For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
232: Outside The Charmed Circle with Tamsin Davis-Langley
01:17 - Tamsin’s Superpower: Recognizing Songs Within Seconds 05:08 - Outside the Charmed Circle (https://www.amazon.com/Outside-Charmed-Circle-Exploring-Sexuality/dp/073876132X) (Tamsin’s book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality) * The Pagan Community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Paganism) * “Necessarily Brief” 09:09 - Consent in the Mentor/Mentee Relationship (Master/Apprentice) * The Universal Attribution Fallacy * Access * Power Dynamics * Conflicts of Interest * The Word “Politics” - how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one 16:57 - Using Certain Phrases (i.e. “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture”) and Divisiveness * Obfuscation * We Hate You Now: The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes (https://medium.com/surviving-covid-19/we-hate-you-now-d0fca14e3b82) * Social Contracts 23:46 - What Is A Person? Individuality & Personhood * Plato (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato) & Aristotle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle) * Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (https://www.amazon.com/Women-Fire-Dangerous-Things-Categories/dp/0226468046) * Hegemonic Norms, Privilege & Power 30:01 - “Fringe Communities”; Subcultures and Intersection * How Buildings Learn (https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966): Edge Cities * The Queer Community * Using the Word “Queer” * Gatekeeping * Fear of Powerlessness * The Relationship Between Radicals and Reactionaries * “Outside The Charmed Circle” * Gayle S. Rubin: Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality (https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Rubin-Thinking-Sex.pdf) 44:30 - Individual Experiences Are Not Universally Applicable * Getting People to Care About Other People * Teaching Empathy * Less Hubris, Gatekeeping, and Self-Reinforcing Superiority Reflections: Jamey: Conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you. Rein: What are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? Helping. Helping by Edgar H. Schein (https://www.amazon.com/Helping-Offer-Give-Receive-Help/dp/1605098566) Tamsin: The dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren’t that dissimilar from one group to another. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 232 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jamey. That is a lot of episodes. I’m here with our guest, Tamsin Davis-Langley who is a white, queer, nonbinary trans femme from a multiethnic family who grew up poor. They spent most of their adult work life as the tech-savvy person in a non-technical office, and are now pursuing a career in digital communications. Their academic path began in liberal arts, detoured through computer science, and ended with a degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Their work explores the ways subcultural communities intersect with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. They've written about how the problems of abuse and predation in subcultures are linked to the power dynamics inherent in those groups. Under their nom de plume, Misha Magdalene, they're the author of Outside the Charmed Circle, a book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Tamsin, welcome to the show. TAMSIN: Thank you so much! It’s a delight to be here. REIN: So you know what we’re going to ask you. [laughter] What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? TAMSIN: My superpower is that I can, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, listen to the radio and identify the song that's playing within 5 seconds, or so if it was recorded within a specific window of time and basically falls under the very broad umbrella of Western pop music. This happened because I was bitten by a radioactive record store employee back in the 80s and since then, I've been able to go, “Oh yeah, that's Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. It's on Who's Next released 1972. Produced by Glen's Johns,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is a delightful party trick for getting people to suddenly realize they want to talk to someone else at the party. JAMEY: I was about to ask – [overtalk] REIN: How do you remember all of that? TAMSIN: How do I remember all of that? I have no idea. I literally could not tell you what I had for dinner last night and I'm in the midst of training sessions for a position that I'm pursuing in digital communications and half the time I'm going, “What was the command to do the things so that I can function?” But I can literally tell you the brand of bass guitar that Paul McCartney played in The Beatles, or the kind of keyboard that Kate Bush used when she was recording her albums in the late 70s and early 80s was a Hohner, a violin-shaped bass, and a Fairlight synthesizer, respectively. [chuckles] JAMEY: I can relate to this because I often think about how many other things I could know if I freed up all of the space in my brain where I kept the names of all the Pokémon. TAMSIN: Right, right. I want to defrag my own brain and just throw out huge chunks of permanent storage, but no. JAMEY: Do you use your superpower for good, or for evil? TAMSIN: In finest, strong, bad tradition, I try to use my powers only for good, or for awesome. I have actually used it to further my career. I did work for a little while at a Musicland, back when those existed, and later at a Tower Records, back when those existed. For younger listeners, those were both brick and mortar stores where you could go in and buy music on physical media and occasionally, accessories that were associated with bands, or musicians that you liked and people would walk in and say things like, “I'm trying to find a CD by this band and I don't know the name of the band, or the name of the song, or any of the lyrics, but it's got this bit in it that goes “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh” and I went, “Bad to the Bone, George Thurogood & the Delaware Destroyers. Here's their Best Of. Thank you.” So that's the extent to which my superpower operates for good, or for awesome. REIN: That reminds me, there was a librarian who worked at The London Library, which has about a million books, for 40 years and could do a very similar thing where they knew what book someone was looking for better than that person did. TAMSIN: Yeah. That kind of talent always delights me when I find it out in the wild where I'm like, “Yeah, I was looking for this book. It kind of was about this thing and I remember it had sort of a teal cover. Oh, here you go.” Yeah, it's kind of an amazing and wonderful thing to see, but then I do it and I feel really self-conscious, so. [laughs] REIN: So, speaking of books, graceful segue. TAMSIN: Yes. Speaking of books. REIN: Tell us a little bit about the book that you wrote. TAMSIN: I can, yes. So when I was finishing up my degree at the University of Washington in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to apply the concepts and the tools that I was learning in my degree program to my actual day-to-day life. It's all well and good when you're in the ivory tower of academia to talk about intersectionality and hegemonic norms of sexuality, or gender, but how does that actually play out in your work life, or in your family dynamic? Or if you are a person who practices some form of spirituality, how does that play out in your spiritual communities, or really, in any subcultural communities that you're a part of? As it happens, one of the subcultural communities that I'm part of is what's generally referred to as “the pagan community,” I'm going to throw a lot of quotes around that because pagan is not a commonly agreed upon term and we could get into a great argument about how much of a community it is. But all of that to the side, one day I was sitting there probably having coffee at the coffee shop on campus and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you took this intersectional feminist lens and turned it on the pagan community?” I thought about it a moment and then I think I literally said, “Oh no,” out loud because I realized that was a book and 2 and a half years later, 3 years later, it was published by Llewellyn worldwide as Outside the Charmed Circle. It's a book about how gender and sexuality are expressed, explored, repressed denied, or whatever other ways engaged within the subculture of modern pagan polytheist, or magical “practice.” It's a book I had a lot of fun writing, which is really strange to hear myself say out loud because there were moments when I absolutely wanted to bang my head on the keyboard, or just fold the laptop up and smack myself in the face with it like the monks in Monty Python. But it's a book that I really enjoyed writing because I got to spend long hours researching and talking about a bunch of my favorite stuff: gender, sexuality, embodiment, philosophy, Van Halen and their impact on Western culture and I say that, and people are like, “Oh, that's really funny,” and I'm like, “No, no, I'm being really serious.” As far as the question that just came up in the chat here: is there something I cut from the book that I wish I could have put in? One of the things that I said in the very last chapter is that the book I wrote is necessarily brief. Each chapter in that book could have been its own book. There's a chapter on embodiment. A chapter on gender and theory – I believe the chapter is actually called Gender and Theory in Practice. There's a chapter, or a couple of chapters on consent and how consent works in these communities. There's so much more that can be said about these topics. There's so much more that I could have said about any of these topics. But 300 pages, I felt like I'd run on quite long enough. Consent in the mentor-mentee relationship also just came up in chat. That's actually a topic that I touch on in the book and it's something I have really strong feelings about. Especially in the pagan and polytheists communities, there's often a lot of stress on the teacher-student relationship, sort of master-apprentice, if you want to get all scythe about it and well, there's a lot of unspoken disagreement about what the appropriate dynamic between those two parties should be. There are people who will cheerfully say, “Oh, well, teachers and students should always have this kind of relationship and should never have that kind of relationship.” Yeah, and by that kind of relationship, we're usually talking about a sexual and/or romantic relationship. And then there are people who are perfectly happy to say, “Well, that's true in most cases, but this situation is different,” and often what they mean is, “my situation is different.” So when I was writing the book, I had the less than enviable of saying, “Dear sweet summer child, no, your situation isn't different. It's not any different. It is never any different. Teachers and students just shouldn't have those kinds of relationships while they are ensconced in that power dynamic of teacher-student, or mentor-mentee.” REIN: Of course, thinking that your own situation is different is quite common. Common enough that we have a name for it and that is the universal attribution fallacy. TAMSIN: Yeah. Not to be super political, but it goes back to the phenomenon that you see quite often in modern sociopolitical discourse where people will say, “X is always immoral and wrong, except when I do it,” and X could be getting an abortion, being in a same-sex relationship, any number of things. “Well, that's always bad and wrong, but my circumstances are different.” JAMEY: One thing I think is interesting about what you're talking about with teachers and students is that the concept of a teacher-student relationship is nebulous in a lot of ways. Like, how would you draw the line here between this is an actual teacher and student relationship and therefore, inappropriate as opposed to “I have this relationship with someone and I'm learning something from them,” which I learn from all people all the time, including my partner and other people? Where is the line between “This is a great person in my life that I'm learning” from versus “I'm in this hierarchical relationship with them”? TAMSIN: The short answer would be access—access to knowledge, access, to experience, access to opportunity. If you are a teacher and I am coming to you saying, “I want to learn this thing,” and your response is not “Okay, sure, I can take you on as a student and teach you this thing,” but instead, “I can take you on and teach you this thing if X, Y, or Z,” that becomes a really sketchy kind of dynamic where if I want whatever it is that you have the ability to give me the knowledge, the opportunity, the access, I am essentially being required to behave in ways that I might not otherwise. REIN: It seems like there are maybe two important things here. One is power dynamics—which always exist; they never don't exist—and the other is more narrowly conflicts of interest. TAMSIN: Right, and one of the things that I ran into, with talking modern practitioners of pagan and polytheistic spirituality, is that a lot of people want to talk about power, very few people are comfortable talking about power dynamics. In part, because in my experience, a lot of people don't want to see themselves as being people who have power to impact others in a negative way. Will they, or nil they? There becomes this attitude of deniability where it's like, “Well, I can't possibly be in an oppressive position. I can't possibly be an abuser because I'm coming to this from just as much a place of powerlessness as the next person,” and that's not always true, of course. REIN: I think sometimes talking about groups in that way is vulnerable to that counterargument and I try to talk about the dynamics as being every relationship between two people has an element of power. TAMSIN: Absolutely, and one of the arguments I often get into with people is about the word politics because people, especially in our current social climate, tend to think that politics means a turf war between these two groups, or parties. My response is that politics is just the word to describe how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one. Politics is how we talk about the policies. There's the whole word police meaning city, politics, policy. It's a thing. Politics is how we arrange policies and laws and agreements so that we can all basically move forward doing the same kind of thing. Yes, from the chat: “framing politics between two groups is very American.” It really is. So I have often been criticized for bringing politics into spirituality and I'm going, “We're sitting around talking about power all day long, pretending that politics isn't a part of that is a way of getting out of having to be accountable for the politics that's actually going on.” That maneuver is as present in any subculture you care to name as it is in the pagan community. I mean, that's certainly not unique to witches, Druids, modern polytheists, and whomever. JAMEY: Yeah. Everything we've been talking about in the pagan has made me think of the tech community, too. My question earlier about mentorship, I was thinking that and when you were talking about “Don't bring politics into” – such a common thing that we talk about in tech, also. TAMSIN: Oh yeah. Why do you have to bring politics into this? Why do you have to bring identity politics, or diversity politics into this argument? We work in tech; this is a meritocracy and the sound of a thousand palms slapping into a thousand foreheads echoes across the land. JAMEY: I know you said it to illustrate that point, the phrase, identity politics, I just have such a visceral physical reaction to. [laughs] TAMSIN: Oh, it's great. Isn't it? It's like, there are certain phrases that in modern discourse have become so completely alienated from their original context that they're almost devoid of meaning. Identity politics is one. Cancel, or cancellation, or – [overtalk] JAMEY: Cancel culture. I just saw a whole conversation about this today because Andrew Cuomo said it in his press conference. It was a whole thing. TAMSIN: Oh God. [laughter] JAMEY: I’m sorry for bringing up Andrew Cuomo. I take it back. [laughs] TAMSIN: Verbal equivalent of keyboard smash right now. [laughter] Yeah, I feel like when people start throwing terms like that around, this is all an attempt at obfuscation. It's an attempt at getting away from having to talk about what's actually going on and, in many cases, what's actually going on is that somebody, or somebodies are doing some shady things that they don't necessarily want to be held accountable for. REIN: People say, “Keep politics out of X.” That statement is incomplete and what they really mean is “Keep politics that don't matter to me out of X.” TAMSIN: Right. “Keep politics that I don't have to think about.” REIN: “Things that don't impact me in any way, I don’t care about those.” TAMSIN: Exactly. Yeah. But if politics suddenly means that I can't get the right chip for the motherboard to run the gaming machine that I really want to set up, suddenly politics is real important. That's the point where I start getting that glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare at somebody and going, “So politics and power dynamics matters when it's something that impacts you personally. Is that what you're saying?” Maybe from there, we could, I don't know, extrapolate that other people who, and this is a galaxy brain moment here, actually exists, have the same relationships [chuckles] to the things that matter to them. Like, I don't know, housing, or healthcare, or to be a little dark, I guess, not being hatecrimed to death. REIN: This is the one of my favorite tweets: “I don't know how to convince you to care about other people writ large.” TAMSIN: Yeah, exactly. We talk a lot lately about how divisive things are and how divided the country is. There's a Medium article that I read recently with the delightfully bracing title of, “We hate you now.” It was an article about the potential going forward into a post-COVID-19 world where all of the people who've been wearing masks when they have to go outside, washing their hands, staying home unless absolutely necessary and who've, essentially, felt that they've been held captive in their own homes for over a year now are looking at the people who've been going to weddings, pool parties, restaurants, barbecues, and two weeks later, half of the attendees are sick, or dead and having, what I would say, are some pretty justifiable feelings of “We were doing all the right things and you selfish, entitled fill in your profanity of choice, have been doing exactly all the wrong things that have perpetuated this situation, such that we're still in lockdown and still in lockdown. We kind of hate you now and there's a real possibility of that we're always going to hate you.” To me, that's the divide I'm seeing in our culture going forward. Things like that. Then again, I am speaking as someone who shares custody of my daughter with my ex who lives in California and what that means, operationally, is that I have not seen my daughter in-person since March 8th of 2020 and so, I'm a little head up under the collar. Wow, that just kind of went off into a really dark place. [laughs] REIN: No, this is good stuff. Very normal for us. This is why I don't have an issue going on record as saying that ethical systems based on naive individualism are bankrupt. TAMSIN: Absolutely. One of the things that came out of my degree program with—and I will point out that I did go to a state university in the notoriously liberal state of Washington. But one of the things that I came out of my degree program with was a healthy and deeply ingrained respect for the concept of the social contract and for social contract theory as a venue of study, especially when you're looking at power dynamics in groups. What I found is that explaining the social contract to people is really easy if they actually want to understand it and utterly impossible, if they're opposed, because if they're opposed, what's really going on isn't that they don't understand. They get it perfectly; they just don't want to agree. I can say the social contract is that you don't punch me, I don't shoot you; we maintain a basic air of non-violence and go on about our day. That's a contract. You don't hurt me. I don't hurt you. We move on. It's as simple as that, or as complicated as, “Hey, look, we have a civilization.” That is a marvelous quote in the chat: “No, thank you. I'd rather pretend I invent the entire universe every time I make an Apple pie.” REIN: This gets all the way like the turtles go all the way down to what does it mean to be a person and what is the person to relationship to society? TAMSIN: And if we are going to dive that deep into philosophy, I'm going to need some whiskey at least. [chuckles] I'm kidding. But as far as what is a person, philosophers have been trying to work that one out for quite literally thousands of years, at this point. When I was writing Outside the Charmed Circle, I wound up necessarily having to go back and read some amounts of Plato and Aristotle because they are, in many ways, part of the groundwork of Western philosophy and as well, part of the groundwork for Western notions of spirituality and magical practice. As you know, pagans are polytheists, or magicians. One of the things that I was horrified to discover and shouldn't have been really—I should have expected this—was that Plato and Aristotle didn't think too highly of women. There are these marvelous quotes that I included in the book and by marvelous, I mean tragic, frankly referring to the distinction between men, and women and other animals. That was text I saw on my screen and looked at and went, blink, blink, blink, What?” REIN: This reminds me of George Lakoff's book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, so titled because there is a language with a category that includes those things in the same category. TAMSIN: Wow. That's great. That's neat. REIN: I think I can respect women being in the same category as dangerous things, to be fair. TAMSIN: I think depending on how we're defining dangerous, anybody of any gender can be dangerous, but I have to admire the hustle of putting that as your title, that's pretty great. But the question of who counts as a person? What is a person? If you look at some of the classical Greek philosophers—Aristotle, Plato—they would say a person is a human male individual who fulfills these criteria and anyone who doesn't fulfill those criteria isn't really fully a person. REIN: The human male citizen. TAMSIN: Right. REIN: Which is also how the US defined it. TAMSIN: Shocking. Yeah, and then if you look at these philosophers as laying the groundwork for how Western culture defines, or describes personhood individuality, the next big cultural movements come along was of course, Christianity. I'm not here to bash on Christianity, but I will note that if you look at Christian philosophy around identity and individuality, especially if you're looking at gendered identities, a lot of that would be drawn from the work of Paul who wrote most of the epistles in the last two thirds of what's called the New Testament, the Christian Bible. Paul had some less than awesome views about women and they're pretty much in a direct line of descent from Plato and Aristotle. You look at the things Paul was saying and it's like, oh, okay so he's basically just importing Greek philosophical misogyny into this new religion, which made a lot of sense because at that point in time, Greek philosophy was, I've called it the groundwork for Western philosophy and the Greeks were considered the de facto mainstream philosophers of that era, and everyone was rolling around speaking Greek, even the Romans. So this notion of individuality and of personhood being something that we specifically define by how you match an established hegemonic norm and by hegemonic, I mean a norm that is imposed by a power above you and it's this established hierarchy. When I was learning about hegemonic norms in my degree program, someone in the class asked, “Okay, so hegemonic norm, how does that apply to us in modern Western American 21st century culture?” It's like, well, it's real easy. Who has the privilege? Who has the power? If you're white, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're Black, or Brown, or Asian, or what have you. If you are a cisgender person, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're trans or non-binary. If you are a cis male, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you are a non-cis male, and so on. That's hegemonic power, that's hegemony in action and a lot of those hegemonic norms come directly down from the classical Greeks through the norms established by Christianity. I spend a lot of time talking about this in a book which is at least extensively about witchcraft, paganism, and magic because they're hobby horses that are really important to me and they seemed to tie in. So I was like, “Yeah, let's do this. Let's just throw it all in there.” REIN: So you have these fringe communities and fringe only relative to the dominant normative culture, right? TAMSIN: Right. REIN: But then they start to intersect on the edges of that hegemonic, cultural conglomeration, whatever you want to call it. It reminds me of – so this is an analogy that I'm going to see if it lands so let me know. There's a book called How Buildings Learn and, in that book, one of the things that he talks about is what are called edge cities, where historically cities have been built around a port, or railroad, or some other thing. But what's happening in modern cities, there's a lot of the action is happening at the edges of the city where the highways intersect and so on. There's also a lot more possibility to build out there because the city center has been made pretty rigid by the buildings are large and they're probably not going anywhere, the codes, the building and zoning codes are very rigid, and so on. So actually, a lot of the most vital growth that happened in modern studies is happening at the edges. I wonder if it's like that as well in these fringe communities and if that term has baggage that you want me to avoid, let me know. TAMSIN: Oh no, I'm fine with the term. I think there's a lot of traction there. One of the hobby horses that I drag out and bang on a regular basis is the notion that subcultural communities reiterate and reinforce a lot of the same core assumptions as the over culture in which they are ensconced. There is this attitude of, “Well, we're different from outsiders. We're smarter, we're better, we're more spiritual. We're more accepting. We're more,” whatever the virtue, or the value that they want to see themselves as having is. But they frequently don't stop to realize that, in many ways, they are just reenacting a lot of the same attitudes that the mainstream culture, of which they are a subculture, is enacting all over the place. I think when you look at the fringes of subcultures, the places where they start to rub up against other cultures, or other subcultures, where they start to intersect and get some new ideas and some new, interesting stuff going on that can be really valid, valuable, and healthy for the community as a whole. I also think that that is a place where there can be a lot of tension and a lot of fear. I've seen that in the pagan community, where there are a lot of people who I think would position themselves very much at the center of the little circle of pagan community and they look at someone like, for instance, me, who's kind of out on this fringe edge here, rubbing up against the queer community, or the trans community, or whatever other communities that I'm part of. They may see this idea, or that idea and go, Well, that's not how we do things. That's not us. That's like some of your weird queer trans stuff,” and I'm going, “No, but wait. It's really cool and it informs what we do over here in this really useful way. And why are you walking away? Come back.” And then occasionally, it's like, “Oh, you were walking away to get a torch and a pitchfork. No, no, no, don't come back.” [chuckles] JAMEY: When you were talking about that with the fringe communities, I was thinking about the queer community as well, even before you brought it up, because I think that what Rein was saying about exciting things happening in that space is definitely true. But I also think that you have a problem in the community sometimes like, people who are younger, or more newly out and don't know as much about queer history trying to roll things back. That's why we have this argument about why younger people, who think that the word “queer” is not okay for anyone to use, coming in and saying, “Oh, we can't do this,” and older people saying, “There has been a lot of discourse, progress, and things that have happened over the course of history that you need to know about before you can have an informed opinion on it. [laughs] TAMSIN: You need to scroll back up in the chat before you start talking. [laughter] JAMEY: Yeah. You need to scroll back up like a bunch of years in the chat. [laughs] TAMSIN: Right. Yes. That is a huge issue in the queer community and it's one that – I'm 47 years old and I have found myself in conversations with people who are 19, 20 who wants to tell me, “Oh, well, you shouldn't use the word queer because queer is a slur,” and I'm going, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, red flag, hold on. Queer has been used as a slur, absolutely yes. But in the 80s and 90s, there was an awful lot of work done to reclaim that word. I know, I was there.” And today, now the primary driver behind the notion that queer is a slur is trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It's transphobes who are like, ‘Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. Queer gives too much leeway for all of these trans people to sneak into this community. So uh oh, we can't be having with that.” So I find myself basically having to strike the compromise of okay, I'm never going to tell you that you have to call yourself queer, but you don't get to tell all of us queers out here that that's not our word and if that means you don't want to come sit at our table, or come to our parties, that's okay, too. The problem of gatekeeping in the queer community, as in every subcultural community, is real and it's real bad. The extent to which some quorum within a community wants to enforce little boundaries inside the larger community. So it's like I have my little walled garden in the queer community, and you can come in if you perform gender, or sexuality, or identity in these specific ways that I am dictating. It's too much headache. It's funny how I talk about these problems in the queer community, or in the trans community, or in the pagan community and I have friends who work in the tech world and they're going, “Huh, this all sounds eerily familiar.” JAMEY: It's almost as if people act the same, TAMSIN: No matter where you go. [chuckles] Yeah, it is. These are not problems unique to any one subcultural community. They are human problems and I'm often tempted to say that the solution is to stop dealing with people, but I like people and I like doing things with people. One of the reasons I'm so mad about this stupid pandemic is that I miss people, hanging out with people in-person and being able to drink coffee with them. But I think that a lot of these problems of gatekeeping, these enforcement of boundaries, these power dynamic issues that we have all fundamentally come back to, at least in many of the cases I've seen, issues around power and the fear of powerlessness, the fear of being disenfranchised, or of losing what you see as power, or opportunity, or access, or privilege that you're entitled to. I mean, that's certainly what seems to be one of the things that's at the core of these ridiculous ideas like white genocide. White people are being crowded out and we're being outbred by all of these other people of color and white people have to band together and blah, blah, blah! All of this garbage is all rooted in fear and under that ignorance. Much wiser and more experienced minds than mine have written at great length about those issues and how best to combat them. I have a lot of hope in that regard, but at the same time, I look at the news app on my phone every morning and that hope dies a little. So it's kind of a tidal thing; it rises and falls. REIN: The relationship between radicals and action areas, I think where it's a relationship to a particular preferred state of affairs and whether you think you need to go forwards, or backwards to get there. REIN: Right. We used to call that the difference between a liberal and a conservative view, but those words have been so battered and worked out of utility that you can't even bring them up anymore. But it, again, goes back to that idea of you have the circle that is the community and the people at the center, who are perhaps most emblematic of its baseline core ideas and ideals, and then the people out on the fringes of things, who are bringing in new information and new ideas, or sending their ideas out to other communities and sharing with them. I think that can all be really healthy and part of a wholesome ecosystem of subcultural engagement and interaction. I also think that when people get scared, they start doing things that are really not in their best interest. They start making really bad choices and that way lies dissent, dissension, and conflict. But a lot of that is why I titled the book I wrote Outside the Charmed Circle because it comes from an essay by a cultural theorist named Gayle Rubin. This is an essay that she wrote called “Thinking Sex” and in this essay, she posited that you can look at ideas like sexuality and if you picture it as two circles, one inside the other divided up like a dark board, pie wedged shapes. The inner circle, the charmed circle is the stuff that society basically all approves of: heterosexuality, monogamy, sex for the purposes of procreation, and so on and so forth. And then outside the charm circle are what Gayle Rubin called the outer limits. Those are the things which society doesn't approve so non-monogamy, having sex for reasons other than procreation, because it's fun, or to make money, or whatever reasons. Each of the things in the term circle has its counterpart in the outer limits, its counterpart outside the charmed circle. Ah, see what I did there? So things like homosexuality, or bisexuality, or asexuality, or demisexuality, or, or, or—these are all outside the term circle because they are fundamentally alien to the hegemonic norms of culture and I just realized I'm throwing a lot of this jargon around, wow. REIN: I think it is interesting as a metaphor here because it implies both, at the periphery and also, a sparseness, or lack of structure. TAMSIN: Yeah. I think that there's value to be found both, at the core and on the edges, on the fringe. [laughs] REIN: What’s [inaudible] is that some of these groups on the edges seem to be reproducing structures that are found in the core. TAMSIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. The structures that you find at the core of a group are really comfortable. They're really comforting if they're built for you. To pick one, for example, the structure of being cisgender is really comfortable. You’re cis if you were born and you were assigned a gender at birth and you grew up and you're like, “Yeah, that's me. That fits me like a glove because it's tailored to who I am. I don't have any objections to this.” But if you take that same glove and put it on someone else, it's going to be too big, too small, it fits in the wrong ways, it's no, this is wrong. These structures of being cisgender don't fit for someone like say, me. That's not to say being cisgender is wrong. It's perfectly fine and that's okay. Just not for me. JAMEY: This is certainly coming back to what you were saying earlier about “Oh, I care about these issues that affect me,” and we have to extrapolate that they affect other people because you'll see people are like, “Oh, but this is so comfortable. Why wouldn't you want this great comfortable thing?” And I can't extrapolate that other people are having a different experience. TAMSIN: One of the real problems that we as human beings have is not understanding that our individual experiences are not universally applicable. It's like handing someone a strawberry ice cream cone and they taste it and they're like, “Oh, thanks. Not for me,” and you're like, “Well, what's wrong with it? It's delicious. It's a strawberry ice cream cone,” and they're like, “I don't like strawberry ice cream.” Like, “Well, how can you not? I like strawberry ice cream.” “Yeah, but I don't taste this strawberry ice cream with your tongue. Your taste buds. Mine are wired differently.” That's just a random example pulled out of the air; I actually like strawberry ice cream fine. Not my favorite, but it's fine. But individual experience isn't universally applicable and to come back to that question of how do we define the individual person as against a larger culture, or community? I think past a certain point of defining an individual, or a person as a self-aware consciousness, I really don't want to try and define personhood at all. If I can acknowledge that someone is sapient and sentient, that's good enough for me and if at some point down the road, we get to a place of developing actual artificial intelligence, like Turing capable AI. If it tells me it's sentient and sapient, I am more than happy to sit down and have a coffee with it and I think that's as much as I want to get into well, how do we define a person? Because once you go any further than that, inevitably it winds up with oppression, slavery, and genocide. Again, pretty grim. [laughs] JAMEY: No, it’s good. REIN: Again, how do we get people to care about other people? TAMSIN: Oh, if I had the answer to that, I could write another book. It would be a bestseller and I would never have to try and get another job. I think that the answer, and I am totally cribbing from my partner here—who is an amazing human being and a developer at a local software company up here. My partner would probably suggest that the answer is you teach empathy and you start teaching empathy by going back to you have this relationship to this issue, or this thing that happened. It made you feel a certain way. How do you think that issue impacted that person? Experiences aren't universal, but the condition of experiencing things is universal. So I'm not going to have the same experience that someone else has with any given issue, but I can acknowledge that they are having an experience and that their experience is as meaningful to them and their lives as mine is to me and my life. Once you've done that, you started the building blocks of developing empathy, which leads to compassion, which leads to, “Oh, maybe we should get kids out of those cages on the border, maybe we should find a way to feed people, and restore the power grid in Texas so elderly people aren't literally freezing to death in their homes in the 21st century in America.” REIN: I think there's a Swedish word for the realization that everyone on this street that you're walking down has just as rich, deep, and complex an inner mental life as you do and I think we need more of that. TAMSIN: Yeah, we do. We do. Now I totally want to go and look up that Swedish word, but that acknowledgement that everyone around us is actually a person. They have an interior life, they have hopes and dreams of their own, and their hopes and dreams don't have to be relevant to me. One of the things that I think those of us who are ensconced in subcultures sometimes struggle with is – well, it's the inverse of another problem so let me, let me try and rephrase this. Those of us who are in subcultural communities—whether it's the tech community, or the queer community, or the trans community, or the pagan community, or what have you—we all struggle with these feelings of our interests and our passions being incomprehensible to people who aren't part of our communities. I am not a developer. I am not even really much of a coder, but I know enough about coding from having been in a CS program for a hot minute to be able to grasp what's cool about really elegant code, what's really cool about this thing that my partner comes to me and she's like, “Oh, I did this thing and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I'm like, “I understood about one word in three, but it was barely enough to hang on with my fingernails,” and that is really cool and awesome. But that's not a conversation that she could have with, for instance, my Mom. My mother, who is a brilliant woman and has a degree in nursing and is a medical professional and does all these things, my Mom would do just glaze over a little and go, “Okay, cool. I'm glad that the good thing happened for you,” but it does reinforce this idea that these things we're into are relatively esoteric. So it in turn reinforces this seclusion of our little subcultural communities into their enclaves and we become this little technocratic priesthood, but that can turn into another problem, which is not only are we weird and different, but we're better. The taking of pride in the cool, awesome thing that we understand and love can turn into, “If you don't understand the cool, awesome thing we're into what's wrong with you?” Oh, well, pfft users. I've heard that exact sentiment expressed by people in the software industry and it always baffles me because I'm like, “You realize that you are making tools for people to use, right?” The people that you're going “Pfft users” about are literally the reason you have a job because otherwise, all of the tippy-tappy you do with the keyboard is an intellectual exercise. Great, you created this incredibly elegant piece of software that no one is going to use. At that point, you may as well just be building a matchstick cathedral in your backyard and then lighting it on fire. What I would really like to see from all of our communities is a little less hubris and a lot less gatekeeping and a substantial amount less of a self-reinforcing sense of superiority about people who aren't inside our particular charmed circle. What I want to see is our subcultural communities, having pride in who we are and what we do, and the cool things that we make, or the cool things that we do, or the cool lives that we lead, or whatever it is that is part of our community without turning that into, “And that's why we're so much better than the normies, the mundanes, the muggles—to use Voldemort's word. That's why we're better than people who don't do this cool stuff that we do.” Because I feel like that need to be better than the people who make us feel kind of weird and like we don't belong is again, just reiterating the same power structures that got us into this problem in the first place. The over culture thinks it's better than these weird freaky fringe communities because they're nerdy, or they're awkward, or they're cringy and the fringe communities in return think they're better than the basic, boring, mundane, mainstream, normie culture and nobody gets to have any fun. I would much rather have a mainstream culture that respects and appreciates the awesome things that fringe communities bring to the table, the innovations that they provide, the new ways of thinking and approaching problems and have subcultural communities that understand that they are ensconced in an over culture, which is the reason that they can exist and that's how I'm going to solve world peace. JAMEY: So we’re coming up to the part of our show where we like to let everyone give a reflection about what we've talked about for the past hour, or so. This is something that is going to be on your mind, or a call-to-action, or just something that stuck out for you. I'm going to go first. What's something that stuck out for me was the conversation that we had actually a couple of times about conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you and how that's so hard for people. Because I think that you see this, even on a microlevel within these subcultures, and I think that suggests to me that it's such a natural human thing to do and I think that I get that because it does feel good to have things in common with other people and to celebrate the things that we have in common. I guess, I'm thinking about this specifically in the trans community where they're like, “It feels great to be able to be like, ‘We have this thing in common and I feel so good about that,’” but there are still a lot of different kinds of people in the trans community and this is how you end up with people saying, “Oh, the universal trans experience is loving being a girl when you take your estrogen,” and I'm like, “That's definitely not.” [laughs] You could probably keep making that thing that you're saying smaller until it's true for everyone in your little group that it's true for. But we have this desire to categorize ourselves in that way and I think that the reason I'm talking about this and saying this is, I think that it's really good to keep in mind the ways that all of us probably also do this on smaller levels. So I guess, my call-to-action is I'm going to try and think about catching myself if I'm doing this. REIN: Well, I'm going to attempt to stay in my lane here with my reflection. I was thinking about one of the first things that came up, which is mentor-mentee relationships, and I was thinking about what you said about empathy. One of the things that – I’ve changed a little bit, even in the last few years in terms of how I think about empathy, which is, I think empathy is good, but I don't think it's very actionable because empathy is an internal thing that happens in individual people's heads. No one else has access to it. What Russell Ackoff says is that systems are not the sum of their components, they're the product of their interactions. So what I started to think about was what are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? What I've started to focus on is the interaction called helping. Edgar Schein wrote a book called Helping and it's a study of the social process, or phenomenon where people help each other. How does it happen? Why does it happen? One of the things he noticed that that was pretty interesting is that helping is mostly notable when it doesn't happen and there's an expectation that it should have. So you think here are things like that's not helpful and what I think that we should try to do is focus more on positive affirmations when it does happen. So that's why when I do retrospectives with teams, we leave that with appreciations. I want to make helping remarkable. I want people to talk about helping and get better at it as practice. I guess, that's my solution to how do you get people to care about each other? It's how do you build empathy and I think it's by the practice of helping. TAMSIN: I like that a lot. That's really good. One of the thoughts that has recurred over the course of this conversation for me is that the dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren't that dissimilar from one group to another, whatever their special interest happens to be. That was the thing I didn't understand growing up. It was a thing I certainly didn't understand through much of my adult life and now, crawling into my late 40s, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around this concept, that in a lot of ways, these groups are really all the same. That's because well, as we've alluded earlier, they're all made up of people and people all tend to be kind of the same in terms of the patterns that they enact, the approaches that they take, the things that they fundamentally want. Again, not universal experiences, but we all have the shared commonality of having these experiences. We all have the shared feature of wanting things and wanting to be understood. Wanting empathy, or compassion, even if we are ourselves not terribly good at giving it. That's certainly something that's been true with me. Even within the course of this conversation, I brought up the Medium article about the pandemic and how it's really easy to want to be furious with the people who are, in a very real way, responsible for the fact that I haven't seen my daughter in over a year. At the same time, at least some of those people were acting in ways that I don't have to think are rational or correct, but they had some reason they did the things they did and if I can understand why they act the way they do and I want to spend the effort and the energy to meet them where they are, perhaps I can find ways to work with them to be different, to be what I would consider better. More in line with a social contract that means that we don't have 600,000 people dead by the summer, but that is work that's on me to do, because I can't ask somebody, who's already living in a state of fear, to suddenly magically have cool, calm rationality descend upon them. REIN: The last thing I'll mention for folks who are listening, who are on software development teams and so on, is that a team is literally definitionally a group of people who help each other. TAMSIN: Yes, yes, it is. JAMEY: This was really great. Thank you so much. TAMSIN: Thank you. I had a wonderful time. This was a blast. JAMEY: And I should say that anyone who wants to have further conversations like this with us, we have a Slack community and we're all there, all of our guests are there, and lots of other really interesting people. You can join our Slack community if you back us on Patreon, patreon.com/greaterthancode, even like a dollar. REIN: These episodes are successful because we co-create them with our guests. We're helping each other make cool episodes. So thank you for helping us to make a cool episode. TAMSIN: It has genuinely been my pleasure. It’s been a delight. Thank you so much for having me. Special Guest: Tamsin Davis-Langley.
231: Deserted Island Safety and Expectations with Austin Parker
01:04 - Austin’s Superpower: Pain Tolerance 02:06 - Deserted Island DevOps (https://desertedisland.club/) (Running an Online/Virtual Conference in Animal Crossing (https://animal-crossing.com/) or Other Mediums) * Deserted Island DevOps 2020 on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVUQjiv8GtwL-B9AJJ-rNdiDtcU2wo7Gy) * Software Circus (https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftwareCircus) * The Great Cloud Native Bakeoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koT08purWDc) * Making Real-Time Audience/Human Connection * Streaming * Watch Parties * Austin Parker: Virtual Events Suck. (https://aparker.io/posts/virtual-events-suck/) 24:09 - Failure; Making it Safe to Fail * Technical Failure * Psychological Failure * Underpromise, Overdeliver 32:51 - Safety and Setting Expectations (The Problem with More is Better) * OKRs * Open Source Principles (https://opensource.com/principles) Reflections: John: The creativity of new ways to experience a conference. Coraline: The importance of moderation. Austin: How to communicate feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to people you’re working with. Jacob: Find a conference that has been thoughtful about interaction when not in person and go. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 231 of Greater Than Code podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke and I’m joined by my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m here with Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Thanks. John! It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, Austin Parker. Austin makes problems with computers and sometimes solves them. He’s an open-source maintainer, observability nerd, DevOps junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring Hacker News threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing. Such a nice pleasure to have you on the show. AUSTIN: It's fantastic to be here. JACOB: We can start the show like we always do by asking you a question. What's your superpower and how did you develop it? AUSTIN: Right now, my superpower is I'm 50% through a COVID-19 vaccine and I developed it by staying indoors for the past year, but more hilariously I guess, I developed a strong resistance to burns by working as a gas station cook for quite a while, back in my younger days. So I ran the fryer and you get really good at ignoring hot oil spattering on you. So I'd like to think that that level of pain tolerance is what helped me get through a lot of DevOps stuff and getting used to computers. [laughter] CORALINE: Yeah. I hate Kubernetes and it's hot oil splashing. They should do something about that. It's open source. I guess, I could open my PR, but . AUSTIN: Yeah. Well, they say PR is welcome, but that's the open-source maintainers. Bless your heart, right? CORALINE: Yeah, exactly. So Austin, I want to know more about this DevOps conference that you ran in Animal Crossing. AUSTIN: So let's start at the beginning, let's take everyone back to just about a year ago now where we were all kind of settling in for our wonderful pandemic that has been extremely not wonderful for most people, but I think everyone was coming to grips with how long it would take at first. My day job, I work as in developer relations. I'm a marketer, effectively. But I remember a lot of people were talking, the marketing team and certainly, the entire events space like, “Oh, what's this going to do about the summer events, what's this going to do about the fall events?” and I'm sitting here like, “Hey, I think this is going to last a little longer than till June.” So the conversation kind of pivots as everything gets progressively worse and people are starting to come to grips like, “Well, can we do a virtual event?” I don't think anyone at the time really had a good idea of what a virtual event would be. We all know video conferencing certainly is something that we've come to rely on in our day-to-day lives over the past year. Even if you weren't already in tech, or weren't already working remotely, Zoom is – it’s been Q-tip. It's been Kleenex. It's a no matter what you're using, you're Zooming someone. So they have that going for them, I guess. People, I think there was a lot of possibility and not a lot of real, strong ideas about what does this actually mean? So I wanted to try something different. I was joking around on Twitter and I had just gotten a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I was staging with screenshots with like, “Oh look, this is funny. It's like a conference booth.” It's like ha, ha, we're all giving out t-shirts and laughing. And the code people picked up on and they were like, “Oh, that's funny. I bet you could actually do a conference in Animal Crossing and stream it out” because you can actually have people like join you, come over to your island and stand around. I was like, “Well, actually, you could just composite that video from the output of the game over some slides and what's the difference?” Someone's talking, someone's clicking through slides, and it spiraled from a joke. I put up a page, a landing page on April 1st, which is the best time to announce anything thing. Because if people don't go for it, you can always be like, “Ha, ha, April fools. Got you!” [laughter] But I put up a landing page and we had a 100 people register for more information that first day, I messaged them on Slack, and I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to do it now; a 100 people one day. That's great.” CORALINE: Yeah. AUSTIN: So long story short, over the next 30 days, we basically put together, myself and then my co-organizer, Katie @thekatertot on Twitter, or Katie Farmer, a virtual conference inside of Animal Crossing. It's called Deserted Island DevOps. You can go watch it on YouTube, the one from last year. We're doing another one this year on April 30th. It's just a one-day live stream. If you're watching it, you're just watching it on Twitch. We have a Discord that you can talk and do the hallway track stuff and ask questions and network. But the gimmick is basically, everyone's presenting has a Switch and they are in Animal Crossing. They're on this island, they're dressing up their little Animal Crossing character and we overlay their slides with the video coming out of the Switch so they can emote and react and it's cute experience to watch. But I think it's also interesting because what I saw, last year at least, is that it solves a lot of the problems, I think most virtual conferences don't quite nail, which is, I think a good event is something that takes you out of your day-to-day. It takes you out of where you are and put you somewhere else. Now, if you go into KubeCon, or re:Invent, or even devopdays, if you're doing this physically like, you're not at your office, you're not at home, you're somewhere else talking to people, literally, you have changed the physical location you're in. But most virtual events, it still boils down to, “Hey, I'm watching a Zoom effectively and I'm talking to people in Slack.” If I wanted to do that, I could just do my actual job. So I think one of the things that people appreciated about Deserted Island and continue to is the idea that this is produced differently. There's a couple other people that are doing stuff like this. I think Software Circus out of the UK, they've done a lot of themed events, themed virtual events like this, where the presenters are wearing costumes. Or there was The Great Kubernetes Bake-Off, I want to say where it’s a cloud kitchen theme so everyone has their chefs’ hats. I think having that concept also gives presenters a lot of mileage in terms of hey, you can theme what you're talking about. Here is an analogy in a box, here is a world that you can put your talk in and you have an idea that everyone can use those shared experiences, that shared language to develop your talk and give people an anchor for it, which I think is one of the good ways you help people learn. If you give them something they know about and then you tie your concept into that concept, then they're going to get more out of it. The other thing is that it's a great way to be expressive. In Animal Crossing, you are who you are, you are whoever your avatar is. So you don't get any of the – I hate being on camera a lot. It gets exhausting because you feel like you're performing for the camera. It’s not the same, but in this, nobody's seeing your actual face; they're hearing your voice and then you can dress your Animal Crossing your avatar whatever. So you can be creative. You can be who you are without having that weird performance pressure of a bunch of people that you can't see staring at your face JOHN: This is an important topic these days because there's still everything's online and will be for a while and I think so many people are still learning how to do online events and those skills are going to need to keep happening over the next coming years. I think because you can do now online events, which are more accessible to more people all over the world, you don't have to be the sort of person who can fly places in order to attend certain events. Having them online is a great accessibility option. So finding new modalities for making that interesting and not just sitting on Zoom all day, I think is a worthy endeavor. AUSTIN: Yeah, and it's super challenging. I don't want to sound like I'm like dragging people's work because I know CNCF has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. I know of the entire devopsdays community has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. This is super hard to do. It's not easy. It requires a lot of intentionality; a lot of planning and I think we will all get better at it over time. The future is not necessarily going to be like the past, I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where we just kind of flip a switch and it's all like, “Oh, we're back to how we were before March of 2020,” I think. So there's still going to be a desire for virtual events and there's still going to be a desire for figuring out ways to be more inclusive and to bring people in, especially because of climate change and everything like that. At some point, we have to come to a reckoning about the actual cost of a global travel-based society but that's maybe a slightly different topic. I don't know. CORALINE: I actually think a good side effect of all this is a focus on accessibility and like you said, a lot of people aren't people to travel. It's expensive. I know conferences, typically in-person conferences, used to spend quite a bit of money with programs to bring in marginalized folks who maybe couldn't afford the travel. But one thing I do miss is getting that audience reaction. Especially as a storyteller, I tend to tell a lot of stories in my talk and I like to be able to see, is the audience with me, is the audience getting what I'm saying? I can tune my presentation in real-time based on audience reactions and I really miss that. I really missed that aspect of it, that feedback aspect of it, because at the end of people are like, “Oh, great talk.” I'm like, “Yeah, but did it get to you?” AUSTIN: Yeah, did you connect with it? CORALINE: Yeah, and that's so hard. AUSTIN: It's challenging, especially because so many of – on the production side, there's a bias, I think in virtual events to prerecord, due to a lot of factors and this is not a diss on prerecording. I personally hate it. I basically have stopped doing any event that's like, “Oh, we want you to prerecord.” I'm just like, “Eh, I'd rather not” because that’s the style, that's the way I talk. I agree with this idea of storytelling like, you're not just reading slides. If I just want someone to read slides, I could just hand them a book. But what's weird to me is one of the things that I think that we did, that I haven't seen anyone else really do, is there's already a way that people do this. If you watch Twitch, if you watch twitch.tv, or live streams like the kids do these days, there is a real-time chat and people are reacting in real-time. It's a little bit delayed. It's a couple seconds delayed, but I don't know why you haven't seen other virtual event platforms take that idea and really try to have even just a button like a clap button, or a sparkle fingers button, or something to kind of let people know that there's people out there watching you and that they're reacting positively and maybe not negatively, but they're reacting. That they are cognizant of what you're saying. It's really surprising to me that we haven't seen more like that and I would love if some of these event platforms thought about that. How do you make that actual, immediate real-time, or near real-time audience connection with the speaker? CORALINE: The Twitch thing is really interesting. Back in October, I started streaming in addition to everything else I do in my life—I'm a musician—and I started streaming, recording, and music production and I have a weekly show. You're right, the audience interaction is great and I incorporate that into my show. I'll stop what I'm doing after I finish laying down one track and I'll ask the people in chat, “What instrument should I pick up next?” Or, “What sound would you like to hear there?” Things like that. It does make that more interactive and it brings some of that human connection back and I think you're right. That's what's missing from a lot of these online conferences is that connection. CORALINE: Yeah, and I actually think you've hit on it right there with streaming. There's been a big question – I don't know how much you follow the CNCF, KubeCon EU talk acceptance drama that kind of popped off a week, or so ago. But the short version is obviously, KubeCon is a very prominent conference in the Cloud Native world and it gets a lot of submissions and because it gets a lot of submissions, a lot of talks get dropped, a lot of things get cut. That's every event; there's always more submissions than there are slots for people to speak, but it turned into a bit of a blow up on Twitter and they actually wrote a blog post that's very explicitly described again hey, this is how we pick these talks. There's a lot of factors that go into it. The thing that occurred to me and I've seen some people talk about, especially people that have been in the industry for a while is, what really is the benefit of a conference at all? When you have things like Twitch and you can build an audience for yourself and it's easier than it's ever been to get a platform. Some people in the world have used that for good ends and some people in the world have used that for ill ends, but regardless, I could go out and just say, “I'm not doing talks and I'm not doing conferences anymore. I'm just going to stream. I'm going to produce things and put them on YouTube.” The only reason you would be at a conference at that point is as like okay, this is a quality filter. These are some people saying, or suggesting that these talks, or these individuals have a higher value to the community because we got a bunch of people, smart people to look at it and say like, “Yeah, we think this one's better than that one.” But I really wonder if all of this with COVID, with the pandemic, with the change in events is going to inspire a different model going forward, where there's less of a centralization factor of you haven’t made it until you've done a KubeCon keynote, or you haven't made it until you've done the devopsdays circuit, or you haven't made it until you've written a book, or whatever. If you’ve got something to say, go say it and I think maybe that's a better way because that also is more accessible. You don't have to necessarily – there's less gatekeepers and a lot of times, gatekeepers and experts are useful because they help cut through all the chaff. But on the flip side, it can be harmful, too because everyone has biases and even the best process is never going to weed out bias and most of the time, you don't want it to weed out bias. You want it to be biased for good things, not bad things. I don't know. I feel like there's a conversation that needs to happen about this that hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet. I'm interested to see where it goes. JACOB: One thing that sounds interesting about this Animal Crossing conferences, you talked about it was a different modality altogether and I'm just curious if did this conference include, or at least was it like there was a side-effect of conference goers just playing the game with each other? AUSTIN: Yeah, actually that was one of my really interesting learnings from it was that when you have a community started, just the best thing to do is just let them go do stuff. We had a bunch of people form impromptu watch parties where they would open up their island and invite people are watching to come and be in the same game space as them as viewers and run around together while watching the stream. So they would tweet out pictures like you would do at an actual conference, where it's like, “Oh, hanging out with the besties,” and then tweet out a picture, a screenshot of their island with people sitting. Some people went really into this; they built little watch party rooms where everyone had chairs and a little movie projector set up. Some people had coffee machines and a little snack plates, or whatever in the game. It was really interesting to me how, when you kind of let people be creative about it and you let people try to build what they want inside this modality, this world, this bigger world, I guess, of being at a virtual conference, that they'll do stuff with it because it's fun and because it gets you engaged. Again, it's not just watching another Zoom. It's not just chatting on Slack. It's, you're doing something and the really good thing about that is if you are doing something, if you do make it a unique experience, people will actually take the time for it. One thing that I think gets lost in a lot of these virtual events right now is that it's not something you're blocking off time for. You're saying like, “Okay, I've got maybe two, or three talks I really want to watch. So I'm going to block off 45 minutes in my calendar here and there and I'm going to watch this different screen for a minute.” But with this, what we saw was people had blocked the entire day off. It was a 6-hour, maybe 5 hours total and people were there the entire time. We had 8,000, 9,000 people watching basically consistently from the beginning to the end and about 15,000 people total watched it over the course of the day. So nearly 50% of that were people that were there the whole time roughly. I think by giving people that space to make time for themselves and to say like, “I'm going to treat this like an actual thing and not just something I'm going to pop back into.” That meant they could do the networking. They could do the chatting. They could react in Twitch and they could do the little clap emojis and the sparkle emojis. They could have those hallway track conversations and network and bond and get that social jazz you get by talking to people that have this similar problems, or have overcome challenges and are like, “Oh, this is how I solved X and Y problem in Kubernetes,” or even, “Oh yeah, this is a strategy I learned for dealing with managers that don't understand me, or making sure that we – how do I communicate this technical concept to the business?” It wasn't just, “I want to talk about really cool IP tables configs.” It really was like, “Hey, we're all people trying to solve these problems,” and that was, I think, wonderful to see and something that I'm really hoping that we can nail again this year. JACOB: I think the wonderful thing about conferences is that, as someone who has a good deal of social anxiety, or shyness, is the in-person experience is an excuse to sort of – well, it was like it prevented me from having the excuse of like, “Oh, I could just watch it on – is this something I can just watch it on YouTube?” I was able to like, convince myself, like, “No, you actually have to go there and you have to sit next to someone you don't know and introduce yourself.” I feel like conferences that I could get the exact same experience just watching the video anyway, I lose that side effect, which is, I think the more valuable thing is that there's an experience that I would miss out on if I wasn't there. So it made me think about what Caroline is saying about that immediacy of being a speaker and I guess, what I’m wondering is maybe the secret is if you can't reproduce the immediacy of people being in the same room together, and I'm not certain that's true, or not whatever it is, maybe the trick is how do you use technology to your advantage rather than thinking about it as a barrier to get around? AUSTIN: Yeah. I'm not going to say I have all the answers, certainly. The thing that I really hope, because I wrote a big thing about it on my blog and I feel like there's a progression of events, virtual events that have happened where people are experimenting and trying new things. I would like to think they're trying to get to that point. How do you use the technology we have to enhance connections rather than viewing it as just like, “Oh, this is a thing we’ve got to do until we can get everyone back on a plane”? CORALINE: And really, that's the best thing about technology is when you find an unexpected use for it. When you find something outside the use case that it's designed for and you get that feeling of delight, I think that's when tech is at its best. AUSTIN: Yeah. I think that was one of the things. The two big things about Deserted Island is the idea that this is a deliberately delightful and cute and comfortable place. It is the softest game you can imagine. There are no harsh edges. There is no failure state. I don't think there's a 90-degree angle in that entire game, but it also gives you enormous constraints because it's a very crafted world and so, working around and through those constraints, but also having sort of the delight of overcoming them and figuring out like, “Oh, this is this really soft round space that I can do stuff in, but I have these walls. I have these barriers set up that I have to work around.” I mean, that's why I'm in technology; it’s because it's endless source of challenges and it's an endless source of like, “Oh, here's a hill I can overcome.” I was never super popular, or fast, or anything. I sucked at sports. I still suck at sports. The one time I went skiing, I tore my ACL in 15 minutes. I'm just not a coordinated guy, but in technology, there's always a new hill to summit. There's always something new to learn. There's always a new challenge that presents itself. That, to me, is that's why I stick with it. I could do other things, but here's something that's always going to challenge me and it's always going to give me something new to do. That, I think is worth celebrating in itself and if we can find a way to blend all these things together, blend all the different ideas about events and the delight and constraints and challenges of technology and dah, dah, dah, dah, and throw that together in a Twitch stream. Cool, rad, let's do that. I think that was a lot of the inspiration. It was just like, “Hey, this might blow up in my face. This might fail terribly, but it's better to try it and see what happens.” Every day when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh my God, it's never going to be as big of a success. Everyone's going to hate me,” whatever, I come back to that like, “Well, better to try and just like fall on my face than it is to wonder what might've been if I hadn't tried.” CORALINE: That reminds me of safety and something that we talk about at least in workplaces is making more places safe to fail and I think at the event level, the fear of failure has got to be a lot more on a different level. So were you prepared to fail and how did you prepare to fail? AUSTIN: It’s a great question. To be super honest, I'm not sure I was prepared to fail by the time it actually – so there's two types of failure. There was the technical failure and that was something that I did have plans for. There's a lot of technical failure that can happen during a live event production; my computer could have crashed, my internet could have gone down, a presenter's internet could have died. In preparation for that, there was a playbook effectively of okay, if this goes wrong, then do this. If this goes wrong, do that. Now, in doing so, I actually discovered a lot of other things that I didn't think could go wrong that did go wrong. One example was, we had very strong moderation in the chat because it's the internet, it's a public thing. There's no registration. Anyone could come into the Twitch chat and say whatever. So I was pretty biased towards okay, now let's crank up the moderation filters and make sure that people aren't going to just come in and say some mean things. One thing I didn't think to ask any of the presenters is like, “Hey, do you have something that's interactive outside of this?” One of them did, they had an interactive presentation where people went to Slido, or something and could that had its own chat input, text input. Any large enough Twitch stream, you had some trolls that had come in and started typing some slurs and other non-code of conduct things. So it's like, “Oh, crud,” and switch that scene off really quick and try to make sure, coordinate in chat like, “Hey, are you aware of what's going on with the speaker?” In real-time while they were continuing to present. We managed to deal with that and then cut out the offensive language in the video on demand version. So it's not there and it didn't disrupt things. there was a blip of like, “Ah,” and then we dealt. I think beyond that, though, the actual psychological failure because my expectations were pretty low in terms of like, “Oh, what is a success?” Because we didn't spend a lot of money on it. I didn't have any sponsors. I think I had an email list with 1,500 people on it and I was like, “Well, 50 roughly, you have some sort of webinar, or whatever, you get 50% of the sign-ups and that's a good one.” A 100 people sign up and 50 people show up. Great, you're doing fantastic. So my expectations were like, “Oh, here's my bar, 1,500.” If we hit that, if we hit anything close to that, we're doing great and then we hit 8,000. So the problem coming back to this a year later is oh, now the expectations are so much higher and we've taken sponsorship. We have sponsors now; we have a sponsor money in order to fund things like scholarships. One of the problems last year was you had to have a Switch to participate. This year we've come, I've gone around and said, “Hey, if you want to sponsor this and pay for someone that doesn't have access to a Switch, or Animal Crossing, or whatever, you can sponsor us by buying that person the equipment thingy to join this because not everyone can afford that.” Obviously, it's some level of exclusionary, like not everyone has internet, but within the group of people, the class people are giving talks to this, I figured that's about what we can do. Especially since you don't need a good camera, you just need a microphone. But because they're sponsors now, because there were so many people last year. It's like, “How do I set myself up for the chance that this is a failure psychologically?” And that, I don't have a great answer to. Therapy, I guess, is the answer to that. I talked to my therapist about this stuff. But it is. I think the psychological effects are actually much harder to plan around and much like in a workplace, psychological safety is significantly harder than technical safety. So my advice is to be very open and honest and transparent with the people that you're organizing with and to talk about it. I think this is the problem with most things is we don't talk about failure enough and we don't talk about how does it feel to fail? How do you get back up after you failed? By keeping all that inside, that leads to a lot of negative stress outcomes and stuff and you just feel like crud. So normalize talking about failure. JOHN: Were there any specific structures, or just communications that you set up with your organizing team around that to get everyone on the same page about thinking through failure and how it feels and how you're going to react to it, anything like that? AUSTIN: So that's also a really great question. It's an area that I could do better at. The organizing team is very small and informal for this like, it's mostly just me and Katie, and I've wound up doing quite a bit of it just for a variety of reasons that are really important. But we've had a lot of conversations about, I think that level of nervousness and that level of stress that you can have. A lot of it is both of us talking ourselves down right and being nobody – and some of it also just being very straightforward with people, with external people. When I did this last year, literally the expectations were very, very low and when people applied to speak, it's like, “Well, you know what you're getting into.” I didn't pretend this was anything other than what it is. This year as well, when I'm going and I'm talking about it, or I'm putting together sponsorship perspectives, or whatever, I'm saying, “Look, here's what happened last year. I can't guarantee you the same level of thing, but I'm also not asking a ton from you.” So I think one lesson from this is preemptive de-escalation. It's better, or maybe a better way to say this is under promise/overdeliver. The perspectives is very clear. It's like, “Look, this is historically what we had. Here's what I'm asking from you and here's what you're getting for it.” I've seen what a lot of conferences charge for sponsorships, I'm asking you for much less and maybe compared to those, you're not getting as much. You're getting a 30-second ad a couple of times over the day, you're getting your logo, you're getting some shoutouts and that's it. You're not getting leads. You're not getting an attendee list because there is none. That's one nice thing, I think about doing stuff like this is you don't have to be super aggro about stuff because it's like well, this doesn't exist. There's no registration so I can't tell you who's attending. But by lowering the stakes a little bit, people are still willing to throw you a couple grand, or whatever on a community conference, because one, that's a rounding error in most places’ event budgets. Two, even if you only get a 1,000 people and you expected 8,000, the video's going to be there. It's a long-term asset. Those videos are going to be on YouTube forever and they're going to be something that people go back and watch so, under promise. And the third thing really is and this actually makes it worse, not better, but this is probably the longest I've talked about this to anyone, this podcast right here. Most of the promotion for this has come from people that attended last year and spoke last year that are going around and talking it up and being like, “Oh no, this was the best thing I did in 2020. You should definitely put this on your calendar.” That actually makes it worse because that's all of your internet friends are like, “Oh my God, this was so great,” and you're just sitting here like, “Wow, I hope I don't let all these people down,” but that's life. I'm not going to tell people, “Hey, don't talk good about this because I'm worried that it's going to fail.” Let those external expectations try to lift you up a little. If everyone knew what it was last year and if you can deliver that again at least, then you're probably going to be doing all right. JOHN: There's two threads I wanted to pull on with that. First of all, you talked about having multiple different people, different constituencies like there's you as the organizing team, there's you and the speakers, there's you and the attendees, there's you in the sponsors. There's all these different groups and there's different levels of safety with each of them that. A different type of relationship with each of those and they each have a different level of communication and setting expectations. And then I think the other thing that really jumped out was the setting of expectations. I think that's such a key to managing an emotional reaction to something because so often those negative reactions come from missed expectations and that proactive communication about where things can land and what's possible and what's likely is a great way of keeping everyone on the same page. AUSTIN: Absolutely. So I want to actually start on that second one about expectations because I think this is something that catches me a lot and probably catches a lot of other people that are – wherever you are in your career, really, but there's both a tyranny of low expectations and a tyranny of high expectations. We tend to focus on one, or the other, but the hardest thing in the world is actually figuring out what that band is in the middle between your expectations are too low and your expectations are too high. I think the tech industry is absolute hot garbage just stem to stern. There's a ton of practices we have in the industry that I think because we're so afraid because the way capitalism works, the way funding works, the way everything works, every incentive is tuned towards preventing you from ever setting expectations too low. So if you look at OKRs, the concept of OKRs, the idea is the objective and key result and you should always set those as something you'll never hit; you should never set your key result too low. I think the Google-y way to think about this as if you achieve 70% of OKR, then that's good. That's what you should expect. To me, that's terrible. I hate that with every fiber of my being because you're giving me an objective that I'm always going to fail. That's how I perceive it and I get why we do this because it's always bad to be too low and I think a lot of this is cultural. It's the success win whatever business culture that's infested technology, where we would much rather set a very high bar for ourselves and then not meet it rather than set a low bar and clear it because if you set a low bar and you clear it, then that means you weren't pushing yourself. Because of the way that all of the money works an d how monetized we make all of our labor, if you aren't doing enough, you might as well not have done anything at all. So the thinking is better to have that high bar and then miss it. But that's extremely, I think just dismantles people that aren't super neurotypical. It certainly dismantles me and I'm whoever, I'm Austin, I'm one person in the distance. But I think it's prevalent throughout everything in tech and I would love to see that interrogated more. You're starting to see a lot of the golden geese of the tech industry being interrogated because of the pandemic. Things like the value of people working in person with each other, or the value of having companies in San Francisco, or the value of hiding your pay, of pay inequity. I think this idea of what should our expectations of ourselves be, of our teams, of the performance of our software even, I made a joke the other day that’s like, I want to see smaller applications written by fewer people that are paid more, that don't work as well and I'm not kidding. Because I think that the idea of oh no, we want the Googles, we want the big companies of the world to encompass everything. We want this one-stop shop. It's not great. It's harmful, it's actively harmful, and I know that there's a lot of voices and people are like, “Well, you can't just dismantle, you can't just cut Google into two pieces, or five pieces, or Amazon into five pieces and have it all worked out.” I agree, you need to be intentional about this. But I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and I remember what technology was like a little more than and the idea that someone could go into business for themselves maintaining a library and just selling a license for people to use that library. Maybe they figured out a really fast way to do a bubble sword and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to sell you a library, a Pascal library that you can link to and it does this work really fast and if you have a problem with it, then you get support from me and you email me, or whatever and I fix this bug for you.” We've taken all those things that people used to be able to do and build and craft and just said, “Hey, we're going to socialize all that expensive maintenance and put it on the open source community and have them do that for free and then we're going to build businesses around extracting value from all that labor.” CORALINE: That's one of the seven criteria of the ethical source principles is that we have a right to be paid. We have a right to have the value of our work respected and if you're making billions off of an open source library, you would better be giving back. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think but it feeds back from – this all goes back to the capitalism.exe; It's all from the same source and a lot of ways. But I think that idea of expectations setting and never setting the bar low; that is a product of this and it's all intersectional. It's all interrelated. There is no one evil other than really big sociological complex sociotechnical human systems, or whatever and we can make it better, but we can't fix it without equally big changes. JOHN: Yeah. I think that the capitalism more is always better rule is what's poisoning this because you could make a small app and it can be successful and it could be two people on the team and those people could be very happy. But everything in society is saying, “Well, make it bigger, add a bigger team, do more things, blah, blah, blah.” I remember reading a story about, at one point a couple of years ago, the Uber like iPhone app was growing by 1 megabyte of compiled code per week because they were adding all this stuff to it and that just boggled my mind. It's like, it's Uber. They do really just one thing and they were having to do all these things and they kept bumping up against iOS store limits of the size of the binary. Just that mentality of let's do all the things because we can and let's stress ourselves out and work ourselves raw just because more is better. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think it's a team problem. It's an organizational problem. Because how does that happen without you having so many people working in the same small space that are duplicating effort, that are duplicating features even, or other things behind the scenes? You just keep hiring and hiring, you keep growing and growing because that's all you can do, because that's the only way you can exist in society as a corporation, or as people building a product, or whatever is to constantly consume and grow and grow. This goes into Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, that have taken, at least my corner of the internet, by storm and the idea that oh, this is a way that you can introduce scarcity into digital art and it's like, “Oh my God, it's such a bad idea.” Every blockchain thing is so, so awful. But the amount of energy it takes to actually encode these things under the blockchain, even on Ethereum blockchain, because of how proof of work algorithms function, the only purpose of these things is to consume more energy for a completely pointless purpose. If you're consuming energy for the sake of consuming energy, to prove that you're doing some work in order to “prove that you own something.” You can't own a tweet; Twitter technically owns that tweet. There are people who are selling cryptographic signatures like, “Oh, it's like a signed tweet. You own the signed tweet.” It's like you own a link and that I'm not even sure that you can own that from any sort of legal, or moral, or ethical standard. That's not how ownership works, especially intellectual property ownership. Oh my God, this industry. Every day, it makes me want to move to the woods and raise alpaca. CORALINE: Well, maybe there'll be an alpaca feature added to Animal Crossing soon. [laughter] AUSTIN: Maybe, yeah. Just live out my alpaca farming dreams in Animal Crossing. It’s a shame that we need money to live. JOHN: So we've come to the time on the show and we go into our reflections, which is a where each of us talks about the things that we're going to take away from this conversation. Maybe the things we're going to keep thinking about, or any new ideas that we were exposed to and just what's going to stick with us. So for me, I think I heard about Deserted Island DevOps last year when it happened, I think some of my friends presented there, but hearing you talk about it more in-depth in behind the scenes, should we a bit more about the creativity, both on your side and in the audience as they put together new ways to experience the conference. I am really excited by that because it's not a place where I've seen a ton of creativity being expressed and finding new ways to have a conference-like experience like different mediations, different ways of participating, I think are really valuable because right now, we're copying online what we used to do in-person, but kind of and it's not always working out great. So if you just sort of throw away all the stuff and start over from, this is our platform and these are our constraints, I think that that leads to creativity and so, it's nice to see that. CORALINE: And I'm thinking about what you said about moderation and the importance of moderation. I was involved in the famous tech feminist wars of the 2010s and I was one of the voices calling for codes of conduct at in-person conferences. I think that becomes even more important with virtual conferences and the need for moderation. I don't think we do a good job, as an industry, of thinking about what moderation means, thinking about how to manage random people on the internet coming to a virtual space and I'm hoping that virtual events continue to invest some more technology. I think Twitch does a great job of giving us tools and I'm hoping that that idea of really investing in moderation takes off because I think that will have ripple effects in a lot of different domains. AUSTIN: I'm going to reflect, I think when you were talking about with failure and psychological safety and how to communicate failure, or those feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to not only peers, but also to people I'm organizing events with, or two people I'm working with. Because I think that one thing that this conversation really led me to realize is that I don't actually communicate it as well as I thought I had, or there's things I don't think about. Sometimes, you need someone to mention it to really piggy back up. I'm wondering if there's ways that we can develop toolkits, or playbooks, or even just point by point, like, “Hey, here's a guide to have these conversations,” because they're hard conversations and they're conversations that maybe you think you're ready to have, or that you think you've communicated. But it's like, “Well, did you think about this?” So that's something I'm definitely going to take away from this. I will put it out in the moderation thing. I used your code of conduct for the Deserted Island one. So yes, I appreciate the work that went into that because it was invaluable to me to make a good one for this. CORALINE: I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, Austin. JACOB: I haven’t been to any conference since the pandemic started and I think part of it is that being stuck at home like pretty much everyone else, hopefully, is that I think I was always telling myself, “Do I really need to take time off when I would probably be bored and restless and would wish I could just watch the video later anyway?” I think I was kind of missing the point because I think maybe what I really need to do is find a conference like this one that has been thoughtful about how participants can interact when not in-person and make the leap and force myself to take the day off, or days off. That’s the only thing I’m doing and force myself to be engaged with it because I’ve got nothing else to do just like any in-person conference. I’m going to give it a shot. CORALINE: Well, Austin, it’s been great talking to you today. Thank you for your openness, your honesty, your vulnerability, and you great ideas. I think we all have a lot to take away from this conversation so, it was really great talking to you today. Thank you so much. AUSTIN: Thanks! It was wonderful to be here. Special Guest: Austin Parker.
