just very stimulating mentally for me. So it's like a puzzle exercise the whole time and it is also an interesting social exercise because you're trying to balance the needs of each person.
I feel like D&D allows you to know people on a really deep level, because a lot of times, our characters are just – that we’re playing. I guess, I didn't really explain what D&D is; I just made an assumption that people would know. It's a tabletop role playing game where you make a character. You're usually heroic and you're going about on this adventure trying to help people solve problems and these characters tend to be just naturally an extension of ourselves. So you get to see all the things that subconsciously the person doesn't real about themselves, but that show up in their character. I think that's really cool.
DAVE: So do you have a weekly game, or how often do you play?
EMILY: I try to run a weekly game. College often gets in the way. [laughs]
DAVE: How many players?
EMILY: It ranges from 3 to 4, sometimes 5. It's really cool because it's also, most of them are people that I met during the pandemic. So we've played predominantly online and this is the way we've gotten to know each other. We've become really close in the year, or so since we started playing together through the game that I DM and through the game that one other person in the group DMs and it's cool. It's definitely a way to kind of transcend the boundaries of Zoom and of video calls in general.
DAVE: Hmm.
ARTY: How did you end up getting into that?
EMILY: It was just a friend group in high school. Someone said, “Hey, I would like to run a Dungeon and Dragons game. Do you want to play?” And I said, “Oh, what's that?” I've always loved books and reading so it was kind of a natural progression to go from reading a story to making a story collaboratively with other people. So that just immediately, I had a connection with it and I loved the game and that's been a huge part of my hobbies and my outside of tech life ever since.
DAVE: Yeah. I played D&D as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, but my mom took all my stuff away from me when that Tom Hanks movie came out that started the whole Satan panic thing. So I didn't play for a long time until my own kids were interested after getting hooked on Magic. Seeing my own kids interested in D&D, the story building, the writing, the math that they had to do, like I don't know why any parent wouldn't encourage their kids to play this game. It's just phenomenal. The collaborative, creative, sharing, math; it's got everything.
EMILY: Yeah. I'm an introverted person so it takes a lot to make me feel motivated to be in a group with other people consistently, but D&D does that and it does it in a way that's not, I guess, prohibitive to people who are naturally shy. Because you're pretending to be someone else and you're not necessarily having to totally be yourself and you're able to explore the world through a lens that you find comfortable.
DAVE: That’s really cool.
EMILY: I guess, also, it kind of goes back to our conversation about teaching. Being a DM, a lot of my players are people who have not played before, or very, very new. Like, maybe they've read a lot about it, maybe they've watched them [43:18] shows, but they maybe haven't necessarily played.
D&D does require a lot of math and there's a lot of optimization, like you can get very into the weeds with your character sheet trying to make the most efficient battle machine, whatever and that's not really always approachable. Especially when I started introducing my younger siblings to D&D, I used versions, D&D like games that were similar, but not quite D&D. Like less math, a very similar amplified character sheets so you're looking at fewer numbers, or fewer calculations involved just to kind of get the essence, because there's a few core concepts in D&D.
You have six statistics about your character that they change a little bit between different types of role-playing games, but they're pretty universal, I think for the most part. It's constitution, strength, dexterity, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma. Once you kind of nail those concepts down and once a person understands what those skills are supposed to mean, that really opens the gates to understanding a lot more about the core mechanics of D&D outside of the spell casting stuff and all the other math that's involved.
I think just simplifying the game down to that makes them fall in love with the narrative and collaborative aspect of the game, and then be more motivated to figure out the math, if they weren't already predisposed to that.
DAVE: So if somebody were interested in picking up a game trying to figure it out, where would they start?
EMILY: It really to depends on the age group. If you're going to play with high school students, I would definitely say if none of you have played before, then pick up a player's handbook, maybe a dungeon master's guide if you're going to DM, you've never DM before because it gives a lot of tips for just dealing with the problems that arise in a collaborative storytelling game. And then probably just a prewritten module so you don't have to worry about building your own story, because these modules are stories that are written by professional game developers and you can take pieces of them and iterate it on yourself so you don't have to start with nothing.
But if you are going for a much younger audience, I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, but it's essentially an animal adventure game. It's very much D&D without using the word D&D because I think it's a different company, it's copyrighted, and whatnot. But you have these little cute dog characters and they're trying to defeat an evil animal overlord who wants to ruin the town festival. It's very family friendly, like there's no death like there is in regular D&D and it's just a chance to engage with the character creation aspect of it.
MANDY: That's really cool.
So we're about heading towards our time, but I really appreciate you coming on the show, Emily and I wanted to just ask you, if you could give any advice to young girls looking to get into tech, or software engineering, what advice would you give them?
EMILY: I think don't be afraid to walk off the path. A lot of my life has been kind of bucking the prewritten path that a lot of people are told is the best one because it didn't work for me, or whatever reason, and I think it's important just to not be afraid of that and to be courageous in making your own path.
MANDY: That's great advice.
So should we head into reflections, everyone? Who wants to start us off?
DAVE: I'll start with one.
I mentioned that when asked Emily about her path into college, that I was interested in a similar path for my own kids. I had a really strange college path that I started out a music major, ended up a computer science major, and had a non-traditional path. I've always believed that college is what you make of it, not where you went. Where you went might help you get your first job, but from then on, it's networking, it's personality, it's how well you did the job.
Talking to Emily about her path, just reinforces that to me and helps me plot a path for what I might have my own children do. I have triplet boys that are in 9th grade. So we're starting to think about that path and not only would a path through Virginia Community College save us a fortune, [laughs] it would also be a guaranteed admission into Virginia Tech, or one of the Virginia schools so it's definitely something worth to consider. So I appreciate that knowledge, Emily.
ARTY: I've been thinking a lot about how we can better teach people that don't have a lot of experience yet. We've got so much stuff going on in this field of software engineering and it's really easy to not realize how far that this plateau of knowledge that we live in and work with every day to do our jobs, and how important it is to bring up new folks that are trying to learn.
One of the things you said, Emily was about teaching is being able to find those shared things where we've got a common understanding about something—you used metaphor of male delivery to talk about IP addresses, for example. But to be thinking in those ways of how do we find something shared and be able to get more involved with mentoring, reaching back, and helping support people to learn because software is super cool. It really is! We can build amazing, amazing things. It'd be awesome if more of us were able to get involved and have that experience and having good mentors, having good role models, all of those things make a big difference.
MANDY: I just love the conversation that we had about men and women in technology and for me, I love to reiterate the fact that empowered women empower women and I even want to take that a step further by saying especially right now in our field, empowered men also empower women.
So I think that that's something that really needs to be said and heard and not perceived as like Dave said oh, he felt like the creepy guy encouraging girls, or women to get involved in tech. I think it's cool. Dave has personally, he's mentored me. He's gotten me more interested. I used to do assistant work and now I'm learning programming and it's because I've been encouraged to do so by a lot of different men in the industry that I've been lucky to know.
DAVE: Well, thank you, Mandy. You certainly have a who's who of mentors.
MANDY: I am very, very lucky to know the people I know.
DAVE: I’m quite honored to even be named on that list of people you know.
[laughter]
EMILY: I think the thought I keep coming back to is one that I've mentioned, but didn't really crystallize in my head until this morning when I was preparing for this recording is, I listened to David's interview and I thought about like, “Oh wow, he did really well on the podcast, all these things that I wish I did.” It really crystallized the idea that your mentor should be different from you and should have skills you don't, and you should seek them out for that reason.
Mentors tend to be the people that I run into and I haven't really thought about it that way before, but that gives me a different perspective to go out and intentionally seek out those people. That definitely gives some food for thought for me. [laughs]
MANDY: I love intentionally seeking out people who are different from myself in general, just to learn and get perspectives that I might have never even thought of before. But with that, I guess we will wrap up.
Emily, it's been so nice having you on the show. Congratulations and best of luck on your exams. I know being – [overtalk]
DAVE: I can’t believe you took the time to do this with your exams coming up.
MANDY: I know!
EMILY: I'm procrastinating as hard as I can.
[laughter]
MANDY: But it's been so nice to have you on the show. Dave, thank you for coming and being a guest panelist and Arty, it's always wonderful to host with you. So I just wish everybody a happy new year and we'll see you next week!
Special Guests: Dave Bock and Emily Haggard.
Sponsored By:
00:54 - Pariss’ Superpower: Being Vocal and Transparent
08:01 - #BlackTechTwitter & Black Tech Pipeline
15:56 - Being Okay with Losing Opportunities
28:57 - UX Design vs Software Engineering (What would you do if you weren’t in tech?)
35:11 - Pariss’ Passion for Acting & Being On Set
43:38 - Growing & Evolving Community
Reflections:
Chanté: Being intentional about community.
John: The impact an individual person can have on culture.
Jamey: Be bothered. Ways that marginalized communities share some things and not other things.
Tim: Having these discussions because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience; Making sure the Black experience is changed for the better moving forward.
Pariss: Being an ally vs being a coconspirator.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 264. I'm John Sawers. My pronouns are he/him. And I'm here with Chanté Thurmond.
CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. My pronouns are she/her and ella. And I'm here today with Jamey Hampton.
JAMEY: Thanks, Chanté. My pronouns are they/them. And I'd like to also introduce Tim Banks.
TIM: Hey, everybody. My pronouns are he/him. And I would like to introduce today's guest, Pariss Athena.
PARISS: Hey, everyone. I'm Pariss Athena. My pronouns are she/her.
I'm founder and CEO of Black Tech Pipeline and creator of the hashtag movement and community, #BlackTechTwitter.
JOHN: Welcome to the show!
We're going to start off with the question that we ask every guest that we have. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
PARISS: This is such a downer, because I really don't know. I don't have one. I don't have a superpower, I don't think.
JAMEY: Just because you don't know does not mean that you don't have one.
CHANTÉ: One of them that I think is obvious to me, when I found you on Twitter, was your ability to see the problem, see the opportunity, and obviously, to find the talent. So those are three clear distinct talents you got there.
PARISS: Yeah. Okay, I didn't consider them as superpowers, but we can definitely go with that.
CHANTÉ: Sure!
TIM: I will tell you; it was interesting to me because Pariss and I don't interact very often on Twitter, but I've been a follower and a fan for a while. The one thing that I've noticed about you is that you are always unapologetically yourself and I think that is a huge thing that cannot be underestimated. Because your ability to do these things, and your ability to inspire and empower others is because you first inspire and empower yourself. That's something that myself as a Black man, especially as a Black woman, we don't see that a lot and we don't see that a lot in a way that uplift others as well.
So I've always been super, super impressed with your ability to do that and to do it unapologetically, and to stand there against all the people that level hate at all of us just to be there, complete yourself and let it go off. So always been inspired by that and I don't think you should underestimate that as a superpower.
PARISS: Thank you! See, I didn't consider these things superpowers, but I guess, now I do. [laughs]
JOHN: There you go.
PARISS: Thank you. You're making me realize things about myself. [chuckles]
TIM: Oh, yeah. That's one thing; we'll tell you about yourself. Whether it's good, or bad, we'll still tell you.
PARISS: I love it. I love to hear the feedback.
CHANTÉ: The other thing you might want to do now is we can ask #BlackTechTwitter what they think your superpowers are. I'm sure that they'll give you lots of insights of interacting with you over the last few years.
PARISS: Yeah. I think the whole saying kind of what I want to say no matter what will probably be a big one.
JOHN: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: Yeah.
PARISS: For me, I like doing that. I guess, I don't mind losing opportunities because I wanted to be honest, like it just is what it is, but I feel like I've always been that way. Maybe because I've been bullied for so many years and I'm just one day I just had it. I was like, “You know what? I'm fed up.” I'm done trying to appease people and I didn't care if I didn't have any friends, or whatever. I was like, “I was tired being a pushover,” and from there, I've just always been very vocal and transparent.
CHANTÉ: Ah, there it is. It's like the superhero wound that turns into your superpower.
PARISS: Yeah. Some people will say that. Some other people will be like, “Oh, that’s my villain origin story.” But I don’t know, I’m at a breaking point [chuckles] and I was like, “All right, I'm done. This is just whatever.”
TIM: See, I always thought that was interesting because the “villains,” or “heroes;” any character in a story is most sympathetic when you understand where you're coming from. It's interesting that we talk about the villain origin story. It's because my favorite villains would be heroes in a different setting. You take like Magneto and I take Magneto because for me, the X-Men comic books, for those of you don't follow, has always been about civil rights.
PARISS: Yeah.
TIM: Always from the get go. Always about civil rights, always about the marginalized, and always about the people who are different. Sometimes they're different in ways that you can't tell and sometimes there's different in very, very obvious ways.
I think that I always spoke to marginalized folks because some of those mutants had powers that you wouldn't know by looking at them. So some people are marginalized in ways where they're neurodivergent, where they have disabilities that you can't see, and some of them are very, very obvious about what they are.
But the big thing that made the villains sympathetic is you understood why they did what they did. You may not have agreed with the methodology, but you could understand and were sympathetic to those costs. It’s like I said, Magneto from the X-Men was a great one.
The heroes oftentimes had to endure the same kinds of problems that the villains did, but they went about it by a different approach and I think that's what makes a real big difference in our society today. It's not that whether folks are marginalized, or not, it's not whether folks have been bullied, or anything like that. It's how they choose to use that experience to go forward from that.
PARISS: Right.
TIM: So people who haven’t had those kinds of experiences say, “Yeah, it's a choice.” People can simplify it, or oversimplify it and say, “Oh, well they just had a choice to do good, or bad,” and it's like, no, it's never that easy. It's never that easy. In the right circumstances, all of us would probably do something that we would consider and the privilege that we do enjoy now—bad, or wrong, or whatever. But it was a thing that was necessary at the time.
So I think we, as folks, especially as Black people, or other marginalized folks in this industry, need to be able to look back and to reach down and pull folks up and say, “Hey, there's a different way to go about it.” Because sometimes they just don't know that they have options and that's why it's important for us to inspire and empower folks to be that.
PARISS: Yeah, and I feel like there's always that argument of yes, there is this problem, but the way you're going about solving it is not okay. But that's one perspective and then there's another perspective. At the end of the day, you're like, “Who's really right, who's really wrong,” and it's like that type of war. It's hard.
TIM: Yeah. We don't live in an actual right/wrong, like very black and white thing.
PARISS: Mm hm.
TIM: Not to delve too far into it, one of the things I always liked about some of the Sergio and Morricone movies, the spaghetti westerns, was that they were never really heroes. Everybody was just shades of gray and it's like, did they do the right thing this time? Yeah. They may have been despicable people, but they did the right thing and I see that.
We see that when we look through our history, regardless who it is, every “hero” has got some darkness to them and so, they didn't do everything right. That's all of us and none of us has ever done everything. It's just a matter what is our aggregate. So we always try and do the best we can.
But like I said—not to steal the spotlight. I apologize for going off on this. But one of the things I've always looked at you, Pariss for is because you never claim to be always right. You never have said, “Everything I do is right,” or you follow me like that. It's always like, “Hey, look, I'm just doing the best I can.” When we are very open and transparent about that and vulnerable about that, that's what's inspiring.
PARISS: Yeah. It's funny he brought up superheroes. I guess, he says he's not a hero, or a villain, which is why I love him so much, but Deadpool. I absolutely love Deadpool because he doesn't claim one, or the other. He's like, “I'm a guy making my own decisions and that's that.” I love that because you're not asking people to side with you, you're just this one person and you're going about life the way you want to do it, or go about things. I feel like that's just sort of what I do. I'm just doing what I do and like it or not, I don't know. I don't want to claim to be a role model, or like you said, that I'm always right. I'm not. I'm a human and that's that.
CHANTÉ: Pariss, I'd love to take that as our cue to ask you. Let's talk about what you do, how you started #BlackTechTwitter and the Black Tech Pipeline. Tell us about what inspired you, what you were going through at that moment, and give us high level overview of where you've come from and where you are now.
PARISS: I'll start off with #BlackTechTwitter. So I got onto Twitter in September, or August of 2018 because I had just been laid off for my first job as a software engineer and I wanted to just talk about my journey, finding a new role. When I got on there, that's when I noticed that there was a really small community of Black technologists and up until that point, first of all, I was new to tech so it's not like I really knew the industry, but also, I never worked with anyone who looked like me since I entered the industry. So when I saw that there was a community, I was excited about it.
So one day I just posted a tweet asking what does Black Twitter in tech look like. I wasn't trying to start anything. I didn't even have followers. I just posted a tweet. That was it and then that tweet just ended up taking off and it gained so much traction. I didn't expect that. Black technologists from all over the world posted themselves into that tweet and it just created that really long thread with their pictures and captions of what they do in the industry and overnight, it really formed this movement community in #BlackTech Twitter. Again, that was not my intention. It just kind of happened.
Black Tech Pipeline then also fell into my lap pretty much just because that tweet and the traction that it gained; all of these employers were DMing me on Twitter. It was weird to have all these really big-name companies just in my Twitter DMS. I'm like, “Oh, wow.” Like, [chuckles] “[inaudible]. That’s so cool.” And they’re like, “Hey, we saw that. There's no pipeline problem. You brought exposure to this community. We want to hire people. Can you send us candidates?” Now I wasn't a recruiter at all. I didn't have recruiting experience. I didn't know what to do, but I was just like, “You're just connecting people. It's not that hard.”
So what I did was I created a Discord community. I moved a lot of the members from Twitter into there and that's what I used to ask people like, “Hey, are you looking for work? I'm working with this employer.” I wasn't actually working with anyone in terms of having a contract. I was helping people for free. [laughs] So I was like, “Hey, let me connect you to this guy at Amazon, this guy at Google, this guy at Etsy,” that's just what it was.
I was connecting people just like that and people were getting jobs and so, it was working. But I formed this entity, Black Tech Pipeline, after a lot of the candidates that I “recruited”—I'm doing air quotes for people who can't see—recruited into these companies. I started Black Pipeline because they came back to me and let me know that they left the companies that I recruited them into. When I asked why, it was like the typical just, “They weren't actually inclusive. It was very performative. It was a negative environment. They didn't really have any goals for me. It's like I was a diversity hire.”
I felt horrible because I didn't vet these companies. I just was like, “Yeah, sure. I'll bring you candidates,” and that was it. So I felt horrible about that, especially being a Black woman enduring so much negativity within the industry. I was like, “If I'm going to do this type of work, then I want to do it right.”
So I formed Black Tech Pipeline and I created this recruitment model, which was inspired by my bootcamp model. Anytime someone got hired from Black Tech Pipeline, I would stay on the job with them for 90 days and that meant I would biweekly virtual check-ins with those hires just to ask, “Hey, how's it going? What's your experience been like? Do you have the tools and resources that you need?” Those hires would give me feedback on their experience and I’d take that feedback and I'll relay it to the employer. So it was this feedback loop for 90 days to ensure that everyone's being set up for success, they have what they need, and they're happy and healthy in their environment. And then I eventually launched a job board.
CHANTÉ: Yeah. I remember actually when you started off this conversation, because I was a headhunter at the time and looking for tech talent. So I stayed, I followed, watched, and I was so excited.
One of the things that, as you were telling back that story, but I remember now that you're retelling it. Initially, I was like, “I love what Pariss is doing. It's very organic, it's real, it's needed. It's an opportunity that had been long overlooked.” I was so grateful that you were just building this movement, but I was also a little sad that you weren't necessarily getting paid. I know it was a labor of love, but I felt like all of a sudden, people started coming to you.
I remember just all this activity and I was like, “Dang, that's a lot to take on,” and as a person in this industry, too. I feel like I'm oftentimes like, “Let me go help you.” I take on this role of being a Black woman caretaker of my community. I feel like I have this obligation to look out for people, which I think is pretty common in our Black community specifically. But it just feels like this problem that was so pervasive to technology and quite frankly, in a lot of other industries, became now this responsibility of you.
People were like, “Hey, can you –?” They're sliding into your DMS and they're like, Hey, can you connect us with talent?” And then the fact that they didn't say, “And let us compensate you equitably for the labor that you are doing on our behave that we don't even have the capacity to do, or to maintain, sustain.” So just want to say I hope that now, as you're getting into this work and understanding the game of it, the business and the economic model that you are charging what you're worth on behalf of doing this labor.
PARISS: Yeah. So that wasn't even – when I thought about that later on, I did it for free for 2 years. I wasn't thinking about it then, but now that I think about like, wow, I really build these companies up with Black technologists and no one offered to pay me at all. No one mentioned money at all and I'm like, “That's performative within itself.” I had to really think about that and it made me upset.
I've actually even had a few of those companies come back to me after I launched Black Tech Pipeline and they expected work for free again. I was like, it just gives me insight into who's just here for the check the box and who's not. I've had tons of different experiences. I've even had companies – like I said, I do that recruitment model where I stay on the job with people for 90 days. I've even had companies offered to pay me more money to not stay on the job with the hires and just place them and I was like, “That's not, no. That's mandatory. I have to stay on the job.”
JOHN: Yeah. Red flag.
PARISS: Right, and I ended up not working with them anyway, but it's just like, so much is revealed in this work and it's frustrating. It’s emotional all the time.
TIM: I think that underlies the whole problem of around diversity and inclusion in tech is that companies are willing to do it as long as they're not out anything. But as soon as they have to make an investment that's going to determine whether, or not they see the value in it. So if someone else is going to do the work, if someone else is going to do the labor of getting the talent to them, they don't have to pay nothing for it. Great. Well, that's just easy, but when you tell them, they actually have to invest in that, that's when they balk.
PARISS: Right.
TIM: Because it's not actually worth it for them. And the companies that will pay, or offer to pay, the companies that will pay Black speakers, the companies that will pay Black talent equivalent to the other ones, the companies that will pay to go and look for talent out of marginalized folks, those are the ones, they may not always do it right. But they're doing it better than the ones that just – if we happen upon some inclusive, great.
PARISS: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
JAMEY: One thing you said earlier when we were talking about your superpower of saying what you mean all the time was that you're not afraid to lose opportunities because of the things you say and stuff. I thought that that was really interesting because folks from marginalized backgrounds have to think about what they're doing and if it's going to lose them opportunities in a way that other people don't have to think about.
So I guess, I was kind of wondering what your feelings are about that. I know I've talked about this with people in my network and the way I feel about if a company doesn't want to work with me, or an opportunity wants to overlook me because of this, this, or that about myself, then maybe I didn't want to work with them. I'm wondering what your philosophy is on that and how you came to that conclusion about it.
PARISS: Yeah. So for me, I do not judge.
I've had a few candidates who, they got hired at Google, but they were scared to announce it because of all of these issues with Google internally when it comes to their Black and brown hires. I was like, “No, you got hired at Google. That's a big deal. Say it. I know Google has issues. Trust me, even the smallest businesses have these issues and I don't think it's something we can actually escape, but you accomplished something, you got thing that you wanted, you should be proud of that so, say it.” That doesn't mean that you're here claiming like, “Oh, Google is the gods of technology.” No, but you got hired at your dream job and that's great. Announce that.
For me, there are certain things I wouldn't do, but that's just me. Personally, like I said, I'm not scared to lose opportunities and I think that's because I'm so angry, I'm fed up, and I'm tired of needing to think of something before I say it, when people in privilege, they can just say whatever they want with no repercussions.
I understand that other people aren't like that and that's totally fine. If you don't want to say something because you're scared you might lose opportunity, then don't say it. I would hate for someone to be like, “You know what, let me try this,” and then they can't sleep that night because they didn't really want to do it. They felt pressured to. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. If you want to, then do it. But I'm not going to judge you based off of that. You do what you want.
JOHN: Yeah. I think a number of times on the show, we've talked about companies that have less than stellar reputations for the way they treat their people, places like Shopify and Google. Pretty much like you said, any company's going to have some issues like that. Some people have the privilege and the place where they can quit that job on principle based on that sort of thing. But we also don't want to criticize the people that have to stay there, that they need that job. They don't feel like they can just pick up the next one immediately.
So you can criticize the company and all the things, but we want to separate that from criticizing individual workers who are working that job. Like you said, you’re going to be proud of getting a job at Google. That's a hard thing to do. That's something you should be proud of regardless of what other crap they're doing in their other departments, or at various levels.
PARISS: Exactly. Yeah. I feel like the only people I criticize are the employers themselves because they’re the ones making the policies, they’re the ones making these roles and these changes. If they're only benefiting you, or the people in power and people in privilege, then I have no problem just roasting you, it's fine. You'll be fine. You still make your money.
JAMEY: The way I kind of see it sometimes when someone that I care about takes a job with a company, Google is a good example, where I have this simultaneously, “I'm really happy for you that you accomplished this big thing and it's not that I'm judging people, but also, I'm a little worried for you.” Like, “I hope that that works out for you.” [laughs]
PARISS: Well, yeah, same. I feel that way, too all the time, but I don't tell them that.
[laughter]
But I don't want to raid on your parade, but in the back my mind, I'm definitely like, “God, I really hope they do have a really good experience and if not, at least you got Google on your resume, you can go somewhere else.” But I try not to rain on anyone's parade. I think my negative thoughts, but outward, I’m like, “I’m so proud of you. Congrats.”
JAMEY: [laughs] Absolutely.
CHANTÉ: Yeah. As you all were talking, it reminds me, too. I think for the last few days, or week, I've seen some pieces around the great resignation and just people having privilege to quit their job and what that means about your social location and your circumstances. Many times, the people who have the privilege to quit are folks who have other things in the pipeline, or other means to cover their expenses and just the cost of living, or they have opportunities galore.
I'm just curious if you've had any conversations with folks about that in the past several weeks, or months, given all the things we've seen with COVID and just how the economy's being playing out.
PARISS: No, people are not – well, this is only true for me and the conversations I've had. No, people are not leaving their jobs without having another one lined up just because it's not like you need the money, right? You still have to pay your bills whether you have a job, or not.
So no, they're staying and it sucks that you have to stay in a toxic situation. Like it sucks. That's just what you have to do and yet, that's kind of just what I'm seeing and I let them know like, “Obviously, I'll help you out.” Like, “I have a job board. I'm connected to all these employers. I'll help you as much as I can.
I also don't even encourage them. I'm like, “Unless you want to quit, then go ahead and do that, and I'll help you as much as I can. Otherwise, yes, I understand at the end of the day, things still need to be paid. You have to put food on the table and regardless of what your situation is, just kind of hold out for as long as you can.” It sucks. It's like being between a rock and a hard place.
CHANTÉ: Yeah, and it’s hard, especially, I feel like what I've seen is folks who have taken the plunge and broken into tech. They're like, “Well, I work so hard to get here. You think I'm just going to quit?” Like, there's a lot of hype with my tech team right now to quit and the stuff that happened at Netflix, it was a lot of hype and it's like, that's great that people can quit and walk out and do whatever.
And then there are people who just absolutely cannot. They want to fight and they want to be in solidarity with their coworkers on things, but they might not have the privilege, or ability to really do that in such a way. It's not just performative. It's like, this is their livelihood, too. Doesn't mean that they're not in solidarity.
PARISS: Yeah. No, I haven't talked to anyone who's felt comfortable enough to literally just up and quit because they're angry, or something.
CHANTÉ: Right.
PARISS: Like for them, they just got to go with it. It is what it is.
CHANTÉ: Yeah.
TIM: I think, too, there's a certain amount of almost protest, or hate working where it's like, I know some folks, who were civil servants, work for federal state governments that they detest it. Especially our parents’ generations, baby boomers, they worked for the federal government. Even though the federal government was doing them dirty, they were still going to get their money. They were going to get paid. They were going to use the government that they couldn't stand to set them up. They were going to take them for all their work.
I think there's a lot of that sentiment, too among Black tech workers. Like, look, this company may be treating me wrong, but I'm going to soak them. I'm going to get every penny and dye my can out of these people and when I'm driving around in my Jaguar and going on vacation, they can eat it. When I buy that house, when I have something to leave my kids, that is what I'm doing this for. They can detest the company and you see them every day. They get home, they're like, “What’s up, man. Look, I'm just trying to get this paycheck, dog.”
PARISS: Right.
TIM: And that’s legit. That is a very legitimate reason. I've worked for companies whose ethics I didn't necessarily agree with. But you know what, when I came home and I was driving a nice car, I had a big house, and my kids get fed, I'm like, “Look, man, that's all I'm here for.” That’s especially for marginalized folks, especially for folks that don't have generational wealth, never mind the actual privilege of being able to quit myself. But when you are set up with generation of wealth and you know you have something to leave the next generation, it's a whole different story than this is my opportunity for generational wealth. This money that I am making, it's a lot and I can hate the fucking company, but you know what, when I have something to leave my progeny, that's what I'm here for.
PARISS: Oh, yes. I cannot stand when people are like, “If you're not here for passion, you're not going to last. You have to do it because you're passionate.” It's like maybe for you. I think this is really for marginalized communities, but we don't have the luxury of doing something for passion.
I'm passionate about acting. I wish my mom could take care of my bills while I'm out chasing my dreams. But that can't happen for me. I have to work a 9:00 to 5:00, work on my little skits afterwards. That's the reality of my life for me. I can't just quit this company because unfortunately, even if they're just a terrible company, I can't just up and quit because I bills to pay. I have a child to feed. I have family to take care of. I don't have that privilege.
So I think especially just Black people, we're so used to just living like this, it’s like this is just our reality every day. We have to deal with the way the world is and then still grow and thrive. Just going into a company and dealing with that is nothing new for us.
CHANTÉ: Yeah. Real talk and I really appreciate you all talking about this because I actually faced the same situation not too long ago where I had two jobs and people were like, “Oh wow. It must be nice.” I'm like, “Must be nice? You think I'm working two jobs because it's a luxury, yo? Like, “It's actually because I'm making up for lost ground and for time.” This is equitable, this is reparations. In order to actually have a savings account, I have to have two jobs to be able to help my family during COVID. Are you tripping?
I got to the point where I actually did need to make a decision because it was so unhealthy. I was getting so sick at work and I lost my dad. Suddenly, he got really sick and then that kind of forced me. The life circumstances forced me. But I was ready and committed to work two jobs just because my parents both have always worked more than one job. They always have multiple incomes. That's all I know. That's all I know.
It's interesting seeing some of this play out in technology. What I noticed was, as I got into more technologically advanced, or well-funded companies and stuff, talking to people, they're like, “You can just quit,” and I'm like, “What are you talking about?” [laughs] That is not my reality.
PARISS: Right.
TIM: Yeah. It's funny that people talk about the hustle culture, whatever, having this and having that, having this thing on the side. Look, Black people have been doing this from the jump, from the get go. We've been having two, three jobs. We had a side hustle. We've been doing this; we're doing that on the side. We have been doing that forever because that's what we had to do that and then second of all, if we wanted to have anything more than the basics, that's what we needed to do.
Both my parents work two jobs. I had two jobs since the time I was 16, since the time I was 35. I had two jobs and that was my present to me was when I made enough that I could only have one job and I was like, “Man, I can see my kids and stuff like that.” It's crazy, right?
But that thing is the thing that people say, “Oh, well, now you can do things like that.” “That has how our existence has been for a long time. For a long, long time and that's not new to us. So for us, it is a privilege. For us, it's a privilege to just have one job, never mind to be able to quit that job.
People say, “I'm going to go on and fund unemployment. I'm going to take a few months off to figure out what I want to do.” That doesn't register with me. That is not something I could ever do comfortably. That's not never going to see me do. Unless you're going to pay me to be gone. When people say, “Oh, I'm going to quit and I'm going to go take a vacation to Europe and then I'm going to come back in six months.” I'm like, “Bro, that is not a world in which I live.”
PARISS: Sounds amazing, though.
TIM: I know it does. I love that for you.
PARISS: I wish I could do that. [laughs]
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TIM: So I guess, Pariss, I want to know when it gets to a point where you get in demand, what people want to hire not just your company, when they want to, “I want to hire Pariss Athena to work for my company.” What role are you going to work? What role do you want to be in?
PARISS: Now? That's hard because I do Black Tech Pipeline full-time and I'm always like, “If this doesn't work out.” Sometimes I feel like I should be in a DEI role, but then I don't want to, because I know what DEI officers go through working at one company and it's just a shitshow. It's really hard. And sometimes, maybe I'll just leave this industry altogether, I don't know, because I don't want to be a software engineer anymore. I think I'd start over and be a UX designer, probably. Literally just start over as a junior in UX design.
CHANTÉ: Tell us more about that because that was actually a question I had. If you weren't doing this, what would you be doing? So tell me more about why UX design instead of software engineering.
PARISS: So I'm a person who loves research a lot, especially with UX because I just think it's cool. You're really thinking about such intricate things to make sure someone's having a good experience and you're thinking of all these different communities, especially the very vulnerable communities. I love that.
You're using that to build a product that people are going to use, whether it's a digital, or a physical product. I think that's amazing. I think it also makes you more empathetic and aware of things and I love that. I just think there's a lot of opportunity to grow as a human. I just really love UX design and so, I would get into that.
JOHN: And what is it about software that you're moving away from?
PARISS: Software engineering is not fun to me when I'm doing it for work, but it's fun if I have a personal project.
When I learned to code, I started coding my own – like I thought I was building this app that was going to make me a billionaire. So I loved coming home from work and building it every day. It was a React native application. Turns out, now that I think about it, it probably would have made me no money at all. The social media platforms would've killed me early. So whatever, but back then, I thought it was this golden egg idea and it just had me excited.
But doing it for work 9:00 to 5:00, I just didn't enjoy it and that could have been because of the companies I was at, or the mentorship that I lacked. I don't know. It could have been a bunch of different reasons, but I've never really had a good experience coding for work.
And then honestly, if I could snap my fingers altogether and be literally anything I wanted, I would definitely work on set of movie films. I wouldn't have to be an actor, or anything. I would really enjoy pulling curtains if I had to. I just like people on set and watching everything come to life, it's like this feeling I can't describe. It makes me very, very happy. I would probably do that, too.
TIM: I think that's interesting. That part, so many people I know have similar things like that.
PARISS: Oh really?
TIM: Whether it’s they want to do lighting, whether it's they want to do the board. For me, I want to be a Foley artist. For those of you don't know, a Foley artist is when you have a scene where somebody's walking through gravel. Well, they don't actually have a microphone at the feet of the person walking through gravel, they have somebody out there who's taking a block and smashing it in gravel in the place where they walk so, they make those sounds. That's what Foley artist does.
PARISS: Oh.
TIM: But so many people in tech that I know that have super diverse sets of interests, always come back to that portion of working behind the scenes.
PARISS: Yeah.
TIM: To make something that's very visible. People enjoy it. Whether it's music, or whether it's movies, that kind of same emotional things. I love that answer. I think is really cool.
PARISS: That's so interesting. I didn't even know that.
I feel like what's funny. A lot of software engineers that I've met, they didn't start off wanting to be a software engineer. They did start off with going to art school and stuff. I'm like, “What happened?”
JAMEY: I went to art school.
[laughter]
TIM: I'm a musician by trade. I started off, when I joined the Marine Corps, I joined the Marine Corps to be a musician and play a bunch of music.
PARISS: Oh wow.
JAMEY: That's really interesting.
PARISS: Right?
TIM: Yeah.
PARISS: What happened?
CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a story you don't hear every day.
[laughter]
PARISS: Like, did we all grow up and realized that we have bills? Like, why did we stop?
TIM: Oh. So I stopped because the Marine Corps that I was too smart to be a musician and made me an avionics tech instead.
[laughter]
PARISS: Oh my God.
TIM: They changed my MOS in bootcamp.
PARISS: Wow.
JAMEY: I stopped because I realized that if I wanted to do big film movie kind of stuff, I would have to move to either New York, or LA and I didn't want to do that. [chuckles]
JOHN: I did actually a lot of dance in college, but I also did software and then obviously, software pays a lot more than dance so I kept doing it. But I think unlike everyone here, I actually enjoy the software for the software and then so that's what's kept me in it for so long. Although, now I'm doing management. I'm not actually writing much software these days.
But I feel like software is great because like you said, you can do it, make a ton of money, and then go do something else that you enjoy more, or that you really want to do. So it's nice in that respect, but it's also interesting that there's so many people in it that are doing it 9:00 to 5:00 and then they go do the thing they really enjoy afterwards.
PARISS: Yeah, no, it pays well and it pays to support your actual dream. So it works out.
CHANTÉ: Right. And I do think that a lot of the people in tech that I – as a recruiter, one of the things I always enjoy is well, how did you get into this field. I think that the trend is that most people don't actually to get into software engineering, but they have all this array of skill, talent, interests that actually make them much better at their jobs, or make it feel like I can come here, do this work, pick it up, put it down, and then I have the emotional and the bandwidth to go do the things that I really love. Whereas, if I was doing that other thing I love, that might get burnt out.
So I always find that that's an interesting – specifically, it seems like in tech that I admire about people that they have that ability to do that.
JAMEY: Pariss, you've mentioned a couple of times about acting and being on set. I can tell how much you love it because the tone of voice that you have when you talk about it. Now we're talking, getting into people's real passions and how tech supports that and stuff. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what got you into acting and what you love about it.
PARISS: Yeah. So I'm going to say it started with home videos. My mom has so many home videos of just doing what I do and I was always part of the drama class ever since middle school. I was always in the plays. I was always main character. I was doing that. And then high school came and I really got into YouTube. So I was doing videos and I don’t know, I always really loved it.
Once high school came, that's actually when I started getting bullied a lot and then I was like, “Oh, I'm going to show them. Once I graduate, I'm going to get into my top university and become an actress.”