230: Using Tech + Policy For Good with Corey Ponder
01:55 - Corey’s Superpower: Empathy * Finding Voice: You Are Not a Statistic * What does it mean to support Black lives? * Authentic Self * Having Conversations Around Allyship * Owning Vulnerability 09:06 - Having People Hear Your Stories * “How are you doing?” * “Me Too” Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement) – learned something about self and blind spots in the process and the feedback was helpful 13:01 - Allyship Best Practices * Growth Mindset * Trusted Sidekicks; Augmenting Journies * Invisible Knapsack: How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality (https://www.ted.com/talks/peggy_mcintosh_how_to_recognize_your_white_privilege_and_use_it_to_fight_inequality/transcript?language=en) (Peggy McIntosh) 19:04 - Developing Empathy * Watch Hamilton! When it comes to leadership, Aaron Burr was right — “Talk less, smile more” (https://medium.com/@mkvolm/when-it-comes-to-leadership-aaron-burr-was-right-talk-less-smile-more-bf1e18dbac7a) (Being Able to Hear vs Being Able to Listen) * Deep Canvassing – How to talk someone out of bigotry: These scientists keep proving that reducing prejudice is possible. It’s just not easy. (https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing) * Google Assistant Research; Inclusive Design * Empathy Mapping (From UX Design) – Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team (https://www.amazon.com/Building-Everyone-Practices-Googles-Inclusion/dp/1119646227) * Empathy Can Combat Mis/Disinformation * Fearing What We Don’t Understand: Nas - Hate Me Now ft. Puff Daddy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKSJN3WWR3E) (song) | Lyrics (https://www.google.com/search?q=nas+you+can+hate+me+now&oq=nas+you+can+hate+me+now&aqs=chrome..69i57j46j0l3j0i22i30.4277j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#wptab=s:H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLRT9c3LDYwLalINit6xOjJLfDyxz1hKYdJa05eY7Ti4grOyC93zSvJLKkU0uFig7KUuASkUDRqMEjxcaGI8Oxi0ktJTUsszSmJL0lMsspOttLPLS3OTNYvSk3OL0rJzEuPT84pLS5JLbLKqSzKTC5exCqUkViSqpCbqpCXX64AEQQAMkDXN6IAAAA) * Active Processing (psychology) (https://study.com/academy/answer/what-is-active-processing-in-cognitive-psychology.html) 36:03 - Using Tech + Policy For Good * Educating & Empowering People Online * Company and Community Values * Pipeline Investment and Early Exposure * Diversifying the Tech Policy Space / Manifestos? * Algorithmic Justice League (https://www.ajl.org/) * Virility * Clubhouse Is Worth $1 Billion Off the Backs of Black Folks. Now What? (https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/clubhouse-is-worth-1-billion-off-the-backs-of-black-fo-1846190868) Reflections: Arty: Centering around empowerment + asking, “How ARE you?” with the intention of listening. Chanté: We can’t outsource empathy. Corey: How the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based to follower-based and influencing. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 230 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone and I had the great pleasure of introducing our guest of honor today, Corey Ponder. Welcome, Corey. COREY: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here. CHANTÉ: We're so glad to have you. If you don't mind, I'd love to read your bio so everyone knows who you are. COREY: Sounds great. CHANTÉ: Corey has over 10 years of work experience, he has had several roles across two industries and has also served in community organizations and nonprofits. At the core of each of these experiences is a passionate commitment to building community and developing people and programs. Corey most recently worked at Google serving as a senior policy advisor focused on privacy, advising product teams on best practices and approaches to inspire user trust. He also owns and manages his own business, em|PACT Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations build inclusive communities by prioritizing empathy as a skillset. Corey serves on boards of InnovatorsBox, a firm focused on creativity, and Youth Speaks, a nonprofit focused on youth arts and education. Great background. Corey, did we forget anything else? COREY: Well, I have to just because I am a lifetime SEC, Southeastern Conference, person, that I have to shout out Vanderbilt University, where I went for undergrad and then also, because I'm in California, I have to shout out University of California, Berkeley, where I went for my Master's in public policy. So those two things I would add. CHANTÉ: Those are great institutions for education. So good. Let's start off with the first question that we give everyone and that is: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? COREY: Yes. I love this question. It gives me a chance to really nerd out. So I would say the first thing that comes up for me is empathy. When I think about empathy, I think about how superheroes, oftentimes exhibit qualities around being empathetic that we might look at as healing abilities, or the ability to regenerate themselves, or regenerate others, the stamina, or the fortitude, last, or survive in a space where there's a lot of things attacking them mentally and emotionally and able to persevere in spite of all of that. So I would say empathy is definitely the superpower that I have. I think when I step into spaces, I'm always thinking about what can I do to make other people feel more welcome, or feel more authentically themselves, which I feel like is the healing part. I feel like the regeneration piece is often me putting myself into positions where I don't like conflict, or seek it out, but I definitely feel like I put myself into spaces where I'm like, I want to support you and it might come at some risk to me, but I think I can bounce back from this. And then the stamina piece. I mean, none of this work, showing up for others even is not just a one-time thing and so, the consistency piece, I think, is something that I've really over time become more comfortable with just knowing that things might be protracted. People might need you for long periods of time and I'm here for it. CHANTÉ: So you said a few things here that really, I think, demonstrate the skillset for somebody who is in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space and I will bet that you probably didn't see that 10 years ago, or whenever you started down this journey. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to know how you got to this space now and I'll also add in, before you answer that question, that a lot of folks, BIPOC folks like us, we know what it's like to be othered. We know what it's like to be excluded. So I know for myself, I'm in the DEI space, but I'm just really curious. I did peek at your background, but just for folks who haven't or who don't have those quick fingers right now, they just want to hear your background, walk us through how you got here. COREY: Yeah, absolutely. So there are two inflection points. The first is I am a Black man so there are moments that I think about as a part of my growth as a Black boy and feeling like I had to grow up very fast to be taken seriously in whatever space that I was interested in to see the world from a perspective of hey, you really have to make sure that you're showing up and representing the person that you want to be because people will quickly ascribe something to you. This was a conversation that was permeating all around me so that when I got to college, there was an inflection point. The first one where I remember I was like, “I want to be a biologist and I might also go to medical school.” When I took lab for the first time, it was a moment where I realized like, oh man, despite all of the things that I have done, all of the things that are within my control, I studied hard. I was getting great grades. I was just woefully unprepared for that space of even just being in a lab and doing a titration. I was like, “What the heck is a titration? What is an Erlenmeyer flask?” I realized that in a lot of ways it was because I didn't have access to the resources, or the conversations, or nobody had even told me that I could do those things. I wasn't seen as somebody that could do those things and so it's like, I didn't know what I didn't know and I think that I really started doubting in many ways from that moment who I could be, what I felt like I needed to thrive in the spaces, what I felt like I was capable of in these spaces. It took me throughout college—great relationships and friendships, but also investment and resources around me to really find that voice that said, “Hey, actually, here's your story,” You're not this other narrative, this person that can't do it and you're not a statistic in a sense of a Black man that is x as opposed to a successful Black man. That was the first inflection point for me. Then I think the second was just having been at this point, maybe like 6, or 7 years working. I was at a moment at Facebook actually, where there was an increased conversation around what does it mean to support Black lives? Why are people talking about Black Lives Matter? In particular, during 2015, 2016, I forget specifically when, but Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were two Black men who were killed by police officers in different instances, in different cities, in different places, but within the same week. It was one of the first times that from a technology perspective, we were discussing this in an international way because it had been captured on Facebook Live. So there was this conversation around who are we as a part of this broader conversation? It was the second inflection point because it reminded me that was man, I am a Black man so even as I've done all of these things, I've been in careers, I've had these jobs and these opportunities where I've done things that I can be proud of, I'm still walking into this space the next day, after hearing about these instances and really feeling like I'm carrying something that I don't know how to speak to. I don't know how – I've never really talked to anybody about how it impacts the way that I am showing up in this space. So from there, I just made the commitment where I said, “I'm going to start trying to be more authentically myself. I'm going to start talking about all the parts of me that make me who I am.” I didn't have a plan for it; I just knew that I wanted to have those conversations. The interesting thing was I started having those conversations and people naturally, after I would talk to people, would say, “Well, what's next? What can I do to support you?” It really just made me think about the broader conversation around allyship. There's a broader conversation around what does it actually mean to show up for somebody and then I realized retroactively that there have been many examples, not only in my life, that people who have shown up for me that now I can pinpoint and look at as case studies, as data points, but also that I have naturally gravitated to doing that because of what I said earlier about the superpower of empathy. It has been something that I had always valued, even if I didn't know what it was, or what I was doing, or what it meant, but it was really important for me to see other people's stories because I knew how important it was for people to see mine. So those two inflection points really shaped how I viewed diversity, equity, and inclusion in my role, in the broader conversation. One, my own vulnerability with myself, but also two, how valuable it is to have people hear your story and validate who you are and your experience and how it's a part of a whole and how they see you. CHANTÉ: Yeah. ARTY: With stories like you mentioned being able to have this experience where you really understood what it meant to show up for someone. COREY: Yeah, absolutely. I'll give two stories. One was actually when someone showed up for me and I remember it was my boss actually shortly after the conversations, or at least what I mentioned earlier about Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. I just was having a really rough, it was a rough day. I mean, I was trying to show up business as usual was very much like, well, I have a job, I have meetings I have to go, and my boss asked me, “How are you doing?” That's a question you hear maybe a hundred times a day and it's also a question that feels like a rhetorical. I mean, you're supposed to say, “Good,” and keep it moving. I said that, but she really stopped me, told me like, “Hey, I'm asking because I really want to know and I have time. How are you doing?” I think just in that simple moment of making the space, creating an avenue for me to actually express a real truth, it just made me feel like wow, you didn't have to listen to my story. You didn't have to consider that I was something more than this a meeting I had to go to, or that I was more than this deliverable, or this project that I was working on. And you did. That meeting was, I, even years later, still to think about it because it was just like, wow, that meeting didn't have to happen that way. But I felt like this wasn't just my burden to bear after that question, or that conversation. The question that she asked and the conversation that followed. I think for me, showing up for others actually has been in this work—working through impact strategies and thinking through how do you actually show up as an ally. I've had a number of experiences. But in particular, there was one right around the decree, I would say the resurfacing of the Me Too movement and that conversation around sexual harassment in the workplace. There was an event, or a town hall, or an opportunity where I had a chance to really show up. I initially—and this is also a part of the failures piece—showed up to that very equally with the best of intentions and said, “Hey, what can I do to move this conversation forward?” Along the way, I remember realizing that oh man, in all of my eagerness to show up to this, I actually have silenced, or not included the voices that were probably most important to actually have this conversation. Women in particular, but also just thinking about in general, people who are survivors, or have been a victim of assault. So it was one of those moments where I took on feedback from people, some of my coworkers, colleagues, friends, I figured out a way to revamp the event, postponed the event so that I could do it the right way. And then I remember in the aftermath of that, seeing I learned something through that process about myself and also, the feedback that I received about the event afterwards was like, all right, this was a conversation where it really prompted people to think about a story that they haven’t thought about before—people who showed up to the event. Because I was helping organize it, showed up, and got something else out of it because I wasn't the only voice in the room. It was another moment where it was like, wow, this isn't necessarily my story, but I leaned in a little bit, or leaned in a lot in the beginning, learned a lot in the process about myself and even where my blind spots were within that entire process of learning in some ways helped tell a story that other people realized like, oh, wow, thanks for helping me see this narrative. CHANTÉ: That is so helpful. I feel like the times where I've had to show up as an ally and lean in to something that I didn't necessarily understand, really helped me to better articulate the needs I had as a Black identified woman, or as a Latino woman to say, “Hey, friend or colleague, you want to show up and help me. This is how you can help me,” Because I've learned from my own ouch moments like, oops, I shouldn't have done that and thankfully, somebody was gracious enough to share feedback in that moment, but many times, they're not. Do you have any best practices in terms of folks who want to show up, especially right now in this year, as an ally, they're very well-intentioned, well-meaning people, but they don't necessarily have somebody like an insider to give them the lay of the land, or to tell them where the real pain points are? COREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing is that to your point about the feedback, I think feedback is so critical and also, we have to recognize that for many communities, like you said, we're in the intersect. We are at the intersection of a lot of identities. I recognize that even though I am underrepresented as a Black person in many spaces, I also am in a privileged position because I'm a man. So I'm having to constantly examine those different nuances and intersections of my identity. Yet that also helps me understand that there's a lot of emotional labor in just showing up to be Black every day so, then sometimes, I might not have the energy, or might not have the capacity to give that feedback to somebody who was looking to be on their journey as an ally. The first thing that I would say is showing up for others is really, there's got to be a hunger, or a desire to actually grow and change. This idea of a growth mindset and it has to be separate from passively taking on the information, or the stories of others. I think once you have that, really having said, “I want to do this and I am motivated to do it.” Then I think the second thing is to go back to the superpower question from earlier, is I like to think about showing up for others as a trusted sidekick. So this model of thinking about you're not showing up to save the day, because that's also a lot of labor. Expecting to be the person to in the movie on a high note and be the person that walks down the aisle to get an award, or reward is not really the goal. But what it really is about is really understanding the stories of the people that you're playing in the same universe with and then figuring out what ways you can augment their journey. I think about three things that are a part of that, which is really those everyday moments. When I've had conversations through my work, oftentimes people are like, “Black lives matter. We need to March,” or “Gender equity. We need to dismantle capitalism.” It’s like, that is probably true and there are scholars out there that are speaking more deeply than I can ever speak to on that, but what about those moments that are outside of that? So you might say that Black lives matter,” and you might have the t-shirt, or you might step up in a forum and say, “Hey, I'm declaring that I believe in this cause,” but are you then actually including your coworker who was Black in the team lunches that happen every day that y'all just get together organically, but somehow that person is never on the organic chain? Or if you're thinking about gender equity and pay discrimination, that is a big thing, but also, are you actually making space and not taking up the room when you're in a meeting everyday being the person that has to get the last word, or are you making sure that everybody's opinions are on the table, including your women colleagues, or female colleagues are heard in the room? I think these are the everyday moments where we can show up as an ally. I think the second piece is thinking about these things that we have to confront about ourselves. It might be ugly or scary, but are necessary. We all have biases. We all are a product of certain privileges because we have identities that confer some amount of power to us and some type of favoritism to us. So if we're thinking about that, we have to really examine that how those show up and affect us. Peggy McIntosh wrote Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, where she did a lot of research in this space, where the idea is that we carry this around and even if we don't acknowledge it, it's still there. This idea of it might be invisible to us, but you can imagine walking into a room with a big knapsack on not realizing that every time you turn left or right, you're hitting somebody with your privilege. So I think it's important to acknowledge that we have that backpack on whether we realize it, or not and it's affecting people whether we accept it, or not. And then the third thing is taking that next step of we have the positionality. So if you're talking about supporting from your identity, or from your perspective, you have some ability to influence change. Again, even if it's at a micro level. Because I'm a man, I have some privilege in the communities and spaces that I hold. Because of I’m a man, people are going to see me a certain way so then what I talk about what I represent, what I say, what I'm willing to advocate for is going to hold a different weight, whether that's right or wrong, it's going to hold a different weight than if a woman were to ask, or advocate for the same thing. So then what can I do to use that privilege in support of what that community might actually be asking for, or want? That might take a little discomfort on my part, but I guarantee it is way less uncomfortable than underrepresented groups having to advocate for their right to be seen, or heard, or validated in spaces. So those would be three things, I think you could do in that journey. CHANTÉ: Those are awesome things. The one that really resonates for me, too is just the empathy part because I feel like that is a core skill that we're going to need for the future of work. Oftentimes, when I say that people ask me, “Well, how do I develop empathy?” I have my own answer there, but I'd love to hear yours. How do you think people can get better at working on that empathy muscle and if you have anything that's worked for you personally, or that you recommend more professionally that you've seen in the workplace? That'd be helpful. COREY: Yeah, absolutely. Two things. The first thing that came up for me is Hamilton. I feel like everybody has seen it now. If you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, there's a theme that goes throughout Hamilton where Ehrenberg says, “Talk less, listen more.” There's this idea that I feel like with empathy, we often think of it as just like, ”I have to be in touch with my feelings,” but actually what I think it is, is actually a skill, a tangible skill of can I actually listen to someone and I think there's a difference between being able to hear and being able to listen. So I think the first thing that I have done is like, how can I actually actively listen more effectively to the people around me? There's actually this research, I think 2014, 2015, it was focused on can we use empathy? Like, actually measure the effect of empathy on reducing, in this case, anti-trans gender opinions? I think the research was called “Durably reducing transphobia,” but essentially, what they did was it was an exercise around active listening. They used the political tool called deep canvassing to essentially equip these researchers to go into a home where people expressed, or had been exposed to anti-transgender views and they literally just listened to them. They processed actively with this person about why they believe what they believe and then through that process, they didn't actually rebut with facts, or say, “But actually, that's not true,” or “Did you know that that's actually not true?” What actually happened was people realized through their own act of processing that you know what, this is not actually about transgender. It's actually about safety. I can relate now. I can empathize because now that I've come full circle and have been able to tell my story about why I'm processed out loud, I realized that I do have something in common with the transgender community. They want to feel safe. This law makes them feel unsafe. I want to feel safe in bathrooms, but those two things don't have to compete with each other. We're all people that want to be safe. That that research for me really sticks out whenever I think of active listening. I think the second thing is I've talked a couple of times about storytelling; there's a part of this for me, that really is seeing people as these amazing figures in a story you just haven't read yet. I think when I practice empathy, it often is just me really taking an interest more deeply in the why somebody does what they do as opposed to what they are doing. This hearkens back to Simon Sinek, who was a leadership consultant, or coach, but he had that phrase in a TED Talk where he said, “People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I think for me, that boils down to the core, how I think about if you want to cultivate empathy as a muscle, or a skill, it's really asking that question, “Why did they do that?” An actual tool that I often use in my work is something called empathy mapping, which is often used in UX design actually, in tech, to really think about human centered approaches to product design. But it lays out all of these ways about how do you think they would feel? How do you think they would see this? How do you think they would hear, or receive this message? And then it really gets you to ask this question about why would they react this way to what you're about to present, or why would they react to these set of circumstances in a certain way? CHANTÉ: One of the things that you're talking about here is the empathy mapping. I actually do this course, or this workshop with some collaborators around designing for inclusion and that is something that we really focus on. Have you seen that in practice well somewhere that you could illustrate, or show? I guess, we could provide an example, or a case study so folks know what you're talking about. COREY: Yeah. One of the things that this makes me think of is Google Assistant space, which is also a space that I spent some time in. But within the Google's Trust and Safety team, there was a focus on thinking about digital assistants and whether they had an inclusive voice when it came to gender, because there is a lot of research now that exists about voices and people perceive assistants to be female, but because of the voices. Companies are really doing a lot of that work now to think through what the implications are around that. But at the time, I remember in this work very early on, what I thought was interesting about this was just the steps that the Trust and Safety team went through to actually figure out if there was an issue here because you design a product, the product is meant to respond to queries. But soon, what they started finding was that maybe some of the queries that the digital assistant was getting were actually maybe more vulgar, or maybe more derogatory. So how does that break down? Does that break down like, is it just objectively that's how people talk to digital assistants? Well, no, and actually doing work and trying to reduce those offensive, or shocking, or risky experiences, what they found was that maybe this is actually offensive, or derogatory on the Google Assistant voices that present, or sound feminine. So now that we have done this research, how can we actually address that in the broader product? I think the Google Assistant then did things to try to make the voices more gender neutral, to provide more options so that there were a range of voices and then also, not necessarily default to the feminine voice, or not even call them feminine. I think they started calling them like Voice 1, Voice 2. So I think that that's one example of that I know, that I am aware of where when you're thinking about inclusion as it could be an objective truth that you're here to provide an answer to a problem. But often, that problem that you're solving might actually have many other subproblems within it. But the idea of inclusive design is important. It's an important lens for everybody to have honestly, on the product, because there are a range of things that might be happening that we're just not aware of. But certainly, the power of doing extensive UX research, or a deep dive on some of those things, I think is what helps augment and move us away from those types of snafus happening in our technologies. CHANTÉ: That was a beautiful example. Thank you. That sounds like a really cool project that you got to be a part of. Was there anything else that you learned from being on that project team that you can share? COREY: Yeah. Well, I should say, first off, this happened before I came into the team, but I think it was one of the things that I found very powerful about the team itself, doing the work and also, where they were centering people. I think that was one of the reasons why I've also been very interested in policy within tech, because it very much it's about centering and advocating for best practices for people and defining what users actually are. But I think for me, the lesson that I took from that just was again, that we all really have to be our advocates for this type of work and this type of change in the products and also, that a lot of this is sometimes not as complicated as we make it out to be. I think that it's really about priorities and what we value. What I appreciated about this team was just this idea of wow, you actually value not just the objective user, but the user in a sense of what context would they use this and how would this impact this community that we're trying to build this ecosystem? ARTY: So there's something you said earlier that really struck me when you were talking about this example with empathizing for these people that had been exposed to anti-transgender ideas and sitting down and listening. One thing that strikes me about that is just that as opposed to these people being a certain way, you framed things as these people were exposed to a certain kind of content that then they had this fear that came up in resonant to something that they were exposed to. I see those sorts of dynamics in other contexts. Would you mind elaborating a little more on that thought? COREY: Yeah. I definitely think that we are in – not that 2020, or certainly, the last 4 years since 2016 with President Trump, I don't think that that is unique. I think that it feels exacerbated because on top of that technology has been a lens through which we've seen almost an exponential growth in access to information. It may have outpaced the way in which we also keep up with the ways in which you are skeptically dissecting this information and analyzing it for truth and veracity. So I think that there's been a confluence of forces that have made it so that things like misinformation and disinformation are permeating and now, it is easily accessible. One of the things that I think about a lot in this space, as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion and why I think empathy is so important is that I feel like it can become very easy to go down this path because we're always looking for ways to validate our own experiences. So if there's one thing that we – an easy way to do it that is harmful, or damaging to others, is to validate by saying that, “Well, it can't be that over there.” I'm invalidating that to bolster the way that I see the world, or my experiences. What I really focus on from my work and why I think the empathy piece has been so powerful is that it's a reminder as we move through that cycle of how can you be more empathetic, that at the core of our human experience is this idea that we all do not like the feeling of being othered, or unseen. Even if for someone who feels like they are, whether you agree or disagree with this idea, I'm disaffected. I think this election cycle is a great example. A lot of people felt disaffected on both sides like, you're white middle-class, or you're Black and in poverty, or you're white and in poverty. You have all these sects of people that are like, “Ah, nobody's listening to me,” and that's reinforced because you're like, “Nobody has the experience that I have and nobody knows what it's like to feel othered like this.” But actually, the reality is, regardless of whether you understand what it means to be grow up white and poor, or Black and affluent, or Black and poor, or white and affluent, you all have this common experience where you have been othered at some point. Empathy says at the core of that human experience is something we all should be able to understand. So we're not necessarily focusing on what you went through so much as why did you have to go through it? I think that this disinformation, this misinformation feeds the – If we had more empathy, I think that would be the thing that would combat this because it would allow us to ask the right questions around maybe this is true, maybe this is not true. If I don't have the tools to actually assess whether it's true or real, what I can say is that I need to really think about the community that is centered in this story and understand how this would make them feel if this were true, how does it make them feel if this were not true. I think that that's where empathy and developing that as a skill could do a lot more work in this space where we're probably only going to see more honestly, content, or information where we have to vet where it comes from, whether it's real, who’s saying it and why they're saying it. ARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about how powerful it is just that even in listening to this context, as opposed to trying to correct it, what you did find was this commonality of, “Oh, we both have a desire to feel safe, it is part of the human experience,” and then with this disinformation, you've got this dynamic that really plays on fear. A lot of this information that's associated with fear reminds me of this TED Talk by Daryl Davis that I think Chanté, you're the one who actually had me listen to that. But specifically, that ignorance breeds fear breeds hate and then if we can go about empathizing and listening and building those connections and tackling the ignorance, that it can have a chain reaction effect on all of these other things. COREY: Yeah. This has made me randomly think of a song lyric by Nas, street prophet that he is, but his song with Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whoever he was calling himself at the time called Hate Me Now. He said that line: people “fear what they don't understand, hate what they can't conquer. I guess, that's just a theory of man.” I was like, ah, this is making me think about that because I think so often, we are pushed into those lanes where the idea is to think that you have to conquer something. So it's like your safety, your capacity to do what you want to do in this world is won by subjugating, or by conquering something else, someone else and that's the only way that it can happen. And then also that fear piece; if I don't understand it, then it's not safe. So if I can't wrap my head around it, then I need to assume the worst and fear it. I think why empathy has been so powerful for me is one, because we don't often talk about it as something that we can actually cultivate. We often talk about it in a you either have it, or you don't, or it's a natural gift, or it isn't. I think it actually is something that can be cultivated and brought to bear, like in that research, where it’s like this was a community. I think the first time I did it, it was in South Florida, or maybe somewhere outside of Miami. I'm not actually sure of the specific locale, but this community had been subjected to all sorts of messaging around the transgender community, because it was meant to drive a particular position, or opinion on a bill around bathrooms and whether bathrooms could be used by people of the multiple genders, or you had to have separate men and women bathrooms. They were able to do through this research, they were able to find that not only were they able to shift people's perception around those issues—actually shift them positively in the direction of saying like, “Oh, actually I do support transgender rights in this conversation.” But that it was a statistically significant shift and it lasted for three months after that conversation when they did a check-in. So I think that it just really speaks to we don't have to fear what we don't understand. If you really just take the time to let people really work out their own narrative for themselves, they will often figure out that their own narratives are incongruent with how they actually are showing up in the space and it's not about telling them, “Your narrative is off,” like, “You're wrong.” I think that there's value in that, but if you're going to make the real change over time, in psychology, they call it act of processing. There's value in actually getting people to their own whatever it is, whatever reason they have for fearing what they don't understand to process that out loud in a way where they can actually be like, “I was heard and are realized that hearing myself is incongruent with how I actually like what I actually value.” So maybe coming to my own conclusions, I don't have to fear this, even though I don't understand all the parts of that experience CHANTÉ: That was really helpful, Corey and one of the thought bubbles—well, one of the many that popped up as you were responding to Arty's question was how do we then, because it sounds like there's a lot of value in anticipating, or using tech and policy for good in those moments. I'm just wondering, I know that you consult around this. So maybe take us down that avenue, because I think we're at this place where we've seen coming off of this last election, the power of the misinformation strategies and how we've partnered that with let's say, the Cambridge Analytica situation where they used data to underpin those fears and then really influenced a community, or a country to the space that they wanted them to be. How do we get ahead of that? What are some things we can do? Or what are some things maybe you're working on that are worth mentioning here today? COREY: Yeah. So those are very, very good questions, or good thoughts. I think that one thing that just thinking about even as you were saying with Cambridge Analytica, my first thought was just that we have existed in the technological space, in this information age where empowering people online, I feel like it has been separate from the using the data, or giving the data up in a way that, or using the data or giving the data up. By that I mean, essentially, we're using these products and tools, wouldn't have never really thought about it as a platform for change, or a platform to see the world we want to sees except for these little blips, or these moments where there are revolutions around like Arab Spring. That was driven, I believe on Facebook and then conversations again, around Black Lives Matter because of live video that we now have, we're able to capture the experiences in real time. So I think that the first thing that I would say is how can we actually educate people around being empowered online? You have a voice, but it's not just the voice to repeat what you have heard, but really to lend your own voice, your own vulnerability, your own story to what's happening in these forms. I think the second thing really is it comes down to the companies. I think that a lot of my conversations, when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, really comes back to values. Many companies, particularly ones that are community-focused and saying that our users are a part of an ecosystem, have to really ask themselves about what ecosystem are you actually trying to build? Because at a certain point, particularly if you are a private company, there are good ecosystems and there are destructive ecosystems. So it can't be a libertarian view of the technology is just a tool and it will all sort itself out. It actually has to be maybe more curated than that and that might not have been the initial approach of technology. Certainly, wasn't the approach to the world wide web either when it first started out. It was just like, anybody could create a geo site, anybody could do anything on the internet, but in some ways, I think that view of technology maybe has to change. It helps lends itself very well to innovation, but the challenge is that it creates a lot of loopholes for abuse. So then I think companies, as they start curating their experiences more, it has to be centered on very clear community values. What is your ideal world and your ideal state that you want to be contributing to as a part of this broader conversation around information and sharing data for the benefit of others? Most of these companies have that in their mission somewhere. They believe that they're doing a public good, even if they're also profiting in the process. Well, if that's true, then what values get you there and keep you there? So I think that that's how the disinformation and misinformation is allowed to persist, because there's just questions that you have to ask around are some things allowable within this ecosystem? Are we willing to take a hard line on some things for the benefit of the greater good? Then it’s also acknowledging that it is hard being in technology and now it's like, even if you're 99% effective at something, if you have a billion users, that's still millions of people, or millions of cases. You have to then also acknowledge that you're always working and it never will be good enough, but you can try to close that gap and be consistent on what you actually value and believe and that at least shows a bit of sincerity over time around what you're trying to do. CHANTÉ: I appreciate your take on that. One thing I might imagine to be true, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think from what I've seen is that the tech policy space is not Black enough. It is not; I don't see enough BIPOC folks. I don't see people really, outside of cis able-bodied white guys in that space. Is there anything that you recommend in terms of trying to change that so that in the future where we're going to have, for sure, undoubtedly more mixed-race people, just given the trends that we're on, how do we address that, or how do we curate for that? COREY: Yeah. I mean, so much of – it reminds me of the story I was telling about biology and going into lab is that I think so much of it is about really understanding the possibilities of what is actually out there and having someone tell you, or exposing you to what those possibilities are. Some of that is pipeline development. So I think we're many of these companies and also, just not even tech companies, but policy in general. This base is about how do you invest back in these communities, knowing that it might pay dividends in 10, or 15 years down the road to have this more diverse ecosystem of policy people, or practitioners, or technologists. Even if you're not developing them particularly for a job today, but down the road. I mean, I think some of that is pipeline investment and actually just telling people at a young age, “I see you, here's the three things you need to get started,” and then the sky's the limit. I know there are some programs around coding that have taken off where people go into the community and do that. It will be interesting to see how, if we were to look over time, whether that's really changing the overall dynamics of actual Black engineers, or BIPOC engineers, or a diverse representation of engineers. But I think that that would be the same for policy and the other thing that I would say is it would seem that many companies, in the tech space in particular, did not actually have – whether they should have, or shouldn’t have, they didn't necessarily have to focus on these types of questions for their growth and success in the early stages. So I think that that also meant that there just wasn't an investment in the broader, we need a policy team. Maybe there were people there to focus on policy and ask these questions. But I think as we continue to see the growth and the impact of companies on just everything like our economic systems, the way we behave, and the way we think about different issues. Now, it is really important to think not just about whether building this product is going to net an additional 100,000 users, at the expense of so many other things, will it affect the political conversation happening in this country? Will it affect the access to resources in this place? Now we're seeing the investment in those communities and spaces, for companies that are growing, or building now, I think it's about really investing in there early and make sure you have the right team and the right representation of the team to address the issues that you could foresee being a challenge, or being a space that your product will exist in. But I think policy is certainly one of many professional spaces where you do see underrepresentation really because of access, or knowledge about the opportunity. I'll just say, because this is a long, long way of saying, but I want to end with a personal story where it's just even for myself going into the technology space, I was always interested in policy, but really from the lens of how you can go directly into government as a civil servant and I try to push the machine, or move through the bureaucracy to actually make effective rules, or regulations that mattered, or meant something to different communities and I think government can still be that thing. There's a lot of challenges there, but it still can be that force. What I didn't realize was that this existed in the tech world, that these were conversations that were happening, that companies were having an influence on the way we legislate, or the way we behave, or the way we think about all sorts of issues that would “fit squarely” in the policy world. It was only through my kind of exploration, but also, connecting with people who had gone over to these companies, in these spaces and the privilege that I had of being able to go to different institutions, where I had access to people who could have these conversations with me, where I realized hey, I could be in this space. But it was something that I didn't even realize was a thing and would never have explored, otherwise. So I think that that also for me, recognizing that I had access to resources and tools that helped me even see it as a possibility and so, I think that has to be the thing that we're in the companies that anybody who has the privilege, or capacity to do so should be investing in. CHANTÉ: Yeah. ARTY: I feel like there's some things that we could do in terms of new precedent setting, that we could do as a broader tech community, that could help drive change of adopting cultural practices within the context of organizations and everything that flows from there. So one of the key threads you brought up was that it comes down to values and we ought to start with having a clear set of things that we want to value as a community and build as organizations and build around that. I started thinking back to you mentioned early days of the internet when anybody could do anything and spin stuff up on the internet and I think about some of the early tech interfaces and stuff we had and I feel like there was a lot more community and curation type things, too. We had message boards and I think about AOL days where you have little chatrooms that you join and stuff that were topic-focused. It seems like, as opposed to being these topic-focused finding each other kind of things by having similar shared interests, we've shifted to this follower type model where it's just about networking and connecting with the people and not necessarily being connected for any other purpose other than getting the most followers. So the purpose becomes the network and then the identity stuff is associated with how many followers you have and how many retweets you get. The dynamics of how we've framed identity dynamics and communication dynamics in tech has shifted quite dramatically. Tech has shifted the internet and then the people seem to have kind of shifted a mirror of the technology that we built. So I'm thinking if we take a step back and start with what you're saying in terms of community values and what a reflection of that would look like technology wise, but what if we started with a manifesto and some vision, even if it's rough vision, of what that might look like? Do you have any thoughts on, if you were to write some of those things down, what you would say? COREY: Yeah. This is making me – and I don't know them off the top of my head, but it's making me think of some of the AI ethics work, artificial intelligence work that several people are working on right now. I think of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, it was Dr. Tim McGraw, I think of a few other contemporaries of them, but there's actually, I think an Algorithmic Justice League where they are actually thinking of that. There's a manifesto of sorts, or a thing that we should be believing and that underpins the ethics that we should have as it relates to that technology. If I were to think of just a couple of things, the first would really be around the empowerment piece and I think I mentioned that before that we're promoting people to feel not just that they can speak, or be on a platform, or they can have access, but that they are empowered with the information, which in my mind, when I say empowered means that they can actually, it's a call to action. They believe that they can do more of the thing that they want to do. I think that is important because then it helps you actually center, it makes you actually have to question all of the communities that are on the platform and what you want them to actually be able to be called to do. Right now, not saying empowerment means that I feel like you're removed from the actual impact of what you are allowing to be shared, or allowing to be set on the platform. I think the second is while there are a lot of companies that would say they do this; it is important to call out safety and authenticity as maybe two and three. The idea is to really root in vulnerability, the idea is really to root in this idea of safety, psychological safety, but also physical, depending on whatever the product is. Because again, I think that those two things require you to then center the user and actually really think about well, what does it mean to actually build a safe community where most of all people feel safe psychologically and while also being their truest selves. Those were the three values, or the three areas where I feel like you would shape some type of principles around, but I also just want to say, I love your point because I do think that in some ways, the way in which we consume technology, or consume information now has really centered on this viral nature. I think in some ways, virality motivates the way that information is even propagated. Whereas before, when you're talking about these interests, it may have really been just genuinely about the interest and then it coalesced around that chatroom. But now virality, because that is the name of the game in so many ways, it almost requires people who have figured out the model of how to make things viral as opposed to people who have figured out something to say that is substantive, or something to say that is empowering to our broader community. Those two things are not always overlapping and so, you have people who will influence and then systems that might reinforce that influence when the influence is not necessarily earned on the merits of actually being empowering, or safe, or authentic dialogue. So I think you're absolutely spot on that like, the way that we consume has shifted to maybe wanting things to be viral and virality being almost the barometer of truth and value when that's not always the case. CHANTÉ: It makes me think that perhaps we've been focusing so much on the tech and the product space, that nobody is—I shouldn't say nobody—but we probably haven't focused enough on the actual consumer and making sure that we stand up resources, or a hub to inform them and make them smarter consumers. Because as we know, every click leads to a dollar, or every like leads to something. So I think we reinforce the system unknowingly. COREY: Yeah. CHANTÉ: I often feel this sort of pull, I don't know about you, but I've been watching versus on Instagram. Are you familiar with versus? COREY: Yes, yes. There have been some good ones. There also have been some duds, but yes. CHANTÉ: Duds, I know. Don't get me started, but #BlackTwitter, right? I'm like, “Oh wow.” So where I was getting excited and I was online early for the pandemic, but there was this part of me that just couldn't. I didn't want to get too attached, or too into it because I was like, “Man, look, we're on somebody else's platform making them money.” I know that there's some stuff being done to shift that and I see this a lot with the Black culture specifically, I feel like sometimes we're online and we're making this tech space, or this product really dope and nobody's there to protect us as consumers. I get really upset about that and I just want so badly to make sure that the consumers are educated, that they are informed and understanding how they should, or shouldn't be using their social capital. How they should, or shouldn't be supporting something that probably doesn't always have their best interests at heart. I don't know, it's not like there's one or two of us who have to be responsible, there's a whole – it's everyone's job. Do you of any collectives, or projects, or are you a part of anything that is aiming to do that? COREY: Yeah. Again, a really, really good point. That really resonates because, I'll just say before I answer the question, I've had that conversation around memes because I feel like memes are such a way that we communicate now as a part of popular culture, but I don't have the tools necessary to trace the lineage of the first meme, but I would bet again, going back to the virality of means that there was something that was also infused with Black youth culture in America that made memes popular and then made them more ubiquitous. So this idea of making technology cool is because there is a culture that is infused in again, making it cool. It's a tool that then you have a community, it feels empowered to do something a certain way, but then that empowerment is not protected. I would say that just in my experience in tech, I have seen companies that have made investments in this conversation on equity and well-being where really, the goal is to how do you work more closely with and partner with creators? How do you work more closely with users of the platform, either through research, or actually through direct partnerships to understand how the tool is actually being used and what are ways that actually supplement the way in which they are using it today? I know in the very, very beginning stages of Twitter, that was one reason why Twitter took off was because Twitter was just – I think it might've started, was it a 100 characters? I don't even know now is way more, maybe it started with the 140 characters, but other than just being that platform tweet 140 characters, everything else was community generated RTs, the idea of having a retweet button, these different features very early on were all things that had organically risen out from the community and they just listened. So I think in many ways, it was cool to see our product at that early stage just say we've created a tool where they were just going to see how people use it and then build on top of that. I think that that work's still happening. Companies should continue to invest in it, of course, but really listening to your creators and rather than saying, “Here's what we need you to fit, we are going to start doing that,” doing more of learning how you're using it is either about talking to you directly, or analyzing or examining it and really understanding what will matter to you and now we're augmenting that with this feature that we have listened to you and heard that you need. And then on the reverse side, proactively thinking about these are the issues that people are citing that they have, then make them feel unsafe, make them feel like they can actually have a voice on this platform and we are listening to that and we are actively going address that even if it's not going to necessarily net us an additional dollar spent, or an additional user earn. This is important because this is preventing you from using a platform to the fullest. So I've seen some things since I have been in the space, I think much of it is going to have to be a continued investment. I can't think of any one product, or any one area where I feel like it's like really landed. But I also think that that speaks to the broader point, which is that it's a journey and then as you continue to grow as companies, you're going to have more challenges. But also, I see opportunities because you're bringing more communities and more people onto the platform and as you scale, that has to be a part of the conversation. It's not just going to be a monolith, or one trigger response to a collective user, but actually many different types of users on your platform. CHANTÉ: No doubt. I’m trying to remember when it was specifically, it was probably three, four weeks ago when there was all this big announcement about Clubhouse, for example, going and people specifically felt some kind of way because here you had a situation where there was a bunch of Black users who were early on joining and you even had a Black man who was the representative of the icon and people were like, “Wait a minute. We're not being involved in this whole opportunity for more funding and what does that mean for us?” I listened in that week to a bunch of conversations and folks were incensed; they felt left out, they felt overlooked, taken advantage of. I think we've seen some action spur out of that, but it just reminded me of that moment that we have a lot of power collectively as a community. But you have to have times and spaces where people can organize and communicate that are not dependent upon somebody else's online community that looks free, but maybe it's not and my feeling is that it has to be a multi-stakeholder groups that are holding these technology companies and even the investor community accountable, but also at the same time, there's got to be people who are thinking about just consumer education and consumer engagement period, because we're only going to see more of this, not less of it. COREY: Yes, on multiple points. Having worked in privacy for some time as well doing policy work, that is something that comes up continually is that even as you build out more mechanisms to keep people's data safe, or you're like, “Hey, we actually are committed to the cause and this is all the work that we're going to do to protect your data,” the number of choices become unwieldy if you don't also have an education around all the things that a company can do with your data. So then it almost feels insincere if all of these things are offered without the education, or the continual reinforcement in different ways throughout their product, or their company's values. And then your point about Clubhouse. Actually, I remember reading that and I agree. Again, it really speaks to what I was saying about the meme piece where it’s like there is something that becomes really, really cool and it helps the technology take off and then it suddenly comes ubiquitous in this different way and it's like, “Whoa, wow, did we really think about the core experience?” How the course readings was shaped by a smaller community, but a very important one. But then the other thing I think about with Clubhouse, but I think a lot of apps are guilty of this in the US is, also just from a tech equity perspective, leaning into the iPhone development space in and of itself often, I feel like creates its own barriers around elitism and privilege. Not because iPhone, or Apple is uniquely trying to say, “Here's our image and here's who the customers are that we have.” But actually, that just even being on Clubhouse in and of itself, or iPhone only products often leave out an entire demographic of people when you think even in the US, I think 50 something percent of people are still are Android users and then you think globally, Android actually has a ridiculous market share of way more than Apple globally. So I was just what you're also thinking about the equity perspective and inclusion, I often think about that as well. Even at the outset, you're already narrowing the lens a little bit, and I get some of that as developmental challenges, but given all the success—I remember reading this article about Clubhouse and what they're worth, I'm like, “Wow, it's all of that.” It would seem like for me, the next step would be now invest in the development of an Android app in order to really see us reach that community, a broader community of which some of the people who help shape the core experience are representative sample of, but we could probably get so much more from this broader community. CHANTÉ: Yes like, I wish I had a lot of snap effects going right now. I agree with that, obviously. So thank you. ARTY: We're getting to the end of the show where we finish up with reflections. So the thing that—I mean, there's so many things in the show—I've been thinking about this idea of what it means to center around core values and community and what type of communities we want to build and everything that follows from those core values and especially this idea of centering around empowerment. I feel like that makes a lot of sense: centering around empowerment. If our goal in building these spaces is to empower people, then what are all the systems and policies and things that follow with that goal of empowerment in mind, how do we raise and lift up people, and create supportive spaces that do that? I think back to one of the things you said at the beginning around authenticity and the ability to, or this conversation that you had, where I think it was your manager, Corey, that asked you, “How are you?” which is normally this plain old question that you just reply with, “Oh, good.” There's an expectation that it's almost rhetorical like, we're just moving on and touching base and not really saying anything of substance. But there's something fundamentally different there with, “No, how are you?” and it's not about the words you're saying, it's about the intention to actually listen. The intention of giving someone the space to let their guard down, to be their authentic self, to tell you what's real. With this goal of empowerment, I feel like that's another aspect that's really important is being able to create spaces where we can drop our guard and be real. We can say what's really going on. In order to learn, we’ve got to be able to be ourselves, too and I feel like there's a lesson in the small in that of something that we can all make an effort to do when we interact with people to really ask them, “How are you really doing? What's really going on?” As opposed to trying to fix it, to change anything, to just listen, to really listen to what's going on with them, to finding those commonalities of, “Oh, I guess we all just want to be safe.” Seeing those things that are the same, as opposed to trying to fix, or change someone else, just focusing on listening and hearing where they're coming from. I feel like if we move toward those combination of things with that intention, with that goal in mind, with that being our why, that how we design the technology, how we design the policies that follow from that will help move us in the right direction. CHANTÉ: For me, I'm thinking a lot about this empathy piece, because it makes me pause and say, “While I prioritize it, I value it,” I just don't know how many hiring managers out there are actually looking for and building empathy into one of their core values that they're prioritizing on their hiring rubric. But as we move to this next fourth industrial revolution where we're automating and people are losing their jobs, we can't outsource empathy. So it's something that we definitely need to make sure we are working on individually and if you have children, I hope that people are thinking about ways that they can cultivate that early in young and teachers and educators, and especially folks who want to be a founder, or they want to be an investor. I think this is something that takes a community effort and I want to hear more people talking about empathy. So I'm really happy, Corey, that that's one of the core things you're focusing on with your strategy and your consulting firm. Really looking forward to connecting with you after this, about that because I think let's celebrate it and make sure that we get more people knowing who you are so that we can see a better future. COREY: Thank you. No, I appreciate you saying that and absolutely. I was looking at your background as well and also, just Greater Than Code. I just thought, “Wow, this is a great model, generally.” This idea of voice because really that's what I connected to when I saw the podcast, this idea of, we all have a story and oftentimes, either because on a micro level on a day-to-day, we're not asked to share our story, or in the broader society, or broader infrastructure or whatever it is, technology. We're not invited to share our story in a way that others are. I think it's just so important to have vehicles like this podcast. Again, I saw your work as well. So I hope to continue to be involved in whatever way I can and also, support in whatever way I can. I think there's been so much has come up today is iterative, which is also why I love these conversations because I feel like I literally want to go back through and dissect some of these points. But the one thing that really is still very top of mind for me is this idea of that came up, or we talked about how the model of technology has shifted away from interest-based almost to this follower-based. I think Arty, it was something that you said. The idea that now we're focused on following, influencing, and how that shifts the conversation and it's something that I had not really thought about until this call, but I think it's like a very important thing to think about. Again, we talked about Clubhouse, but I think one of the reasons why Clubhouse may have taken off was because it really seems like it centers the idea of, “I just join a room and just come together around an interest,” and that is enough. I think that that idea, however, the model ultimately works, maybe that's a sign that people have an appetite for really finding that type of space again and maybe that means that virality is not – it might be entertaining and there's going to be echoes of it, but maybe that's where we're shifting, or we need to be thinking about shifting. Maybe if there were companies proactively trying to do more, when it comes to helping stories be told or helping to empower people, maybe that's something that we're thinking about, or that we're investing in more as technologists on the call, but also, as people who use technology and consume technology. So that really stood out to me and that's something I really want to think about more. CHANTÉ: Those are great reflections. Thank you so much. That was such a good note to end on, Corey. It's been a pleasure to have you on our show. Let's make sure that we definitely stay connected. COREY: Yeah, absolutely. It has been an absolute pleasure. I'm excited about this and also thank you for giving me a reason to talk about superpowers and superheroes at different points throughout the show. Special Guest: Corey Ponder.
229: Union Organization with Melissa McEwen
02:21 - Melissa’s Superpower: Being Extremely Online 03:06 - Unionizing Glitch (https://glitch.com/) * Glitch workers sign tech’s first collective bargaining agreement (https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/2/22307671/glitch-workers-sign-historic-collective-bargaining-agreement-cwa) * Misconceptions re: Unions * Engineer Salary Discrepancies * Middle Management, Product Management Unionization * Minority Unions (i.e. Google) * What is a Minority Union? (https://workercenters.com/labors-loophole/what-is-a-minority-union/) * The Rise of Minority Unions: How Social Movements and Tech Giants Could Be Showing Signs of Things To Come (The Rise of Minority Unions: How Social Movements and Tech Giants Could Be Showing Signs of Things To Come) 14:58 - Melissa’s Previous Experience with Working w/ Unions * Communications Workers of America (CWA) (https://cwa-union.org/) * Civic Technology (What Is Civic Technology? (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/19/what-is-civic-technology/)) * Chi Hack Night (https://chihacknight.org/) 17:13 - Positive Skills Union Organizers Should Have 18:32 - Thoughts on Leading with Petitions * We are Frank — a platform for worker voice (https://getfrank.medium.com/we-are-frank-189111ceb54a) * 2018 Google Walkouts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts) 26:58 - Writing Online; Dismantling Publications and the Fracturing of the Media World * The Rise Of Substack—And What’s Behind It (https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2021/01/20/the-rise-of-substack-and-whats-behind-it/) * Melissa McEwen: The best JavaScript date libraries in 2021 (https://www.skypack.dev/blog/2021/02/the-best-javascript-date-libraries/) 29:41 - Evaluating Human Performance * PSA: DevRel isn’t fake !! * How to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for Your Team- Even If You Don't Have a Recruiting Department (https://www.amazon.com/How-Hire-Players-Recruiting-Department/dp/0470562242) * People Skills 43:21 - Getting Started with Organizing a Union * Use Signal (https://signal.org/en/), Not Slack * Be Harder to Fire Reflections: Casey: Hearing success stories re: unionizing. Jacob: How people skills can be a function of your individual team. Melissa: Studying more about unions in other countries. Rein: Looking more into co-ops and collectivisations. An injury to one is an injury to all. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_injury_to_one_is_an_injury_to_all) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JACOB: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 229. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with my co-panelist, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. I'm here today with Melissa McEwen. Melissa is a web developer, working in content now. She often writes about the JavaScript ecosystem. She helped unionize Glitch, which recently signed their first Collective Bargaining Agreement in late February. Welcome, Melissa. So glad to have you. MELISSA: Hi, everyone. CASEY: We like to start each show by asking you a certain question. Melissa, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MELISSA: My superpower is being extremely online and I acquired it by being given computers way too young and having nothing to do, but play with computers. CASEY: I like that phrase “extremely online.” What does that look like today for you? MELISSA: It means, I know way too much about what's going on in Twitter and the internet in general and sometimes, I'll make references that you only know if you're extremely online and it's kind of embarrassing. I don't even know what it's like to not be extremely online, but I'm trying to stop being extremely online because it's overwhelming trying not to check Twitter every 5 seconds. CASEY: Oh, yeah. I did that a lot, too. I don't know if I would describe myself as extremely online, but I might have seen some of the same memes as you and I think that would [chuckles] give me a little bit of that. MELISSA: Yeah. I mean, memes, what's the latest drama on Twitter today, that kind of stuff. JACOB: Is there a way to turn that superpower and help people around you or, how do you leverage that? MELISSA: Yeah, the only thing that's good about it, I would say is that you know a lot. I try to write about things and provide my knowledge to other people. I mean, you know a lot, but on a surface level, that's the problem so, you have to always be aware of that. I'm not an expert on unions and for the Glitch union, I was one of the original organizing committee folks, but I was laid off last year in March and there were 18 people, I think laid off. So the union has been going on without me and that's just great. Me and some other externally online people, when we started the union, we leveraged our externally onliness because we were connected to a lot of people who helped us like the CWA, which is the Communications Workers of America. We found them online, for example and they were critical in getting the union actually started because we'd been talking about it, but they were the people that pushed us and they're one of the bigger unions. They've been around for a long time. They have an organized telecommunications workers, primarily and now they're doing some tech stuff. So very interesting. JACOB: Well, as someone who is moderately online at best, I have been reading a little bit about recent union news with Glitch, but I would love to hear your story about how it started and how it brought us to today. MELISSA: Yeah, I mean there's only so much I can say, but the stuff that really was – building a union is about connecting with your coworkers and a lot of people have said, “How are we going to build a union to the remote workplace?” Well, I was remote and half the company was remote. That's one good thing about being extremely online is you’re probably used to talking to people online. I connected to people in my workplace and people on my team. At first, it was mainly people on my own team and then what CWA teaches you to do is to build connections in your workplace. It's almost like you map it out and you talk to other people in your workplace and you try to leverage those connections. I wasn't connected to everybody in the workplace, but I was connected to some other people who were connected to people I wasn't connected to. So it was challenging in that this was not an office where I could go see these people every day. I had to kind of – you can't just sneakily invite someone to a call unionizing. You have to actually build social capital and build relationships and then turn those into those connections you need to build a union. A lot of us had been following union stuff in tech. I was a member of Tech Workers Co, I think others were and we thought since Glitch is a very diverse workplace, we want to make sure that workers have a seat at the table and can actually help each other and to help the company do right by the workers. We had some bumps along the road. It is hard to organize people remotely and a lot of people have misconceptions about unions. They think unions are only for certain workers like people working in a mine, or they have bad impressions of unions. Like, I don't know. I grew up and my parents were like, they told me that unions were bad. We watched On the Waterfront and they were like, “Oh, look, unions, they’re so corrupt.” But a union is just like an organization. It's a big organization and they have a history and they have a context and a union is just like anything. Like a company. It can be bad; it can be good. It's based on the people and once you join a union, you can help guide that union by being part of it. JACOB: I would think an extremely online person would be very good at that. MELISSA: Yeah, it did help to be constantly on Slack and on Twitter. JACOB: And good at really just making those connections. That would not come naturally to make all those personal connections, what you just said. MELISSA: Yeah, but also, it was. I do think people who had those real life – who were at the office did have an advantage in forming those connections because not everybody at Glitch was extremely online, for example. Also, meeting each other in real life, occasionally like, we'd go to the conferences and stuff, that really helped. It's complicated about how much organizing you can do in the workplace and at what times. You don't want to ever do it on times are supposed to be working, for example, so. CASEY: What were some of the things that made this unionization effort successful and possible and what were some of the things that got in the way? I think we've covered some already. MELISSA: Yeah. I think having a pretty social workplace, that was social online, but that doesn't include everybody. There’s some people who were more online than others, for example and the fact that we relied so much on online organizing, it was harder to reach those people. So it was very crucial that we have people in the New York City office who were able to do some on the ground in-person organizing and getting those people on board was like, once we got those people on board, that was a very important thing that we did. Because originally, it was all remote people and then we added in the New York City office people. Yeah, the bumps along the road are just misconceptions about unions, what they mean. People can union bust themselves just by having these misconceptions like, “Oh, union is a third-party. It'll affect my relationship with my manager. I can't be friends with my manager anymore.” It's not true at all. So some of the organizing committee had been in unions before. Like, there was one woman, who was a social worker, who had been a social worker union and I had been in a Civil Workers Union before. So I knew that I was friends with my managers in these unions and I mean, not that being friends with the manager is the priority, but the idea that if you're friends with a manager, you can't do a union. That's just not true. But some people thought that. CASEY: The biggest misconception I can think of is why do you well-compensated professionals need a union and I'm sure you've heard this all the time. MELISSA: Oh yeah, that’s a big one. CASEY: Yeah. Fill us in for that. Like what do you say to that? MELISSA: I think so. Online, someone was like, “Oh, it's cultural appropriation of blue-collar workers.” I do not agree with that. I think all workers benefit from a union and it is just an organization that allows workers to negotiate with their bosses and on a fair playing field. It's not a culture. You don't have to be in the movie, The Irishman, or On the Waterfront, or even know people like that. It's just a way of organizing a workplace and having a seat at the table, so. JACOB: You mentioned earlier that I think, or maybe you implied that this union joins multiple disciplines, too. Is that true? MELISSA: Yeah, like we had engineers and then we also had a media department. That's where things would be hard because a lot of workplaces are quite siloed and I've always been against that. Like, I hate the term non-technical for example, like video production people, those are the most technical people I know they're literally working with like technical equipment every day and they know so much about it. Those people are tactical. And then another big obstacle is who is eligible for a union? Who can join? It's not clear because tech has roles that aren't very traditional, like product manager. Is that a manager, or is that an individual contributor and often, that’s hashed out on the negotiating table. It's based on all these laws and I've read some of the laws, I'm not an expert, but it's good to read a little bit of the labor law just to understand. But even if you know it, it's interpreted differently by different courts and stuff. There's a National Labor Review Board that reviews labor disputes and stuff and that was Trump's appointed board. So we wanted to make sure we got a voluntary recognition because we didn't want anything to do with that board at that time because they were very hostile towards workers. JACOB: The reason I was curious about joining together all kinds of different people from different roles, I was just curious if that diverse workforce came with a diversity of priorities and goals for a union and if those presented any challenges. MELISSA: Yeah. There's a big class difference between engineers and people outside of engineering. Engineers are overwhelmingly paid higher than people outside of engineering, for example and I totally understand the resentment towards engineers. We need to acknowledge that if you're organizing multiple people and outside of engineering. I mean, the fact that engineering is so well-compensated. I don't understand why, for example, a video producer isn't compensated the same as an engineer. It's just an accident of history, how culturally valued, supply and demand, all these things mixed up together. So you have to realize that and when it comes down to money, paying dues. For an engineer, it might be like, “Oh, you're taking 1%, or 2% for the union,” and that's like, “Oh, that’d take you away from being able to go on vacation.” Whereas, for someone who is making a lot less, that's taking away from their ability to pay rent. So that is really, really hard and I don't have a good solution for that. I wish unions would offer things like maybe peg it to your income, maybe not, maybe at a lower percentage, but it tends to not be that high of a percentage; it's 1 to 3%. But acknowledging that that can be the difference between someone being able to afford or not. Especially the salary ranges were quite extreme in our case so, that was really hard. CASEY: I'm listening to this conversation based on my background as a product manager who happened to have managed engineers, designers, and product managers, I don't know how that structure came into play. But even that tier, I wanted to be part of a union, but I think it's US law maybe that gets in the way that says managers at any level can't be unionizing in any form, not even like—let's use a synonym for a union—collective people who tell each other, “Yes, you deserve more money,” or something like that. It's not we're not incentivized to work together in any way and we pretend that the HR department of the company does that for us, which they do the opposite often. What do you think about that middle management kind of thing and how it plays into product management? Your thought process? MELISSA: Yeah. That really sucks because then it becomes like some people feel left out who wanted to be part of the union and at that point, they feel like, “Oh, am I part of –?” Like, they're obviously not C-suite so that's really hard. Other countries have other types of unions like sectoral bargaining that get around that. I don't know that much about that, but we weren't sure if a product manager fit under the definition of qualify, or not. It just depends on if you make decisions on employment, if you tell people what to do, there's a lot of criteria. We did find that product managers were not going to be part of the union. So what does the product manager do? Well, they can't organize themselves, but they're just not legally protected under this bargaining thing under a labor law. So that really sucks and I don't know what the solution is. I guess, getting involved in bigger organizations that work for unionization. The Google union is very interesting and that is a different form of union. It's called a minority union and I don't know that much about those, but I know that people who are managers can join that one, but it has fewer legal protections. So I assume when CWA decided to organize Google under a minority union, it was because they felt they were not capable of doing the traditional union because there are so many obstacles to doing so in Google—Google’s size and multiple locations. It's very difficult. You can organize however you want, it's just what is legally protected and that kind of goes in, in that article. I talk about petitions, for example. Petitions are an example of organizing. That's not unionization, it's not protected by US labor law, but it is a form of organizing. The Google walkout, that's a form of organizing. That's not unionization. You just have fewer legal protections and you don't have the structure that you get from a union when you do those things. CASEY: Well, that's awesome. I'm not up-to-date on this. I'm going to be Googling minority union and sectoral bargaining after this call. MELISSA: Yeah. I didn't even know what a minority union until that came out. I was like, “Wow, I guess, someone should write a book.” There probably is a book. I'm going to find that book. JACOB: Melissa, what brought you to doing this in the first place? Did you have experience with organizing before, or was it something new to you? MELISSA: I didn't have any experience organizing, I suppose, but I was in a union before. I worked at University of Illinois in Chicago and their IT departments are in a union, an older established union. As soon as you join as an employee there, you're a part of that union. Actually unions, some of them aren't that great. Our union was kind of mediocre, to be honest. They barely involved people, for example, in the very top down. That's one thing when you're organizing, you have to choose which union you're going to organize under, or even to start your own union. We thought about starting our own union. I don't feel that qualified to hire union lawyers. You need to advantage money because CWA provided that all the lawyers and stuff like that and all the structure. CWA has gotten a lot of flack on Twitter recently with the Google union stuff. People have dug up the fact that they've represented security guards in the past, but it's a big organization; it's like working with the government. You can't expect perfection, we've got to get involved. If you want to change things, you've got to be involved yourself. I'm very skeptical of the idea that we should just throw that away and start our own thing as tech workers. Because I think people of different ages and classes and stuff have so much to teach us and that's what you get when you join a big union like CWA and you can't demand they fit your extremely online standards. So if you want them to follow the standard, you've got to join and get involved. JACOB: So definitely a politics of compromise from the get-go. MELISSA: Yeah, and I've been involved with the civic technology a little bit. So I was a little bit familiar with that. I've worked in government contracting and I've gone to Chai Hack Night, which is a Chicago meetup, for quite a while. It's a Chicago meetup focused on civil technology and government. I was familiar with some of that, but if you're a startup person, maybe that's harder. You expect unions are going to cater to you, treat you like a freaking princess or whatever, but no, they're not. They are a saboteurization. They've got members, they have a history, and you've got to take that for what it is. CASEY: All right, Melissa, you brought to the table to the union organizing effort your superpower of being extremely online. What other skills did some of the union organizers have that really helped? MELISSA: Yeah. Actually being consistent and organized, that's really important. Organizing meetings. I'm not into that kind of thing and thankfully, there were other people who did that and I thank them quite a lot. Taking notes, following up, once you make me angry, I'm very effective at arguing with people. So that's a good thing about extremely online, but it's bad about being extremely online, but it did come in handy a few times when unionizing. But otherwise, doing in-person on the ground work, I couldn't do because I was remote and organizing the meetings, taking notes, following up with CWA, coordinating between different people, that stuff. The other people helped with that. The other members of the organizing committee and then after the union was recognized, we had an election and some people did that election where you elect the reps and other people did that and I was really happy because I was tired at that point. [chuckles] CASEY: So I'm going into a little bit of a different topic. Melissa, I think you mentioned something about companies and nonprofits who want to lead with petitions and you have some thoughts on that I'm curious to hear. MELISSA: I am super anti petitions. I think these organizations push them and I think they're just antithetical to unionization. A Coworker, for example, they really push you to do these petitions and a, you're alerting your boss that you're organizing, you're doing it under a way that's not legally protected. Why don't you just unionize? I understand that some people can't and if you genuinely can't, that's great, but I wouldn't trust Coworker to tell you if it's okay, or not. I have noticed that some of the conflict on Twitter regarding the Google union, some people involved with that are also involved in Coworker. So I'm really against that and another company that's spread it out. It's a startup, they're called Get Frank but they're also doing petitions. They're very antithetical to unionization and people don't want to say that because the people who were involved with that are nice people and some of them are even involved with Tech Workers Co and stuff and they're nice online, or they're well-respected, but at some point, you’ve got to say, “This is just anti-union.” REIN: Yeah. I mean, taking a collective bargaining opportunity that can stretch across multiple issues and organize the workforce to push for all of them and turning into a petition about a specific thing that has marginal support. I don't see how that helps. I mean, I don't think that those startups are disrupting business organization. I think they're disrupting union organization. MELISSA: Yeah, and I think more people should call them out and the fact that a lot of people who the media goes to for comments about tech organizing are like – so, Liz Fong-Jones, I really respect her. She's on Twitter and she's a member of the board on Coworker and I find that not good. REIN: I mean, I guess the argument is that any place where you can voice concerns and generate support within the workers, the employees is better than none, but that's not how the world works. We can have unions, too, or instead actually putting effort into that means that you're not spending that time putting effort into organizing. MELISSA: Yeah. So when we were first thinking about unionizing, I was on Tech Workers Co and they connected me to people at Coworker and they were really pushing out to do a petition. I'm really lucky that my coworker, Steph, could have connected with CWA because she was like, “No, let's talk to CWA.” CWA took it from there and they actually got us the motivation and the resources we needed to unite us. Whereas, Coworker was like, “Oh, we love unions, but why don't you do this petition first, it's building organization?” and CWA is like, “No.” Unfortunately, some people are taking the CWA being against that as an insult on them personally, which is really weird, that it's an insult for people who did past organization efforts that weren’t unionizing. I don't see why that is relevant. I understand sometimes you can't unionize and I respect other organization efforts, but you're taking an example of a company that can unionize and you're pushing them to do a petition. You're wasting their time. You're endangering their jobs. It's just bad. REIN: Well, I think if there was evidence that it starting with petitions led towards more formal union organizing, I would be more in favor of it, but I don't know of any. MELISSA: Yeah. People use the Google walkout, for example and I guess, the Google unions and the controversy on Twitter was about how the union wasn't involving the past organizers who did all this work for the Google walkout. I recognize Google walkout was an amazing thing and the people who organized that were really great, but that doesn't mean that you have to use their expertise to unionize. A union should be for the current employees. When I'm talking about our union at Glitch, I'm not speaking for the union. I was laid off. I'm not a member anymore. That's very sad. It's very unfair, but I'm not a member and the employees who are working there have insight into the company that I don't. So I don't expect them to recognize me, or to ask me for advice, or anything. I don't even talk to them that much anymore because that's their sphere. CASEY: I'm not an expert on Coworker, but this reminds me of another metaphor a little bit. Let me know if this is close, or not, or similarities and differences. So you know how when you look on the bottom of a solo cup, you see a triangle, or a cycle symbol with a number? Some of those aren't really recyclable and the lobbyists who made that happen, and you’re required to put them on, knew that ahead of time. So they are doing this small change, “Look, you can do the thing,” and then that stops people from pushing back against the production of it. It's helping, but not really and I'm hearing your view of Coworker seems to be helping, but not really. MELISSA: I mean, the Frank one is even worse. They're a for-profit startup. I'm like, “If anyone is giving them positive coverage, they are not asking the right questions here.” Actually, when I saw them written about, I attempted to join just to see what they were about and they rejected me because they were like, “Oh, you're already in a union. You don't need us.” So very interesting. They occasionally email me asking for my feedback, but I'm like, “I don't think you're worth my time.” REIN: If someone wanted to make a platform for unionizing, but I don't think you're going to get much traction in Silicon Valley on that one. MELISSA: There is one person who's doing that. It's called Unit, but I don't know that much about it. I'm just very skeptical of the idea that tech can disrupt unions and it's the easy way out to say, “Oh, the old unions, they're not radical enough. They don't cater to tech workers.” To throw that all away for those reasons is bad in my opinion, because they're not perfect, existing unions, but you're unionizing with a diverse workforce that has a history and has power and I don't know. I think it's also classist, too, like, “Oh, we don't want to organize with these people that aren't tech workers. We don't want to organize with these blue-collar workers.” They're not thinking that maybe explicitly, but that's what they're saying in a way. They don't want to say that, but that's what they're saying. REIN: Yeah. I personally have a problem with trade unions that is that they fracture the workforce and they prevent people with different trades from organizing together and historically, that's been on purpose. Like there's a reason the AFL is still around, but the Knights of Labor aren't. MELISSA: Yeah. I mean, unions are organizations, they’re just like companies and stuff. There's some that even have dark histories of racism and stuff like that. Although, trade unions are a little different than like CWA. This is where I wish I was more up to the terminology, but it's very complicated. REIN: I would just like to unionize whole companies and not worry about what job titles people have because I think that's the systems thinking way to do it. MELISSA: Yeah, and we unionized everyone in our company that qualified under the labor, the national labor law, and not just engineers so, that was good. Luckily, the people were into engineers being craftsmen, or whatever are usually typically anti-union, but otherwise, you'd think that they'd be like, “Oh, we need an engineer's trade union because we're like electricians, or something.” But I think that would not be a good direction. CASEY: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense that there are unions for people who work at a company, separate from groups of people working on a technology like, Ruby user groups and all the other meetup groups for every technology everywhere and the conferences. It's like the skills are separate from the union, from the company and it's funny, I guess maybe historical that a lot of them are conflated together. All the engineers in the company are doing both a little bit. I like that we're cleanly splitting it now sometimes. That sounds great. Melissa, I noticed that you have a Substack newsletter, which is a popular thing lately. Not that you're working on a lot lately. I know we talked about that, but there's a trend for individual people to be writing more and more online lately and it seems like you're aware of that and in that sphere. What's your experience lately writing online, trying to get an audience and all that? The process. MELISSA: I say no to Substack because I'm like, “This is just more work and I don't need any more work.” I started a Substack because I was like, “Oh, a lot of people have Substacks.” But then I was like, “Oh, this requires me to do, this is another job.” You have to have a consistent thing and at least, we are starting to – Substack encourages paying creators. That's good. But at some point, it's like, “Oh, I'm paying like ten different creators. I wish there was this thing where I could just pay them all at the same time and they could have jobs and benefits. Oh, that's called a publication. Too bad, we've systematically disabled these by predatory capitalists, hedge funds and stuff, buying them and disposing of them.” Like what's happened to the Chicago Tribune. I had friends who worked there and that thing it's basically just been totally dismantled by predatory companies. So I think Substack is going to be here and other similar models are going to be here for the foreseeable future. But I don't think they are – I think it's sad. CASEY: Have you worked with any of the traditional publications to try to get things published? I know you do JavaScript content work. MELISSA: Yeah. So I originally was a food writer and I've worked for Chicagoist. I left Chicagoist because I didn't have time due to my tech job, but they unionized and they were shut down because they unionized and that's really sad. A lot of my friends lost their jobs. So I have a little bit of experience in the media world and I've watched the media world become so fractured and precarious and I think the tech industry has been unfortunately, a negative actor in that. But now, I primarily write about JavaScript and I do so professionally. It'd be nice to write about food instead, but I like JavaScript. I like coding a lot so that's cool. There's no jobs in food writing, though. CASEY: Tell us about something you wrote recently. MELISSA: I wrote about JavaScript date libraries and like the different ones that are out there and when you should use the library and when you shouldn't use the library and that's for the blog I work for, which is called Skypack blog and I do DevRel all for them in there, a CDN for JavaScript modules. Oh, here's the thing we can talk about: how people attack DevRel as being non-technical and I hate that. JACOB: Yeah, please. MELISSA: There was a tweet this week, or maybe it was on Friday, it was like, “Offend a developer relations person in one tweet,” and I'm like – so it was a variation on the original one, which was, “Offend a software engineer, offend a DBA in one tweet,” and those were often there a software engineers making fun of software engineers or DVA's people making jokes about data structures, or a bad data. The DevRel one was like, “Oh, your job is fake.” That's what all the jokes were and most of them were not from DevRel people and I'm like, “I hate this.” I used to be a frontend developer and people used to joke like that about frontend developers, like, “Oh, you just play with CSS all day and you just push little boxes around the page and give them different colors.” We need to recognize that there’s sexism involved in this and also, racism because frontend development and DevRel tend to be more diverse subsections of tech. I'm just tired of men saying a job is fake and that I'm not technical. I left frontend dev because of that, partially. I shouldn’t have done that because the end of the day, there's no way to convince these people that you're a real engineer. They're just not going to be convinced because they're sexist and they're jerks and they should be deleted. REIN: Yeah. It was kind of funny when it was software engineers laughing at themselves, but it turned into punching down pretty quickly and then it just got me in and I did not like it. I would say to those people that they should try a day in the life of a DevRel and see if you think you're good at it. MELISSA: Yeah. It's thinking that, okay, if you have these skills, you don't have the technical skills and also, that your other skills aren't valuable at all. This is a constant struggle, working with engineers, especially working in cross-departmental is engineers not recognizing other skills. I was talking about video editing before. I'm like, “That is the worst thing I can totally think of is calling a video editor non-technical; they're literally the most technical people I could think of.” They're walking with software technology and also, a lot of engineers who are like, “Oh, anyone can write things,” and I'm like, “I've edited y’all’s writing. I know you can't write.” [chuckles] Even me, I feel like sometimes the more engineering I do, the worst I become as a writer. That's scary, but I try to balance it. I try to be a mediocre engineer and a mediocre writer. REIN: I want people to stop doing that because it’s just a shitty thing to do, but I will also say that as you get more experienced as a software engineer – so I'm a principal now, which means I'm a huge deal, but as you get more experienced, you need to get good at a lot of the stuff that DevRels are good at. You need to be able to convince people that your ideas are good. You need to be able to communicate both verbally and written in writing. You need to give a shit about product and marketing and customer support and people who aren't engineered. You have to start doing all that stuff if you want to grow as an engineer. So to some extent, I think these people are limiting themselves more than are limiting DevRel. They should still stop being shitty people, though. MELISSA: Yeah. The whole principal engineer thing is funny because I was just thinking about how every company has a different definition for principal, senior, junior. That's one of the things that a union can help with and otherwise, it can be very arbitrary and you can feel like they're used to discriminating against people. So if the union can negotiate what a ladder is and what it means, that's way better than having just a random manager do it. That's my rant with all of tech. We're always constantly reinventing the same thing over and over again. Ladders were like, “Oh, we’ve got to build this from scratch for ourselves. Even though we have no training on building ladders, we're just going to invent this because we know everything because we're engineers.” Same with interviewing process. I'm like, “Oh, there's decades of research on interview process. but you want to invent your own new interviewing process.” I'm like, “At some point, you're just like experimenting on people and that's unethical.” I'm like, “Take your weird games elsewhere. If you want to design weird games, play Dungeons & Dragons, or something.” REIN: Yeah. I mean, if you want to take human performance seriously, you can do that. People have been doing that for decades. You just need to go take a course and read some books and started taking it seriously. It's not hard. I mean, it's hard to evaluate human performance because human performance is very complex, but it's impossible if you don't know what you're doing. MELISSA: Yeah, and I tried to get – any interview process I'm involved with designing. I'm like, “First of all, why am I involved with designing this? I'm not qualified. Second of all, at least I did read some research and I do know that the research shows that you want to do a structured interview.” If I can just get people to agree to that one thing, it's so much better than if they're just asking random questions. So structured interview means you agree on a structure beforehand for the interview, you agree on questions and what you're going to talk to the person about, or what exercise you're going to do, if you insist on doing programming exercise. You ask the same ones to every candidate. There's other things you could do to make it more fair, but if you just have that one baseline. Otherwise, it's so arbitrary. REIN: There's a book called Hiring A-Players, or something like that and I like some of the advice that it has, but I think the idea that you can distinguish between “A and B players” in an interview is pretty marginal. But I do like the parts about trying to make things more evidence-based when you're trying to assess capability. I think that a lot of the hiring practices we have today mostly are about providing motivated reasoning to hire people who look like you and that's about 90% of what they do. MELISSA: Yeah, and there's also this thing, I will die in this hill, but I have people who insist if we don't do a specific code exercise, or do some kind of screener that we're going to hire someone who can't code, who literally can't code and some people will have insisted that they've worked with such people. I'm really skeptical that like can't code. What does that mean? I don't know. Does it mean they just didn't integrate with the team correctly? No one tried to help them? I'm not sure. I'm just really skeptical of that. It just sounds like more hoops to jump through, but I have not convinced anybody of that besides myself. [chuckles] At least in workplaces. REIN: I think in my career, I've maybe worked with one person who I genuinely thought couldn't code, but that's when I was pretty new. What I think now is that they were really not put in an environment where they could be successful. They were dropped in immediately into a high-pressure scenario, with little experience, with a team that was small, under-resourced, over pressurized, and didn't have time to support them. So what I thought then was, “Wow, this guy sure can't code. He sucks.” What I think now is, “Wow, we sure screwed up putting him in that position.” MELISSA: Yeah. I've taught people to code who are 12. I'm really skeptical that someone was hired that managed, I don't know, I just sound like they're not managed well, or not onboarded well, but that'd be a cool, like, I don't know. Maybe I'm becoming too interested in HR, I will become an HR researcher and study the phenomenon of people saying that their coworkers can't code and what does that mean? REIN: Yeah. MELISSA: I mean actually find those people, ask them, and then find the people who supposedly can’t code and find out they actually can. They were in a very difficult environment, for example, or I don't know. I've been in environments where getting the dev environment started took you five days. No wonder they had trouble; you thought they couldn't code because you did set them up to being able to code. They had to install 40 different things and do a proxy, or whatever. So yeah. JACOB: I’m someone who’s very – well, there's that phenomenon stereotype threat you perceive that other people are making preconceived judgements about you. Like, “Oh, I'm the only person of color in my team and I can tell that I'm not expected to do well.” It affects your performance and as a white male, that actually does make some sense to me. If I can feel that I'm going to be judged for the output that I put out, instantly whether it's I didn't follow the great style, or it looks like my work is going to be picked apart immediately. That's just going to be debilitating and I'm just going to be constantly focused about looking good rather than trying to solve the problem. That is not what – Rein’s story does not surprise me at all. MELISSA: Yeah. If I actually hired someone who couldn't code, that would be actually exciting to me, it would be like My Fair Lady, or something because I could definitely teach them how to code and I'd be really impressed because I was like, “Oh, they were able to talk about all these projects and stuff and not actually be able to code?” I don't believe this person exists, by the way. REIN: The other thing I really wish people would understand is that human performance is ecological. The context matters. If you take one person and drop them into five different hypothetical companies, you'd get five different outcomes. They'd perform in different ways. You wouldn't get the same performance for them in those different companies because it's not just about the person. MELISSA: Yeah, and it's also about the demands of the job. I worked with one guy and people told me he couldn't code and what they actually meant was that they just didn't think he was technical, or something, but he was coding every day. He was doing Dribble templates, which is not considered the highest level of work by some snobby engineers. But that guy could definitely code and he did his job and it was very unfair to say he couldn't code. CASEY: I have a story I can share about some evidence-based interviewing I did back at the IT department. We evaluated hundreds of student employees to fix laptops every year—we hired a whole bunch—and we evaluated them based on the people skills and their technical skills on a scale we put that into data for all the points that evidence and structured questions and all that. Some people had a 5 on people's scales out of 5 and 1 on technical skills, or vice versa, or something close to that. And then we look back a year, or 2, or 3 later, after they had time to learn and grow in the position, we loved all the people with the 5 on people's skills. They were the best employees. They learned the most over time. We're proud of them. They were great to work with. They taught other people a lot, too. But the ones with the technical 5s weren’t people ones. A lot of them resigned, or didn't like the job, or people avoided working with them, they were solo employees. Maybe they got some work done, but that lesson that you can learn the technical part, but you can't necessarily learn the people part. Some of it's learnable if you're motivated, but the disposition is what really drove success in that role. I think that applies everywhere. It's not surprising. MELISSA: I wish there were more approaches teaching people skills because, I don't know, it feels like there's a lot of trainings for engineering skills, but not for people's skills. I've definitely like, I was raised by parents who were weird and homeschooled me. So I definitely use a lot of stuff like books to learn people skills and stuff like that. I don't know. It's super basic, but How to Win Friends and Influence People, that one. You could just read that. I mean, it gets you some of the way there. So I wish there were more resources like that. REIN: Yeah. I would say that you can learn people skills, but companies don't teach them. That's not what companies think is part of their responsibility. They think that they're hiring the person as they are and can teach them technical things. That's another problem, which is that companies aren't providing the opportunities to grow that people need. JACOB: There's probably different people's skills for different companies, that would be successful. MELISSA: Yeah, and it's the same thing. It's the saying that I've heard at workplace is like, “Oh, he doesn't know how to code.” I've also heard the same thing like, “He has no social skills.” It's like something you're born with and can't be changed and that's just your lot in life and I don't believe that. I was homeschooled and when I first went to school, you would have said, “I had poor social skills,” but now I have serviceable social skills. JACOB: I think Casey pointed out an important distinction between a disposition to be personable and learn and apply people skills versus the skills you have at a particular moment. I, as a neurodiverse person, I think that's a really important thing because I'm sure people have said behind my back many times in my life that I don't have people's skills without commenting on the disposition of my ability to do well and interface with people. I think they’re two different things. MELISSA: I think neurodiverse people—I'm also in that category—also sometimes are even better at certain people's skills because we've been told we have these issues and we really want to think about them. I've read a lot of books; I don't think most neurotypical people have read as many books as I have on human psychology. I wasn't a psychology major—I just want to know why are these normal people trying to get me to do these things? What does it mean? That's a level I’m asking? Yeah, but that's a skill and it's a learned skill that is valuable to me. REIN: Can we talk about unions again because I have a question? If you already talked about this before I got here, just let me know. But my question is: what would you say to someone who really has no idea how to get started with this, but thinks that there's an opportunity to organize their company is worried about retaliation and things like that and wants to get started? MELISSA: Yeah. Get in contact with, they could DM me and I could connect them to people at the current Glitch union, or two, you can approach a union directly. CWA is happy to help. The union that Kickstarter organizers worked under OPEIU, I think is also another option. It can be hard to pick a union because some only do local organizing, but there are some that are national like CWA. CWA has a lot of resources. I would just go with them at first. But you can always do your research and stuff. I'd just be careful with people who direct you to those petition sites, or whatever and that did happen to me. REIN: And don’t do your organizing on the company Slack. MELISSA: Oh yeah, for sure. Use Signal, don't do it on company time when you're supposed to be working, build social relationships with people at work. Although, it could be, I don’t know if – I was a member of a company where they specifically seem to discourage social relationships. I was a contractor. I wonder if that was a way that they were discouraging organization and unionizing. You see that with Uber and stuff like that. Uber drivers, they're not given a company Slack, pr whatever, or even like, they don't have a way to chat with other drivers. They've had to do this on their own time on Facebook; they've used Facebook to organize. So definitely don't use any company resources, or company time. You're not legally protected if you do that. If you do contact CWA and stuff, they'll tell you what's legal and illegal. It is for example, legal to organize during lunch, I believe, but you should definitely check that beforehand. And then you get into issues if you're remote, time zones, everyone has lunch at a different time. You have to be creative. REIN: Yeah. It turns out it's legal, except for all of these loopholes that make it not legal and companies are incentivized to make the case that what you did was illegal so that they can fire you. So just be extra careful. MELISSA: Yeah. I don't know. I've known of union organizers that they're going to find a way to fire some of them, but if you can stand up and up in your job, you're harder to fire. Make sure to attend all your meetings. Don't be late to work. I am not a fan of that and I think it's very unfair that you have to be expected to live by this perfect standard that non-organizing employees don't have to follow, but I'm willing to do it for the union. REIN: Yeah. I mean, just be aware that once it becomes apparent that this is what you're doing, they're going to try to fire you—any company will—and so you need to be on your best behavior even more so than you were before. MELISSA: And it is scary organizing unions. I've often wondered would I have been laid off if there was a union, or not? I don't know. But the thing is you negotiate severance for me and I didn't have to do that individually. So it gave me a good cushion when I was laid off and I know people who are laid off who didn't have those things. A company can hurt you even if you don't unionize and at least, unions give you some protection and I'm very grateful to CWA negotiating my severance. REIN: So are we getting close to reflections? CASEY: I think it is time for reflections. I can go first. As a product manager and engineering manager before, I've always been interested in being part of a union and it's awesome hearing a success story about how, what happened at a company, even though it was the formal type that I'm not eligible for as a manager. But now I'm very interested in looking up some of these alternative forms like sectoral marketing, minority union. I think there's a whole lot happening recently that could help middle managers like me and a lot of my roles have the benefits. Often, I hear, “No, you can't possibly ever be part of a union. Why would you even ask that question?” And it's just great to hear someone actually who has worked with a union and say, “No, that's possible. It's just a different form. Not covered by loss.” That's what I want to hear. That's what I wanted to believe. MELISSA: Yeah. It's so unfair. Unions are just what's the law now doesn't have to be the law tomorrow, for example and different countries have different forms of unions and stuff, so. JACOB: I'm thinking more about the thread we got on about personal skills, people skills and I'm thinking more about how those can be really just a function of the culture of your team and who's on it and what everyone's individual needs are and how their brains are wired and so many other factors. I'm just thinking about, “Well, what are the right skills that I need for my team rather than just an arbitrary, or a universal list of what those skills might be?” MELISSA: Yeah. I'm thinking I need to like – I'm here talking about unions and there's so much I don't know about unions. I'd like to study unions in other countries, especially. I really want to learn about different forms of unionization and really delve into the history of unionization. I've done it a little. I was never taught that much about unionization in school and stuff like that, especially from homeschool because my parents were anti-union. But even when I went to public school, after being homeschooled, we really didn't talk that much. I know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, but I think for most people, we don't know that much about it and I definitely want to beef up my history and international knowledge on that. REIN: Yeah. I think also looking into collectivization work around collectives, things like that, there's a tech consultancy that does the websites for Verso and Haymarket and some other lefty publications and there are workers collective and there are actually a surprising number of them. MELISSA: Yeah. That's super interesting to me. I've done a little bit of co-ops and stuff. I've been members of co-ops. There is an interesting article, I forget where I saw it, but it was about how co-ops can be good, but they're not the answer to work, or organizing because often they replace work, or unionization. For example, they were talking about this coffee shop that they were trying to unionize and they all got fired and then they formed a co-op and that was seen as success, but it's not necessarily. For example, I'm a member of a co-op, a food co-op, and the workers there were trying to unionize and the co-op was union busting them and that was like, wow, that is really special and as a member of the co-op, I was writing to the board. I was like, “How dare you, I'm going to quit.” [chuckles] We should recognize the union. They really fought that union and I was like, “This is supposed to be – co-op is supposed to be empowering to workers,” but just like unions, there are many different forms of co-ops. There's a very interesting history, especially internationally and I don't even know the tip of the iceberg on that. But I'm very fascinated and having been in co-ops and been involved with co-ops. Another issue with co-ops is often the membership that can be almost like trade unions in that, there can require an onerous process to join one. REIN: I think the thing I'd like to leave our listeners with, you might've heard the saying, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” and you might know that that comes from the IWW, I believe. But you might not know that it comes from preamble to their constitution, which says in part, “Trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to feed one another in wage wars. Trade unions aid the employing class to mislead workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can only be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all of its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on.” So the IWW obviously believes very strongly, you have to organize whole companies and not just the techies maybe get their union because they're special. I mean, can you imagine if Uber, if the tech workers and the drivers unionized together? They share the same interests, folks they could do that. MELISSA: Yeah. That's an interesting question. Like, could they? That's another thing that contracting, or permalansing, I don't know, maybe there'll be a major court challenge, especially with the Biden administration where the National Labor Board might be more sympathetic. Can contractors unionize with regular workers? Contracting is a way to bust unions and to keep people in a position of precarity, but what if they ruled that you can unionize. Once you realize that’s arbitrary, you're like, “Oh, if you've got good enough lawyers, if you have politicians that can get involved, maybe unionization 10 years from now will look really different because maybe they –” REIN: Yeah, the main difference is that the drivers don't have multi-million dollar lobbying organization that they're backed by. That's the main difference and the reason they're not getting the respect they deserve. Special Guest: Melissa McEwen.