I did get into my top university in New York. I moved there to become an actress and then that's where – no, I didn't, I lied. I went there for film and screen studies. I lied, but I wanted to be an actress, too. But when I went to New York, that's when I realized everybody wants to be famous. Everyone wants to do this work.
I was like, “Okay, let me go to LA.” Go to LA, it's even worse. First of all, I saw 80 people who looked just like me. I was like, “Okay, it's going to be really hard to make it in this industry.” It killed my dream a little bit, but I have still always really loved it, but I don't think it's one of those things I want to pursue whole time to get in front of the camera and that's when I started loving just simply being on set.
I was like, “Oh my God.” I love just watching because I just think it's so cool. I really enjoyed being a background actor on set because you get to see the actors walk by and how they build these things. It's just like this vibe.
Another thing I loved was watching – I would go on YouTube and I would buy the extra DVDs for movies. They don't do that anymore. I don't think. But DVDs for movies, they would come with watch the bloopers and how we put all this together. I'd watch that more than the actual movie. I'd watch it for hours and hours. I'd go on YouTube and watch behind the scenes of all my favorite movies. Everything was just so amazing behind scenes.
It's just so fun seeing humans in this amazing job and that's what I fell in love with it, really. I also realized I don't think I want to do acting. I just like be there.
JAMEY: I relate to that a lot about watching the behind-the-scenes stuff. I totally get it.
PARISS: Yeah.
[laughter]
JOHN: Yeah. I always like that feeling that sense of knowing what's going – for example, if you work at a theme park and you know what all the trails are behind the scenes and how they set up the things, even then when you're attending, or whatever, you still know all the stuff that's going on as part of supporting the façade of the experience. I really always have enjoyed having that experience.
I can even remember that back in high school, because my parents were faculty at the school, so I got to go into the places that most of the students never got to go and talk to people in a different way. So I always had that sense of being on the inside a little bit.
PARISS: Right.
JOHN: And that knowledge of more about how things operate and that's always very satisfying to me.
PARISS: Yeah. Yeah.
JAMEY: It's really interesting because I've had people ask me before like, “Oh, you know a lot about –” I was going to do film editing was what I was studying in school and they're like, “Oh, you know a lot about cinematography and editing and how that stuff gets done. Doesn't that ruin watching movies for you because that's what you're thinking about when you're watching them?” I guess, I get why people ask that, but I'm like, “Not at all.” Like, it's great. [laughs]
PARISS: Yeah, I do that, too. I'm like, “Oh.” I'll point things out and I'm sure it's really annoying to people, but I'm like, “But I never did that!”
[laughter]
I even do that now. As someone who used to be a software engineer, I'd be like, “Oh, I know what they use. Oh, they use these –.” I just know all these things and I know it's annoying to people.
JAMEY: I got a GraphQL error in the wild on Facebook the other day and I was like, “Look at this GraphQL error,” and all my friends were like, “I don't care about that at all.” [laughs]
PARISS: That’s [inaudible].
TIM: I think it's interesting though, because as we're talking about these things, about understanding how the sauce is made and understanding what goes into the things increases our enjoyment on it.
To bring this back a little bit, it's like when I see marginalized people, especially Black folks, succeed in tech—I'm happy for my friends and they do well—but I am over the moon for my Black friends, for Black women, for Black transwomen for anything like that when they succeed. Because I know what all it took. I understand the things they had to go through to get there and it's not the same as everybody else.
So me having understand, because I have that common experience to understand that what it took to get there, I am like, “Yes.” So if you do get that high paid job at Google like, “Yeah man, fuck Google, but yes, get that bag.”
PARISS: Right.
TIM: Because I know what it took to get to that point and a lot of people don't appreciate that. Especially if they don't have the common experience because they don't understand it's not just about knowing the code. It's not just about getting the interview. It's so much more to even get to that point to get that. If you go to the Google, if you go to even Facebook, whatever they call themselves now, and you get that bag, I'm happy. You get that bag because I understood what it took to get there.
PARISS: Right. Yeah, and you understand how it's going to change your lives dramatically and that's the most exciting. Anytime I see someone just got their first – someone from #BlackTechTwitter, anytime I see that they just got their first job, or whatever it is, I'm like, “I am so excited that you're about to start this life-changing journey,” because I was on it, too. I know.
It’s like ah, it's so exciting and you know they're going to have these super amazing experiences that they probably wouldn't have and been able to have had they got a job like a 9:00 to 5:00, I don't know, as an administration person, or something. It’s the financial aspect of it is life-changing. It's exciting.
TIM: Yeah. It's like, I remember the first time I ever flew first class.
PARISS: I still have to do that!
TIM: First person in my family, in my whole family, to ever fly first class.
PARISS: Yeah.
TIM: And I remember texting my parents and my parents cried because their kid got to fly first class and people don't understand what all goes into that. They're like, “Oh, you're in first class.” Somebody on Twitter, they came at me sideways for mentioning I was in first class. I'm like, “You know what, I am going to talk about being in first class.”
PARISS: Right.
TIM: “Because ain't a lot of people like me in first class, you go hear about it and I don't care it bothers you. You're just going to have to be bothered.”
PARISS: Yeah. people are like, “Get over it.” People don't realize that, it is. It's a big deal. Again, these are experiences that we might not have ever been able to have. But luckily, we got into this industry and we became successful in it. Like I said, it's life-changing and we might be the first ones in our family to experience these sort of things and I would hope we're not the last, but that's a big possibility, unfortunately. So it is a big one and I think you should talk about it. Who cares?
JAMEY: Can I tell you how much I love, “You're just going to have to be bothered”? I'm like, [laughs] “I'm keeping that one.”
TIM: Oh no, it's funny because I've had to read somebody in-person and it's like, you're just going to have to be bothered and it goes like –
[laughter]
If I could turn that into a t-shirt, or whatever, it’s be bothered.
JAMEY: I would wear that t-shirt.
[laughter]
PARISS: Have it into a – [overtalk]
CHANTÉ: I want that t-shirt.
PARISS: Go for a gift, whatever.
TIM: Yeah. Because I mean, that's the way we do people come at us sideways for all kinds of stuff like that whether it's been our hair, whether it's been the way we dress, whether it's because the codeswitch to back to how we really talk instead of having to codeswitch to that white professional talk, whatever it is. We say y'all, we eat spice, whatever it is, people come at sideways and I'm not apologizing anymore.
CHANTÉ: Good for you. Don't.
TIM: And again, that's something I've always appreciated about you, Pariss is that you don't apologize to that. You’re just like, “You don't like it. I'm not even sorry. You're just going to have to be bothered by it.”
PARISS: Yeah. I just tell people to unfollow me, or block me. It's fine.
[laughter]
CHANTÉ: Yeah, Pariss. One of the questions I have for you is just in this journey, what has been the most surprising thing you've learned?
PARISS: It's not really something I learned because there's a lot of things I already knew. Especially just working with employers, really teaching white people about diversity, equity, inclusion. Certain responses I've gotten, it's not surprising to me, or anything. Maybe things within my own community, but that doesn't really surprise me either. I think it's maybe the experiences I've had, but coming from my own community. Anything happening within my own community is more shocking, or I just feel more when it's from my own people, but I'm also like this happens in every community. It doesn't matter. But of course, this is my community so it affects me more.
CHANTÉ: And then the other question that maybe this will help to prompt that, too. But for me, it's been a lot to experience and to hold and sometimes I feel like I don't want to do it anymore, but I look for things that sustain me, or things that inspire me. So I'm curious, what are those things for you right now in this season?
PARISS: So I follow, I think it's called @BotBlackTech. It's a Twitter account and they retweet all these hashtags, including the #BlackTechTwitter one. So I get to see every – and anytime someone hashtags #BlackTwitter, I see what that announcement is and I get happy seeing that people are just asking questions to #BlackTechTwitter. “Hey, how should I build this?” “Hey, I did that.” I love seeing that. I just love seeing that the community has grown.
I love knowing that people don't know how #BlackTechTwitter started, because that shows the progress. It means that community has grown a ton and that’s the whole point. You want it to continue standing and later on people find out the origin story of it. That’s not the priory.
The priority is there are just more people here now and that's what's most exciting and I think that's just what really keeps me doing this work because I never wanted to do – what I'm doing now, I never wanted to do it. I actually promised myself I wouldn't do this work. Yet I'm here. But seeing all the good that's come from it, I'm like, “Wow, this is really, really dope.” I feel really blessed and lucky and it just makes me very happy.
CHANTÉ: That's dope. And do you ever give thought about if you ever want to step away, or you need to step away, how this would proliferate, how it would continue to grow, and evolve with, or without you? Have you given any consideration to that?
PARISS: Oh yeah. I don't know if I would want to do this forever, but I know I'd want it to stay around forever even if I'm not the one running it. I'd love to hand it off to someone else. That's something we're thinking about now, because I think the issue with Black Tech Pipeline is that the business – if I were to die, or something, that would be it for Black Tech Pipeline and that's not a good business model. It needs to be able to run with, or without me. So that's something we're currently figuring out right now, how to make that happen.
As for the community on Twitter and the just social media period, it's fine. There's no face to #BlackTechTwitter. It's just a community and it's good. It's set for life.
CHANTÉ: I'm glad you have given that a consideration. I thought about the same thing and I'm always here if you ever want to chat about it, or just have a jam session about it. I'd love to be in community with you and help you explore what that would be.
PARISS: That'd be awesome. Thank you.
CHANTÉ: Of course.
JAMEY: There's something really beautiful about doing something that you care so much about that you feel like you want to worry about what will happen to it, even if you weren't there for it.
PARISS: Yeah, no, this is necessary. Again, #BlackTechTwitter and Black Tech Pipeline have created an immense impact. It has to continue, especially for the Black community. It has to continue, no matter what. Whoever's turning that wheel, it shouldn't matter like that. Like I said, there shouldn't be a face, or just one person, or one designated area. It just needs to be decentralized. In any community.
There's so many different communities and companies that have grown out of the #BlackTechTwitter movement and I hope they're thinking of the same thing. It has to run forever. This is extremely important, especially digitally, perfect. Must continue forever.
TIM: So I guess with that in mind, what are you going to say to the next generation? Let's say, somebody calls on you to give the commencement speech at Howard and there's always that quota. What do you tell the up-and-coming folks, the folks who are going to take up your work?
PARISS: That this cannot ever be personal.
I think the number one most important thing to me is not being afraid to say no and not being afraid to, again, lose opportunity. I think that is so important because so many people can be swayed by money and we cannot—I cannot stress this enough—this cannot happen in the Black community period.
We cannot be swayed by money. I don't want to take money and then need to be silenced, or follow someone else's rules that don't benefit my community, or impact it negatively. We can't be swayed by that. We have to do what's best for our community and that's number one and money, or just that benefit even if, I don't know if it's monetary, or not, you can't be swayed by that. And that takes hiring really good humans, really genuine, good, strong humans, which is really, really hard. But I think for me, that's the most important thing.
CHANTÉ: I really appreciate that. I'm having a reflective thing, but I actually want to save it.
So I want to prompt us to move to reflections, if it's okay and I'm willing to go first, because what you just said really elicited something in the end.
What I heard you say, Pariss is that we need one, as a Black community, a Black and brown community, solidarity, and also, shared values and vision. We have to be on the same page about what we care about and also, what we want people to understand about our experience and why we're so valued and why we are that token of the month, or year, or era. I think that means that we need to be intentional about community and just building a container and having culture around what we are now and who we want to be in the future.
I've been giving myself a lot of time and space to really think about time as a spiral, connecting with my ancestors, connecting with the present, and connecting with the future and just remembering that I can heal all of those parts if I'm present. I'm in community with people who understand that, that we have an opportunity together.
So again, extending the olive branch and just saying I'm hoping that we can be intentional about building community and anybody who might catch this episode today, let's build community intentionally.
JOHN: So what's something to me is the rather remarkable impact that an individual person can have on the culture, really. Like you started this organically out of just what you were seeing and the way you were talking and then now you've built this into a company that you're running and now you're working on how to make sure this company is perpetuates itself even without your work. So you're creating an institution here that's generating all this opportunity for your community.
I think that's an amazing amount of power that you've harnessed there just with your own caring, that you've put this time in to build something and that you're going to eventually build something that can run for however long it needs to run. That's absolutely amazing, absolutely remarkable that one person can start that and bring more people in. It's not just you doing the work, but you're guiding that work. Collecting, focusing it in, and making it into something that’s going to have this fantastic impact. So it’s amazing to see one person can do that.
PARISS: Thank you. I’m telling my community none of this would have happened if each individual in this community didn’t really bring exposure to it, care about it, and bring awareness to it the way that they did. So it's a collective effort, and a collective care and love for the community and its members.
JOHN: Yeah.
JAMEY: I keep coming back to this, my brain keeps coming back to this, “You're just going to have to be bothered,” because I love that so much.
But it's got me thinking, this whole conversation has gotten me thinking about it's really meaningful to be able to listen to you all talk about your experiences in the Black community in tech. It's striking to me how some aspects of it resonate with me as someone in the trans community. Like what Tim was saying about people will come at me and I feel that.
But then there's other aspects of it that are not the same and I hadn't thought about in the way of generationally. My parents aren't trans and they didn't have this experience and it's not this pathway of time where that kind of marginalization is happening.
So I think it's interesting and important to think about the ways that different marginalized communities share some things and not other things. Because I think that's what we really have to understand and internalize if we're going to have different intersectionalities of marginalized folks like coming together to build community together and I think that that's really important.
TIM: So I think it's important for us to have these conversations because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience and the Black experience in America has always been difficult. The doors have not always been open to us. We have not had warm welcomes. We've had our time, our freedom, our money, and our land stolen from us from the jump.
We are getting now to a point where we can establish ourselves a little bit and we've got forces and powers in this country who are trying to cover their tracks on what they've done to us so that they can do it again. It's important for us to have these discussions so that people understand same with the Black experiences and it's important for folks like Pariss to do that work so that we can become established. So that we're not only just citizens, but we have influence with our money, our power, and our position so that the we, as the fruits of the Black experience, can make sure that the Black experience has changed for the better in this country going forward.
That is going to take us, as Black people, helping each other and relying on, unfortunately – I don’t want to say not unfortunately relying on, but relying on folks who are not marginalized to recognize that we do need your assistance and your allyship and your being an accomplice to changing the Black experience for the better in this country. Because if we don't the people who want to change the Black experience back to what it used to be will win and I'm not here for that.
JAMEY: I love accomplice instead of ally, I have to say it. That's so good. That's such a good way to describe the mindset that you want people to be in in a more descriptive way.
PARISS: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: Yes. Thank you for that, Tim.
PARISS: I like that. There's what is it, co-conspirator. There's being an ally and a co-conspirator. My mom does DEI work full-time. She's done it her whole life. So from what I've learned from her, she's for an ally, they're saying like, “Yes, Black lives matter.” They're doing very subtle work. For a co-conspirator, they're getting in front of the Black person when a cop has a gun to their face. They're like, “Do not pull that trigger.” Like, “This is wrong.” You’re really in it actively. So I always prefer a co-conspirator, or accomplice.
TIM: An ally will film it; an accomplice will jump in front.
PARISS: Mm hm. Yes.
CHANTÉ: Yes. Yeah, for sure. And it's important, we need all of them. Everyone does play a part, but if we're going to dismantle systemic and institutionalized racism and oppression, then that is what it takes is to have multiple people willing to play multiple roles and you don't have to stay in one. You can change as your privilege, power, and your resource changes, or maybe it increases over time because you do gain strength and understanding by being in community with people, or maybe you have more money and opportunities. So you're like, “Yeah, I can fund this.”
But Pariss, I'd love to hear your reflection. Bring us on home.
PARISS: This conversation right here about accomplice, co-conspirator, and ally just because I think that conversation was really talked about when George Floyd was murdered, especially on Twitter. There were just so many different expectations coming from the Black tech community, then you have tech Twitter, which is kind of the more white tech community, and just wishing that more things were being done, or people not understanding their role, or not understanding what to say and things like that.
I like what you said about people being able to play their part and then maybe learning more and then growing into other roles. I think that's really important. For me, I always want people to jump right in. Because that's what I have to do, period. It doesn't really matter. That's what I'm forced to do because I am Black.
So for me, I'm always like, “Oh, I respect the people who are just like, ‘Fuck you. This is what it is and whatever.’” For me, I'm more so like, I didn't like when people were coming into my DMs like, “Hey, I don't know if I should say this. Should I say this?” I'm like, “I don't have time to educate you. Just do what you want to do. Just say it.” But sometimes, I have to – not that I have to educate them, or take time to respond to them. But for me, I have to understand that people need to learn how to play which roles because maybe they're good at some versus others and you're right.
They can grow into other roles and it's not something I've really thought about just because like I said, I'm one of those people who wants to jump right in. So I'm just reflecting on that. It's something I'll continue talking about and thinking about and becoming more understanding of.
CHANTÉ: Thank you. That's a perfect endcap to our conversation. I'll look for some, unless you have a favorite resource, but I'll share some so that folks can have more learning to learn about the difference between what it means to be an ally, an accomplice, and a co-conspirator because I think this is just beautiful and definitely needed.
JOHN: Yeah.
CHANTÉ: Pariss, thanks again for joining us today. We can continue the conversation so we welcome you back if you want to come and have part 2. But really appreciate all that you have said and of course, all that you're building and doing for the Black and actually, the BIPOC tech community, but specifically the Black folks. Thank you so much.
Special Guest: Pariss Athena.
Sponsored By:
02:01 - Kat’s Superpower: Terrible Puns!
08:07 - Security Awareness Education & Accessibility
20:58 - Making the Safe Thing Easy
22:43 - Awareness; Security Motivation; Behavior and Culture (ABC)
33:34 - Dietary Accessibility; Harm Reduction and Threat Monitoring
Reflections:
John: Internal teams relating to other internal teams as a marketing issue.
Casey: Phishing emails cause harm.
Kat: AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
Unconscious Bias Training That Works
The Responsible Communication Style Guide
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
JOHN: Welcome to Episode 263 of Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Casey Watts.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're both here with our guest today, Kat Sweet.
Hi, Kat.
KAT: Hi, John! Hi, Casey!
CASEY: Well, Kat Sweet is a security professional who specializes in security education and engagement. She currently works at HubSpot building out their employee security awareness program, and is also active in their disability ERG, Employee Resource Group. Since 2017, she has served on the staff of the security conference BSides Las Vegas, co-leading their lockpick village. Her other superpower is terrible puns, or, if they're printed on paper—she gave me this one—tearable puns.
[laughter]
KAT: Like written paper.
CASEY: Anyway. Welcome, Kat. So glad to have you.
KAT: Thanks! I'm happy to be here.
CASEY: Let's kick it off with our question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
KAT: [chuckles] Well, as I was saying to both of y’all before this show started, I was thinking I'm going to do a really serious skillful superpower that makes me sound smart because that's what a lot of other people did in theirs. I don't know, something like I'm a connector, or I am good at crosspollination. Then I realized no, [chuckles] like it, or not, terrible puns are my actual superpower.
[laughter]
Might as well just embrace it.
I think as far as where I acquired it, probably a mix of forces. Having a dad who was the king of dad puns certainly helped and actually, my dad's whole extended family is really into terrible puns as well. We have biweekly Zoom calls and they just turn into everyone telling bad jokes sometimes.
[laughter]
But I think it also probably helps that, I don't know, having ADHD, my brain hops around a lot and so, sometimes makes connections in weird places. Sometimes that happens with language and there were probably also some amount of influences just growing up, I don't know, listening to Weird Al, gets puns in his parodies. Oh, and Carlos from The Magic School Bus.
CASEY: Mm hmm. Role models. I agree. Me too.
[laughter]
KAT: Indeed. So now I'm a pundit.
CASEY: I got a pun counter going in my head. It just went ding!
KAT: Ding!
[laughter]
CASEY: I never got – [overtalk]
KAT: They've only gotten worse during the pandemic.
CASEY: Oh! Ding!
[laughter]
Maybe we'll keep it up. We'll see.
I never thought of the overlap of puns and ADHD. I wonder if there's any study showing if it does correlate. It sounds right. It sounds right to me.
KAT: Yeah, that sounds like a thing. I have absolutely no idea, but I don't know, something to do with divergent thinking.
CASEY: Yeah.
JOHN: Yeah. I’m on board with that.
CASEY: Sometimes I hang out in the channels on Slack that are like #puns, or #dadjokes. Are you in any of those? What's the first one that comes to mind for you, your pun community online?
KAT: Oh yeah. So actually at work, I joined my current role in August and during the first week, aside from my regular team channels, I had three orders of business. I found the queer ERG Slack channel, I found the disability ERG Slack channel, and I found the dad jokes channel.
[laughter]
That was a couple of jobs ago when I worked at Duo Security. I've been told that some of them who are still there are still talking about my puns because we would get [laughs] pretty bad pun threads going in the Slack channels there.
CASEY: What a good reputation.
KAT: Good, bad, whatever. [laughs]
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: I don't know. Decent as a form of humor that's safe for work goes, too because it's generally hard to, I guess, punch down with them other than the fact that everyone's getting punched with a really bad pun, but they're generally an equalizing force. [chuckles]
CASEY: Yeah. I love that concept. Can you explain to our listeners, punching down?
KAT: So this is now the Great British Bake Off and we're talking about bread. No, just kidding.
[laughter]
No, I think in humor a lot of times, sometimes people talk about punching up versus punching down in terms of who is actually in on the joke. When you're trying to be funny, are you poking fun at people who are more marginalized than you, or are you poking at the people with a ton of privilege? And I know it's not always an even concept because obviously, intersectionality is a thing and it's not just a – privilege isn't a linear thing. But generally, what comes to mind a lot is, I don't know, white comedians making fun of how Black people talk, or men comedians making rape jokes at women's expense, or something like that. Like who's actually being punched? [chuckles]
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: Obviously, ideally, you don't want to punch anyone, but that whole concept of where's the humor directed and is it contributing to marginalization?
CASEY: Right, right. And I guess puns aren't really punching at all.
KAT: Yeah.
CASEY: Ding!
KAT: Ding! There goes the pun counter.
Yeah, the only thing I have to mindful of, too is not over relying on them in my – my current role is in a very global company so even though all employees speak English to some extent, English isn't everyone's first language and there are going to be some things that fly over people's heads. So I don't want to use that exclusively as a way to connect with people.
CASEY: Right, right.
JOHN: Yeah. It is so specific to culture even, right. Because I would imagine even UK English would have a whole gray area where the puns may not land and vice versa.
KAT: Oh, totally. Just humor in general is so different in every single culture. Yeah, it's really interesting.
JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me. Actually, just today, I started becoming weirdly aware as I was typing something to one of my Indian colleagues and I'm not sure what triggered it, but I started being aware of all the idioms that I was using and what I was typing. I was like, “Well, this is what I would normally say to an American,” and I'm just like, “Wait, is this all going to come through?”
I think that way might lead to madness, though if you start trying to analyze every idiom you use as you're speaking. But it was something that just suddenly popped into my mind that I'm going to try and keep being a little bit more aware of because there's so many ways to miss with communication when you rely on obscure idioms, or certain ways of saying things that aren't nearly as clear as they could be. [chuckles]
KAT: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that's definitely a thing in all the corporate speak about doubling down, circling back, parking lots, and just all the clicking, all of those things.
[laughter]
But yeah, that's actually something that was on my run recently, too with revamping one of the general security awareness courses that everyone gets is that in the way we talk about how to look for a phishing – spot a phishing email. First of all, one of the things that at least they didn't do was say, “Oh, look for poor grammar, or misspelled words,” because that's automatically really exclusive to people whose first language isn’t English, or people who have dyslexia.
But I was also thinking we talk about things like subtle language cues in suspicious emails around a sense of urgency, like a request being made trying to prey on your emotion and I'm like, “How accessible is that, I guess, for people whose first language is English to try and spot a phishing email based on those kind of things?” Like how much – [chuckles] how much is too much to ask of…? Like opinions about phishing emails, or the phishing training anyway being too much to ask of people to some degree, but I don't know. There's so much subtlety in it that just is really easy for people to lose.
JOHN: Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that even American English speakers – [overtalk]
KAT: Yeah.
JOHN: With a lot of experience still have trouble. Like actually, [chuckles] I just got apparently caught by one of them, the test phishing emails, but they notified me by sending me an email and saying, “You were phished, click here to go to the training.” And I'm like, “I'm not going to click on that!”
[laughter]
I just got phished!
KAT: Yeah.
JOHN: But I think my larger point is again, you're talking about so many subtleties of language and interpretations to try and tease these things out. I'm sure there are a lot of people with a range of non-typical neurologies where that sort of thing isn't going to be obvious, even if they are native English speakers.
KAT: Exactly. Myself included having ADHD. [laughs]
JOHN: Yeah.
KAT: Yeah. It's been interesting trying to think through building out security awareness stuff in my current role and in past roles, and having ADHD and just thinking about how ADHD unfriendly a lot of the [laughs] traditional approaches are to all this.
Even like you were just saying, “You got phished, take this training.” It seems like the wrong sequence of events because if you're trying to teach someone a concept, you need to not really delay the amount of time in between presenting somebody with a piece of information and giving them a chance to commit it to memory.
ADHD-ers have less working memory than neurotypical people to begin with, but that concept goes for everyone. So when you're giving someone training that they might not actually use in practice for several more months until they potentially get phished again, then it becomes just information overload. So that's something that I think about.
Another way that I see this playing out in phishing training in particular, but other security awareness stuff is motivation and reward because we have a less amount of intrinsic motivation. Something like, I don't know, motivation and reward system just works differently with people who have trouble hanging onto dopamine. ADHD-ers and other people's various executive dysfunction stuff.
So when you're sitting through security training that's not engaging, that's not particular lead novel, or challenging, or of personal interest, or is going to have a very delayed sense of reward rather than something that immediately gratifying, there's going to be a limitation to how much people will actually learn, be engaged, and can actually be detrimental. So I definitely think about stuff like that.
CASEY: That reminds me of a paper I read recently about—I said this on a previous episode, too. I guess, maybe I should find the paper, dig it up, and share.
KAT: Cool.
[laughter]
CASEY: Oh, but it said, “Implicit bias awareness training doesn't work at all ever” was an original paper. No, that's not what it said of course, but that's how people read it and then a follow-up said, “No, boring! PowerPoint slide presentations that aren't interactive aren’t interactive.”
[laughter]
“But the interactive ones are.” Surprise!
KAT: Right. That's the thing. That's the thing.
Yeah, and I think there's also just, I don't know. I remember when I was first getting into security, people were in offices more and security awareness posters were a big thing. Who is going to remember that? Who's going to need to know that they need to email security at when they're in the bathroom? [laughs] Stuff like that that's not particularly engaging nor particularly useful in the moment. But that DEI paper is an interesting one, too. I'll have to read that.
CASEY: Do you have experience making some of these trainings more interactive and getting the quicker reward that's not delayed and what does that look like for something like phishing, or another example?
KAT: It's a mixed bag and it's something that I'm still kind of – there's something that I'm figuring out just as we're scaling up because in past roles, mostly been in smaller companies. But one thing that I think people, who are building security awareness and security education content for employees, miss is the fact that there's a certain amount of baseline level of interaction and context that you can't really automate a way, especially for new hires.
I know having just gone through process that onboarding weeks are always kind of information overload. But people are going to at least remember more, or be more engaged if they're getting some kind of actual human contact with somebody who they're going to be working with; they’ve got the face, they've got some context for who their security team is, what they do, and they won't just be clicking through a training that's got canned information that is no context to where they're working and really no narrative and nowhere for them to ask questions. Because I always get really interesting questions every time I give some kind of live security education stuff; people are curious.
I think it's important that security education and engagement is really an enhancer to a security program. It can't be carrying all the weight of relationships between the security team and the rest of the company. You're going to get dividends by having ongoing positive relationships with your colleagues that aren't just contact the security team once a year during training.
CASEY: And even John's email, like the sample test email, which I think is better than not doing it for sure. But that's like a ha ha got you. That's not really [chuckles] relationship building. Barely. You’ve got to already have the relationship for it to – [overtalk]
KAT: No, it's not and that's – yeah. And that's why I think phishing campaigns are so tricky. I think they're required by some compliance frameworks and by cyber insurance frameworks. So some places just have to have them. You can't just say we're not going to run internal phishing campaigns, unfortunately, regardless of whether that's actually the right thing for businesses.
But I think the angle should always be familiarizing people with how to report email like that to the security team and reinforcing psychological safety. Not making people feel judged, not making people feel bad, and also not making them sit through training if they get caught because that's not psychological safety either and it really doesn't pay attention to results.
It’s very interesting, I remember I listened to your episode with Eli Holderness and at some point, one of the hosts mentioned something about human factors and safety science on the evolving nature of how people management happens in the workplace. How there was this old model of humans being a problem to be managed, supervised, and well, just controlled and how the new view of organizational psychology and people management is more humans are your source of success so you need to enable their growth and build them up.
I think a lot of security education approaches are kind of still stuck in that old model, almost. I've seen progress, but I think a lot of them have a lot of work to do in still being, even if they're not necessarily as antagonistic, or punitive, they still feel sometimes paternalistic. Humans are like, “If I hear the phrase, ‘Humans are the weakest link one more time,’ I'm going to table flip.” First of all, humans are all the links, but also – [overtalk]
JOHN: Yeah.
KAT: It's saying like, we need to save humans, which are somehow the security team is not humans. We need to save humans from themselves because they're too incompetent to know what to do. So we need, yeah – which is a terrible attitude.
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: And I think it misses the point that first of all, not everyone is going to become a security expert, or hypervigilant all the time and that's okay. But what we can do is focus on the good relationships, focus on making the training we have and need to do somewhat interactive and personal and contextual, and let go of the things you can't control. [chuckles]
JOHN: Yeah, I think Taylorism is the name for that management style. I think it came around in the 40s and – [overtalk]
KAT: Really?
JOHN: Yeah, ruined a lot of lives. [laughs] Yeah, and I think your point about actually accepting the individual humanity of the people you're trying to influence and work with rather than as some sort of big amorphous group of fuckups, [laughs] for lack of a better word. Giving them some credit, giving them, like you said, something that's not punitive, somewhere where they don't get punished for their security lapses, or forgetting a thing, or clicking the link is going to be a lot more rewarding than, like you said, just making someone sit through training.
Like for me, the training I want from whatever it was I clicked on is show me the email I clicked on, I will figure out how it tricked me and then I will learn. I don't need a whole – [overtalk]
KAT: Yes.
JOHN: 3 hours of video courses, or whatever. I will see the video, [chuckles] I will see the email, and that is a much more organic thing than here's the training for you.
KAT: Exactly. Yeah, you have to again, give some people a way to actually commit it to memory. Get it out of RAM and into SSD.
JOHN: Yeah.
[laughter]
KAT: But yeah, I love that and fortunately, I think some other places are starting to do interesting, innovative approaches. My former colleague, Kim Burton, who was the Security Education Lead at Duo when I was there and just moved to Texas, gave a webinar recently on doing the annuals security training as a choose your own adventure so that it could be replicated among a wide group of people, but that people could take various security education stuff that was specific to their own role and to their own threat model. I really liked that.
I like being able to give people some amount of personalization and get them actually thinking about what they're specifically interacting with.
JOHN: Yeah, yeah. That's great and it also makes me think about there are undoubtedly things I'm pretty well informed in security and other things that I'm completely ignorant about. I'd rather not sit through a training that covers both of those things. Like if there's a way for me to choose my own adventure through it so that I go to the parts where I'm actually learning useful things. Again, a, it saves everybody time and b, it means I'm not fast forwarding through the video, hoping it'll just end, and then possibly missing things that are actually useful to me.
CASEY: I'm thinking of a concrete example, I always remember and think of and that's links and emails. I always hover and look at the URL except when I'm on my phone and you can't do that. Oh, I don't know. It has never come up in a training I've seen.
KAT: Yeah, you can click and hold, but it's harder and I think that speaks to the fact that security teams should lead into putting protections around email security more so than relying entirely on their user base to hover every single link, or click and hold on their phone, or just do nothing when it comes to reporting suspicious emails.
There's a lot of decision fatigue that, I think security teams still put on people whose job is not security and I hope that that continues to shift over time.
JOHN: Yeah. I mean, you're bringing up the talking about management and safety theory that probably came from Rein Henrichs, who is one of our other hosts.
But one of the things he also has talked about on, I think probably multiple shows is about setting the environment for the people that makes the safe thing easy.
KAT: Right.
JOHN: So that all the defaults roll downhill into safety and security rather than well, here's a level playing field you have to navigate yourself through and there's some potholes and da, da, da, and you have to be aware of them and constantly on alert and all those things. Whereas, if you tilt the field a little bit, you make sure everything runs in the right direction, then the right thing becomes the easy thing and then you win.
KAT: Exactly, exactly. I think it's important to put that not only in the technical defaults – [overtalk]
JOHN: Yeah, yeah.
KAT: But also process defaults to some degree.
One of my colleagues just showed me a talk that was, I think from perhaps at AppSec Cali. I'll have to dig it up. But there was somebody talking about making I guess, threat modeling and anti-abuse mindsets more of a default in product development teams and how they added one single line to their sprint planning—how could this feature potentially be misused by a user—and that alone just got people thinking just that little process change.
JOHN: Yeah. That's beautiful. But such a small thing, but constantly repeated at a low level. It's not yelling at anyone to…
KAT: Yeah.
JOHN: Yeah.
KAT: Yeah. And even if the developers and product designers themselves weren't security experts, or anti-abuse experts, it would just get them thinking, “Oh hey, we should reach out to the trust and safety team.”
CASEY: Yeah. I'm thinking about so many steps and so many of these steps could be hard. The next one here is the security team responsive and that has a lot to do with are they well-staffed and is this a priority for them? Oh my goodness.
KAT: Yeah. [laughs] So many things.
CASEY: It's layers. But I'm sure you've heard of this, Kat. The Swiss cheese model of error prevention?
KAT: Yeah. Defense in depth.
CASEY: Yeah.
[chuckles]
I like to bring it up on the podcast, too because a lot of engineers and a lot of non-security people don't know about it.
KAT: Hmm.
CASEY: Do you want to explain it? I don't mind. I can.
KAT: Oh, yeah. Basically that there are going to be holes in every step of the process, or the tech and so, that's why it's important to have this layered approach. Because over time, even if something gets through the first set of holes, it may not get through a second set where the holes are in different spots. So you end up with a giant stack of Swiss cheese, which is delicious, and you come out with something that's hopefully pretty same.
[laughter]
CASEY: Yeah, and it's the layers that are – the mind-blowing thing here is that there can be more than one layer. We don't just need one layer of Swiss cheese on this sandwich, which is everybody pay attention and don't ever get phished, or it's your fault. You can have so many layers than that. It can be like a grilled cheese, really, really thick, grilled cheese.
[laughter]
KAT: Yes. A grilled cheese where the bread is also cheese.
CASEY: Yes! [laughs]
MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
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CASEY: Earlier, you mentioned awareness, Kat as something interesting. You want to talk about awareness more as a term and how it relates to this?
KAT: Oh, yeah. So I – and technically, my job title has security awareness in it, but the more I've worked in the security space doing employee security education stuff as part of all my job. I know language isn't perfect, but I'm kind of the mindset that awareness isn't a good capture of what a role like mine actually should be doing because awareness without behavior change, or action is just noise. It's just we're all very aware of things, but if we don't have an environment that's friendly to us putting that awareness into some kind of action, or engagement, or response, we are just aware and scared. [laughs]
CASEY: Yeah, awareness alone just makes us feel bad. We need more than that.
KAT: Yeah. So I think security awareness is sometimes just a product of a term that got standardized over several years as it's in all of the compliance control frameworks, security awareness is a part of it. I don't know it's the best practice thing. I hope over time it will continue to evolve.
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: As with any other kind of domains.
JOHN: Yeah. I think that maybe security motivation might be a better term for it.
KAT: I've seen a bunch of different ones used. So I end up speaking in terms of, I don't know, security education and engagement is what I'm working on. Security culture is my vision. I've seen things like security awareness, behavior, and culture, ABC, things like that. But all this to say security awareness not being in a vacuum.
CASEY: I like those. This reminds me of a framework I've been thinking about a lot and I use in some of my DEI workshops. AIDA is an acronym. A-I-D-A. The first one's Awareness, the last one is Action, and in the middle is Interest and Desire.
KAT: Nice.
CASEY: So the questions I use to frame is like, are they aware of, for example, if they're misgendering someone? That's the context I'm using this in a lot. Are they aware of this person's pronouns in the first place? Are they interested in caring about this person and do they want to do anything about it and did they do it? Did they use their proper pronouns? Did they correct their actions? It's like 4 stages – [overtalk]
KAT: I like that.
CASEY: AIDA. It's used in marketing a lot for like a sales funnel, but I apply it to all sorts of how do you get someone from aware to action?
KAT: I like that a lot.
It's been interesting working at a place that makes a product that's more in the sales and marketing space. Definitely learned a lot because a couple of previous roles I've had been with security vendors. I think one of the interesting ideas that was a new concept to me when I started was this idea of inbound marketing, where instead of just cold contacting people and telling them, “Be interested in us, be interested in us, buy our stuff,” you generate this reputation as being of good service by putting out useful free nuggets of content, like blog posts, webinars, and things. Then you get people who are interested based on them knowing that you've got this, that you offer a good perspective, and then they all their friend. They are satisfied customers, and they go promote it to people.
I think about this as it applies to security teams and the services they provide, because even though corporate security teams are internal, they've still got internal customers. They've still got services that they provide for people. So by making sure that the security team is visible, accessible, and that the good services that they provide are known and you've got satisfied customers, they become promoters to the rest of their teams. Think about like security can definitely learn a lot from [chuckles] these sales and marketing models.
CASEY: I can totally imagine the security team being the fun team, the one you want to go work with and do workshops with because they make it so engaging and you want to. You can afford to spend your time on this thing.
[laughter]
KAT: Oh yes.
CASEY: You might do it.
[laughter]
JOHN: Yeah, and I think marketing's a great model for that. Marketing sort of has a bad reputation, I think amongst a lot of people because it's done badly and evilly by a lot of people. But it's certainly possible and I think inbound market is one of those ways that you're engaging, you're spreading awareness, you're letting people select themselves into your service, and bring their interest to you. If you can develop that kind of rapport with the employees at your company as a security team, everybody wins.
KAT: Yeah, absolutely, and it can absolutely be done.
When I was working at Duo a couple jobs ago, I was on their security operations team and we were responsible, among other things, for both, the employee security education and being the point of intake; being the people that our colleagues would reach out to with security concerns to security and it definitely could see those relationships pay off by being visible and being of good service.
CASEY: So now I'm getting my product manager hat on, like team management.
KAT: Yeah.
CASEY: I will want to choose the right metrics for a security team that incentivizes letting this marketing kind of approach happen and being the fun team people want to reach out to have the bigger impact and probably the highest metric is like nobody gets a security breach. But that can't be the only one because maybe you'll have a lucky year and maybe you'll have an unlucky that's not the best one. What other metrics are you thinking of?
KAT: That's the thing, there's a lot more that goes into not getting pwned than how aware of security people are. There's just way too many factors to that. But – [overtalk]
CASEY: Yeah. I guess, I'm especially interested in the human ones, like how come – [overtalk]
KAT: Oh, yeah. And I mean like – [overtalk]
CASEY: The department allowed to do the things that would be effective, like incentivized and measured in a sense.
KAT: Yeah, and I think a lot of security education metrics often have a bit of a longer tail, but I think about not – I don't really care so much about the click rates for internal phishing campaigns, because again, anyone can fall for a phish if it's crafted correctly enough. If it's subtle enough, or if just somebody's distracted, or having a bad day, which we never have. It's not like there's a pandemic, or anything.
But for things that are sort of numbers wise, I think about how much are people engaging with security teams not just in terms of reporting suspicious emails, but how often are they reporting ones that aren't a phishing simulation? How much are they working with security teams when they're building new features and what's the impact of that baseline level before there's, I don't know, formal process for security reviews, code reviews, threat modeling stuff in place? What does that story look like over time for the product and for product security?
So I think there's quite a bit of narrative data involved in security education metrics.
JOHN: Yeah. I mean you could look at inbound interests, like how often are you consulted out of the blue by another team, or even of the materials you've produced, what's the engagement rates on that? I think that's a lower quality one, but I think inbound interest would be fantastic.
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking to some degree about well, what kinds of vulnerabilities are you shipping in your code? Because I think there's never 100% secure code. But I think if you catch some of the low-hanging fruits earlier on, then sometimes you get an interesting picture of like, okay, security is being infused into the SDLC at all of these various Swiss cheese checkpoints.
So think about that to some degree and that's often more of a process thing than a purely an education thing, but getting an education is an enhancer to all of these other parts of the security programs.
JOHN: So in the topics for the show that you had suggested to us, one of the things that stood out to me was something you called dietary accessibility. So can you tell me a little bit more about what that means?
KAT: So earlier in this year, in the middle of all of this pandemic ridiculousness, I got diagnosed with celiac disease. Fortunately, I guess, if there was a time to be diagnosed with that, it’s I'm working remotely and nobody's going out to eat really. Oh, I should back up. I think a lot of people know what it is, but just in case, it's an autoimmune disorder where my body attacks itself when I eat gluten. I've described it in the past as my body thinks that gluten is a nation state adversary named fancy beer.
[laughter]
Ding, one more for the pun counter. I don't know how many we're up to now. [laughs]
CASEY: I have a random story about a diet I had to do for a while for my health.
I have irritable bowel syndrome in my family and that means we have to follow over really strict diet called the low FODMAP diet. If your tummy hurts a lot, it's something you might look into because it's underdiagnosed. That meant I couldn't have wheat, but not because I had celiac disease; I was not allergic to the protein in wheat flour. I was intolerant to the starch and wheat flour. So it would bother me a lot.
People said, “Do you have celiac, or?” And I was like, “No, but I cannot have wheat because the doctor told me so, but no, it's not an allergy.” I don’t know, my logical brain did not like that question.
[laughter]
That was an invalid question. No, it's not a preference. I prefer to eat bread, but I cannot, or it hurts my body according to my doctor.
KAT: [chuckles] So you can't have the starch and I can't have the protein. So together, we can just – [overtalk]
CASEY: Separate it!
KAT: Split all of the wheat molecules in the world and eat that. [laughs]
CASEY: That's fair. I literally made gluten-free bread with gluten. [laughs] I got all the gluten-free starches and then the gluten from the wheat and I didn't have the starch in the wheat and it did not upset my stomach.
KAT: Oh man.
JOHN: Yeah. I've got a dairy sensitivity, but it's not lactose. It's casein so it's the protein in the dairy.
CASEY: Protein, uh huh.
KAT: Oh, interesting.
CASEY: I apologize on behalf of all the Casey.
[laughter]
Casey in.
KAT: Who let Casey in?
CASEY: Ding!
KAT: Ding!
No, but it’s made me think a lot about as I was – first of all, it's just I didn't fully appreciate until I was going through it firsthand, the amount of cognitive overload that just goes into living with it every day. [laughs]
Speaking of constant state of hypervigilance, it took a while for that to make it through – I don't know, me to operationalize to my new life that's going to be my reality for the [laughs] rest of my life now because it was just like, “Oh, can I eat this? Can I eat that?” All of that.
Something that at least helped ease me out of this initial overwhelm and grieving period was tying some of the stuff that I was dealing with back to how would I do this in my – how would I approach this if this were a security education and security awareness kind of thing?
CASEY: Oh, yeah.
KAT: Because it's a new concept and it's a thing that is unfamiliar and not everyone is an expert in it. so I’m like, “How would I treat myself as the person who's not an expert in it yet?” I, again, tried to get myself back to some of those same concepts of okay, let's not get stuck in thud mode, let's think about what are some of the actual facts versus what’s scaremongering. I don't need to know how much my risk of colon cancer is increased, because that's not how helpful for me to actually be able to go about my day. I need to know what are the gluten-free brands of chips? That's critical infrastructure.
CASEY: I love this parallel. This is so cool.
KAT: And so I thought about to – I've mentioned earlier, decision fatigue as a security issue. I thought about how can I reduce the decision fatigue and not get stuck just reading all the labels on foods and stuff? What are the shortcuts I can take? Some of those were like okay, let me learn to recognize the labels of what the labels mean of a certified gluten-free logo and also just eat a lot of things that would never have touch gluten to begin with, like plain and raw meat, plain potatoes, plain vegetables, things like that. So just anything to take the cognitive load down a little bit, because it was never going to be zero.
It's interesting. Sometimes, I don't know, I have tons of different interests and I've always interested in people's perspective outside of security. A lot of that stuff influences the way I think about security, but sometimes the way I think about security also ends up influencing other stuff in my life, so.
CASEY: Yeah. I think that's brilliant. Use – [overtalk]
KAT: And interesting to connect with those.
CASEY: The patterns and you're comfortable with, and apply them.
KAT: Exactly.
CASEY: A lot of really cool ideas come from technology.
KAT: Yeah, and go for harm reduction, not nothing because we don't live in a gluten-free world. It’s like I can try to make myself as safe as possible, but at some point, my gut may suffer a data breach and [laughs] when I do, should be blameless and just work on getting myself recovered and trying – [overtalk]
JOHN: Yeah. I mean, thinking about it as a threat model. There's this gluten out there and some of it's obvious, some of it's not obvious. What am I putting in place so that I get that 95th percentile, or whatever it is that you can think of it that way? I like that.
KAT: Exactly. It's an interesting tie to threat modeling how the same people – even if people have the same thing that they can't eat, they may still have a different threat model. They may, like how we both had to avoid wheat, but for different reasons and with different side effects, if we eat it and things like that.
CASEY: I love these parallels. I imagine you went into some of these in that talk at DisInfoSec. Is that right?
KAT: Yeah. A little bit.
So DisInfoSec, it's a virtual conference in its second year of existence, specifically highlighting disabled speakers in the InfoSec community run by Kim Crawley, who's a blogger for Hack the Box. There was a really interesting lineup of talks this year. Some people, I think about half of them touched on neurodiversity and various aspects of security through lenses of being autistic and ADHD, which is really cool.
For mine, I focused on those of us who have disability-related dietary restrictions and how that affects our life in the tech workplace, where compared to a lot of other places I've worked, there's a lot of free food on the company dime hanging around and there's a lot of use of food as a way to build connection and build community.
CASEY: Yeah, and a lot of stuff, a lot of people can't eat. I'm with you, uh huh.
KAT: Yeah. I just took stock of all of the times that I would take people up for lunch interviews, go out to dinner with colleagues when they're in town, all of these things. Like snacks in the office. Just there not being a bathroom on the same floor as me for multiple jobs where I worked. [laughs] Things like that.
So I really wanted to – the thing that I wanted to highlight in that talk in general was systemic level accommodations to be made for people with be they celiac IBS, food allergies, diabetes rather than relying on people individually requesting accommodations.
This universal design model where you've got to make sure that your workplace is by default set up to accommodate people with a wide range of disabilities including dietary needs and a lot of times it doesn't come down to even feeding them. It comes down to making sure their health insurance is good, making sure people can work remotely, making sure that – [overtalk]
CASEY: Higher levels of Swiss cheese on that. They are various levels.
KAT: Yeah, the levels of Swiss cheese. A lot of stuff cascades from lunch interviews, making sure that if you do them at all, that you're really flexible about them.
JOHN: Yeah. I can definitely relate to the being able to work from home, which I've done for the last decade, or more, has been huge for being able to have a solid control of my diet. Because it's really easy to have all the right things around for lunch rather than oh, I've only got half an hour, I can run out to the sub shop and I'll just deal with the consequences. Because that's what's nearby versus, or trying to bring food into the office and keep it in the fridge, or the free – that's a whole mess.
So just like you said, good health insurance, working from home, these are things that allow for all sorts of different disabilities to be taken care of so well that you don't – that's the base, that's table stakes to formatting kind of inclusion.
KAT: Exactly, exactly.
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: Exactly. Yeah, and I think what sometimes gets missed is that even there are other things that I need to – the ability to just sometimes lay down, the ability to be close to a bathroom, and things that are not food related, but definitely are my reality. [laughs]
CASEY: And companies went out, too. By accommodating you, they get all of your expertise and skills and puns. In exchange for flexibility, they get puns.
KAT: [laughs] And I still make puns about gluten, wheat, rye, and barley even though I can I eat them anymore. That will never go away.
CASEY: They just keep rising.
KAT: Wheat for it. Wait for it.
[laughter]
CASEY: Ding!
KAT: That's just my wry sense of humor.
CASEY: All right. We're getting near end of time for today. This point, let's talk about reflections and plugs.
JOHN: I can go first.
I think the thing that's definitely sticking with me is thinking about the internal teams relating to other internal teams at a company as a marketing issue. Security is obviously one where you need to have that relationship with pretty much every team. But I'm thinking all sorts of all the way around development, DevOps, tech QA. Everyone can think this way and probably gain something from it as a what are we presenting to the rest of the company, what is our interface, and how do we bring more things to it such that people like working with our interface a lot so that we have great relationships with the rest of the team? I think I’m going to keep thinking about that for a while.
CASEY: I'll share a reflection.
I liked noticing that those phish emails can cause harm to people—they can feel bad and then make them less receptive. I've always been a fan of them overall. But thinking about that impact, I might have even been the one to say that, but it was still surprising to me when that came out of my mouth. Say, oh yeah, it hurts people in a way, too. We don't have to have that painful experience to teach people. It can be done in a safer environment.
I wonder what else we can do for training of things like that to make it more positive and less negative. I'm going to be thinking on that.
KAT: Yeah. And I wrote down AIDA. Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Did I get that right?
CASEY: Yeah.
KAT: I'm definitely going to look into that. I think that's a great model for education of all kinds.
CASEY: Yeah. If you want to go even deeper, there's like 6 and 7 tier models on the Wikipedia page links to a bunch of them. That's just the most common.
KAT: Awesome.
CASEY: For plugs, I just want to plug some homework for you all.
Everyone listening, there's this Unconscious Bias Training That Works article that I've mentioned twice now. I hope you get to read that. And I guess, the AIDA – It'll be in the show notes for sure. And then the Wikipedia page for AIDA marketing just so you have a spot to look it up, if you forget about it. Try to apply that to situations, that's your homework.
KAT: I think something I plugged on Twitter quite a bit over the years and a lot when we were talking about the language that we use earlier, I'm a huge fan of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, which was put out by the Recompiler, which is a feminist activist hacker publication. So they've got guides on words to avoid, words to use instead for when talking about race, gender, class, health, disability status. It's written for a tech audience and I really like that as a resource for using inclusive language.
JOHN: Yeah. It's great stuff.
CASEY: I love it. All right, thanks so much for are coming on our show today, Kat.
Special Guest: Kat Sweet.
00:59 - Evans’s Superpower: Talking about topics that aren’t interesting to whomever he’s talking to at the time
12:45 - Debugging Oneself, Neuroscience, Meditation
21:57 - The Limitations of Science
24:54 - The Spiritual Side, Mindfulness, and Meditation
32:03 - Psychological Safety
49:28 - Faith and Science
01:04:08 - Words!
Reflections:
Damien: The value of being vulnerable.
Evan: Disagreement leading to deeper discussion. Cultivating more empathy.
Casey: We can’t usually know what is true, but we can know when something’s false.
Mae: Think about the ways you are biased and have healing to do. Talking about ways we are not awesome to each other will help us actually be awesome to each other.
Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
Greater Than Code Episode 248: Developing Team Culture with Andrew Dunkman
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Transcript:
DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 262 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I'm joined by Mae Beale.
MAE: And I'm here with Casey Watts.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here with our guest this week, Evan Light.
EVAN: Hi, I'm Evan Light.
CASEY: Welcome, Evan.
Evan has been in the tech field for over 25 years, and has the grey hairs to show for it. Evan was searching for the term “psychological safety” long before it became mainstream — just wishes he had it sooner! Evan prizes growing teams and people by creating empowering environments where people feel free to share their ideas and disagree constructively. He lives in the crunchiest part of the DC area, Tacoma Park, Maryland.
So glad to have you here, Evan.
EVAN: Thank you. Glad to be here.
CASEY: All right, we're going to ask our question we always ask, what is your superpower, Evan and how did you acquire it?
EVAN: Well, the first thing that came to mind is talking ad nauseam about topics that aren't all that interesting to whoever I'm talking to at the time. And the way I acquired it was being born probably a little bit different with ADHD and I say probably because I still need to prove it concretely that I have ADHD, but I'm working on it.
DAMIEN: Well, that sounds like a very useful superpower for a podcast guest.
[laughter]
EVAN: Well, if you want that guest to take up the whole show, then sure. [laughs]
MAE: Yes, please. We want – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Yeah, that's why you're here.
EVAN: Well, I do like conversation, that's the funny part. I like give and takes. Just sometimes I lose track of how long I've been talking.
MAE: I do that, too, Evan.
CASEY: Fair.
EVAN: Yeah. I wonder how many of you have ADHD, too. [laughs]
MAE: I do – there is a statistically significant portion of programmers, for sure.
EVAN: I don't know that there've been scientific studies of it, but the currently reported number of, I think 4 and a half percent of the population is well-acknowledged to be significantly under reported. At least among adults. And that's because one people say ADHD goes away with age it, in fact, doesn't. We just look – and I kind of hate that word 4-letter word.
People with ADHD often tend to find ways to compensate for it, those of us who don't get diagnoses later in life, if we don't have it already. And two, how many people do you know who seek out mental health evaluations and counseling? So I'm sure it's massively under reported.
DAMIEN: Which brings up my question. How does one diagnose an adult with ADHD?
EVAN: Yeah, that's a fun one.
So I know of – well, I guess three ways now. One, you are talking to a doctor who themselves has ADHD and has some idea, or a person who has ADHD, not necessarily a doctor, who has a pretty good idea of what to look for usually because they have it. You tell them about some problems you're having and they say, “Huh. Well, I know this problem can sometimes be caused by comorbidity, which is medical term that's often thrown about, this other problem, ADHD.”
That's how I found out about it and frankly, I was trying to figure out how to—after having dealt with so many other problems in my life—lose the excess weight, talking to a weight loss medical specialist in D.C., and also has ADHD. He said, “Huh, this all sounds like ADHD. Fill out this really simple test,” that I'll be glad to share with you all. It's just a PDF and you can share it with listeners and you can pretty quickly see for yourself how likely you are based on how you respond. That's one way.
Another way is sit down and talk with a psychologist, or a psychiatrist who has some special background in ADHD, who they can just sort of evaluate you.
And the third way is coupled sometimes with the second one, which is what I did this early this morning. There is a test called QbCheck letter—Q letter, b, check. It's an online test that uses your camera and eye tracking, so I guess that uses computer vision as part of it—which I thought found intriguing—to test your attention, apparently how much your eyes are moving, and how quickly and correctly you respond to prompts on the screen.
I think QbCheck, you're not supposed to take directly from the – maybe you can, but in my case, I'm going through a psychologist who's going to evaluate that test with me and then talk to me about it. However, I'm really, really curious for the results. I kind of wish I was talking to y'all in a week, because I'll get them tomorrow morning.
I've been a meditator most of my life, I can focus my attention when I well, deliberately concentrate. So I deliberately concentrated taking that test. I wonder if I skewed the test results that way.
[laughter]
I'm really eager to find out.
[laughter]
Because I very naturally sort of slipped into a meditative state with focus on the space on the screen, hit the Space bar when you see a pattern, repeat it, and then just stay there. Okay. It's really hard for me to do this with a lot of distractive noises. All right, I'm just going to be aware of distracting noises, but I'm going to stay with the thing on the screen. That's meditation. Instead of focusing on my breath, I focused on the object on the screen. So I'm dying the know. [laughs] I'll find out tomorrow.
DAMIEN: So then I have a follow-up question. Why seek a medical diagnosis for ADHD as an adult?
EVAN: Ohm yeah. So first off, it's how do I debug myself and if I want to speak nerdy about it, but I guess, that's how I approach a lot of things, trying to fix a problem in myself that I've been trying to fix for well, now 48 years, the time 47 years, this was last October with my weight. Okay, now 47 technically. This would've been 40 years and well, nothing else worked then if I have a new potential cause, that gives me another lever I didn't have before. So when the doctor says, “Oh, ADHD might be a contributing factor.” Huh, I need to know more about that. So that's part of it.
Some of it is I wouldn't say post hoc rationalization, more like post hoc understanding and even self-compassion. I've never really felt like I belonged among most people.
Okay, I present straight white male, like everyone else in tech. I was raised Jewish and that means I'm 2% of the population. So around this time of year, I would always feel like the weirdo people are singing songs in school. I'm being forced to sing their songs. Don't like it. I would squirm them every time the Holocaust came up because I lost relatives in it and I've always just had a hard time, frankly, connecting with – or I had a hard time a lot as a kid connecting with other kids.
I was a pariah a lot of my life and there might be an explanation that really, if fairly concrete one of, well, here's why you didn't belong this because your brain is different, and then I'm really interested in exploring that because that gives me a whole different way to evaluate my life.
Why did I make some of the decisions that I made? Because I don't like some of them. Why did I have some of the problems that I had? How could I do it differently that it's not just understand the past better and have more compassion, it's how can I live a better life? And that's where I can say, “Oh,” a camera, which you all can't see, I'm holding up my Adderall at this point. Thanks to this gem and is this the other one? No, wrong bottle. Thanks to Adderall and Vyvanse, I'm a much happier, less anxious person on a regular basis. Anxiety and depression used to eat me alive for a lot of my life and I don't have that problem nearly as much, that I get maybe one bad day a month now and it used to be a lot more often than that.
I wrote a blog post about it because it mattered such so much to me, I wanted people to know. I've always been very pro discussing mental health, normalizing mental health, because I had struggles earlier in my life, too where—this is a whole other tangent—I was a caregiver for 10 years and that really put me through an emotional ringer and a lot of mental healthcare. So I wanted other people to feel comfortable talking about it, partly because I wanted to feel comfortable talking about it.
So I want to normalize it also because I know I work with a lot of people who have undiagnosed conditions, where if they just explored them and if they work with me, they've got pretty good insurance. They could. Then, oh my God, why wouldn't you? Okay and I say that there's grief associated with the knowledge.
When you find out you've lived a large chunk of your life in a way with these suffering you didn't have to have, it hurts to realize that. Because on one hand, yay, my life can be better, but oh fuck, everything that came before that if I'd known this, it didn't have to be that bad. That maybe I wouldn't have had those experiences, or maybe they just wouldn't have hurt so much because I had to not take my meds for 24 hours to take that test this morning. I was really unhappy last night. [laughs]
I wasn't depressed. It was just, I was really irritable, lots of things were making me stabby, and I don't take a big dose of Adderall. It's not like I'm a junkie. I take 7 and a half milligrams, which for most people with ADHD, that's a tiny dose. But I've played with my dosage and that's right about my sweet spot that that's just enough stimulant where I don't feel stimulated, where I don't feel uncomfortable, but I also don't feel irritable and before the meds, irritable, anxious frequently. That was just my normal life; I didn't know that, that I didn't know it could be different, can be different. So that's why you want to know.
MAE: What an amazing answer, Evan.
CASEY: Yeah.
EVAN: Long one, which again, that's superpower. [laughs]
MAE: Love it. We’re with you.
I would add to your superpowers, the ability and willingness to be vulnerable. Having known you awhile, someone who is willing to just say the things, answer the real answer, and the answer below that answer. There's nothing I like more than talking to people about where they're really, really, really at. I'm just so grateful about how you always do that and there was a couple things in your sharing about not feeling like you belong. It really struck me because you are someone who is always creating opportunities for belonging.
EVAN: That's a reason for that.
MAE: Yeah, exactly. It's like a super, very classic tears of a clown that most of the people, myself included, who work to make spaces for people, it's usually because they have experienced that other thing. So I am sorry that you have had such challenge to be so different, but I can say speaking personally and on behalf of many, how grateful I am and we are for what you have done with that.
EVAN: Thanks. That was something prior to a lot of therapy and medication, I would've cringed at hearing because I wasn't at all comfortable receiving gratitude. I say receiving it, I mean internalizing it. I would hear it and I would wince. I'm not worthy. [laughs] That was what would come to mind. No, thank you.
But there really was a selfish – there's always a selfish component to it and that’s, I create spaces for belonging because I want to belong there. That if I don't feel like I belong in other places, then maybe I can create a place I belong and other people can belong to who feel like they don't either. So again, I can help myself, but I can help other people at the same time.
MAE: Totally.
You said a second thing that stuck out to me about debugging oneself and it reminds me of our co-host’s book called Debugging your Brain.
[laughter]
And I'm curious, Casey, if you have anything that you might want to say about that topic.
CASEY: Yeah. Evan and I talked a lot about this ideas that are in the book before I published it, before I had to talk about it and I would bounce ideas off of him. He knows very well all the stuff in my book. [laughs]
EVAN: I've read some parts of it multiple times over a few different drafts. I was always bothering Casey with what was less CBT, more self-awareness, more emphasis on self-discovery and meditation. I've softened somewhat in that respect that I used to take a more, or a less generous perspective to meditation versus CBT. That I told Casey before you need to have at least a certain level of self-awareness to be able to be able to CBT and that what I see is a lot of people lack that fundamental self-awareness they need in order to CBT effectively. I don't think that that's true anymore. I think it's just like meditation that you peel layers of the onion, potentially and having more than one tool to do that can be effective, but having too many could be exhausting.
So I see a therapist, he doesn't use CBT. He uses – oh geez. Short-term. I always get it wrong. I'll have to look it up, or I'll remember it later in the podcast. It's a 5-letter acronym that's a little convoluted and it's not as common. CBT is about – [overtalk]
MAE: Speaking of acronyms, Evan. Would you be willing to say for listeners what CBT is just in case that –?
EVAN: Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy. Sorry. Cognitive behavioral therapy is where you identify thought, or thoughts that cause the stories and feelings that we're reacting to. The therapy that I have is sort of the inverse it's you start with the feelings, and you go and look at how those show up in the thoughts, stories, and physical manifestations in the body.
I've seen some intro to philosophy courses; where does thought begin, or where does feeling begin, and which comes first. I don't know that neuroscience has successfully answered this question, but philosophy sure hasn't. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Well, I can tell you with some confidence that neuroscience science is not capable of answering that question. I don't know if it ever will be.
MAE: Ooh!
EVAN: That’s interesting. I don't know that – you're saying science won't ever be able to prove a thing?
DAMIEN: Do say more, do say more.
EVAN: Yeah, that's an absolute, I don't believe in too many of those.
DAMIEN: [laughs] Well, we're talking about internal conscious thought, internal experiences. Like I don't think that that's a scientific concept. The best you can get is self-reporting on it, I suppose.
EVAN: The best we can now. That can change.
DAMIEN: Sure. And you can measure neurons and interneurons potentials, and serotonin and dopamine levels. But translating that to thought is not a scientific concept.
EVAN: Not yet. I say not yet, but we keep developing technologies at smaller and smaller scales and if we can develop technologies – we have nanotechnology already. We have complicated enough systems that we can inject into the body that can measure this information and send telemetry on it and you would probably end up with massive amounts of telemetry. But if you could correlate that with honest self-reported thought, maybe you end up with a Rosetta Stone of sorts, or really, really heavily data loaded Rosetta Stone.
DAMIEN: I mean, and that's as close as you're going to get in biological telemetry coupled with self-reporting.
EVAN: Yeah.
DAMIEN: Which is what we have now.
EVAN: But except not at that level of fidelity that if you get a high enough fidelity, maybe you can approximate what people are actually thinking with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
MAE: Oh my gosh.
DAMIEN: We can do that.
CASEY: Let's talk about this fidelity. This is my background, neuroscience.
MAE: Yeah.
EVAN: Right. I know. And a little bit of mine now.
CASEY: So my favorite types of studies, when I was studying this at Yale were the single neuron studies, because then you really know the electrical, what's going on over time for single cell. And I always wish there were more studies that did 1 million cell study—I don't know how many neurons are in the brain—but every single neuron in the brain I want to measure at the same time without the needles affecting anything about how it works, which – [overtalk]
EVAN: Right.
CASEY: Another problem.
EVAN: Yeah.
CASEY: And then that's just the electrical part, but you can't – from that measure, the epigenetic modifications to each gene over time in each neuron and oh my God, it's so complicated to truly represent everything that's going on at the lowest level that I would want to do. So that's why there's some studies on single neurons in organisms with only one neuron, or very few neurons. They just have 6, some model organisms do. But then a human brain, oh. Our best – [overtalk]
EVAN: Let’s say, but at 6 neurons – [overtalk]
CASEY: [inaudible] proxy for neuronal activation. That's an MRI. And I would love to get a full [chuckles] download of everything going on in the brain in every way whatsoever. But that is so sci-fi, I can't imagine what it would look like today.
DAMIEN: I think the focus on the neurological system is completely misplaced. Like I can tell what people are thinking by their respiration rate.
MAE: Yeah.
DAMIEN: By the pupil dilation stuff, I can see it. You can see people's heart rate by the change in color and their face.
EVAN: But there are so many indicators. And so, you see now we're getting into another topic that's interesting to me, too. Because I've been learning to teach the Search Inside Yourself program, which came out of Google from over 10 years ago, which is a combination of neuroscience backed by about 20 different neuroscience studies and neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness to develop leadership skills and to increase performance.
There are a lot of things you're saying, Damien that neuroscience has been able to prove already, that we can prove that – neuroscience has demonstrated for example, that habits, or that behaviors that we repeat, the brain optimizes for those habits. That's neuroplasticity that the brain alters its structure based on the activities we perform. In Search Inside Yourself, we cite a study where experienced meditators versus unexperienced meditators, and experienced meditator's brain is substantially different that they –
So for example, that we can see in FMRIs, for example, that they experience less anticipatory stress before pain than someone who is not an experienced meditator, that they spend less time in distress after that pain. After the pain is applied to mentioned anticipatory so they know it's coming. It's not anxiety, it's they know it's going to happen, then they experience it and then the time after, they recover faster.
So this is proven under FMRI. There are a lot of things like that, where we have that at kind of the macro level, we got really into the weeds, because I do that with the ADHD, I think. But talking about what if we could model, if we could record every neuron, every electrical transaction, every electrical exchange in the brain, but then there's also the biochemical exchanges, too, the neurotransmitters. Casey's point.
Honestly, I didn't think of the actual genetic modifications that occur, but that's I guess, also a manifestation of the neuroplasticity itself perhaps.
My point is—because I got a little into the sci-fi land again—we have these studies that show that the brain can be intentionally altered, that we do this all the time when we practice any skill, we’re altering our brain.
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MAE: I wanted to get back to the thing that Damien opened up about, the limitations of science. My undergrad is biochem and what I realized is most inquiry, most scientific inquiry, is fundamentally a result of a discomfort with the unknown.
EVAN: Hmm.
MAE: And I went to massage school for a little while and I lived at Kripalu the yoga retreat center. So I've been around some of these same circles, Evan and what I find is a lot of times, those folks will use a lot of scientific words and rationale [laughter] to basically justify the fact that they are supporting people, deepening their spirituality. To use science as a validity tool about anything to do with one's spirit, [laughs] I have a lot of feelings about that. It grates on my ears when I start to hear people trying to quantify and justify. I want some mystery, I'm okay with it and I think there's a piece in there.
I agree, though, with all of your opening statements, Evan, about knowing more about one's self and what you can do with that. But I don't dream of every neuron being measured because I think it will actually shroud our ability to understand the things we need and want to as humankind. I don't know.
EVAN: So – [overtalk]
CASEY: I see a pattern, that bothers me a lot, that's very related. Some people take the science to the extreme and they say, “I will only believe the things that have been proven.”
MAE: Yeah.
CASEY: “I will not believe things that have not been proven. Even if they haven't been disproven either, the unknown things, I just won't believe in them at all.” Like meditation wasn't respected by a lot of science thinkers until now there's more studies saying it – [overtalk]
MAE: Totally.
CASEY: Does things. But we knew it worked for a very, very long time.
[laughter]
EVAN: See. And because of the ADHD, I literally have to take notes because I don't want to lose topics.
CASEY: Oh, me too.
EVAN: I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. Ah.
MAE: It's quite why – [overtalk]
CASEY: I wonder – [overtalk]
MAE: I'm an interrupter in life, Evan too is because I'll forget about it if I don't say it right then.
EVAN: Me too. Hey, that's ADHD possibly.
MAE: Oh yeah. I'm in the group.
CASEY: Yeah. I relate to that.
EVAN: Okay.
CASEY: I relate to almost every ADHD meme I see and I wonder if I have it sometimes, but I don't have a diagnosis and I don't feel like it would help me that much because I'm not looking for the med part and I am already doing the coping mechanisms part, like the non-medication therapies for ADHD. I just read everything I can about every mental illness in case there are any nuggets that help improve my life.
EVAN: Mae, what I'd say first is I don't think I brought the spiritual side into anything I said.
MAE: You didn't.
EVAN: Yet, yet.
[laughter]
CASEY: Yet.
EVAN: Yet. I say yet. I mean, sure, I'll just come out and say, “Okay, by the way, I'm a Buddhist.” I didn't start there, though, or I suppose in a weird kind of way maybe I did. I just didn't mean to. No, I started with meditation at age 17 because I was an angry teenager and I kind of accidentally fell into it.
DAMIEN: How does an angry teenager get started with meditation? That’s a key for me.
MAE: Yes.
EVAN: Yeah. Well, it wasn't intentional. It was my mother didn't want to pay for Kung Fu lessons, which is what I wanted because I wanted to beat the crap out of things to take my anger out on them. Come on, that seems obvious, right? Physically, I don't know, punishing inanimate objects. But there was this really nice aikido dōjō nearby and “Why don't you try that? That's cheaper.” “Oh, okay. Fine.”
I didn't know anything about aikido at the time. It also turned out that I found myself in one of the most internal, if not the most internally focused aikido schools of aikido that exists in the world. It's called Shinshin Toitsu Aikido. I’ll provide a link to it. Also known globally as the Ki Society, not K-E-Y, but K-I.
Every Sunday, there was this lovely woman named Mary K who started with a meditation, an hour-long meditation set, and I found that I had so much more peace that. I just fell in love with it and I didn't continue to practice rigorously after going –when I started in college, I tried to. They have a dōjō in Charlottesville where they did.
But it stayed with me and then when my first wife was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease—huge tangent there—I remembered before I went to University of Virginia, they gave me this reading list and they said, “Here are all these books we want you to read.” I didn't know that I wasn't going to be tested on any of the stuff, but I felt obligated to read it. One of those was Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which is a story – [overtalk]
MAE: So good.
EVAN: Absolutely excellent book.
MAE: Yeah.
EVAN: Yeah, okay. So I remembered Siddhartha. Buddhism. Yeah, there is this whole religion that says life hurts. Hmm, maybe I should explore that. That's not really what it says, but that suffering is unavoidable and the whole religion, such as it is, religion is about how do we engage with that, or at least the philosophy of it. And I found a website and a podcast that is currently defunct called Zencasts, which is ironic considered we are using an app called Zencastr, and that comes from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. I've been listening to them ever since 2006 to the Dharma Talks, which is a talk given by a person who is usually an ordained priest of Buddhism.
Now they have a podcast called Audio Dharma that's still running. That's recordings of their meditations and their Dharma Talks and I followed that for years and years and years telling myself I don't do this religion thing and I gave up in religion decades before, but mindfulness. Okay, that’s secular version. So that mindfulness, I'll do that. It turns out, I guess when you get into that enough, you're going to be exposed and you listen to enough talks, you're eventually going to be exposed to some ideas that aren't just mindfulness, that are Buddhist related and quickly realize okay, fine. Maybe I can self-describe I did of, I can maybe there is an identity of secular Buddhism. It turns out that's most Western Buddhism. Most people don't buy into the reincarnation thing, karma, and all of that but the philosophy.
MAE: I'm a huge Pema Chödrön fan.
EVAN: Yeah. I've read some of hers. ADHD makes it really hard for me to take in any book that's non-fiction in its entirety, but I've read some Pema Chödrön and I've read some of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Some people object to the “his holiness” part. Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gil Fronsdal, who is the lead teacher at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and a few others. I just got a huge soft spot for Gil because his was the first Dharma Talk I ever listened to and now I just find his voice so soothing. Let’s say I'm a Gill fanboy.
MAE: Love it.
EVAN: But the mystical versus scientific part that I feel you. The analogy that comes to mind; I got really pissed at George Lucas when he started explaining the Force away with Midi-Chlorians.
[laughter]
It's like, “God damn it, George, take that back.”
DAMIEN: [inaudible].
EVAN: The Force is supposed to be magic. Don't take magic from the world. That just makes me upset. On one hand, I feel what you're saying, Mae. On the other hand, I subscribe to the notion that I'm a biological machine and with adequate science, I'm probably fully deterministic. At the same time, I wouldn't want people to be able to read my mind and with businesses out there like Meta AKA Facebook. No, fuck that.
MAE: Yo!
DAMIEN: I want to say these are not contradicting philosophies. You can believe in a clockwork universe that absolutely is deterministic. While at the same time, knowing that there are things that science cannot prove that are true. Like that's a scientific fact. There are things that are true, that science cannot prove and then there are things that are literally not scientific. My favorite color is blue. That's a fact. That's not a scientific fact. There is no science that's going to prove that. The closer you’re going to get – [overtalk]
EVAN: I wonder if that's really true that no science currently they could prove that. Still, I question whether it's universally true no science could ever prove that.
DAMIEN: The best you can get is correlation between a physical response and a particular wavelength of light.
EVAN: Again, currently. I still – I think there's a chain of causality there that you might be able to connect with enough really, really deep telemetry, which we do not have nor seem likely to have any time at all in our lifetime.
MAE: I'm still on the I don't care how many stats there are, there's still more. And to your thing, Damien – [overtalk][
EVAN: I hope so.
MAE: The definition that I learned in school, in college of scientific fact is not yet then proven false. Like that's the best that we can do.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: And this is pretty limited.
DAMIEN: Yeah, absolutely.
MAE: Also, when you look at the history of scientific thought, which I have taught before, it's fascinating what we used to think were facts.
[laughter].
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: And when we just like – we are constantly talking about it like it's just this aggregation of facts over time and really, it's just constantly rehabbing everything that we got attached to. So all of the things that we even are referring to as facts are things we now know, or whatever, or things we will find out later. Yeah, and most everything we think right now is the probability of it being told is very high.
EVAN: Well, that's why science calls them theories, right.
MAE: Yeah.