228: Career Snarkiness – Words Hold Weight with Corey Quinn
02:21 - Corey’s Superpower: Reading 3,400 WPM * Increasing Reading Speed 05:35 - Keeping Up w/ AWS * Last Week in AWS (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/) * AWS Morning Brief (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/) * Screaming in the Cloud (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/) 08:45 - Delivering Corey Quinn – Personal Evolution * Speaking Truth to Power (Kindly, but Snarkily) * Privilege * Sonia Gupta and Corey Quinn - Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK6yrvsSaFs&list=PLK3MtoG6xjv_eLXKEVKG_uuYCZWqKfAaa&index=101) * Holding Yourself Accountable * Defensiveness * This Cloud Computing Billing Expert Is Very Funny. Seriously. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/technology/corey-quinn-amazon-aws.html) (NYT Article) * Intentionality 25:51 - Career Snarkiness * @SimpsonsOps (https://twitter.com/SimpsonsOps) * @killedbygoogle (https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle) 28:05 - Approaching and Handling D&I as a Business Owner * Discussing Salary Compensation 43:44 - Making and Delivering Jokes 45:08 - The Prospect of Being a Public Figure 50:03 - Recognizing Your Own Failure Mode * The Art of Delegation 54:32 - Approachability * Admitting Mistakes * What’s the point? Reflections: Rein: Systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. Tim: Iterating on oneself to become a better person. Becoming a human optimized. Arty: Holding yourself accountable. Taking responsibility for how other people see you in a public context. Mando: There’s a power in not hiding who you are. Apologizing for not letting people know what’s going on. Corey: Words are loud. Words are heavy. Words carry weight. Words carry impact. There is a balance. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 228 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thank you, Artemis. I'm delighted to be here with my good friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Mando and I'm here with my friend and brand-new co-host, Tim Banks. TIM: Thanks, Rein. I am Tim Banks and I am delighted to have our guest for this show, Corey Quinn. COREY: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to once again, indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. TIM: Just so everyone knows, Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and somewhat less horrifying. He also hosts the Screaming in the Cloud and AWS Morning Brief podcasts; and curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. COREY: I would agree that that is a fair characterization of what I do. Excellent work. Thank you. MANDO: Corey, we like to start off every podcast with asking our guests kind of the same question and that question is what do you consider your superpower to be and how did you get it? COREY: I would consider my superpower to be the fact that as tested and certified by some random site on the internet, I read 3,400 words a minute and the way that I got there was growing up, most people have friends, I had books because of the wonderful thing that happens in my world namely, having a personality that is pretty obvious to anyone who's spoken for more than 30 seconds. In my early phases of my life, this didn't resonate super well so I turned to escapism in the form of reading. Later in life, this turned into something of a superpower when you're trying to do something like, I don't know, read every release that comes out of AWS in a given afternoon. MANDO: Yeah, that'll do it. [laughs] REIN: There are so many. MANDO: I went to a private elementary school for a year and one of the less weird things that they had us do was do speed reading training. They had this little cylinder and you would feed in a piece of paper and the cylinder had room for, I don't know, 8 to 10 lines of the paper and it would scroll automatically at a certain rate and you would read the story and then take a test afterwards and then as you pass the tests, they would both speed up the cylinder and then also shrink the amount you could see at one time to point where it got to just reading line by line and this thing's scrolling superfast. It was really weird and really struck my competitive juices like, I really wanted to show the teachers that I could read as fast as possible. So that's the one thing from that weird private school that I went to that I think has had any sort of payoff in my adult life. COREY: There are a bunch of tools and techniques that people can use to increase reading speed, and I've never done any of them. I don't know how I do it, I just do it. It's easy to sit here and think that, “Oh, I'm going to read super quickly. That's a superpower. That's something I can use and leverage, too,” and then what? The skill, or the talent is necessary, but not sufficient the way that I do things and you have to refine it and apply it in different ways. Sitting here and doing it as a spectacle or sport on a conference panel or something and look at how fast I can consume information, not much of a party trick. Using that and applying it to something that for, in my case, distilling vast quantities information down in an understandable and meaningful way, that was the outcome. It was never about just “being smart,” which is how I often hear other folks talking about various superpowers. “Oh, I have a natural innate intelligence.” Great, what do you do with it? How do you apply that? That's the thing that often gets overlooked; at least by folks in a somewhat early stage of the development that they're dealing with professionally. REIN: So let me ask, you do the Last Week in AWS podcast, why do you give a shit about that stuff? COREY: Functionally, what I do and what I started doing when I started The Duckbill Group, it was understanding the AWS bill so that I can reduce it. Sure, it's easy to do that from a pure numerical analysis perspective and figure out oh, what reservations, or commitments you can use. But a lot of it required insight into what the application was doing because the worst consultants in the world are the ones that walk in, look around, have no idea what they're looking at, and then start telling you that you screwed everything up. That's not helpful, it's not compelling, and it's the sign of a terrifically awful consultant, in most cases. I see something that looks like it's ridiculous, my first question is: great, can you help me understand this? I don't tend to, by default, assume the person I'm talking to is a moron and similarly, I had to understand the various economic impacts of different capabilities, features, and services. They're changing all the time. I had to keep up with this stuff so I shoved a bunch of things into my RSS feed and I was tracking this because there was nowhere else to do it. That got me 80% of the way there to being able to share this with the rest of the world. I figured, ah, I can make other people do my work for me. I figured I would launch a newsletter, run it for a few weeks, someone would chime in, “Well, why don't you just read, insert other thing here?” and then great. I can turn off the newsletter. I found the thing that does this for me and I can focus on other things. Instead, 550 people signed up for the first issue and it's been growing ever since and it turns out that thing that people should read to solve this problem is the thing that I built. It still surprises me and the reason I care about it all is because my customers need to know these are the things, but they don't want to read all of it. They don't want to know all of these things. They want to solve their problem. REIN: It seems relatively easy for a consultant to go in and say, cut here, trim there, and then you'll get 20, 50% off of your AWS bill. But isn't the thing that you want for the people who will be there long after you're gone to be able to make better decisions about their own spend? COREY: One of the nuanced areas of what I do is this idea that, “Oh, I'm going to come in and lower your bill,” That virtually always happens, but that's not the actual goal. The goal is to inform the business so that they can make decisions around managing spend, managing capability, and managing risk. In some cases, we suggest spending more on certain areas such as, “Huh, you claim that that thing is an incredibly critical to your business set of data and you're not backing it up anywhere. Perhaps, you should consider doing that.” It's the idea of doing the right thing, not the cheap thing. It's we don't ever charge for example, by percentage of savings, or percentage of bill, it's flat rate only because once that's done and we agree on what that rate is, there's no other conflict of interest. I'm not trying to rack up savings to claim a percentage of it. I have no partnerships with any vendor in the space, so I'm not getting a kickback if I say, “Oh, use this tool or that tool or that service.” Instead, it purely reduces me down to, “This is what I would do if I were in your position, take it or leave it.” TIM: So I think Corey, it's fair to say that people recognize your expertise, both in optimizing of costs and optimizing the practice. Writing good tools, adopting best practices, having sound resilient architectures, and saving money. But it's also fair to say that that's not why people follow you. You have a voice and a particular way of analyzing things that appeals to people. Snark has its place and it's very well-placed in your commentary, but what it mostly involves is true insight. So can you give me the story behind what really empowered you and made you comfortable in delivering your full Corey Quinn to people in an industry where maybe people aren't really supposed to be their whole selves? COREY: My entire career, I had a core competency that I was always the absolute best in the room at, across the board and no one could step to me as far as being good at that thing and that thing was getting myself fired because of the things that I said. My entire career, every boss, every mentor, every teacher, every family member, every vague acquaintance that I pass on the street has given me the same advice: “Your sense of humor/personality is going to hold you back in your career.” When I started this place, I was so tired and beaten down from hearing that, that I figured that either everyone I've ever spoken to is right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and they're all wrong. And with the confidence born of being a mediocre white man in tech, I figured let's try it and see. Because worst-case, if the whole thing blows up in my face, well, I can go back to using my maiden name professionally. I can effectively shove the Corey Quinn identity as it is down the memory hole and I can go back to being an unhappy employee somewhere else. It started to resonate and it took on a life of its own and for the first time in my entire career, I don't feel like I have to hide who and what I am and that is a powerful thing. TIM: So one of the things that I think people appreciate, especially in your very active and humorous Twitter feed, is saying the things that everyone is thinking about the Giants. You speak truth to power, but you do so in a manner that does not insult nor mischaracterize the people who make the technology, who make the decisions. Can you talk to us a little bit about how being kind while still being somewhat snarky guides – what's your thought processes and how does that guide your commentary? COREY: You say this like it's a done deal, but it's very much not. Earlier, the week that we're having this recording, I wound up doing a snarky, sarcastic rebuttal of the profile of me that appeared in the New York Times in the voice of AWS. I made some snarky offhanded comments that implied basically that AWS marketing was crap and I heard from several people inside that team that, that they thought that hurt them and to be very direct, I got that wrong. If people are hearing what I have to say and feeling bad about themselves, about their work, then I've gone in a wrong direction. It's a very fine line to walk, given who and what I am, but when people see what I have to say and hear it and they walk away hurt, I failed. I don't always get it right, clearly. All I can strive to do is be better and not make the same mistake twice. It's a constant process of evolution and learning. And to be very direct, I am incredibly grateful by people feeling that they have the psychological safety to reach out to me and say, “That hurt my feelings.” MANDO: One thing that I've seen you do, Corey, as an accessory to that is be on the lookout for people who maybe don't feel that same kind of psychological security, but also feel some, or have some negative impact, or connotation with what you said. I've seen this a couple of times. I saw it once this week, when you were talking about – you had a Twitter thread talking about how to find a job in tech, how to negotiate salaries and stuff like that. And then there was a Slack group that we're both involved in and someone made a comment saying that they felt put out a little bit by the tone of what you had said and I personally found it impressive and a little bit inspirin, the way that you responded to that individual. Would you mind building on that a little bit, why you think that's so important and then how you address and maybe manage those kinds of situations? COREY: Sure. Privilege is a funny thing because we all swim in it in various ways, no matter who you are or what you do, there are elements of privilege that are inherent to you based upon aspects of your life and to you. That's not something that you're generally aware of in a conscious sense. Instead, it's very much a part of the background of your own lived experience and it's difficult, at times, to put yourself in the shoes of people who have different stories. The natural response, in some cases, when being told about privilege is to push back, “Excuse me, nothing was handed to me. I had to work and build this thing and sure, maybe that's true on some level, but you did not have to deal with a headwinds against you that a lot of other people did.” And there is an element of, “Well, I was born on third base. I didn't hit a triple.” Yes, that's true. It absolutely is. But you still got to go from third base to home on some level. It's easier than someone who's starting off on home and having to round all of the bases and there's still work that has to be put in. But it's important to understand that this is an important thing and a lot of people struggle with it because our society is inherently unjust. There is no way around that. The differences is that I'm not sitting here when I have these conversations, talking about how I wish the world was, or how it should be. I'm one of those people that sees the world as it is, or as I assume, as I interpret it to be, and I speak from a position of this is how I function in the environment in which I find myself. Now, some aspects of what I do, do not apply to people who don't look like I do. I generally go out of my way to avoid airing those things. I don't want to build a conference talk on how to handle job interviews for white guys, because that's awful. It's about getting interesting perspectives on this one. I did that actual talk, or something close to it back in 2016, or so and when I realized what I'd built, I was horrified and didn't give it again for a couple of years and then I gave it as a keynote at devopsdays Charlotte. I did that with my co-speaker, Sonia Gupta, who she and I sat there and gave the talk called Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans. Her background is as an attorney. She also doesn't look like I do. And it became a much more equitable talk, it became a much more universal talk, it was better in every respect, and it remains one of the talks I'm proudest of giving. It's a matter of when you realize that you have done something that inadvertently causes harm, or perpetuate some of the inequality that is rampant around us, it's incumbent on you, if you want to continue to be a good person, even if nowhere else other than you're in your own mind, to correct the misbehavior, say, “I'm sorry about that,” and then this is the key part, strive not to do it again. We're all works in progress. TIM: I think that notion of us all being a works in progress rings more true than I think most people like to admit. We constantly iterate on ourselves as we should be doing to find our mistakes, correct them, and then implement those corrections as we go forward. The thing that I think most people miss is the fact that they have to admit the fact that they did something wrong in the first place, especially in the form of public opinion. In a very public place like Twitter, Corey, you have done really well at that and I think there's a lot of wisdom that people can gain just by watching how you say, “Hey, this was not right,” or “I can do better,” and holding yourself accountable when especially other people hold themselves accountable. How do you think that we can promote this type of behavior in our culture and in our industry? COREY: Okay. Let me tell you a dark secret then because I don't want people to get an unrealistic expectation of who I am, or what I do. When I get it wrong, very often someone will either say something on Twitter or DM me with a, “This isn't a great take,” and every time like clockwork, my immediate response is to get defensive because no one likes being called out. What I learned I going by through the process is when I feel that flash of defensiveness: shut up. I do not respond. I step back for a minute. I go for a walk. I think. I wait for that reaction to subside and then really think about the feedback that I'm given from a place that is not in the moment, fraught with emotion. There are times that I can do that in seconds. There are times it takes me days. Usually, what happens is I realize that they have a point. Very occasionally, I disagree with what they're saying either because I didn't communicate clearly, or they misunderstood, or on some level, past a certain point, it is so far below even the level of rising to microaggression that it's one of those. Yeah, I have a bit of a hard time accepting that feedback where easy example of this is, I wound up having a gag recently called AWS Hambone, where they had some line art drawings in some of the AWS stuff that was put out, and I wound up having an event called AWS Hambone. Twitter Safety blocks someone who tweeted the phrase at one point, it was, “What is this?” Someone said, “Ah. Well, on Urban Dictionary, if you look up the word Hambone and scroll down a few things,” and of course, it's something horrific. There's always something horrific for three quarters of the words in the English language and at that point, you're so far into the weeds that I don't know that I necessarily would agree with that in that sense, but it's also not going to be a recurring gag that I use all the time. When I named my company, The Duckbill Group, and slapped a platypus up on as our mascot, I spent a week researching is there anything problematic on any aspect of the platypus and every bit of research I could do was no and here we are and no one has ever told me, the platypus is problematic. At this stage, that offer has expired. Please don't email me. But it's about doing your best to make these things right when you get it wrong, taking people's advice seriously and again, I don't do this in a vacuum. I have a number of people whose insight I trust and with whom I have a sense of psychological safety that I can reach out to and ask them, “Is this too far afield or not?” I want to be very clear, the majority of those people that I reach out to look an awful lot like me, because I'm not asking folks who are not overrepresented to do additional on paid free labor. REIN: I’d really liked to dig in a little bit more deeply to the part where you said you get defensive and then you take a moment because that seems like the key to me and it also seems like something that's really, really hard in the moment to do. Virginia Satir says that the problem isn't the problem, how we cope as the problem and that these emotions come unbidden to our consciousness, and then we get to decide, we have an opportunity to decide what we do with them. So what I'm hearing you say is you make a conscious effort to decide what to do. You feel defensive. You don't have control over that. What you have control over is what you do with it and so, my question is how do you create the space for yourself to cope? COREY: It helps tremendously in that the most common form that I use for my aggressive shitposting, hot takes, et cetera, et cetera, but also testing new things out is Twitter. There is no SLA around responses on Twitter. I don't need to respond within 30 seconds or so. Right now, we're having a conversation, if I stop for 2 minutes to really think something through, you're going to wonder if the call dropped. Twitter doesn't have that problem and from where I sit, it's a place of, I don't believe that I can control my own emotions to the point where I don't that defensive flare, but that's on me. That's something I need to think through. I don't wind up turning aside and kicking the dog, or punching a hole in the wall. I sit there because it never feels great, but it's where growth comes from. If you've doubled down on being wrong when people whose lived experience are actively telling you that what you're saying or doing causes harm, I don't believe that you are being the kind of person that in your heart of hearts, you wish you were. Now, some people want to be shitheads and that's fine. Good for you. I don't want to be around you. REIN: I want to make it possible to say your real yeses and your real nos. COREY: Yes, absolutely. Punch up. It's hilarious. I mean, I'm a hell of a cyber bully to a company that's worth $1.6 trillion, the last time I checked. If they can't take it on the chin, they need to deal with it. But there are individual people who work there and they don't deserve getting dragged. As I mentioned previously and repeatedly, the single exception to this is of course, Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. Because even if someone's garbage, they have friends and family who love and care for them and Larry Ellison is an asshole who does not. Nobody likes Larry Ellison and the best part of that is I got a lot of pushback and a lot of feedback on that article in the New York Times and the one thing that I thought was notable is not a single person defended Larry, or said that I was wrong because I'm right. He's an who has no friends QED, but everyone else, off the table. REIN: You're obviously very intentional about this. So what do you do intentionally to stay on the right side of that line? COREY: The honest and easy way is I talk to people. I fall into the trap personally of forgetting people behind things. To my worldview, a big company is one that has 200 people and when I don't know anyone on a service team at AWS who is involved in building a project, or launching a service, I just view it as this thing, this enormous behemoth thing and then I make fun of it. As soon as I talked to someone who was involved with that it's, “Oh crap, I need to understand who these people are.” Honestly, one of the reasons I've been so rough on Amazon Marketing is that no one in that group talks to me. It's basically a void so it becomes almost a punchline and then I have to be reminded from time to time that there are people there. That's an area I get it wrong in. Now on some level, the Amazon corporate posture is if we ignore Corey, he'll probably go away, which is absolutely the wrong direction to go in. It's akin to, “Well, if we kidnap the bear cubs, then may be that grizzly will let me pet her.” It doesn't work. [laughter] It's like smacking an alligator over the snout with a rock in the hopes it'll make him friendlier. Don't do that. I guess, I'm saying I crave attention. Well, roll with it. REIN: I think you compared yourself to an alligator. COREY: Oh, absolutely. TIM: Oh, that sounded deliberate. [overtalk] REIN: It’s fair. TIM: Alligators, to my recollection, do not have bills, correct? COREY: No, no. Those are reserved for generally ducks, geese, and platypuses. TIM: Is it platypus or platypi? COREY: Platypi is a myth. It's platypoes, if you want to go down that particular Latin root. TIM: I don't know if there's a witty monotremes joke in general so, I'll just let that go. COREY: Exactly. There are, but you have to look for them. That's why my mascot is an extreme monotreme. REIN: I like that you explicitly tried to avoid being [inaudible] platypus. COREY: There is always that aspect of things. REIN: All right, so I can tell you that platypus is actually extremely racist! [laughs] COREY: Exactly. No, no. The platypus for the mascot that we have is not racist. Well, insofar as other than the [inaudible], we are all racist to some extent, which is problematic but it is a thing to say in some quarters, but let's be a little more intentional of how we say it. The platypus isn't a bigot. The platypus isn't even usually angry most of the time. The platypus is just disappointed in all of us, because realistically, we could be doing better than we are. REIN: Do you have any advice for any of our listeners who might want to make a career out of being snarky? COREY: Quite honestly, don't do it. I'm serious. They're either a number of folks who try it periodically because they see what I'm doing, or they reach out to me and ask for advice and the advice is the same: don't do it. The reason is that with almost anything else that you're trying to do, the failure mode is just, okay, no one cares. It doesn't make a splash. It doesn't work. Okay, great. The problem with being snarky is the failure mode isn't obscurity, it's being an asshole and that failure mode is potentially very damaging. To that extent, when I see various parody accounts on Twitter, the novelty accounts that are doing snarky, or sarcastic things, I generally don't engage for a while. I want to get a read on them. Two of the parody accounts that absolutely nail it are, what is it? @SimpsonsOps is the parody account there. MANDO: Oh god, that’s fantastic. COREY: And @killedbygoogle. Both are phenomenal. They get it. I talk with the people behind those accounts regularly and I learn from them. There are times, I get it wrong and they correct me and very occasionally, I will give feedback to them when I think they've gone in a different direction and we all sort of make each other better for it as a result. But most folks do it. It doesn't end super well. There's an Andy Jassy parody account and has been for years and it's just mean. It's just mean, I'm sorry. One of the most distressing things I ever heard, that got to me through the grapevine. was that some exec at AWS was convinced for a little while that it was me and that hurt because to be very honest, I don't operate like that. I'm not here crapping on people individually, with a remarkably small subset of exceptions to that and those exceptions universally have something in common and that is that they punched down, they drive good people away, and they're small people in positions of inflated importance. Think the corporate equivalent of a number of senators that I'm sure already leaped to mind when I say that. TIM: So Corey, I'd like to ask—we talked about how you handle things on Twitter, we talked about your personal evolution—now as a business owner in the tech industry, a small business owner, B2B, not a large trillion-dollar company yet. But how are you approaching in handling diversity inclusion, especially around hiring and retention and salary equity in your own company? Q: Fair question and no one has ever asked me that, if you can believe that. The answer is that in order to build and hire diverse teams, it takes effort. The easiest thing in the world to do is to reach out to the people you know from your background. Well, that's not generally hugely diverse because regardless of what we look like, you're generally encountering them in the same types of environments, doing the same kinds of things, and you basically wind up accidentally hiring half your fraternity or whatnot for those who went to college and that's a bit of a challenge. So you have to be intentional about it, for one. You have to be prepared to expand your hiring pool. Do things that don't necessarily come naturally. There are folks who specialize in diversity, equity, and inclusion who have tremendous advice on how to do this, pay them for it. Advice is worth what you pay for it and have them assist and then from there, it's do your best. Have a way to measure what you're trying to achieve and whether you get there or not. As far as salary goes, that's relatively straightforward for us because we publish the ranges when we put the job position up and the ranges are relatively narrow and we stick to them. We are very transparent internally with what our structure is and how we approach these things and to be very direct, the delta between the highest and lowest paid employee is smaller than people would expect. MANDO: I've got a question about salary ranges. I have a hard time understanding what good reasons a company might have for not making their pay scales and salary ranges transparent, at least within the company. I've worked at several places where if you're lucky, your manager may know what the salary ranges are, but as an individual contributor, you're not supposed to find out and I have a hard time coming up. Are there any good reasons why, other than exploitation? COREY: There are a bunch of bad reasons, but not many good ones, but here's one that we can try on for size. If you and I have the same job and we work at the same company and I discover that you make $20,000 more than I do, there are a few different ways that I can react. I can get angry at the company, which is not generally constructive in that context. I can ask what I would need to do to get to a similar level of compensation. If I want to be nosy, I can start digging into well, why do you get more? And there are a bunch of answers to that. Maybe you've been doing this for a longer and a better experience. Maybe you have a skillset that was challenging. Maybe it's competitive bid situation. Maybe it's an accident of fate. Maybe you asked for it and I didn't. But there is a very common mode where now that I know that you're making $20,000 more than I am, I'm going to be a shit heel to you. I am going to hold it against you personally, because I'm envious and jealous and instead of asking how I can get up to your level, my immediate response is how to drag you down to mine. That can be a subtle and pernicious thing and if I look like I do and you don't, then that manifests in a whole bunch of other ways that are reinforced by systemic biases and as a result, it winds up impacting some of the folks that that transparency would be designed to help. That is one expression of a good reason. Is that outweighed otherwise? I don't know. I really don't. We speak in generalities and total budget. We don't disclose individual's compensation internally because that is not – MANDO: True. COREY: Again, it's a weird thing if I tell your coworker how much you make and then they're mad at you. Same type of problem. We strive very hard not to have that culture and I don't believe that we do, but I'm not willing to risk someone's psychological safety on that. MANDO: Yeah, no, I get that. I think in my experience, it's been a little more, I can't find out what the top and bottom band is for this role, unless I have people working for me in those roles and that's where, at least for me, it makes it difficult to understand why that's the case. It's hard to talk to people who you're managing about moving in different directions, moving possibly to other areas of the company, or even up and down the ladder without being able to say, “Here are the numbers that you could be looking at.” COREY: I'm also coming at this from a different/possibly privileged position where we do not offer equity in The Duckbill Group. The way we're structured, it doesn't support that. We're a services company that does not have anything approaching an exit strategy. I'm not looking sell the company to the very types of companies I energetically and enthusiastically insult. So we're not offering the brass ring of equity because there's no expectation of ever turn into anything. Instead, we offer cash comp and we have a bonus structure that is tied to what the company does. It becomes very easy for you to look at what we're doing and if you're toying with a role here, we have those conversations and figure out what your compensation is going to look like. Is it comparable to Netflix pay? Of course not. They pay top of market and tend to, but that's okay. We also don't have you on edge every day, wondering if you're about to get fired. So there are benefits to the way we approach things. There are drawbacks as well. Again, it's different people want different things and that's okay. At a company that has a significant equity component to compensation, that usually is removed entirely from transparency in compensation, unless you're a named executive. How many shares have you been granted? Are there options? What was the strike price? How is the vesting work? Did you come aboard as part of an acquihire? In which case, there was a very distinct compensation structure, that was almost certainly set up for you, that does not apply to other people. Do you have a particular rare skillset that was incredibly valuable? Let's be direct here, is your cousin the CEO of a target customer and having you there has that nice, quiet benefit that no one is ever going to dare whisper out loud? There are a whole bunch of reasons that compensation will vary, that companies don't necessarily want to explain to each other. When I worked at an agency consultancy, they would periodically have a consultant/engineer who would discover one day that the company was billing it out for roughly twice what they were being paid, which is a fairly standard and reasonable structure given the overhead cost, and they would be incensed by this because well, sales and marketing, how hard could that be? I should just go direct and wind up making all that extra margin myself. It is never that simple. If you can do it, good luck. It's a near certainty you can't because no one can, not at any step and that's scale. There is the lack of maturity that is understood, or not understood by folks you're dealing with and especially as you grow beyond a certain size, you can't expect everyone you're talking to in your company that you hire, or potentially hiring to come in with that level of maturity. So it's far easier just to avoid the topic altogether and then of course, there's a nefarious thing if we want to see how much we can rip people off. I have a hard time accepting that as being a genuine reaction, because for example, from a company perspective, the difference of a $10,000 or $20,000 to make someone happy versus angry, your payroll costs at a certain point of scale is never going to notice or feel that you don't want to waste money. But if that's all it takes to make someone happy, why wouldn't you spend it? MANDO: Has anyone here worked at a place where payroll numbers accidentally got sent out to the entire company, or is that just me? TIM: I have not worked at a place like that, but I wish that had happened. MANDO: It happened to me super early on in my career. I've been doing this professionally for maybe 2, or 3 years and it was a small little dev shop here in Austin and it was, you had your classic accidental reply all situation from whoever's in charge of keeping the books and the next day, like 8 people out of the 30 who worked there just walked out. It was kind of bad and ugly, yeah. COREY: One of the things that I find the most interesting about that type of story is that when those things come out and half the company is in flames over it, this was preventable. When we started The Duckbill Group, we did the exact same thing. We have always operated in such a way that if our internal documents and chats and everything else were to become public, there would be some missing context we'd have to fill in, but there's no one that would, or at least no one who has understanding of the relevant issues would look at this and say, “Well, that's just not fair, or just.” That even goes down to our pricing structure with our clients. Like we don't disclose what our margins are on certain things, but if they were to see that they would look at that, understand the value of that process of how we got to those price points and say, “Yes, that is fair.” That has always been our objective and it's one of those if you act as if it's going to be made public, it turns out that no one can really hold things over anymore, which is interesting because given the nature of what we do with AWS bills, confidentiality is super important. It's critical because some of our largest customers do not let us admit to anyone that they are in fact, our customers and I get that; there's a strong sensitivity around that. Other customers are, “Yeah, by all means, please talk about us all you want. Put us on the website.” I mean, the New York Times mentioned that Epic Games, Ticketmaster, and The Washington Post were customers of ours. Yes, we have logo rights. We are very clear in whether or not we're allowed to talk about folks publicly. It's great. We love our customers, but what are the tricks to getting there incidentally is if you don't respect a company's business, you probably shouldn't do business with them. We're not sitting here making massive value judgements about various companies that we look at. But when it's one of those, you make landmines, not so much. Whereas, I noticed, I was like, “Okay, you’re ad tech, do I love it? Not usually, but I also understand how the world works. It's fine. Don't worry about it.” Unless, you're into truly egregious territory, there's never one of those, “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” The “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” question honestly distills down to, “Can we actually help them get to where they need to go/think they need to go and is it the right thing for them?” If the answer that's no, then all we're going to do is have an unhappy customer story out there in the world. We don't want that. It's not that hard to act ethically, as it turns out. REIN: There is an interesting contrast between Corey, your story about salary disclosure and Mando's, which is you made the point of that it could be in your employee's best interest to not disclose. I don't think you're lying, but I bet if you had asked Mando's company's executives, they could have very well may have given the exact same story. The thing that, I think is difficult is when you have to trust in the benevolence of capitalists to figure this thing out. COREY: Absolutely and from my perspective, again, I have this position that I'm coming from, which is, I assume good faith. From my position, if our salary compensation numbers were to be exposed internally, the external is a whole separate thing. Because honestly, if there's a certain implicit expectation of privacy, if you work at my company and suddenly without warning you, I tell the world how much you're being paid. That's not necessarily a situation you would be thrilled to find yourself in. So let's remove that from the table entirely. When we speak internally about what you're making, I have always operated with the expectation that you will exercise, in the US, your federally protected to discuss your compensation with your coworkers, because not discussing your compensation with your coworkers only really helps those capitalists, as you put it, who run companies themselves. If I want to exploit people, yes. Step one, make sure that they're all scared to talk about how much they're making with each other. That doesn't align with anything I ever want to see myself doing. So from my perspective, why would I not disclose salary information? The only reason I can think of that would really matter is that, does it make it harder either first, most importantly, for my employees to operate as they want to operate and two, does it do any harm to my business in any meaningful way and that is a nuanced and challenging thing to figure out. I don't know the answer is the short response to it. I don't think there'd be anything necessarily good that would accelerate my business if we're suddenly talking about compensation numbers publicly. I don't know that necessarily anything bad would happen either, but it's not the story that I want people telling about the company. We're small. We don't have a marketing budget. We have a spite budget. So when people bring us up, I don't want it to be in the context of compensating employees. I want it to be in the context of fixing the AWS bills since that's the thing that lets us compensate those employees, [laughs] It's a fun and interesting nuanced issue and it's easy to take a singular position from all of the different stakeholders that are involved in something like that and make strong pro, or con arguments from that person's position. But one of the weird things about running a company that I discovered is you have to put yourself in multiple shoes simultaneously all the time, where you have to weigh the opinions and perspectives of various stakeholders. You ask someone in engineering what they think we should be focusing on strategically, the answer is probably going to align around engineering, but is engineering going to align with what the company needs to do? If you're getting no sales coming in, is engineering going to be the way you fix that? Maybe not. Maybe you invest in marketing or sales as a result and it's always about trade-offs and no one's perfectly happy with what you decide. The world is complicated and for better or worse, one of the bad tendencies of Twitter is to distill these principles down to pithy soundbites that fit 280 characters and the world doesn't lend itself to that. REIN: Okay. Let's try to distill this down into a pithy soundbite. COREY: By all means. REIN: No, I was just kidding. COREY: And I'm sure someone's going to be pithed. It'll be fine. MANDO: Hey! TIM: I was waiting. Took longer than I expected. [laughter] COREY: Latency. REIN: What's the most important thing in comedy? TIM: It's timing. COREY: Timing. REIN: Timing! [laughter] It’s easier to love that joke in-person. TIM: It is. COREY: Or if you’re going to put that in, just make sure you insert a bunch of time before audio engineer can wind up doing that. [laughter] TIM: Right. I was going to ask if an audio engineer can actually make that joke funny, or is that? [laughter] COREY: Yeah. Or it’ll just come off as corny. So many jokes work super well when you deliver them in-person or face-to-face with a small group, but then you deliver into, to an audience of 5,000 people and they fall completely flat because the energy is different. That observation right there is why so many corporate keynotes are full of jokes that bomb horribly, because with the 20 people who were in there and have context and nuance, it's great in the rehearsal, but then you have a bunch of people and it just feels lame. TIM: Yeah, I thought the corporate keynote jokes, they failed because the 20-person focus group was a bunch of sycophants ready to laugh at anything they said. Whereas, the audience, maybe not so much. COREY: Yes. Do you end up with the entire executive committee watching it? They're just a bunch of yes men and the one token yes woman, but diversity is important to them. Just look at their website. No, no, the point that makes the statement about diversity being important, not the pictures of their team. MANDO: That part. One of my favorite speakers in the technical circuit is Aaron Patterson and I think part of the reason why I love his delivery so much is that he himself personally laughs at all his jokes. Like it really [laughs] like he cracks himself up and so you just can't help, but get pulled along with him. COREY: I find that most of my jokes that I put in my talks and whatnot are for me, because without it, I get bored and I lose interest and have other people come along for the joke, great. And if not, well, that's okay, I'm still laughing. MANDO: [laughs] Yeah. TIM: So Corey that I have a question that I had wondered and then never got to ask out loud. But seeing as how, although we pretty much knew that Andy Jassy was going to be the new CEO of Amazon, would obviously need someone to replace him at AWS. What would you say to the AWS recruiter when they offered you the job and why? COREY: Directly, that would be one of the most thankless jobs I can possibly imagine for the way I see the world and how that job has to be done, in all seriousness. It is the ultimate expression of responsibility without the ability to directly impact an outcome. You will have to delegate absolutely everything and it's paradoxical, but the higher you rise in a role like that, the less you're able to say. Every time Jeff Bezos makes a comment in public, it hits the news. He doesn't get to go effectively shitposting on Twitter. How Elon Musk manages to do it, couldn't tell you, but his random jokes move markets and that's why he's constantly in trouble with the SEC. The reason that I enjoy the latitude and the freedom that I do is that I am functionally, a nobody and that's okay. As soon as I start becoming someone who is under global public scrutiny, then that entire thing becomes incredibly misaligned. Every time there's a controversy or a scandal, I would never be allowed to sit down and be directly and completely honest about what I think about those things because you can't in those roles. These things are always nuanced and public messaging is a problem. I do firmly believe. For example, the reason I don't weigh in very often on a lot of the labor relations issues, for example, that Amazon winds up finding itself confronted with is, I believe firmly that there is a choice that I get to make as part of my expression of privilege. Here, I can be part of the mob on Twitter, yelling at them over these things, or I can have conversations directly with people who you are in a much better position to influence these things internally. I do not believe you can do both, simultaneously. We pick and choose our battles sometimes and I can't wind up going off about every outrage, real, or perceived, that accompany does, or I simply look like an endless litany of complaints. You have to find the things that make an impact and there's always a price to that. An example of a fight that I do go to bat for is Amazon's position on non-competes for their employees and their decision to pursue them after they leave Amazon. I think it has beneath them, I think it makes the entire industry poorer for it, and it's one of the areas in which I do not respect Amazon's position, full stop. Their employees are better than that and deserve more. That's an issue that I feel profoundly about and I'm willing to go to the mat on that one, but when I do it, it comes with a price. It makes them look at me like a little bit of a, “Oh, is he going to be one of those?” whatever those happen to be and maybe. There's a reason I don't bring it up casually. There's a reason I don't drag them with that in casual joke threads, but it's there and that's what one of those issues I'm willing to be known for. Now, labor organizing and the rest. There's an entire universe of people paying better attention to a segment of their business that I don't talk about, or know about and who are well-suited to lead a public opinion, to have conversations internally. I don't know about a lot of those things and this is why I've never cut out to be a VC either, by the way, where when I don't know something, I don't feel that I should be sounding off about that thing on Twitter. Apparently, that is not normal in D.C. land, but here we are. The beautiful part about being me is that I'm fundamentally in possession of a platform I can use to broadcast every harebrained idea that crosses my mind out to an audience to test it. So I don't feel constrained in what I can say. In fact, that's the reason that I am what I am is that no one can fire me. I'm an AWS customer, but I have no client that is a significant percentage of our revenue base, which means I can't get fired. The only real risk is something either systemic that happens globally, in which case, all bets are off, or we're at a scenario where I have surprise, become a secret dumpster goblin and no one is going to want to do business with me anymore and everyone abandons me. But that doesn't seem likely because that is not my failure mode. REIN: Do you know what your failure mode is? COREY: Oh, absolutely. I sometimes, as I mentioned, go too far. I find that things that are funny, just wind up being mean at times. A joke wasn't that great there. I mean, my entire company is fundamentally built around aspects of my own failures. I am possessed of a profound case of ADHD that manifests in a bunch of interesting ways. A lot of the company is functionally scaffolding around me and picking up the things that I am not good at and will not be successful at if left to my own devices. I feel bad about it on some level, but on the other, it frees me up to do the things I am great at. It's an area of being able to take the things that make me, for better or worse, borderline unique and really focus on those because I don't have to continue to wrestle with things like making sure that JIRA tickets get done for us to use an example from my engineering days. We tend to have this bias when hiring people to optimize for hiring folks who have no weaknesses rather than hiring for strengths. Yeah, there are a lot of things I'm crap at, but I'd rather be very, very good at the subset of things that are intensely valuable and that means that okay, maybe someone else can handle making sure my expense report gets filed, if you want to use a banal example. REIN: One of the first things that you talked about was sometimes to improve the way a customer uses AWS; they have to spend more money in one area rather than less. There's an interesting property of systems, which is that you can't improve a system just by making each individual part better and actually, sometimes you have to make some parts worse to make the system better. So I'm hearing a little bit of that here as well, which is you want to build a system that works well and takes advantage of the parts that you have, the people you have, their relationships, their strengths, how they work together, and you're not interested in everyone having to be perfect. You're okay with parts that work in different ways and accounting for that and focus. So the other thing is that a system is not the sum of its parts. It's the product of its interactions and what I'm getting is that you care about those interactions. COREY: Very much so. It's hard to build things in isolation. It's hard to wind up treating everyone as interchangeable components that you can shuffle up and have them do different things. You don't want to know what would happen if you put me in charge of accounting, for example. There's this also this idea as well that is endemic, particularly to the world of developers and software engineers in the context of – I saw this most prominently with a number of professors in my first job, as a Unix systems administrator at a university, where I have a Ph.D., I am a world leading expert in this very narrow field of knowledge and I am brilliant in it, which means I'm very good at everything else, too, ha, Getting the computer to work. Oh, they don't even offer Ph.Ds. in that so how hard could it really be? This idea that, “Oh, I am terrific at this one very valuable, highly advanced skill; I should be good at everything else.” Well, not really. It doesn't work that way and is there even value in you learning that particular skill? Let's use an example that's germane to what we're doing right now. When I record podcasts, I'm good at having the conversations. I'm good at making the word noises come out of my mouth to varying degrees of good and then we're done with the recording and what tends to happen next? Well, it has to get edited, put together, and the rest, and I don't know how to do that. Now, do I go and spend a year learning how audio engineering works and then spend my time doing the audio engineering piece, or do I find someone who lives in that world, who loves it, who they are great at it, and they want to do it and they want to do it more and wind-up paying people for their expertise and let them come out with a far better product than I'm ever going to be able to deliver? If it doesn't need to be me doing a thing, I might want to tag someone else in to do it instead. That's the art of delegation and increasingly, I have to be more and more comfortable with letting more and more things go as our company continues to grow. It's a hard lesson to learn. I mean, the biggest challenge of running a business bar, none, I don't care what anyone else tells you, it's always the same and it is managing your own psychology. ARTY: So you mentioned earlier with you were talking about psychological safety and people being able to give you feedback about when their feelings were hurt, or things that are challenging to talk about. What factors do you think contribute to your approachability when you have the stance of being this kind of snarky identity? What makes you approachable still? COREY: I think it's that when I get it wrong, I'm very vocal at apologizing. Let me use an example of the time I got it spectacularly wrong. A while back, I did a parody video of Hitler Reacts, the Downfall parody thing that everyone's doing and it was Hitler receives his AWS bill was my entire shtick. I did a whole dialogue thing for it, as one does. There's generators for it—this was not an artistic endeavor whatsoever—and one line I have in there is one woman turns to the other and says, “Yeah, I get gigabytes and terabytes confused, too,” and it goes on. People started liking it on Twitter and I went to bed. The next day, I get a message from someone that a number of women were having a thread somewhere else that they thought it was offensive because that was the only speaking line women had and it was admitting that math is hard, more or less and when I heard that my response was, “Holy shit.” I took the video down and did a whole thread about here's how I fucked up and some people were saying, “Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. It's fine.” You are wrong. I'm sorry. People felt shitty because of what I said and that's not okay and just deleting it, or not talking about it again is a response, but it's not an instructive one and what I did ideally, will help people avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Again, this stuff is not easy. We're all learning. I've made jokes when I was – if I go back in time 10 years, I made a whole bunch of jokes and had a sense of humor of now I look back and I am very honestly ashamed of them and I'm not talking about things that the kind of joke we have to look over your shoulders before you tell anyone to make sure that someone doesn't look like you isn't within earshot. No, I'm just talking about shitty jokes that punch down. I don't make those jokes anymore because guess what? They're just not that funny and that's important. We all evolve. So that's part of it is I vocally critical of myself when I get it wrong. I also have DMs open for this specific reason. Again, I am not in the demographic people going to harass me by a DM. Not everyone has that privilege so people can reach out to me when they think I get something wrong, or they just want to talk and I view confidentiality as sacrosanct. If someone says that wasn't funny, I always thank them first off and then I try and dig deeper into what it is that they're saying. If someone says it on Twitter, because they don't feel that a call-in is warranted—no one knows you would call-in—a callout is fine, too. I try to engage in the same behavior just because if nothing else, I can set an example. I don't know if people feel they have a sense of psychological safety in approaching me, to be perfectly honest. No one knows their own reputation. But the fact that people continue to and I have never once broken the faith and thrown someone out under a bus publicly, or even mentioned who they were without their permission first, that's powerful and I hope anyway. I mean, again, no one knows their own reputation. For all I know, there are whisper networks out there that are convinced that I'm a complete piece of crap and if that's true, I'm not going to inherently say that they're wrong. I would be honored if someone would tell me and would let me know what I'm doing that has caused that opinion to form, because if possible, I'd like to fix it. If not, I at least want to hear the perspective. But feedback is an opinion and not everyone's opinion carries equal weight and I don't agree with everyone's opinion, but I would like to know how I'm being perceived. The biggest problem I get is with all the podcasts, with all of the tweets, with all of the newsletters, that most common response by landslide is silence. There are days I wonder I remember to turn the microphone on. There are other days where oh, I get emails and I love those days because I at least get to learn how I'm coming across. ARTY: I can imagine just seeing someone having a history of admitting when they make a mistake and trying to correct it and fixing it, turning you into someone that if you have feedback that feeling like you'd be heard, that your feedback would be listened to and taken seriously, I can see that really making a difference. I also really appreciate you modeling that kind of behavior, too because I think it is important. We are human. We make mistakes and having models to follow of what it looks like to be confident enough in ourselves that we can screw up publicly, I think is really important. COREY: I have the privilege and audience and at least apparently public reputation to be allowed to fail, to be allowed to mess these things up and if I can't own those things that I get wrong and what's the point, really. The honest way that I feel about all of this is I just recently crossed 50,000 Twitter followers, which is a weird, trippy, and humbling experience. But if I can't use that vast audience to help people, then what the fuck was the point of it all? Why did I do it? It's not just for my own self-aggrandizement, or trying to sell consulting projects. If I can't leave a little bit of a dent in the universe in the sense of helping people become better than they are then what was the point? Spoiler, the answer to what was the point never starts with a dollar sign. REIN: What do you think is the point? COREY: I think it has to be different for other folks. For me, the point has always been about helping people and I have a sense of indebtedness that I have my entire career because early on in my career and consistently throughout, people have done me favors and there's no way for me to repay them for the kindness that they have shown and the help that they've given. All you can ever do is pay it forward. But I help people with an introduction. It doesn't take much from me. You two people have problems that would be a solved by having an introduction between the two of you? Wonderful. Go ahead and talk. Let me know how I can help and it costs me nothing and when people are like, “How can I thank you for this?” Help someone else. It's always the same answer. It's a someday, you're going to be in a position to help someone else, do it. Don't think about how it's going to come back and help you. Maybe I will, maybe it won't. Cosmically, I found it always does somehow, but again, you don't have to take that on faith. Just assume it doesn't help you in the least. The more you help people, the more you wind up doing favors for people, the more it comes back around and that is something that opens up a tremendous level of, I guess, leverage. I guess, it makes sense of being able to make a difference in the world. Now, please, don't misunderstand what I've just said as, “Oh, you should do a bunch of uncompensated work for anyone who demands a moment of your time.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting you let people take advantage of you, but when you find someone who's struggling at something that you know would approach it, it really doesn't cost you much to reach out and ask if they need a hand. ARTY: That seems like a good note to switch to reflections. REIN: I think that's great. I was thinking about Corey, how you look at mistakes as opportunities to get better, not just for yourself, but also for how you participate in communities that matter to you. One of the interesting things about systems is that systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. So an engine drives its purpose from how it relates to the other parts of the car. If you take the engine out of the car, the car doesn't move, but neither does the engine. So I think that the best communities, whether they're basketball teams, or software development teams, whatever they are, are communities that make each person better and that we derive our purpose and our meaning from our relationship with other people. TIM: I can offer my reflection on this. I've often been either disappointed with, or very impressed by people's ability to learn about themselves and about the impact that they have on the world. I have observed in Corey and have been inspired to do self-optimization, where I have a course of action or behavior, or a line of thinking or reasoning presented into the ether and then based upon the feedback in whatever other means of observability, I amend and iterate on myself to become better. Never perfect—perfect is the enemy of good—but just to be better, to be continually improving. If I were going to find a term to describe Corey and the term that I would ascribe to myself to become a human optimist. I think if we take some of those examples that Corey has discussed and apply them, we can all reach that point to where we'll always know that there's always ways to improve and if we listen to those around us and we study the impact that we have on those people that we can do that. ARTY: It's been interesting listening to you talk and have this description of you in my head of this kind plus snarky being and what does that look like. One of the things I've seen you model repeatedly as I've listened to you talk is holding yourself accountable. In one context, being able to take in one-on-one reflections from other people and really take it in and think about what people say. But two, also taking responsibility for how other people see you and your position in the world and how those things you do end up affecting other people. So, I really appreciate your taking responsibility for the one-on-one interactions that you have as well as how people see you in a public context and react to those things as well such that when you're out there being a model and someone that people look up to, that you try and have a good influence on the communities around you, too. MANDO: What's kind of striking me today is strangely enough, it's a little bit of a meta reflection almost. It's like a reflection about y'all's reflections, which is kind of weird, but today is what, February 26th. It's been a rough couple of weeks here in Texas and it's been a rough couple of years, if I'm being truly honest. But the past couple weeks have been really tough and I found myself not being, I don't know, maybe as open about the rough time that I've been having. Especially with people at work because I’m an engineering leader at work and I feel like I don't want to put that on folks, but something that Rein, that you said is the system is a product of its interactions. I've been intentionally cutting off parts of myself from the interactions of the system that is work and the people that I work with. Something that hit me really hardcore when you said earlier was that there's a power in not having to hide who you am and what you are and what you're bringing to the table and how you're doing at a certain time. I want nothing more than to be able to model that kind of behavior to the rest of the company and make it so that they can be okay with coming in and saying, “It's been a rough couple of weeks. I'm sorry, I'm not going to hit my” whatever deadlines, or whatever they said they were going to do. So maybe I need to spend some time doing a little bit of apologizing and apologizing for not letting people know what's really been going on and working to make myself better. COREY: For my part, I know that my words are loud. I imagine that my words are funny, but this is really reinforcing the notion that my words are heavy in that they carry weight. My baseline assumption is I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm going to just have fun with it. I talk about how I see the world and how I view things, but it's more than a little disconcerting to hear and have it presented in plain view that people are changing how they approach things based upon the things that I say. That my words carry impact and that is a heady thing and it feels dangerous on some levels where I wind up deciding to do a random joke and people don't realize that's a joke. Does that have potential impact? I mean, I’ve always been viscerally aware of it where I don't want to come across as if people misunderstand what I'm saying, they'll wind up causing harm to others. There is a balance and there is a, I guess, growing awareness that maybe all these people aren’t just sticking around for the jokes. ARTY: Well, thank you, Corey for coming on the show. REIN: Also, everyone. COREY: Thank you for having me. REIN: Thanks, Corey. Special Guest: Corey Quinn.