EVAN: Because fair theory means this has been demonstrated to be true, given the information we have available, but theories can also be proven false.
DAMIEN: Yeah. And I love that word, non-falsifiability, like scientific facts are falsifiable.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: Yeah.
DAMIEN: And scientific theories are falsifiable and if you work really hard to falsify them and you fail, then it probably true.
[laughter]
EVAN: I mean, if –
DAMIEN: That's what we call true.
EVAN: This is where we can get down to what's the definition of facts, scientific facts. You could call measurements, facts, but even a measurement is going to be some degree of approximation because you are always rounding at some point. [laughs] Right?
DAMIEN: I agree.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: Oh my gosh. I'm starting have so much fun right now.
[laughter]
Okay, but there's also generally not like truth, capital T, is usually very – includes a lot of contradictions and if it is one way and everybody answers that same thing, that's probably fallible. [laughs] Like when you start to get the contradictions and see a richer picture, that's when I feel closer to whatever truth that is.
So when people tell me that there's such and such kind of person and they think this kind of way, or a scientific fact, it's the only one truth. This is when I definitely don't believe whatever it is. So that's also why I like to include the – [overtalk]
CASEY: Yeah, group think.
MAE: Mystery magical option in there too, because unless you're including that, you're not getting the success of approximation to the truth in my book.
EVAN: See, this is where I start – Casey was going there, too. This is when I start thinking about human dynamics and teams that as a leader, or as a manager—because there is a difference between management and leadership, frankly—I tend to be my most uncomfortable when no one disagrees with me.
[laughter]
That if I'm – [overtalk]
MAE: Yes!
EVAN: Or I should say if I'm putting an idea out there that is fairly obvious, that we're all breathing in oxygen, that I'm not too concerned about if people disagree with me. When I'm putting an idea out there that's fairly novel and there's some risk associated with it and no one says anything to disagree, I get nervous. “Wait a minute. No one has a problem with this at all. Do you feel safe enough to respond? What's going on here?” [chuckles]
DAMIEN: Yeah. What's more likely: everybody agrees, or people don't feel unsafe disagreeing?
MAE: Yo!
EVAN: Right? Whoa. No, nom and you just used one of the most painful things you could use with me: double negative.
[laughter]
Ow. No, don't do that. It's like using unless in a Ruby statement, it hurts my brain.
[laughter]
MAE: Oh my gosh, Damien. It's so true. It is hard to foster environments where disagreement is welcomed, acceptable, encouraged, sustained. [laughs]
EVAN: I know what I do, and I know to try to do that. I also know it's not universally successful was I was given a little dose of much needed humility in that regard recently with a team member of mine.
I think, Mae, Casey, you've seen this with me before that I tend to be one of the earlier people to deliberately be vulnerable, to admit some shortcoming, or some mistake. That I try to establish, “Hey I'm okay admitting I'm wrong, or I've been wrong and if it's okay for me, if you see me as an authority figure, this is me trying to tell you I want you to feel okay doing it, too.” That I'm up here saying, “Hey, I have to –” Well, that time I chose not to swear for whatever reason. I think I'm in a little bit more of the work context, I'm talking about teams and no one's throwing stones at me yet. So maybe it's safe for you to do it, too.
That works for some people. I – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: That's so important. It's so important to come from people at the top, near the top.
MAE: Exactly.
DAMIEN: Like when your boss is like, “Oh, I was wrong about this.” When the CTO was like, “Oh yeah, last week, I knocked off production. Ooh, my bad.” [laughs]
MAE: Yes.
EVAN: But when you say that, I tried to think about the counterpoint because I've seen this not succeed. Sometimes I've been confused by it. There's well, what happened after you made that mistake? Was there an accountability conversation? What did that look like? Were you taking a risk, or did you just make a “dumb mistake?” Was it really bad judgment? That there's a difference between being vulnerable and creating psychological safety and having accountability, and that can be a kind of fuzzy boundary.
But what I found is holding accountability, you got to do that in private, because that disrupts psychological safety and you have to think about, when you're holding accountability well, who's going to hear about the repercussions and what will that do to psychological safety? I won't go into details, but I can think of a situation where I saw someone perhaps have a severe lapse in judgment, get fired over it and then having a chilling response on an organization as a result, causing a severe reduction in psychological safety.
I'll say, I had no part of this. [chuckles] Just want to be clear. I do not reach for the fire button when it comes to people making mistakes. It's okay, how do we learn from this and get better is my preference That when someone makes a mistake, I think of it usually as okay, you made the mistake. How did the system allow for this in the first place?
DAMIEN: Bingo.
CASEY: Yes, first place.
EVAN: And how can we prevent this in the future such that the system puts you in a position where you are able to make that mistake? Can we put in guardrails and checks and does the danger, the magic red button, does it need to have a safety cover on it, for example? That how many different protections can we put in place and are there enough of them?
MAE: And I try to do that. I'm an engineer manager, also Evan, and similarly, try to demonstrate vulnerability and publicly share mistakes. There are ways in which that impacts some people positively. There are ways in which that me as a white person admitting mistake is a different deal and me as a woman admitting a mistake is a different deal. And like – [overtalk]
EVAN: Totally.
MAE: there's just so much in there about, I appreciated that you were going into the what happens after, because we can get people to say things. But then if the system does not actually hold what it is that people are saying, and if the system does not hold accountable to the people who are most marginalized in the system, that's who gets to define whether, or not accountability is real, whether, or not if there is psychological safety, et cetera. It's not for the people with the most power to assess.
EVAN: Yeah. This really resonates with me, particularly because of a conversation I had with one of my directors at work lately. But I found it really profound when this one director of mine was very open about their experience as someone more diverse than me, let's just say, because I at least appear to be about as non-diverse as you get at least on the outside.
Their very real concerns because of the diversity, how that might impact their career, how people perceive them, and how they're perceived impacts their career growth. I was really grateful and humbled that they shared that with me and so, I took all that in and everything that they were telling me about the concerns, thought about it some, and that I received that sharing has impacted my management on my team, that I don't talk to others on the team about this person's diversity, but I am trying to get them to reflect further as a way of trying to you check for bias with other people.
MAE: Yeah. That's been my main mission. [laughs] I feel like most of my life is like, can we just say and see when we are biased because we are of a culture that is incredibly biased and unjust, and there is no way to be separate from it.
One of my very favorite quotes from Diane di Prima, this beat poet, is, “For every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy.”
EVAN: God, I feel that.
MAE: As much as we can be change agents and social justice advocates, ultimately, we are still of the thing.
EVAN: Yeah. And yes.
MAE: And I try to go on record all the time. I am definitely racist, sexist, [chuckles] homophobic, atheist, and ageist; I am all of the things. I catch myself all of the time. And – [overtalk]
EVAN: And then there are the times you don't catch yourself, too, probably – [overtalk]
MAE: Fair.
EVAN: Which is unconscious bias, because that's why I try to make other people aware by approaching it indirectly is unconscious bias can creep in so many different ways and okay, so all I can do is kind of explore this person's surface area and see, well, what is it you are really, what story are you telling yourself here? What data are you operating on? Is this congruent when you look at all of it together, or do you see gaps for yourself?
I haven't had anyone's light bulb go off just yet, but I'm still working on some people and maybe it's possible that there are legitimate concerns, too. That can be accompanied by unconscious bias and that can get really hard to deal with.
CASEY: I read a paper recently about unconscious bias training being not effective at all ever. And then I read another paper saying – [overtalk]
MAE: What!
CASEY: It's not effective when it's done very poorly, like in our [inaudible] – [overtalk]
[laughter]
And it is effective when you have people talk about it with each other, actually apply it, and think about it.
EVAN: It's not effective?
CASEY: And that’s not so – no, no one was surprised.
EVAN: Yeah.
CASEY: Put it on my feed on Twitter and everyone was like, “Duh. But now we have science.”
EVAN: When it's done poorly, does it work. Hello? [laughs]
DAMIEN: But the addition to that is most of the time it's done poorly.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: Yeah.
CASEY: That's true, too. Yeah.
DAMIEN: And I'll give you my personal opinion. I didn't come up with this myself. If you're comfortable doing it, it's not being done well. [laughs]
EVAN: That's the truth.
MAE: Yes!
CASEY: Well said.
MAE: Yes.
EVAN: Yeah. This is where I'll go back to meditation and mindfulness training, that with mindfulness, you become more aware. I've become more aware of the passing thoughts that I have; they're automatic thoughts. Buddhism has this idea of monkey mind that the mind is a machine that shatters like a monkey. It's a machine for creating thought and we have metacognition if we're aware of our thoughts, if we're paying attention to our thoughts.
I have noticed more of that chatter and oh, whoa, whoa. I didn't – I thought that? What? Okay, let's slow down here for a moment and explore that because that made me really uncomfortable that that went through my head in that moment about that person whether it's racist, sexist, whatever. I'm human, these thoughts come up and now I'm never getting a job again. [laughs]
MAE: Well, I went first so.
EVAN: I know you did so, you were vulnerable. Thank you. [laughs]
MAE: Do you all know about Resmaa Menakem?
EVAN: No.
CASEY: No.
MAE: Oh my gosh. Okay, so check it out. This guy says he wrote this book called My Grandmother's Hands and he's saying that trauma is passed down physiologically.
EVAN: I've heard this.
MAE: And part of the reason why we have not been able to deal with bias and all of this is because we are trying to do it through the mind – [overtalk]
EVAN: Really?
MAE: And that is not the place to go. It's actually physiological healing that we all are responsible to do as part of contributing toward creating a different world is like it's within us.
So his premises that the white-on-white trauma in the Middle Ages got passed down and that is part of how white people have been [chuckles] passing along a lot more trauma, I'll say that.
Anyway, the book is fascinating and the first time I've heard a non-brain thought focused way to approach social change.
DAMIEN: I feel this very, very strongly, like there's such a focus and this is why I bristled at our neuroscience experts here [laughs] and their lovely focus on neurology. Like there's so much focus on neurons, the neurological system, and the cognitive mind and the cognitive mind is such a tiny, tiny part of what we are.
EVAN: Yeah, true.
MAE: Yes.
EVAN: We're a whole system. So no, I was going to say something, not double negative, not all that dissimilar.
[laughter]
You said closer to the mic to be ironic. That they're interconnected. Casey was talking to it, too that thought creates physiological changes, creates chromosomal changes so, genetic changes.
MAE: And vice versa.
DAMIEN: Yeah, and you can tell this vice versa. That the most obvious way to do this is next time you're angry, breathe slowly. It's literally impossible to be angry and breathing peacefully.
MAE: Hmm. Oh my gosh. This is such a good challenge.
EVAN: Yeah, pretty much.
MAE: I know this is what Casey is going to quote at the end.
EVAN: I mean, when you say breathe peacefully, let's be clear. You can slow your breathing down, but not be breathing peacefully when you're slowing your breathing down. But now it's how do we define peacefully?
DAMIEN: Sure.
CASEY: Cognition!
EVAN: That makes you really pedantic here. But as a meditator? Yeah. Mae, you meditate, too, though? Don't you? I thought.
MAE: I’m a dabbler in all of the things.
EVAN: So what is breathing peacefully that deep breaths will tend to encourage the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and over that encouragement, the parasympathetic nervous system, the so-called rest and digest. So it's hard to sustain deep breathing for a long time and not calm down, but I'm sure it's possible. I've had some experiences where I've been so emotionally activated—you could use the word triggered. Take your pick, some people don't like it. But at that point, if there's a trauma involvement, then it can be really hard to use the physiological to tamp down the emotional.
DAMIEN: Well, what I will say is just on a more fundamental level. Your thoughts, your emotions, they're physical, and they're embodied.
EVAN: Yeah, totally.
DAMIEN: They are literally in your body and so, they change your body and your body changes them, and they're not a separate thing.
EVAN: So you thought we were disagreeing? That's neuroscience, too. Sorry. Eh, you failed.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: I failed at disagreeing.
MAE: Ah!
DAMIEN: I will never make it on cable television now.
EVAN: No, I think this is what you call violent agreement.
CASEY: Yes!
[laughter]
Yeah, for a lot of these things we're talking about, I quickly go to like, “Yes, there's even a science that supports it.”
[laughter]
Even if we don't have the science to support it yet because there's so much we don't know about everything.
EVAN: I feel like we've kind of got to meet the press table here because we've got the two on two of the people who want to say, “No, it's not science,” and the people on the other side were saying, “Hey, this thing you're not saying is science, there's science for this!”
[laughter]
CASEY: I was saying it about the audience.
MAE: I’m just saying I don’t want to have to use science in order to be able to have faith. That's what I'm saying.
EVAN: Ah.
CASEY: Mm hmm.
EVAN: Well, I would argue that even for those of us who don't really want to have faith, that there's always something we're taking on faith.
MAE: Totally.
EVAN: Because there's a lot of it, because even those of us who think we know science so well, there are plenty of things we're ignorant of that we have, that we operate with very large assumptions on. We essentially take on faith because we don't understand them.
DAMIEN: The scientific method is taken on faith.
MAE: Mm!
EVAN: Oh, oh god.
MAE: Yes!
EVAN: Someone get Gödel, Escher, Bach; I think we’re hitting recursion.
MAE: Oh my gosh, I’m having so much fun!
EVAN: Another book I’ve read some of. [laughs]
CASEY: I always think about the audience we're talking to. So I'm well-equipped to talk to people who really want to hear some science because I can bring up some like, “Well we don't know this part over here,” and I'm very happy to be the person to talk to those people. I am much less well-equipped to talk to someone more spiritual, who doesn't want to think about science things at all. I'm not well-equipped to talk – [overtalk]
EVAN: No, I've loved doing that.
CASEY: Some people are fluent in both, but I specialize in the science part.
EVAN: I’m fluent in it but I – [overtalk]
CASEY: Conversational, perhaps.
EVAN: I like areas of disagreement and this really makes some people very uncomfortable. In student government in college, I prized the people who thought very differently for me because I often learned from them and had insights that wouldn't have otherwise. I've made my in-law super uncomfortable because they're deeply religious. I am so not. And when I asked them challenging questions, I think they thought I was trying to start a fight and said, “No, I was trying to start a discussion to explore and learn,” but they got upset. [laughs]
MAE: Yes, I have this, too, Evan.
DAMIEN: A lot of people don't want to explore and learn because they're afraid of what they'll find, and I think – I know that's true for me in certain areas.
EVAN: I don't know that that's accurate, but I also don’t think – I'll be frank, I don't think it's all that generous either.
DAMIEN: No, it's not generous. Of course.
EVAN: Yeah, and I've been tested on this a lot, because my wife is really quite religious and I'm not. So we're a really interesting pair that way, that I think it's instead that they're projecting negative intent on me because they're more accustomed to people challenging their belief from an aggressive and a hostile place.
DAMIEN: That's also fair.
EVAN: Where frankly, I probably had some of that unintentionally, but my true intent was—and this goes back to something you were saying earlier, Mae that I wanted to say and I forgot because of ADHD probably—that my vulnerability, my discussions with people, it's because I'm a little obsessed with truth. And one doesn't find truth through constant agreement. One finds truth by taking your truth, comparing it to other people's truths that are different, testing them, and the exploring, which I think that's where we get the assignment – [overtalk]
MAE: And then combining them enzymatically. Let’s just use a science word to prove this approach.
EVAN: Yeah. You look for the yes ands, but then you also look for the oh, these don't connect here, here, here, and here and the person with more faith might just say, “We have to just agree to disagree here,” and I might just have to, “Okay, fine. You're saying you don't want to talk about that part is what I hear then.”
[chuckles]
One of my best friends when I lived in Eastern shore of Maryland, devoutly religious evangelical and… also in the computers. When we met, we would often go out to lunch and just have these really strong disagreements that I always found fascinating. We would just talk and talk and talk and inevitably, it would get into religion and God, and he would get down to “Because God has a plan for every one of us,” and I'd say, “Yeah, I don't believe it.” [laughs]
DAMIEN: Well, that's unfalsifiable.
EVAN: Right, so we’re back to those I can't prove it's false thing; you can’t prove it – [overtalk]
MAE: Oh my gosh, now we're just having fun. And then – [overtalk]
EVAN: Yeah, I can't prove the non-existence of God, ooh, I'm done. That's the Godwin's law of talking about religion. That’s what's Godwin's love every conversation on the internet inevitably becomes about Hitler. Boom.
MAE: Wow.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: But it's an important point. Like when you even as a person who – [overtalk]
EVAN: I just mentioned Hitler, sorry. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Even as a person who has taken on faith, this shared objective, external reality exists, [chuckles] there are still things that are unfalsifiable and so you have to – well, what I like to do is I get to choose. I get to choose what I believe. [laughs]
EVAN: We all do.
DAMIEN: I choose the beliefs that serve me the best.
EVAN: Or we all think we do. We might – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Well, I believe that, too.
MAE: Ah!
EVAN: We might add a free will, but you might believe we do and I'm not so sure. I suspect we don't.
DAMIEN: Well, that's also non-falsifiable. [chuckles]
EVAN: I know.
DAMIEN: And so, it's another opportunity for me to choose a belief that there – [overtalk]
EVAN: Right. Currently, I'm falsifiable and as I said earlier, closing another loop, I'm not sure I want to live in the world where we can prove it because it'll get misused.
MAE: Mm yeah. There's no deal there, too.
A loop piece, too, that I wanted to say is, Evan on the thing about being interpreted as being consternatious, or content – like trying to create conflict. Disagreement to me is not conflict. [chuckles] Like you can disagree and not be in conflict, but I am from upstate New York and the way that I talk –
EVAN: [laughs] Wait, Upstate, not Manhattan.
MAE: Correct.
EVAN: So there's different. [laughs]
MAE: Correct. I can sound like I am having a problem with someone because I'm challenging a thing they said and those are just very different to me; challenging a thing that someone said versus having a problem with a person and what they think. My coined phrase I made up is “conflict is care.” So if they're really in conflict, it's because there's emotion involved. Somebody has to care for there to be actual conflict.
DAMIEN: Otherwise, you walk away.
MAE: Yeah.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: So like, whatever. That was weird.
EVAN: So few things. First, conflicting disagreement to me, they can mean the same thing. Conflict doesn't have to imply hostility, or violence. Two different books come to mind based on what you just said.
One, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I love that book because one example, you know it's a management book because it has a four-quadrant diagram in it and – [laughs] Mae’s laughing. That's not on the audio.
But I love that book and there's the top left quadrant, I can't remember what it's called. I always forget these, which is the you're just not contributing because you don't care enough. So there's the whole right side of the diagram is you care enough to intervene. I think the bottom right is can't forget, but basically, you're saying the truth but you're just a jerk about it. It's the I'm sharing and I'm just being blunt and I'm not addressing your feelings on the matter at all, I'm just sharing. And the top right, the radical candor is I care and I'm sharing to try to help so it speaks to compassion in the sense of, I see a problem. I'm offering because I care and I'm trying to, I'm taking action because I have empathy.
By the way, I'm almost literally borrowing from a Search Inside Yourself program when I say that, when I describe compassion that way.
The other book that came to mind… Oh, yeah was Nonviolent Communication. I think that's – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Another excellent book.
EVAN: Daniel Rosenberg. Yeah, that has been a hugely impactful book on me. Some people have a lot of difficulty with the notion that speech can be violent. But it comes down to what does the word violence mean because if you think of violence in the form of violation, if you are saying things that are unwelcome to another person, that is a violation.
DAMIEN: Well, also the author breaks that down, clears that up in the very beginning. What they mean by violence is causes harm.
EVAN: And then quantifying harm.
DAMIEN: Yeah.
EVAN: There's not just physical harm. Although, then we get to the neuroscience and physiological part, emotional harm is physical harm because – [overtalk]
MAE: Yes.
EVAN: These things we call feelings—I'm going to Search Inside Yourself again here, these things we call feelings, they are felt sensations in the body. They are manifestations of emotions that are in the brain.
DAMIEN: I just want to say that again. Feelings are felt sensations.
EVAN: Bingo. So when I feel bad, it's I literally feel bad.
I was telling my therapist yesterday when I was having a bad day, I said, “I reached right for the pain relief that day,” and he said, “Oh yeah, I totally do that, too.” Because the felt sensations in the body are hurt and hey, guess what? Pain relief medication can treat the physical hurt and if you treat the physical hurt, that can help with the emotional and mental hurt, too a little because you don't have that exacerbating the emotional hurt. You don't have that exacerbate – [overtalk]
CASEY: This is not just true. It's studied.
[laughter]
EVAN: Casey, blow people's minds and go to the study in the show notes.
CASEY: Yeah.
EVAN: I bet you can find it. I hope it's public.
CASEY: Yeah.
EVAN: This is something that drove me nuts in the Search Inside Yourself program. That I'm that guy that when I'm looking at the neuroscience, it's okay, I see this study. I'm reading through this study. Cool. I want to know something about some of the other studies that are referred to you in here because I have more questions. Wait, this shit’s behind a pay wall? Fuck this.
CASEY: Ah, yeah.
EVAN: There are so many studies behind the pay wall unless you're associated with the university. You can't get them. Oh my God. I hate them.
DAMIEN: Pro tip, scientific authors love sharing their work and they own the copyright to it. [chuckles] Email them, they'll send it to you.
EVAN: Oh, you can't see my huge O face. [laughs] I am totally doing it.
MAE: But – [overtalk]
EVAN: Thank you.
MAE: As someone who worked in higher ed for many years, that is consistently being defunded. Scientific inquiry happening in higher ed is like the places where the money goes and what research is allowed to happen is a pretty murky water. And so, paying the distribution place to help there be some peer reviewed studies out there that are not only and solely funded by big industry [chuckles] no names that I'll give them my 3 bucks.
EVAN: I wish it was just 3 bucks, though.
MAE: I know, yes.
EVAN: I'm looking at wait, you want to purchase this journal so you can – some of them you can rent, I think they said, but – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Also – [overtalk]
EVAN: [inaudible] journal is like 250 bucks for a single journal.
MAE: Oh no.
DAMIEN: And do the journals pay the – do they pay the authors? Do they pay the peer reviewers?
MAE: Yeah. You get – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Oh, okay
MAE: Well, it depends on the journal, on the industry, but there is a whole extra thing about peer review being a part of kind of community service. It's like open source. You have to have done it to be able to be let in the club and keep up your reps, or whatever. So there's definitely a lot of peer review stuff that happens. That's not as cool for, especially earlier career researchers, but there's definitely some funding that really goes back.
EVAN: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Getting research funded in academia is always hard, so sure. I mean, if it's a few bucks here and there, it's one thing, but 250 bucks for a journal.
MAE: That’s fascinating, that’s great.
EVAN: Damien, I'm going to try your idea. [laughs]
CASEY: The research I did was funded by the military because it was PTSD related.
EVAN: Oh.
CASEY: Even though for my interest, it was basic science; how do epigenetics affect memory. But that is the application is PTSD and the military has a big budget for that.
EVAN: Sounds like, you know what?
CASEY: I always felt a little weird about it because that's – I don't know. I didn't want to get money from the military, but I did want –
MAE: A lot of [inaudible] has – [overtalk]
CASEY: The research was important – [overtalk]
MAE: Always come from the military.
CASEY: A lot has. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
EVAN: Hey, this internet we're talking on? [laughs] This internet thing that we're using right now?
MAE: Yeah, sure.
EVAN: That little thing came from this thing called defense something research project agency, I think DARPA, ARPANET originally, and that was the internet way back when.
MID-ROLL 2: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
Compiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you’ve always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code.
Compiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source?
I checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can.
Listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We’ll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support.
CASEY: We've been talking about knowledge and what is truth, and I want to bring up an idea that I'm surprised surprises so many people. I use these words completely differently—believe, think, no, wonder, want, need. Every word like that is unique to me. So if I say, I believe that's true. That doesn't mean I think it's true, or I know it's true, or I want it to be true. It means I believe; it's a belief I have based on something. Do you want to know what that something is? I can tell you what that comes from. Or I know this is true. I reserve that for personal experience, or there's a study.
EVAN: Yeah.
CASEY: In the study, I might not even use no for, because they can be contradicted as we're talking about all the whole episode.
EVAN: Can we survey listeners? Because I'm actually curious how many people make this distinction. I do, too.
CASEY: Yeah.
EVAN: So I'm actually curious now is this normal, or are you and I weird in similar ways that way? Because again, how did I end up finding out I have ADHD and why did it matter to me? It's how am I different?
MAE: And we can a tarot deck out it.
EVAN: Oh and by the way, I mentioned comorbidities of ADHD. ADHD and autism spectrum disorders, they tend to coexist. There are a lot of people on autism spectrum disorders have ADHD, also comorbid anxiety, depression, sometimes eating disorders, ding, ding, ding and rejection sensitivity disorder. The list goes on and on and on.
CASEY: Yeah. Yeah.
EVAN: So some of these patterns, I've occasionally wondered hey, am I somewhere on the autism spectrum? I don't know. But I sometimes get into my clarifications and get really pedantic about them.
CASEY: I can be pedantic. Sometimes. I try to go light on it.
MAE: I like to be pedantic, too! [laughs]
DAMIEN: I promise you, normal people do not make distinctions between those words, but normal people are generally very sloppy with their language.
CASEY: Yeah. We can't afford to; forever programming changes the way we think.
MAE: I would like to normalize this word we're using right now pretty liberally, normal. Speaking of being special about our words.
EVAN: Neurotypical and neuroatypical – [overtalk]
MAE: Common.
EVAN: Might be a little bit better.
CASEY: Common, I like better most of the time.
DAMIEN: Common is the word what I should have used.
EVAN: Yeah. I don't like normal so much. Common, okay. I tend to – there's a whole ADHD Twitter. I could probably link to a few lists. There's just the ADHD hashtag gets thrown lot around a lot and you see people talk about NT an awful lot. They’re neurotypicals.
CASEY: Yeah, that's more specific. It is much more specific than normal. What kind of normal?
EVAN: Yeah.
CASEY: Normal, the word I want to drop, but it still slips into my speech. Just like guys.
MAE: Yeah, same.
CASEY: I have it found a perfect replacement for how guys feels to use.
EVAN: Y'all.
CASEY: I wish I could.
EVAN: Y'all. I love y'all.
CASEY: Sometimes y'all’s good. But if I walk into a room and say, “What are –?” Okay, that's not a good example.
EVAN: How are you folks?
CASEY: What are you guys doing? Well, y'all is great there.
EVAN: I use folks.
CASEY: It sounds like – [overtalk]
EVAN: I use filters – [overtalk]
CASEY: Where guys – [overtalk]
MAE: I use folks. I use people. I use peeps. I use y’all.
EVAN: Yes.
MAE: I use all kinds of things.
EVAN: Yeah.
CASEY: Yeah. I use all these, too.
EVAN: I might have gotten one, or two of those to use – [overtalk]
MAE: When somebody says guys, as someone who has hung out in mostly places where it is all guys, I don't like it. I just don't.
CASEY: No.
MAE: Does not make me feel good.
EVAN: How do you know they self-Identify as male? Right? I mean, seriously, so. But no, I was going to say, Mae, or I tried to say earlier, I might have [inaudible] amount of – I’ve used that occasionally. I'm pretty sure maybe at least one of these came from you, from interacting with you at one point, just can't say which. Y’all, that was from a stint at Rackspace and going to Texas enough times, but I stuck with it.
CASEY: Y’all is great. Y'all should be more formal, popular, mainstream accepted English. It should not be just slang casual. I use it in formal writing as much as I can get away with.
EVAN: So happy in a work meeting yesterday to hear someone new to me use y'all in a work meeting setting. It tickled me. [laughs]
CASEY: It's like Spanish. Spain’s Spanish has vosotros that's y'all and that is more formal in Spanish.
EVAN: Yeah.
DAMIEN: Once we get y'all in English, we can extend it to the even more useful all y’all.
MAE: Yes! Now we're talking.
DAMIEN: You, y’all, all y'all.
EVAN: No, wait, there's some other ones I learned, too. There's yinzer. There's some other – [overtalk]
DAMIEN: Philadelphia yinz. That's a third person plural, second person plural.
EVAN: It gets kind of weird me, but every neologism starts weird before it gets normalized. I air quoted. [laughs] I remember the first time I heard fleek and I just couldn't accept it. [laughs]
MAE: Oh my gosh.
DAMIEN: That's a tough one.
[laughter]
CASEY: Fleek is for eyebrows. Eyebrows on fleek, that's what it's used for mostly.
I think it's my gray hair showing just, yeah, I still twitch a little there. I just lost a whole generation of people who might have been paying attention. [laughs]
MAE: What, by telling the truth and demonstrating vulnerability and saying things that…?
EVAN: Yes. [laughs]
CASEY: So first let's do reflections on the episode and then we'll do the plugs. Who wants to go first?
DAMIEN: I can go first. Yeah, because my reflection is something I think one things we talked least about, but was demonstrated most: the value of being vulnerable, of just revealing things and I think that's like – I think because Evan, you were so vulnerable opening up this conversation, it allowed us to have a really open and just really valuable conversation with that. So that's an object lesson that I witnessed today and was a part of.
EVAN: Thank you. And Mae was saying it a lot earlier and I really appreciate that you were vulnerable in sharing that feedback as we went. By the way, that's also me sort of trying to imply to people who are listening, feedback doesn't have to be bad.
[laughter]
Feedback can be encouraging, too.
MAE: Evan's doing his plug right now.
EVAN: Well, sort of. People hear the word feedback; they think it always has to be critical. I winced.
My reflection is I was tickled that we got to explore so many things and while there were points of disagree that the disagreement ultimately led to deeper discussion. I just had such a fun time with this. So very much echoing the sentiment Mae shared earlier in the conversation. My reflection is this was just fun kind of bouncing around all these different topics and exploring things scientific, spiritual, existential in all manner.
CASEY: I'll go next. I like how many times Damien got the word unfalsifiable into the conversation.
[laughter]
DAMIEN: And non-falsifiable a couple times.
CASEY: Yeah, yeah.
DAMIEN: One of those will be incorrect, right?
[laughter]
EVAN: We used not unfalsifiable the first time and I winced.
CASEY: Not unfalsifiable, yeah.
So I haven't thought on it in a long time. I'm sure I have before, but we can't usually know what is truth. Truth is maybe unattainable in a lot of ways. But we can know when something's false and there's something really satisfying about that. So I'm going to try to hold onto that thought and see how it feels.
MAE: I love that, Casey.
I'm trying to remember the thing that Damien said that I thought was going to be the thing that you were are going to say, Casey, because you're so good at always getting in on the CTA options, but.
EVAN: CTA?
MAE: Oh, thank you, Evan. I'm usually so good about acronyms and saying what they are. Call to action.
EVAN: Oh, I see.
MAE: Well, I'm going to – [laughs] my reflection is that I need to spend some time rethinking all of the stuff that we talked about. Maybe even relistening to be able to relay—I'm trying to come up with another word that starts with R-E. What my reflection is, but it's something Damien said and it was really good and I can't wait to rediscover it.
EVAN: Was it about unconscious bias and that we need to be talking about our biases because if it's not uncomfortable, then it's not productive?
MAE: That’s the one.
EVAN: Yeah.
MAE: That… maybe it wasn't. I think it is.
DAMIEN: Right.
MAE: I think I have to get back to us. [laughs]
EVAN: I think it was it's not an effective conversation about bias if it's not uncomfortable.
CASEY: Mm, that's it. I love that.
DAMIEN: Evan remembers it because it has a double negative in it.
EVAN: That's possible. It hurt me.
[laughter]
I’ve got to admit, it did hurt saying it. That's the truth. I felt it.
[laughter]
But it's also true, I'm just – I admit in my head, I am trying to knot the knots [laughs] and it hurts. [laughs]
DAMIEN: Well, don't get tied knots doing it, Evan.
EVAN: Bang, bang and Ruby hurt my brain except they convert things to Boolean. That's a nice little trick in the Ruby language.
MAE: I have a plug and kind of call-to-action.
CASEY: Plug, plug!
MAE: I really just like please everybody, think about all the ways in which you are biased and have healing to do and in your body. Brains, well, they're complicated and maybe we'll have some more studies to tell some more things about them. But our bodies, if you would consider bringing that also into your workplaces, in your families, in your communities about starting to truly talk about ways in which we are not awesome to each other, it will actually help us get more awesome to each other.
EVAN: Amen. Yeah, we don't get better until we talk about where it hurts. Until we face it.
I think I plugged it a few times already, but I'll say it more explicitly: Search Inside Yourself. I don't make money off of this. This is something where I took this class. I took it as a class in D.C. about 6 years ago. I took it with Casey. In fact, we took it the same time and…
CASEY: Yeah.
EVAN: It has been so impactful in my life in so many different ways that I literally took the time and effort to learn how to teach it. This is something I've been primarily doing in my spare time and it's taken a little bit of time away from work for the actual sit down with other people in trainings with the super experienced trainers. But most of that time has been evenings and weekends pouring over material and cramming all these things into my brain and trying to not only learn it all, but then learn the mental model of it all to be able to share it with other people.
Search Inside Yourself is a way to build the muscles to do exactly what Mae is urging you to do. That empathy is a skill, you can learn it. That you might not have learned early that enough – I'm extending that plugs to ADHD again, [laughs] but I'll finish.
That most of us didn't grow up with the minimum recommended dose of Mr. Rogers in our life. I say that as someone who didn't. I know someone, Casey and I have a good friend who did, and I'm really grateful. I guess, I'll mention that friend, Andrew Dunkman, that he grew up with a lot of Mr. Rogers and got me thinking and reflecting a lot more on the man and the more I learned, the more I wish I had paid attention when I was little.
MAE: Yeah.
EVAN: Because a lot of those lessons are really important in the modern world where we need to work with other people and live better with other people, and the consequences of not doing that is a world with a lot of hostility and divisiveness that oh, by the way, we live in right now. So if we all cultivated some more empathy, I think we would all be a lot better off. I think. Sorry, no, I don't think. I believe, but I also have data to support it. Interesting. See, I did use, I think colloquially there.
CASEY: Nuance! Yeah, Andrew has been on the show before. If you miss the episode with Andrew Dunkman, you might want to go check it out. It's pretty good.
All right. I want to share my plug. I'm so shy about sharing. I have my own business, Happy & Effective, and it is so related to every episode, honestly and finally enough people have encouraged me to talk about it on the show and now is a great moment. Just like Evan is studying to teach Search Inside Yourself, I do workshops kind of like that through my company on emotional intelligence and well-being. Things like debugging your brain. I do a lot of DEI training—diversity, equity and inclusion—strategic thinking, leadership skills. And my approach is so hands-on, it's all breakout rooms and talking to each other and applying it. I give homework. I give reading assignments.
Anyway, if you want to bring that to your company, reach out to me. I'd love to chat with you. We can help make it happen. The website for that is happyandeffective.com.
DAMIEN: Do you make people uncomfortable in that process, Casey? Excellent.
CASEY: Yeah, but they love it because they're in a supportive environment. That might be my superpower, making people comfortable trying do that things.
EVAN: That’s the one. We do that in Search Inside Yourself.
CASEY: It's true in the dance classes I teach, too. I get people who hate dancing, think they hate dancing to become comfortable with it, happy with it.
EVAN: You make people uncomfortable in Search Inside Yourself, too. Yeah.
CASEY: True.
EVAN: Well, you’ve got to stretch yourself. Damien, you haven't gone.
DAMIEN: [laughs] I wish I had something to plug. I'll plug some of the books we mentioned. Siddhartha, absolutely amazing.
EVAN: Yes.
DAMIEN: Short narrative.
EVAN: Short read.
DAMIEN: Fun read.
EVAN: Oh, yeah.
CASEY: There's a free link of this on Gutenberg. I put a link in the show notes. It's free. You can just get it on your phone, do it.
DAMIEN: Nonviolent Communication, another amazing book. That's not as much fun to read, but in part incredibly impactful.
EVAN: Oh, there are also courses on Nonviolent Communication that you can take offered around the world really fairly cheaply Some of them tend to be community given. My wife and I went to once some time ago, so.
DAMIEN: Yeah. I've heard good things about those.
EVAN: Yeah.
DAMIEN: And then finally the last one, Conversations For Action. Ooh, I hope I got that right. Fernando Flores. We didn't talk about this.
MAE: Ooh.
DAMIEN: But it talked very much about speech being an act. You're not just talking; you're doing something when you talk.
EVAN: Right.
DAMIEN: Also amazing book.
EVAN: Yeah. There are a lot of books in this list, that makes me happy. I have more things to read now, though. Get it?
[laughter]
Longer reading list.
DAMIEN: Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today.
EVAN: Thank you for having me.
MAE: Yeah, super fun.
EVAN: I was really glad. This was lot of fun.
Special Guest: Evan Light.
Sponsored By:
Catch Dave on Episode 006 of Greater Than Code! Getting Technology Into the Hands of Children with David Bock
02:10 - Dave’s Superpower: Ability to Reevaluate and Drop Ideas – Onto The Next!
07:10 - The Acceptance of Ruby; Using Ruby as a Teaching Language
18:01 - Mobile Development
24:10 - Teaching Remotely
34:25 - Computer Science Education Week + Teaching/Volunteering
“Computers aren’t smart. They’re just dumb really, really fast.”
56:39 - Handling Time Management and Energy
Reflections:
Casey: Motivating students to learn algorithmic efficiency. Feeling the problem.
Mae: Becoming more involved in the community.
Chelsea: What are people in the tech world ready for?