227: Doing DevRel Right with Jonan Scheffler
02:28 - Jonan’s Superpower: Jonan’s Friends * The Quality and Reliability of One’s Personal Network * Finding Community * The Ruby Community in Particular – Focus on People and Programmer Joy * Happy Birthday, Ruby (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)! 09:07 - How Developer Relations is Changing (DevRel) * Kicking Off New Relic (https://newrelic.com/)’s New Developer Relations Program * Outreach and Community Growth Value * Developing Developer Empathy & Adjusting Content in the Spirit of Play * The Correct Role of DevRel 22:41 - Doing DevRel Right * Feedback Loops * The Definition of Success 31:45 - Engaging with Communities & Networks via DevRel * Using Twitch, YouTube, Discord, TikTok, Twitter, etc. * Consider the Platform * The Relicans (https://www.therelicans.com/) * Emily Kager's TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@shmemmmy?lang=en) * @theannalytical (https://twitter.com/theannalytical) * @cassidoo (https://twitter.com/cassidoo) * @laurieontech (https://twitter.com/laurieontech) 40:22 - Internal DevRel * Content Review Meetings * Make Friends w/ Marketing/Internal Communications (Comms) * Be Loud & Overcommunicate 53:32 - Addressing Trauma & The Evil in the World “I respect facts but I live in impressions.” In The Mouth of Madness (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113409/) Reflections: Mando: We are who we spend time with. Rein: If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and experiences. Jess: If it works, it’s going to be obvious it works. Jonan: Talking about the things that suck and talking about who you are in a real way. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JONAN: Welcome back to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 227. I am Jonan Scheffler and I'm joined today by my guest, Jessica Kerr. How are you, Jessica? JESSICA: Thank you, Jonan. Well, I’m great today because I get to be here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Aw thanks, Jessica. And I'm here with my friend, Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, Rein and just to bring it back around, I'm here with my friend, Jonan Scheffler. Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, although his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively, he is particularly excited about observability as of late, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night. Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jonan. How are you doing today, bud? JONAN: I am great. I liked the part where I got to intro your podcast. That was a lot of fun, actually. MANDO: It was fantastic, man. JONAN: This bio, this guest sounds really interesting, if I would be permitted to say so myself as the guest. MANDO: So we like to start off every podcast with our normal question that we ask every guest, which is, what is your superpower, Jonan and how did you acquire it? JONAN: My superpower is my friends. They are my superpower and I acquired them after a long career in software and talking to a lot of humans. I don't know actually why, but it's been easy for me to make friends in software. I felt like early on, I found my people and then I just got lucky and it's going okay so far. I'm very fortunate to have them. MANDO: Well, we're fortunate to have you, bud. It's interesting that you say this, I mean, just like Slack for operators, DevOps folks, and Savvy folks, there’s been a lot of discussion as of late on the quality and reliability of one's personal network in things like finding new jobs, finding new opportunities, learning and growing in your career, and stuff like that. It’s been interesting for me personally, because my experience, Jonan sounds a lot more like yours. I was very lucky to find some strong communities of folks that were very welcoming to me. I found my people pretty early on, but a lot of the folks in this other community that I'm tangentially related to seem to have had wildly different experience. I don't know if it's like a software development versus operator kind of thing and in-person versus not in-person kind of thing. It's something that struck me as weird. JONAN: I think it varies by community, too. I've gone to a lot of conferences for a lot of different languages and depending on the conference and depending on the community, I think that you're going to have a different time. I think if I were starting over again, I would probably follow about the same path—attend small conferences with tight focuses and get to know a couple people early on who seem to be having a lot of those conversations, watch for a social butterfly and tag along for a bit and you'll get introduced. MANDO: I'm pretty sure that I met Rein at a local Ruby conference here in Austin. Is that right, Rein? REIN: Sounds right. Sure, yeah. MANDO: But I think it was one of the first Lone Star Ruby Conferences where we met. REIN: Yeah, that sounds right. JONAN: Yeah. I think speaking of butterflies, I also met Rein, I think at one of the very first conferences I attended back in the day. Being welcomed and seeing the application of the Pac-Man rule, where when standing in a circle, you always leave a space for a guest to join and someone joins and you open up again in-person back in the Ruby community in that day was, I think inspiring for me; directed how I decided I was going to be when I showed up here. So thank you, Rein. REIN: It's funny. I remember when I was new to the Ruby community and not sure what to do. I was new to programming, too. I started going to the local Austin meetup actually and the welcome I got as someone who didn't go to college for computer science, someone who wasn't a professional programmer, someone who was just thought it was cool and thought maybe that I could get paid to do it at some point in the future really made a big difference in my life. JONAN: Jessica, how did you get started? JESSICA: Good question. Before I answer it, I noticed that we're talking about Ruby conferences and Ruby programmers and indeed, I learned Ruby in order to go to Ruby conferences so that I could talk to Ruby people because part of the superpowers that that language gives you is friends or buds back in the day, but still is because the Ruby conferences are still super friendly back when we had them. REIN: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah, that's a really good point. I was a professional programmer for probably 5, or 6 years before I started doing Ruby programming. I would say that for those first 5, or 6 years, before I joined the Ruby community, I didn't feel at all like I had any kind of community or group of people. JONAN: What do you think inspires that in a community? I think strong leadership is part of it. Matt has certainly received his share of criticism over the year, but I think that fundamentally, he was trying to build a place where people focused on people instead of the glyphs that we type into our little boxes. I think that matters. What else do you think there is to that? REIN: We here at Greater Than Code also agree with that sentiment. [laughter] JONAN: Seems to align, doesn't it? JESSICA: Yeah, that focus on people and Ruby was always about programmer joy. It was always about the experience; it was always about being happy and there wasn’t that expectation that the optimal thing to do is to go in a corner and type. JONAN: Yeah, I think it's very fortuitous timing that we're actually discussing Ruby so much on the 24th, which was the day that Ruby was named 28 years ago on February 24th, Ruby became the name of this language. So happy birthday, Ruby. JESSICA: Aw. Yeah, happy [inaudible]. JONAN: It really has changed my life. I have regularly, whenever I've seen Matt at a conference, got up to thank him for my house and my kids' college education. Before I got into software, I did a lot of things, but none of them would have brought me either of those. I spent probably 10 years in factories and hotels and casinos. I was a poker dealer for my last gig before I got into software and the number of opportunities that Ruby opened up for me, I can't as long as I live be too grateful; I'll be paying it forward till I die. JESSICA: Yeah, but not the language it's the community—the people, the friends. JONAN: Yeah, exactly. It's the community. It's the people who welcomed me with open arms and made sure that they were contributing to my growth in a far more altruistic sense than, I think is reasonable to expect. I mean, I had nothing to offer in return except a good conversation and high fives and hugs and they spent their time in their energy taking me around conferences and making sure I met people and it was great. REIN: I remember when you first went to New Relic and you were first thinking about, “Hey, maybe I could do this developer relations thing.” What I remember about that, in addition to your obvious aptitude at talking to people about things, is the help that you got, the advice, the mentorship that you got from your friends in the community. I remember at the time being blown away by that; by how many people were willing to just take an hour of their time to talk to you about what it was like for them as a DevRel and things like that. JONAN: Yeah, and I'm still very fortunate to have those people who have helped me build this team here. When I did the onboarding, I put together an elaborate onboarding process. I was able to hire all ten of the DevRel engineers here at the same time. We spent a week doing improv training and having speakers come in as guests and I was able to invite all of these DevRel leaders from over the years to give a perspective on what DevRel was in their eyes, but it is today and always has been clear to me that I am only here where I am by the grace of the communities that I was lucky enough to join. I wonder if developer relations is changing; if it's at a different place than it was when I started out. I feel like certainly, pandemic times have affected things, but all that aside, the segment of the industry is still pretty small. There are only maybe 10,000 people doing this work around the world. It's hard to believe because we're quite loud, right? [chuckles] We’ve got a lot of stages. You see a lot of us, but there are many of us and I think that the maturity of the discipline, I guess, is progressing. We are developing ways to measure the effectiveness. Being able to prove the value to a company is going to change the game for us in a lot of ways. REIN: Yeah. I would love to talk to you about that at length, [chuckles] but for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that you're someone who wants to start a program at a company that doesn't have directly tangible make numbers go up in a business sense value, but you believe that if you're given the chance to do it, that you can show them the value. How do you get that opportunity? JONAN: That's a really good question. Kicking off a developer relations program is, I think it's the same as building most major initiatives within a company. If you had an idea for a software project that should be undertaken, or a major feature that mattered to you, it's about building allies early and often. Making sure that when you show up in that meeting to have the conversation with the decisionmaker, that nine out of ten people in that meeting already know about the plan. They have already contributed their feedback; they feel ownership of that plan and they're ready to support you so that you have the answer going in. I think the mistake that I made often in my career was walking into that room and just pitching my idea all at once and then all of the questions that come out of that and all of the investigation that is necessary and the vetting appears as though this wasn't a very well-thought-out plan, but getting the people on board in the first place is vitally important. I think also you have a lot of examples to look through. You have a chance to talk about other programs and the success that they've brought, the companies where they started off. It's not a thing that you need to start in a big way. You can put a couple of people on the conference speaking circuit, or a couple of people focusing part of their week on outreach and community growth and see where it takes you. If you start to see the numbers, it becomes a lot easier case to make. REIN: You were talking about how you're excited about being able to make this value more tangible in the future. What do you think is the shift that's happening in DevRel that’s making that possible? JONAN: So I think there are actually kind of a lot of factors here. One is that DevRel had a division almost of method where some people, probably by the leadership of their companies, were convinced that what they should be doing is talking about the product all of the time. You're there to talk about the product and evangelize the product and get people to use the product. That is part of your role, but it shouldn't be, in my opinion, the primary role that you play. You should be there in the community participating. In the same way that Rein stood in that hallway and welcomed me to Ruby, I need to stand in that hallway and welcome newcomers to all the communities of which I'm part and in so doing, build that group of friends and build that understanding of the community and their needs. I develop empathy for the developers using our product and, in the industry, generally and that's invaluable intelligence. I sometimes think of ourselves as these like operatives—we’re undercover marketing operatives out there in the developer world talking to developers and just understanding them and it at one point, took a turn towards, “Well, I'm just going to talk about New Relic all the time,” for example. It feels good to see all that content and see all those talks. However, you're only talking to your existing audience. No one is Googling “what exciting things can I do with New Relic,” “seven awesome New Relic tips.” No one's searching for that. They're out there looking at things that are interesting. They want to click on a link on Twitter that is about some random topic. Running Kubernetes on Raspberry Pis and soldering things to Yoda dolls. That's the kind of stuff that I'm going to click on in my free time and in that spirit of play, that's where I want to be engaged and that's where I want to be engaging people. So I think there was this turn. That's part of it and then in reaction to that, I think that the teams who were doing DevRel well and actually seeking out ways to lift up and support the communities and gather that information for their companies—and yes, certainly talk about their products when the situation warrants it. But I mean, how do you feel about that person who shows up to a conference wearing a New Relic hoodie and a New Relic shirt and a New Relic backpack and says “New Relic,” the first 10 minutes you meet them, a hundred times? But you're like, “Wow, this is a friend who is here for my best interests.” MANDO: Right, or every presentation that they give is 30-minute infomercial for whatever company. JONAN: Yeah. So I think people are headed away from that and in response to that, you saw a lot of success from the people who are doing DevRel well. In addition to that, it's becoming to measure these things in hopefully less creepy ways. We can track the people who show up to anything that we do now. If I have a Twitch stream, I can see how many people were there; Twitch provides good stats for me. I can pull those stats out via an API, I can connect them to my podcasting for the week, I can connect them my blogging for the week, and I can show that my audience is growing over time. So whether or not it is valuable yet, we're building the machine right now. We're finding ways to measure those things and that will allow us to adjust the content in a direction that is popular and that’s really just what we're trying to do. We're trying to give the people what they want. We want to talk about the things that people want to hear about. I want to talk about the fun stuff, too, but I'm very surprised sometimes when I learn that hey, nobody wants to hear about my 3D printer API project with Ruby. They want to watch me solder a Raspberry Pi to a Yoda doll and that's great. I'm down for both of those things, I really don't care. But being able to adjust your content towards the sort of thing that is going to interest your community is really valuable obviously to developer relations and we're getting better at it. We have more data than we've had before and not in a way that, to me, feels like that is violating people's personal privacy. REIN: Where do you think that DevRel ought to fit in a company's structure? Is it part of revenue? Is it a sales adjunct? Like, what is the correct role of DevRel? J: I don't think it's part of revenue. I think that it leads to that. But in developer relations, we talk about orbits a lot instead of funnels. We talk about bringing people into the orbit. You generate content so that you generate gravity and you move people in the orbits closer to the company so, you can talk to them more and help them with their problems. When you tie that to revenue, it changes the goal. Is the goal to be out there and help, or is the goal to get the cogs into the machine and continue turning them until they produce coins? When you tie developer relations to revenue, you become trapped in this cycle because look, we’re hackers. If you give me a number you want me to hit, then I can hit the number. But am I hitting the number in the most useful way? Am I generating long-term value for the company? Almost certainly not. It's like the leader that you bring in. So like, “Hey, revenues are up because I fired customer support. Yes, all of them.” In the short-term, there's going to be some great numbers. You just believe yourself and entire team. Long-term, you’re the new Xfinity with the lowest customer support ratings that have ever existed for a company. So I think that actually the majority live under marketing right now and I think it makes sense. I think that developer relations people do themselves a disservice by not understanding marketing and understanding the role they play there. I actually think it belongs under its own organization. But if you try and think about that means from a corporate hierarchy perspective, that means that there's probably a C-level who is responsible only for community growth and C-levels by design, they have numbers, they have dollars that they are bringing in. So until we get to a point where we can prove that the dollars are coming in because of our work, there's not going to be a chief developer relations officer at any company. But give me 5, 10 years, maybe I'll be the first CDRO. MANDO: It's interesting to hear you. I didn't know that they were usually grouped under marketing, but that sounds right. In my most recent life, I worked at two different companies who did a combination of social media management, analytics platforms, and stuff like that. A majority of our customers at both of these places were in the marketing org and they were hitting the same kinds of things that you're talking about that developer relations groups are hitting. They're trying to provide numbers for the kinds of stuff that they're doing, but there's that inherent, not contradiction, but discord between trying to give customers what they want, but have it also not be infomercials. JONAN: Yeah, and I think that that is a tough spot for DevRel teams. I think no matter where you stand in the organization, you need to be very close friends with marketing. They have a tremendous amplifying effect for the work that I do; what I want to do is produce content and I am uniquely suited to do that. I’m a person who can show up on the podcast and wax philosophical about things like developer relations. I enjoy that. I would like it if that was my whole day. What you need to try and design is a world where it is your whole day. There are people who are better at that than you are; that's why you're there as a team. Your job is to get up and talk about the thing, explain technical concepts in easily digestible ways—a process called vulgarization, I guess, a more commonly used word in French. But I think it's very interesting that we vulgarize things. I mostly just turn things into swear words, but the marketing organization puts a huge amount of wind at your back where I can come onto a podcast and spend an hour talking words and then the podcast is edited, tweets go out, images are made and it's syndicated to all the various platforms. If you can get that machine helping you produce your work in the background, you don't have to know all of the content creation pieces that most of us know. Most of us are part-time video/audio/any content platform, we mostly do it ourselves and taking the support of your organization where you can get it is going to be tremendously helpful in growing the team. REIN: So if you can't tell, this is a personally relevant topic for and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the short-term pressures of there might be for DevRel orgs to produce numbers that the business likes and how you balance that with your long-term vision? What's the story you tell leadership that's effective there? JONAN: That's a really good question. So I talk about this developer orbit as being almost pre-funnel work, that there are people that we have within the company who are real good at turning an email address into a dollar and turning a dollar into 10. There are people who have spent 20 years learning how to do that thing. What I'm really good at is getting people to care in the first place and that's my job here. I describe it sometimes like an awareness campaign in marketing; this is the thing that you put the money on the billboards all over San Francisco and people spend millions and they'll go and get VC events, spend every dollar, making every billboard look like their logo because it works. Because just making people aware whether or not they like the billboard, making people aware that you exist is a first step and I would rather that people complain about our product and complain about our company on Twitter than just not think of us because then you're irrelevant. You're not even part of the conversation. Being able to shift sentiment in the community and being able to hear people, genuinely hear people. It doesn't matter to them, when they're angry on Twitter, that they're factually incorrect. Wrong answer. It's your fault. Show up and just address it, “Hey, that sucks. I hate that. Wow, I'm sorry that happened. Let me see if I can fix it,” and go talk to the product team. So I talk about it in that way as this kind of pre-funnel work. And then I talk about how we are measuring it and where we measure it as a team is this care orbit where we have a curiosity and awareness step that work in tandem, where people either have seen the words New Relic, or they've seen the logo, and this is awareness. Or they are curious and they've actually clicked on a thing; they've actually followed that down the rabbit hole. And sometimes, they may be aware because we sponsored a conference one time; they've seen us, they know that we exist, but they have no idea what we do. So if they are curious, they're getting to a step where they could buy a free word association exercise, connect New Relic and observability, for example. And when they're doing research, I don't think there's a whole lot of interactivity we have there as a team there. When I go and research product – think about how you'd buy a developer product. I hear someone say something three times, tail scale. I've been seeing a lot of conversation about tail scale lately. So I hear someone say tail scale three times and then I think to myself, wow, I should probably care about that thing because it's relevant to my career and I don't want to fall behind. In a couple of years, this may be the thing that everyone is using for whatever it does. I don't even know what it does. I better go figure it out and then I go and I do my research and, in that step, I'm reading documentation and I might have run across a blog post, but I'm certainly not watching webinars. I'm just not going to be in that step. And then there's entry. I say entry instead of sign-up because I just want people close to us. I want them to enter the orbit. I want them to be bought in on the dream of the community and hopefully, we've expressed our values in a way that makes it clear that this is the place for them and we're talking about values and not features of a product. Think about how Apple has been successful. Apple is selling a dream. Apple's throwing a woman throws a sledgehammer through the screen in front of people and that's the dream. That's what you're actually buying is this identity, this tribe. I think companies more often end up creating these bulleted lists of checkmarks. I saw one the other day that was probably 50 items long. Here are the 50 things that we do and look at those 2 checkmarks. Our competitor doesn't have those. Gotcha! I don't care. Prove to me that you value the things that I value. Sell me on the purpose and that's the kind of thing that we're really good about talking about. And if you can demonstrate that in a boardroom, then your program will be fun, but you've got to measure it, you've got to show that people are making progress, and you've got to show growth over time. “See, look, we may not be pointing the megaphone in the right direction right now, but it's growing. We're getting a better megaphone. Is that enough for now?” And then we can direct over time, our contact direction towards the place that is being most successful for us as a company and hey, maybe it's I just talk about New Relic all the time, but I'm willing to bet it won't be and when the time comes, I'll have data to prove it. REIN: In the meantime, how do you know whether what you're doing is working? What are your feedback loops look like? JONAN: My feedback loops, our feedback loops as a team right now, we know what we're doing is working when our total audience size is growing. This is kind of a sketchy metric because there are different values to different audiences. For example, Twitch versus Twitter. If I'm going to follow on Twitter, then I follow on my personal account or I follow on the New Relic account because those both provide a place for me to use my voice to engage people. It's a much lower value engagement platform, though from a one follow perspective. 30,000 people I tweeted in front of, 5 will click or 5 will care about the content and that's great and maybe I'm really good at Twitter. I'm not, if I fail, I don't spend as much time on it as I should, but maybe I can refocus my content. I get more via the platform. If you look at something like Twitch, however, someone follows me on Twitch, that means that every time I go live on my stream, they get a notification on every single one of their devices by default. I mean, you can turn it off, but what's the point in following someone, if you're going to turn off the notification; you want the notification. You're saying, “This is the content that I am here for, watching Jonan solder on this silly thing or teach people how to write Ruby from scratch. That's the stuff I signed up for. That's why I'm here on Twitch and I want to be a part of that.” Those have a kind of a higher value. So there is something to weighted consideration across the platforms. But first of all, is your audience grow, just generally? Are you getting a bigger megaphone and more importantly, how are you doing it and moving people from “I'm aware that you exist” to curiosity, “I'm investigating you”? And that's a step when they're aware they've done something like click on a Twitter profile. It's a hard case to make that if they click on my Twitter profile and they see that it says New Relic, that they will have no idea what New Relic does. I have now at least made it into their brain somehow and they will say, “Oh, I've heard that name before.” But the next step of getting people over to curiosity, let's say that we successfully get 10% of our audience over there and 1% of our total audience size, this quarter actually ended up creating accounts and that's where things get real hard because companies tend to have really entrenched MarTech, measuring marketing technology, measuring, and Google analytics setups. And it's hard to bind that piece together to be like, “That signup? That came from us.” We did that and you need to stand up and say it loudly within a company because everyone else is. Everyone else is real excited to take credit for your work, believe me. You’ve got to stand up and prove it, stand up and say, “DevRel did this. DevRel was growing the company.” We're doing good things for the community. We're helping people understand how to use our product. They're caring more about us because we care about them first and here are the numbers to show it. Did that answer your question? I tend to ramble. REIN: Yeah, no it did. Can we do a thing? Can we do a little improv thing, Jonan? JONAN: Yes. REIN: Okay. So I am a chief revenue officer and I hear your pitch and what I say is, “Okay, so I get the DevRel increases engagement. So how much are you committing to improve conversion? How many percentage points are you guaranteeing that you'll deliver in the next quarter?” JONAN: In the first quarter of our existence, I'm going to go with none. I would say in the second quarter of our existence, we will have developed a baseline to compare against and I can guarantee that we will be growing the audience by 10% month over month, over our previous audience size. As the audience grows, it is very directly correlated to numbers that you care about like, signups. If I talked to a 1,000 people, I get 10 signups. If I talk to 10,000 people, I get a 100 and that's the baseline. I mean, that's just the math of it. And if I'm doing a great job, maybe I get 15. So if we want to actually do the math, give me a quarter to do the math. Give me a quarter to establish a baseline because I don't know where our company stands in the market right now. If I'm starting off here at this company and you're Google, I'm not going to have a hard time raising awareness, am I? I think most people have heard of you. If you're Bob's awesome startup and you don't have any awareness out there, then we have some different things to focus on and our numbers are going to look different. We're have a slower ramp. But if you're asking me to commit to where you are right now, then I need numbers first. I need to be able to build the machine, I need to be able to measure it, and once I have those metrics in place, I can tell you what those goals should be and we can set them together and when we exceed them, we will adjust upwards because we are aggressive by nature. We like to win at these things. We like to be good at it because for us, it means that we're doing a better job of loving our people. That's what success means by the numbers. The numbers that to you mean money. If we're doing DevRel right, to me, they mean that I am living with purpose. So yes, I can measure those things, but you’ve got to give me time to get a baseline, or the numbers that I make up will be meaningless and we'll be optimizing for the wrong things. How'd I do? REIN: I’d buy it for a dollar. JONAN: Yes! Sold! MANDO: Yeah, I believe you. So tangentially related; you talked about Twitter and Twitch as two platforms that you're using to engage with prospective folks and grow and welcome the community. I was wondering if there were other places, other things that you use either personally, or as part of your DevRel work to do that same kind of stuff, or if you have specific types of interactions for specific different types of networks? JONAN: Yeah, absolutely. I had left one of our primary platforms off of there, which was YouTube because we're still headed in a direction where we can make that a lightweight process of contributing our work to YouTube. So our strategy, as a team, is to head for platforms that offer two-way engagement. I think that in our generation, we've got a lot of criticism for being the Nintendo generation. “Oh, you were raised by television; you have no attention span.” I have no attention span for TV news. I have no attention span for this one-way oration that has been media consumption my entire life because I live in a world where I have “choose your own adventure” media. Where I can join a Twitch channel and I can adjust the direction of the conversation. Where I can get on Twitter and have a real conversation with famous people, because I am interesting and engaging and responding to them in intelligent ways, hopefully. When you tweet poop emojis at people in your software community as your only game, it's not as likely to drive engagement, but they're very engaging platforms and so, we're aiming for things like that. YouTube being the possible exception. YouTube is still levelling up there. I'm not sure if you find out on the YouTube comments section lately, but it's a little bit wild in there. It's getting better; they're working on it. And those are the kinds of platforms that I want to be a part of. So as far as new things go, I'm going to go with not Clubhouse. Clubhouse has one, got some accessibility stuff to work out, but two, in my opinion, stuck in a trap where they're headed towards that one-way conversation. Anyway, it may be a conversation like this podcast, which I love doing, but our audience isn't given an opportunity to respond in real-time and to drive the direction. Clubhouse is eventually going to turn into a similar platform where you have a hundred people in a room. Can a hundred people speak at once in the same conversation? I don't think so. So there's the accessibility piece – [overtalk] JESSICA: In text! JONAN: In text, they could. JESSICA: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the combination. REIN: Clubhouse needs to innovate by providing a text version of their application. JONAN: Or when we get NLP, when we get natural language processing to the point where those kinds of things can become accessible conversations automatically, then it's different and people can contribute in their own ways. You can have a realistic sounding robot voice who’d read your thoughts aloud for the group. But beyond those, beyond Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, we're checking out TikTok a little bit, that's kind of fun content. It's a good way for us to reuse clips and highlights from our Twitch stuff without having to go through the old process of creating the new content and similarly, for YouTube. If I get on my high horse and I'm waxing philosophical about why you should use instance variables instead of class variables, I can put that piece out and I can make a YouTube video about why you should use instance variables instead of fostered. That kind of content does well on that platform, but you need to consider the platform and I would say, choose a few and focus there, look for the ones that actually have high engagement. Discord is another good place to hang out, love hanging on Discord. And then you've got to be blogging too, but blog in a place where you can own the conversation and make it about what matters to you as a community. We're real focused on learning and teaching, helping people become content creators, and focusing on the quality of software, generally. We're data people. We want to be talking about that. So we have our own community on therelicans.com where we talk about that. That's just a instance of forum. It's just like dev.to, but we own it and we get to period the content a little bit in a direction that is valuable. You want to keep them loose when you're going in community so that you can let the community take shape as it grows into those values. But that's my recommendation for platforms. MANDO: Right on. Thanks, man. It's funny that you bring up TikTok—not at all related how I've recently fallen down and continuing to fall down the TikTok rabbit hole and out of all the different types of content I see on TikTok, it is tech content that I have seen almost zero of. It’s just like, I don't know if there's just like a dearth of the content or if the algorithm hasn't set stuff up to me. JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: The algorithm is super good about all other kinds of things that I'm super into like, I'm inundated with cute dogs and goats and [laughs] you name it, but I don't know. Maybe the algorithm is telling me something about myself that... JONAN: No, I mean, you just have to click on it. JESSICA: Or something about tech content. JONAN: I always just cause answer. Yeah. Jessica, you have thoughts on TikTok? JESSICA: Well, TikTok is really cool but it t's just takes a ton of work to make a piece of content that tight, especially around something technical. JONAN: Yeah. I think that's a good point, actually, that it's not as easy as it looks ever producing a piece of content. You may watch a video for 2 to 3 minutes. I once had a 5-minute lightning talk, but I did 65 takes on it. it took me maybe 20 hours to just record the thing, not counting the 100 hours of research I put into the actual content. So depending on the piece of content and how polished you’re going to make it – TikTok’s initiating platform, though. Look up Emily Kager. If you go watch Emily Kager’s TikToks, you'll head down the right path, I suspect into the good tech ones. MANDO: Awesome. Thanks, man. JONAN: I really like the ones that are explaining algorithms with M&Ms. That kind of video, I like those ones a lot. Here's how databases work under the hood. This is actually what in the endgame using toys or whatever is handy. Cats, I saw someone that worked with their cats and the cats are running all about it. [chuckles] It was fun. MANDO: Oh, that's awesome and that's the kind of stuff that, I mean, I don't know what the time limit is on TikTok stuff, but our TikToks, if they seem to be about a minute to a minute and a half, it's not like you could do any kind of in-depth deep dive on something, but something like describe what Kubernetes with Legos, or something. It seems like you could fit some sort of bite-size explanations, or a series of definitions, right? JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: I mean, there's someone, whose videos I see all the time, who does these videos on obscure Lord of the Rings facts. She'll describe this intricate familial family tree of beings whose definitions have spanned not only the Silmarillion, but other – and she fits it all in a minute and a half. It's fascinating and it's amazing to watch. I'm sure, like you were saying, the stuff she's been researching and she knows this stuff. She spent probably years and years and user for life gathering this knowledge and gathering the ability to distil it down into a minute and a half. JONAN: Yeah, and I mean, it's not even – look, I think a lot of people have the perception, especially starting out creating content, that you have to be the expert. You don't have to be the expert. You just have to do the work, go read about the thing, then talk about the thing. You're actually better suited to talk about it when you've just learned it, by far. Because you know the pain, you have a fresh memory of the pain and the parts of that API you're describing that were difficult to understand and once you become a Kubernetes expert, those things are lost to you. They become opaque; you can't find the parts that were terrible because the memory of the pain goes away. So TikTok is a good place to explore with that kind of stuff in a short-form piece of content. I have a couple more recommendations for you that I'll drop for you in the show notes, too about the people on Twitter—@theannalytical is great at that thing, @cassidoo, and @laurieontech. I'll put them all for you in the show notes. But there are, there are some people you can emulate early on and if you're just starting out, don't be afraid to get up there on the stage. The bottom line is in life in general, we're all just making it up as we go along and you can make it up, too. What have you really got to lose? You're not doing it today. Tomorrow, you would still not be doing it if you don't try. REIN: Continuing with my program of using this podcast to ask Jonan to help me with my personal problems, do you have any thoughts about internal developer relations? Or let me ask this a different way. There are companies that are big enough that there are teams that have never met other teams and there are teams that produce platforms that are used by application development teams and so on. What are your thoughts about building more cohesive and engaged developer communities within a company? JONAN: Yes, do it. I've considered this a huge part of what developer relations needs to be doing generally. Binding those departments together and finding the connections for people and advocating the use of internal software, those internal tooling teams. This is why a lot of DevRel people have a background in internal tooling, myself included. It's just fun to be helping out your friends. That's why you get into DevRel. You like helping your friends and developers are your friends and they're my favorite people. The point that I was making about internal developer relations is yeah, you should be doing it already as part of a DevRel team, but there are actually dedicated teams starting to form. Lyft, I think was one of the first people I heard of doing this where there's an entire team of people. Because the bottom line is DevRel is a very, very busy job. Because you don't have this marketing machine behind you working very effectively, you're probably doing a lot of the production work of your role anyway and it takes a full day to do a podcast well, in many cases. So you're losing a day every time you spend an hour on a microphone. But if you're doing that and then you're going to conferences and then you're writing blog posts and then you're having the usual buffet of meetings and everyone wants to talk to you all the time to just check in and sync and see how we can collaborate; we need forms for that. When people come to me and they want us to speak at their event, or they want us to collaborate on a piece of conduct, I have a form for that and once a week, the entire team sits down and we review all of those in a content review meeting and that guarantees that person, the highest quality of feedback for their project, all 10 of us, 11 of us counting myself, are going to look at that and give them the answers they need and we have guaranteed timeline for them. We have a deal that we will respond to you by Friday 2:00 PM Pacific if you give us the thing by Thursday morning, every single week like clockwork and that encourages the rest of the organization to engage you the way that makes sense for you as a team, instead of just little random ad hoc pieces. So yes, it should be done internally. You need to make space for it. If you are doing external DevRel, too, but it's already part of your job and having a dedicated team actually makes a ton of sense. I would love to see more of that. REIN: Let's say that I am a technical lead, or a senior developer and there's this thing that my team has been doing and I really wish the rest of the company knew about it because I think it could help them. What should I do? JONAN: You should find marketing people. You're looking for the internal comms team in your marketing organization. There are people whose whole job is to communicate those things to the rest of the company; they're very good at it and they can tell you about all those avenues. We all have that internal blog thing, whatever. They're all pretty terrible, honestly, especially in larger companies—nobody reads them, that’s the problem—but they can help you get engagement on those things, help them be shared in the right channels, in your chat platform. That's the people I would work out to. There are humans who are real good at helping you talk about your work and they're in marketing and it's a difficult place to engage, but look for your internal comms person. Failing that, make sure that your project is on point before you take it to people. If you don't have a read me that is at a 110%, that's your first step. Make sure that people understand how they can get involved and how to use the project and try it over and over and over again from scratch. Break it intentionally and see how painful it is to fix. Make it just the most user-friendly product you possibly can before you take it out there and you'll get better. MANDO: This is something also that not just techniques and senior engineers should be thinking about management should be thinking about this for their entire teams and the people that they manage and lead. Because if you can provide visibility for the stuff that your people are working on and have worked on throughout the year, when you, as a manager, go to your management when salary reviews and unit reviews come up, it's much easier to make the case that your team mates or your people on your team should get the salary increases that you're trying to get them. If they have had the visibility for their work. If you can say, “Oh, remember this big thing,” and you can point to the blog post and you can point to the Slack conversation where 10 people congratulated Sam on her upgrade for Costco or whatever it is. You know what I mean? JONAN: Yeah, and you have to talk loud here. MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: You’ve got to scream about it. Look, people are only going to hear 25% of what you say anyway, and it feels like bragging, but overcommunicate and often, especially people in management. I mean, really think about how many bulleted lists go across a manager's desk and how you want yours to matter. Better make it longer and more relevant and as detailed as possible so that some portion of it actually makes it through to their consciousness and they can communicate it on there's superiors. Superiors is a terrible way to say that; they're managers. MANDO: They're managers, right? Yeah. This is something that I learned as I was going through management and something that was never taught to me and it's something that I advocate really strongly about. But if you're managing people, if you're leading people and you're not advocating for them and for their work, like you're saying, as loudly as possible to the point of possibly being annoying, you're straight up not doing your job. JONAN: Yeah, you are. I learned early on in my career that the loudest people were the ones getting the promotions and having the career success, whether or not they were good, or they were actually contributing things that were value. I watched someone merge 600 lines of untested code against the objections of his coworkers and get a promotion about it. That's about conversations; it's not about quality. REIN: Yeah, I also think there are things that companies can be doing to make this easier. So you can have a weekly show and tell email. JONAN: Yes. REIN: You can let people pitch stuff to it, you can track engagement with it, and see whether people are getting value out of it and try to make it better. JONAN: And that's exactly it: you have to have a feedback mechanism so that you can adjust the direction of your content. We actually have plans, when we get our feet under us a bit, to do a morning news show like of us had in high school. Just 5 minutes in the morning where we take a question a day and explain it. There are a lot of people who work at our companies who have no idea what a virtual machine is, or at what layer it operates, and how it differs from a container. Telling them the difference between LXC and VMs, that's a thing that DevRel people do well. So we can actually explain, I can take Kubernetes and I can explain it with M&M's in 5 minutes, and then I can invite people to come and talk to the devil to come hang out in the Slack channel. There's a Q&A form. We answer one of these every morning, maybe your question will be next. By the way, here's some fun and interesting stuff that we're up to this week, come check it out. You can find this all on therelicans.com and we've got the internal page over here, and we've got this over here. And then you just have an opportunity daily to communicate this, what feels like a waterfall of work coming out of your team, but getting those daily touchpoints, or maybe weekly to start is a good place to go. MANDO: I love the idea of morning announcements, especially as for specific teams. You assume that a certain size of an org to be able to do this kind of stuff. The place that I'm at right now, there's 4 of us total, so we're not going to be doing this kind of thing. But my last gig, there were thousands of people who worked there and I was in charge of the operations team. JONAN: I actually think the morning news show is a really good way to do that, but you're right that in a smaller team, it's not as relevant. I would argue however, that you're doing it anyway, because with 4 people, you're able to communicate everything that you're all working on all the time. MANDO: That is exactly what happens. JONAN: And you don't have to scale. MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: But it's nice to be bought in on the dream and to feel like you're living your life with purpose and work is a huge part of our lives whether we like it or not. We live in this system and we get to choose every day. I choose to live a life that feels purposeful. I choose to seek meaning because I want to wake up in the morning and be excited to come to work. I want to help lift up the rest of my team so that we're out there making more developers who get to turn this into their dream, which we can't know or predict. I just want to help those people get over the line because I now have desperate it feels on the other side of the fence. I mean, I worked 16-hour days for several years at 5 different jobs and I came home and the world was telling me to live myself up by my bootstraps. You’ve got to be kidding me. That's your American dream? Come on. MANDO: Yeah, I got no more bootstraps. JONAN: Yeah. I want you politician to go and spend 3 hours getting a jug of milk that you pay twice as much as it's necessary for it and have to take two buses to find. I want you to have that experience, how desperate and time consuming and expensive it is to be poor in this country and then lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Because it's not a thing. We have a finite amount of motivation, of will in our day to spend and you've got to make the room. You've got to pay yourself first in that. Get up in the morning and write some code and then go exhaust yourself so your employer gets shortchanged. Your fourth job of the day, they're going to get a little bit less of your time and energy because you gave it to yourself first. That's how you're going to build a wedge to get into tech and I want to be there to help people do that thing. That's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is making more developers and supporting them as that grow. I mean, I can see dystopia from here. The tech is headed towards a place. MANDO: Oh, yeah. JONAN: We have 1% of people on earth able to program today and we're about to double the global access to high-speed internet. When Starling comes on board – they're launching 70 satellites a month now. When Starlight comes on board, everyone on earth will have access to hopefully low-cost, high-speed internet access. We will double the global audience for many of our services. That's going to be real bad for the world if that 1% who can program and control most of the money in power on the internet becomes half a percent. Historically, that has not worked out great for humanity. So we need to start loosening that up. We need to make more developers yesterday by the thousands, by the millions. We need more people writing this code and helping us to turn this industry into a place that we want to be because the model culture is not going to make it. We will extinct us. We will eliminate humanity whether only the soul or in reality, if we continue down this path where we have a whole bunch of people collected in Valley somewhere, who are defining the rest of the planet. Facebook had no small part in recent revolutions around the world. That's tech. That's us. Whether you want to own it or not, you contributed to the culture and the software that built that monster. REIN: And the other side to making more developers is not having work that chews up and spits out their desiccated husks at a profoundly troubling rate. JONAN: It's true. It’s absolutely true and I think that that's equally, if not more important, that we're not feeding more to the machine. We have toxic spaces in our companies and in our communities and we define them. We need to change them. We need to create better ones. That's, I think a better option, even because you're not going to change that many people's minds. I think that especially this late in the game, for many people—people who have had success with their bad opinions—they continue to spout those bad opinions and believe them. Make a new space. Make a new space and prove it. Show your community, the numbers. If you have another meetup, because the one you're going to has had 18 months of 18 white men speaking and mostly the same people, then make a new meetup and see if the community likes it better and I bet you, they will. I bet you, they'll come. If you build it, they will come. But we got to do the work to make these places better before we just bring people in and watch them suffer. I can't do that anymore. I can't be that person in the world. For a while, I stopped speaking at code schools and bootcamps because I felt like a monster because I knew what I was setting these people up for. I was looking around tech and seeing the poison and I was bringing people, who I genuinely cared about, to the slaughter and I couldn't do it anymore. But I think that now I can do along the way is advise them how to avoid it, what red flags to look out for, how to find the good parts in between, and that's a better approach. It enables me to feel good about my work. MANDO: Yeah. Building up that, I don't want to jump us to reflections yet, but the thing that I keep coming back to is the desire to help your friends. JONAN: Yeah. MANDO: And for me, personally, something that I've been struggling with for a long time now and it's really crystallized over the past, I don't know, year or so, is seemingly how few people have that desire. Maybe not have the desire, I think it's natural to have a desire to want to help your friends. But maybe there's so few people who see everybody as someone who is potentially your friend and someone that you want to help. It's like, they'd be willing to help the person that they hang out with every weekend. But they're going to step over the homeless guy who is standing in front of Target while they walk in. You know what I mean? JONAN: Yeah, and I don't think that they're bad people. Like, I’m not actually a big believer in bad people; I think that there are good misguided people. I don't think there are a whole lot of humans on this earth, with the exception of maybe a handful, who wake up in the morning to do evil. Who wakes up and is like, “Man, today, I'm going to make some real bad days for those around me.” They mostly, I think, believe that they're contributing too good to the world and many of them are very misguided in those attempts, to be clear. There are people actively contributing harm every day, but they don't see it as such. So we have that piece of the conversation and the other part, where I just fail to have empathy for other people, is probably in part about not having good experiences. When I reached out to other people, having a form of attachment in my life, maybe when I was younger, that was traumatic for me. That taught me that I could not trust the world to catch me when I fall; that I couldn't trust other people will be there for me and to show up. Because of that, I had to rely on myself and here I go again on my own. This song I'm off on this walk and it's just me and I need to look out for myself because nobody else will. It's the hurt people hurt people. We saw a church sign when I was driving with my son when he was quite young and he said, “Hurt people hurt people. Why do they want to hurt people so bad?” So internally, in our family, this became a chant: hurt people hurt people instead of hurt people hurt people conversation. But I think the part where we are perpetually enacting our traumas on those around us, because as a society, we've decided that addressing your own traumas, getting your own crap out of the way first is somehow a taboo subject. Like, just go to therapy, people. We just have to put mandatory therapy for people. I want to see a government program that institutes mandatory therapy for people. I'm sure the people will love that. “Oh sure, everyone gets to see a doctor now. I bet you don't want people to die of preventable diseases either?” No, I don't. I want people to get over their collective trauma and stop harming other people because you were harmed and it takes work. Because you got to do the work if you're going to make the world a better place. MANDO: Yeah, I don't know. I personally feel like it's difficult for me when it seems as though the trauma is ongoing. Without this turning into my own therapy session, it makes me sad to see how different I've become over the past year. Is it a year ago? I would've said the same thing that you did, Jonan where I didn't believe that most people were awful monsters hellbent on destroying me and everyone that I love. I don't know so much that I believe that anymore. JONAN: I think JESSICA: They don't think of themselves as monsters. MANDO: Right, right. JESSICA: They may be hellbent on destroying you because they really think that's somehow good are wrong. MANDO: Right. At the end of the day, you're absolutely right, Jessica. How much of that matters? How much of that distinction matters? JESSICA: It does matter. JONAN: I think it does. JESSICA: It matters in what we do about it. JONAN: Yeah. JESSICA: And I don't want to destroy them either. I do want to segregate them off in their own little world. JONAN: Yeah. I love that. MANDO: For me, the ratios make it work in the other direction. JESSICA: Like you want to segregate off in your own little world? MANDO: Well, just that there's way more of them. JESSICA: Oh, okay. MANDO: And so, putting them off someplace would never happen. JONAN: Yeah. I think it's worth noting here that I am a large loud white man speaking from a place of tremendous privilege in that I maybe have experienced less of that “You don't get to exist.” Like, “You're not welcomed here in life in general.” Not even a maybe but that like over my lifetime, very few people have come out to me and just said like, “I wish that you weren't a thing. I wish that you as a human didn't exist on this earth, that you were never born, that your parents were never born.” I've not had that experience. I mean, I have when I've received somehow particular malice from someone usually as a result of my ridiculous jokes. JESSICA: But then it’s personal which yeah. JONAN: But then it’s personal and that’s [inaudible]. People who don't even know me. So yeah, I do. I speak from that position, but I think that this is another – gosh, I'm really not trying to be like let's all come together and have a conversation person because some are too far gone from that. But I think that I'm not ready to give up on humanity as a whole just yet, as much as I'm inclined to. I might be ready to give up on the United States, looking into options overseas. [laughter] REIN: I think for me, the reason this distinction is so important is because when someone claims that there's just evil in the world and these chaotic forces, it decontextualizes people's behavior from ideology, from culture, from socialization, from the worldviews that they have that mediate these behaviors. So I think it's important to understand that people aren't just evil. People have certain worldviews and ideologies and that those manifest in these behaviors. JONAN: And that we built the – JESSICA: Which meant the ideology is evil. JONAN: It makes the ideologies evil. JESSICA: Yeah, which causes the behavior of the people to be evil. That if – [overtalk] JONAN: And these are the systems that we build and perpetuate. JESSICA: Right, exactly and if we keep blaming the people and saying, “There are evil people,” then we will never fix the system. JONAN: Exactly. REIN: The most profound example of this I am aware of and if this is too heavy, we can cut it out of the show is [laughter] when Jordan Peterson claimed that the Nazi's final solution was because they were just evil, chaotic forces. In fact, their worldview demanded it. Their ideology demanded it. JESSICA: Yeah, there was nothing chaotic about that. JONAN: No, it was pretty organized. JESSICA: Yeah. MANDO: Thanks, IBM. JONAN: Yeah. JESSICA: Did you say IBM? MANDO: I said thanks IBM for their efforts. JONAN: And Bosch and every other company, right? MANDO: Yeah. JONAN: I mean, the world would not be able to sustain its current population without the work of Bosch creating nitrogen out of the air and also, then the Nazis used it to get gunpowder when they had no access. So we have a lot of those kinds of systems that we've built over the years and that's absolutely a part of it. You talked about the industries that are involved across these bridges. You don't get to show up to work, team and just be like, “I don't actually care about the impact that I have on humans. I care about the impact that I have on this graph.” You can't be that person anymore if we're going to make it and you can't walk around and point at those people and be like, “Yeah, they were fundamentally flawed from birth.” Whatever that thing means to you, you can't just say like, “Yeah, that person's evil. They probably had bad parenting.” Yeah, maybe they did. But I know a lot of people who had bad parenting or no parenting and turned out okay because they fought their way up that mountain. They overcame it. JESSICA: And they found friends, it helps them. JONAN: Yes. JESSICA: It's not, “Fight your way up the mountain, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” No, it's, “Keep looking for a better place,” and by place, I mean friend group. JONAN: Yes. Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about you and care about the things that you care about. I wish I'd learned that earlier in my life. Man, I hung out with some people who had different values than I did over the years and I changed my life just by finding a good friend. JESSICA: Yeah. Because we are social animals and we really are the people we're closest to. MANDO: Yeah, absolutely. JESSICA: That's what makes sense with us. That is the world we live in. What was that John Gall quote from earlier? “I respect facts, but I live in impressions.” Especially the default appropriate behavior is whatever the people around us do ad that is what we will fall back to without active intervention and we only have so much of that willpower to combat in a day. REIN: Oh, I've got a new thing for a fact that I just read. So this is from Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior and there's a diagram where reality minus meaningfulness equals facts. MANDO: I’d buy that. JESSICA: I mean, okay. But reality very broadly because when we're looking at more than what's just in front of us, it comes to us as facts and stories, but stories can lead us either way. Oh, manipulated facts can, too. But we still have to look for facts in order to realign our vision of reality and meaning with something bigger than we can personally see. MANDO: Have y'all seen the movie In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter, back from the 90s? It's a super good kind of thriller horror movie, kind of Lovecraftian in the ancient ones are coming to take over and stuff like that. But it's about this guy who, he's an author. His name is Sutter Cane. He's like the new Stephen King; super prolific and writes these kind of horrifying, terrifying books that are just sweeping the zeitgeist. And then something changes and it seems as though his books start affecting the people who are reading his books, not in the [inaudible] was a genius, I’ve been affected by it, but making them bleed from their eyes and go crazy affected. So the movie plays around with these ideas of facts and reality as something that is mostly shared and understood as opposed to something that is concrete and stands alone by itself. It's super freaky and really good. My daughter and I just watched it again a couple of days ago so it's kind of fresh on the mind, but I highly recommend it. I think it's on Amazon Prime. JONAN: I think I like this discussion because it speaks to weaving the facts into the narrative of your life. You need to leave the reality that you're presented with and the reality that people share with you, the facts into the story that is you develop that shared story we're all telling together. REIN: Yeah. You need a Dirk gently belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things sort of thing. Another thing is diagram is that phenomena minus interconnecting context equals objects. So the whole point, well, for me, what I take to be the point is you have the fact, but you have to understand them in context. JESSICA: Yeah, the connections. And the weaving is really important because we can't understand anything top down. We can't understand anything bottom up, not fully. You have to weave back and forth. REIN: By the way, Lewontin in his biology, his ideology lectures, talks about how the mechanistic approach to understanding the world didn't work, but the holistic approach and isolation didn't work either. So Jessica, exactly what you're talking about that you need both. JESSICA: Yeah. JONAN: All right. Reflections time. What do we do for reflections? MANDO: I'll go first. There was a lot in the conversation, but right here towards the end, the idea of who we spend time with and we are who we keep that small circle of friends with is super important. I had this realization, Jessica, as you were talking about that that my deep-seated negativity that's been growing in me for the past year or so, it comes out more and more and it really only comes out with that small, tight circle of friends. So I need to be very, very careful that I'm not turning into the toxic one [laughs] in my group and that might be a way to help me self-regulate this stuff. It’s not like I don't want to share it because I do because these people, they're my family. Like, I’ll lay down in traffic for them. JESSICA: Is it something that emerges within the group or do you only see it in yourself? MANDO: No, no, no. It's only in me. I mean, not only, but you know what I mean? Like it's what's more pronounced and sometimes, I feel like I'm convincing [laughs] them, which I don't want to do. JESSICA: Because eventually, they'll reflect that back and it'll spiral. MANDO: Right. Exactly. I don't want to turn them into me. [laughs] So I should be more careful and maybe listen a little more. REIN: We started and we ended this conversation by talking about people helping each other and about friends and as I've been studying resilience engineering, what I realized that it's about is the ecology of human performance. If you want to understand how someone behaves, you have to understand their environment and their experiences and sharing adaptive capacity—people helping each other when they need help. So ecology of human performance and sharing of adaptive capacity. There's a story in science, in social biology that humans are inherently aggressive and competitive and domineering, and that this explains and motivates and justifies social systems of domination and oppression and so on. And what, at least my experience tells me is that the reason their people are putting so much effort into asserting these things to be true, is that the plain evidence of our eyes is they're not true. That people are helping people, that that's what we're good at. JESSICA: Something that stood out to me from early is there was a question about how do you convince people that something is valuable when it's not going to move the metrics that they're currently looking at? And sometimes what is needed, if it works, it's going to be obvious that it works even if it's not going to be measurable by what you're measuring now. Jonan had made the point that if you get enough people on board and everyone in the room considers this, obviously the right thing to do, then it becomes obvious in a social sense and that makes it easier to convince someone. JONAN: I think these all tie together for me. I think talking about being vulnerable and understanding what it takes and how that is necessary to really build empathy on the other side, to just stand up and talk about the things that suck, talk about who you are in a real way and have the deeper conversation. I'm sure it's happened to you all, but there've been plenty of times in my life where I sat down with someone and 5 minutes later, I felt like we were just opened like, this is just me and reaching that level of vulnerability, sometimes never comes for some people and that ultimately, to me is this kind of curve of self-actualization that humans are setting up for their lifetime, hopefully. We can help people up on that and especially people who have had the kind of privilege that I've had, this wind at my back, and I'm not even just talking about all of the socioeconomic pieces. I'm talking about you. I’m talking about all three of you, you being my friends, being here to support me, you make it possible for me to hand that support onto the people around me and it's not actually a choice at some level. You have demonstrated as peers, the kind of behavior that I want to emulate. And I have no choice, but to spend the rest of my life, trying to offer that hand to the next person, who's going to come along and continue doing the good work that you all are doing. So I am feeling grateful today, more than anything, for having been here and had this conversation. So thank you all. Special Guest: Jonan Scheffler.
226: Incarceration and Technology with Kurt Kemple
01:49 - Kurt’s Superpower: Lifting Others Up: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” 07:00 - “Self-Taught” vs “Self-Guided” vs “Self-Motivated” Developers 11:32 - The Intersection of Incarceration and Technology * Destigmatizing Incarcerated Folx * Hiring the Formerly Incarcerated * Providing Stability to Folx Coming Out of Incarceration 22:15 - Having Privilege Working in DevRel to Raise These Issues * Bias and White Privilege 26:51 - Helping and Advocating For the Formerly Incarcerated 29:32 - The Interview Process as it Relates to the Formerly Incarcerated * Background Checks * Rolling Jobs 36:26 - Always Be Applying (ABA); Technical Interviews and Fabrication/Bending Truths * Voluntary Disclosure: I'm an Impostor - Incarceration and Living a Lie (https://theworst.dev/im-an-impostor) 45:29 - Problematic Binary Identities 47:07 - What can companies and hiring managers do? / Problems with Hiring in Tech and Tech Interviews * Make No Assumptions * Avoid Feigned Surprise * Don’t Treat People Differently * Don’t Take Advantage * Don’t Interrogate 01:05:19 - Contextualizing Advice Reflections: Kurt: Community is what you surround yourself with. Laurie: Having empathy and understanding as a hiring manager for people who have perceivably negative things in their background. Jacob: Polyglotism and not being so gatekeep-y. John: Being reminded of how terrible our carceral state is here in the U.S. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JACOB: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 226 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, John Sawers. JOHN: Thank you, Jacob and I’m here with Laurie Barth. LAURIE: Thanks, John. I’m excited to introduce our guest today, Kurt Kemple. Kurt Kemple is a technical writer, speaker, and software developer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s very passionate about the intersection of technology and incarceration. Currently, he works for Apollo GraphQL, as a Developer Relations Manager and when not working he can be found by the ocean or relaxing with his family, which sounds really incredible. So Kurt, I'm going to have you start us off by answering the question we ask all of our guests, which is what is your developer superpower? KURT: Well, first thank you for that awesome introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. So diving into what is my superpower, I thought about this a lot and I'm not really someone who I feel has some innate skill or ability that really makes me stand out in any particular area. But I think one thing that I do really well is I care very much about lifting up the people around me. I work actively to generally help others more than I'm helping myself. I think the rising tide lifts all boats kind of mentality and I think that that is definitely something that sets me apart is I gauge my success by how successful folks around me are. JACOB: That sounds fantastic. Was that something you felt like you've always done, or was it something do you consciously develop, or did it just sort of come around? KURT: I think it evolved out of situations in my life. I've dealt with a lot of stressful situations and pretty tough upbringing and I think a lot of it is just finding opportunities to make sure people don't have to experience those things and not being so drastic that it's always in relation to something very life altering. But there's something about removing roadblocks for other folks that you have the ability to do that is very rewarding to me and I think I just started to realize that later in life that that's something I value greatly. LAURIE: That's really interesting to hear because I think in a lot of areas of technology and in the industry, we often hear people saying like, “I had to do it, so you have to do it, too.” I've heard that with sort of the toxic interview, it's almost like hazing mentality and the tools may be abstracted, but if you don't know the super, super low-level piece of it, then you're never going to understand it the way I do sort of mentality. A lot of this gatekeeping stuff comes from that. So it's really refreshing to hear that you feel sort of the opposite of that. KURT: Yeah. Like I remember very distinctly, many times starting out programming, like getting the response: RTFM. It's like, people, they don't want to help for whatever reason. They want you to – it's like almost like a badge of honor; forcing folks to figure things out for themselves. There's something to be said with taking on learning as your own responsibility, but part of learning is knowing how to get answers and ask for help when you aren't figuring it out and so, I definitely really cannot stand to see that kind of lift the ladder up behind me mentality, or pull yourself up by the bootstraps type mentality. JACOB: So who are those people around you in your role with Apollo? Who are the people that you would measure the success of? KURT: Yeah. So it's actually spread out across multiple things, but I'll start from Apollo. I'm a manager of the developer relations team so definitely my direct reports absolutely care about how well they are doing as well as the DX organization, it extends out to their world. We're all part of developer experience and we want to make sure that things we're doing is helping lifting up the education team and DX as a whole. And then of course, that spreads out into Apollo, which is just by helping developers be successful with Apollo, we're actually helping a policy succeed. But when we talk about developer relations, really that's just communities I'm involved with at all. So that could be anybody from the communities that I'm a part of, whether that's content creation, DevRel, things around GraphQL, or developments, it could be anything related to that. Pretty much any person that I have interaction with, I start to look at ways in which I can help them move forward. JOHN: It's funny the phrase “bootstrap” is so embedded in our culture because it's coming from – it’s technical terminology at this point, but it's so interesting and I think important to think back to the origin of that phrase, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was satirical because it's obviously, not possible to do that for you. You can't lift yourself by grabbing your boots and that's the whole point, but it's almost like turned over on itself and becoming oh, that's just what you do as economic policy or a social policy despite the fact that it was originally the complete opposite of that. KURT: Yeah. It's funny. I never really thought about that, but it's very true. They took something that was meant to be like satire, like, “Oh yeah, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and then turned it into something serious. I still view it as satire. To me, it's the silliest phrase ever, but a lot of folks take that very seriously. JACOB: What else is satire or was originally satire was the word, “meritocracy”? KURT: Oh wow. JACOB: Yeah. It was basically like oh, the new aristocracy of people who think they're on top because of their merit; it's the meritocracy. It's something else I think about is the phrase self-taught; ex self-taught developer, self-taught engineer, or the million Medium posts of how I taught myself to code in 12 weeks. What does that mean, taught yourself? Do you have no interactions with any human? JOHN: You didn’t think a human produced? LAURIE: Yeah. The self-taught thing is actually really complicated and nuanced in my mind because a lot of people like to claim it and say, “Well, we're all self-taught because we all read blog posts and have to teach ourselves other things because as a developer, you're always learning new things and so, we can all claim that title.” And then there's the area of people who consider themselves self-taught, but they were working one-on-one through DMs with someone that is a working developer and they know really well. But then there's actually a last category of people, which is what I feel the label was sort of designed for, which is they never had any formal classroom experience that taught them like, the variable goes on the left side of the expression. So they had to learn just those super fundamental syntactical things through reading and through example videos and potentially sometimes asking questions, but it was a very async process. I think that's what self-taught is designed to imply that there wasn't a curriculum laid out in front of them and that they didn't have a helping hand along the way. I think there's something incredibly powerful about that and I hate the idea that it's been co-opted as well, everyone's self-taught, I'm like, “No, I got to sit in a computer science program and have teachers tell me what I needed to know in a certain order.” Was that necessarily the best way for me to learn? No. Did I have to go in and teach myself how to do things after that fact and for the rest of my career? Absolutely. But did I have some of those baseline foundational things conveyed to me based on someone who knew the order of operations of learning this topic? I did. So I am not self-taught in any sense of the word. KURT: Yeah. I think that's very interesting point and what I've been using. So I'm the other end of that spectrum. No official – that's actually not true, I took intro or intermediate web development course when I was incarcerated. But this was basically, here's a book on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and good luck. But aside from that, I had no real formal education, but I've adopted the term self-guided, which I feel is a better descriptor of that. Because it's more about guiding yourself through a curriculum to learn programming and it's like, you're pulling bits and pieces from wherever. You can find it to create your own curriculum is essentially what you're doing. But I did learn from lots of other folks along that journey, both through asynchronous communication and DMs, watching videos, reading, blog posts and stuff. So it's not like I was in a room with no outside influence and had a computer and was like, “I will code.” But I think I really like that term, self-guided, because that's a better representation, I feel like of what actually happened. LAURIE: I love that and it reminds me of when I was in high school where you get to take independent study and it's sort of the same concept of you get to go in-depth on a topic, but you're determining what shape that takes and where you go and what you focus on. JACOB: What successful means. KURT: Yeah. JACOB: And then no one will probably care, to be truthful. No one will actually care if you don't do it. LAURIE: Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing; self-motivated is a big part of that. Like, no one's grading papers or assignments. There's no papers in coding. [laughter] No one is grading assignments. You don't have deadlines that are imposed by other people. If you buy the course and you never watch a single video, the only one accountable for that is sunk cost fallacy of having wasted the money. There's nothing forcing you to power through and that's actually a great way to prepare yourself for coding on the job. Because it's like, technically, there's just this ticket and you need to be looking at it and feel the sense of oh no, I need to get this done because no one can actually force you to do it! [laughs] KURT: Yeah. That's very accurate. [chuckles] JOHN: Concurred. It sounds like from your bio there that the group of people that you consider yourself to be responsible for helping to lift up is beyond just the team that you're responsible for. So I’d love to hear more about the other groups that you're working with on that level. KURT: Yeah. So, I think it's interesting when we talk about community and groups and to me, community is not like a thing with guidelines and boundaries, community is whoever you surround yourself with and so, to me, there is no React community, or GraphQL community. There's just people in my community who happened to know React, or GraphQL and I think it's an interesting way to look at community because it breaks down a lot of barriers. But if we do talk about specific groups, I am very into the intersection of incarceration and technology and the reason why is because I myself am formerly incarcerated and getting into tech had such a drastic effect on my life. So it’s just naturally, I want to and again, a lot of this motivation for lifting others up stems from this. I feel like I am often sitting on a gold mine and I feel selfish when I know that there are people who were in a similar situation who are coming out of prison and don't have any idea that this industry exists, that they can have a future in it with some self-guided learning, some hard work, and a lot of perseverance. It's by no means easy, let's be real. Coding is a very difficult skill, but most folks can accomplish that goal of learning it and it just feels like if I'm not actively working to help expose people, who are coming out of incarceration, find this industry and see if it's a fit for them, then I feel like I'm just like holding something that I should be freely giving away. I think a lot of where it comes with lifting others up is that feeling of, I'm holding something that other people should have access to and that's education, information. When we talk about self-guided, it's actually one thing about picking your own curriculum that is anxiety inducing is, am I picking the right things to learn? The industry is huge and you could pick so many different things and I lucked out that I was introduced to something that was a good path into tech for me. I would like to provide folks coming out the information that the industry exists, but also a little bit of guidance around some of the different ways that you can go and break into it. So I'd say that is definitely a community, or a group of folks in my community that I care deeply about is those who are transitioning from incarceration back into society. LAURIE: I'm curious if – obviously, this is an experience and a community that a lot of us don't have a lot of insight into and it's great that you do and you have those connections. Can you talk to us a little bit about the kinds of things that we all can do to make that transition easier to support those groups of people, whether it's in an organization or outside of that? KURT: Yeah. I'll say there's really two avenues where you can do a lot of good. One is in de-stigmatization. So it's sharing information about incarceration, figuring out who these people in the community are, building relationships with them, checking at your companies, and seeing if they're adhering to the laws around hiring formerly incarcerated folks. A lot of times background checks will violate labor laws within states and companies don't check that. They say, “Give me the default. I want all the information.” It's up to the company to actually check and make sure that they have the proper configuration that they're not losing people based on laws. A good example of this is in California, they can only look 7 years back on your record for criminal activity, barring certain types of activity. But for most things, only 7 years. However, there's companies that will do background checks and pull stuff up from way back. I had this happen with a company and I was like, “Hey, just to let you know, you're not allowed to pull up information from when you did. You showing me that you found my background is actually admitting that you're violating the state laws.” Now here's where the problem lies. It takes people who are the ones, the vulnerable being affected by it to push this forward because our only recourse is to hire a lawyer and to fight it in court. I'm jobless, have just come out of prison; I don't have any money for a lawyer to fight some company, to do that and then do you want to go now work for a company that you had to fight for the job in court? So it takes people who are not in that situation asking their employer, “Hey, what is our policy on hiring formerly incarcerated? What programs do we have in place to make sure we're not dropping them out of the pipeline?” That's a huge one. And then the second one is most people don't really want to go back to prison. That's not always true. You have people who actually do want to go because it's a place where they can get more stability and safety and stuff than they can. That says a lot about the United States as a whole, but most people, they come into prison with high hopes. I wasn't the only one in that web programming class like, I wasn't the only one learning how to train dogs, learning welding, carpentry, plumbing; taking every course that was available to me. There's a lot of other folks, too. But what people don't have and why recidivism is so high is there's no stability. So we get these skills. We get out into the world. We have no income. We have no job history for years because of this. Companies that would hire folks for the skills that we have learned are doing background checks and turning us down because of them. So it's like yeah, we're learning skills, we're learning stuff, but none of it can actually be used until x amount of years after you get out and you're just kind of left floating there. So finding programs, local programs that are based in civil activities, providing housing, providing food, providing access to equipment and education, further education for folks coming out of incarceration. Those are the two best places that you can by far have a huge impact. $50 worth of food can be the difference between somebody going back to prison or not. Because if they don't have it, they're going to revert to what they know and what they know is crime often, and then boom, they go back. Of course, if we look at who's the most affected by this, it's marginalized communities. So focusing on those communities is especially going to be impactful. JOHN: Yeah. I would also imagine that the lack of a support system in the outside world is also a huge factor there. Like you were saying the $50, people that have a support system can probably make-do relying on other people that they know to help out, to get by through that part where they need that extra money for food. But if you don't have that, there aren't really any other options. KURT: Yeah. It took me almost 3 years to land my first job coding as a software developer and I can pinpoint multiple times during that 3 years where I