Dave: How much talking about computer science education is invigorating and revitalizing. Seeing problems through beginners’ eyes.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.
CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 261. I’m Chelsea Troy and I’m here with my co-host, Mae.
MAE: And I’m here also with Casey Watts.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here today with Dave Bock.
Welcome, Dave.
DAVE: Hi, glad to be here again.
CASEY: David Bock is the Vice President of Strategic Development at Core4ce, Inc. where he is responsible for taking new strategic ideas within the company through development and into production.
Dave speaks frequently on software engineering and management topics at software engineering conferences.
Dave’s true passion is his work as the Executive Director of Loudoun Codes, a nonprofit for teaching K-12 students in Loudoun County, Virginia topics related to computer science. He has been volunteering in classrooms since 2013, working with parents and teachers on an official curriculum, extracurricular, and other supplemental activities.
Welcome, Dave. We’re so glad to have you.
DAVE: I'm thrilled to be here. I love to talk about my passions.
CASEY: Speaking of your passions, we always start the episode with a certain question. I think you're ready for it.
DAVE: Yeah, I’m never ready for this question. [laughs]
CASEY: What's your superpower and how did you acquire it?
DAVE: You know it's funny, listening to this podcast over the years, I have answered that question in the car a dozen times and every time it's a different answer. Sometimes, I don't think there's a good answer for it. It's like trying to settle on what I wanted to talk about this time. Because it's like I don't have any superpowers; they're just mundane powers applied well.
But I think my superpower, if I had to pick one, I would say it is my ability to quickly reevaluate and drop ideas that I no longer find value in like, I don't get overly attached to an idea. I guess, that's the best way to put it.
The first time I realized thinking about that was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard said to somebody that if you truly believe your convictions, you won't be afraid to reevaluate them, and that's just something that I've always kind of applied.
It came up again. My wife watches the TV show, House, which is now long since off the air, but the premise of that show was this doctor who was an expert in rare pathological diseases and he was a kind of a grumpy antihero doctor.
Every episode, there'd be some weird, rare disease and he'd be the first one to identify it and then some other symptom would present itself and he'd abandon that idea and move on to the next one. At one point somebody said to him, “You always think you're right,” and he said, “No, I always think I'm eventually right.” Because if you see it, he's always willing to drop an idea and move on to the next one even when other people were still wedded to the old idea and I think I apply that daily.
But even in my career, back in the 2006, 2007 timeframe, I was set. I could have kept as a Java developer for the rest of my career and instead, I abandoned it and started doing Ruby on Rails development. And I've since abandoned it again. Did the Clojure for a while, abandoned that again and got into management. I just didn't want to identify myself with any one track record too long.
MAE: Love it. Was that how you ended up having that approach is from TNG, or that is like a –? [overtalk]
DAVE: No, I just realized that I had that and that resonated with me. That line resonated with me, that stayed with me all these years. I can't say I noticed it the first time that I saw the episode. It was in a repeat one day that it just really struck me.
CASEY: When did you first realize you have this skill? Was it before that?
DAVE: I think when it was made conscious to me was around the time I was career switching. I had a resume in the Java space that sounded unbelievable. I was a president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. I was on the Java 6 Spec Committee. I was one of the 100 people that Sun had called a Java champion. And I really had – I was speaking at a Java themed software engineering conference.
I saw Ruby on Rails and I was like, “That is so cool.” It's such a breath of fresh air. It's like every decision that a team normally argues over for the first several weeks is just made, you can just start moving out. I quit my job, started a consultancy doing Rails development and kept with that for 8 years and it was a blast. Meanwhile, I had friends in the Java community who were like, “Why are you doing that? That's a toy language.”
CASEY: Oh, wow.
[laughter]
CHELSEA: What did you say to them?
MAE: Yeah!
CASEY: How did you retort? Yeah.
DAVE: Yeah, I didn't have a good one. It was just, it was a good career move
MAE: Maybe you've been doing it so long, you don't have a way to explain it anymore, but how do you not get too emotionally attached to any single idea?
DAVE: Oh, man. I think it might be just a healthy amount of imposter syndrome.
[laughter]
Where I question myself a little bit and I know that it also presents itself in a way that, especially as I've gotten older, I noticed that when I'm working with people and a good idea will present itself, they'll immediately attach to that idea and start doubling down on it and about the time other people are starting to write a blog entry on it, I'm wanting to lean in and do research and figure out prior art. [chuckles]
CASEY: Have you experienced any downsides of this? Has this bit you before?
DAVE: Ah.
CASEY: I'm all for this concept that you're talking about, but.
DAVE: That's a good question. Have I ever been too quick to abandon an idea that would have paid out? Probably. I also fall into that cliché of people that wonder if they have never diagnosed ADHD because I have a million half started projects and it's like a milestone when I actually get to finish one. I wonder if that's related. I don't know.
MAE: It's a pretty huge swath of programmers.
DAVE: Yeah. [chuckles]
CASEY: True.
MAE: You mentioned the thing about the Java folks calling Ruby a toy language and I'm curious about where you think it stands today and why and how you find Ruby really effective, especially for educational purposes.
DAVE: I guess, I'm saddened to see so much news lately where people are talking about the death of Ruby, or the death of Rails. Because I really think that the acceptance of Ruby in a first-class way was my eye-opening to the world being a polyglot environment. That even when I was a Java developer, I was a JavaScript developer, a CSS developer, an HTML developer, and Ruby was just another dot on that map for me.
If I look at my career path, I started professionally programming in Pascal, did C, C++, Objective Pascal, switched to Java. So moving to Ruby was just another step on that long road for me, but it's the one that I keep going back to. I've also done Clojure. I'm managing a project now that's in Python and JavaScript and React. Ruby is at a sweet spot for me. When I want to solve a problem, it's the tool I bring out every time despite a half dozen languages I could probably do that with.
I did mention that it was a sweet spot for me in terms of teaching and I need to say that the curriculum that we formally teach in high school is based on Java and that's because the AP exam is in Java. So the march is towards programming in passing the AP exam. But I think the curriculum is a little bit schizophrenia in trying to decide whether it's teaching computer science, or whether it's a vocational skill for teaching programming. For me, teaching Ruby makes computer science much more approachable, mainly because I get to get syntax out of the way.
The first few weeks in a Java programming course, my students struggle with where the semi-colons go? Wait, why do I need to begin in brackets here? What is this public static void main thing about? Which is, that's especially frustrating because we never fully explained that even in 2 years of programming courses.
And Ruby just strips all that kind of complexity away. But then at the same time, it makes some aspects of teaching computer science much more approachable. The fact that I have all these cool things I can do with collections, like I can say each, I can select, I can reject, I can over a collection ask for every combination of five elements of that without it being a page and a half of recursive code [laughter] to get every possible combination.
I teach concepts around algorithmic performance by talking about permutations and combinations that would be inaccessible that quickly in other languages, including Python. Python is a close second, I think and Python definitely has mindshare for teaching in that space. But Ruby is just in a slightly sweeter spot than that for me.
It's funny because you get five programmers in a room and start talking about high school computer science education, you'll get six answers as to what language we should be teaching. I can say that 8 years in a classroom has challenged every assumption I've ever made about that and there are situations where I've taught students 6502 in Z80 assembly language programming on retro computers. So I've been through the gamut of trying to teach students various things.
There's an example where we even do a little bit of prologue to solve a [inaudible] puzzle. When my students, who have been programming in Java for a while, see Ruby, they accuse me of cheating.
[laughter]
No, you can actually program like this professionally.
MAE: Love it.
CASEY: I used to teach, too and a lot of this resonates with me. I taught undergrad programming and I chose Ruby, too for a lot of the same reasons [chuckles] because it's approachable and syntax gets out of the way.
I just shared in the sidebar here, a diagram that it's a dependency graph and you need to know what a variable is before you can sort an array, you need to know res exists before you can sort them, and you need to know about objects before you can learn Rails because it's based on objects. It's like, what do you need to know before you can know the next thing? It's a huge, huge spider web of stuff.
But in other languages, if I had taught Java, for example, there's a whole another mess, web tangled ball of yarn at the top, which is the syntax getting in the way. Ruby gets a lot of this whole what you need to learn first, second, third. It's a lot cleaner in Ruby.
DAVE: Right. And I don't know that there's a perfect teaching language and I think that's irrelevant that there isn't. I think how many of us professionally program in the first language we ever learned? I think the real expertise as a software engineer comes when you know several different languages and can bring them to bear on different problems.
So really – and I think that the computer science, the teaching community is starting to get this right, that they're starting to concentrate on computational thinking, not the syntax of computer programming. If you look at the kind of the hierarchy of skills, there's things that we can teach elementary school kids about computational thinking, give them puzzles on how do you explain to your friend how to solve a maze, things like that.
Then there's the notion of computer programming. How do we get the curly braces in the right place? How do we take our ideas and translate them to the computer? And then above that, there's computer science concepts and then using computer science concepts, but in a much different way, is software engineering.
I'll have students that ask me, “Well, what's the difference between the two?” And computer science, I tell them it’s ultimately about like the performance of algorithms and you can get into almost philosophy of what is computable within the universe if you take computer science to the ultimate theoretical limit. And software engineering is about how do we use as various pieces to solve business problems? How do we work together as a team? And those are very different problems and it's one of the reasons why you can go to school for 20 years to get an advanced theoretical computer science degree, but it's possible to come out of a 12-week bootcamp and have skills that those people would never have.
CASEY: Well said.
MAE: Chelsea also is a teacher. And I'm curious, Chelsea, if you have any thoughts in this realm?
CHELSEA: I do. So I teach a couple classes at the University of Chicago. One of them is Python programming. I teach Python and then intermediate Python and I teach a mobile software development class.
It's funny that you mentioned that there's not one perfect programming language for teaching, because I found that to be true as well. I teach the Python programming class, for example, the point isn't specifically to learn the syntax of Python. The point is to learn principles of programming and the language is chosen basically because it's a relatively low overhead language for a lot of the reasons that Casey mentioned before. But there are limitations that come with that, too.
So Python, I think one of the strengths of Python for example, is that the core Python team makes explicit what I think a lot of other programming language core teams leave implicit in such a way that it is apparent for new learners to understand which is that any tool, any programming language, anything that we write, or read, or use in computer science was written with a perspective in mind because it was written by a person, or a group of people. The Python core team makes that perspective explicit in a number of ways and that perspective leans towards object-oriented programming, which works for a lot of our use cases.
But if we are attempting to teach principles of programming, it also makes sense for us to include functional programming, functional paradigms, and functional programming thinking and I end up needing to use a couple of workarounds to get to that in Python. We end up writing decorators.
A decorator is a sort of meta function in Python that you can pass other functions into and it can rack those functions in the same way that you would decorate a class in something like Ruby. It's not the kind of thing that you would write as an end user application developer. Most folks using Python don't write decorators. I'd hazard the guess in fact, that most people who write Python don't know what a decorator is really.
So students start a little bit confused about the decorator syntax and even Python core maintainers have asked me, “Why do you teach decorators in an introduction to programming like Python course?” The reason isn't that students are going to need to use decorators professionally, it's that decorators are one of the only access points in Python for teaching functional concepts.
We run into a – we handle the problem a little bit differently, or I handle it a little bit differently in mobile software development. So that course, similar to the Python programming course, is a platform specific way to sneak in general programming concepts. And I happen to think that mobile is a really great avenue for teaching a lot of things in computer science. Because before you're on a really small device, a lot of the algorithmic optimizations and data optimizations, that we talk to students about being so primarily important, are just not functionally relevant on a machine of the power that these students have.
At this point, a laptop is so powerful that telling them that they need to optimize this loop in order to make something run faster, they're not going to be able to notice a difference on their machine. But when we're talking about something like a mobile device, where there is a very real, very tangible limit on the amount of data that your application can take up, those things start to feel tangible to students in a way that makes them relevant and memorable. We end up using a couple of different programming languages in that course—we use Swift, we use tiny bit of Objective-C, and we use Kotlin.
CASEY: I love that idea that you can motivate programming a really efficient algorithm by putting it onto a mobile device. [chuckles] Sometimes in a class, I would bring that up as the example like, “Well, sometimes you'll need to make it very efficient, like a mobile,” but we never taught – in my experience, I had never taught mobile app development, but that's so motivated. It matters there.
CHELSEA: It helps. I find that mobile is a great avenue for teaching a lot of different things in computer science. So we end up not talking a lot about sourcing ethics for mobile devices, for example, is a very tangible way for students to understand some of the engineering ethics concerns that we have.
And mobile allows us to talk about accessibility in ways that are tangible for students, because the truth is that the vast majority of the design innovations that made mobile devices so important when they came out, came from accessibility companies, accessibility ideas, and accessibility products.
So if folks have heard me talk about mobile development before, then they've heard me say this, but the touch capacitive screen that made the iPhone so important that made it break the market for phones that existed when we were using T9 and keypads. That innovation and its precursors came from this company called FingerWorks that Apple acquired and the goal of that company was to enable human computer interaction for people who had lost their fine motor skills.
There are a lot of things in development that are like that, where the fact that everyone at this point who's got a mobile phone, considers it so indispensable to their life is a testament to the way that building something in an accessible fashion makes it more useful to everyone, not just the community that “needs the accessibility.”
MAE: Yes. Thank you for plugging accessibility as accessible for all.
DAVE: You mentioned being able to teach them performance and you're right, that is a challenging problem on modern machines. I just shared in the chat two different links to puzzles that I use in the classroom.
One is this Star 26 puzzle, which is the numbers 1 through 12 on little pegs and you have to arrange them in rows of four numbers, kind of like the Star of David and have it so each row adds up to 26 and there are several hundred solutions to that problem. I walk through my students solving that puzzle and the way we can write a program to find every solution to that is just try every – I was talking before about combinations and permutations. We can literally try every possible permutation of the numbers 1 through 12, and we just have a function to see if that's a solution. In a Ruby program—Ruby is not the fastest language—and it can chug through that in about 2 minutes on my laptop.
The second puzzle I shared is called Aristotle's Number puzzle and that has the numbers 1 through 19 that have to be ranged in a hexagonal, almost like a honeycomb pattern so that every row and column has to add up to 39. If you look at the size of the permutation of the number 1 through 19 – and I'll show that puzzle to the students and they'll be like, “Oh yeah, we can write a program to solve that,” now that they've written the first one. They write the program and not considering the size of the set of the number of permutations of 1 through 19 and they sit there and they wait for it to start to spit out answers and wait and wait.
A few minutes go by and nothing happens and then I ask them, “Well, how much bigger is that space?” So we talk about finding all the spaces and we realize that if we could solve permutations of 1 through 12 and about 2 minutes, the permutations of 1 through 19 will take over a 1,000 years. So we're like, “How can we get that down?” And we have to have a completely different approach to solve that problem.
CASEY: That is motivated. To make them feel the pain of waiting, even though – [overtalk]
DAVE: Right, right.
CASEY: It's probably, it's time bound, right?
DAVE: Right.
CASEY: To give them a…
CHELSEA: How long did the final programs end up taking?
DAVE: So you use a little bit of linear algebra and believe it or not, I can use this to – they can intuit the concepts of linear algebra from this puzzle. I'd have to talk you through it, but I can find the solution to that first puzzle in under 30 seconds and then using the same approach on the first Star 26 puzzle, we can bring that solution to find all the possible answers in under 6 seconds.
CHELSEA: Wow.
DAVE: So we go from blindly testing every possible permutation to a depth first search where we quickly eliminate entire branches of the problem, because we know that they don't solve a simpler version of the constraint. And I have a bunch of different puzzles that kind of fit that pattern of the first one, the obvious brute force solution solves it in a couple of minutes, the next one would take a 1,000 years. So we have to figure out a smarter way to solve it.
CHELSEA: I think that's really cool that you give them the opportunity to see, to feel the waiting process.
DAVE: Right.
CHELSEA: I think that those sorts of experiences end up allowing lessons like these to stick in a way that just explaining that this thing is going to take a long time sometimes doesn’t.
DAVE: Right. I should also – I'm talking a lot about my time in the classroom here. I need to give credit to the teacher that I work with. I'm not going to say his name because I didn't get permission to mention him beforehand. But I work with a math teacher at the high school where I work, where 8 years ago, he opened his classroom to me and we lecture together. Most of the time, I would just wander around and help students with lab time. But there are several topics that he just lets me stand in front of the class and give my ideas and give them extracurricular projects. It's just fantastic that he opened his classroom to me like that.
I volunteer in his classroom two mornings a week and that has led to things that I do at local elementary schools, local middle schools. And then last year during the pandemic, when a lot of teachers were looking for other ways to engage their students, I started to engage a lot more remotely and that finally got me some visibility at the county level where there's a Director of Computer Science Education and a few education facilitators that I'm working with now as well.
CHELSEA: Very cool. How did teaching remotely compare for you to teaching in-person?
DAVE: Oh my God, it was so hard. In addition to this—I got into this whole thing because I have 3 boys that are triplets and they're finally at the high school where I'm teaching. But when they were in kindergarten, I started to volunteer through a program called Watch D.O.G.S Dads at their local elementary school. So that's how I got into this whole thing.
So I taught in the classroom for years before COVID and I saw it, first of all, with my own kids in that there were classes that they did fine at, especially with me being able to tutor them in some math stuff, that worked well. But it was also the first year that all three of them were taking Spanish and that was just a really hard remote thing to try to take a foreign language remotely because you sit there and you watch the teacher and she's like, “Okay, I want everybody in the class to say Hola, but I want you to all be muted because I can't hear you all at the same time. Okay, say Hola. Okay, now Daniel, you unmute and say Hola. Daniel, Daniel, the button. Yeah, honey, the button to unmute. There you go.” It took an entire class to get every student to say Hola and it was not going to go well that year.
In the computer science class, most of the time it was okay because it was lab time once they’ve got a concept of just sitting and thinking in front of a computer. In some ways, it was even easier because they can share their screen with me and stuff like that. But there's one topic that I love to teach. It's like I love to teach recursion to the high schoolers because the high school age, you teach them recursion and when they get it, it's like I taught them one of the secrets of the universe.
Normally, in the classroom, I see their faces light up and their eyes were like I've made the connection. They've understood it. At least they understand it in the minute. I'm sure you've all been there where you understand something and then tomorrow, it's a dim memory and you have to grasp for it again. But they understood it in the moment and remotely, I could not make that decision, or make that connection. I walked out of my office and went in to see my wife in her office across the house and I was just like dejected. I was like, “That was the worst teaching experience I ever had,” because I covered the material, but I had no connection with anybody. I could've just been doing it to a blank screen.
My county did not force students to have their cameras on, which is probably a good thing. But at the same time, very few students had their cameras on. So there were very few faces to make that connection to as you're talking. So oftentimes, I was just speaking to a blank screen and a microphone; I could have been singing in the shower for all I knew. There was no connection.
CHELSEA: Wow.
CASEY: Yeah. It's unnerving. I've been teaching online this year, too and when everyone's camera's off, it is unnerving.
DAVE: Yeah.
CASEY: I feel like I'm literally talking to myself. But often, I'll ask people to turn the video camera on and when I ask people to even give me visual feedback, even one person can completely transform my experience.
DAVE: Oh, right.
CASEY: Well, just one person. But I don't know that I do that with kids. I feel like you're stuck where you are.
DAVE: Right. Especially there's – not that any of that's happened in my county, but there are situations where students have been disciplined for posters they have up in their bedroom and stuff like that because it was now a school event. So I understand why as a high school student, I wouldn't want the school intruding into my personal space like that.
One good thing to come out of the remoteness of the pandemic. In Loudoun, we went to virtual very suddenly towards the end of the year before last. So the last few months of school was all remote and we weren't expecting to do that. It was one day, “Okay, we're going out on break,” and then all of a sudden, “No, you're not going back.” So students picked their classes for the next school year remotely and our percentage of women in the class went up and there's no real, like I haven't heard anybody doing studies on that.
At the Computer Science Teachers Association, there was anecdotal evidence that that was true across counties everywhere and the general thinking is that students pick their classes without that peer pressure of people being like, “Ooh, you're going to take that?” So the percentage of women taking computer science classes in high school went up.
And that's always been a mystery to me because we do events at the elementary school level and boys and girls are equally good and equally interested up until 5th grade, which is the end of elementary school. Then I see students again in the middle school when I do events in 7th grade and we already have that 70/30 split. It's like, where are all those girls that a couple of years ago really loved this stuff. They're just all kinds of weird peer pressure and there's no one cause that I can contribute to it. But then by the high school, where on bad years, were down to 20% women in a class. This year, we're up to 33, which is better than normal, but we can still do a lot.
CHELSEA: I wonder whether some of it would have also had to do with somebody’s experience in the class. So if you're taking a class remotely, you're not in this class surrounded by potentially people you don't know, people that you're not spending a lot of time with, people that you're not friends with. That's the kind of thing that I think would really influence the way that a middle schooler would select classes.
DAVE: Yeah.
CHELSEA: I remember being at that age and wanting to be in the classes that my friends were in.
DAVE: Right. Yeah. In fact, I have students that I've talked to, there's a little bit of perception there that that's the geeky subject, I don't want to take that, or girls are more academically interested earlier than boys are. So they want to start language classes a year earlier because that's a requirement and statistics bear that out. This is an optional extracurricular class and so, they're all kinds of reasons. There's no one root because that I can point to and say, “That's the thing we need to fix.”
MAE: Well, with the academic orientation, it's funny that you brought that up because when you described that about the online trend, I was like, “Well, I mean, people are.” It's pretty clear that having these skills will position you better and that is something that girls tend to be pretty attuned to. If we're talking in terms of a gender binary and if we're talking in terms of [laughs] total platitudes about gender stuff.
CASEY: I had some peers in undergrad who were really gatekeeping me as a developer. I had done some community college classes in high school. I was a total nerd. My parents supported me in doing it. It was great. I knew programming, but in freshman year, people said, “Are you a programmer? Here, I know how to tell if you are a programmer. What's recursion?” And I don't know, somehow, I was like, I got it already. I knew recursion years ago.
DAVE: Right.
CASEY: I was like, “I don't know how to answer this question.” So I clearly wasn't a programmer until I could prove I knew of recursion to this undergrad boy that was trying to gatekeep me out of it. Any amount of pressure like that, even if it's more subtle, to the women I imagine is even stronger.
DAVE: Yeah, and the gatekeeping thing is weird. The first year I was teaching, I saw a boy in one of the classes say to a girl that oh, I think it's cute that a girl is learning how to code and she beamed like it was a compliment. And I realized this is going to be tougher to figure out than I originally thought, because this mixes up in the high school dynamic of who has a crush on who and who wants a compliment from whom. At the time it happened, I sat there and just didn't know how to respond to it and since then, whenever I've seen something like that happen again, I actually have a little bit prepared where I'm like, “Well, actually the first computer programmers were women.” And I have a whole little keynote presentation ready to go that has – [overtalk]
MAE: Yes!
DAVE: Pictures of women in front of ENIACs switching the wires around and Grace Hopper is there in her admiral’s uniform and a whole little thing to talk about how this was originally seen as programming was kind of that secretarial pool, the original world of computers. But when computers were people and the computers were just a step above the secretarial typist pool and that as people figured out oh, actually this is kind of interesting, kind of like guys dominated. And how they kind of attribute that in the 80s as video games became popular and first-person shooters ruled the world, that computers became the toy that was in the boy's bedroom, not the girl's bedroom and that's where a lot of our gender bias today can come from. So I try to make them aware of that.
It's funny, I originally took the opportunity to volunteer in high school as a completely selfish reason to see what high school peer pressure was going to be like for my own kids these days. Because I grew up when breakfast club was a reality. My high school was clique upon clique and it's almost encouraging that that doesn't seem to exist as much today. There's, I think a lot more acceptance than I see in the high school.
CHELSEA: That’s interesting to hear. I wouldn't have… My experience of high school was very similar to your experience of high school and not only was it my experience, but it's also what I have seen reflected in—I'm not particularly partial to movies, or television that focus on high schoolers, but any movies, or television that I have seen that is focused on the high school age, or even the middle school age, that has essentially been the expectation for what it is like for students to be in school.
DAVE: Now I have to admit the students that I'm largely exposed to are a special group in that our first-year computer science, the intro class is a completely voluntary thing. It's not a requirement. And then the AP class is a volunteer thing again, an extracurricular, or not an extracurricular, but an elective.
CASEY: Elective.
DAVE: Yeah. So they're opting in twice. If they get involved in anything I'm doing extracurricularly with the competitions, or the events that I hold at my local library, they're opting in a third time. So those students are a rare group and they seem to be much more accepting of each other. I can't say that that's true in your typical English class for instance, but I do have geeks, jocks, nerds, everybody all in one room and they get along.
MAE: While we're on the topic of computer science education. Upcoming is the Computer Science Education Week, Dave and I understand you have a bit to tell us about.
DAVE: Yeah, this is how I actually got involved in this whole thing. I mentioned that I was volunteering at my son's elementary school and the first year I was just as overly enthusiastic parent who was kind of disappointed that they had a computer lab, but they only seem to teach 20th century office worker skills. I volunteered to try to teach something and “Well, we can install stuff on the computers. We don't have any curriculum.”
Well, the next year was the first annual Computer Science Education Week and there was this curriculum called the Hour of Code. The goal was to get every student in the country to have one hour of computer programming experience. I mentioned that to the technology resource teacher and she helped me get the principal involved in it and we ran the Computer Science Education Week with all the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at the elementary school.
And then that got me involved at volunteering at the high school level and since then, we have been having our high school students every year go back to elementary schools and help teach the Computer Science Education Week. So we have high schoolers going back to the elementary schools that they went to helping their old teachers teach computer science. And – [overtalk]
MAE: Oh, I love that!
DAVE: It's amazing how much they accomplish in an hour. If you go take a look at code.org, or cseducationweek.org, or even hourofcode.org, there are lessons that take about an hour and need nothing more than a browser. My favorite is the one from the first year that just uses the game characters from Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies and you have to write a computer program that tells a zombie how to get through the maze to a flower.
So it starts out, you have to tell the zombie to move forward, and then move forward and turn right, and then move forward and if the path in front of you is blocked, turn left. Oh, but if the path to your left is blocked, turn right. And there's this whole – steps you through the algorithm to solve a maze and at the end of the class, you tell the students that just doesn't solve that maze, that can solve any maze and it blows their mind.
[laughter]
The schools are always looking for volunteers to help teach that stuff. So consider this a call to action for the audience, reach out to a local elementary school, a local middle school, even a high school, find the math teacher, or whatever teacher that's teaching some coding aspects, find out if they're doing an Hour of Code event, and volunteer to help. Because it is almost a stereotype that elementary school teachers walk into the classroom and are like, “Oh, don't ask me to program. I don't know anything about programming. I can't even figure out how to use the printer.”
That's not a great mindset to be teaching our elementary school kids because they eat this material up. They think it's fun. Let's get them encouraged with it. So I've been using other students to do that for years and it's to great success. I now have students that are arriving at the high school looking forward to this event because they remember it from when they were elementary school students.
CHELSEA: That's cool.
MAE: Yeah. I love that. I've done an Hour of Code before. We did a Scratch thing, but it was Star Wars themed.
DAVE: Yeah, I remember that one.
MAE: I wore my hair in buns. It was really fun.
DAVE: Yeah. The great thing is over the years, they've built out more and more curriculum. The problem with the first year is that advanced, like 5th and 6th graders, especially by the time they'd done it a couple of years, they were bored with it. Like, “We've done this before.” Oh, I have a great story about that I'll get to in a second. But then the 1st and 2nd graders would come and number one, sometimes they had trouble reading it. Number two, it's only at the end of the 2nd-grade year that they have the concept of they're looking top down on this screen, but they can't see it from the zombie’s eyes where the zombie has to move forward and then turn left and then move forward.
So the Star Wars curriculum has BB-8 that can move up, down, left, or right. So they take away the having to see it through the zombie’s eyes.
MAE: Right, yeah.
DAVE: And then at the kindergarten, 1st grade level, they have it with just up, down, left, and right arrows so you drag the arrows out. So now they don't even have to read. But then at the 5th-grade level, they have one based on Frozen where you're ice skating and you can do angles like 45 degrees, 30 degrees, 90 degrees. So there's a lot more motion available in that and almost spirograph like effects. So there's something for everybody there. It's just fantastic. It's stuff that's geared towards educational level, stuff that's geared towards gender, just all kinds of material there. You could almost get a computer science education for free off of code.org.
So I mentioned that I have two great stories about teaching 5th graders. The first year we did the Hour of Code when they complete the lesson, they can hit Show Code and it shows them the JavaScript code that would do what they just did in terms of move forward, turn left, all that stuff.
Well, I showed them the code I'd written for a game that played Connect 4. So we played Connect 4, I let the computer beat the whole class, and then I showed them the code. I was like, “Look, there's a lot more of it, but it's the same stuff you were just writing,” and we broke it down into one little and I showed them how six lines of code work and I said, “All the computer's doing is it looks –” there's only seven possible moves in Connect 4. So it looks at all possible seven moves and imagines what if it happened? Well, after that move, there's seven possible moves. So there's only 49 possible moves at that level. After that, there is only so many other moves and we keep – and I said, “So the computers just look seven moves ahead, sees who wins and loses, and decides I'm going to go that way down this whole tree.” And this 5th-grade girl said, “Oh, so computers aren't smart. They're just dumb really, really fast.”
MAE: Oh my gosh. I love that.
DAVE: And that quote, I use that quote all the time.
And then I had another student who came in a few years later and she was like, “I'm getting tired of this. I don't want to drag the buttons. I want to type the code like the big kids do.” So with one of the high school students in another one of the Hour of Code lessons, she was typing out JavaScript and we got a when she had to do move forward, move forward, move forward, she was like, “There should be an easier way to do this.” So she just tried writing “move forward” and in the empty parentheses she put the number 3 and it worked. She was like, “Awesome.” So. [chuckles]
MAE: Yes!
DAVE: And it's just great to see students like that that you're encouraging them to push the boundaries without fear.
CHELSEA: Well, and kudos to the developer who wrote the API that had move forward where you could put 3 in it.
DAVE: Right.
[laughter]
CHELSEA: I wish I had experience doing any – honestly, AWS integration anything.
[laughter]
If it were intuitive, I would cry with joy.
[laughter]
So at the level that I – I teach Masters students and at that point, I don't have as many fun things for them to program, but I make them program things like they write a testing framework, they modify a testing framework that I've written, and then they do a similar thing for a data analysis framework similar to pandas if you use Python, or something like that.
But the goal is very much what you were describing earlier with showing folks that Connect 4 code insofar as that I want them to understand that the libraries that they're using on a day-to-day basis aren't magic. There's not something happening in there that the fundamental concept would be unfamiliar to them if they were to hear about it. It's effectively maybe more complex and maybe more fiddly versions of things that they are writing and at some level, there's sort of this Pareto principle thing going on, where you can get 80% of the functionality of a lot of APIs with 20% of the code. Provided you're willing to make some assumptions, like people know how to use it and they're not going to put it in the wrong thing, and that kind of thing.
DAVE: Right.
CHELSEA: When you're introducing, like trying to make helpful error messages, that's way more code in most of these things than the happy path implementation is. So it's cool to see them implement those things and start to realize that a lot of the code that they use on a day-to-day basis, at least from the happy path perspective is not different from what they write themselves.
DAVE: Right.
CHELSEA: So you mentioned that you teach 1st and 2nd graders, 5th graders, 7th graders. Did I get that right?
DAVE: I've had done some stuff at the middle school and let me tell you, the middle school, my favorite thing to do there is to walk in as a guest lecturer with several teachers that I know. Because when you walk in for the class—and I tend to bring in wooden puzzles, or little encryption toys and stuff like that and I bring them in in this little suitcase that looks like the suitcase that guy in the Harry Potter movies that the animal pops out of? You walk into a classroom with something that looks like that and you have everybody's attention like the students are silent, waiting for you to open that thing and see what's in it. And teachers are always like, “I can't believe how attentive they were for you.”
But I can say that several years ago, pre-COVID, I ran a afterschool robotics club for middle school and where once a week we would spend an hour and a half building out this robot with the VEX Robotics team stuff. That was a little hard having to work with the same group of kids regularly on an afterschool extracurricular thing because there were several students who were there because they knew they loved robotics and you see them a few years later at the high school doing stuff with the robotics club. There were kids that were there because their mom can't pick them up until 4:30 and “You're going to do something after school that looks educational, you're going to do that and they didn't want to be there.”
The other coach and I are not formal teachers in the county. We're there as volunteer coaches. So these students. I don't know if they instinctually know that, or what, but there are disruptive students. That like 7th grade age where they're like, eh just so I've gotten to this point where like, if it's any long committal thing like that I have fun with them until 5th grade and then I'm like, “I'll see y'all in high school. You'll go have – I have some stuff to work out.”
[laughter]
But I do like to volunteer as a guest teacher in the classroom maybe four times a year with teachers that I know. That way you have a good rapport with the students. They remember you from elementary school. They're going to be happy to see you when they get the high school. Anyway, that's what my experience at the middle school levels become.
CASEY: Very cool. If someone listening wants to guest lecture at a school, what could that look like for them? If they call the front desk at the elementary school, who are they going to talk to, and then who, and how do they meet them?
DAVE: I have the best results reaching out to the teacher that I know is teaching the curriculum. And if you go to your school's website, there is probably going to be a list of all the faculty at the school and the subjects teach. Computer science topics are generally under the math curriculum. If you can't find exactly who's teaching it, talk to the department head, and they'll put you in touch with who's teaching it. Because that teacher is going to be the one that can say, “I have exactly the thing I can use you for.” The further I go up that chain, the harder it is as an entry point. But if you start grassroots, you can move up that chain.
So the whole reason I'm at the high school is that the first year I did this at the elementary level, we got some local press for it and the elementary school principal was like, “This is fantastic.” And then that high school principal was like, “I want to know more about that.” So that's how that happened, but I always have the best success just reaching out to a teacher and saying, “Hey, I have some stuff prepared. I'd love to volunteer as a guest in your classroom.”
It's even branched out from math teachers. I have a curriculum on computers in World War II that I did at the middle school level, when they were learning about World War II. My sons, who are now in 9th grade, I've talked to one of their world history teachers about talking about the development of math from a historical perspective. Like, I don't know if you've read the book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
MAE: No.
DAVE: But that, oh, fantastic book. It's called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and it's about the history of where the number zero comes from.
MAE: I have heard some of this, but I wasn't familiar with the book. Yeah.
DAVE: Yeah, because zero's kind of a contentious topic.
MAE: Yeah.
DAVE: Because counting is a natural thing when I'm counting my sheep in my farm. I have 5 sheep. I have 6 sheep. Oh, I'm giving you 2 sheep. You can almost even end up with negative numbers making sense because I gave you 3 sheep kind of thing. So you can – it's kind of weird that I have negative 3 sheep, but you owe me 3 sheep. Somebody can understand, but I have 0 sheep. Well, I also have 0 pigs. Why does that matter? So it was like a huge philosophical debate: is 0 a number we need to consider in math?
When 0 was introduced to cultures that used something like a Roman numeral based counting system, it didn't make sense. You think about counting in Roman numerals, you have the number 5. What do you do to make 6? You put a 1 in front of it, or a 1 after it. You put a 1 before it to make 4. Well, so if I have the number 5 and I put a 0 in front of it. 0 means nothing. But now you're telling me it's ten times as much. It's 50. What? But I put as 0 in front of it! So it didn't make a lot of sense to people where that was their mindset and it was a big cultural shift. And that book goes into that.
MAE: I must have talked to someone about this book because it was sheep examples and it was something also about that before numbers, people would take rocks and when the sheep went out, they would put a rock for each one and when the sheep came back in, they would then move that pile of rocks. So even – anyway, sheep counting [laughs] is a lot of base math apparently.
DAVE: [laughs] Right, right. So, and I have two great examples that I'm dying to use with this world history teacher who's currently on subjects of Mesopotamia and stuff. There is an artifact that is in this collection and it's labeled as Plimpton 322. This is a clay tablet that has numbers in, I can't remember the counting system, but it's based on a stick pressed into the tablet and the orientation of the stick represents what the number is.
After decoding this tablet, they realized that contains a bunch of Pythagorean triples, which if you remember the Pythagorean theorem, 3, 4, and 5 are a Pythagorean triple. So it's basically any three integers that can be the sides of a triangle. This tablet contains a bunch of Pythagorean triplets 1,500 years before Pythagoras was around and this is in Mesopotamia. That's like, where did that knowledge come from? That's just amazing that such a thing exists. So I have a bunch of references like that I'm using with this curriculum I'm working up to present to a world history class.
MAE: Love it.
CHELSEA: That seems like a great opportunity to drive home the idea that a lot of the things that we attribute to a singular person having invented, or discovered it, it probably wasn't necessarily that way. Even in the cases where we attribute one person, it was often a collaborative effort and even in the cases where we're attributing that one collaborative effort, a lot of ideas sort of materialize in several different places around the same time period.
DAVE: Right.
MAE: I know, it's so cool.
DAVE: You think Newton and Leibniz both came up with calculus at the same time, apparently pretty independently, but it's because the world was ready for such a thing to exist. We had all the foundational knowledge in place.
CASEY: I was just in Cancun last week for a wedding, which was really nice, and then we went on a trip. The Mayans apparently had zero and they represented it with an empty shell.
[chuckles]
MAE: Ah.
CASEY: Oh, this is a theme for me lately. Zero.