came very close to committing a crime again and that's wild to think about now. Now, I would never in a million years do anything, but I also have stability. It’s just a living example, somebody directly in front of you just proving that the prison system, prison industrial complex is really just a money-making machine that is not incentivized in any way to help provide you with stability and keep you out of prison. Most of our prisons are actually owned by private businesses and private businesses need revenue and for a private prison, what do you think the revenue stream is? Prison labor, slave labor, me working for 14 cents an hour. That is how they make money. So what is the real incentivization, or real incentive, I guess, is the actual word to actually have programs to help people be stable when they get out? To provide learning and education around things they'll actually be able to get jobs for? To not have lobbyists literally fight to keep laws around hiring formerly incarcerated as strict and terrible as they are? So the prison industrial complex literally sends people to Congress and have them lobby against improving these systems and then they pay people at the state level and it's just like all the way down. They pay judges to make sure they send non-violent offenders into the prison system. It's a nightmare of a system, but to circle back to that, that $50 makes a huge difference and can really be the differentiator. LAURIE: For what it's worth, I appreciate you being so candid about all of this. I think it's a topic that some of us are tangentially aware of, but don't necessarily have the specifics. I remember some of this from my poly-sci degree and it was horrible then and it's worse now. KURT: Yeah. It's not fun or pleasant, but I am privileged enough to be in a position to candidly speak about it and so, again, if we use manager speak, [chuckles] circle back to lifting up others and feeling like I'm holding onto something. This stuff is really stressful. It's hard to talk about even with as much as I do, but I find that the DMs that I get from folks who are struggling and trying to get into tech. When they reach out to me and they're like, “I found your blog posts or this podcast or video and it gave me hope,” I'm going to keep trying that's that motivates the ever-living crap out of me and it far outweighs that pressure. But another thing, too is not everyone is in a position to be able to speak about this. It's just, I've developed enough of a brand and identity in the industry. I have enough of a work background. The incidents have happened so far in the past now that they can't really be held against me for finding future work. So not everyone has that situation. LAURIE: I'm curious if you feel like being in the developer relations space has impacted your ability to have those conversations and have those interactions and be more visible compared to some sort of a more IC coding role where you don't necessarily have the same kind of network effect based on the work that you're doing day-to-day. KURT: Yeah. Oh, that's a really interesting insight. I mean, yes, the faster the audience grows that I can reach, clearly, it’s the more people I can reach with this message. So I definitely think DevRel has put me into a situation where I can reach more people faster because my network is growing faster than it was as an individual contributor. So yeah, a 100%. I think it's also interesting to find the balance between like, we all know how tech folks feel about people being people and having lives outside of technology. So it's like finding that line of growing your audience while producing information about things or causes that you care about and stuff without causing a lot of churn in drop off is a feat in and of itself. Every time I tweet about prison or something like that, I watch my followers drop. It's just like you can set a clock to it. But it's an interesting balance to try to not overshare in that regard and just continue to lose audience because then that affects things like algorithms and how many people I reach and stuff. So it is interesting. I never really thought about that, though. JOHN: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that like the way you talk about the work you're doing. At this point, you have the privilege to be able to talk about those things when so many people don't and that's certainly a powerful way to use that privilege that you currently have. What you're talking about there is losing follower count, which affects your job a little bit and trying to balance how you're talking about these things without cussing yourself too much. But it's interesting that those are the costs that you're weighing about speaking out and you know what those are and you also know that so many other people can't speak out because their consequences are going to be so much more drastic. KURT: Yeah, absolutely. When we start to look at this through the lens of bias in the industry. I am cis white dude; I have the benefit of like failing upwards. So it's like me going to prison, I get to spin it as this redemption story and I get to be the symbol of hope for prisoners coming out and breaking into tech. But it's not the same story for a lot of folks that I talk to who don't look like me or aren't basically white men. It gets really tough the further you get from that. So I also want to call out, too that a lot of times, the privilege to be able to speak is based on literal white privilege; I always get the benefit of the doubt. It's interesting, but yes, I get the benefit of doubt. I get to fail upwards. I'm formerly incarcerated, who's now the DevRel manager of Apollo. But I know so many other formerly incarcerated people who are way better at this stuff than I am and they still haven't found a work yet. So those disparities exist and when you compound other issues that the tech industry faces against that. Like, the hiring rate for formerly incarcerated Black women is like 4% or something ridiculous like that according to last statistics, from what I could find, which was about 2019. That's 4% compared to white males, which is about 43 or 44%. We have to take that into account, too. That privilege is steeped in white male privilege as well. JOHN: It's like the prison association just magnifies all of those existing inequities. KURT: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You're an ex-con, or a felon—I get to be formerly incarcerated, not a felon. JOHN: Yeah, the language matters a lot. KURT: Oh, yeah. JACOB: So what are some of the details of how you're helping folks? It looks like you have, it’s a Twitch stream? I just pulled up your Twitter account just a minute ago, but tell me details. KURT: Yeah. It's interesting. So when we think about helping people, I have stream, which I do a lot, a lot of blogging, involved in a lot of communities. Most of the work that I do. So if we're just talking about community in general, also the Apollo stream; I do a lot of streaming for them. My calendar is open; folks drop in there a lot. When it comes to helping formerly incarcerated, that's a lot more scaled down and on a one-on-one basis because every single person has a different situation. Also, a lot of them can't come forward and say that they're formerly incarcerated. There's an entire network of folks. Some of them can and they have, but there's an entire network of folks who I'm working with regularly and just, nobody knows because they can't really share or express that information. But I really focus on a couple of things, which is helping them figure out their path into tech, what it is that they'll like. So trying to get them guided on that, helping them build their network, teaching them about things like learning in public and how to do that. We work on freelance, because it's really hard for folks to get jobs, full-time employment so we focus on freelance work and how to look for red flags, clients, promote yourself, and stuff like that. It's generally different for each person because it all depends on where they are on the scale of their education into tech, how stable is their environment at home. It's just a lot of things that go into it. I am working on starting a nonprofit to formalize this training, but it's very slow going. I just really don't have the time that I would like to dedicate to it. Some other ways that I've been helping out is there's a really cool nonprofit project called The Marshall Project. They take a data-driven approach to exposing issues within the criminal justice system. I do a lot of stuff with that. I sponsor and support a lot of prison reform lawyers. They don't get paid a lot and stuff like that so monetary support for them, monetary support for the people who are coming out, who need that. There's really where I spend most of my focus, but if you ask anyone, I'm available. If somebody wants or needs something from me, I try to make myself available I talk to a wide range of people from all different communities about all sorts of different things. But I don't really have a centralized way, a singular path into helping folks out. It's pretty disparate, honestly. LAURIE: This is a slightly different topic, but it's something you touched on and what you just said. I'm wondering if we can talk about the interview process as it relates to being formerly incarcerated and revealing that information. Because I think one of the – I had an interaction with someone a couple of years back who said, “I got all the way through the process. I didn't tell them they offered me the job and now I have to tell them because it's about to come up on a background check,” which the efficacy of that we can discuss for a long time. “But it's about to come up on a background check, what do I do? How do I have this conversation?” I think we all know that especially for entry level positions, there's thousands of applicants and the minute you give them one red flag, they're like, “Oh, well, we have 500 other people to talk to.” So what has been your experience with talking to people going through this and how they can navigate what is already an incredibly stressful and difficult process, even not having some flags that unfortunately, don't get perceived the way that we wish they would? KURT: Yeah, this is a really great question. It’s the most – I won't say the most, it is an extremely stress and anxiety inducing situation. I've developed a system over the years from having dealt with this, but in the beginning, it was very chaotic. You would just get through the process; you don't say that you have a record, you don't come upfront and say it. You never do that. If they're going to do a background check, let them do it. I've had situations where companies have made me fill out paperwork for background check and then they never, I guess, submitted it because they never came and said anything about it, or maybe at that job, they were following their state's laws and it didn't come back. I would say it's a multi-step process. So first things first, never say that you have a background upfront. Second of all, is investigate the state laws around hiring the formerly incarcerated for that company for where they are located. Where is their business set up at? Understand those state laws? The next thing that's going to happen is if you get through the interview process and they're going to do a background check, so what they always do—this is the most annoying thing. Oftentimes, you will sign your offer letter. You will have a start date. You will do all this and in there, it says contingent upon a background check. This puts you in this situation where, especially if you're at an existing company, you want to give them time. Do you put in your leave and throw all of your eggs into this basket only to then come on and then they do the background check and then it comes back and they fire you? It puts you in this just purely stressful situation for about two weeks. But a couple of things that you can do to get ahead of it is I started doing things where I will message them and I get real creative and I'm like, “Look, I've had issues with discrepancies, with insurance and other things, not going through before I've signed my start date and then there were problems, disagreements. I need to know all the paperwork. I need to have that signed upfront and have everything taken care of before I will decide on a start date. I want to make sure I give ample time to leave.” So sometimes that will work and that will get you a lot closer. When that doesn't work, the other thing that I do is anytime they're going to do a background check, you have to consent to it and part of that consent is they'll tell you the company that they're going to use. If I've made it this far, I will then pay out of pocket and go get my own background check from this company. For most of them, you can do that. Now what it is that even if a company reaches out, I will put them off until I get the background check so I can see what has come back about my record so I can better prepare my statement for how I want to discuss this with them. If you make it through all of that and you get there, sometimes they just still are going to say no, or they'll just ghost you and I've had that happen to me, too. Just literally been ghosted and it's just hard, it's stressful. There's not a lot you can do with it. The best thing that you can do is understand the laws around the different 50 states, figure out which ones are the most forgiving towards you and your situation, apply for jobs—ideally, remotely—within that place. If you're in that position, a lot of people aren't in that position, but it's just stress-inducing nightmare. One thing that I did do is I always had backups. I would have offers from multiple jobs and accept multiple offers, which sucks. But then if I get one, I stay in and I don't, but I would stagger the start dates. LAURIE: Wow. KURT: Yeah. I learned that from my 3 years of trying to get my first job because even trying to work at Target, Walmart, all these places I check yes on that have you been convicted of a felony in the last 7 years and I'd never hear from them. So I just stopped checking it. I would get a job at Target. I would work there for three weeks and then they would be like, “Hey, background check came through. Wish you wouldn't have lied to us. You're one of our best workers, but now we have to let you go.” It's like, “Well, cool. You wouldn't have hired me anyway. I'll take my 3-week paycheck. I've already got a job lined up at McDonald's. So I'm going to go work there for three weeks now.” My first 2 years out of prison, I had like at least 10 W-4s, at least 10, probably closer to 20 my first year and then I got a little bit smarter about places that I was picking through the second year so I was able to stay places longer. But you just have to do whatever you have to do or you have to resort back to crime, really. That's always, my advice to folks is rolling jobs like, ABA. Always be Applying. Always be applying for jobs and lining them up so if they come at you, “We did your background check. We're going to let you go.” You can just go to the next place and you don't have to go so long without having income. LAURIE: That sounds like an incredibly stressful way to live. KURT: It is a very stressful way to live. Yeah, it absolutely is. And that kind of comes back to tech can change lives. Even my first job was a really crappy paying job doing pretty boring work, but I was so happy when I actually got my first job. It changed my whole life. Literally changed my life and then after learning about the industry, finally getting my job, talking to other industry professionals, I was able to realize how drastically underpaid and overworked I was. Slowly started to work my way out of that and up to a standard developer salary for this day and age. I make money today that I never dreamed in a world of possibility that I would ever make in my entire life ever. Never thought that this would be the life that I live today and it can really change folks' lives and that's why I'm so aggressively trying to help folks. LAURIE: It's interesting that you talk about Always be Applying. There was some Twitter threads stuff going around a couple of weeks back about that in relation to the tech industry and talking about you should always see what's out there and see if there's better possibilities. My first reaction was interviewing is the most stressful part of working in tech, who would voluntarily do that if they're not looking to leave a job? I suspect it is slightly less stressful in some ways, if you're applying to retail positions, but more stressful if you're dealing with something like a record. Just having to have that in the back of your mind and always trying to find a new job and that new security is – I mean, we talk about people in tech who do it every 1 to 3 years and that already seems like way too often. Every three weeks is just unfathomable to me. KURT: Yeah. It's like you said, it's a lot of stress. By the time you figure out who everyone is, you're onto the next place. You get so tired of hearing, “You're one of our best workers, but we have to let you go.” You can only hear that so many times in a year before you just never want to hear that phrase again. It's just very aggravating for sure. I will say that that was less stressful than tech interviews in my opinion. LAURIE: Oh, that's damning! JOHN: Yeah. KURT: Yeah, that was way less stressful. The anxiety of technical interviews, especially when they're asking me questions about my background, because I have to fabricate basically 10 years of my life and that was one of the hardest parts. So one of the hardest parts about having a record and not being able to share it, especially in an industry where everybody wants to know how you got there, it's very hard to build that lie around what you do and it starts to really weigh on you. I made me really depressed constantly having to lie. “Oh, how'd you learn how to code?” “Well, actually I was in prison and they had a course called Intermediate Web Page and I took it.” I can't say that. I can't say that. So I have to fabricate and then I just bend the truth, which it was true. Like, “Oh, a friend of mine was going to take this course, I decided to take it with them.” That was true. I just left out that that decision was made in prison. It's like, “Oh, I got my first taste of it and then I just started buying books to continue to learn and use any opportunity I could in front of a computer to continue programming.” Also true. Just didn’t mention that for the next about year and a half, I didn't have access to a computer and I picked that back up when I got out. Yeah. It's just about bending those truths and it's like, “Oh, well, where did you work?” Not a full lie, I'm like, “I did a lot of freelancing and consulting,” which I did. I did IT and website development and stuff, freelancing and consulting work, the little bits I could get. Doing a local plumber's website or something like that, helping somebody get all the viruses off their computer. Wonder how those got there. But it's stuff like that. So that's what I had to do. I had to fabricate this false history. Part of me coming out and talking about this was also selfish. It was just very depressing and I was tired of lying all the time. I was finally in a position where I felt that while coming forward about this part of my life could still have negative impacts that I have enough of a time distance and enough of an identity that I could probably still have a future in tech. That's what I did. I was at Major League Soccer and I let my team know and the people around me know and then I posted a blog post about it and that's really when everyone started to find out. This is only 2018, 2019. I got my first job in tech – or 2018. I got my first job in tech in 2013 so it was like 5 years, I went with only telling a couple people. LAURIE: I was about to ask if you still have to lie because I feel like the minute you Google you, that's one of the first thing that comes up, this really incredible post about your experience. It's like if someone didn't check your Twitter, I'm questioning the due diligence that they did and just relying on a background check seems a little odd if they haven't even looked up your social media. Your public technical, social media, not looking to see if you have a Facebook with lots of beer cans behind you sort of thing. KURT: Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. But you'd be amazed. I mean, people don't look at your social media first. It's interesting when we think about especially tech hiring; your resume in a pile and before you even get to that pile, you're just a resume that gets pumped through a system a lot of times. It's like until you build a network that is often yeah, you are a victim of that a lot of times. They're not going to know who you are personally before they see you on paper and that's very detrimental, but you would think they would do a little bit of research and look that up. It's actually funny, you brought up a good point, which is if you search, you'll bring it up. I worked so hard to actually get my actual prison from North Carolina thing pushed off the first page and build a public profile and now it's right back at the top, but because I put it there. So that is really funny. [chuckles] LAURIE: But that matters, right? KURT: It matters. LAURIE: It’s like voluntary disclosure versus something that you don't have control over, that is a huge, huge difference. I’m thinking of the Meghan Markle thing right now, where everyone's like, “She sued because they published a letter with her father, but now she's disclosing her pregnancy,” and I'm like, “Yeah, very different! One she chose to and the other one, she did not.” KURT: Exactly. Yeah, that's a huge difference. But it's just really interesting to think about that I'm back at the top of Google now for being formerly incarcerated. [laughter] But under much better terms and I get to tell my story and explain why. Not just be like a mugshot with some records. JACOB: If you had asked me before this episode, “Have you ever worked with an incarcerated person while you’re working in tech?” I privately would have told myself, no. I mean, I probably would have said, “I'm not sure,” but I think my implicit bias would have said no. KURT: Yeah. JACOB: And I think this is making me realize I probably have and I think probably a lot of our listeners have, too and it just either a, it didn't come up at all, or b, was handled in a way that it didn't get around to the rest of the workforce, which is probably the best thing. KURT: Yeah, there are some companies. I have found the companies that do you actually advocate for formerly incarcerated. They do it really well and only because I'm so vocal is why my team knows. Even at Apollo, they're very careful about it. We talked about my background actually coming up and then they were like, “Well, this wasn't supposed to show up, but even regardless, we're not going to hold this against you even if it was within the timeframe.” It was very nice and this is between us, it won't matter and I'm like, “Well, I've kind of let the cat out of the bag so it's not a big deal if it's between us,” but I loved seeing the approach that they took. You're right, you probably have worked with people who were incarcerated before. It's a large percentage of people who have been to prison in the US. A very large percentage, way more than it should be and so, it's really interesting to think about, but you're right. It hasn't come up. Most people who have been incarcerated aren't going to just leap out and be like, “Oh, that's an interesting thing. Let me tell you about the time I was locked up and how this was.” They're going to keep that to themselves because you never know how people are going to take it. You just don't know how people will react and some people, even if they are cool with it, will still look at you differently and I've had situations like that happen and it's tough to deal with, but it's a part of life. Again, I'm not trying to make this a sob story. I did things that put me in prison and I did my time and I I've paid my dues to society. Rightfully so. Well, there's a whole thing about the sentencing and what we should be doing in the US, but according to law, I paid my dues and I was released and really, the buck should stop there, but you don't stop doing time when you're released. You continue to do it pretty much forever because the US again, we have the stigma around prisons and why do we have that? Because the prison industrial complex is pushing this agenda that we have a lot of crime and we need a lot of cops and we need to lock people up and people who come out of prison are in prison or felons and bad people and deserve to be there. This is instilled into us from the time that we're kids and that's why I say the two most important things are providing stability for folks getting out and helping de-stigmatize having a record and helping break down the prison industrial complex. It's the only way we see a future where this is not an issue. LAURIE: This could probably be a whole other episode, but you saying that and talking about there are felons and they're bad people in there and it's instilled in us. It's the idea of a binary identity, which exists in so many different places in our society. There's good and bad, and there's right and wrong, and there's the reason that people hate using this term, because it's incredibly racist and problematic. It's black and it's white. All of these things are rooted in the same ideology, which is that to simplify the way that our brain experiences life, we can categorize things into one is good and one is bad. That's not the way the world works and that's not who people are. People take bad actions and they take good actions, but that doesn't make them bad people or good people. A lot of the reason we do that is because we like to tell ourselves we're good people. And I'm sure you've heard this phrase, I'm sure all of us have heard this phrase, but the phrase, “You didn't make good choices. You had good choices” is the same as the meritocracy argument, which is like, you had the ability to get somewhere because you started on third base, you had the ability to make all the right decisions and do all the things because you had stability and resources and comfort. Without those things, would you have made the same choices as the person that you're looking down on? Probably honestly, probably and you just have no idea what that's like. So I appreciate you pointing that out because I think we've had episodes in the past about binary identities and what problems that causes. JOHN: So Kurt, you called out something that's pretty interesting that was going by and what you were saying earlier about how Apollo treated you when they found out about your record and the way they went through that. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about if there's someone who's a hiring manager, maybe in a small company without a giant HR organization and strict policies around the hiring. What is a good way for that person to handle when they find out through the background check that the candidate that they really like has a record of some sort like, what's the good path there? KURT: Yeah. There's two things there. So I want to answer that question, but one thing I do want to actually circle back to very quickly, which is what you said about bigger companies with stricter policies. In my experience, it's actually the bigger companies that you have an easier chance of getting a job at. They have huge HR departments and law teams and want to protect themselves and we'll make sure that they're actually following the proper hiring laws and state regulations for wherever it is they are. I had no problem getting a job at AWS, but when you flip it in reverse to these startups and they outsource their HR to these other companies, that is actually where most of the trip-ups happen because they don't have – well, a lot of times it's ignorance of the situation. They're ignorant of the fact they're violating hiring and labor laws and they don't even know. So I just want to state that is something because that was something I learned, too that actually shifted my job search function was I would actually target more organized companies because I stood a better chance of knowing that if they did do a background check, it would actually follow the state guidelines. But to answer the question, that's a really good point and a really good question, I mean and a tough one to answer. I think just number one is making no assumptions. There's a couple things and this actually kind of relates to some other stuff. So there's going to be – you can't be defensive. I've discovered that a lot of times when people find out that you have a background, they feel somewhat lied to and it's like, “I didn't come up front about it up forward,” but it's kind of a bomb when it lands. Again, we have the stigma about people with records and then they see it, their first instinct is to be like, “Well, why don't you share this with me?” The obvious reason that it wasn't shared with you, but you might not be realizing it at the time, is because I don't know if it's going to matter getting this job. It's something that could hurt me and I don't want to reveal it until you've had a chance to get to know me. So just know that, the reason that they did not share it with you is because they wanted you to know them as a person and go through the interview process before you find out about something like this. They're just trying to get a little bit of empathy from you. The second thing is to avoid things like feigned surprise, like, “Oh my goodness, I can't believe you have a record,” or “I never would have guessed that you would have a background.” Things like that, they start to split somebody's identity and make them feel like again, we talk about this good and bad binary and that's going to really cause them a lot of stress and anxiety. You want to avoid things like that. And then the last thing to do is just to continue to treat them the exact same way that you did before you knew. If you can do those things, that person is going to feel safe and they're going to have a great experience working with you. JOHN: Great. That's super handy. I imagine that there's some people out there having that question like, “Oh I've never been in that situation, but what's the best way to handle that?” So it's definitely good to know. LAURIE: Totally outside the episode, but Mandy Moore just released a screenshot of a place that wanted to interview her about her entire career and she said she wouldn't talk about the abuse allegations against her ex-husband and they canceled the interview and they said it would be essential to the story. She said, “If you only want me for my trauma, when I have a 20-to-30-year long career, then I have no interest in having this conversation,” and how upsetting that was. It’s like one person is not their worst – I mean, not even a mistake. Like, one person is not their association with another person's bad actions. KURT: Yeah. That actually brings up a really interesting topic, too, which is people trying to take advantage. When you talk about lifting others up, I often find myself in situations where people are just blatantly trying to take advantage of me and my willingness to help folks. That happens all the time. JACOB: How so? KURT: Just a lot of things like, private companies will want me to do webinars or talks on things about breaking into tech and just different topics, or ask me for access to my network or do I know formerly incarcerated folks who might be interested in contract work? I can tell that they're asking because they feel like they could get them for a cheaper price. You know what I mean? They're not going to have to pay them as much and it's like a lot of shady business practices and stuff like that. I get that on the regular. It's pretty frustrating. LAURIE: Oh my gosh. It's Women in Tech in a different outfit. [chuckles] KURT: Yeah. LAURIE: It feels the same hearing you explain it. I'm like, yup, yup, yup, yup. KURT: Yeah. It's been an interesting side effect of this. JOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of we had Veni Kunche on the show a while back talking about the diversified tech system platform that she's built and how people paid to post jobs to her audience. But she does a lot of work to vet those companies to make sure that they're not going to just come in the door and be kicked out again in eight months because there's no support for actually having those sorts of people joining the team. So it's such an important trust relationship there with the community you represent, especially because most of them need to be somewhat on the DL as being part of that community. It's like, if you're a Black woman, it's no surprise that you're a part of that community, but it's still so important for you as someone, who's much more public and representing them, that you have to be so careful about who you're connecting to. KURT: This has been one of the biggest holdups for me starting this nonprofit and providing training is there's a lot of issues with exposing people through this. So it's like the end goal would be for them to leave and be able to seek training, or employment, but the real problem comes afterwards when you are trying to help them seek employment or freelance jobs. It's like you have to disassociate your network and attachment with them from that nonprofit. If a lot of people know that I'm doing that nonprofit, then they're going to automatically start to assume everyone who I provide through my network is going to be coming from this program. So there's just like a lot of things. I've been very much trying to figure out how do I prioritize these folks and vulnerable people, in general and I think a lot of that has to do with, I don't know, I'm like why I've been so hesitant to move forward with this? I don't want to start a nonprofit with the best of intentions, but that the impact of that nonprofit ends up being more harmful than good and it's like, who does that really benefit? That's why so far, I've been sticking with this more kind of like one-on-one. I know it doesn't scale well, but that's okay. If I help some people that's better than helping no one, first of all and second of all, helping a few people and having that be really beneficial to them, as opposed to helping a bunch of people and it might end up good for you, or it might end up bad for you and we don't really know, it seems very risky to me. So I think it's why I've been working very slowly at that and really trying to figure out what does that process look like once they're done training because there's still a lot of unknowns there. JOHN: Yeah. It's a conundrum that most training programs and diversity programs don't have to deal with because most of them, they want to highlight the intersections of the people that come through their program because that's part of what they're after and raising the profile there and you have the exact opposite situation, which is how do you smuggle them in before prejudges? KURT: Exactly and so, completely flips the game on its head. I think it was you Laurie, that tweeted if you had your salary, your developer salary and you could do anything, what would you do? I would actually become a prison reform lawyer. I think the real goal is to stop the flow of folks going in. The band-aid is helping folks come out. The real work is stopping folks from going in to begin with, but I can't go back to school for another 8 years to become a lawyer and then move forward with that direction. So that's what I want to talk about. I've been helping sponsor prison reform lawyers and look for ways to get involved with that. I've offered volunteer time to The Marshall Project to help with them and their data collection efforts and stuff like that. Again, taking myself out of the center, the nonprofit I'm very centered in that scenario and I feel like I can have a bigger impact in more areas by just contributing as opposed to being the creator of the thing. So right now, that's kind of where my mind is at while I feel out this nonprofit and see if I can develop something I'm comfortable with, from that. LAURIE: I was just going to say, I was doing that math and you just said 8 years. Does that mean you have your GED? This may not be a thing that I know. KURT: Yeah, I have my GED and no college education. I went to college for a little over a year for graphic design, but could not afford to go anymore, so stopped and then that's like my education. In order to get a law degree, I would first have to get a Bachelor's so I need 4 years of college—I don't know how many of my credits would be transferable from graphic design—and then I would have to go to law school afterwards and then still deal with certain states. If I can even take the test for the bar, or be on the bar being a convicted felon, which in most states you can, but there are still states where you cannot. LAURIE: So the reason I asked and it wasn't to do the math, but it was more, that is another community that you belong to that, I think perhaps in the past had a very different set of opportunities available to them in tech. And as tech has become higher paying and we've done a lot more recruiting from the Stanfords and the MITs and Harvard and Yale and all of those things, it used to be, you could break in – it goes back to the self-taught like, you could break in without any undergrad degree and now that's getting harder and harder and harder and harder. So I'm curious if—obviously, it's hard to decouple those based on your experience because you were formerly incarcerated and you didn't have that formal Bachelor's degree. But have you seen situations in which that has been a different community that you're a part of, or that has impacted the opportunities that you can pursue? KURT: Yeah. I wouldn't be able to separate maybe if I went back and thought about it, but in my mind, every time I've been ghosted has primarily been – well, it stopped me from not applying to a lot of places. That's for sure. It's blocked me from feeling confident enough to even apply and that was definitely in the beginning before I knew the industry and how bad most job application postings are and realize that the requirements they often ask for are way beyond what you actually need to do the job. But I didn't know that. So I would see like needs a Bachelor's degree and I'd be like, “Nope, not applying to that one.” So I guess, I did miss out on a lot of opportunities just from that. But most times, I feel like if it came down to decision and I went through the interview process and they did a background check—I just always assumed it was the background check that I got ghosted. JOHN: Yeah. Usually, if the degree is going to be a factor, it's right at the front of the process. KURT: Early on, yeah. But it could be a deciding factor, especially with entry-level folks. Two people made it through the interview process. They both did really well. It really comes down to what the person who makes that decision cares more about, do they care more about this on paper or some sort of like behavioral give that seems this person would be better to work with. It's like, what do they care about and so, it can definitely have huge effects. This gets into a whole another discussion, but that's just the tech industry and hiring in general is just terrible. LAURIE: Broken! KURT: Beyond broken. Yeah. It's just like you know? [chuckles] The fact that it can come down to whether or not you get a job based on the preference of the person who's looking at the things in front of you is just super problematic. But I definitely feel that I'm sure, there's a lot of cases where people would see one has a degree, the other does not and they're going to go, “Oh, taking the CS grad anytime, because we're about to go write all these algorithms.” LAURIE: Kurt, do you know my favorite story about ridiculous things that should not be a thing? KURT: Oh, I can't wait. LAURIE: So I was interviewed for a job, internal transfer. I got the job. They sent the paperwork to HR and HR said, “Sorry, you can't hire her because she has a Bachelor of Arts and Mathematics, not a Bachelor of Science and Mathematics.” Literally not even joking, this is a real thing that happened. I was halfway through a Master's of Science in Computer Science because I was annoyed by the fact that they cared that I had a Bachelor of Arts and they said, “So because she doesn't have the right degree, she needs to have the right amount of courses that would be equivalent to the degree.” In that case, that was 16 computer science or math specific hard science courses, which is more than the Bachelor's degree was required! So if I had that, I would have had a Bachelor's degree of Science and Computer Science or a Bachelor's degree of Arts and Computer Science, because I went to a liberal arts school and they are not accredited to give Bachelor's of Science regardless of what your major is. So on the scale of ridiculous things that happen in tech, just add that as a fun story to remember. KURT: It's like what goes through their heads? It's like, “Oh, well, we must adhere to this policy because clearly, the policy makes more sense than somebody who has worked here, has a proven track record of doing their job well, has already moved to the other team and everyone is cool with it, but wait a minute, you don't have enough credits.” LAURIE: I got blocked. I didn't get to move. To be fair, it was the federal government so that's sort of how the world works, but still. KURT: Yeah. Still, it shouldn't work like that and it's symptomatic of the ridiculous hiring process that we've developed as a tech industry. It just like, I don't know, I've worked in construction. I've worked in the restaurant industry. I've worked at a lot of other places and none of my interviews have ever felt really like somebody was trying to prove that they knew something I didn't, or like catch me in a gotcha. You know what I mean? This is what I mean by tech interviews are more stressful than even when I was interviewing at all those other jobs combined, because I never felt like I was being interrogated and that's the difference. Honestly, tech interviews feel a lot like when I was actually being interrogated. That should tell you something. It just feels like they're constantly trying to trip you up, trying to get you to say something that disagrees with what you said five minutes ago, prove they know something that you don't. Does all of this sound familiar? LAURIE: I mean, Kurt, if you're a personal brand is that you're kind and you help people and you were formerly incarcerated and you do cool things now, you know that mine is just railing against tech interviews, so. KURT: Yeah. [laughter] LAURIE: This is a known thing. KURT: Well, that's amazing. But it's a very aggressive interview process. It often pits folks against each other as opposed to working with each other. I just have never been a big fan of tech interviews. LAURIE: Terrible for anyone who has ever had anxiety in their life or deals with any kind of PTSD or trauma. Yup. No, it's really – My favorite tweet about this is that Tatiana explained that she felt it was equivalent to – it was an abusive relationship and that it's string you along for seven interviews and then they're like,” Oh, well you don't have the skill that we need,” except you would have known that I didn't have this skill because it was on my resume and it's been in every conversation, but you just put me through all of this just to say no, because you told yourself that it was better for me and you were giving me a chance and all of these things. A lot of people came back and they were like, “That's going to step too far,” and I was like, “You know what? I honestly don't think it is.” It really is that bad and that's horrifying and it's why so many people stay in toxic work environments because the idea of going through a toxic interview process doesn't feel like something they can possibly do. KURT: Yeah, and those folks who are saying it ain't that bad are probably the ones who are normally on the other side of that table, so. [chuckles] JOHN: Yeah. I always find I have to hold my tongue when people are in otherwise, decent situations or even when they're in bad situations, my automatic recommendation is, “Well, start looking for something else,” but I always have to back up from that and not say that because if there's any sort of difference in privilege between us, I can't give that advice because it's such so much more work for them than for me. So I have to be very careful. KURT: Yeah. That's another really awesome point and something that I have worked a lot on over the last 2 years in helping folks, which is contextualizing my advice and making sure that anything that I share comes with the statement that this was my experience, it may not be your experience, and then also reach out to other folks who share similar situations to you to trust, but verify this advice and make sure that it lines up with their experiences as well. Also, why I always try to connect people that I'm working with to people who are more representative of them than myself, if we're that far off. It's hard for me to share advice with a Black woman because I don't have that lived experience, I don't know a lot of the issues that they'll hit and even being as aware of the harm that I can cause in my privilege as I am, I still will cause harm. So it's about connecting folks; a big part of what I do honestly, is just connecting folks quietly. JOHN: Yeah. That's a good point. When you're poised to give advice, having that second thought of, “Okay, I can give this advice, but I need to put all the caveats on there to point out that this may not be your experience.” But then being able to follow that up with someone else in your network who is going to be able to give something much more accurate and representative is I think is a really useful second step there. KURT: Absolutely. LAURIE: This was a conversation probably a few months back where people had a similar association with people coming out of bootcamps right now and people trying to enter the tech industry right now. Anyone who did it even 3 years ago probably doesn't have the relevant advice or lived experience to understand what it's like with the oversaturation of people coming in with very, very similar skillsets. Especially true in the frontend area because there's so many bootcamps that have just popped up in the React space specifically, because there are a ton of jobs that are needed there, but there also need to be senior resources to help those junior resources—I hate the term junior. But it's a similar thing where it's like, “Yeah, I did it 5 years ago.” “I did it 10 years ago.” The amount of time in which your experience is relevant is getting shorter and shorter and shorter every day and it's very, very challenging to tell someone, or give them advice on this is how you stand out in an interview process, this is how you stand out in a resume when you just have no idea what the current environment is like. KURT: Yeah. It's interesting because it's repetitive. I call this the JavaScript bubble and l it's popping. It's at the point where it's popping. LAURIE: Hey! [laughter] KURT: It is. We're meeting the inflection point where there are so many people, it used to be that getting a job doing JavaScript development was a bit easier because like when Node first came out and JavaScript aren't being used in all these different places and we started building entire frontends, SPAs in JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. Everyone started to learn JavaScript and we saw this with UX designs. I don't know how many folks remember this, but there was a time when UX design was first coming to be a thing. It was a very high paid, very sought-after role, and then a lot of schools started to focus curriculum on UX design and eventually, so many people entered the industry and eventually, enough people will become senior in that industry. That runs out right. The market flips. Now it becomes, there's too many people for the jobs that are available and while I think JavaScript, we're getting there, but eventually, this is going to happen as well. All the boot camps focus on JavaScript. All of this is coming out. Those people who came out of boot camps 2 or 3 years ago are very close to becoming seniors and it's like, eventually, we're going to hit this inflection point where choosing JavaScript as your starting language might actually not be the best opportunity anymore. I think—here's my little prediction—is that really things like Python and Rust will probably be the most beneficial over the next few years, Python for the machine learning and AI stuff. Almost all of that is written in Python or R for data science. And then Rust just because it's becoming the next JavaScript. You're being able to run it in a lot of places. It's also way faster and a lot of other things typed and stuff. So that's my prediction is that eventually, a couple of years, JavaScript jobs will be much harder to get even at senior level and the easier path into tech will be less about frontend and more about machine learning and backend development with Rust. JACOB: My prediction is that companies that can somehow figure out a way to hire the roles they need without firm requirements on prior technology experience are going to excel. So it’s like I need Python developers, but I can hire former Ruby developers, then suddenly, your pipeline gets so much bigger. KURT: Absolutely. LAURIE: It's interesting because Rust, specifically as a language – so I've done Python, Java, JavaScript, and PHP for a little while and those comparatively, I consider them siblings. Rust, to me, is much closer to a C type language. It requires a lot more knowledge of what's happening under the hood when you're coding it and it's a great language, really great air handling all of that, but there are pieces of it that are just harder than using something like JavaScript, harder than using something like TypeScript. So it's going to be really interesting to see that evolve. Kurt, I agree with you. I think Rust is going to be everywhere, but I think Rust is going to be everywhere in the tooling and systems space. So many of those software technologies are open source and therefore, aren't funded and actually getting a job that pays you to write in Rust is going to be – I'm interested to see how it evolves. I think you may be right, but there's this really weird kind of give and take of where Rust excels and where we tend to pay people to build proprietary things, and I'm very curious to see what the overlap is going to end up being. KURT: Yeah, that's very true and again, this is based right on my experience and what I've seen. I'm just thinking about the emergence of FOSS, which is Financed Open Source Software. Us, at Apollo specifically, we're using Rust for a lot of things in our backend and UCLI is built in Rust and those are people who are paid to write open source software. I think as the emergence of FOSS continues to grow, combined with the flexibility and adoption of Rust, I do think that it stands to be a pretty good – Now I did say backend, but I should step back. I don't mean APIs. I don't see a lot of APIs written in Rust. Much more of like what you're talking about; systems infrastructure, command line tooling, stuff like that. I just kind of bucket all of that into the backend. Probably shouldn't. LAURIE: I call it middle end. KURT: Yeah, middle end. There you go. LAURIE: It's the backend of the frontend. It's the tooling ecosystem. The other reason I call it that is because it's really hard to describe what the heck I do every day. [laughter] It's not frontend, it's not like CSS, and it's not backend. I don't touch databases anymore. I don't make fetch calls. I build middle end. [chuckles] KURT: Yeah, that's funny. LAURIE: We need a better term for it though, because no one can describe it and it's a very large, ever-growing set of software that needs to be built. It's basically software that allows other developers to be productive. KURT: And just to touch on what Jacob mentioned before, I completely agree that companies who are smart enough to recognize not about the technology specifically are just always going to excel. And those who are even willing to have polyglot environments and let teams figure out what is the right technology stands so much of a better chance to be successful in just about anything. JACOB: Yeah, it's the environment to know that when I hire someone with not the specific technology that I need them to eventually do, are they going to be successful? Because I don't actually know what that means, but I think that's a really challenging question. KURT: It is, but I think a good example of this might be a backend engineer. You're familiar with caching and why that's important and performance, database operations, and how you structure and organize your APIs. It's like remove Python and drop in Ruby or Java or anything and all those principles still remain and are very important and yes, the surrounding technology has changed, but you've also surrounded them with a team of people who are extremely familiar with that technology. There's something to be said that is definitely in my opinion, easier to ramp up in a new language in an environment like that than it is to completely adopt a new part of the stack or something where it's like the underlying things that are important and that you just have to understand and have experienced dealing with. Those are really heavy. JOHN: Yeah. LAURIE: I agree with all of that except Rust. Rust is my exception to everything right now because it's such a mindset shift and mutability and ownership [chuckles] is just such a wild thing that doesn't exist in any other language. I'm sorry, I'm being a total nerd right now. But no, I absolutely agree and I think anyone can learn any language. I think people can read Rust if they know JavaScript. I know how to write five lines of Rust so this isn't even me gatekeeping something I understand. I'm saying I don't understand it yet, it's hard and I've learned a lot of different languages over the years. I used to do exactly what Jacob was just implying because I was a consultant and so, I had to learn whatever language the client was using. I've done that for PHP and I've done that with Python and Java and that sort of thing. I actually don't think I could do it with Rust. I really don't think I could, unless I was given a couple months to sit down and study. It's hard. It's awesome, but it's hard. KURT: That's fair. I mean, that is also transitioning levels of abstraction when we go from something like JavaScript to Rust, which is very valid. I had to spend a year working in C++ and it was horrible for me, personally, just for me. I don't like being that close. I want my garbage collected for me. I don't want to know what I've put into memory. I really don't care. I mean, I care about performance, but I don't want to be responsible at that level for it. I had a lot of issues with C++ and memory leaks, just going to say. LAURIE: Yeah, I've never had to learn a C language and I think that's part of why Rust is so hard for me. I always assumed Java was very similar to C and I think in a lot of ways, it is, but the automatic garbage collection is a really big distinction between languages. KURT: It really is. That's funny. JOHN: So at the end of every episode, we like to do what we call reflections, which is each panelist and guest get to chance to reflect on the things that they enjoyed most about the conversation, or the ideas that they're going to be thinking about for days afterwards. So who'd like to start with that? KURT: I can take it. I’ve got something that I've been thinking about. We started off talking about community and I said something that I've been running through my mind since, which is communities are things that you’re a part of. Community is what you surround yourself with and I think that that's been an interesting distinction for me and has helped me break down barriers between different parts of my life and make it easier for me to connect those different parts of my life. It's something that I think I'm going to express probably pretty soon in some form of writing or another because it's just a change in mindset that I think has been really beneficial to me and allowed me to be more of my whole self, especially online, than I had been previously so. LAURIE: I think my takeaway is that we all know and have experienced the fact that interviews can be a bit of a landmine depending on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. Having empathy and understanding both, as a hiring manager, or someone who's involved in making these choices, or someone who's a fellow perspective candidate for roles. Having empathy and understanding for the fact that this is infinitely more challenging to navigate if you have things in your background that employers have not previously looked kindly upon. Knowing that those people not only have to navigate that, but they also have to know their legal rights in a country that isn't really great about providing that and that if you get an opportunity in the future and you look up those rights and you know the fact that they shouldn't be able to look x number of years in your background, even if there's nothing there for them to find and you can push back on the behalf of someone else in the future. You can have an impact and paying attention to knowing those rules when you aren't required to know them can be really important and really helpful. JACOB: So we talked a little bit about polyglots and some one thing that really appealed to me to the job that I'm in now is during the hiring process, they seemed pretty not concerned with specific technology I was talking about. That was really a positive for me. So we write Python in my job and what I'm thinking about is what's work that I can do on team that if we hire somebody new who is new to Python would be able to get up to speed as fast as possible? What are the implicit idioms of Python that could be made more explicit? Or what are the things that could be done that make it not quite so gatekeeping? And then that what that transition needs to is another thought is okay, I was thinking earlier about how there's probably someone at my company who was formerly incarcerated and I just don't know it. What are things I could do on my team that would make their life better in some way, but without them having to tell me, without I need to actually know who that specific person is? What are some things that would just make their life better working with me? JOHN: Yeah, I think coming into this conversation, I'm aware of how terrible our carceral state is here in the US. But I think it's also valuable to get Kurt's perspective on that and to be reminded, on a personal level, what that experience is just to help keep that concept alive in my mind so I can be more aware of the people that are in that situation and ways that I can make that easier for them. Also, to do simple administrative things like checking in with my HR department and finding out what their policy is on these things, if nothing else, just to know and even more, if there's ways that I can push back on those to say that that's not really something we need to care about, like, why is that requirement there? So I think that’s really helpful for me to keep in mind. Thank you for joining us, Kurt. This was a fantastic conversation. KURT: Yeah, my pleasure. This was a blast. I really enjoyed talking with you all. Special Guest: Kurt Kemple.
225: Uncovering and Breaking Patterns with Tim Banks
03:31 - Uncovering Patterns * Making the Covert Overt * Reasons for Covertness 13:22 - Taking Care of People as Whole People * People Are Dynamic – Not Stagnant * Roles Are Constantly Changing * Iterating on Practices * William A. Kahn: Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work (https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/256287) * Financial Compensation * Metrics and Observability 28:43 - The Tech Industry: Now vs Then (aka we still have A LOT of work to do) * Gatekeeping * Accountability * Inclusivity * New Zealand Maori leader ejected from parliament for refusing to wear 'colonial noose' (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-politics-necktie/new-zealand-maori-leader-ejected-from-parliament-for-refusing-to-wear-colonial-noose-idUSKBN2A9329) * Whitewashing 45:59 - The Messaging Around Diversity and Inclusion * Doing the Right Thing 51:26 - Changing Mindsets * Using Privilege to Speak to Power Reflections: Rein: Capitalism and White Supremacy are the same thing. The Invention of the White Race (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Invention_of_the_White_Race_Racial_o/G4elgqb-MjwC?hl=en&gbpv=0). We have an obligation to not just make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but to also make it healthy. John: It’s always great to have these conversations as reminders. Tim: Figure out why something makes you uncomfortable. Look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you run away, you’re never going to grow and things are never going to get better. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JOHN: Hello, everybody. This is Greater Than Code, Episode 225. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: And I’m here with our guest, my friend, and Dungeons & Dragons party member, Tim Banks. Tim Banks has a career spanning over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine in avionics. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to work as a government contractor. He then went into the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups in his current role as a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, having won American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championships in his division. Hi, Tim! TIM: Hi! Good to see everybody in here. REIN: Yeah, I did that on the first take and I'm very proud of myself. TIM: I am so, so proud of you. That was amazing. REIN: Tim, it's time for the question. TIM: Right. REIN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? TIM: So my superpower is using empathy to uncover patterns that people haven't seen in the past and I think that's a superpower because a lot of people can look at something, there's a lot of folks out there that can see a pattern just on the surface like this does that, this does that, this does that. But when you really talk to groups and you talk to people, you can see some common things that aren't necessarily things that are going to have an output or a metric, but you can see how people feel about a thing. And then when you get enough people who feel a certain way about a thing, that's not going to be a coincidence, it's going to be a pattern. So finding those patterns is my superpower. As far as how I acquired it, it's hard for me to say. The easy way to say is over time, but over time and myself being a person who necessarily wasn't listened to, or seen, or heard trying to explain how things are, why things are the way they are without having metrics. So having been on one side of that equation, I've been able to see people on the other side of it. REIN: So Tim, you said “to uncover patterns.” Can you say a bit more about the word uncover? Because I feel like that might've been a specific choice that you made to use. TIM: Yeah. There are typically, as we see with anything else, especially being tech or people that like to take things apart, I'm sure as we all did as kids, there are things that you see on the surface. There are things that you see, this pattern or this thing happening here, but you take the face plate off of something, or you delve down below the API, or you delve down below the operating system and there are so many other things that are happening beneath that. If you kick over amount of dirt and you see an ant hill, the ants have their own system, how they do things down there that you don't necessarily create, but you're just going to see it and you have to uncover a few things. You have to move things around. You have to look below the surface to see some of these patterns that happen just below the surface that bring the things at the surface to fruition. REIN: This reminds me a lot of I guess, it's a mantra that I learned from Virginia Satir, which drink if you're playing that game, make hidden things visible, make the covert overt and make the general specific and related to you, me, here, now, and the current situation. TIM: Yeah. I think that's actually a good – I had not heard of that one before, but I do like that a lot. REIN: So when you say uncover, that makes me think, make the covert over. TIM: Yeah, I think so. I like that. It's interesting because people sometimes think that things are covered up to make them hidden and it's not necessarily, they're hidden like someone has hidden them so you can't find them. A lot of times they're hidden in plain view. You don't find them because you're not looking for them and when you actually start to look for some of these things, some of the underlying causes, you'll be surprised what you find. It's like a lot of us here have done RCAs on things and oftentimes, if you do a good RCA, you're going to go through a few levels and different layers to find what the actual root cause. Like, most of the times the root of something is not at the surface, it's way down. So you actually have to go down and dig to uncover these things, to really find out what's at the base of something. REIN: So since this is the show where we talk about the social side of things, I want to ask you about these things that are covered that are maybe covered for a reason and maybe that the reason that they're covert is that people are trying to protect themselves and they don't feel safe to make them overt. So do you think about these situations and how do you go about making that safe to talk about? TIM: So I do think about these situations and there's a couple of reasons why. First, obviously, is in the professional world you can't always call people out immediately for things. Even if you know that there's something that's a lie or something that's not right, there are the political reasons why you have to be tactful or you have to be very deliberate and cautious about how you uncover these things because even if people aren't necessarily intentionally hiding things, or it is their mind that I must hide this as he'll feel safe, people's egos are the number one obstacle, I think to innovation. Someone has staked out a claim. Someone has a territory. Someone has some domain that they have, that they are a gatekeeper thereof and it is their ego that makes sure that you have to pay homage to them or to that ego in order to get anything done. So figuring out what they're protecting, whether they're protecting their job, whether they're protecting their ego, whether they're protecting levels of influence so that they can rise in their career. You have to figure out what that is, that what that thing is that is important to them so that way you can make sure that it's either protected, or you can make sure that there are more than one person that have access to that thing so you can make your way. At personal levels, there are things that people cover up because they don't feel safe and doing the work of trying to make them feel safe so you can talk about these things, I think that's the hardest thing that we do in the industry. Solving technical problems is easy compared to solving people problems, or cultural problems, or societal problems because those are the problems that we've had for millennia that we, collection of people in a common industry, are trying to figure out. Saying to somebody, “Hey, I see these patterns here of work, or absenteeism, or productivity, or whatever it is and I need to know what it is that's going on so that we can fix that,” and make them understand that you are there to help them and there to fix that problem, whatever it may be, that takes some work on the part of the person who's trying to uncover that pattern. It takes vulnerability and it takes confidentiality. It takes empathy. Especially if it's something that you've never dealt with before. Someone's going to tell you, “Hey, I have this problem,” and you're going to say, “All right, well, I know leadership or I know management or unknown this senior technical professional here, but I don't know the answer to this problem, but I can say that I will help you find it and then we can work together on it.” And a lot of people don't like to say, “I don't know the answer.” We see a lot of people that are very technically savvy and because they're very technically savvy, they are now considered to be experts in all kinds of domains. Nobody in particular—Elon Musk—but there are people that are looked to be some kind of great genius just because they happen to know how to code something, or architect something. I think when you display the vulnerability of saying, “I don't know.” Or you are upfront about your problems or upfront about your struggles, it makes people feel safer about being upfront about theirs and then you can go through the work of trying to solve those problems. Well, first of all, identifying if it's a pattern, and then solving the problem that's causing those patterns. JOHN: I like that you use the metaphor of anthill earlier on in this, because rather than when you describe something as pattern, it's very abstract and feels like an object. But when you talk about an anthill, it's individual entities working together in a system. It's something that exists on its own, made up of other individuals. It's not just some object that we can examine and I think that brings it into thinking about it in a different way and much like the way you've been describing how you talk about these things and how you work with people. Very humanizing and I like that. TIM: Yeah. I do think there's a lot of us when we're looking at an organization, whether we're looking at a society, or government, or whatever it is, a neighborhood even all of us have the role that we play whether we're aware of it or not. It's a role not necessarily either we're assigned, that we signed up for, or that we just have by nature of and by coincidence of our birth. But we all do something that contributes in some way to the organizations that we're in. When we look at that as that – okay, that role covers a lot of things. No one is just one thing; no one is just a software developer, or no one is just a cashier at a grocery store, or no one is just an artist. No person is monolithic. No one is defined by their job save except maybe the police and that's not a slam—they're always at work apparently. But there are all these things that we have that yes, as you look at an ant farm, this one ant does all these various things, but they have this contribution to the colony as a whole. And I do think that when we look at it as a pattern, if we look at one individual person and all the things that they do, it is important to see that they are more than just a worker. We are not ants. We're not that specialized. We have all kinds of things that we contribute to. So like the colony metaphor breaks down there just to understand that all of us have different things that we do outside of just what our role is to make money or to contribute. We all have dreams. We all have hopes. A lot of times, the fact that these dreams or hopes have been unrealized or worse yet, they have been forcefully deferred by the society as a whole affects that role that we have. It affects how we view ourselves. It affects how others view us. That's what we bring when we sit down at our desk every morning, that collection of all those things rides along with whatever your skills are, that is it's not compartmentalized. As much as people may want to say they can't compartmentalize these things, you can't. You can’t contain it forever. So when these things start to manifest themselves in different ways, we as people—whether we are neighbors, whether we are leaders in government, whether we are coworkers, whether we're management—need to do whatever we can to make sure that these people can become a whole and they can thrive. When people thrive on a personal level, they thrive on a professional level. Maybe not at the job that they're in, maybe not at the company that they're in, but wherever they end up, when they thrive as people, they are going to thrive as professionals. REIN: I also want to throw in another element of the ant colony metaphor, which is that ant colonies are dynamic. They're constantly changing. Tunnels are caving in, new ones are being constructed; the colony itself changes over time. You were talking about the complexity of a person in a given moment, but their roles within the company are also constantly shifting based on how they interact with other people. TIM: That's true; how they interact with other people and how the companies need change. I mean, no company is typically monolithic in and of themselves. They always have to be growing, they have to be thriving, and they have to be moving into different segments and as that happens, your roles change within that company. What's been being kicked around Twitter these past few weeks is people talking about like, “I don't understand why people leave jobs,” and I was like, “Well, yeah, they leave jobs because they want to go do other stuff.” People don't like to stagnate, typically and people who do like to stagnate, most companies don't want to keep them around. So stagnation is not really in human nature. As resistant as we are to change, we are all extremely adaptable. It's built into our damn DNA so we tend to do that well. I do like the fact that people are dynamic, or if you look at what maybe people had expectations of what 2021 was going to be in 2019, it's clear that a lot of things have changed due to the various circumstances around the world—pandemic, social uprising, Nazis, whatever it is. We've all had to make some big changes and even though it sucked and it has sucked, we're still here. We are in the new normal because we are adaptable and so are the dynamics of our existence lend ourselves to the fact that our roles are constantly changing. What does it look like when you were a working parent 2 years ago versus what does it look like you're a working parent now? What does it look like if you were a single person with a job 2 years ago versus if you're seeing a person with a job now? So many things have changed and it speaks to the fact that we are adaptable. That all said, if you're looking at how we can improve and make better for people, we can't look at the ideal state or the state we were in 2019 or whatever it was. We have to look at how things are now and then we had to look at what we have learned in the past year, year and a half will prepare us for what's yet to come because we know that shit is always going to roll downhill. So we have to figure out what have we learned here and what can we do next? I think a lot of the things that we still need to embrace is how to take care of our people as a whole people, and not just employees and not just take care of how they can contribute to us. How many commits can they do? How many tests can they write? Or anything like that. We need to take care of their needs as people and when we take care of their needs as people, they are more likely to be able to take care of us, our needs from them as companies and orgs. REIN: What Russell Ackoff always says when people talk to him about total quality management and all of these things about how to improve the quality of your business, what he always says is, “The quality that matters is quality of work life.” The quality of the lives of the people who are doing the work. TIM: That is absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Some of the worst cases of burnout that people ever have, some of the worst working environments, it's because they do not treat their people like people. They treat them like any other resource, like print, toner, cartridge, and the people personally as people cannot thrive and people burn out that way. People have a hard time setting and maintaining boundaries around their work life. Yay, capitalism. That's one of the things that we start from. It's like, if you want to get ahead, you’ve got to work real, real, real, real hard. Well, yes, to some extent, but the higher up you go, let's be honest that “hard work” looks way different. You're working hard on a yacht apparently, or you're working hard on a vacation to Paris apparently, but the people that are actually doing the labor to enrich the people higher up the chain, those basic human needs for rest, relaxation, recovery, they're oftentimes not being met and I think that's a fucking shame. REIN: Yeah, and if something is particularly incumbent upon leadership to show that by example and to encourage that behavior because I think lower down in the ranks, if they've probably been punished for any sort of thing like that, or they've seen people punished for that kind of thing, they're going to be highly resistant to doing that unless you can prove that it's safe for them to do so. TIM: Oh, absolutely. I think it's interesting when you talk about what it is for a person lower down in the rung and the common gatekeeping tactic you see is “Well, they've got to pay their dues.” They've got to suffer through this role so that way, they can make it for other people or they can be a better employee going forward. That is so horribly bassackwards. I mean, you really want to nurture junior folks. You want to nurture people coming into the industry. You want to nurture people who are just starting. You want to mentor them. You want to give them knowledge and guidance. You don't want to push their nose into the grindstone. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish there. That's fine if you're in the Marine Corps. That's fine if you're going into the military service. That's obviously, a consequence of the choice you made to join. But if you're not doing that, you don't need to punish people at the bottom ranks, really You should be, as a leader, like you said, modeling those behaviors, but you should also be making sure that they can thrive, whatever that looks like. Thriving for a junior person doesn't look like giving them a half hour lunch break and watching them clock in and clock out. It doesn't look like monitoring their bathroom breaks, or some of the stuff that I've seen the junior folks have to do. These people are whole people, they are not servers. They're not computers. They're not billed by the hour like that to perform X number of tasks. They really have to be nurtured and they have to be guided and mentored. The other thing we have to take into the fact is that not everybody learns the same. People are neurodivergent. So what productivity looks like for some persons, it’s going to look completely different for another person. For me, the worst thing I had as a senior person was to be expected to sit down and work 4 hours, take a half hour break, and then work another 4 hours straight. I have ADHD and anxiety and that is torturous for me. Now I did it and some people will turn around and say, “Well, I did it. So you can do it. too” like the motherfuckers that talk about student loans. But I would say, “I had to do it and it sucks. So I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.” That's what we should be doing. We should be iterating on our practices as an org, iterating our practices as a society to say that, “Oh, well, just because I had to suffer, that doesn't mean that you should have to as well. We should actually fix that so that you don't have to go through that.” Typically, in capitalism, that's how they say you're supposed to do. A 2021 Ferrari has more features than the Model T because you add features, and you add features, and you add features. So I don't see why we can't do that for the people that actually build these vehicles, or build anything else for that matter. REIN: There's a study that whenever this topic comes up, that I refer people to, because I think it's really, really good. It is from Kahn in 1990 and this is interesting because this is the study of the “Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work.” So even the idea that in a capitalist country, you could get a grant to study the engagement of the human spirit at work is amazing to me. But the idea is that there are three psychological conditions that relate to this. What I wanted to do was list them and then get your thoughts. TIM: Sure. REIN: Add them, change them, do they resonate with you? The conditions are meaningfulness. Do I find meaning in the work and my job title, my tasks, and so on? The second is psychological safety. And the third is the availability of emotional and psychological resources and this includes things like, am I emotionally drained at the end of the day? Do I wake up looking forward to going to work? Am I being supported by my manager or my supervisor? TIM: I like all of those. I think those are all really good, but I do think it overlooks the financial aspect and the reason why I say it overlooks the financial aspect is because those things are important for how you feel about your work. But if you are struggling financially, your ability to deal with the normal rigors of work are significantly decreased when you have to then go home and figure out how you're going to make the ends meet. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you going to pay off debt? You're trying to figure out how to take care of your children. You're going to have to figure out how to do all these other things. Your overall capacity is reduced because you have these other concerns as well. So I think it cannot be overstated, the impact of making sure that people's needs outside of work are met to make sure they can also, you can also take care of the needs inside of work. But going back, I do think those are very, very important aspects of people feeling spiritual engagement at work. I think the meaningfulness and the psychological safety to me are the two most important. You can do meaningful work, but if you're getting harassed all the fucking time, it's not a great place. Or you can have a great loving and nurturing environment, but you're just toiling away in dumb anguish and it's like, “Oh, well, I don't know why I'm doing this job. Everyone's super happy and I'll stay here for a while because I really like everybody, but I don't really get any meaning out of what I do.” So I think I like that list. I would just add a fourth one talking about making sure people are financially compensated to make sure their needs are met plus, plus. REIN: And actually, the study doesn't consider that and I think you're right that that's a huge oversight. There's a second study that attempts to quantify these relationships to say how much each of these influence engagement and the result is that meaningfulness was the highest correlation, but the way they did this is interesting. They did a quantitative survey and the survey would include different sections with questions on for example, rewarding coworker relations with questions like, “I feel worthwhile when I am around my coworkers.” I think we should be asking questions like that more often. I think that the engagement surveys you get in the modern world are superficial. TIM: Oh, they absolutely are. They absolutely are. Well, I mean, it goes back to a lot of topics we have in observability. What are your metrics if whatever you measure is what you're going to do? I learned this lesson working in tech support call centers right out of the Marine Corps where if they're going to reward you for the number of calls or they're going to – the primary metric is the number of calls you took in a day. So people were going to do whatever they can do to take the most number of calls, then to like, “Oh, then we're going to do NPS scores after that.” But they set the NPS score pretty low and saying, “Well, we just need you to answer the calls. They don't have to be that good.” That's what you're going to get. If you were measuring things like, “Oh, did your manager make you feel good this month?” If you ask that and they answer honestly, maybe they made you feel good once a month or something like that since the last one, but primarily, they made you feel like crap. That's kind of what you need to ask. I do think the interpersonal relationship aspects, they're hard to quantify because it looks different for everybody and even the nature of the questions are different for everybody. What that question looks like to a cis, white, straight male is going to look way different to say, a queer Black woman. REIN: What if the question is: “I feel a real kinship with my coworkers and I'm like a little, eh about that one?” TIM: Yeah, that goes back to that we're a family thing and I don't necessarily like that at all because we aren't a family. You can't fire your family or lay your family off. REIN: But then there were questions like: “I believe that my coworkers appreciate who I am,” and I like that one a lot. TIM: That's a good one. The appreciates who I am, that speaks to being a whole person and the more that we can be whole people at our jobs, the better off we are going to be. If you have to bite your tongue, if you have to cover your tattoos, if you have to make sure your hair is undyed, or you have to wear clothes that you don't necessarily like because they’re considered “professional” whatever that means. That the more that a person has to distance themselves from who they are as a whole person, probably the less happy they're going to be in that environment. Less safe they're going to feel in that environment. JOHN: Yeah, I find that there is a gap between the rhetoric about bringing your whole self to work and the practice of building a space where it's safe to do that. Like I myself know some things that can lead us in that direction, but I don't feel like there's a great playbook on building that all out. TIM: There really isn't and part of the reason is that the tech industry started out, by and large, as an artifact of the US government, US military, which is never not really known for being very welcoming and safe for people outside of a certain demographic. You talk about what the industry looked like when I got in back in the late 90s, IBM had just stopped requiring people to wear suits to work and they were allowed to wear polo shirts and khakis. That look was what you had. It was the “business casual.” Couldn't have long hair, couldn't have accessed piercings, no visible tattoos; not unlike dress codes or appearance regs that you would see in the military. So you make everybody look like the stereotypical white guy, essentially, because this is what you have to wear because some old white guy said, “This is what people should look like.” Those things are hard to break because who still has power in those things and it's a self-perpetuating society. People that do not fit that mold do not last in that industry, or the people that do last in industry had to divorce themselves of who they are so much that it becomes hard to break that mold once you get into places of power, because you can very quickly be run out for rocking the boat too much and it was very, very self-standing. This is the one thing that I think came out of the .com bubble burst after Y2K and the early aughts was that it broke up a lot of these big companies, big old legacy companies and you saw a lot of smaller startups come out. A lot of these smaller startups that came out of it maybe had a different way of thinking because they weren't run by 70-year-old white guys who were defense contractors. But I do think, when we get into that, if you look at what a person in the tech industry looks like in 2021 versus what they look like in 2001 is dramatically different. I can have my hair long. I can expose my tattoos. I can have a beard. I can say, “I'm a queer, ADHD, Black-Mexican man,” whereas such a thing would be dangerous career-wise and maybe even personally, 20 years ago. I remember in the industry when the first person that I knew personally came out as being transgender and the harassment that she had to go through was horrifying, but it was considered perfectly normal in 2001. We have come a long way, but that just speaks to what a shitshow it was before. Not that we're doing great now, because we have so much farther to go and we are still here in 2021 seeing all white panels, all white male leadership, diversity being heralded when you bring a white woman onto a board or when you bring a gay white man onto a board. And that ain't it chief. That is not it. We have so much more to do and the hard part about that is convincing people that you can't rest on your laurels. Convincing people that you haven't done enough in the first place. Convincing people that there are still problems. That goes back to what you're saying about some of these questions, about some of these metrics that we have about people in the workplace. The questions that you have to ask on these to really get an idea of where you are, have to be uncomfortable. They have to be uncomfortable. They have to challenge people's safe spaces and not just a safe spaces of other people who are marginalized, but certainly, the safe space of the people who are overrepresented. It goes back to talking about, “Hey, do you realize that you have gotten where you are largely by privilege?” or that you've been able to fail up, or that doors have been opened to you that haven't been opened to others, or bars have been lowered for you that weren't as lower for others, or even at the bar wasn't lower, the bar was not raised for you like it was for others? People don't like to hear that. People get very upset when you challenge the notion that maybe they haven't had to work as hard as other people have to get where they have. If you tell somebody, “Well, you got here because you had a fair amount of pillars to help you along the way.” People don't like to hear that. Now I will very much, I've said in the past I may be Black and I may be queer but I'm still a man so I have some privilege that goes along with that that women and non-binary folks have not been able to enjoy. I typically don't have to go to a conference and worry about whether I'm going to be sexually assaulted. God help the person that tries at least with me. But that is a worry and a concern that people have to have going to a conference that's supposed to help their career and that's a big detractor. That is a big obstacle that people don't realize that they have and then worse. I mean, heaven forbid, we even talked about motherfuckers that actually do the harassing there that are still allowed to enjoy their place in the industry, that are still allowed to hold positions of power, positions of influence where they can continue to do this. Not even just keep their jobs, but they keep being by to back these places and they can continue to perpetuate that kind of harassment and making the industry hostile to brilliant people. But it's funny that I will say that here I am on a podcast and every podcast I've ever been on with the exception of one – well, no, all the podcasts I've ever been on hosted by all white people. Every last one. Some have had white women in them, but it's all white people. So when we talk about these subjects, it still comes from a certain perspective that white folks aren't going to have, or that men aren't going to have. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to do something about it. We need to have more of these voices routinely, not just in our panels at tech conferences, but in our normal, everyday consumption and I think that's important. We talk about what do these things look like? What are the patterns we're seeing? If you look at a tech company, especially in Silicon Valley, tech companies look like the neighborhoods. It's not very diverse. People refer their friends, people refer their coworkers, or they have these things about what was that Google employee letter? “We only want people with Bachelor's from Stanford or Ph.Ds. from these places and no one else gets accepted.” Those places are already quite exclusionary in and of itself. They list no HBCUs on that piece of paper, because they don't value HBCUs. They don't value schools that allow people of lower economic or lower in the socioeconomic strata to attend. It's literally self-perpetuating, that kind of gatekeeping. These people who pass through these gates erect those exact same ones and only the people that fit that mold are going to go through it and you never fix the problem. We do not do enough to break those gates down. We don't do enough to model that kind of behavior that we should be expecting. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to be more about doing it. REIN: Yeah, and our whole panel for this show is majority not white dude, but it might not surprise you that the people who most often have the spoons and the privilege to take time out of their workday to do this podcast are the white dudes. JOHN: Yeah. TIM: Yeah. But I think when we talk about going forward, it's one thing to see a pattern and I think people who, if they're looking, they can see what it is, but what do you do? Do you just throw up your hands, go, “We tried, it's hard to do, so we're not going to do”? “Ah, all right, we gave it a shot. We asked some folks, but they can’t do it.” Or what do you do? I've seen a couple of folks, to call out the good behavior when I see it, I know Ashley McNamara when she had said that she was going to step aside from doing conferences, she was like, “Don't talk to me about conferences. Go talk to underrepresented minorities about these roles. Don't talk to me. I'm not going to take it.” I've seen folks that will say, “I'm not going to speak at this thing if it's an all white panel or if it's all male panel.” “If you're not paying your speakers, especially of color, to come, I'm not going to do these things.” That's how we see it in action. Holding the people that build the platform accountable to make sure that everyone has access to it. I think the thing that the pandemic has taught me that I've seen, for the most part, is a lot of these conferences have become free or very, very low in price because there were virtual, a lot more people showed up. People that couldn't necessarily go before and sometimes, it was harder even for them like you mentioned before Rein, just to get off of work and now they can kind of manage to do it in between because they don't actually have to leave. So when we get to a point where we can have in-person conferences again, I think it behooves the organizer of these conferences that if they're really serious about doing something about being more inclusive about breaking these patterns, not to have them in Silicon Valley, in the most expensive real estate on earth. Have them someplace less expensive to lower the cost for people, if they charge it at all. If anything, you cannot tell me that AWS cannot put the cost of an entire – AWS, Microsoft, all these panels’ sponsors cannot put the cost such that you don't have to charge people for a standard price of admission. You can't tell me that they can't sponsor it to the level where you can pay your speakers, especially women, underrepresented minorities, people of color, like that to come in and appear and talk about these things. Especially if it's a topic on which they have to do the emotional labor for. That's what I want to see us do to break some of the patterns that we're seeing, to make things better for everyone else, and then once some start doing that, that is going to be it. Once you start modeling that behavior, you're going to see other conferences do the same, where these big trillion-dollar companies that are sponsoring these orgs or sponsoring these conferences can actually put some money into it so that more people can come. I don't really have a good understanding yet as of why that hasn't happened and I'm sure folks who organize conferences will probably have plethora of reasons. But I feel like the time has come to do these kinds of things and if it means we have fewer conferences, okay. Move them more virtual, it's fine. REIN: Yeah. I have liked that some conferences are starting to do two tier tickets where if the company's paying, you pay the higher price and if you're just an individual or whatever, then you're paying a much lower price, and then usually, there's also some sort of scholarship program again, to try and bring people in. But I think you're right. Especially if it's the much more company focused things like AWS re:Invent or whatever, why is there a cost to attend that? Even for the tickets, but on top of that, there's all the travel, there's taking time off work, there's childcare; there's so many other attendance costs to going to a conference at a place that even if the tickets were free, there's still a huge barrier there. TIM: You could even go as far as say some of these venue choices. You go to a place like D.C., or New York City, or someplace that have HBCUs, those HBCUs have [inaudible] and conference centers. You don't have to go to some Richie rich hotel. Why don’t you give Howard some money to use their facilities? Why don't you do it in the [inaudible] area? Why don't you give Home by the Sea Hampton University some money? Or Atlanta? Any of these places where you have – or some of these are just lower income schools that serve underprivileged communities, give them the money to host these conferences. Not some hotel. Have it catered by minority-owned businesses, have something, do some things to get more people in. Like, have scholarships for HBCUs CS students where if you're a student—junior, senior—looking for internships where they're like, “Hey man, you know what, come to this conference, we’re not going to charge you and we're actually going to give you a stipend for travel.” That's doing something and it is almost the peak of intellectual dishonesty for people to try and act like the money isn't there because it's there. We've seen time and time again, all these earnings calls coming out, all these market caps going up and up and up and up. The money is there; just people don't want to open up them purse strings, I guess. REIN: Before the moment passes, I do want to point out that you call this podcast out for not doing enough to schedule things so that all of the panel can attend. I gratefully appreciate the rebuke and we're going to go work on that. TIM: I appreciate that and I appreciate you for giving me a space that I feel safe to say that. That matters. Like, if you want to do something, give people space to talk about it and don't get butthurt when they say something. REIN: So when you were talking about white person dress codes and the need to assimilate into that, I was reminded of this thing that actually just was published by CNN about a Maori representative in New Zealand’s parliament who was objected for refusing to wear a tie. TIM: I think he called it a colonizer's noose? REIN: He did and when they changed the rule and he was allowed back in, I am still thinking about what he said, which is, “The noose has been taken off our necks and we are now able to sing our songs.” TIM: It's true and it's a big deal because I know for me as, especially as a young Black male, it is imperative for our survival to not be threatening and I'm not overstating that. It is imperative for our survival to not be deemed as threatening. If you go into a workplace and you don't have a comfortable appearance whether your hair's cut close, you can't have dreadlocks, you don't want to have anything that's let's say, too Black. You have to look a certain way. Your car has to look a certain way. You can't listen to certain music. Can't talk a certain way. Those are the guardrails which I had to perform under and I say perform early on when I was early in the industry, because that's what was expected. You would see when the few Black people in an org would get together and the white folks weren't around, we would relax and it looks a whole lot different. If you're a fly on that wall, you would look and sound a lot different because we could be who we were and the problem happened was that you would see, you'd have to go out there and you'd be like oh, man. “Hey, Tim you have a blah, blah. You don't really sound Black.” Hm, okay. REIN: You’re so articulate. TIM: Oh yeah, that's a good one. “You're so articulate,” “You know a lot of words,” and that kind of stuff. The problem with that is that in order to do that, in order to assimilate into that culture to make a living, you have to do that and then we have to go back to our communities and hear about it. Hear about selling out, hear about – and it's one thing to get a job. People like to see people succeed, but what they don't like people have to do is change who they are in order to succeed. But that's what was expected of us to fit into this predominantly white culture. White people didn't have to change. Not really. I can't recall how many dudes I saw walking around with mullets. Even to this day, you see guys walking around with khakis, the polo shirt tucked into the belt, the mullet, the wraparound sunglasses. That has been unchanged since like 1985. But Black people now are starting to be able to be our whole selves, but how many didn't last in the industry because they couldn't? There's a lot and that was just for being Black. Heaven forbid, people who are gay, people who are trans, people who were immigrants first generation, or immigrants that really had a hard time. It's not great. We have not done, this “progressive tech industry” has not done a lot. Did not do a lot early to be welcoming or to do anything, really towards inclusion. It had to be done kicking and screaming by people who have kicked down the doors and I think, honestly, we really need to be. I am grateful that you are kicking down the doors for me and I've done my best to kick down doors for people behind me, who've come after me. But we need to keep doing that and I don't think we acknowledge really, how bad it was because it's uncomfortable. Especially the folks who are still in the industry that were part of that. You catch a lot of these high-tech level CEOs, C-levels SVPs who say they've been in the industry 20 plus years. They were complicit. No one was talking about that. They want to talk about what they're doing now, but no one wants to come up front and be like, “Yeah, I actually participated in this. This is the things that I was doing back then.” Or “I didn't speak up for whoever, whoever.” I guarantee you, if people had an honest disclosure of all that, you're going to see that. It talks about what US history looks like if we don't whitewash it. If we're really honest about it. We can prevent making the same mistakes, hopefully because we don't have this narrative that we were great all the time. Companies are the same way, managers are the same way, people who are long in the tooth of this industry are the same way and I think it's important that we talk about that especially when we talk about even now. You take salespeople, that is a good foray into tech for people that don't have a technical background, especially people of color and women and they still have to look like they're fucking bankers to sell a SaaS to people who are wearing hoodies and boardshorts to work. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense. REIN: Can I share a hot take with you, Tim? TIM: The hottest of takes, please give me lava. REIN: I'm getting really frustrated with the messaging around diversity and inclusion that works and the fact that we have to use it, which is look how good this is for the business and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who do that work, sell that message. A lot of the people I've talked to who are doing this are Black women and they know how to get it done better than I do, but it must be grading to not be able to just say, “Look, we do this because it's right. We do it because it's just.” TIM: It's because the people that they have to placate in order to get this signed off on. Who are they? They are, by and large, white men and to try and give a message to them of doing it just because. People who are a hundred millionaires, billionaires sometimes, if you don't tell them it's going to be good for their bottom line, they're not going to do it. For the most part. Then there are some folks that I'm sure that wouldn't, but in the most part, you're talking about raging capitalists that will be glad to cut off. That would be the same people that didn't offer health insurance to their employees because they didn't have to. The same ones that give them shitty healthcare, but the executives get really, really nice healthcare. The stratification of the value that you hold to the companies is very apparent in the benefits package, pays, and other kinds of things they offer them. To expect them to do it for altruistic reasons is the peak of naivety. So yes, the people that can get those people to sign off on a diversity and inclusion program are fucking miracle workers. REIN: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not mad at them for choosing that messaging. I have a huge amount of respect for their ability to be pragmatic and use the messaging that gets the job done. I mad that that's what they have to do because of how the system is. Because of how racism is. TIM: I wished we could live in a society where we can say, “This is the right thing to do so we're going to do it.” I've talked about this before, where you look at that AWS Leadership Principle of leaders are right. There's no impetus on doing the right thing. You can say, “Oh, I was right about this.” Well good, congrats on your fucking jeopardy win. But do you do the right thing? Doing the right thing is an ethical question. Do you do the right thing? Not for the business, right thing for the business. There's no parenthetical after that, there's no qualifying clause. If you are ethical, you will do the right thing and if that right thing isn't necessarily good for the business, okay. That's fine. All right. There's more money to be made and if your business cannot withstand you doing the right thing, then you're probably a shitty business in the first place. REIN: It’s not a means, it’s an end. TIM: Exactly. REIN: Okay. Well, there's my hot take for the episode. TIM: That was like medium hot. That was like jalapeno hot. JOHN: It's something we've all noticed, that language always comes up the moment you start talking about DE&I. TIM: What I think for me, the hurtful part is when I watch these things especially as you see these things like what you're seeing at Google because of fucking course, Google is that when people really start to move the needle, when people start to make a real impact, the powers that be get uncomfortable and then they start to let people go and they replace them with someone that they are more comfortable with. They don't realize that the discomfort that they feel is what's supposed to happen and you can make it very, very simple for them. If you were to talk about this as a digital transformation, as we say, it's like, “Oh, well, we're going to go from this monolithic gigantic system that we’re running on to microservices, cloud-based API, stuff like that,” and people say, “Well, these old school database administrators are very uncomfortable with it and they tell them.” It’s like, “Hey, well this is how it is now. You're going to have to deal with it, or you're going to probably have to find a different way to get the industry, because this is the way it's going and it's better for everyone involved.” They explain all these benefits and they tell people that discomfort is part of this journey. You're going to have to learn to swim in new waters and things are going to be different, but they're going to be better overall once you get on the other side of that, but they can't apply that to them fucking selves when it comes to about diversity and inclusion and I don't get it. JOHN: I mean, that's the privilege that they haven't had to be practiced at being uncomfortable in those situations, or even if it's a little bit of technical discomfort versus the much more impactful discomfort that comes when you start actually talking about race. TIM: Yeah, there's a level of introspection that they haven't had to do and they are seemingly unwilling to do. That's the part that's most frustrating; the people that have the least to lose in this are the most unwilling to change. REIN: Oh, do you think it's worthwhile if what we're talking about here is a change in mindset? It's a change in what these people strive for, what they want and I think that that change is incompatible with let’s call it, white supremacy and capitalism. So do you think that it's worthwhile to try to pursue that, or do you think we have to continue doing these pragmatic things? TIM: Well, first of all, I would say that white supremacy and capitalism are redundant, but I would say that we cannot change the minds of the people in power with anything other than pragmatic reasoning because if we could, they would have already. There has been more than enough reason, appeals to emotion, consequence, societal collapse, all these other things that we've seen, especially these past 18 months or so. A reasonable person would say like, “You know what,” or all the people who are reasonable about this and who are ethical about this have already changed their minds. At this point, anybody who doesn't see the need for it, the self-evident need for it without for the justification for business reasons, but the self-evident need for it will not be convinced. So you have to appeal to pragmatic reasons until they leave the industry. REIN: This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift: the people with the old views have to die or otherwise go away and be replaced. TIM: Essentially, that's it and so that's why it's so important for us to nurture the junior folks coming into the industry and the people who are mid-career to make sure that people who understand this, to make sure that the people who are underrepresented, and to make sure your LGBTQ, your people of color, any manner of folks that are not properly represented or that have been heretofore unsafe in this industry, stay in the industry by any means necessary. To make sure that the industry can change in the long run. It is incrementalism and as unpopular as it is in some circles to say, “Oh, we can't just change everything right now because we're inspired to do so.” I'm sorry, you don't steer a ship that quickly. This is a large thing we have to change. The industry is a lot of people and it's a lot of money. So you're going to have to change it a bit at a time and the only way to bring that change about is to bring and keep people in the industry that can affect that change. REIN: And for those of us who are more securely in the industry, whether it's because we're white dudes or we have experience, whatever it is, we have an obligation to do what it takes to keep them around you. TIM: You absolutely do and you also have an obligation to continue to push on the folks that don't see the value in keeping them around. Very openly. You have to use your privilege. You have to use your privilege to speak to power. You don't have to take anyone else's voices. You don't have to pick up someone else to sign a waiver on his own, certainly, but you have to keep them from being silenced and that is the important thing that we need to do. If you are a straight white male in this industry and you have seen the necessity of the industry being more inclusive, diverse, and to have a good sense of belonging, then what you have to do is you have to check your peers when people speak. REIN: And not just keep them around, but make it possible for them to thrive. TIM: Absolutely, absolutely. They have to have strong roots in the industry. They have to feel like they're safe here, that they can grow here, and that they belong here and then when they do that, that's when they can affect change. JOHN: Yeah. That is how you keep them around, either that, or you don't want to them to have to rely on just complete bloody mindedness to have the perseverance to go through all of the pain to stay in the industry. You want it to be them thriving in the industry. Like you said, they can be the tomorrow's leaders that can start that real change. TIM: The last thing I want to do is also say, I want to make sure that when we talk about doing that thriving, that again, we're talking about not just taking care of them in the workplace, but taking care of them as whole people. I will beat this drum every time I can get on, we cannot let, we cannot let women leave this industry. We cannot do it. We're losing too many women because they have to make the choice right now in 2021, in this pandemic, as to whether or not they have to be mothers or whether they have to be career professionals and it’s bullshit. It is bullshit and it goes two ways with that: we're not supporting mothers and we're not supporting our fathers. We can support our fathers, then they can play a more active role in raising their children and Mom doesn't have to take care of everything. Now obviously, work can't influence whether a father is a piece of shit father or not and there are a lot of them out there, I'm going to be honest about it, that won't change a diaper, that won't clean the house, shit like that. We can't do that, but we'll at least avail them the opportunity and not have them use work as an excuse. So we have to change the way we do business to make sure that working mothers can be whole people so they don't have to choose between raising their children and doing work. If we don't protect these women, and the reason I say that is because it is the women of color that are the most susceptible to having to make this choice, because they have fewer resources outside of that, typically. So we need to protect people. We need to protect these people so that they can stay in the industry and we need to do that now. Because we are bleeding off too many women as it is like way, way too much. And that goes beyond whether or not we're actually treating them as they should be treated like equals, like the brilliant engineers they are in the conference rooms. So that's a whole other problem. We need to tackle that too, but we need to at least keep them from saying, “Hey, I’ve got to leave the industry because I got to take care of my kids.” We should be fixing that and we should be fixing that yesterday. JOHN: Yeah, that’s part of bringing your whole self to work is the other selves that you're taking care of. Like, if you can't have that baby on your lap for the meeting, then you're not going be on the meeting and then it's snowballed from there. TIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we start coming back, whatever that looks like post-pandemic, think about what they did in World War II and beyond to keep women in working. They had daycares, like the companies had daycares. But why fuck can't we do that now? We have so much money. You mean to tell me Amazon can’t have a daycare at the facilities You mean to tell me that Microsoft can have a daycare facilities? You mean to tell me that fucking WeWork can't have WeWork fucking daycare that companies pay for? Like, there's no reason for it. People just don't want it and it comes down to greed and it’s bullshit. REIN: So maybe now is a good time for us to do reflections. I usually have two things, I guess, that's my pattern now. One is I wanted to point out that Tim said that capitalism and white supremacy are the same thing and I didn't want that one to go under the radar either. If you're a white person who doesn't know what Tim is talking about, I can recommend a book called The Invention of the White Race. Maybe Tim has some of his own recommendations. My reflection is that we have an obligation not just to make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but if we're dragging them through the barbed wire that is this toxic garbage industry, we're hurting them, too and so, our obligation is to make it healthy. JOHN: Yeah, I think that's really just been reinforcing a lot of my own thoughts on things like, I don't know if this is a reflection other than just it's always great to have these kinds of conversations as reminders. These are thoughts that happen, but sometimes they happen in the background or you're not quite sure to connect them to action and continuing to have these conversations to continually remind me what the priorities are and what the other perspectives are is incredibly useful to me. So Tim, if nothing else, I appreciate you spending the time talking with us, talking to me in specific about your perspective on this. So thank you. TIM: I want to take a moment again, to acknowledge and thank you all for giving me a space and a platform. I know it's difficult sometimes to hear criticism especially if you're doing what you think is right for someone to say, “Hey, well, you can do better.” It's hard, but I think it's important for us also acknowledge that growth is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable. One of the things that I learned in jujitsu, if it has taught me anything and it's something that I've reinforced in my life, is that adversity makes you thrive in some ways. Not adversity for adversity’s sake, but when you exercise harder, you get stronger. If you run faster, run harder to get faster. If you spend more time being crushed under a 300-pound man, you get better at jujitsu. In this context, the more time you spend listening to some of these things, the voice of the people that have been marginalized and it makes you uncomfortable, figure out why it makes you uncomfortable and don't figure out how to disqualify the person talking. Think about why you're uncomfortable, look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself and in your world and how you interact with it, and then once you find that pattern, fix the problem. Once you do that, you can then help others do it. But you have to at first be comfortable with being uncomfortable and to do, if there's maybe sound a little cliche, but it's true. If you just run away from that feeling, you're never going to grow, you're never going to improve, and things are never going to get better. JOHN: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Tim. TIM: I appreciate it, John. Thank you all for inviting me. I’m honored and humbled. Special Guest: Tim Banks.
224: Better Allies with Karen Catlin
02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things * Simplifying in a Team Context 05:55 - Better Allies (https://betterallies.com/) – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research * @BetterAllies (https://twitter.com/betterallies) * Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Everyday-Inclusive-Workplaces/dp/1732723303) (Book) * The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Allies-Approach-Hiring-ebook/dp/B082WR7F86) (Book) * Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking (https://www.amazon.com/Present-Techies-Guide-Public-Speaking-ebook/dp/B01BCXHULK) (Book) 14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias (https://genderbiasbingo.com/prove-it-again/) * Channeling White Men; Men Listening to Other Men * Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (https://www.amazon.com/Whistling-Vivaldi-Stereotypes-Affect-Issues/dp/0393339726) (Book) * [Podcast] 'Whistling Vivaldi' And Beating Stereotypes (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125859207) * Reduce the influence of unconscious bias with these re:Work tools (https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/fight-unconscious-bias-with-rework-tools/) * Build the Culture Instead of Fit the Culture 26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit * Recognizing Bias Instead of Removing It * Meritocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy) 32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/homogenous) Networks * Marginalization + Privilege Can Be Self-Reinforcing * 50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace (https://betterallies.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/50-potential-privileges.pdf) 41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job 48:12 - People to Follow * Minda Harts (https://twitter.com/MindaHarts) * The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table (https://bookshop.org/books/the-memo-what-women-of-color-need-to-know-to-secure-a-seat-at-the-table/9781580058469) * Jeannie Gainsburg (https://www.savvyallyaction.com/about) * The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate (https://www.amazon.com/Savvy-Ally-JEANNIE-GAINSBURG/dp/1538136775/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=savvy+ally&qid=1608561617&sr=8-3) * David Smith (https://twitter.com/davidgsmithphd) & Brad Johnston * Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (https://www.amazon.com/Good-Guys-Better-Allies-Workplace-ebook/dp/B08412XCHB/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=good+guys&qid=1614095097&sr=8-3) * Corey Ponder (https://www.coreyponder.com/about-me) * Learning the ABCs of Allyship (https://www.coreyponder.com/single-post/abcs-of-allyship) 51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry * Women in Tech -- The Missing Force: Karen Catlin at TEDxCollegeofWilliam&Mary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiEHaDSfgI) 58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo Reflections: Rein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech. Damien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens. Chanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge. Arty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts. Karen: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. REIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two. So full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again. I'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin. So after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Welcome, Karen to the show! KAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me. ARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us. So our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? KAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth. And I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized. Certainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do. Yeah. So that's my superpower. ARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that? KAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other. Hearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was. Actually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.” ARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful. KAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too. CHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey. KAREN: Okay. CHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people. KAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to. So the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity. Now I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening. So while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit. So about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.” So I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive. All of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies. Also, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others. So I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work. In hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that? Others are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there? So I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven. Then the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing. So I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?” So I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don't have a book. I don't have a book. I don't have a book, sorry.” But I did finally write my book. In fact, I've written two books on the topic—"Better Allies" and also, "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring.” The Better Allies book, I just released a second edition. It's been out there for 2 years. I've learned so much that I wanted to do a full update on the book. So I've just released that a few weeks ago. CHANTÉ: I have a follow-up question then, because Karen, you mentioned that you wanted to maintain your anonymity when you started off that handle and I would just love to hear maybe why that's so important when you're doing this work of allyship and accomplishing in this space? KAREN: Yes, and I don't know if it is important for everyone—and I'm not anonymous anymore. I have claimed credit for this. As soon as I published my books. Writing a book is a lot of work; I'm going to claim the credit. But I didn't in the beginning because okay, I'm going to say this. A lot of people thought it was a man behind the Twitter handle and I must admit, I was kind of channeling white men that I have worked with over my career and thinking about what would they really do? What could I get them to do? All of my tweets are first person, “I pledge to do this,” “I will do this,” I'm going to do this,” and there were people I have friends even who were like, “Hey, have you seen this @betterallies Twitter handle? I wonder who's behind it. I'd like to interview him for my podcast,” That type of thing. So I think that there were people out there who thought it was a white man behind the Twitter handle and I was comfortable with that because not only was I channeling these white men I had worked with in the past, but I also think that there's power in men listening to other men. I'll just say that. I have actually gotten speaking engagements when I've said, “I'm a contributor.” They're like, “Are there any men who could speak because we think men would like to hear this message from another man.” So anyway, that's kind of why I started out with that anonymous Twitter handle and with this character behind the scenes of this fake man. [laughs] But now it's okay. I say that I curate it, it's me, and I'm comfortable with that. I still do it first person because I think that white women can also be allies. We all can be allies for others with less privilege than ourselves in the workplace and I think it's important for us, everyone to be thinking, “This is a job I can and should do to be inclusive at work and to look for these everyday situations. I can take ally actions and make a difference.” ARTY: How's that changed things like, revealing your identity and that you're not actually a big white dude? [chuckles] KAREN: I know. Well, I never really said I was a big white dude! Or even a small white dude, or whatever. But I think it's fine. I claimed the association with the Twitter handle when I published my book and it was just time to just own it. It's not like people stopped following me or stopped retweeting or anything like that. It's only grown since then. So Arty, it's a good question, but I don't know. I don't know. REIN: And this is more than a little ironic because when you were talking about your coaching—and I'm going to read into this a little bit, but I think you can confirm that it's backed up by the research—to appear equally competent or professional, women have to do more and other minoritized groups have to do more. So what I was reading in was that part of the problem you had with coaching was that to get them to an equal playing field, they had to be better. KAREN: Yes. What you're describing, Rein is “prove-it-again” bias and this is well-researched and documented. Prove-it-again means that women have to prove themselves over and over again where men just have to show potential. This often happens and I'm going to give you just a scenario to bring it home. Imagine sitting in some sort of promotion calibration discussion with other managers in your group and you're talking about who gets promotions this cycle. Someone might say, “Well, I'd like to see Arty prove that she can handle managing people before we move her to the next level.” When Arty, maybe you've already been doing that for a few years; you've already managed a team, you've built a team, whatever. “I'd like to make sure she can do this with this additional thing,” like, make sure she can do it with an offshore team or something. “I want to see her do it again.” Whereas a man's like, “Ah, Damien's great. I know he can do the job. Let's promote him.” Okay, totally making this up. But you see what I'm saying is that this is what the prove-it-again bias is. So whether it is women have to be twice as good or something like that, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but they have to deal with this bias of once again, I have to prove that I'm worthy to be at this table, to be in this conversation, to be invited to that strategic planning meeting, to get that promotion, and I don't want to coach women to have to keep proving themselves over and over again. Instead, I want to change the dynamics of what's happening inside these organizations so it is a better playing field, not just for my clients who are mostly women, but also, anyone out there who's from an underrepresented group, who might be facing challenges as they try to navigate this world that really has been designed for other people. ARTY: Wow, that's really enlightening. I'm just thinking about this from a cognitive science perspective and how our brains work, and then if you're making a prediction about something and have an expectation frame for that. If I have an expectation that someone's going to do well, like I have a dream and image in my mind that they'll fit this particular stereotype, then if they just show potential to fit this image in my head, I can imagine and envision them doing all these things and trust that imaginary dream in my head. Whereas, if I have the opposite dream in my head where my imagination shows this expectation of this person falling on their face and doing all these things wrong, I'm already in a position of having to prove something that's outside of that expectation, which is so much harder to do. So this is the effect of these biases basically being baked into our brain already is all of our expectations and things are set up to work against people that culturally, we have these negative expectations around that have nothing to do with those actual people. KAREN: Thanks. Arty, have you ever read the book, Whistling Vivaldi? ARTY: I haven't. I am adding that to my list. KAREN: It explores stereotype threat, which is exactly what you've just described, and the title, just to give you some insight into this, how this shows up. The title, Whistling Vivaldi, is all about a story of a Black man who had to walk around his neighborhood, which I believe is mostly white and got just the concerns that people didn't trust him navigating this public space, his neighborhood. So what he would do, and I don't know if it was just in the evenings or any time, he went out to walk to be outside, he would whistle Vivaldi to break the stereotype that he was a bad person, a scary person because of the color of his skin. Instead, by whistling Vivaldi, he gave off the feeling that he was a highly educated person who studied classical music and he did that so that he could navigate his neighborhoods safely. It's awful to think about having to do that, but this book is full of these examples. It's a research-driven approach so, it's a great book to understand stereotype threat and combat it. DAMIEN: So in the interest of us and our listeners, I suppose being better allies, you spoke about stereotype threat and gave an example there. You spoke about prove-it-again bias and specifically, with prove-it-again bias, I want to know what are ways that we can identify this real-time and counter it in real-time? KAREN: Yes. With prove-it-again bias—well, with any bias, really. First of all, reminding yourself that it exists is really important. At Google, they found that simply reminding managers, before they went into a calibration, a performance calibration meeting, probably some rank ordering exercise of all the talent in the organization. Before they started a calibration meeting, they were all given a 1-page handout of here's the way bias can creep into this process. That simple act of having people review the list of here's the way bias creeps into the process was enough to help combat it during the subsequent conversation. So I think we have to remind ourselves of bias and by the way, this resource I'm describing is available as a download on Google's re:Work website. I think it's R-E-: work. There's a re:Work website with tons of resources, but it's available for download there. So that's one thing you can do is before a calibration meeting or before you're about to start an interview debrief session with a team, is remind people of the kinds of bias that can come into play so that people are more aware. Other things, and I'll talk specifically about hiring, is I am a huge proponent of making sure that before you interview the first candidate, you have objective criteria that you're going to use to evaluate the candidates because otherwise, without objective criteria, you start relying on subjectivity, which is code for bias. Things will start to be said of, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit,” which is code for bias of “They're different from us. They're different from me. I don't think I'd want to go get a beer with them after work,” or “If I had to travel with them and get stuck on a long layover somewhere when we can travel again, I don't think I'd enjoy that.” People just instead say, “I just don't think they'd be a culture fit. So you get away from that by, instead in your objective criteria, looking for other things that are technically needed for the job, or some values perhaps that your company has in terms of curiosity or lifelong learning or whatever your company values are. You interview for those things and you figure out how you're going to measure someone against those objective criteria. Other way bias creeps into interviews is looking at or saying something like, “Well, they don't have this experience with Docker that this other candidate has,” but really, that wasn't part of the job description. No one said that the candidates needed Docker experience, but all of a sudden, because one of the candidates has Docker experience, that becomes important. So instead of getting ahead of that, make sure you list exactly what you're going to be interviewing for and evaluating people for so that the bias isn't there and bias, maybe all of a sudden Docker becomes an important thing when you realize you could get it. But it may be that it's the person who seems the most like the people in the team who has it and that’s another – you're just using that as a reason for increasing that candidate’s success to join your team because you'd like to hang out with them. You'd like to be with them. You would want to be getting a beer with them. Does that help, Damien? DAMIEN: Yeah, that's very helpful. The framing is an absolutely pre-framing before an evaluation, before an interview what biases can happen. That's a wonderful tool, which I am going to be using everywhere I can. And then what you said about culture fit and really, every subjective evaluation is, I think the words you used was “code for bias.” Like, anytime you have a subjective evaluation, it's going to be biased. So being able to decide in advance what your objective evaluations are, then you can help avoid that issue. Culture fit is just such a red flag for me. You said, I wrote down the words, “culture built,” right? Decide what the culture is – because culture is important in the company, decide what the culture is you want and then interview and evaluate for that. KAREN: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Build the culture instead of just fit the culture. I've also heard people say, “If you ever hear someone say, I don't think they'd be a culture fit, respond with ‘Well, I think they'd be a culture add,’” or Damien, to quote you, “I think they build our culture instead of just fit in.” Really powerful, really powerful. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I agree with you all and Karen, I'm not sure if you knew this, but one of the many things I do, which takes up most of my life, is I'm a DEI practitioner and I have a firm, and I also work in-house at a company, Village MD, as a director of DEI there. So one of the things that I talk a lot about is culture add and one of the things I'd love to see more companies do is to think about like, basically take an inventory of all the people on your team and try to identify where you're strong, where you're weak, and look for the skills gap analysis, basically and say, “What don't we have here,” and then, “Let's go hire for that skillset or that expertise that we don't have that we believe could help us build this thing better this year.” That's going to require people to do that exercise, not just once because your team dynamic shifts usually a few times a year. So if you're a high growth company, you should be doing that probably every quarter. But imagine what the difference would be if we approach interviewing and promotion building from that lens instead. KAREN: Yeah, and Chanté, the way you framed it is amazing. I love it. You said, “What do we not have that we need to build our product to deliver to our customers?” I don't remember the exact words you used, but that I think is important because I've also, in conversations I've had around culture fit and culture and everything, someone say to me, “Well, wait a second, Karen, what if you we're evaluating a white supremacist? It's clear, there are white supremacists and we don't have one of those yet on the team. Does that mean we should open the doors and let them in?” That's when it's like, you can use the way you've just framed as “Well, if we're building a product for white supremacists, then yeah, probably.” But to be more serious about this, it's like what's missing from our team structure, from the diversity within this team, that is going to allow us to deliver on our product, on our offering better? I think that's important. Another lens to apply here is also you can still do values fit. Make sure people fit with the values that you have as a company and that should allow you to interview out people who don't fit with your values and just to use that example of a white supremacist. That would be the way to do that, too. REIN: I think it's really important to say that ethics still matters here and values fit as a way to express that. One of the things that I would maybe caution or challenge is—and this isn't a direct challenge to you, Karen, I don't think—but it's been popular in the industry to try to remove bias from the equation. To do debiasing training and things like that and I think that that's the wrong way to go because I don't think it's cognitively possible to remove bias. I think instead what we should do, what I think that you're talking about here is being aware of the biases we have. Accounting for them in the way that we hire, because the same heuristic that leads to a bias against certain demographics is the one we use to say, “We don't want white supremacists.” KAREN: Yeah. Plus a hundred, yes. [laughs] I agree. What I was going to say, Rein to build on what you just shared is that it's important to see things like color, for example, to understand. Even if you feel you're not biased, it's important to see it, to see color, to see disability, to see someone who is going through a transition, for example, on their identity. It's important to see it because that allows you to understand the challenges that they are facing and if you say, “I don't see color, I just see them as their new identity, post-transition. I don't see their disability; I just see the person,” it negates the experience they're having, as they are trying to navigate the workplace and to be the best allies, you need to understand the challenges people are facing and how you can take action to help them either mitigate the challenge, get around the challenge, whatever that might be, or remove the challenge. ARTY: So you're not being empathetic to the circumstances by pretending that they don't exist. KAREN: Yes. Well said, yes. REIN: It’s the idea that you can be on bias that I think is dangerous. I want to call back to this idea of a meritocracy; the idea that every choice we make is based on merit and that whatever we choose is indicative of the merit of that person is the bias that is harmful. KAREN: Woo, yes. I can't wait to refer to that. I can't wait to come back and listen to you. What you just said, Rein that is powerful. REIN: Because becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We're a meritocracy so everything we've chosen is means – if we chose someone that means that they have merit by definition. There's no way out of that trap. KAREN: Right on. CHANTÉ: Yeah. When you say that, it makes me think, too of just the sort of committal to always transforming and iterating. So if you come in the door saying, “Listen, there's no way we can eliminate bias all the time.” We're going to make the assumption that we're always being biased and therefore, what things can we put into place and what tools can we use? What resources can we leverage here to make sure that we're on a pathway for greater inclusion, greater accessibility? Therefore, making our organization more diverse and more innovative. I think, like Rein, I just want to really underscore that because that is something that I've had to really try to lead with versus add to the conversation later. So I'm appreciating that you brought it up today. Thank you. REIN: It’s like some of the choices, some of the evaluations we're making are subjective. We can't make them objective in every case; I think what we want is a framework that allows us to do these subjective evaluations in a way that accounts for bias. DAMIEN: So that's amazing. Where do we go from here? ARTY: One of the things we talked about last time with regards to various people getting promoted, this effect of maler and paler as you get closer to the C-suite, is that one of the effects of that is when you're sitting down to hire someone, well, who do you know? Who's on the list of people that I know within my network? So one of the huge biases we end up having isn't necessarily a cognitive bias, it's just a effect of where our attention has been and who we've been hanging out and who we have relationships with that are preexisting. These existing network effects also keep us in the thinking and stuff and making decisions within the context of those networks. We promote people that we know. We promote people that we have relationships with. So even just some of the dynamics of if you've got existing C-suite dynamics that is dominated by men and you've got these dynamics where it’s difficult for men and women to have relationships for various reasons, things that get complicated, that those sorts of things can end up creating a self-reinforcing effect, too. I'm wondering what are some of your thoughts on some of the ways that we can expand our networks and expand the people that we know to shift some of those systemic effects? KAREN: Yeah. Most of us have homogenous networks. Homogenous networks meaning people who are just like us because we have something in common with them, whether that is hobbies that we share, music we like talking about, food we like to go out to enjoy whatever we have things in common. So most of us end up having a –and it's true. Most white people have networks that are full of other white people and this also is friendship circles. There's again, social science research out there that shows that we tend to have networks full of people just like us. As you just were saying, Arty this impacts so many aspects of work in terms of who we hire, who we recommend, who we promote, who we even ask to take on some like stretch assignment or tasks such as giving the update at the all-hands meeting for our team, or going in and exploring some new technology that might be on the horizon that we could leverage. Who are we going to trust with these stretch assignments are people that we know and the people that we know are the people in our network. So it is important to look to diversify our network. There's so many ways to do this. When I give talks, I share some of these ways. One is literally when new people join your team or from a different demographic than you, get to know them and get to know their work and their career goals and down the road, look for how you might be able to connect some dots. But really, take the time to get to know people who you might otherwise just like, “Oh yeah, they're joining the team, whatever,” but set up that virtual coffee or whatever. The other thing you can do is join Slack groups or other discussion forums at your company for people from that demographic. After checking first, if you'd be welcome and invited, of course, but many of these groups will be open to allies and if you are wanting to join that discussion groups so that you can sort of understand the conversation, understand the challenges, get to know some of this talent. That's a great way to do it. You can also go to conferences that are designed for members of other groups that you're not a part of. Again, asking first permission, if you'd be welcome as an ally, but in tech, there's so many of these, but there's lesbians who tech, there are Black women in tech or Black coders conferences. There are Latinas in tech. Meetups and things like that. So there's so many opportunities to go and hear incredibly talented speakers talking about the technology and the projects and the work that they do and it's a great way to expand your network. I'll share my favorite hack that I do when it's in-person and I'm going to a meetup or an event. I'm an introvert, I will let everyone know that. It's hard for me to go into a networking group like the meetup that's happening and there's some pizza and some drinks before it starts, or that conference reception. It's hard for me to go into a room like that. So when I do, I quickly scan the room and I look for someone who's standing by themselves or sitting by themselves, who is from a different demographic and I go over and say, “Hi.” That's the easiest introduction for me as an introvert is to go find someone who's all by themselves and maybe feeling a little awkward that they're all by themselves too and it's a great way to strike a conversation and again, to expand my network, meet some new people, not just my friends that might be coming to the same event. DAMIEN: So one of the things that I want to call attention to, too with what you're saying there is that this marginalization and privilege is self-reinforcing. You don't have to have – even though we all have cognitive biases, they aren't actually necessary for marginalization and privilege to self-reinforce and in fact, because that actually takes effort to undo these things. If we just go along, if we pretend not to see color, or whatever, we are actually reinforcing the problems that exist. KAREN: Yeah, and Damien, on that note. In my book, and it's also a free download on my website, betterallies.com. I have a list that I've curated of 50 ways you might have privilege in the workplace. I like people to read through this list and think about all the ways they have privilege that others might not. The top of the list are “I'm a male,” and “I'm white,” and those are the top two things. But then it gets into more nuanced things and nuanced things being, “I'm not the primary caregiver for someone else.” Well, why is that something we should be aware of as allies? Well, when you're the primary caregiver, that means you may have to drop things at a moment's notice to take a child or a parent to a doctor's appointment, for example, or you might be interrupted in your work. So there's privilege when you don't have that caregiving responsibility. Another one is that you actually have budget enough spare money so that you can do after work outings with a team that aren't company sanctioned. Like, “Yeah, I can afford to go out to dinner,” and gosh, this all sounds so weird now with the pandemic and how long it’s lasting. But “Yeah, I can go out for drinks or dinner with my team after work and pay my way,” or “I can do that whitewater rafting trip on the weekend that people are getting together with.” Even though it's not company work, it's still networking and that builds bonds that builds relationships and sure, work is going to be discussed. It also includes things such as “I am not holding a visa,” which means that I have confidence that I maybe can take some risks with my career. “I can move teams, move to another manager, try something new out because I have confidence that I'm not going to potentially lose my job, which means losing my visa, which means losing my ability to live in the United States.” So there's so many ways that we have privileged that I think at first blush, we might not realize and I think building on your point, Damien it's important for us to understand this privilege so that we can be understanding of how and why we should be diversifying our network and getting to know people who have different levels of privilege than ourselves. REIN: And if you're like a white dude who's like, “This is a lot to keep track of.” Yes. When you don't have them, it's obvious. KAREN: Yeah, you can be oblivious. Otherwise – not that you would be, Rein. I'm not saying that, but one can be very oblivious. REIN: I’m probably oblivious of like, at least 30 of them, so. DAMIEN: For people who are marginalized every axes, we really cannot be unaware. It's dangerous. Those of us who were unaware of it, suffer disastrous consequences. So in places where you are privileged, if one of the privileges is to not be aware of it and yes, it is a lot to keep track of and yes, as everybody else has to keep track of that stuff. KAREN: Yeah, and building on what you both just said, this is just like technology in some ways and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's not take it out of context because there's some nuanced stuff I'm about to share. But in tech, there are so many areas of specialty, whether that is in data science or product security or accessibility related engineering or internationalization engineering and, and, and like, there's so many areas of expertise. And Rein, you’re like, “As a white guy, how am I supposed to keep track of all of this?” Well, it's hard. I get it because the field keeps changing, things keep getting innovated on or brought to the surface and the same thing, I'm sure that Chanté sees this in the DEI space. We are learning all the time about how to create more inclusive workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. It's the same as like what am I learning about writing the right kind of code that is going to have lasting impact, that is going to not cause incidents over the weekend [chuckles] when we all want to be doing something else? When it's not going to down the road because technical debt that is going to have to be retired? So yeah, it's hard work. I don't mean to say it's not, but we need to make sure we have people who are thinking about this around us, who are reminding us, who are teaching us the best practices so that we are getting ahead of this versus falling behind. REIN: One of the things you said last time that I really want to make sure we bring back up is that doing this work is everyone's job. KAREN: Yes. Yeah, and Rein, I think we got into that conversation talking specifically about product security, software security. You can have a team of people who are software security specialists/experts. In fact, when I was at Adobe in my department, that was one of the groups in my department was cross-engineering product security specialists and they know this stuff. They are paying attention to the landscape. They know when those zero-day incidents happen and what the response is like, and what bounties are being paid and they know all of that because they love it. They're paying attention to it, but they can't solve the problem for the whole company. They cannot make sure that every piece of code is hardened so that the viruses don't get injected. There aren't security violations. What they need to do is educate others, be there to support them when things go bad. But it's really about educating every engineer to be using the libraries the right way, to be allocating memory in the right way, whatever so that we don't have those security violations and it's the same thing with being inclusive. I have so much respect for anyone and Chanté, it sounds like you do this work, but like, you are responsible for diversity at a company and are looking top down at what are the measurements we're going to have? What are the quarterly or annual goals that we want to have to improve our diversity? How are we going to measure that, make it happen? But we also need people in every corner of the organization, in every code review meeting, in every interview debrief, in every casual hallway conversation, or a chat in a Slack, we need all of those people to realize they have a role to play in being inclusive and have some awareness of what it looks like to not be inclusive. What someone from a different demographic is experiencing in a way you might not and what are some of the ways you can take action? So I see so many parallels there and I firmly believe, it's something I say all the time like, you don't have to have the words “diversity inclusion” belonging on your business card to make a difference. It's inclusion as a job for everyone. CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to make sure that we directed folks to. I love that on your website. That was one of the things that before I ever even knew you were going to be a guest here. That's why I started following you. I love that and I want to actually dive into that because one of the things that I hear often from people when I'm doing this work, they're like, “You're so good at this.” I'm like, “Yeah, but this is a skill that you have to work towards.” So it's just like any other thing you want to make a lifestyle. You have to wake up that day and make a decision. If you're somebody who wants to eat healthier, then you wake up every morning and you have decisions to make. If you are a yogi like me, you might decide that you want to get on your yoga mat or you might want to pick up a book and read the philosophy instead. So it's a lifestyle. I'd love it if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your journey because it's humbling to hear that you got into this work knowing that you wanted to coach women in tech, but you didn't necessarily aspire to be thinking about and writing about allyship, but that became a part of it. So what are some things that you did early on, or what are some things that you're doing now in terms of showing up every day and being a better ally? KAREN: Yeah. I think that one thing you have to be comfortable with and it's hard, but I do this a lot is being an ally means realizing you're going to be wrong some of the time, because you are constantly stepping outside of that comfort zone that is just so safe—"I know how to navigate this kind of conversation, using these kinds of words and everything”—and you have to keep stepping outside that comfort zone so that you are taking some risks and you're going to make some mistakes. You are. I make them pretty regularly. I might put something in a newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called 5 Ally Actions with 5 ideas and things people can take and I get emails back from people who disagree with me or say, “If I had written that, I would have changed it slightly this way,” or whatever, and I'm comfortable with that because I approach everything with this mindset of curious, instead of furious. I want to be curious about why someone's giving me the feedback and what's underneath there and what can I learn from it as opposed to getting furious at them for giving me feedback and like, assaulting my expertise, or whatever, or my voice. So curious, not furious, I think is an important thing here and I want to give a shout out. I learned that phrase from a podcast I was listening to and it was Kat Gordon, who has something called The 3% Movement, which is all about getting more gender diversity in the creative industry, like the ad industry. So hat tipped to Kat Gordon for that. So getting back to you got to get comfortable with making mistakes and when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize. Heartfelt apology, folks. Apologize and then figure out what you're going to do differently the next time. That's what it's all about. So the journey is real. No one ever gets an ally badge or an ally cookie. In fact, I will tell you, I recently searched on LinkedIn in job titles for ally. I was curious to see how many people put in their job titles. There are people out there who have claimed it and I don't think that's right. Unless someone else has told them that, in which case, okay, someone else has said, “You are an ally,” maybe you can put that in your title and claim the badge, but it's really not about that. It's about being on a lifelong journey really, to be inclusive, to keep learning, to keep understanding how things are changing, and not putting the spotlight on yourself. Opening the doors for other people and just stand right behind that door and realizing that it's not about you. It's so hard to do this at times because we all want to be like, “Hey, look at the cool thing I just did for somebody else.” We want that feedback, but being an ally means stepping out of the limelight and letting someone else shine. CHANTÉ: Those are great. Thank you so much, Karen, for that. I want to ask one more question since we're there. In terms of not making it about ourselves and not necessarily centering ourselves and taking action in the moment and not giving ourselves the allyship title, if you will, who are some people that you either align yourself with or that you learn from, whether it's up close and personal or from a distance? Like who are people that you feel are providing you with gems and knowledge so that you are then sharing with folks like us, that we can at least either put in the show notes or give a shout out to? KAREN: Yes! Oh, I love this. So many people. One, I will say right off the bat is Minda Harts. Minda Harts is a woman, a Black woman, and she wrote a book called The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Get a Seat at the Table, I think is the byline. She and I spoke on a panel together a few months ago and I learned so much from her. I learned a lot from reading her book about the experience with Black women in the workplace, but then also, on the panel and since then, I feel that we have a nice professional, Twitter kind of friendship going on, which I just value so much. So I learned from her and what she shares all the time. Another person I learned from is Jeannie Gainsburg. Jeannie Gainsburg is an LGBTQ educator and wrote a book called The Savvy Ally and The Savvy Ally is all about – the funny thing is she and I connected. We realized we went to college together or the same class, but we didn't know each other in college, but we have the same mindset of understanding something and then distilling it into how an ally can show up. With her perspective, it's all about being an ally for the LGBTQ community and I've learned so much from her. In fact, I've quoted both Minda and Jeannie in my second edition pretty heavily. I also have learned a lot from David Smith and Brad Johnson. They recently published a book called Good Guys and their approach is also incredibly similar to mine, but they focus completely on how men can be allies for women and they don't focus on other aspects of allyship. But very much I learned about, they're the guys who are talking to other guys and basically saying, “Hey dude, it's your responsibility as a man in a professional setting to be an ally.” Like, it's part of your job to meet with the women on your team and sponsor them and support them. So, they tell it in a real way. Oh my gosh, I feel like I learned from so many other people, too and I'm forgetting, I'm not thinking holistically. So anyway, those are four people it's nice to give shout outs to. CHANTÉ: We put you on the spot so thank you, Karen. [laughs] KAREN: Okay. Here's another one. Corey Ponder, he works in tech, but he also does speaking and writing about diversity and inclusion on the side and he is a Black man. I just learned about his experience and perspective in such a real, raw way and I value that a lot. DAMIEN: Karen, I'd like to ask you a bit about something you brought up really early in our conversation today. You mentioned that before you got into this work with Better Allies and that sort of work, before you became a executive coach, leadership coach, you noticed a decline in gender parity in the tech industry. Can you talk about what that decline was, how it might've happened? KAREN: Yeah. So first of all, Damien a question for you. Were you surprised when I said that? DAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, no, not at all. I actually just today read about one of the earliest computers at NASA which is a woman, a Black woman, that the astronauts explicitly by name depended on, for example, Apollo 13. So I wanted to hear your story about what happened. KAREN: Yeah. Okay, okay. I asked only because there are many people who, when I just drop that into the conversation, they ended up coming back to it minutes and minutes later or towards the end of any kind of interview. At any rate, what happened? So I have theory and actually I gave a TEDx talk about this, exploring the theory. I won't do all 20 minutes of my TEDx talk, but when I decided to study computer science, I was a senior in high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, what I wanted to study in college. My father said to me, “Hey, well, Karen, you're really good at math and you enjoy making things. You're always crafting and sewing and knitting, and you like solving problems. I've just been reading this article about this new field called computer science which seems like it would combine all the things you're good at and maybe you would enjoy making software and by the way, this is what people earn in this field.” [chuckles] I have to admit, I grew up in a very humble financial household and so, I wanted to make sure I could support myself and earn a living when I graduated from college. So I'm like, “Okay, I'll study computer science. I'll learn how to build software.” That was 1981, the year I graduated from high school. Now get this, I had never touched a computer. Okay, we didn't have – I mean, 1981 was the year the IBM PC was released into the field. The Macintosh did not come out until 1984. So in my home, we did not have computers in the part-time jobs I had after school and summers, no one had computers and certainly, we didn't not have computers in my high school where I could learn to code where it would probably would have been in basic. This was a situation for many people across the United States. Going to college in the early 80s, if you wanted to study computer science, many people were coming with no experience. Maybe a little more than me. Maybe they had taken that basic class, but very little experience. It was almost like a level playing field at that point and we were encouraged to pursue this. My graduating class from college, I went back through my yearbook not too long ago to count, there were 38% of the computer science degrees went to women in my class and that statistic 38% is very similar to what was happening across the whole United States. According to the Department of Education, the year 1985, when I graduated from college, 37% of all computer science and information science degrees went to women. So that was pretty good. Now, fast forward 20, 25 years and that number dropped to a low of about 17%, I think and the overall number also went down of how many women were getting these degrees. And now, you don't have to have a computer science degree to work in tech necessarily, but in many tech environments and tech companies, the engineers are incredibly valued and are very visible and are paid very well. They are an incredibly important part of any tech company. So my point is that there used to be a lot more women computer scientists and it did drop. I do think it's this level playing field that I started at, but the decline happened because I believe a society, we as a society, started thinking and encouraging our young boys to get involved with robotics, with tinkering, with coding classes, with summer camps where you might learn to do coding or programming robotics. We encouraged our young boys more than our young girls and over time, that meant that a girl, if she wanted to go to the summer coding camp in her neighborhood, would show up and see only boys there, or see only a very small number of girls and be like, “Well, maybe this isn't for me.” Or coding assignments in colleges that were much more aligned with masculine interests and more feminine interests. Things that might be more – oh, I don't even really want to get into stereotypes. I don't even want to go there, but things that would be more appealing to an 18-year-old boy than an 18-year-old girl who just have different interests and just became self-fulfilling. What we're seeing now though, is that graph is moving in the right direction. The numbers are inching upwards because there's been so much focus across the United States – and hopefully, around the world, but across the United States, in terms of gender diversity is important in this field and we should be welcoming of all and we're making changes to all of these programs and encouraging our young girls to study this field, get involved with STEM, and pursue it when they get to college and beyond. DAMIEN: Yeah, you avoided giving an example so I'll give one that you reminded me of, which is for a very long time, the standard, the most common image used as an example of compression algorithms was that of a undressed woman and so, we can – KAREN: Lena. Her name is Lena. Yes, actually I know her name. She was someone when they were working on an image compression algorithm like, “We need a picture,” and someone just grabbed the Playboy magazine from their cube, took the centerfold out, and used that. REIN: You do. [laughter] Or at least as you did. The effect here is really interesting and also, really, it makes me very sad, which is that computing became seen as a prestige job. Once men realized that there was something to this, it requires expertise, they decided that they were going to do it and when they did—there's research that shows this both ways. When men enter a field, it raises the prestige and increases wages. When women enter a field, it lowers the prestige and decreases wages. KAREN: Yeah, that's a problem, but real. I don't mean to at all disagree. It's a real problem. ARTY: Just curious. Do we reinforce these things by saying them as a statement like that with a period versus bringing it up as a question? REIN: Yeah. ARTY: I'm just wondering. REIN: What I’m trying to do is describe and not be normative, but I think that's a valid point. ARTY: In my life coaching thing recently, we were talking about statements with periods and it's really easy to define the world of expectations of ourselves, define the world of expectations of everyone else for all time and all affinity as a statement with a period. As we go and do this, it creates these reinforcing effects, and then we go and do things and enact behaviors that reinforce those belief systems. So we're sitting here talking about biases and how all of this stuff gets baked in her brain and one of the ways that it gets baked into her brain is by making statements of “Well, this is how it is period.” I realize you’re making a statement of something to challenge, but I think it's something that we really need to think about that if we want to change the status quo, it starts with reimagining it different. Coming up with a different statement, with a period even as a starting point, and then letting that lead to questions of how do we go and manifest this new reality that is more what we want. KAREN: Can I embarrass myself? [laughs] ARTY: Yes, of course. KAREN: Okay, right. [laughter] KAREN: So I have two children. That's not embarrassing. They're in their early 20s now. That's not embarrassing. I had read, when they were younger, that there is research done that said that if you tell a girl just before she takes a math test, that girls aren't good at math, that her score will actually go down. This is the embarrassing thing. So before dropping my daughter off for like her PSATs and SAT exams, I just said, “Remember, girls are really good at math and you are really good at math, too.” [chuckles] So maybe already changing the narrative by using different periods statements, too [laughs] making up alternate realities. Oh gosh, I can't believe I just shared that story. My daughter would probably be so embarrassed. DAMIEN: That’s a modern story and I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about there and I think Arty brings up an amazing and very valuable points. The suggestion I want to make in response to that is, because what Rein was describing is a fact and I’m sure it's important to know about and to know that it happened—and I'm already using that language now: it happened. In the past when men went into a field, it became more prestigious and higher paid. When women into a field, it became less prestigious and higher paid. And that's what has happened in the past and by stating it that way, now we can go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” REIN: There's a thing I learned from Virginia Satir that I probably should have done here, which is when you find one of those ends with a period sentences Arty, like you're talking about, you add until now at the end. So when women enter a male dominated fields, wages go down until now. ARTY: And now they go up. Now they go up because everyone wants women because they're so awesome. Women bring so much awesomeness to the table so wages go up. The more women you have, the better the wages. CHANTÉ: Period. KAREN: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, and—yes, and—the other kind of way to look at this is, I've been doing a lot of work with how might we statements and so the question is, how might we change the trajectory? How might we imagine the future of work where all people and all identities are welcome and we are building towards a future that is literally more equitable and more accessible for all? So how might we do that? We can maybe answer that question today, or we can invite folks who are going to listen in to weigh in when we post this online and talk to us on Twitter. ARTY: I love that, though. I mean, I think if we really want to change the status quo, part of that is realizing that we're the ones who make it. We're the ones that create our reality and our culture is just a manifest of all these beliefs and things that are in our head emerging from all of us. If we realize that we're actually the ones that are in control of that, that we're the ones that are manifesting that, then we can create any type of world that we want. So what does that vision look like? Let's go up to the whiteboard and create and dream up the type of world that we want, the type of vision that we want, the type of company we want, the type of culture we want. Write those things down, make them real to us, start selecting and doing things that reinforce those visions and beliefs. But we've got to start with believing. It's possible. We got to start with imagining that reality is already there, that we're already there, that we've already created it right now and now we're just living it. KAREN: 100%. REIN: Well, I think that is a great sentiment to end our episode on. We should do reflections and thanks to Arty, I already have one. So I can go first, if anyone else wants to? CHANTÉ: Take it away. REIN: So my reflection and Arty, you really sort of brought this home for me with the last thing you said, is that – Karen, you said that your superpower is your ability to simplify things and I would offer that you have another one, which is your ability to translate ideals, values, intentions into actions. There's a word for that and the word is practice. So what I think we all need to be thinking about is how to get better at practicing. KAREN: Thank you for that, Rein. In fact, I wrote it down because I clearly have to go look it up in the dictionary afterwards and become more familiar. So thank you. I learn something new every day and I've just learned a new vocabulary word and I'm honored. I don't even know what – I do know what it means based on how you used it just then, but I'm honored by your thoughts and your reflections to me. Thank you. DAMIEN: Yeah, I'll build on that because I learned so much in this conversation today and I'm so glad we had it. Specifically regarding very practical things that framing with the one sheet of how bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens and what Arty said about our use of language. I'm a certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner and so, these are the things that I've known, but hadn't applied. So just again, being reminded of them and being able to take that and go, “Okay, let me use these things in the service of this goal of being a better ally” to use your turn of phrase. So thank you. Thank you all. CHANTÉ: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that we didn't record it properly the first time so I could selfishly join this conversation. Yes! I love it when things work out that way. I really appreciated the fact that we talked about so many of the practical things, just what Damien mentioned here. We kind of reiterated some things I already knew, but could have an excuse to tweet out later [laughs] and that is just that we're all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Many of us, Karen, to your point of your story, that we don't start off doing this work, but the journey and the problem is big enough for all of us to take a part in it. What I love about where we are these days is that the world offers us so many resources, tools, and networks that we have a decision to make when we were talking about this lifestyle choice. So today, you might be the ally. Tomorrow, you might be the bridge. The next day, you might be the person who simply passes on somebody's resume, but all of those parts matter when we're trying to imagine a different future, especially around technology. I'm really appreciative of the conversation and I'm looking forward to continuing it. Thank you. REIN: You're welcome, Chanté. [laughter] ARTY: Yeah, we screwed this up just for you. CHANTÉ: [laughs] Yay! ARTY: So my reflection, I wanted to bring up the thing that I actually mentioned last time as my reflection, because I feel like it's really important. One of the simple things that we can do to make a huge difference is just expanding our network and there's so much limitation that's caused by these homogenous networks we have and staying within our circle and friends. Even though, it takes some effort to get outside of our comfort zone and meet new people and to build relationships with people we might not otherwise. The benefits that happen because of all those new relationship, connections are huge and it's totally worth it. I love your simple trick at the conference thing of go find the person who's in the corner by themselves. Talk to them. They're the easy ones, right? I love that. Super easy, but I think change is one of those things that takes some courage on all of our parts to take one little bitty step that can make a big difference. KAREN: Yeah. Arty, there's a saying that says, “When you step outside your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens.” So I think you're already a believer of that and I hope that it plays out in real life for you. I'll just say to wrap up my reflection, I absolutely loved this conversation. I am glad we got to do it again, too. It's it was very different than the first time and I think it was absolutely wonderful. So thank you everyone and if I think about, I learned something from all of you. The one that I think I will really be putting into practice is a combination of Arty and Rein, what you've shared in terms of if there is a period statement, how to turn that to more of a question, or to add to it to say until now. I want to try that out. I want to use that as I am speaking to people about allyship and navigating this on writing my newsletter. I'm not sure where, but it is something I want to try out and see how it – I'm sure it's going to be effective and I appreciate that. Thank you. ARTY: Well, thank you for joining us on the show, Karen. This was a wonderful conversation. KAREN: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, everyone! Special Guest: Karen Catlin.