[laughter]
DAVE: Let me tell you something. It sounds like it would be a dry, boring book, but Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is definitely worth the read.
CHELSEA: I mean, and now we're back to the point in programming where people don't want to have Nolan programs, so.
DAVE: Right.
[laughter]
CHELSEA: There might be something to this we really need zero idea?
DAVE: Well, then there's the whole debate around imaginary numbers. That's a whole interesting branch of mathematics as well.
CASEY: This reminds me of a line I almost said earlier where, when you're learning programming, you go from caring about programming for the computer’s sake, like algorithmic efficiency, and then on the next level of complexity is programming for people who are way more complex. The developers developing after you, maybe you, and the people you're developing for. They're differently complex, but practically, in all the jobs I've worked in, the algorithmic complexity is not the most complex one that takes the most time, it’s the hardest for problems space for it.
DAVE: That's one of the things that I tell students about when they're learning Java and they ask me about other programming languages like, “Well, why do other programming languages exist?” And I say, “Well, it's not so much for the computer because the computer will run any old thing we tell it to.” The different languages exist because it's how humans use to express thoughts and – [overtalk]
CHELSEA: That's right.
DAVE: Often where it's documentation for other humans.
CHELSEA: People want to express their perspective and if their perspective differs from a programming language that they see out there, they write their own.
DAVE: Right.
MAE: [laughs] I explain programming to non-programmers often as, or in describing coming into the industry, I thought it was going to be way more math like and really, I found it to be creative writing. A lot of people think that other people's code is bad because it's not how their brain works, or how they would've arranged it. And so, it is this thing about, is your brain most like the other brains, or are you able to predict what the other brains will want you to have said. [laughs].
DAVE: Right.
CHELSEA: Right. And we end up spending a lot of time reformatting code over things like that.
MAE: Yeah.
CHELSEA: So I give this workshop it's about technical debt and what technical debt action is and what that term means because folks, everyone sort of knows what technical debt feels like, but then the way that we end up conceptualizing it is a little bit different to that.
One of the things that happens a lot of times, if you give people a free week to refactor and reduce tech debt in the code base, what you get is a fair number of code renovations where what happened was somebody didn't like the way somebody else wrote it so they wrote it their way. Right now, it does the same thing and right now, the maintenance load is the same as it was before. Best case scenario, it's the same as it was before. Worst case scenario, you erased a bunch of context the team had about the way it worked.
The fundamental difference is a preferential one, rather in a functional one, rather than a documentation one, or a context one and it is shockingly easy to fall victim to that. It is extremely easy to feel like you are reducing the maintenance load in the code base when you're not because your personal perspective aligns by better with the way you're trying to write it than the way the code is aligned at that time.
MAE: Yeah.
DAVE: Yeah. I have students that in the first few weeks of programming get really frustrated learning to program, learning their syntax is wrong, their semicolons in the wrong place and they blame themselves. I'm like, “Don't. This isn't you; the computer is the stupid one in this relationship. You have to be smart for both of you.” And it's kind of like writing poetry for an obsessive-compulsive English teacher who is expecting where every semicolon has to be in the right place.
MAE: [laughs] Oh. And to go back a moment, though, I do want to put in a plug because Chelsea recently can that workshop at RubyConf and when that comes out and is available, definitely check it out.
DAVE: Excellent.
CHELSEA: Oh yeah, I did. If you have a RubyConf ticket, by the way that recording is available as of today.
MAE: Ooh.
CHELSEA: Yeah. It'll be on YouTube at some point too. But I had a teacher who expressed a very similar thing that you did, Dave insofar is that if we were having trouble getting something, he was very, very quick and he said that he did this in his programming job as well. He would blame the UI typically and I find myself doing that a lot. In particular, when it comes to ops type stuff. [chuckles] if I'm messing with ops, I'm like, “It's not my fault that I don't understand why this dropdown only has one item in it,” and stuff like that.
It's funny that you – and I'll bring this back as well that you mentioned earlier elementary school teachers talking about how like, “Well, I can't be expected to know anything about code. I can barely operate the printer.” When you said that, I thought to myself, “I mean, I'm a professional software engineer and there are days that I can't operate that printer.”
DAVE: Yeah. That's a hardware problem. I'm a software – [ianudble 56:27]
CHELSEA: I know.
[laughter]
Like, I'm a mechanic, that don't mean I'm a good driver and it certainly doesn't mean that I can read the mind of a designer who I never met, who released something 20 years ago that now sits in a break room somewhere. I think it’s very different skillsets.
CASEY: And that designer probably didn't think it was great either; they had constraints.
MAE: Right. Totally.
CASEY: But there are people who will defend the design. Maybe they don't see the fuller picture here.
MAE: They didn't take Dave Bock's lesson of how to not get too attached to an idea.
CASEY: Ah! Love it.
CHELSEA: Actually, I did need to ask you that about that, Dave because you mentioned you teach a number of different age groups, you do a number of different guest lectures. You go and you volunteer at the local library. I imagine that for a lot of our listeners would love to be able to give back to their communities in addition to their full-time job. But like you, they got kids, they got things going on and there's logistical challenges associated with that.
I'm interested in hearing a little bit about how you manage maybe your time, but in my experience, limiting ingredient is really more energy than it is time. So I'm curious to as to how you approach that.
DAVE: Wow. It's not like I have more time in my day than anybody else. I just – [overtalk]
MAE: Especially with triplets.
DAVE: Right. It's just how I manage it. If anything, because of the triplets, I'm used to having to have a higher energy level. But first of all, for years, I didn't watch television at all. Not a single thing on TV at all. Like I missed probably a decade of cultural awareness and movies and everything. First of all, because I had kids, but also because I was volunteering in the classroom and that kind of stuff.
But I have to say that the curriculum that I'm building with my students, that effort back every year. Every year, I'm like, “Oh, you know what, that's a neat little puzzle. I tend to do stuff with a lot of little wooden puzzles and I'll be like, “Oh, that's a neat puzzle. I'm going to add that to the curriculum,” and “Oh, that's just like that puzzle.”
So I mentioned earlier, the 26 puzzle and the Aristotle’s Number puzzle, those are two puzzles I saw at completely different times, but similar gimmick, different scales. By the same token, if you've ever seen the Cracker Barrel triangle peg jumping thing.
MAE: Oh yeah.
DAVE: The peg solitaire. Well, that also exists in what they call English solitaire, which is marbles on a board and there's about 33 marbles doing the same thing, like a cross arrangement. Again, similar jumping mechanic, completely different size space problem. So I keep finding puzzles like that in pairs. I found a bunch of board games that are like this and each one illustrates some concept along computational thinking and every year, I have a fresh crop of new students so every time I add a puzzle to it, it just keeps glomming onto the complete set of curriculum I've developed. So it's not like I've spent tons of time developing this curriculum. I've spent a little bit of time over 8 years building it out and it's evergreen because there are always more students to learn.
So how do I manage my time? I could not tell you that I have any secret sauce. I can tell you that prior to COVID, since about 2007, I have been working remotely on and off and not having a commute really gave me time, back in my day, to do stuff. The job I have now, they treasure the time that I spend in the classroom.
In fact, my last several jobs have really supported me in this in the fact that I work from home, I'm 5 minutes from my high school, I can schedule a class on my calendar and it's just like a meeting. I can disappear for an hour and come back and it's just like I had a meeting in the middle of my day with anybody. So it really gives me that flexibility to volunteer at the school. In fact, for a year and a half, I had an hour and a half commute on a good day and for that year and a half, I was not in the school nearly as much because I couldn't get to it.
So I think being able to work remotely is a big draw of my time. Not spending time parked in front of the TV, which admittedly has changed. I found a few guilty pleasures in television shows lately.
CHELSEA: Ooh, what are you watching?
MAE: Yes!
DAVE: Oh my God. I am late to Ted Lasso.
MAE: I haven't seen yet!
[laughter]
CHELSEA: What!
[laughter]
MAE: Why have you not seen?!
DAVE: Oh, oh God. I’ve got to tell you. I'm not going to spoil anything because I want everybody to watch this show.
A friend of mine was raving about this show in terms of its postmodernism and he's off on a tangent describing that he predicted a show of this kind of non-ironic sentimentality and virtue ethics years ago because of the way the society was going.
When I first heard about this show, I was like, “Let me get this straight, a show about an overly positive, self-righteous character that is a soccer coach? Okay, I'm not a sports guy so I don't care about soccer and everything I've seen and heard about this guy, it sounds like it's Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. Why am I going to watch a show where Ned Flanders is the main character of that show?”
[laughter]
So I was dead set against a show forever and then somebody said to me—I was at a gathering of a bunch of friends recently and he said to me— “You're absolutely right. You need to watch it anyway.” So then I don't know, a month, or so ago, my wife and I were watching something. We were dead tired after a long day, sitting down for dinner. She wanted to watch something on TV and we were like, “Well, we could start the Foundation series. or we could watch the Dune movie,” and we're like, “No, both are too heavy to get into now.”
And Apple TV showed us a big flag thing for Ted Lasso and I was like, “Sure, I'll watch it right now. I don't feel like watching anything and I won't get committed to it.” 15 minutes into it, I'm watching it and I'm thinking, “Yeah, this isn't for me. Yeah, this is not the show I want to watch.” And then there was a line. I'm going to say the line—it doesn't give anything away. But this Ned Flander's type, after making somebody angry with his at first what comes across is toxic positivity turns to somebody else and says, “Wow. If he thinks he hates us now wait till we win him over?” And that line kind of touched me, like he's not just some random one-dimensional Saturday Night Live character failing up; he's doing this with intent and this is a decision to be this way.
MAE: Mm.
DAVE: And all of a sudden, the character had all this depth and with that one line I was hooked. And then in another episode, he was talking about his role as coach and a reporter was interviewing him—another one liner that doesn't give anything away. A reporter was interviewing him about the loss of a soccer game and he says, “I don't care if my team win wins, or loses,” and the reporter thought that was incredulous. He's like, “You don't care if they win, or lose?” And he's like, “It's not my job to care if they win, or lose. It's their job as the players to win, or lose. It's my job to make them the best players, the best people that they can beat today,” and I was like, “Wow.”
The show revolves around this character who is just an upstanding human being at every point, unironically, and how he influences the lives around him and influences them just through his existence to be better people and how all this chaos around him and they all become aligned. It's just such an awesome show. I really recommend it.
When we watch a TV show, my wife and I have a commitment that we don't binge watch it. I hate binge watching a show because later on I'm like, “Oh, I don't remember that thing.” So we're watching one episode night, or two and it gives me the space to think about that episode and it's just such a rich, rich thing to think about it. It's really something that makes you think about your philosophy of life.
CASEY: Oh, maybe I have to watch this now, don’t I?
MAE: I know! That’s how I feel. [laughs]
CASEY: It also sounds like – [overtalk]
DAVE: Sometime when you're brain dead and don't feel like watching anything, give the first episode a shot.
CHELSEA: Yes.
DAVE: Let me know what happens.
CASEY: It also sounds like the first contemporary male role model I might like.
CHELSEA: Oh, totally.
CASEY: My favorites for me are Dick Van Dyke, Bill Nye the science guy, Weird Al, and a lot of people from Star Trek, but there's none in the last 10 years. No one I can name who in media has been a good, positive male role model other than Ted Lasso, apparently.
DAVE: I really think you'll like this character. I can't imagine who wouldn't. You would have to be the most cynical puppy kicker to hate the show.
MAE: I definitely want to watch it. As someone that can be taken as a Pollyanna person about other people's lives [chuckles] and not my own, I have chosen a lot of things about being positive and honest, and it can get lost and be seen as naïve. So I really like what you've described.
I get extra positive by looking at the negative, like I can hold contradictions and human foibles and failures really, really well. So that doesn't make me now not want to deal with that person. So yeah, I'll be curious to see what Ted Lasso has to say about all kinds of things.
DAVE: Yeah, definitely recommend that show. This'll date me when I talk about how I haven't watched TV for a decade. The last characters that I felt this kind of passion about and they were the antiheroes was the – God, I can't remember the character's name now. But it was on the TV show, The Shield, which was basically a bunch of cops as antiheroes about how they had come to terms with, they could not just be forces of good in the world at sometimes they had to be the force of least evil and the mechanism that they had to do that and they were at times, real antiheroes.
Then the early days, I only watched the first two seasons of Dexter, the serial murderer with code. So real antihero kind of TV shows. I just have not watched a lot of TV and then to land on Ted Lasso is such a breath of fresh air. I can see why, especially during the height of the pandemic, that show resonated with a lot of people.
MAE: Oh my gosh. I have so many things to say to [chuckles] what you just said about the being least evil and a lot. Also Chelsea, you brought this up about how many things happen through – [overtalk]
DAVE: Vic Mackey. That's the name of the cop, Vic Mackey.
MAE: Oh, cool, cool, cool.
DAVE: Sorry.
MAE: No, no.
[laughter]
How many people contribute to whatever it is and a lot of the vexing problems, like the pharmaceutical industry, it gets really complicated when you start to see there is no one lever and a lot of people do feel, in those positions, that they are being the least evil.
So many more topics, but we might be closer to the end of our session. I don't know if anybody else has any other zingers they want to put in before we do our reflections?
CASEY: Yeah. I think we're out of zingers for now.
[laughter]
We could come up with more.
All right, let's do reflections.
I happened to have one already, I can go first. Usually, I take a second to think of one. From earlier in the episode, I noticed a couple examples we had about how do you motivate students to learn about algorithmic efficiency and we had two examples.
One is Chelsea has mobile apps need the faster algorithms and that makes sense. [laughs] If I knew mobile app development enough to teach it, I think I would start there, too. And then Dave had the great algorithm, like a simple wooden puzzle and then a complex wooden puzzle, and then moment in the middle where you pause, they're trying to run the simple naïve algorithm. That's so motivating. Help them feel the problem in the mobile app sense, help them see how slowly it would load before you make it refactored.
In my background in education, computer science, it was definitely algorithms first and I was always like, “Why, though?”
[laughter]
No one answered that at any point, really. [laughs] I was never that motivated to learn algorithms and I still didn't study them, but I might in these situations.
MAE: I have participated in Hour of Code and I did call my local school, but it kind of fell through and so, I really appreciate just getting reminded about coming more involved in my community. So thanks for bringing that, Dave.
CHELSEA: For my reflection, I tend to have a strong recency bias right after I'm thinking about things and so, the thing that I'm remembering the most right now is our discussion of the television shows.
But what I think I'll take away from that is the comment from your friend, Dave, around having predicted that something like this would have its time, which reminds me of our discussion earlier in the conversation about the world being ready for something being a larger factor in when something gets developed than a fictitious individual progenitor of that thing, the way that calculus was.
I find myself wondering right now, what in our field, in programming, in tech in general, what is the industry, is the world, are the people that we serve, what are they ready for that I expect will see not because some genius comes along, but because that's what our field needs and I don't know what it is, but I'll be thinking about that.
DAVE: Ooh. Wow, that's real food for thought there.
MAE: Mm hm.
CHELSEA: I try, I try.
DAVE: That's kind of like – [overtalk]
MAE: I knew Chelsea’s was going to be really good, which is why I went first. [laughs]
CHELSEA: Oh gosh.
DAVE: That's kind of the William Gibson quote of “The future is here—it's just not widely distributed yet.” I used that in another curriculum we'll talk about someday.
CASEY: I hope the answer to that is inclusion because that's a big thing – [overtalk]
MAE: Yes!
CASEY: And it's not being applied nearly enough.
DAVE: Yeah.
MAE: Totally.
CASEY: I hope that's what we get next. That's the next upgrade I'm looking for in teamwork OS, whatever.
DAVE: So I can tell you that I've been at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference the last 2 years that it's been virtual and inclusion is a big topic there, even dominating discussion about pedagogy and teaching algorithms. People are talking more about how do we increase representation in the classroom.
So my takeaway—and I actually did not realize it until the last second when Chelsea mentioned what I said was my superpower at the beginning was me sitting here talking about Ted Lasso is exactly an example of that. Because I was committed that I was not going to be interested in a show with Ned Flanders as a character and now here I am saying, “Everybody needs to watch this.” So that's a little example of I'm not wedded to that evaluation and I revisited it and moved on.
But before she said that, the thing I was considering about my takeaway is how much even after a long, tiring day at work when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh, okay, now I have to do this interview. It's going to be an hour and a half and then I can take a break.” Whenever I talk about this stuff, it is invigorating and revitalizing. I am just so passionate about this stuff that it gives me so much energy. It recharges me. So I'm going to try to take that point in some useful direction.
CASEY: I want to comment on that last thing you said. I was thinking earlier, what gives you energy so you can volunteer more, Dave Bock? And then your answer was kind of volunteering gives you energy.
MAE: Mm hm.
CASEY: You didn't quite say that, but that's what I picked up from it. So anyone who wants to get the enough energy to volunteer may be powering through and just getting started and trying it once could be enough to get you started and if it energizes you in the end anyway. It might not. You could try it, though.
DAVE: Yeah. I never expected it to be this kind of fuel. I’ll have one last parting thought on that in that when I hold events at the library, it's often without any real agenda, except, “The end of the semester's coming up, come to the library and I'll help you with our end of the semester projects, or even if you just want to explore something else, I'll be there, to” – I'll have students that come with random ideas and we just sit there and just my presence can give them the encouragement to do something they'll be like, “I don't know, let's do that together.”
I can get so involved in an interesting problem that I can forget I'm working with a high school student and not some relatively new graduate peer of mine at work and I just begin to see a problem with beginner’s eyes. That is very invigorating. Maybe I’m a vampire stealing energy from our youth, I don’t know. [laughs]
CASEY: They’ll got plenty; they’ll share.
MAE: Yeah, yeah.
Special Guest: Dave Bock.
Sponsored By:
01:01 - Ian’s Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning
06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy”
12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken)
16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry?
24:25 - Interview Processes Don’t Align with Skills Needed
35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process
Reflections:
Mandy: Peoples’ tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning.
Arty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship.
Ian: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?”
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore.
MANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas.
Ian has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He’s currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education.
Welcome to the show, Ian.
IAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
MANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
IAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way.
But it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you’re signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic.
ARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you?
IAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share.
I grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked.
Thankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean?
In the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it.
And then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.”
[laughter]
But as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home.
It was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.”
[chuckles]
Whatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that.
Just the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business.
And so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time.
MANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming?
IAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching.
I started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?”
So I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years.
And then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide.
When I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that.
A friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.”
The curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.”
I love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well.
I think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively.
So the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun.
ARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many.
IAN: Definitely. Yeah.
ARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews?
IAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken.
There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs.
As a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be.
So the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips.
I've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible.
I used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website.
And then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer.
Because there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change.
I'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together.
MANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here.
IAN: Yeah.
MANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street?
IAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company?
That's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years’ experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years’ experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years’ experience.
So the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years’ experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job.
I know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there.
MANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job?
IAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine.
You can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.”
It really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have.
So I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs.
The other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills.
As a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply.
The challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I’m bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of.
So I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years’ experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team.
Now you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills.
I went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff.
ARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job.
You mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment?
IAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems.
Where the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry.
Back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.”
Well, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does.
One criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it?
But then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.”
We shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing.
ARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will.
IAN: Sure.
ARTY: Being able to think that way, it’s fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles]
IAN: I agree.
ARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis.
IAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that.
But I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk]
MANDY: Do they want to learn?
IAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing.
MANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here.
IAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works.
And then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people.
But some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you’re signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it.
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ARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things?
IAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too.
But I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview.
But I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it.
So I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I’ve got to tell my friends about this.”
That's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that.
So I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that.
And I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.”
I think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that.
I think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time.
Unfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.”
Companies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there.
ARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack.
I think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it’s generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that.
IAN: Yeah.
MANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting.
ARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging.
IAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.”
I think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments.
But I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?”
I think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn’t even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that?
So I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.”
But again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations.
And then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there.
If people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too.
MANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry.
IAN: Absolutely.
MANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.”
IAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.”
When I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case.
But there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you’re like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.”
But then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates.
If anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve.
I was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.”
It's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well.
ARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody.
IAN: I agree.
ARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this.
Another thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we’re like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills.
Maybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.”
I feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality.
IAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time.
But at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you’ve got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send.
Again, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them.
I think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things.
That's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team.
It's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.”
But I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to.
MANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment.
For me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be.
Also, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight.
ARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen.
I know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship.
Although, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us.
IAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better, wanting to help build up other people around them to make something better about tech. There are a lot of things broken in tech. I'm a white guy in tech; I've been a part of the problem. I will admit that very forthrightly.
But my main takeaway here is how easy it is to just sit down and have conversation with people, who I've never met before, and still come up with great ideas and collaborate and just be open to ideas, open to perspectives. I'm walking away from this conversation going now, I wonder what it would take to go build that open source collective on shaking this thing up. Who do I know at different companies that would be open and willing to help back this and put their name on it? Who do I know at different companies and who do I know in different upper management types of positions that would be willing to take a chance and say, “You know what, we're going to try this a little bit different for a quarter and see what kind of impact it has on our team and kind of impact it has on our hiring,” and then report back? Do that agile feedback of try a thing, get some feedback, make a change.
I love that we can just sit down and have conversation about it. It doesn't have to be polarized. It doesn't have to be politicized. It can just be, “Yeah, this is not working. What idea do you have?” I love that you're both willing to entertain ideas and present ideas and I appreciate the concept now. I actually want to go do something about it.
So if anybody listening to this wants to do that, you can reach out to me. I'm on techinterview.guide. My email's on there. My LinkedIn's on there. You're welcome to contact me at any point and I would love to keep this conversation going.
Arty, I'd love to pick your brain a little bit more. And Mandy, if you've got ideas about this, too, let's start pooling this stuff together. Let's start being that change.
ARTY: That sounds great.
MANDY: Thank you.
ARTY: Thank you, Ian so much for joining us on and I agree, we should totally keep this conversation going. This is how magic happens, right?
IAN: Sure.
ARTY: You have connections and relationships that form just in the context of having a conversation like this and maybe we can kickstart something awesome.
MANDY: Heck yeah! Well, thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you all next week.
Special Guest: Ian Douglas.
Sponsored By:
01:42 - Rin’s Superpower: Writing, Public Speaking, and Being Neurodivergent + Awesome!
02:18 - GitHub Actions
07:47 - Improving Developer Experience
11:33 - Neurodivergence + Autistic Burnout
17:04 - Mentoring and Reviewing for Kubernetes
20:49 - Open Source Contribution
29:04 - Mentoring (Cont’d)
32:46 - Evaluating Open Source Projects: Tips For Newbies
Reflections:
John: Technical Mentorship vs Social Mentorship.
Mando: Providing a welcoming sense of community for people with non-traditional backgrounds.
Rin: Being intentional about helping others, but also helping others means helping yourself.
John 2: The distinction between technical and autistic burnout.
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.
JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla.
MANDO: Hi, John. Thanks. And I am here with our friend, Rin Oliver.
RIN: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with you all.
MANDO: We're happy to have you, man.
Rin is a Technical Community Builder at Camunda. They enjoy discussing all things open source with a particular focus on improving hiring pipelines in the technology industry for those that are neurodivergent and improving the developer experience for new and returning open source contributors.
So Rin, we like to start off each of our episodes mostly the same way, which is to ask our new friend, what is your superpower and how did you arrive to it?
RIN: I’m solid at writing, pretty solid writing, and I've been writing since I was a kid. I'm somehow really good at public speaking and I never used to be good at that. That was just through repetition. Other than that, being neurodivergent and being awesome is another superpower.
[laughter]
MANDO: Absolutely.
RIN: Yeah, I would say writing and public speaking and generally just being awesome. In terms of programming languages, I'm still kind of learning a bunch of different things. I'm enjoying DevSecOps and I really enjoy GitHub Actions so CICD.
MANDO: Cool.
I think this might be the first time I've ever heard someone they enjoy GitHub Actions.
RIN: Oh, I think they're great.
MANDO: Oh, I mean, so I love them as well and I shouldn't say that. I should take that back because I very much enjoyed GitHub Actions for the first, I don't know, two, or three weeks that I was using them. [laughs] And then I started hitting the problems of trying to share bits and pieces of my jobs across other jobs and that became a non-stop frustration.
RIN: Do you mean by concurrent actions where you use a different piece of action and another action kind of thing?
MANDO: I don't know about concurrent necessarily, but more just like, I want to be able to run this reusable step across multiple different actions.
RIN: They fixed that. We had that problem, too. They fixed that very recently back in August and you can now use the uses and with keywords and action repeatedly. You don't have to have it just – you can have the uses word define more than once.
MANDO: Really?
RIN: Yeah.
MANDO: Huh. Man. All right. Well, this podcast – [overtalk]
RIN: Made your day.
MANDO: Just covered the price of admission [inaudible] guy. Thank you.
RIN: I know, right. You're welcome.
[laughter]
MANDO: Yeah. The solution that I had before was to pull that stuff out into some bash script, or…
RIN: That's what we did, too. We've got it in bash script right now, but we might go back in and refactor it so we can have that uses keyword come back in. Just do it that way. Yeah, but now you can do that.
MANDO: That’s great.
RIN: Yeah, they just fixed that in a patch back in August, early September.
MANDO: Oh man. That's fantastic.
RIN: Yeah. The words you're looking for is concurrent actions. That's what they call those.
MANDO: That's what they call it? Okay. Well, fantastic. That's great to hear.
RIN: I know, right?
MANDO: So what kinds of things are you doing with GitHub Actions? Like, is it just CICD, or are you doing other things with it as well?
RIN: It is mostly just CICD, but another thing that I've been working on along with our infra team was bringing in security into that CICD function in that we brought in Aqua Security Trivy to scan the automatic releases that we were doing using GitHub Actions for critical vulnerabilities before they could automatically release. So we brought Trivy in with a bash script and it says, “Hey, if you have a critical CVE, you cannot do that release. Go back, do not pass Go, do not collect your $100.”
MANDO: No, that's awesome. That's fantastic.
RIN: Yeah. I just gave a presentation about it a couple weeks ago at DevX Day, which was a KubeCon, cloud data con co-located events. So that was pretty cool. I will link you all the slides if you'd like.
MANDO: So was it doing actual scanning of the thing of the output artifact, or was it –? Can you go a little bit deeper into I guess, what you all were doing specifically around security scanning as part of your pipeline?
RIN: Specifically? So what we had Trivy doing was scanning that output artifact and flagging it for CVs and if it didn't return them, it would upload them to Trivy in SARIF format so that people could review them, the retainers could review those and be like, “Hey, here's that?” And they wouldn't be able to automatically release until they'd resolved that.
MANDO: Got you. What were these output artifacts like? Were they like Java JARs, or –?
RIN: They are. They are mainly Java JARs. Yes, that's correct. It was used for publishing artifacts that may have been central.
MANDO: Got you. Nice.
RIN: I will actually link it to you. It's in our community hub and that is my project that I've been working on for the entire time I've been at Camunda and I've been there for almost a year.
Camunda Community Hub is our open source GitHub organization where all of our community powered extensions live. That is their home and if that is where people can find all of the things that extend Camunda and make it better, that are powered by our wonderful community and it's a wonderful place. There's a 124 repositories in there as of today and one of them is our community-action-maven-release, which is this tool that we are using to allow some of our maintainers that opt to use it to release automatically to Maven Central. So I will drop a link and it's a wonderful tool.
It was a collaboration with myself and our infra team and a bunch of our other team members and the community itself. It was a whole bunch of people that came together to make this happen and make it better collaboration between Camunda, the community, and all of our wonderful people involved in this open source project to make it happen. The infra and developer experience team collaborated on that security piece and then we've also had a few people come to improve the tooling as of a whole in the DevRel team and the community as well in the last couple weeks too, which is great.
JOHN: Nice.
MANDO: I'm reading the README right now. [laughs]
RIN: Good. I'm glad. I'm glad I love a good README. That's wonderful. Good.
MANDO: Yeah. But it makes for not great podcasting [laughs].
RIN: That is true. That is true.
In summary, essentially, this GitHub Action supports the community extension release process for those individuals in our Camunda Community Hub that have extensions that are written in Java. So that workflow defines composite run steps to duplicate actions across repositories that allow for releasing to Maven Central and we do have a process workflow that shows that workflow as it stands in terms of both, the security scanning, how you use it, the prerequisites, and troubleshooting so that if you're interested in that and you want to undertake that option to release those artifacts to Maven Central automatically using this tool, you can do so.
JOHN: Nice. So I noticed in your bio, you talked a lot about improving the developer experience of new and returning contributors and open source and sounds like that's where you've been spending a lot of time with this community work that you've been doing. So tell me more about what it is that you feel needs to be worked on and what work have you been doing in that area?
RIN: The short version is that right now, I work in the Developer Experience team at Camunda, which is about again, obviously improving the developer experience, which is, for those people that are working with Camunda, ensuring they get the best experience possible. How can we make that experience better for those developers that are working with and extending out Camunda in that open source community? That's where I come in. And then Contributor Experience, how do we make the experience for our contributors, for our extension maintainers better? How can we improve that process as a continually improving function moving forward?
On the longer-term side, I actually am a member of Kubernetes and I got involved in Kubernetes in 2018 and I joined the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group. So that's where I do a lot of my behind this scenes work is in the Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG and I've gotten a few people interested in Kubernetes who have gone on to actually speak at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and have gone on to do wonderful things and just generally, amazing people and have been a pod mentor at Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in the past—a few of them now—and just said, “You don't need a technical background,” and I hate to say technical. But you don't have to have a computer science background. You don't have to have a certain background to contribute to open source. Don't self-select out. You have an option to contribute to this community no matter what your background. You can write documentation. You can update READMEs. You can any number of things, you can be supportive of the open source community with and the Kubernetes community definitely needs your help.
JOHN: Very cool. So what sorts of things – you were talking about working behind the scenes. So tell me more about what those things are that you're doing to make that developer experience friendly, or smoother, or whatever their goals are there.
RIN: So for me, basically what I do, or I try to do anyway, is I do a lot of work improving, for example, contributor experience docs, building out that contributor ladder, making sure that there's unified READMEs and processes in general is what I'm hoping to build out at Camunda, unifying that contributing.md document, making sure that contributor journey is clearly laid out and everyone has the same experience regardless of where they come into that contributor journey and that there's a clearly defined pathway towards becoming a maintainer, et cetera. So that they know that this is what a commit message should look like, this is what's to be expected of code reviewers, this is what's to be expected of maintainers, et cetera. That experience is unified and cohesive across that platform.
Making sure that in terms of the broader spectrum, such as Kubernetes, just making sure that we're holding space for people and just making sure that we understand that not everybody learns in the same way, not everybody absorbs information in the same way. Starting those conversations about burnout and enabling people to come together and talk about those conversations; what does that look like, what does autistic burnout look like, how do we recognize that, et cetera.
MANDO: From a first time, or an early contributor for projects like the different Kubernetes and Cloud Native projects, Rin would you suggest that the CONTRIBUTING.md be kind of the first place that you start, if you are thinking about contributing code? Should you start there and do some research – [overtalk]
RIN: Absolutely.
MANDO: Before you start diving in?
RIN: Yeah, I would say hands down, go there first. Go to kubernetes.dev and then just go check out that welcome section and then check out, it says right there, “The first step is check out the contributor guide.” That's absolutely the first place you should go is always check out that contributor guide. That's your first point of call.
MANDO: Okay. For those of our friends listening right now who are neurodivergent, what are some things that you think they should be especially on the lookout for, or things that they should keep in mind before and during their journey down open source?
RIN: I would say if you haven't already, definitely check out the recording that Julia Simon did at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 a few weeks ago on burnout. Julia’s presentation was amazing and it was packed during that KubeCon and that was a reason for that is that we're talking about burnout. Julia started a burnout channel and the CNCF Slack. I would say, join that.
I've given some presentations on autistic burnout. I will link that. I would say autistic burnout, be aware of what that looks like because it's very different from how neurotypical people experience burnout. Be aware of autistic burnout, be aware of those signs and recognize them, and be sure that you're talking about it with your team, your community, your friends, and be sure that what that looks like for yourself.
JOHN: Yeah. That was going to be one of the questions I have on my list here is how does that differ from burnout in more neurotypical area?
Oh, actually before we get too deeply into that, I did actually want to talk have, if you could quickly talk about neurodivergence and what that means to you just in case there are listeners out there that are maybe not entirely clear on what that means.
RIN: Absolutely. So neurodivergence, basically that's an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of things. It relates to autism, ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s—there's a whole boatload of other things and it's very individual just because one person relates to neurodivergence another way. And also, it can relate to aspects of mental health as well. It can also be acquired; it doesn't have to be something you were born with. For example, CPTSD, or complex posttraumatic stress disorder is another form of neurodivergence and you don't have that necessarily at birth. That's something you acquire and that is a neurotype.
I'd say that there are plenty of – every neurotype and every combination of neurotypes is very unique to the individual. Nobody has the same neurotype. So I would always caution you that just because one person that is neurodiverted, you know just that one person. Definitely, you know just one person.
I myself am autistic, I have ADHD, I have dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and CPTSD so I have a whole boatload of things. I also have some ignored disabilities in that I have a bunch of metal in my left leg, but you wouldn't know it by looking at me. [chuckles] So it's just one of those wonderful things.
I navigate the world as someone who is also fat and trans. So those are also things. Visually impaired. So that's another one and the list goes on, but they're just some of the many facets that make up me and none of them fully define who I am. They're just aspects of who I am as we all are. We all facets of things that make up a whole and I would say that none of us are static. I would always be aware of that, that we are always ever evolving as individuals.
MANDO: Oh, I love that. Yeah, because it's absolutely true. The person we are today is not who we were yesterday.
RIN: Absolutely.
MANDO: Probably won't be the person that we are tomorrow, right?
RIN: No, I like to tell people that if you met me before I was like 32, we've had some updates to the system and all the bad codes have been patched down.
[laughter]
Be aware that there are further releases coming in the pipeline.
MANDO: [laughs] Yeah. Got to keep an eye out.
RIN: Exactly. Continuous improvement, continuous deployment of self.
JOHN: I have a conference talk where I talk about if you've got unhandled traumas, or emotional stuff that's stuck in there, that's emotional debt just like you have technical debt and you need therapeutic techniques in whatever stripe to do the work there and that's an update. Like you're clearing out all that old stuff; it leaves more room for all your current processes to run, they get more CPU, more RAM, or space to expand and really be the you that you want to be rather than you that's stuck in forever ago.
RIN: That is so true. I feel like also therapy is something that is very individual as well and I think that individual journey is just another, that's so unique to every individual and everyone has their own unique journey with therapy and the therapeutic process. I think that's something that's really challenging for neurodivergent people as well is to find a therapist that will listen to you and that's been a rough one, finding a good therapist
JOHN: Yeah. With CPTSD as well, there are so many forms of therapy, or therapists who aren't informed enough to actually be able to treat you well and it's a challenge to find someone to work with. Once you've gotten to the point where you've decided you want to work with someone, actually getting someone that's going to do some good for you is hard.
RIN: Absolutely. I found a therapist that finally specializes in EMDR and I'm just, just starting to say, I might want to explore that, maybe, eventually. Let's talk about that. She's been really respectful, but it took me months to find her and I'm like, “Okay, okay. This is good.” EMDR is pretty cool. But again, that's super unique and just because it might work for me. Check back with me in a few months.
[laughter]
MANDO: You never know given how our brains are in fact, individual snowflakes and – [overtalk]
RIN: Exactly.
MANDO: You don't know what medication is going to do to you necessarily. You don't know what different kinds, like you were saying, Rin of therapeutic approaches. Just because it did a certain thing for one person doesn't mean it's going to do it for you.
RIN: Exactly. You could take one medication and it could be fine for you, but it makes somebody else break out in hives.
MANDO: Yeah. So Rin, what areas of the Kubernetes project are you closely connected to right now, if any?
RIN: Closely connected to right now, I would say I'm actually working on becoming a reviewer so I'm in a mentoring project wherein I'm getting some mentorship and being involved with other mentors and learning how to become a reviewer for Kubernetes. The good part is you can take that at your own pace and I fully tend to do that because I do have a day job and contributing to open source is not my bread and butter. So I would do that on my free time, very slowly, and learning hopefully, how to review and become a reviewer in Kubernetes.
Another place that I'm contributing actively, or plan to is in our annual contributors’ summit, sort of contributor celebration event. We had a bakeoff last year, or the year before—my years are kind of blurry together—that I actually won, which was awesome. [laughs]
Yeah, won that, which was rad. That was super fun. But it was tough. I was up against a really stiff competition and it was a challenge for sure, but that was a really fun event.
This year my friend, that came in second. It was a dead tie; we actually had a vote off. Anyway, we're both going to be judging this year, if we have another bakeoff. So that's something that I'm hoping to be involved in and I will be. If we do end up having another bake off, I will be a judge on that and that is something that I'm hoping comes to fruition. Fingers crossed because that's cooking show judge has been my dream since I was a kid.
[laughter]
Please let this happen, please.
MANDO: Awesome.
JOHN: Yeah, can't go wrong with that.
RIN: I love it. It was during peak pandemic so we couldn't do it in person, but I wish we could have because it would've been so fun. It would've been just – and it was really, it was so fun. Even virtual, it was. We were all on Zoom and just cooking and it was chaotic, but it was fun and just getting to hang out with a bunch of my favorite people. Like I had somebody come up to me two weeks ago and they're like, “My kid thinks that you are their hero because the cake that you made at the bakeoff had candy that came out of it. It was a piñata cake and my kid loves you.” I'm like, “This is the best day of my life.”
[laughter]
MANDO: Oh.
[laughter]
JOHN: That's what you want to be known for.
RIN: I know, right. If I'm known for anything, please let be the piñata cake, I'm begging you.
MANDO: Well, best of luck that you'll be able to put another one together.
RIN: I know, right? Yeah, that's where I'm working is that area of being mentored to learn how to become a reviewer. I poke my hat in SIG counter backs, but I actually have taken a little bit of time off from open source because I am trying to focus all my new job, my new role here at Camunda. I want to learn to become a reviewer and be more active in that reviewer process. Also, I’m a mentor for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as often as I can be. So I try to do that.
So yeah, that's where I'm most active and of course, I spoke at the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon that just happened and I throw my hat in the ring for speaking every now and again at KubeCon. So in terms of being active in Kubernetes right now, I'm on that mentor short path and I'm taking it slow, but I've got to balance my time and I dip my head in every now and again and I try to do my best to be welcoming and positive when people do see me and they go, “Hey, it’s Rin.”
MANDO: Heck yeah. What did you speak on at the last?
RIN: At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, I did the DevX Day co-located event for building secure open source communities from the ground up.
MANDO: Nice.
RIN: And then I did at CloudNativeCon itself was how did I get started in open source using your Kubernetes contributions, or building off your Kubernetes contributions to further your career sort of thing. I'm blanking on any of my own talk, but that's fine.
MANDO: Oh.
[laughter]
Yeah, absolutely.
RIN: Yeah, that's fine. Everything's fine.
MANDO: [laughs] That's something that I've seen, or at least I've felt like I've seen a shift in the way people understand open source contribution. And it might just be me getting older, but it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you feel different, but it seems to me like people are walking into doing open source contributions now with maybe their eyes wide open a little bit more than they used to. What I mean by that is they're coming into these kind of contribution spaces looking not only to see how they can make – how they can improve the community and contribute to the community, I should say.
But they're also approaching it with a solid eye on like, how can they use this to further their career? How can they use this to get a better job? How can they use this to move into maybe a different direction that they were originally kind of started off in, or use it as a way to get their foot in the door? Maybe more of, I don't know, mutually beneficial path as opposed to the older school “altruistic path” of like, you're going to contribute open source software for the betterment of the community and then Apple takes your code and makes a bunch of money off of it and you're just kind of sitting around wishing you had more money.
RIN: That is true and that's something that I've had to conversations with a few people about now, about paying maintainers and saying we need to support our maintainers and make this experience better. I don't know what's going to come out of that conversation, but it's an ongoing one. Not my project, but I'm talking to people that are organizing a project around that so fingers cross that comes to fruition, because I'm always of the mind that we need to thank maintainers and pay maintainers. There's a GitHub sponsor button. It does great things, use it.
But in terms of people coming into open source with their eyes wide open, I think so. I think that's true. But I also think that yes, people used to contribute for altruistic reasons. You did that because you love the project, or because you want the maintainers to have an easier time, or because you genuinely see something wrong and you know how to fix the IT, or whatever. But I think that there's also a case for the fact that open source software contribution is a way for people that don't necessarily have access to a computer science career background sort of education, or they can't clear those gatekept hurdles to get involved and say, “No, I am enough and here's how.”
MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely and it was a refrain early on in my experience with open source was that this was a way, a path, a potential path and you would hear stories of folks who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds contributing to open source and then getting hired by some company based on their open source contributions.
RIN: That's what happened to me.
MANDO: Yeah. Do you feel like that's something that's well understood kind of in the – and this is so hard to say because I was thinking in the community of people who want to break into technology, but don't come from a traditional background. But okay, what cohort of people is that? [chuckles]
RIN: It's starting to be. It's starting to be because people like myself and a lot of people in the Kubernetes community and a lot of people in the broader open source community are saying if you come from a nontraditional background, make sure that you have your open source contributions on your LinkedIn, on your resume. Call it out, make sure that when you are applying for jobs, they know about it. Tell people and never stop telling people. Document those wins and say, “I have contributed to the following projects. These are my skills. This is what I'm doing. Here's my GitHub. Here's everything that I've done and the ways that I'm active in the community that might not necessarily be code. Here's the meetups I'm running. Here's the special interest group meetings I attend. Here's the projects that I'm helping on. Here's the mentoring I'm doing, or the mentoring I'm receiving,” et cetera.
MANDO: When we're talking about this area of technology specifically, like DevOps, DevSecOps that have that part of the community, in my mind that is a little bit of a, I don't know, harder task to experiment and play with this stuff on your own as opposed to sitting down and writing a Rails project, or a Spring project. Like there's more involved, in my mind, to doing DevOps-y kind of stuff, like building a lab and things like that.
Rin, what's your experience in helping people who aren't – maybe who are interested in doing that kind of work, but don't really know where to start. Like, do you point them toward like, I don't even know anymore. I know that there was MiniKube used to be a way that you could get a small Kubernetes cluster running on your laptop. What are the options for folks now?
RIN: Yeah, MiniKube is still a thing as far as I know. But for me, in terms of DevSecOps, where I actually turn people to is I'm actually a board member for The Diana Initiative, which is a non-profit for gender diverse individuals in technology that's focused on information security, DevSecOps, et cetera. They have an annual conference and they have a wonderfully active Slack full of a couple thousand people at least. And that's where I tell people to hang out and submit CFPs and generally meet that community and get them involved.
And I say, the CFP is going to be open in January, please submit. If you are a gender diverse person and interested in InfoSec, DevSecOps, et cetera, cybersecurity, all of those wonderful things, submit to The Diana Initiative. We'd love to read your CFP. [laughs]
JOHN: No, that's fantastic to have a spot that helps people land. That says, “This is for you. This is where you can come get that feedback on joining community, starting your speaking career, starting your open source contributions.”
RIN: Absolutely. And for that security side, it's full of just such helpful people, like the people that I met in The Diana Initiative InfoSec community are some of the most helpful people that I've ever met in this industry and they are people that you would never think would take 2 minutes to talk to you that have given me time out of their days to help me and to say, “Hey, here's some options.” I've met wonderful friends and wonderful community members. It's just a great place to be and they're always really helpful and really inspiring.
I'm glad to be a part of that community, be on that board, and to push that initiative forward into getting more gender diverse people, more non-binary people, more trans people be involved in that community and saying there's a place in for you in cybersecurity, there's a place for you in DevSecOps.
In terms that projects to work on. Honestly, for me, I'd say look at things like Aqua Security’s Trivy. How can you implement security scanning into tools that you're already using? You don't have to reinvent the wheel; look at how you can use DevOps and DevSecOps tools into things that you're already using.
MANDO: I love that. That's fantastic. Absolutely one of the things that is a constant struggle, especially when you're talking about building containerized workloads. How do you make sure that the containers that your engineers are building are running on the latest version of the operating system that they're pulling in, or make sure that they're doing the dependency scanning to make sure that they're not releasing something that has a recently discovered CVE?
All that work that you were talking about in the beginning, Rin beginning of the episode, the stuff that you had done spreading that gospel, [chuckles] if you will, to your engineering team, or I guess, your engineering friends, or whatever. That does sound like a pretty interesting and I don't know, I guess, relatively low friction way to start. You don't have to shove that in the middle of a process. You can kind of do that out of band and roll it out slowly rather than having to say, “We're going to stop the world and do this incredibly intrusive security audit and no one can release software until this third-party auditor has come through and gone through things.” Right?
RIN: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in terms of auditing, that's another thing where people that have non-traditional backgrounds can get involved because you can be involved in an audit and not necessarily have to write code. You can look at docs. You can review things that you have access to. It depends on who your CSO is. It depends on your cybersecurity team. You can help them write the documentation. You can help them write their findings. You can help them check their grammar and their reports, et cetera. You can still help. Even if you necessarily aren't writing that hard cybersecurity code, you can still help.
JOHN: You mentioned mentoring at KubeCon and I'm curious is that mentoring first time speakers coming in, or is that mentoring attendees of the conference?
RIN: That is actually mentoring attendees of the conference and I will drop a link to that. KubeCon pod mentoring. “Pod mentoring gathers a group of mentors to help people get their Kubernetes-related questions answered quickly and efficiently.” So where I usually sit is in that community track, that's where I come in is I mentor in the community track because that's where I have a lot of expertise is the community side.
But there's people in – there's a technical track. There's a whole bunch of other things and people ask really – they ask some really solid questions and it's pretty great. It's available during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events. You have to register for it individually for the event to be eligible for mentoring, but it's really cool. They're not run by Contributor Experience, actually run by the CNCF and Linux Foundation. They're not run by SIG Contributor Experience, but they do advise and the SIG Contributor Experience members do help out such as myself. So that is a CNCF/Linux Foundation initiative and it's great. I love doing it. Something that I will always do if I have time at every KubeCon I go to.
JOHN: That's so interesting because what you described there is completely different from what I was imagining, but in a way that's really interesting to me because I'm part of the scholarship organizing group at Ruby Central. So we do RubyConf and RailsConf.
RIN: Oh, cool.
JOHN: And so we have a scholarship where we get people who are either brand new and underrepresented to tech – [overtalk]
RIN: I know that.
JOHN: For scholarships to the conference. But then we also pair them up with a guide so that they have a conference buddy, someone who's more experienced, who possibly knows a bunch of people, can help introduce them, and also help just get plan through what they're going to do and get the most out of the conference. That was sort of what I was thinking.
As far as mentoring goes, we don't have anything like that in the Ruby conference world that I'm familiar with, where we have that technical question and answer like, “Hey, I'm stuck on this problem,” or “I don't really understand how this thing works.” That's a really interesting way of also like bringing developers in and helping support at them that I hadn't heard about and so, now I'm sort of spitting in my mind about what we could do there.
RIN: The good news is it's open source and you can use it as a framework.
JOHN: [laughs] Awesome.
RIN: If you want any help, I'm happy to help. That's something that I love doing and like I said, I'm getting interested in Ruby and poking around with Ruby and GitHub Actions, who knows maybe I could be a mentee this time.
JOHN: Yeah.
[laughter]
RIN: Switch it on me. I could actually get some help. [laughs]
But starting a mentorship program such as this one in any community, I think is really valuable because you have time for people to ask those questions and say, “I'm stuck,” and be in that supportive environment where they're not going to get downloaded on Stack Overflow, or some other terrible place and they're not going to get judged relentlessly. They can come to that safe space and get answers from the people that are actually doing the work on a daily basis and that might have more experience in a particular area and can help them get unstuck, or at least push them further towards a resolution.
JOHN: Yeah. That's super fantastic. I do some individual mentoring with people outside of the conference and I can definitely, in that experience, I can see how so often it would be so valuable to them if there was that technical resource where it's like senior developer on demand where you can go ask the questions like, “I don't quite work how this thing is doing for me,” or “Here's my code, why doesn't it do what I think it does?” I think that would make for a wonderfully welcoming community.
RIN: I agree. And I think making those community is welcoming. It's just a concept of, like we said, in the beginning of the show, continuous action, continuous improvement. Nothing is static; it always evolves over time.
JOHN: Cool. I think the other question I had was around again, working with so many people who are new to the industry and I think lot of them here, especially in the bootcamps. “You should have some open source on your resume. It's going to help out do the thing,” like we were saying earlier. And I hear the next thing out of their mouth is, but I have no idea where to start. I don't know what projects are out there and accepting which ones have been groomed with issues that are suitable for new developers. You don't have to be Mr. Expert, or Mrs. Expert to go in and jump on those issues and actually solve them and start getting that contribution count up.
So do you have any advice for people to sort of like, “Oh, I'm a bit lost in this whole world. Where is a good place to start looking, or how do I evaluate a project once I am interested to find out if it's going to toxic, or welcoming?”
RIN: I would say, first things first, always make sure that a project you're contributing to has a Code of Conduct and read it. Sign their Contributor License Agreement. If they have one, sign that CLA. Make sure that you adhere to that Code of Conduct, do your best to be a good human, just be a good person and if they have a CRC lined up – and CRC stands for Code of Conduct. If they have that Code of Conduct lined up, you know what you're in for, what to be is expected of you, what is expected of the people that you're going to be working with.
So read that and then from there, I would say, check out the issues. Are they labeled? Do they have that good first issue label? Are they using it well? And if they're not, see if you can go at it to some issues that you think are good first issues. That's a good place to start, too.
MANDO: You mentioned CLAs there. Real quick, could you give our listeners a quick definition of what a CLA is?
RIN: I can. CLA actually stands for Contributor License Agreement and it's an agreement that a lot of open source projects would ask that you sign and some people like them, some people don't, we don't have time to get into that. [chuckles] But CLAs in general are a tributed relations agreement that says by signing this, you are contributing to this project open source and it's a whole bunch of legal jargon. Essentially, read it. But that's basically what it is. It's an agreement between yourself and the project that you're contributing to that says you can do these things, but not necessarily some other things.
MANDO: Are there any things in the Code of Conducts, or the Contribute License Agreement that you think people should keep an eye out for? The things you have seen in the past that you'd equate to being like a red flag.
RIN: I would say not having a code of conduct. [laughs]
MANDO: Fair enough, yeah.
RIN: Is kind of a red flag. I'm sure that there's some projects even that might not have a code of conduct in our community up. I'd like to hope they all do. But on the other hand, it's not necessarily something that you can force people to do. It's something where you can say, “We recommend that you have this, we would prefer that you have this,” but we can't force anyone to have it. We would like to hope that people do. A lot of projects do have those, what they call default community health files, where they've automatically any repo that is created – actually in the community hub, if you create a repo from our template repo, you well automatically get a Code of Conduct IMD generated. So that is good. We have that in place that says you have to buy this Code of Conduct if you would like to be a participant in this organization. So we do have to adhere to our Code of Conduct to be a part of the community hub. So that is very important. [laughs]
But I would say not having one, or just not going to rattle off the many lists of things that would red flag because that's individual from me, what red flags for me are, I would say use your best judgment. If someplace feels unwelcoming, or seems like it's overly judgmental, or is just a negative place full of people that are saying things that aren't positive and not aren't welcoming, I would maybe not.
MANDO: Yeah. That's a really good point.
JOHN: And you would see those discussions and say, GitHub issues, like as things are going back and forth?
RIN: Exactly. Yeah. You watch the issues. There’s Stack Overflow, or Reddit, or wherever that discussion is taking place, or Twitter. You'll know if that conversation is ingenuine in any way.
MANDO: That's a really good thing to mention that when you're deciding to contribute your time and effort to a community, take a little bit of time. Just because you like using a piece of software doesn't necessarily mean that the community might be as open and welcoming as you would hope. It's not necessarily indicative of a community that you would want to spend time interacting inside. So it's worth going to Reddit and it's worth going and checking out their GitHub issues, or whatever they're using to track it. Look to see if they have a Slack, or a Discord. Just spend a little bit of time trying to get your thumb on the pulse of the community. That's a really good thing.
RIN: Absolutely. I would say try to get your feel for community before you start contributing. Get the lay of the land, explore some special interest groups, explore the Slack, see how things are run, figure out how things are done, how people respond to issues, what that contributor experience is like, see how people talk to each other, see how they treat each other and say, “Is this a place that I want to invest my time?”
JOHN: Yeah. Better to do that upfront than to have spent months working on code and then trying to perfect your submissions, and then discovering that it's going to be a real fight to get through your thing. Even though it's not that big a deal, or if you just getting being dismissive, or in intent, or whatever the dysfunctions of the community are. Knowing that beforehand, this is probably really valuable.
RIN: Exactly.
JOHN: It's funny that reminded me of – completely tangential. A friend of mine was trying to figure out what kind of dog breed to get and so, he spent a whole bunch of time going into different dog owner, like breed owner communities to see what the people that owned those kind of dogs were like, and use that as another data point to say like, “Oh God, I would never hang out with those people. I'm not going to get one of those dogs.” [laughs]
MANDO: It's not bad. Isn't that bad at all.
RIN: That's smart. Honestly, I wish I would've done that. That's really smart.
[laughter]
JOHN: So we've come to the time on our show when we do what we call our reflections, which is basically just each of us is going to reflect on this wonderful conversation we just had and talk about what it is that's going to stick with us, or we're going to be thinking about for the next couple of days, or new ideas things that we found.
And for me, I think looking into this different concept of technical mentorship versus social mentorship and especially in the conference context, but it could go into a lot of different areas, too and ways to expand that level of support within a community so that you not only have social support and mentorship on that level, but also, on the technical side, just to make that even more welcoming. I love that idea and I'm going to keep thinking about what we can do in the communities I'm in.
MANDO: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
The thing that struck me, I had thought about it some. It’s something that keeps kind of rolling around in my head here and there, but the idea of all of the different ways that we have, as a community, to allow folks from non-traditional backgrounds, maybe non-computer science backgrounds and how it's a bit of – it's a responsibility on us and Rin, you touched on this and this is what really made it stick in my head. It's a responsibility on us who are in the community to make sure that the wins that folks get, who come from non-traditional backgrounds, make sure that we keep track of those and make sure that we celebrate them so that we provide that welcoming sense of community, John, like you're saying. That we provide a way to say, “These are some paths that people have taken.” You can see kind of the fruits of their labor and where they started from and where they've gotten to and they didn't have to go through the traditional path.
It's on us to make sure that those things are brought out into the light and other people get to see them so that they can if not be inspired, at least have something that they can stumble across on the internet when they're feeling maybe a little down, or discouraged, or I'm never going to get in. I'm never going to get that job. They can come across these wins, maybe it'll give them a lift in the sales at the right time.
RIN: Absolutely. I'm going to be thinking about [chuckles] just continuous improvement and being intentional about where you spend your time, being intentional about helping others, taking time out of your day, but also understanding that you also sometimes helping others looks like helping yourself. It's that whole adage: put your mask on first like they do on the airplane. That whole concept is important to understand that you need to be aware and check yourself of burnout and make sure intentionally how you're spending your time and remember that you and everyone around you can hopefully always improve as people and try to uplift people and make this community better. Leave it better than we found it.
MANDO: Beautiful.
JOHN: Yeah, for sure.
MANDO: 100%. Yeah.
JOHN: And actually that's my post-reflection reflection is also that you brought up the distinction between typical burnout and autistic burnout. That's definitely something I'm going to be reading up on because I had no idea there was a distinction there and it sounds like a very important one.
MANDO: Yeah, yeah. Me neither. But it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense that there would be distinct differences there and as folks in the community, this stuff's on us.
RIN: Totally. It's on all of us to just do better, and learn and be better, and research and find what we can to just make this a better place to be at the end of the day and I guess, our takeaway is what are you going to do to make this a better place?
JOHN: All right, that wraps us up for today. Thank you, everyone for listening to the show.
Special Guest: Rin Oliver.
Sponsored By:
01:53 - Michael’s Superpower: Networking and Community Building
10:36 - Defining Mental Health
20:09 - Involving Gaming in Engaging in Talk Therapy
31:13 - “Age-Appropriate Horror”
38:45 - Social Media, Media, and Mental Health: Curate & Engage Responsibly
50:41 - The Geek Therapy Community
55:16 - Connect with Mike!
59:14 - Intergenerational & Epigenetic Trauma
Reflections:
John: Coyote & Crow Role Playing Game + Using Role Playing and Game Playing to treat mental health.
I’m Begging You To Play Another RPG (Facebook Group)
Mae: The pragmatic approach to seeing where people are and meeting them there.
Casey: Helping middle schoolers talk to friends in a structured way.
Mike: The hardest part about doing something is helping people know you’re doing it.
Bristol Children’s Hospital: Oath of Accessibility: “Anyone can be a hero. Everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”
This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode
To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
Transcript:
PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.
JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 258. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae.
MAE: Hi, there! Also with us is Casey Watts.
CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Mike, The Nerd Therapist.
Mike is a mental health counselor from Perth, Western Australia, and he does geeky therapy. He runs programs in which they use video games and tabletop games in therapy like Civ, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Mike also writes the Pop Culture Competence project, which is a resource for parents, teachers, and therapists and seeks to boost professionals’ awareness and understanding of the themes and applications of Nerd Culture.
Welcome, Mike.
MIKE: Hey, thanks for having me.
CASEY: All right. It's time for that question we prepared you for. We want to know, Mike to kick off the episode, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?
MIKE: My superpower, I'd say I've been told by people whose opinions I trust is networking. In my last job, I was actually known to a few people before I even got there. And then in my previous job, when I worked in school counseling, I knew most of the applicants for new roles and I knew before the manager of our agency knew that they'd been picked up for jobs.
Yeah, I love community and I found this out after recovering from social anxiety, that I just love community and building networks and meeting people. And that's evolved very naturally into creating professional spaces and working in professional spaces and just getting to know and to meet people.
CASEY: That's awesome. How did you acquire this skill, networking and community building?
MIKE: When I see a need, I'm driven to fill it, which that may actually have been a better answer to begin with, but hey, we're committed to this answer.
So during my degree, we had an opportunity to do some training in a program called Mental Health First Aid. It's a really good piece of training, it's meant for like bystander civilian level people, but it's a professional grade training. It's really good. My university said, “You have to organize this. So just organize this on your own time, but we thought this might be cool to share with you.” So I contact the trainer and she goes, “Listen, it's 2 grand to book the weekend, but if you can get group of 20 people together, it's a 100 per person.” So I'm like, “Yeah, okay.” So I got 20 people together and we did that and then I sat there at the end of the second day of training. I'm like, “We could do this again.”
About three months later, we did some more mental health training. We did some severe critical mental health training. A couple months later, we did it again with a special victims’ ward of our local hospital and then we did probably about four training courses that year. We actually were all in our second, or third year of our degrees, but we were as qualified as graduates to actually deliver programs. It's kind of, I discovered that it is able to get out there and get people together to accomplish something.
MAE: I love that Mike, I find also sometimes I want to stay in community, but I'm so oriented to goals and outcomes [chuckles] that I try to do it around projects. So I'm a much more reliable buddy on keeping in touch if we're working on something together. I'm curious, it sounds similar to what you said, but maybe different. I don't know if it resonates with you.
MIKE: No, I hear you. If I'm in proximity to someone, or we're working on something, I find a way easier to keep in touch. Especially when we're with workmates, or studying, or something, I do find it better if there's kind of not a reason to give someone a message, but I find it easy to stay engaged if we're working towards something. That community of professionals that I'd actually built up, the long-term goal was to become a volunteering agency. But unfortunately, just being university students, what we had planned was a little bit it out of our scope and no one would insure us.
[laughter]
R: The bureaucracy bites.
MIKE: It does. It was also my call because the original plan was to put mental health workers. So we've got a part of our city is just devoted to nightclub and the overall plan was to put mental health crisis workers in the nightclub district so that some drunk girl gets kicked out of a club, one of our team can make sure she gets into a taxi safely, or just someone's having a moment as a former nightclub bartender—nights don't always go well.
So just having some Mental Health First Aid trained people in the city that can deescalate and bring people down to a safe place, that was the goal. But unfortunately, that also involved putting a whole bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds in the nightclub district on weekends and it was a logistical nightmare to do that ethically and safely.
CASEY: I think I've heard of bartender training, or professionals. Oh, the specific story I heard of was training barbers, I think it was in New York City, to have this Mental Health First Aid triage, or connecting people to services that would be helpful for them. So this idea is really powerful, I think.
MIKE: It is really good because it's really helpful because there's two types of people that people tell everything, that's barbers, or hairdressers and bartenders and that was kind of the goal. We actually have a similar program here in Australia where we're teaching hairdressers and barbers, we're actually providing them domestic violence training so that they can recognize signs and know who to talk to next.
Because if there are people in society who are being told everything because it's very intimate physician, it would be a missed opportunity to do some good, but also to provide these people some training so they can handle it because as a bartender, I heard a lot of stuff that would be challenging to hear if I wasn't already an experienced mental health professional while I was doing it. So these programs, I love that they're recognizing this is a thing that happens and I'm also really hoping that they're teaching these people how to actually support themselves when they're hearing the rough stuff.
CASEY: Yeah. I wonder what percentage of bartenders and barbers get any kind of training? 1% would be better than I would've thought a year ago.
MIKE: Honestly, I wouldn't know. I haven't been something I've been engaged with. My city, Perth, we've got a big focus on mental health at the moment. There's a few charities working in the industry, trying to support people from an employee perspective, but also from an industry perspective because bartending doesn't lead to the healthiest lifestyles.
JOHN: I was thinking, it reminds me of there's an organization called MAPS that does research into psychedelics and they provide counselors for example, at Burning Man, or at other places where people are going to be doing a lot of these things, trained in dealing with people having problems while they're on psychedelics and so, they were able to talk people down and keep them centered and get them into a good place. I think it's so powerful to acknowledge that people are going to be doing these things.
MIKE: Yeah.
JOHN: People are going to be doing drugs, they're going to be going out in the evening, they're going to have a night out. But they're not always going to go well and having a support system right there is, I think so important versus waiting till it spirals so much more than it would otherwise. And then police are involved and every goes downhill from there.
MIKE: Oh, a 100%. It's all about the harm reduction. I actually didn't know they did that. That's a really great initiative.
MAE: Love it. I was going to bring up Burning Man. Mutual Aid and so many different community conveners are in touch with how much mental health is connected to all the other things. My dad owns a biker bar and I'm 5 feet tall and it has been interesting to bartend there in rural upstate New York, figure out how to navigate the after-midnight hours. [laughs]
MIKE: That would be interesting. I was once contacted about providing mental health and emotional support at a BDS&M night and that would've been a really interesting – unfortunately, I was busy because when you are bartending, you're already working weekends. But I liked that the organizers were looking for some support for these events and they ended up doing the Mental Health First Aid training as well.
JOHN: Nice.
MIKE: Which was really cool.
CASEY: That's awesome. Yeah. I'm thinking about all this in the sales funnel framework so like, how do you get people into the top of the funnel in the first place.
[laughter]
It's often the missing step.
MIKE: Yeah.
CASEY: You’ve got to get people exposed to the idea that they could, take the training, and then they have to be interested and they have to decide to do it and go to the barrier of scheduling and paying. And then same for applying it; it’s like a process. I love that we're talking about the top of the funnel because a lot of the conversations in the bottom of the funnel, like go to a therapist. I mean, as a series of funnels but.
MIKE: Yeah.
CASEY: Very top of the stop post one.
MIKE: And that's the big part of the conversation is a lot of people don't know these services exist. Like Mental Health First Aid, if you go to any given Mental Health First Aid training course, it will doubtless be mostly filled with people who work in mental health, or be people who work near mental health, like teachers when it's designed to be a bystander level course, it's designed for people. So if you were [chuckles] literally anyone who doesn't work in mental health, that's who the course is for and getting people out there, who can actually provide support, is so important for that ground level stuff so we can head off a crisis.
MAE: I wonder if it might be useful to talk about some definitions for a moment and people who don't identify as having any mental health challenges, or know anybody in their life, it can sound really big. So just to say, maybe from your perspective, how would you define mental health and my opener leading question caveat is that I don't understand how we all don't just have [laughs] orientations toward external support and there's a lot of stigma stuff. Just hoping to break down some of that for any listeners who have us experience with this whole framework could have some access points.
MIKE: The problem I experience with mental health is that people only ever use the phrase mental health to refer to times when something's not working correctly, or when something's wrong like a crisis. It very rarely comes up in terms of positive mental health and in terms of things going well; it's always disordered. That's a problem because it would just be nice to not have the phrase mental health be synonymous with not doing well. Mental…
[laughter]
Mental anguish.
CASEY: Yeah. Well said. That sounds like it would be the literal term for it: health of the mental [inaudible] – [overtalk]
MIKE: It does.
CASEY: But it is not.
MIKE: And semantically, it is. But when we're talking about mental health trauma, it's always talking about disorders, or experiences like trauma and it becomes really challenging because we see a lot of these big conversations and it's harder than it has to be because a lot of people self-invalidate. They'll go, “Oh, I'm just experiencing this. It's not as bad as what this person's going through, or this news article I've seen.”
I guess, the one thing I tell a lot of people is that your experiences are valid and what your feelings are. Just because you don't have it as bad as the next person doesn't mean you still don't have it bad. We have this idea called dialectics, which basically distills down to two seemingly contradictory concepts can peacefully coexist and that in this context with you, other people have it bad and I can also have it bad even though doesn't seem to be as bad as them.
MAE: Yeah. I really love moving away from comparative definitions [chuckles] into self-assessment stuff. Is that where you were going to go, John?
JOHN: Well, I was noting that I frequent the CPTSD subreddit for complex PTSD and the number of people in there who have had truly horrific experiences that are having that same argument with themselves. “Oh, what?”
MIKE: Yeah.
JOHN: “I wasn't actually murdered as a child so, other people had it –” and it's really heartbreaking to see someone having had such experience still invalidating them and still thinking they're not worthy of treatment and support.
MIKE: I attended a training when I worked in schools and some of the participants there were from a very prestigious private school in my state. They were teachers, they were year leaders, they were, I think the principal was there as well. It was close to a third of the class from this one high school and the thing they all said their students faced was everyone just assumes they don't have problems because they're rich, or everyone assumes their problems can't be solved with money. Now we can solve a lot of problems with money, don't get me wrong. But it really just brought to mind this comparison that these privileged kids must be experiencing. It would be hard for them to go because people are very invalidating of that because they have means and access. This is just a really interesting thing that I'd never really considered.
MAE: Are you familiar with the study about the amount of money at which point more money does not lead to more happiness? Like, there's basic needs and some comfort, and then after that, the more money really does not have a direct correlation to happiness, but below that, for sure.
MIKE: I did. I only read that a couple weeks ago. It was really cool. It was titled like “Money does buy happiness, but it suffers from diminishing returns,” and I really enjoyed reading that because it's true. A lot of problems, a lot of issues that a lot of people face is systemic and it's financial. There's a whole lot of stresses out there that wouldn't be stresses if we could just afford the way to solve it. But unfortunately, people don't always get that, or understand that. We get these trite little sayings like, “Money doesn't buy happiness.” It's like, yeah, but it puts food on the table and it buys medicine and it pays for therapy.
JOHN: It buys a lot of happiness up to a point. [laughs]
CASEY: It's a more nuanced phrase, less catchy maybe.
JOHN: Yeah.
CASEY: But I'd rather have that one.
MIKE: Mm.
MAE: My life and experience of life and other did change when I could afford my bills and I didn't have to check my bank account every day to figure it out. And the amount of hours that I would have to spend in order to make sure that my bills were taken care of like, to be poor is significantly more expensive.
MIKE: Mm hm. Oh, it is.
MAE: Which compounds mental health challenges as well.
MIKE: It's like that line from… Well, it’s not a line, it's like a whole page, but it's from a Discworld, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and it goes into the Boots theory of poverty. A rich man can spend $50 on boots that will last him all year, but a poor man will have to spend $10 a month on boots that will only last him the month, but he can't afford that $50. All he can afford is the $10 so it's more expensive to be in poverty because you have to buy poor quality items.
JOHN: Yeah. I'd always wish that some high-powered economist could actually crunch the numbers on what the curve is like, at what level of income does it stop being more expensive to be poor and then I assume that there's the opposite curve where the more money doesn't do any. But I know there's a curve there and it would be super curious to know what that looks like.
MIKE: That would be really interesting to read. I'm not a big money person. I don't like those conversations. I really struggle with business and finance sort of stuff. But I would read that article in a heartbeat to figure out where is the line.
CASEY: I want to hear the original one adjusted for inflation, too. The original study saying money doesn't buy happiness is probably old at this point. I think the dollar has doubled in, or halved in value since 1990 to today. Did you all know that? I look it up once in a while. I try to see the sodas I bought as a kid, how much are they inflated to today and it is $2, it used to be $1 for a soda. So, for all these studies, double it at this point, if you're not sure.
MAE: A comment on the money thoughts. There's this book, that's now a couple years old, circulating called Decolonizing Wealth. It's mostly focused on fundraising and the development, discipline and philanthropy and how all of that happens behind the scenes. But it's written by a man who is indigenous and has some really interesting takes on money and how and when and why it flows. I think he might appreciate that one, too, Mike.
MIKE: That would be an interesting read.
JOHN: Yeah, I think I want to track that down.
CASEY: Let’s link it. By the way, we also have noted that we will link Mental Health First Aid, which I encourage all the listeners to take. I haven't taken myself, but everyone who's taken it raves about it afterwards. It's so helpful. It's practical.
MIKE: It is such a good piece of training. I can't speak for other ones, but the provider I had came from a youth not-for-profit who are based in Melbourne on the other side of Australia. They come over to Perth, my city, to deliver it and I picked up more practical information in a 2-day course than I probably did at six months at uni. And that's speaking more about the quality of the course than the quality of my education. My uni was great, but the course was so – it was a big 2 days because you were covering some huge topics.
I always experience what I call a course hangover because it's 2 days of thinking about some really heavy stuff. So I always leave with migraines, but it is such a powerful skillset and I wish it was more available to the general public.
JOHN: Yeah. Actually, my company's making a big push to get people that training, which I'm super excited about.
MAE: Awesome!
CASEY: Brilliant.
MIKE: There's lots of different variants, too. So there's Mental Health First Aid is the standard, there's Children's Mental Health First Aid and all the different variants focus more on the issues that affect that group. So there's Children's Mental Health First Aid. I haven't done that one. There's Teen Mental Health First Aid that focuses a lot on anxiety and eating disorders. There's a Youth Mental Health First Aid, which is like everyone from 5 to 25, and that focuses a lot on substances, eating, and anxiety again. There's Older People's Mental Health First Aid. Again, I haven't done it, but it sounds really good. And there's even one, and I really want to do this, it's an Indigenous Australians Mental Health First Aid. It teaches how to be culturally appropriate in terms of mental health delivery.
MAE: Love all of this.
JOHN: Yeah. That's amazing
MAE: In listening to your bio, Mike, I couldn't help but think of, and I wonder if you could share a little bit about if you're familiar with her work and if it has some overlap, but Jane McGonigal's TED Talk about mental health and gaming. It's a little older now.
MIKE: I feel like I've watched that TED Talk. Is that the How Gaming Can Make a Better World one?
MAE: Yeah.
MIKE: I have watched it.
MAE: She's got a couple, actually and she was one of the early proponents of involving gaming in engaging people in perhaps non-standard talk therapy ways and the gamification of positive healthy habits.
MIKE: Yeah.
MAE: Which sounds right up your alley. So regardless if you're familiar with her, [chuckles] maybe if you want to tell us a little bit more about some of your applications and approaches.
MIKE: Sure thing. I do remember watching that TED Talk when I was at uni and I thought it was amazing.
Oh, for the last little bit over a year, I've run Nerd Therapy. So I started off as a counselor working in schools like elementary schools and probably September last year. So we've got our own like – therapists have a million Facebook groups for location, for specialty, for their needs, just really, if you can think of a niche reason to have a group, there is one.
I'm in a few of them and those recurring questions about, “Hey, what's Fortnite, what's Minecraft, what's Pokémon,” and a lot of the answers they were being given were actually pretty disingenuous. Someone literally called Pokémon a children's dogfighting game, which isn’t wrong, but it was also completely inaccurate.
[laughter]
Pokémon consenting at the very least, it's a very healthy industry. And I've realized these people who are working with kids were getting very tarnished views of the media these kids are engaging in and it's going to be hard to engage in a positive way if you actually have told and you believe that children are engaging in recreational murder.
So I started writing up whole essays in Facebook comments. I was that person and it was getting tiring finding them again and reposting them because I didn't have the foresight to save them to a Word document for reuse later. So I made a website and I called it The Nerd Therapist and it was, “Hey, this is Fortnight. This is a simplified overview of what it is, here is why people like it.”
I really enjoyed writing that segment because it made me think that Fortnight's one of the most inclusive games ever made in terms of access because it'll run on almost any device and everyone can play together. So you've got like that one kid in the friend group who doesn't have the newest console, or has an Xbox and all his friends that have PlayStations, that kid doesn't get left out. I love that because that would happen with a lot of games.
I write why they're into it, what makes it fun, and finish it off with a segment like, “Okay, here's how you use it in therapy.” You can use it to build communication skills. You can use it to build teamwork abilities. You can just use it to think about mental health and defenses in your own strategies. There's a lot of symbolism and don't talk so much smack about the Battle Royale when everyone's favorite book for a few years was about a Royale book by the name of The Hunger Games.
I create this project and for a few months I ran it in secret because I'm like, “You know what? I don't feel confident sharing that I'm doing this with people because I'm going to get called unprofessional.” It's going to get nasty because I'm out there telling this industry, these people with a very uncharitable view towards video games that they can actually think about video games and anime superheroes in a productive way.
I started that this September 4th last year and I'm yet to receive a single negative comment on the internet.
MAE: What?!
MIKE: Yeah.
[laughter]
Even that's after two Reddit AMAs and that's…
MAE: Wow.
MIKE: A hell of an achievement for anyone who gets the internet to any degree. So after about two, or three months, I went public with them like, “Okay, this is me. This is what I do.” I took the shot; I shot my shot. And then I got asked by someone who contacted me for the project for some advice, they go, “Have you ever do you run D&D as therapy?” And I sat there for a second and I'm thinking, why the hell don't I run D&S as therapy?
[laughter]
CASEY: Yeah.
MIKE: Because I'd read the studies, I'd read the awesome articles about people doing it, and I'm like, “Why the hell haven't I done this yet?” So I probably spent like a month reading through research and figuring out how to do—it was my obsession—and then I introduced it to the program and I started running D&D as therapy. And then I completely rebranded because I had a counseling practice at the time, but the Facebook page was very neutral earth tones, very touchy feely, it was kind of nice counselor, but very generic counselor and I just went, “No, this isn't me. I'm cosplaying as a therapist here. This isn't really who I am.” Had a lot of mountain imagery and I'm like, “You know what? No.”
So I rebrand, I become The Nerd Therapist and I changed my project's name to Pop Culture Competence because I'm advocating for movies, media in general, to be more recognized as an element of cultural understanding because at the moment, it's not. There isn't someone you can go to. There's a consultant for every cultural group. Every cultural religious group, there'll be someone in this community who runs a project, or organization so you can learn more about them and how to engage them in therapy.
But until this project started, I was not aware of and I still haven't found just a free, simple resource you can go to when you need to know about nerds. When you work in primary schools, they may not be nerdy, but every kid's playing Fortnite. So if your view of that is not charitable, it doesn't help your relationship with them and the kids can tell. Every little facial expression that an adult pulls that when they're hearing about games and they don't want to hear about games, the kids pick up on it and it hurts a little.
CASEY: Yeah.
MIKE: I actually got sent by a colleague, or friend, they’re working in the United States, actually have a list of phrases that will shut down any conversation with a gamer and it was really cool to read because it's basically a list of nerdy microaggressions. It was really fascinating to read and I'll share some with you.
MAE: Yes, please. Yes.
MIKE: If you want to shut down a conversation with a gamer, “You play what now? Oh, I heard that game was violent.”
JOHN: Oh yeah.
CASEY: Oh, that's bad.
MIKE: Yeah. All that phrase is all you need to tell your kid that you don't actually care about what they're into is that you're just believing whatever's been on the news out it, or whatever other people have told you, and you're not willing to listen to them about why you are really just frigging thrilled that you figured out how to make something in Minecraft. It's digital Lego. You can't malign Minecraft. You can malign Notch who made Minecraft, but he's out of the picture now.
But I get a lot of calls from people whose kids have been invalidated and belittled by a therapist for playing games, or whose parenting skills have been brought into question by therapists for allowing them to play games. I've said this since I was about 8 years old, but I'm not going to take criticism on gaming from people who watch an equal amount of TV.
CASEY: Oh! Love it. [laughs]
MAE: I love thinking of you at 8 years old having that to say as well. [laughs]
MIKE: I was a mouthy 8-year-old
[laughter]
But it's that invalidation and it stops conversations from happening. So I started this project so I can at least boost understanding.
And probably the best article I wrote was the one that really pushed what I was willing to say was I did an article on Grand Theft Auto and that was a calculated risk because I'm like, “Okay, here's probably the most famous game for being kind of what people accuse it of being.” And I enjoyed GTA, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. So I wrote about it. I'm like, “Look, this is Grant Theft Auto. First, I have to start off by saying, ‘Look, I don't advocate for any of the in-game actions [chuckles] because of all the legal stuff. But if you want to start with it, this is what you can do.’”
I gave a brief rundown of the history and then I started talking about the plot of Grant Theft Auto V because GTA V has a plot. I also talked about the social commentary in it and the political commentary in it about how, especially in GTA V, crime isn't portrayed as particularly glamorous, or without risk. It's a game where a lot of people die simply for being involved with you.
I used it to talk about the socioeconomic determinants of crime and what leads people to do crimes and how it's way more than presented because GTA V actually gave us some storylines. You had Franklin who is just raised in the hood, raised in the cycle of gang violence, and trying to break out of it. And you had Michael who peaked in high school and never really managed and his only real thing that he could figure out was crime.
And then even again, finish off that article with here's how to use GTA's imagery to boost communication and teamwork, because you need to have a good cohesive team who communicates in order to pull off a heist.
That one was a tricky one to write because GTA is infamous and that article actually got some good reception. I got even got some messages from some people with really impressive job titles and they're like, “I've never thought about GTA in this way before,” and I'm like, “Yeah.”
CASEY: That's awesome. You were really taking the perspective of other people and including yourself, I guess, in this case. But what do people enjoy in this and how can it make sense to someone who doesn't get it? You're validating.
MIKE: Yeah, and that's what I try to do. That's what I try to say even for stuff I'm not a big fan of. Like, I'm not a huge fan of Five Nights at Freddy's, just not my kind of game, but I still did an article on it and I gave it it's validation. Oh, this is what it's about and also, while we're here, can we talk about how there's no kids horror.
Kids are seeking out horror content and they're having to go out of their age range because they don't make horror for kids and yeah, horror for kids would be incredibly tricky to pull off and it would be a huge niche, but it's also better than being greeted by a group of 3rd graders who've just watched Stephen King's It because I wouldn't even sit down and watch that movie. I don't like seeing kids get hurt. I don’t know how we'd get it done. But I just feel like kids like to be scared, like to be startled, they like suspense, they seek out horror. So we get a lot of kids into stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's, or Slender Man despite it being not appropriate at all and I just wish there was more age-appropriate horror for younger viewers.
MAE: Ooh. I love what you just said. Age-appropriate horror, [chuckles] that I do think is an untapped market right there, [laughs] market need. I personally like have always moved away from horror. Even as a kid, there was some movie, I don't remember what it was, but it ended up not being a scary movie in the end. I think it was the one where there were the little roller animals that – [overtalk]
JOHN: Oh, Critters?
MAE: Yes!
JOHN: Critters, yeah.
MAE: Yes, John, thank you. We went to the movies as a family and we were going to see Critters and I was like, “Mm I can't do it. It's too scary.” I left and instead, I went into the Jackie Gleason movie where he's dying. [laughs] Like this super heavy drama, that's where I went as a kid. But you're helping me because I do have and the older I get, the stronger it becomes; some judginess and aversion toward violence, hatred, and horror. I don't totally support my niece's 5-hour day TikTok habit, so.
[laughter]
There are ways in which I don't want to be like, “Boy, that rock and roll is really messing with the kids today.”
[laughter]
But I also, I don’t know, there's pieces in there that I don't love like the portrayals of women from the Grant Theft Auto posters I've seen, or there's stuff that I don’t know is awesome even when there's other things that are skills-based that we all could use more of.
MIKE: No, I hear that and that's another thing I address in the topic of my Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto posts. I'm like, “Look, these aren't for kids. These are not for kids. They are explicitly not for kids,” but kind of that acceptance of kids are playing them and we've got to look at what we can do in that scope if we're not stopping access entirely. That can be really challenging because yeah, GTA, it aims to be problematic.
[laughter]
And I still enjoy parts of it for what it is in that not a lot of games will just let you drive around a city without being incredibly boring and that's what – like, I've talked with a lot of parents whose younger kids play GTA, but it's not for the violence. It's not for killing. It's just for being let loose on a city with a car because there's not a lot of games where you can just kind of drive around a city and if there are, there's usually some sort of caveat, like you’ve got, in Crazy Taxi, your missions are only going to last for 90 seconds, or something.
This is kind of that free-roaming freedom and that's one of the things I do bring up is like, look, these aren't age-appropriate. Here's what they're getting out of it. Maybe let's think about some alternatives and unfortunately, there's not always alternatives. I always come back to stuff like Five Nights at Freddy's and the horror genre, and they're seeking out these age-inappropriate things because there isn't much age appropriate for them. One of my favorite movies when I was 8 was Starship Troopers and I still love Starship Troopers, but there's nothing kind of really in that big gung-ho military satire sci-fi for my age group at the time.
JOHN: Yeah, and I can't say that I'm any sort of expert in this, but one way to approach say, your 12-year-old niece comes to you saying how much they love Grant Theft Auto and they've been playing it 5 hours a week and whatever may like your reaction is like, “Well, okay, I can see there's fun stuff, but there's also this stuff that makes me cringy and I'm really uncomfortable with.” I'm thinking that that can actually be a point of communication.
MIKE: Yeah.
JOHN: Like you can relate to them about what they're doing and what they're enjoying about it and then you can say, “Well, what did you think about that other thing? Like, was that something you thought was cool, or were you a little uncomfortable, or?” You can use that to discuss, like you were saying, Mike, about the social determinants of crime in the world that it exists and you could start conversations on that because they're portrayed in the game world.
MIKE: Yeah. They are great prompts. It's like, “Hey, you've seen this thing happen in the game. Is that something you'd like to talk about?” And if you've got adults that a kid can trust to have that conversation, you can actually start conversations rather than end them. So if you hear a kid say, “Oh, I'm really into” – we'll keep going with Grand Theft Auto. “I'm really into Grand Theft Auto.” It's like, cool and instead of dumping on GTL saying, “Oh, that's not appropriate. Let's do something else.” Then you can actually start a conversation, go, “Yeah, how did you feel about that scene where Michael's daughter is trying to get onto a reality show and she's being exploited by Lazlow?”
You can talk about some of these really big topics if that's where you want to go and that's kind of at the end of every article, I talk about themes and it's, “Here's where you could go if you want to have a conversation, here's some of the topics you could go into.” I do a lot of values-based work and that's where we can look at where we can go from here. It's like, how do you have a conversation with people about using Among Us for instance, or what conversations can you start?
CASEY: My therapist friends, Among Us was their go-to last year.
MIKE: Hmm.
CASEY: It was also the zeitgeist. The most popular thing. But to do during therapy with kids was Among Us, totally.
MIKE: Yeah. I didn't use Among Us in the work, but I still have it on my phone and we just again, covered it in articles like, “Here's the conversations you can have with it. Here's how you talk about. Here's a way to look at intrusive thoughts as being this little imposter trying to tell you, you are what you're not.”
One game I'm currently playing – and again, looking at gaming and decision-making, one game I’m currently playing is Civilization VI and we're looking at values in terms of like hey, what kind of civ are you going to be? Are you going to look more at military? Are you going to look more economics, trade, politics? Where's your decision-making going and then you can look at decision-making by the turn. It's like hey, this city's been at war with you for a little while, you've been on war with it for a couple of turns now, what are you thinking of doing and you can look at why, what logic, and what values are driving your decisions.
MAE: Yeah, totally. And just for the record, I’m not an advocate of all that much censorship, but just well, what I usually say is, “Listen, Niecy, you are in charge of your brain and the stuff that you put in there, it affects how you think about yourself and others and so, it's up to you. There are things that you're going to be curious about and going to want to know about, but just as long as you're having a more meta view,” [chuckles] which I don't say it that way, but I think it's food. It's mental food, all the things that we engage ourselves in, these topics among them, and we can be healthy consumers of information to go back to that word, health, or we can eat lots of candy, which I definitely do sometimes.
MIKE: And that's a 100% accurate especially in terms of, I'm actually looking at that similar thought process in social media right now because I see a lot of parts about how social media is damaging. But what I'm also suggesting to people so if you're having a bad experience on for media, you can curate your newsfeed and if you're seeing posts that are just designed to make you angry and there's content out there designed to elicit an emotional response from you, change what you're seeing.
During my degree, I subscribed to a whole bunch of science pages and it was really cool cause it was science posts and then it reached this point where they'd stopped being about science posts as much as they started being about abuses and human rights violations of children in American schools.
It reached this point where I was logging onto social media and just becoming incredibly frustrated and then typing out half an essay in a comment section and like, “Wait a second. What am I achieving here? I am just railing against someone in the USA who will never read this post.” There’s some school principal who's made a horrible decision and while it is important to stand up for what's right, you've also got to take the choice of when it is impacting your mental health and looking at when things are and aren't serving you.
It's the same in media and I really do think that's why the last few years has been such a push to wholesome memes is because our media consumption, especially during I guess, the last few years of the 2000s was very focused on being edgy. And then we see that in the series like Rick and Morty, or BoJack Horseman, they’re incredibly depressing and cynical and that's fine. If that's what you want to engage in, that's fine. But also be wary. I've watched BoJack Horseman at a time when I shouldn't and it sucked. It was just so depressing. It was too depressing and we've got to –
It's a 100% right that the fruit and nutrition analogy is perfect because there are cognitive houses out there and if all you're taking in is this specific media on these specific topics, it does affect your world view. That's again, where we've got to have conversations that are empathic and validating. It's not as if you should stop because this is wrong. It's like, well, friend, person, human being, please think about how you're engaging and engage responsibly and maybe if you're not vibing with it right now, just go play some Minecraft, or listen to something chill because we do need that balance of our media content.
MAE: You reminded me of BoJack Horseman. There's this one episode of where he's giving a eulogy for his mother. There's parts about it that are depressing, but the realism of challenges many, many people have with their relationships, with their parents, and orientations to their passing. I thought it was incredibly therapeutic [chuckles] and people who are very close to me, who have those challenges, I've recommended [chuckles] it so many times as one of the very best pieces of, I don't know, any collection movie, any medium, this best captured for me the complexity of some of those challenges.
So I don't know, but I get excited by naming complexity and challenge. [chuckles] Whereas, other people are really discouraged by that. Once there's more of a map, or a light in the room, or something, it all feels more navigable to me. So there's that
MIKE: When I'm sitting there watching a movie and the point of it clicks and I'm like, “Wow, this movie is about something.” When I watched Zootopia, it was during my degree and I'm sitting there watching Zootopia with my family and I'm like, “Wow, this movies about a lot of stuff.”
I had the same thing with Pixar. They could just do this. Inside Out, I left that – I think I watched Inside Out a month before I started my degree, before I started studying—I'd quit my last job and I was going to start working in mental health—and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” This just perfect. This is how depression works. This is a big conversation about grief is happening here as well. The complexity of the emotional experience in terms when everything turns from just these five emotions, these five core emotions, and sadness and happiness becomes bittersweet, and anger and joy joining together to form assertion and fun. It's really awesome to kind of have these aha moments as an adult and being like, “Oh, that's what this movie's about.”
I kind of realized when I was like 7, or 8 that the X-Men was about oppression and that's again, one of my favorite conversations to have with people who maybe are new to comics, or new to the X-Men. I can't wait for the MCU X-Men to start so I can have this conversation with even more people, because that's been such a cool thing to think about and I do love having those big conversations with people.
It's also why I can't watch Onward ever again. I don't know if you watched Onward last year. I feel like this movie doesn't get as much conversation as it deserves. It's absolutely brilliant, but it's also about a really specific experience of grief that just kicks my ass and I can't watch that movie without crying.
CASEY: Oh, that was the D&D trolls one. I did see that. Which one was that?
MIKE: Yeah, it was an urban fantasy. They were elves. They were blue and had pointy ears. I think they were elves. And they were on a quest to resurrect their dad. Pixar released it in June 2020 so still talking like height of the pandemic and they released it online. I think it was one of the first big online releases and yeah, I just watched that and it broke me in a way that a movie hadn't for a long time.
CASEY: But Mike, you're inspiring an idea in me and maybe you were already working on this—it sounds like it. A lot of people end up wanting to use the same approaches to deal with challenging experiences, for instance, talking about it and journaling and I see fewer people reach to reading things, or consuming media that's related to what they're doing. I think partly because it's hard to find an appropriate one that you would relate to. I hear you listing out a whole bunch of things that might relate to a circumstance someone is in. Have you thought about that problem space and how would you navigate trying to help get people to the right media that helps them?
MIKE: Well, I kind of vibe on what people are already interested in and I don't always give recommendations, but I will have chats about to see what people where people are and what they need and if there's kind of an experience they're seeking. It hasn't been a big one for me because a lot of the clients I see are already into a lot of what the stuff I've been to and I end up getting more recommendations from them than I have to give.
[laughter]
But I use them to, again, it's for conversations. It's like, “Have you watched this? Have you thought about this?” And the conversation kind of go, “Yeah, I've seen it and this is what I thought,” or “I haven't seen it and here's why.” And sometimes, I'll have a conversations like, “Have you watched this movie?” and people go, “No, I really don't want to because I know what it's about and I don't want to kind of go there yet.”
CASEY: Sure. Yeah, yeah.
MAE: Kind of riffing off of your thing, Casey and tying in some of Mike's work with equipping schools better with mental health tools that having a little, I don't know, glossary of here's a challenge and here's five different options like here's a poem and here's a movie and here's a video, or song. That'd be amazing.
I agree with you on Inside Out, my lap was so wet thinking just the tears were streaming out of my eyes thinking of all the young people who will now have language to be able to articulate [chuckles] what it is that they're feeling.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah. There’s actually really cool programs that use Inside Out in therapy. Because I left that movie theater thinking about how I'm going to use this in therapy later. I hadn't even started my degree. I had no theoretical backdrop. I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to use this.” And then a year later, I'm at a school – taking my son to school and I see the classroom is covered in Inside Out stuff and I'm sitting there like, “Oh my God, this is better than I ever imagined.”
I love having these conversations and I love playing clips and stuff. When I worked in the schools, if we had a school competition—and people would win and people didn't win—there'd always be someone who's really upset because they didn't win this thing. Whether it was a classroom recollection, or sports stuff, we'd always have conversations. I would go in and one of most fun things I'd ever do is I'd fire up YouTube and I'd play that clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard says, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That's just the way life is sometimes.”
I'd probably written that on every other board, every other whiteboard in a classroom, because it's such a powerful quote and it's such an awesome way of just looking at sometimes things don't turn out. We've got to deal with that and we've got to do the next thing and then the next thing would be playing the clip from The Dark Night as what do we do when we fall, Master Bruce? We stand up and playing that. It was Batman so it was a bit more approachable to the kids, but knowing these little bits from movies and stuff to really just tie in and begin a conversation.
MAE: You reminded me of the montage at the end of Captain Marvel, where despite all of the “powers” she acquired through the accident, her true strength came from her just consistently standing back up no matter and it's just this – she gets knocked over, she gets insulted, she loses something like it's just a lifetime of getting back up. I was pretty moved by that one, too. I had a wet lap [laughs] after that one also.
MIKE: And I love it when movies can lead to these inspiring conversations that this still worthy scene from Endgame when Thor goes back to Asgard. He's still able to call Mjolnir and he's still worthy and there's a whole conversation. I've written a whole article based on that scene alone and I've seen people with tattoos of Mjolnir with still worthy engraved into it.
It's just this really powerful and moving scene that again, it starts a conversation and I can see a lot of people out there who can resonate with that scene. Especially when we look at worthiness as also our own inner worthiness and how we feel about ourselves. But also, in the context of Thor’s own story is that it wasn't worthy in just in general, it was worthy in the eyes of Odin. So at this point in the story, Odin had been dead for a long time, but Thor, in that moment, got – after everything he'd been through, he was not only still worthy of the hammer, but he was also worthy in his father's eyes, which was a big part of his own journey through the movies.
MAE: Yo! So after hanging out with you for a little while, Mike, there are like 47 people that I want to connect with you.
MIKE: [laughs] Go for it.
MAE: And I'm curious about what sort of engagement is welcomed, where are your widest open doors, where are you headed next, and how we support the amazing perspectives and work and experience that you have?
MIKE: I mean, the hardest part is, is that I'm in Australia and I can't work with Americans. The US and Canada is explicitly outside of my remit. In the USA, you've got to be registered state by state so even if I was in the USA, I could only work in the states I'm registered in and that is a whole process for each state.
JOHN: Yeah.
MIKE: I've been told it's expensive. And then it's tricky when I do stuff like the Reddit AMAs, because I get messages like, “Hey, I'm in Florida and I want to see you.” I'm like, “Well, I can't.”
But thankfully, I've used my superpower of networking to join a group called The Geek Therapy Community where it's a whole bunch of geeky therapists, sharing, resources, sharing ideas, and training. I've just got a thread in there saying, “Hey, look, I get approached by Americans every now and again, please tell me what state you're in and if you're open,” and always try my best to link people in when they message me. Currently looking for someone in Louisiana, but that one's being tricky. Yeah, it’s a really good group. It's really supportive. It's really friendly, and it's just really open to having a conversation about hey, look, I'm not really into this, but a lot of my clients are really vibing on this content, what can you share with me right now?
So the big one at the moment the conversations have been around, well, Minecraft will never be out of the conversation [chuckles] but also Goblin Slayer the anime and My Hero Academia are consistent topics, which is really cool. I have to sit down and watch Goblin Slayer because I haven't yet. But at the moment, I'm running well, I've got a Facebook page where I share nerdy memes and stuff. So one of my favorite ones is thinking about Spoon theory as spell slots from D&D.
JOHN: Mm.
MAE: What. [laughs]
MIKE: Yeah. I don't know. It's not a meme, but it's just, I don't know what it is. It's a screencap from Tumblr and this person's therapist reconceptualized string theory into spell slot theory, but also talked about hyper focus as a free action and a cantrip. So it’s a bit more complex.
MAE: What! Okay, okay, okay I’m totally nerding out right now and I want to make sure that if you would be willing to say what spoon theory is and what a cantrip is, some of these things, yeah.
[chuckles]
MIKE: Sure.
MAE: I love that we’re saying these words that I know!
JOHN: Hey! [laughs]
CASEY: Yay!
MIKE: And that's the point, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. We're trying to provide a common language. So for those uninitiated, spoon theory is a term used by people experiencing mental health and/or disability to describe their energy levels. You can look at any activity as you have a set amount of spoons—and this changes per day. Sometimes you've only got a 2-, or 3-spoon day and different tasks have a spoon cost. So doing the dishes could cost you 5 spoons. If you are only having a 10-spoon day, doing the dishes is going to take it out of you.
I actually saw a great TED Talk recently. It was about, I'm still explaining spoon theory, but also everyone knows what a burns, or no burns day is and it's a very similar concept. And then someone has adapted the sprint theory to the Dungeons and Dragons spell slots. So for the people who play D&D, spell casters in Dungeons and Dragons get a set amount of spells they can cast per day. So this really translates really well into, I've got a certain amount of things I can do in a day before I'm burned out and I need to take a rest.
And then you've got cantrips, which are minor spells, but you can use them at no cost. Sometimes there's things you can do if you're experiencing mental health, or you've got a disability that you can do that don't cost a spoon, it could be a hyper focus, or it could be a piece of self-care that just really does it for you, it's really nice, and it doesn't actually take an emotional toll to actually carry out this task.
JOHN: Yeah, that's fantastic.
MAE: Are there any other topics that you were hoping that we would touch on?
MIKE: So at the moment, what I'm providing is D&D therapy. I've got one group a week. I'm looking to expand that to two, or three groups a week. I'm looking at also branching out to different RPGs like, I'm really excited for the Avatar RPG. This should be coming out early next year. I've already got a quick start copy and that's looking like a whole lot of fun. I'm hoping to start a Star Wars RPG, or a Warhammer 40K RPG group because I was dead/not haunted, but heckled at a convention. Someone says, “I bet you can't turn 40K into a therapy RPG. It's too depressing,” and I did it and now I don't have a group to run it for.
[laughter]
But Warhammer 40K universe is a universe where your emotions become psychic energy, which can become demons and I really can't think of a better setting in which you go out and literally slay your demons.
MAE: Whoa, yes. I did not know about this – [overtalk]
CASEY: Wow, what a good framing.
MAE: And love that framing.
MIKE: That's the hope is to create a story. I've created a storyline where players are going to go out literally to slay their demons because we see in Warhammer 40K, there's actually demons that have arisen from specific experiences. There's a demon that was brought into existence when the first sentient life form killed another one. It's called the Echo of the First Murder and it's super depresso and it’s super gaff. But I love it because it gives you this idea that there is a demon out there that could be made up of what you've been through and you can go out there and banish it and seal it. You can go on this own adventure literally facing your demons.
CASEY: That sounds so powerful. I can't wait to hear how it goes when you get to do this on people.
MIKE: It'll be a fun one. See, that's kind of what I'm doing in the RPG world right now. I'm doing more gaming therapy so we're playing Civ, doing a lot of Minecraft because Minecraft is so easy to access. Minecraft, Roblox and Civ at the moment just to give for people who fidget. For neurodiverse people who like myself, you may have noticed on camera, I don't sit still. I do better as well if I've got something to do and so do some of the people I see. So we play Minecraft and we do things. We share an activity. It's the same kind of mindset that leads to just going out for a walk with someone and having a big talk. It's like, let's build a castle and go find some diamonds.
JOHN: Yeah. There's such a difference between two people facing each other. Even if you're in some therapeutic relationship, it's friendly, there is still that hint of confrontation. Like you were saying, you're both looking into screen. You're both going for a walk. Suddenly, you're both looking forward and it takes that level of pressure down. That's so useful.
MIKE: It really does. It's just a nice way of doing things, especially for kids and younger teens who, if they're being sat down and confronted with someone in the past, it's probably because they've been in trouble. So this way, it's just look, we can sit down, we can vibe, we can build something, and we can even use the game to power the conversation.
Minecraft is a great one because there's so many resources for it, but we can talk about filling needs here. What do we need? We can build little stations for mental health check-ins, which I've got on my page. Or we can even just ad lib, not ad libs, I do a lot of improv sort of stuff. We got attacked by zombies in one game because I never the play on peaceful and we got attacked by zombies. So we had to, very hastily, build some walls and we built a house that could withstand attack and punctuated that with a conversation, where do you go when you don't feel safe, or what can you do if you need to feel safe, and we talked about self-care, self-supporting, and self-soothing from that.
MIKE: Are you familiar with the book, My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem’s work?
MIKE: No, I am not.
MAE: When you were talking about the Warhammer 40K and going out and slaying the demons that have arisen from certain experiences, Resmaa’s basically premise is that a lot of our current social justice challenges and racial challenges have to do with the fact that we have transferred experiences of trauma through physical by having children, like we physically inherit it. And the reason we haven't been able to solve a lot of these problems is that we are focusing on our thoughts about them. There's a whole transformation, a physical healing that if we can engage at that level, then we've got a shot at some of this intergenerational trauma stuff.
MIKE: Yeah. Intergeneration and epigenetic trauma is such a huge topic and it's something we are learning more about. It blew me away to first learn about it at uni, but it's also one of those topics that is, we were only really starting to see the effects and we're really only starting to get an understanding. In my knowledge. I could be wrong because it's not my area of specialty, but from what I am seeing, we've still got a whole lot to learn on this topic. It's going to be incredibly profound to just to start learning about the effects these things can have in the long-term.
JOHN: Yeah.
CASEY: Well, I want to define epigenetics for the audience. I studied this in undergrad. Epigenetics is like the genetics, like T, A, G, C codon pairs, but it's the part like how they wrap around spools in the body and then the spools might be tight, or loose. So different spools of DNA in your body are tighter, or looser, and that gets passed down generation to generation. And we can't measure it as well. It's harder to measure so we know a lot less about it than we do T, A, G, C DNA base pairs. Anyway, it's heritable. That's the main takeaway for here, but science nerd nugget.
MIKE:I think one of the big ones is that our experiences are things. As you said, they're heritable, we can pass stuff down and our genetics can change with us. I thought that was really, that was a huge read, especially when we talk about cycles and patterns of disadvantage.
JOHN: Yeah. There's not only the social machinery that's reinforcing the disadvantage, but then you've also got it coming directly into the biology as well.
MIKE: Mm. Thank you for the book. I'll have a look at that.
MAE: Yeah. I think you I'd really love it and if you do check it out, I totally want to talk to you about it. In fact, I'm finding it hard to not bring up a whole bunch more topics.
[laughter]
But we have been on a while and it might be time to transition to reflections. Even though I don't really want to right now!
[laughter]
CASEY: Yeah, me too. I've got notes of things I could bring up. We're not going to get to.
[laughter]
MIKE: I am always happy to come back.
CASEY: Oh, cool. Very good.
JOHN: Cool, man. I mean, I think that like you, Mae and Casey, I think we're all having lots of ideas swirling around in our heads and one of the ones that's popped up just as, as you were talking about specifically the work you were doing with RPGs, D&D, 40K, and all those. It just reminded me there's a Kickstart, it's just about out, an RPG called Coyote & Crow, which is set in alternate history of indigenous people in the United States. In an alternate history where colonization didn't happen.
MIKE: Hmm.
JOHN: Yeah. And they've built a whole structure around this and they're using all Native artists and writers and publicists, and then the whole thing. They're doing amazing stuff there.
But I think having context like that, again, allows you to – especially if you were working with someone who was indigenous, or with another disadvantage. Being able to use the structure of the game to talk about their experience of being indigenous and how that is one of the intersections that is affecting that person and there are just so many layers that you can go through with all this. It strikes me that there's such massive potential through all of it and it's actually interesting because for the longest – I've been in and out of therapy various times over the years, and I know that some therapists like to do roleplaying where you take on various people, or talk to certain people.
That idea had always somewhat terrified me perhaps, because the thing I need to work on is there. But now that I've been doing D&D for a couple of years, I have more experience with roleplaying in a less emotionally fraught context. So that gives me that little bit extra comfort with the idea of doing such a thing in a therapeutic context. And even more particular, if there was therapeutic context that was even spinning in all of the world of D&D, that seems like that would make me even more comfortable. So it's just really fascinating how bringing in all these extra concepts can cut through baggage and things for people to get to doing the work that is most can be good for them without just – and shortcutting so much of the fight you have to get there.
MIKE: It makes it easier to talk about something. Eevery conversation when I was youngest started with, “Oh, my friend. My friend is going through this.” It makes it easy to talk about something; it doesn't have to be about you. It does also lead to nuance. When you're an RPG therapist, you have to ask questions like, “Hey, is this just your character's tragic backstory [laughs], or are you going through something we need to talk about?” Asking that question has been an interesting one, because I do prefer that my players make as much of they can of themselves into their characters. But I also don't require it because they may not be ready yet, even to just admit something about their character could be huge for them.
But it is huge and I'm loving this. I'm a proponent and an advocate for social justice and I love seeing projects like this. I've been following it on, I can't remember what page I've been seeing that post on. I think it's called I'm Begging Play You to Play Another RPG is where that's being posted. I'm really into it and I've been really tempted to get some sort of qualification in teaching so I can lean more into an education perspective with these because there's an awesome opportunities for social and emotional education.
In my own campaigns, I use a Homebrew World called Advantasia and it's actually based on the – well, it's based on where I live in the world. It's not quite Australia. It's a typical, not European fantasy world, but continentally, it's similar to Australia. It's in the Southern hemisphere and stuff. But the weather cycles, the calendar years in Advantasia is the same one uses the indigenous people of the land where I'm living.
They don't have the four-season model. They actually have a season model that actually fits where I live. They've got a six-season model. So there's two months for every season and it just fits way better than the autumn summer, winter, spring seasons we have here. We've got Birak, which is December and January. It's just hot and it's dry. And then Bunuru is February and March and it's still hot, but it's also like a humid kind of heat. And then in April and May, we've got Djeran, which it's starting to get cooler. And then June and July is Makuru where it's cold and wet and there's stormy. And then August and September is Djilba and it's getting warmer, but it's still quite hot. It's still quite wet and windy. And then October and November, where we are now is Kambarang and it's longer, it's more dry periods, and we're kind of starting into the summer.
It's just a way more nuanced look at the world and I include this in my settings, so that not only can players learn about mental health, but they're also learning about part of their world, where they live, and how we can actually ways we can look at the world in a better way.
MAE: I love that; ways we can look at the world in a better way. Look at the world and ourselves [laughs] in a better way.
I think the thing that struck me the most out of this conversation, if I have to pick one thing, or one theme, it'd be, I really appreciate the way in which the pragmatic approach that you're taking of this is where people are, let's just hang out there. [chuckles]
MIKE: Yeah.
MAE: And regardless of what all the other philosophy, politics, opinions, blah, blah. It's like, well, how about we just hang with the people? So I really appreciate being reminded to continuously work on starting from there and connecting from there.
MIKE: Well, we have a saying --- well, as a saying it's a bit of a maximum therapy. It's called meet people where they are and that's often about not invalidating people because of the way they're seeing the world, or not belittling people because someone else might have it worse than them. It's just about understanding this person and how they see the world and just being with them where they are.
To me, what I'm doing is just taking that to its rational next step is especially during the past, let’s just say the past 18 months, has really highlighted a need for online services. A lot of therapists play Flash games like there’s browser-based UNO, or Battleship, or something and I'm just going, “Well, we could do that. We could also play Minecraft.”
[laughter]
This is meeting people where they're.
MAE: How about you, Casey? Do you have something that struck you, or that you're going home with?
CASEY: Yeah. I keep thinking about, I didn't want to talk about myself so much on this call, but I've been working on a board game for doing mental health skills for middle schoolers. But I was very happy to talk about the D&D themes today instead of that. But I keep thinking about how my approach is to help the middle schoolers talk to their friends in a structured way where the structure helps them talk about things they wouldn't normally be able to, or think to, or they wouldn't be prompted to.
I've play tested it a lot. It's really successful. People love playing it, but they don't always know they'd love to play it because it's not something they're going for already. I wish I could talk to my friends over a board game. So I don't know about the marketing side of this thing. It might be more helpful as a tool for therapists to bring out with a group of middle schoolers who want to talk to each other.
But anyway, my takeaway is also meet them where they are. That sounds so powerful when you just get on Among Us, or Minecraft with them where they're at, the barrier is solo and then they still get that engagement like they're fidgeting, or whatever that they need to do to get comfortable. That’s really powerful.
MIKE: I would love to see this board game. I think schools need more tools and that's kind of, I was working in schools and in my private practice when I developed my RPG therapy program. But it's also the kind of stuff that would be really helpful for schools and I would love to see that is anything which we can use to empower connection with people is incredibly – well, it's incredibly vital, but it's also very beautiful.
CASEY: All right, Mike, how about you? Do you have any takeaways, any insight you got today on the call with us that you're going to take with you?
MAE: It can be something you said, too. Doesn't have to be – [overtalk]
MIKE: [laughs] I've done a lot of talking today. Again, I think my reflection is actually from what you've just mentioned is that you could have something really special and this does sound something that's also really special, this board game you've designed. But the hardest part about doing something is helping people know you're doing it.
There's a bit of a negative connotation to networking and especially here in Australia, we're not too big on talking about ourselves in a positive way. We have cultural values against that, but I feel like there's a really important need for people, who are doing good work, to be able to talk about it in a positive way. Because I guarantee you, there's a whole lot of really awesome stuff being done out there, but people aren't talking about it because they fear being accused of being like self-aggrandizing, or looking for attention when at the end of the day, if we can build awareness that there's other ways to do things, or there's new ways of doing things, we can hopefully inspire and empower.
CASEY: I love that it comes back to networking, which is your superpower as we said at the very beginning.
MIKE: I was really tempted to not list that [chuckles] as my superpower, but I am continually told that it is. It's one of those tricky ones. We have a thing here in Australia called tall puppy syndrome. It's a person who is conspicuously successful and whose success frequently attracts envious hostility and it's just, what is it? The nail that stands out gets the hammer. It's just kind of this cultural value of just not being self-aggrandizing. There's also finding that happy medium where you are happy to talk about yourself and what you're doing in a way that gets it out there.
CASEY: Yeah.
MIKE: Because I reckon that's a whole lot of really cool stuff out there that isn't being talked about because people are a little bit shy, or just might not want to be seen as talking themselves up too much.
CASEY: And then getting over that hump of being shy, then you have to get over the other hub of finding the right people to talk to and that's the marketing and sales aspect, that's my head's been. I started my own business this year and I don't know much about marketing and sales.
MIKE: Congrats!
CASEY: Thank you. Well, I do now, but 12 months ago, I did so much less than I do now. [chuckles]
MIKE: I understand that. I went full-time in my practice 6 weeks ago. Until recently, I was working…
MAE: Congratulations!
CASEY: Yeah.
MIKE: Thank you. Until recently. I was just working in schools and then I went to a youth not-for-profit, and then 6 weeks ago, I just had this opportunity where I was getting emails daily. Like, look, I see two people a week, that's all I've got room for. Two people in a D&D group a week and then I looked at all the people who sent me an email like, oh, okay, I could go full time if all these people say yes. So I gave notice and it's been a hell of an experience.
CASEY: That's awesome. Congrats. I love this trend.
MIKE: Thank you.
CASEY: People are starting more small businesses. Another therapist friend of mine, she just started her own small practice. It's booming. I like this trend for our economy, too.
MIKE: Hmm.
CASEY: It's a trend. I hope it sticks.
MIKE: Yeah, and it's really cool because it lets people do their thing.
CASEY: Yeah.
MIKE: It lets people live their passion and their authenticity, and it creates this environment where we have a lot more diversity and people can be who they are. If we can make these small, innovative businesses work, we're going to see a lot more diversity in our services we can deliver because we're not tied to an organization that says, “You will conform,” or an organization that says, “No, you won't have a social media presence. No, you won't talk to the press about things.”
CASEY: You just got a great image in my head. We want to be rainbow pinwheel, not gray cogs.
[laughter]
I want more of those.
MIKE: That's very true.
MAE: I'm ready for that plan. Casey.
CASEY: It's spinning.
MIKE: One thing I see a lot of is, there's a D&D resource coming out of the Bristol Children's Hospital and they created the Oath of Accessibility. It is a Paladin subclass as the whole point is to create accessibility tools for D&D and it's awesome. They do some really good stuff, but they have this tagline and I think it's really special. It is, “Anyone can be a hero and everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”
JOHN: Aww.
CASEY: I love it.
MAE: Yes.
CASEY: What a great quote. That's true.
JOHN: That’s a great place to end it.
Special Guest: Michael Keady.
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