223: Emotions, Achievement, Joy, and Goals with David MacIver
02:15 - David’s Superpower: Being Confused * Norms of Excellence (https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2020-05-31-09:20.html) * The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance (https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314) 11:56 - Daily Writing * David’s Newsletter: Overthinking Everything (https://drmaciver.substack.com/) * Unfuck Your Habitat (https://www.unfuckyourhabitat.com/) 15:47 - Learning to Be Better at Emotions 23:22 - Achievement and Joy as Aspirational Goals * [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) * Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard (https://www.amazon.com/Aspiration-Agency-Becoming-Agnes-Callard/dp/0190639482) * Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153/ref=sr_1_2?crid=HEYGC212F6SG&dchild=1&keywords=seeing+like+a+state+by+james+c+scott&qid=1613057768&s=books&sprefix=seeing+like+a+state%2Cstripbooks%2C164&sr=1-2) * Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/1405159286/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JRUU030WBCWQ&dchild=1&keywords=philosophical+investigations&qid=1613058025&s=books&sprefix=philos%2Cstripbooks%2C209&sr=1-1) Reflections: Jessica: Trying not knowing yourself. Rein: You shouldn’t be the owner of all your desires. Instead, you should measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values. Jacob: Thinking of yourself as the sum of all of the habits you maintain or don’t. David: The [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) distinction, and cleaning a home as an ongoing process. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: SPONSORED AD: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JACOB: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 223. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-host, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I'm here with my friend and also stranger because we haven't done this together in months, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thank you, Rein! And Iím really excited today because our guest is David MacIver. Twitter handle, @DRMacIver. David MacIver is best known as the developer of Hypothesis, the property-based testing library for Python, and is currently doing a Ph.D. based on some of that work. But he also writes extensively about emotions, life, and society and sometimes coaches people on an eclectic mix of software development, intellectual, and emotional skills. As you can probably tell, David hasn't entirely decided what he wants to do when he grows u and that's the best because if you had decided well, then so few possibilities would be open. David, hello! DAVID: Hi, Jessica! Great to be here. JESSICA: All right. I'm going to ask the obligatory question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? DAVID: So as you saw me complaining about on Twitter, this question doesn't translate very well outside of the United States. JESSICA: Yeah, which is fascinating for me. DAVID: I'm a bit too British to say nice things about myself without sounding like I'm being self-deprecating. JESSICA: Self-depreciating it is! DAVID: [laughs] So I thought about this one for a while and I decided that the answer is that I'm really good at being confused and in particular, I have a much more productive response to being confused than it seems like most people do because basically, the world is super confusing and I think I never know what's going on, but then I notice that I know what's going on and I look at it and I'm just like, ìHmm, this is weird, right?î And then I read a book about it, or I sort of poke at it a bit and then I'm not less confused, but I'm less confused about that like, one little facet of the world and have found ten new things to be confused about. [laughter] JESSICA: Nice. DAVID: Usually, I can then turn this into being slightly better at the thing I was previously confused about, or writing about it and making everyone else differently confused than they started with. JESSICA: Definitely confused. That is a win. That's called learning. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. [laughter] This is where a lot of the writing you were talking about comes from and essentially, about 2 years ago, I just started turning these skills less on software development and more just going like, ìLife, it doesn't make sense, right?î [laughter] And noticing a whole bunch of things, I needed to work on and then that a lot of these were shared common problems. So I am, if anything, far more confused about all of it than I was 2 years ago, but I'm less confused about the things I was confused about that and seem to be gradually becoming a more functional human being as a result of the process. So yay, confusion. JESSICA: That superpower, the productive response to confusion, ties in with your reaction to the superpower question in general, which is as Americans, we're supposed to be ñ we want to have power. We want to be special. We want to be unique. We want to make our unique contribution to the world! And as part of that, we're not comfortable being confused because we need to know things! We need to be smart! We need to convey strength and competence and be the best! I hate the superlatives. [laughter] I hate the implied competition there, but instead, we could open our hearts to our own confusion and embrace that. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. DAVID: One of the things that often comes up for me is it's a thing that I think is slightly intentioned with this American tendency youíre pointing at, which is that I kind of want to be the best, but I don't really want to be better than other people. I just want to be better than I am now. I wrote a post a while ago about neuromas of excellence like, what would a community look like, which helped everyone be the best version of themselves and one of the top lists was basically that everyone has to be comfortable with not being good at things, but another is just that you have to not want to be better to the other people. You just need want to be better. Again, this is where a lot of the writing comes from. I've just gone, ìWell, this was helpful to me. It's probably helpful to other people.î That's not as sense of wanting to change the world and wanting to put my own stamp on things and it does require a certain amount to self-importance to go, ìYes, my writing is important and other people will like to read it,î but then other people like to read it so, that's fine and if they don't, that's fine, too. JESSICA: Well, you didn't make anyone read it, but you did start a newsletter and let people read it. JACOB: Is this weird thinking reflect a journey that you took in your life? Because I think about my company and my team and how incredibly generous everybody is and even still, I just find it's natural to compare myself to everyone else and needing to not be on the bottom. Part of me wonders if that's just like a natural human tendency, but just because it's natural doesn't make it so. JESSICA: Way natural American. JACOB: Yeah, basically I'm asking how do I stop doing that? [laughter] DAVID: It's definitely not something I've always been perfectly good at. But I think the thing that helped me figure out how to do this was essentially being simultaneously at the bottom of the social rung, but also super arrogant. So it's your classic nerd kit thing, right? It's completely failing at people, but also going, ìBut I'm better than all of you because I'm smart,î and then essentially, gradually having the rough edges filed off the second part and realizing how much I had to learn off the first part. I think sometimes my attitude is due to a lot of this is basically, to imagine I was a time traveler and basically going back in time and telling little David all the things that it was really frustrating that nobody could explain to me and I sadly haven't yet managed to perfect my time machine, but I can still pay it forward. If nobody was able to explain this to me and I'm able to explain it to other people, then surely, the world is a better place with me freely handing out this information. I don't think it's possible, or even entirely desirable to completely eliminate the comparing yourself to others and in fact, I'd go as far as to say, comparing yourself to others is good, but I think theÖ JESSICA: Itís how do we have a productive response to compare ourselves to others? DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. There's a great section in The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a book that I have very mixed feelings about, but it has some great bits where he talks about competition. If you think of a mountain climber, a mountain climber is basically pitting themselves against the mountain, right? They're trying to climb the mountain because it is hard and you could absolutely take a helicopter to the top of the mountain, but that wouldn't be the point. It's you're improving yourself by trying a hard thing. I mean, you're improving yourself in the sense that you're getting better at climbing mountains. You might not be improving yourself in any sort of fully generalizable way. JESSICA: Okay. [laughter] DAVID: When you are playing tennisóbecause this is a book about tennisóyou are engaged in competition with each other and you're each trying to be better than the other. In this context, essentially, what you are doing is you are being the mountain for each other. So you are creating the obstacles that the other people overcome and improve themselves that way and in doing this, you're not just being a dick about it. You're not doing this in order to crush them. You're doing this in order to provide them with the challenge that lets them grow. When you think about it this way, other people being better than you is great because there's this mountain there and you can climb it and by climbing the mountain, you can improve yourself. The thing that stops everyone becoming great is feeling threatened by the being better rather than treating it as an opportunity for learning. JESSICA: Yeah, trying to dynamite the mountain instead of climbing it. Whereas, when you are the mountain for someone else, you can also provide them footholds. Rein, do you have an example of this? REIN: I sure do, Jess. Thanks for asking. So I was just [laughs] thinking while you were talking about this, about the speed running and speed running communities. Because speed running is about testing yourself against a video game, which in this case, serves the purpose of the mountain, but it's also about competing against other speed runners. If it was purely competitive, you wouldn't see the behaviors, the reciprocity in the communities like sharing speed running strats, being really happy when other people break your record. I think it's really interesting that that community is both competitive, but there's also a lot of reciprocity, a lot of sharing. JACOB: And it's like the way the science community should work. It's like, ìOh, you made this new discovery because of this discovery I shared with you and now I'm proud that my discovery is this foundation for all these other little things that now people can be by themselves in 10 seconds instead of 30.î JESSICA: Yeah. Give other people a head start on the confusion you've already had so that they can start resolving new confusions. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely one of my hopes with all of this writing is to encourage other people to do it themselves. Earlier this year, I was getting people very into daily writing practices and just trying to get people to write as much as possible. I now think that was slightly a mistake because I think daily writing is a great thing to do for about a month and then it just gets too much. So I will probably see if I can figure out other ways of encouraging people to notice their confusion, as you say, and share what they've learned from edge. But sadly, can't quite get into do it daily. JESSICA: This morningís newsletter you talked about. Okay, okay, I can do daily writing, but now I want to get better at writing. I've got to go do something I'm worse at. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think daily writing is still a really good transitional stage for most people. To give them more context for this newsletter for people listening. Basically, most of my writing to date, I just write in a 1- or 2-hour sitting from start to finish. I don't really edit it. I just click publish and I've gotten very good at writing like that. I think that most people are ñ I mean, sometimes it's a bit obvious that I haven't edited it because they're obvious typos and the like. But by and large, I think it is a reasonably high standard of writing and I'm not embarrassed to be putting it out in that quality, but the fact that I'm not editing is just starting to be sort of the limiter on growth for me. It's never going to really get better than it currently is. It's certainly not going to allow me to tackle larger projects that I can currently tackle without that editing skill. JESSICA: [laughs] I just pictured you trying to sit down and write a book in one session. [laughter] And then you'd be tired. DAVID: Yeah. I've tried to doing that with papers even and it doesn't really work. I mean, I do edit papers, but Iím very visibly really bad at editing papers and it's one of my weaknesses as a academic is that I still haven't really got the hang of paper writing. JESSICA: Do you edit other people's papers? DAVID: I don't edit other people's papers, but I provide feedback on other people's writing and say, ìThis is what worked for me. This is what didn't work for me. Here are some typos you made.î It's not reading as providing good feedback on things, that is the difficult part of editing for me. It is much more ñ honestly, it's an emotional problem more than anything else. It's not really that I'm bad at editing at a technical level. I'm okay at editing at a technical level. I just hate doing it. [laughs] JESSICA: That is most problems we have, right? DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: In the end, itís an emotional problem. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is definitely one of the interesting things I've been figuring out in my last 2 years of working on learning more about emotions and the various skills around them is just going, ìOh, right. It's not this abstract thing where you are learning to be better at emotions and then nothing will change in your life because you're just going to be happier about everything.î I mean, some people do approach it that way, but for me, it's very much been, ìOh, I'm learning to be good at emotions because this really concrete problem that I don't understand, it turns out that that's just feelings.î [laughter] It's like, for example, the literature on how to have a clean home, turns out that's mostly anxiety management and guilt management. It's like fundamentally cleaning your home is not a hard problem. Not procrastinating on cleaning your home is a hard problem. Not feeling intensely guilty and aversive about the dirty dishes in the sink and is putting them off for a week. I don't do that. But just as a hypothetical example. [laughter] I mean, not a hypothetical example, I think a specific example that comes from the book, Unfuck Your Habitat, which is a great example of essentially, it's a book that's about it contains tips, like fill the spray bottle with water and white vinegar and also, tips about how to manage your time and how to deal with the fact that you're mostly not cleaning because of shame, that sort of thing. Writing books are another great example where 80% about managing the feelings associated with writing; it turns out practical problems pretty much all come down to emotionsóat least practical life problems. REIN: Sorry, I was just buying Unfuck Your Habitat real quick. [laughter] DAVID: It's a good book. I recommend it. JESSICA: Our internal like emotional habitat and our external habitat are very linked. You said something earlier about learning to be at emotions is not just you're magically happier at other things in your life change. DAVID: Yes. I mean, I think there are a couple of ways in which it manifests. One of them is just that emotions often are the internal force that maintains our life habits. It's you live in a particular way because moving outside of those trained habits is scary or aversive in some way. Like the cleaning example of how, if your home is a mess, it's not necessarily because you don't know how to make your home not a mess. Although, cleaning is a much harder skill than most people treat it as speaking as someone who is bad at the practical skills of cleaning, as well as the emotional side of cleaning. But primarily, if it were just a matter of scale, you could just do it and get better at it, right? The thing that is holding you in place is the emotional reaction to the idea of changing your habits. So the specific reason why I started on all of this process was essentially relationship stuff. I'd started a new major relationship. My previous one hadn't gone so well for reasons that were somewhere between emotional and communication issues, for the same reason basically every relationship doesn't go so well, if it doesn't go so ñ Oh, that's not quite true. Like there are actual ñ JESSICA: Some people have actual problems. [chuckles] But these things are. I mean, our emotions really, as sometimes we treat them as if they're flaws. As if our emotions are getting in our way is some sort of judgment about us as not being good people, but no, it just makes us people. DAVID: For sure. JESSICA: So you started on this journey because of the external motivation of helping someone you're in a relationship with, because it's really hard to do these things just for ourselves. DAVID: It is incredibly hard to do things just for ourselves. I guess, that is exactly an example of this problem, right? It's that there is a particular habit of life that I was in and what I needed to break out of that habit of life was the skills for dealing with it and then figuring out these emotional reactions. But unfortunately, the thing that the habits were maintaining, it was me not having the skills and so having the external prompts of a problem that was in the world rather than in my life, as it was, was what was needed to essentially kick me out of that. Fortunately, it turns out that my standard approach of reading a thousand books now was one that worked for me, in this case. I probably haven't read a thousand books on this, but that certainly worked. JESSICA: It wouldnít surprise me. [laughs] DAVID: I read fewer books than people think I do. I may well have read more than a hundred books about emotions and therapy and the like. But I probably haven't, unless I cast that brush really broadly, because I mean, everything's a book about emotions and therapy, if you look at your right. REIN: Have you read any books by average Virginia Satir? [laughter] DAVID: I don't know who that is, I'm afraid. JACOB: Drink! REIN: Excellent! Excellent news. [laughter] JESSICA: Itís about Virginia Satir, right? REIN: Virginia was a family therapist who wrote a lot about processing emotions and I have been a huge fan of her work and it's made a huge difference in my life and my career. So I highly recommend it. DAVID: Okay. I will definitely hear recommendations on books. What's the book title, or what's your favorite book title by? REIN: I think I would start with The Satir Model, which is S-A-T-I-R M-O-D-E-L. The Satir Model, which is about her family therapy model. JESSICA: Chances are good, you've read books based on her work. I was reading Gerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management: Volume Two the other day, which is entirely based on The Satir Model. REIN: Yeah. He was a student of hers. One of the things that she likes to say is that the problem is never the problem, how we cope is the problem. JESSICA: Can we have a productive response to the problem? DAVID: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I think often, the problem is also the problem. [laughter] JESSICA: It's often self-sustaining like the habits you're talking about. Our life habits form a self-sustaining system and then it took that external stimulus. It's not like an external stimulus somehow kicked you in the butt and changed you, it let you change yourself. DAVID: Yes, absolutely. I guess what I mean is ñ so let's continue with the cleaning example. The problem is that your flat is messy and your flat is messy because of these life habits, because your emotional reactions to all these things. If you do the appropriate emotional work, you unblock yourself on shame and anxiety around a messy flat, and you look around and you've saw you've processed all these emotions. You fixed how you respond to the problem and it turns out your flat is still messy and you still have to clean it. I think emotional reactions are what either ñ Iím making it sound like emotional reactions are all negative and I really don't mean that. I mean, that way is just ñ JESSICA: Oh, right because once you've dealt with all that shame and the anxiety and stuff, and maybe you've picked up your flat some, and then you come in and you have groceries and you stop and you immediately put them away and you get a positive, emotional feeling from that as you're in the process of keeping your flat tidy. The emotions can reinforce a clean flat as well. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that has always been one of my goals more than it is what am I active? JESSICA: No, I love this distinction that you're making here. Is it a goal or is it something I'm activelyÖ? The word goal is [inaudible]. DAVID: Yeah. So I think for me, one of the other problems, other than the relationships it starts, was me essentially realizing that my emotional experience, it wasn't bad. I mean, it wasn't great, but I wasn't actively miserable most of the time, but it also just didn't have very many positive features, which it turns out is also a form of depression. It's very easy to treat depression as just like you're incredibly sad all the time, but that doesn't have to what it can be like flatness is. So I think very much from early on in my mind was that the getting better at emotions wasn't just about not being anxious. It was also about experiencing things like joy, it was about being happier and I think having this as sort of an aspirational goal is very, very motivating in terms of a lot of this work and in terms of a lot of trying to understand all of this, because I think I don't want to be miserableóit only gets you so far. If you have a problem that you're trying to solve, and that turns out to be an emotional block, you have to actually wants to solve the problem. It's like, I think if you don't want to clean the flat, then it doesn't matter how much you sort of fix your anxiety around that. You're still just going to go, ìOkay. I'm no longer anxious about this messy flat. That's great,î and your flat is going to stay messy because you don't actually want it not to be and that's fine. JESSICA: Itís just fine, yeah. Who cares? Especially now. DAVID: Unless it becomes a health hazard, but yeah. [laughter] DAVID: Certainly like thereís ñ JESSICA: If you're affecting the neighboring flats with your roaches, thatís fine. DAVID: [laughs] Yeah. JESSICA: So you were talking about joy as an aspirational goal, but it's not the kind of goal where you check the box at the end of the year and declare yourself worthy of a 2% raise. DAVID: [laughs] No, absolutely not and I think for all big goals, really, I find that I want to be very clichÈ and say, it's the journey, not the destination. JESSICA: But it is! No, it totally is! DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: See, the word goal really irks me because people often use it to mean something that you should actually reach. Like write every day per month, that's a goal that you find benefits from hitting, but feelings of joy are, as you said, aspirational. I call it a quest, personally. Some people call it a North Star. It is a direction that can help you make decisions that will move you in that direction, but if you ever get thereÖ No, that doesn't make sense. You wouldn't want to exist in a perpetual state of joy. That would also be flat. [laughs] DAVID: No, absolutely. And I think even with big but achievable goals, it still is still quite helpful to treat them in this way. So for one, quite close to my heart right now, a goal of doing a Ph.D. I think you've got a 3-, 4-year long project in the States, I think it's more like 5 or 6 and if you treat the Ph.D. as it's pass/fail, like either you get the Ph.D. or those 3 or 4 years have been wasted, then that's not very motivating and also will result in, I think, worst quality results in work. Like the thing to do is ñ JESSICA: Like anxiety, stress, and shame. DAVID: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. [chuckles] So just thinking in terms of there's this big goal that you're trying to achieve of the Ph.D., but the goal doesn't just define a pass/fail; it defines a direction. Like if you get better at paper writing in order to get your Ph.D., then even if you don't get your Ph.D., you got better at paper writing and that's good, too. JESSICA: Because the other outcome is the next version of you. DAVID: Yes, exactly. JESSICA: Itís about who does this aspirational goal prompt you to become? REIN: This reminds me of the difference between homeostasis and homeorhesis. Homeostasis is about maintaining a state; homeorhesis is about maintaining a trajectory DAVID: That makes sense. Yes, very much that distinction and also, one of the nice things about this focus on a trajectory is that even if a third of the way through the trajectory, you decide you don't want to maintain it anymore and actually you're fine where you are. This goal was a bad idea or you've got different priorities now, possibly because a global pandemic has arrived and has changed all of your priorities. Then you still come all that way. It's like the trajectory doesn't just disappear backwards in time because you're no longer going in that direction. You've still made all that progress. Youíve still got to drive some of the benefits from it. JESSICA: Yeah. There's another thing that maybe it's an American thing, or maybe it's wider than that of if it doesn't last forever, then it was never real, or if you don't achieve the stated goal, then all your effort was wasted. DAVID: Yeah. I don't think itís purely an American thing. It's hard to tell with how much American pop culture permeates everything and also, I shouldn't say that although I'm quite British, I am also half American. So Iím a weird third culture kid where my background doesn't quite make sense to anyone. But yeah, no, I very much feel that. This idea that permanence is required for importance and it's something that every time I sort of catch myself there, I'm just like, ìYeah, David, you're doing the thing again. Have you tried not doing the thing?î [chuckles] But it's hard. It's very internalized. JESSICA: If you clean your flat and a week later, it's dirty again. Well, it was clean for a week. That's not nothing. DAVID: Yeah. I do genuinely think that one of the emotions that people struggle with cleaning. Certainly, it is for me. JESSICA: Oh, because it's a process. It is not a destination. Nothing is ever clean! DAVID: Yeah. JACOB: I think of myself sometimes as I want to be the kind of person that always has a clean home, as opposed to, I like it when my house is clean. JESSICA: Yeah. Is it about you or is it about some real effect you want? JACOB: Yeah. Is it about like the story that that I imagine I could project if I could project on Instagram because I'm taking pictures of my pristine house all the time, or is it just like, I like to look around and see things where they belong? DAVID: Yeah. I'm curious, does this result in your home being clean? JACOB: No, it doesnít and thatís sort of the issue that I'm just realizing is it's not actually a powerful motivator because it's just not possible trying to imagine that I could maintain homeostasis about it. It's not a possible goal and so yeah, it's not going to happen. REIN: Yeah. The metaphor here is it changes motion, but it's always happening so it's more like the flow of time than motion through space. JESSICA: Itís not motion, too. REIN: Actually staying the same is very hard to do and very expensive. DAVID: Absolutely. JESSICA: No wonder it takes all of our feelings to help us achieve it. [chuckles] DAVID: So the reason I was asking by the way about whether this idea of being the sort of person who has a clean home is effective is that this ties in a little bit to what today's newsletter was about. There's this problem where when you have self-images that are constructed around being good at particular things, being bad at those things is very much, it's a shame trigger. It's essentially, you experienced the world as clashing with your conception of yourself and we get really good at not noticing those things. You see this a lot with procrastination, for example, where you are putting off doing a thing because it does force you to confront this sort of conflict between identity and reality. I think sometimes, the way out of it is just to identify less with the things that we want to achieve in the world and just try and go, ìI'm doing this because I want to and if I didn't want to, that would be fine, too.î Essentially, becoming fine with both an outcome and failing to achieve that outcome is often the best way to achieve the outcome. JESSICA: So practicing editing in order to practice editing, whether you achieve writing a book or not, whether you're good at it or not, and it does come back to the journey. If what you're doing is a means to an end and yet not in line with that end, it often backfires because the means are the end. In the end, they become it. So having a clean house is stupid. That's not a thing. Picking up is a thing. That's something you can do and what I am picking up. True fact! [laughs] You don't have to worry about whether you can, are you doing it? All right then, you can! Whereas, having a clean house is not a thing. DAVID: Very much. This kind of ties into the comments about books earlier, where you were talking about how many books I read, and one of the things that I think very much stops people from reading books is the idea that oh God, there are so many books to read, I'll never get through all of them. JESSICA: If I started, I have to finish it. DAVID: Oh, yeah. I mean, people definitely shouldn't do that; books are there to be abandoned if they're bad. JESSICA: I read a lot of chapter ones. DAVID: Yeah. I have a slightly bad habit of buying books speculatively because they seem good and as a result, I think my shelf of books that I'm probably never going to get around to read, but might do someday and might not and either is fine is probably like a hundred plus books now. JESSICA: I love that shelf. I have big piles everywhere. [laughs] There's always something to read wherever I sit and most of it, I will never read, but it's beautiful. DAVID: I'm currently in a very weird experience where I write, for possibly the first time in my life, I have more bookshelf space than books. JESSICA: Huh, that's not a stable state. DAVID: No, no. This will be fixed by the time I leave this flat. The piles will return. JESSICA: You will maintain the trajectory. DAVID: Yeah. [laughs] Because I'm just reading. I can read these as many books because I just sit down and read and at some point, I will finish a book or I will abandon the book and both are fine. But I think if you treat this as a goal where your goal is to read all the books, then that's not the thing and also, I think people go, ìMy goal is to read a hundred books a year,î or I don't know how normal people guesstimates are. JESSICA: Itís like, is it really or itís their goal to learn something. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: And the means is reading books. DAVID: Yeah. I think if one instead just goes, ìI like reading and it's useful so I'm going to read books,î you'll probably end up reading a lot more than setting some specific numerical goal. Also, you run into sort of Goodhart's law things where if your goal is to read a hundred books in a year, great buy the Mr. Men set. But wait, it's not a thing in ñ the Mr. Men are a series of kidsí books which tells ñ JESSICA: With the big smiley face? DAVID: Yeah. Exactly, that's the one. [laughter] You can read a hundred of those in a weekóI assume there are hundred Mr. Men books, I don't actually knowóand youíll probably learn something. JESSICA: Then again, you might choose Dynamics in Action, never get through it, and then feel bad about it, and that would be pointless because you learned more from the introduction than you did from the Mr. Men series. DAVID: I don't think I've even opened my copy of Dynamics in Action. I think you recommended on Twitter or something and I was just like, ìThat does sound interesting. I will speculatively buy this book.î JESSICA: It's a hard book. DAVID: Yeah. It's far from the hardest book on my shelves, but it's definitely in the top. I'm going to confidently say top 20, but it might be harder than that. I just haven't done a comparative analysis and I don't want to overpromise. [laughter] JESSICA: The point being read books because you want to know. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: Or sometimes because you want to have read them. That's the thing. There's a lot of things I may not want to pick up, but I do want to have picked up and I can use that to motivate me. DAVID: Yeah, and even then, there are two versions of that and both are good, actually. I think one of them sounds bad. One version is you want to have read it because you want to understand the material in it and the other one is just, you want to be able to say that you have read it and thus, you ñ and probably for the status game and also, just sort of as a box ticking, like I think ñ JESSICA: Oh, itís not completely wrong. DAVID: No, it's not completely wrong. JESSICA: You still get something out of it. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: On the other hand, if you want to read it because you want to be the kind of person who would read it. I don't know about that one. DAVID: Yeah, I agree. I thinkÖ JESSICA: Then again, life habits. Sometimes, if you want to be the kind of person who picks up and so you fake it long enough to form the habit, then you are. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely and I read a book recentlyóof course, I didóby Agnes Callard called Aspiration, which I'm glad I read it. I cannot really recommend it to people who aren't philosophers, because there's a thing that often happens with reading analytic philosophy, where the author clearly has a keen insight into an important problem that you, as the reader, lack and the way they express that insight is through an entire bookís worth of slightly pedantic arguments with other analytic philosophers who have wrong opinions about the subjects. JESSICA: Half of Dynamics in Action is like that. DAVID: Yeah, I think it very complicated. REIN: Was it written as a thesis? DAVID: I don't think so. I'm not certain about that, but it might've been. It ended up being quite an influential book and I think she was mentioning that there's going to be a special issue of a journal coming out to recently about essentially, its impact and responses to it. But I think it's just genuinely that analytic philosophers had a lot of really wrong opinions about this subject. So the relevance of this is the idea she introduces the book is that of a proleptic value where ñ JESSICA: Proleptic, more words. DAVID: Proleptic basically, I think originally comes from grammar and it means something that stands in place for another thing. A proleptic value is what you do when you're engaged in a process of aspiration, which is trying to acquire values that you don't currently have. So she uses the example of a music student who wants to learn to appreciate the genre of music that they do not currently appreciate and they find a teacher who does appreciate that genre and they basically use their respect for that teacher as a proleptic value. They basically say, ìI don't currently value this genre of music, but I trust your judgment and I value your opinion and I will use your feedback and that respect for you as a value that stands in place of the future value of appreciating this genre of music that I hope to acquire.î So I think this thing of reading a book because you want to be the sort of person who reads that kind of book can have a similar function where even though, you don't really wants to read the book, that process of aspiration gives you a hook into becoming the sort of person who does want to read the book. JESSICA: That's like being the mountain for each other. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: In some ways. You're not going to get a view yet. You're only 10 feet off the ground, but meanwhile, just climb to climb because it's here. DAVID: Yeah. I'm not necessarily very good at being the sort of person reading books for this reason. Partly because there are so many books, I have so many other reasons to read, but yeah. JESSICA: Yeah, you're fine. You don't need more reasons to read a book. DAVID: [laughs] But I think two books that I have read mostly to have read them rather than necessarily because I was having an amazing time and learning lots of things reading them are Seeing Like a State by James Scott, which it's a good book. I don't think it's a bad book, but it is very much a history book that also has a big idea and there are like 70,000 blog posts about the big idea. So if you're going and wanting just the big idea, read one of the blog posts, but I'd seen a reference so many times and I was just like, ìYou know, this seems like a book that I should rate,î and my opinion is now basically that like, if you like history books and if you want lots of detail, then yeah, it's a great book to read. If you just want the big idea, donít. JESSICA: Right, because other people have presented it more succinctly, which probably happens with your Aspiration book that you talked about. DAVID: I would like it to happen with the Aspiration book. The Aspiration book is only a few years old. JESSICA: You've written a ñ oh, okay, so it's too soon for that. So you'll write about it, if you haven't yet. DAVID: Yeah, I havenít yet. Looking at it, it was published in 2018 and you have the paperback from 2019. So this is really cutting-edge philosophy to the degree that there is such a thing. [chuckles] JESSICA: Yeah. Oh no, what do you mean? [inaudible]. REIN: Seeing Like a State is. DAVID: Well, I've had this argument with philosopher friends where I was arguing that it was a thing and the philosopher friend was just like, ìIs it a thing, though?î Because the interesting thing about philosophy is just that it never goes out to date. People are sort of engaging with the entire historical cannon so the question is not does new philosophy get done? The question is more, I think is this less ñ? JESSICA: This isnít really a cutting edge. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: Itís more kind of a gentle nuzzling. DAVID: [laughs] Yeah. But also, is this more cutting edge than, I don't know, reading Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics? I don't know. JESSICA: Philosophy [inaudible]. DAVID: Yeah, I personally think that there is cutting-edge and this is on it, but plenty of room for philosophical dialogue on that subject if you can sort of dig Socrates up and ask him about it. [laughter] Yeah, and speaking of philosophy, the other book that I have read essentially to have read it rather than because I was getting a lot out of it was Wittgensteinís Philosophical Investigations where I essentially read it in order to confirm to myself that I had already picked up enough Wittgenstein by osmosis that I didn't really need to read it, which largely true. JACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to reflect on what we took from everything and just wrap things up a little bit. JESSICA: I have one thing written down. We talked a bit about who you are and who you want to be as a person, and how sometimes what you want to do is in conflict with how you think of yourself. Like, when you think of yourself as good at something, it's hard to be bad at it, long enough to learn better. It occurs to me that in our society, we're all about getting to know yourself and then expressing your true self, which is very much a homeostasis more than a homerhesis. But what have we tried not knowing yourself? What if we tried just like, I don't know who I am and then I can surprise myself and have more possibilities. That's my reflection. REIN: All of this discussion about happiness and pleasure, and diversion and striving reminds me a lot of Buddhist philosophy, or what I should say is, it reminds me a lot of my very limited understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Specifically, this idea that you shouldn't judge your life by the outcome of your preferences; that you shouldn't identify yourself with your wants and cling to the outcome of things. You can acknowledge that these things have happened and you can avoid unpleasant things, but you shouldn't be the owner of all of your desires. Instead, what you should do is measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values. JACOB: Yeah. Maybe to put another way, I'm starting to think maybe I could think of myself as the sum of all of the habits I maintain or don't, and try to think of outcome of those habits as what a lagging indicator, I guess, or as a secondary and think more of myself like, ìWell, what are the things that I find I am naturally doing and if I'm not, what can I do to just try to enforce it for myself that I'm going to do that more?î Or maybe I don't care. DAVID: So I'm not finding myself with sort of a single cohesive summation of the conversation, but I've really enjoyed it and there's been a couple of things I'm going to take away from it and mull over a bit more. I really liked the homeostasis versus homeorhesis distinction. I'd obviously heard the first word, but not the second word and so, I'm going to think about that a bit more. Sort of tying onto that, I very much liked Jessica's point of how a clean home isn't really a thing, you can only do cleaning and thinking much more in terms of the ongoing process than trying to think of it as a static goal that you are perfectly maintaining at all times. Slightly orthogonal in relation to that, but I'm also just going to look up Satir as an author and maybe read some of her books. [chuckles] REIN: Yay! DAVID: Because as we have established, always up for more reading. [laughs] JACOB: That should wrap up our Episode 223. I'd like to thank David for joining us and weíll see you next time. Special Guest: David MacIver.
222: Evaluating Human Performance with Elyse Robinson
02:05 - Elyse’s Superpower: Fearlessness * Moving to Mexico * Living in Mexico * Dual-Existing and Codeswitching * Elyse’s Podcast (https://elyserobinson.com/podcast-youtube/) & Blog (https://elyserobinson.com/) * A Day In The Life 19:41 - Auditor => IT Consultant * Lissa Explains it All (http://www.lissaexplains.com/) * Discovering The Cloud 24:02 - Broken Interview Processes and Evaluating Human Performance Reflections: Damien: The ways that I can be fearless. Arty: You only have one life. Don’t put limits on it. Rein: Being intentional about making our networks more inclusive. Elyse: There isn’t a pipeline problem in IT. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: SPONSORED AD: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. ARTY: Hi, everyone! Welcome to Episode 222 of Greater Than Code. Iím Artemis Starr and Iím here with my fabulous co-host, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Arty. Iím here with my co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein and Iím here with our guest, Elyse Robinson. Elyse Robinson has been described as fearless. After losing her mother to blood cancer, she left America to mourn her mother in Mexico and decided to stay. Going into her 5th year of residing in Mexico, she is the Founder of NewsIn.IT and runs a blog, podcast, and a YouTube channel about her life in Mexico under ElyseRobinson.com. Before becoming the fearless person Elyse is now, she was an auditor that kept the public safe and before COVID hit, an IT consultant in Mexico helping people understand the intricacies of the cloud. You can find Elyse splitting her time between America and Mexico when she gets tired of tacos and Spanish, or Chick-Fil-A and English.† Welcome to the show, Elyse. ELYSE: Thank you. DAMIEN: So you know the first thing we do on this show is ask every one of our guests the same question. So for you, Elyse, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ELYSE: Fearlessness! Not many people would leave everything they know to go move to another country and then stay for almost 5 years. [chuckles] I tell people that closed mouths donít get fed. You have to put yourself out there for opportunities or else, theyíll just pass you by so I donít have an issue doing that. Moving to a whole another country, not knowing anyone. Wanting to mourn, not knowing the language and not knowing the culture. Oh, that'll make you fearless all the way around. [laughs] DAMIEN: Or the opposite. It could have had the exact opposite effect. ELYSE: That's true. That's true. Because I know many people that have moved to another country and then they came right back and so. [chuckles] REIN: What do you think made the difference for you in terms of staying versus leaving? ELYSE: Everything just fell into place. I tell people all the time that I have not had a bad experience in Mexico; everything has been like roses and pearls, I guess. People are friendly. The food is good. I mean, I had a time of my life, About a month and a half in, I called my father up and told him I wasn't coming back home daddy and he was like, ìOkay.î [laughs] DAMIEN: Well, for my own benefit. What part of Mexico are you in that's so wonderful? ELYSE: Well, I first had went to Mexico City, but I'm in MÈrida now. MÈrida is about, I live about 15 minutes from the ocean, which I can't even go to no more because of COVID. [laughs] But it's always hot. It's never cold. But I mean, before COVID hit, I was supposed to go back to Mexico City, but Mexico City is one of the largest cities on earth. So it just didn't make sense to go back and be all up underneath all those people with COVID. Mexico City also gets cold so I didn't want to be in the cold either dealing with COVID since it affects your lungs, but I definitely recommend Mexico City if you ever go. Don't go to Cancun, go to Mexico City. [laughs] REIN: So you couldn't have known this at the time, but you picked an interesting decade and interesting 5 years to move to Mexico with everything that's happened since. ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I meet all kinds of people that say they want to leave because of well, at the time it was Trump or because of racism, sexism, all the isms, or their job sucks, whatever. But my reason for moving was totally different. I literally had to quit my life to take care of my mother and help out my family. So I had nothing left and it just, for whatever reason, I think by that time Trump had got elected. Yeah, I knew by then because I left in November and it was what it was at the time because people literally think that people move because they just hate their country and that wasn't my reasoning, so. I thought I was going to come back, but I just didn't. ARTY: So this fearlessness, where do you think it comes from? ELYSE: I have no idea. I don't know. I feel like at least my motto is that you only have one life and so, why are you putting limits on it? I try not to put limits on my life and I want to experience all the things, all the things and fear always puts limits on things. If I am fearful, I try to put that to the side and do what Iíve got to do. DAMIEN: So one of the things that would scare me in the situation like youíre in is working in another country and in another language. Did you speak Spanish before you moved to Mexico? Do you speak Spanish in your work as an IT consultant? How did that work? ELYSE: No. I knew like three words. I knew uno, dos, tres. [laughs] See, no. It was funny because I got lost my very first night in Mexico City. You hear all the things about Mexico; the cartel, they're going to sex traffic you and cut your body up, steal kidneys, all that stuff. So I didn't talk to anyone and I literally walked around in my neighborhood for like 2 hours before I finally broke down and was like, I'm going to talk to someone, [chuckles] or at least try. So everything worked out because somebody helped me find my place and everything like that. But no, when I became an IT consultant, I focused on real estate companies because real estate companies, they're usually bilingual, the people that work there and so I didn't have to know that much Spanish, But I ended up moving to Guatemala to get my Spanish down because Spanish classes in Mexico are ridiculously expensive for whatever reason. Mexico is one of those places where if you don't know Spanish, they will find someone that knows enough English to help you. [laughs] So for the longest, I never even knew Spanish. I never knew because I didn't have to know it. REIN: I've had this question on my mind, but it's kind of heavy so if you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine. ELYSE: Okay. REIN: But what is it like for a Black American, a Black woman to leave America and to go to a country that doesn't have a history of slavery? If thatís comparable. ELYSE: Uh, it actually does have a history of slavery. REIN: Does it? Oh. ELYSE: Yeah. There's this Black Mexicans that look just like me. So they do have a history of it, but they might have been the firstódon't quote me on that. They might have been the first to eliminate it, though but all of Central America, all of South America, they had it. Of course, America, Canada, But living in Mexico as a Black American woman. Like I said, I haven't had any bad experiences. I know of other people that have, but they live in small towns. I have not lived in a small town. So small town minds, small town behavior. Not to stereotype, but that stereotype is there for a reason. So they think these things and they're just not true, but it's been wonderful. I have no complaints. REIN: Yeah. I feel like I just put my foot in my mouth. I want to just mention that I'm aware of the history of colonialism in Latin America. I didn't mean to erase that. So I would like to apologize for doing that. ELYSE: No, no. There's plenty. It's in Oaxaca area and Veracruz area is where the Black Mexicans live and a lot of them are just very dark skin and they have the Mexican features, but then there are some that look like me and my Auntie and my Uncle and everybody else. But yes, Mexico does have a history of slavery. Yes, they do. REIN: I guess, my question is, is the impact today different? You mentioned that you haven't encountered as much racism. I guess, what I'm asking about is more of the structural conditions. ELYSE: That does exist. I think it comes more so into play because I am an American and so, they're more so curious about that, but it also doesn't come into play because a lot of times people don't even think I'm an American. They might think, since I'm closer to Belize, depending on how good my Spanish is for the day, I'm Cuban. If my Spanish is not that good, then I'm Belizean. So it's a strange dynamic. More so in Cancun area, they would automatically know that I'm American because Americans come through all the time, but in smaller areas, they're like, ìYou're Haitian,î ìYou're Jamaican,î because there's a lot of them there and unfortunately, they have a stereotype that we're poor. So it's a very interesting dynamic. But when I first moved to Mexico City, one of the first people that I had run into when I got lost was a Haitian guy and so, Iím asking him about like, should I live here, should I stay, things like that. He was born in New Mexico and so he doesn't know anything else like I do, but he said that he loved it. One of the first people I met was a Black person so it kind of put me at ease more so, especially when you hear all these things about Mexico. DAMIEN: Then not being in America for the Trump administration. [laughter] How did you feel about that? ELYSE: Well, I actually came back very often. My father and my sister was getting tired of me because I would come back like every two months or so. So I came back very, very often and stayed probably like a month or so at a time. I didn't work in America, of course and I didn't technically live here and funny enough, I'm back in the States now [laughs] for the holidays and I will be here until April because my sister is an essential healthcare worker and so, she took a travel contract. So I'm here, but I don't know. I guess, more so Mexicans wanted to know why Trump was the way that he was. So yeah, in the beginning I got a lot of flak about Trump and how crazy he was, but I definitely was in the States during Trump time a lot, I was. REIN: You moved to Mexico, sort of, you just had to drop everything and move to Mexico and what was it like trying to pick things back up once you got there? ELYSE: I mean, I don't know. I guess, I tell people all the time I live in a dual existence because in my house, I'm full English, but when I step out, I'm in full Spanish and it can be difficult to switch. When I come back home, I'm still saying, ìhola,î ìbuenos dios,î ìsi,î ìgraciasî and then I don't know, when I come back, though it's like an instant turn on. I don't know. It's pretty instant. The only problem comes into play when I come backóhome, home is what I call itóbut that's really the only issues that I have is when I come back. Because if you're going months speaking another language and then you're only here for like a month or so, it's really different. But yeah, the dual existence gets difficult sometimes because I still do US things and I still live like an American and it gets to be a lot, a lot. [laughs] REIN: Thereís like a whole new level of code switching now where it's not just different in English. Do you have to code switch in Spanish, too? Like, are there different situations where you speak Spanish differently? ELYSE: Oh, yeah. No, they think I'm a child a lot of times because I sound like a kid, I guess. [laughs] They think I'm a child! I went somewhere at one time and they were like, ìAre your parents going to come sign the papers?î I'm like, ìIím like over 30!î [laughter] So I think that kind of plays into it. I think I sound like a child and then I'm also skinny and Mexicans are not known to be skinny and I really look like a child when I cut all my hair off because sometimes, I'll go totally bald. So they probably think I'm some little African child or something. I don't know. I donít know. [laughs] But I get it a lot. I get a lot that I'm a child. They were giving me discounts on the bus and I'm like, ìWhy are they giving me discounts on the bus?î [laughter] They think I'm a child! So I don't know. I don't know, it's weird. [laughs] DAMIEN: I also speak Spanish at the level of a small child. [laughter] So I can see that happening to me. ELYSE: No, my voice sounds like a child too, though because when you learn another language, you don't sound the same when you speak your first language. Because I'm a part of a Black language group and I asked in the group, I'm like, ìHow does your voice down when you speak your other language?î and everybody's laughing because they don't sound the same. So I think I sound like a child when I talk. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah. I know from watching Dora the Explorer, but I then start talking like Dora and that's not how I normally sound. [laughs] ELYSE: Right, right, right. Well, yeah, itís very, very different. ARTY: I was wondering what kind of stuff you talk about on your podcast and blog? ELYSE: Ha! Whatever I feel like. Well, of course, recently I have been talking about COVID cause COVID has hit to Mexico very, very hard. At one point, Mexico was number three on the list with the deaths and lastly, people are just ñ well, they're still coming, but people were steadily coming in the middle of the freaking pandemic and I'm just like, Iím oh my gosh, literally thousands of people were dying a day and people were like, ìI'm coming to Mexico because Mexico is like the only country in the whole wide world that's open!î So I'm like, ìWell you can catch the COVIDî [laughs] because I mean, if it was pretty bad in my little small town, I don't even want to know what it was like or is like in Cancun and Mexico City and the bigger citiesóPuerto Vallarta. When I'm home, I don't go anywhere. I mean, I go to the bank because I still have to get my rent out because they're behind and I go to the spa because that keeps me sane. But other than that, I don't go anywhere. ARTY: So like food wise, do you do groceries or what does your just day-to-day situation look like? What does a day in the life in Mexico like? ELYSE: The food? Uh. Where I am now, I don't enjoy the food. It's one of the main reasons I need to get back to Mexico City is because it's a large city, they have everything you can think of. But big city life, this is one of the reasons why I love Mexico City so much is because I can live like an American and then I also don't have to live like in an American if I don't want to. It was funny because when my sister and my nephew came to visit me, they were like, ìNo wonder you don't want to come back. You have all the American eats and you can do all the American things.î I mean, Mexico City has Six Flags. Mexico City has Cheesecake Factory, Red LobsteróRed Lobster is one of my favorites. I can just get all my American eats and be perfectly fine. That's why I say when I come back home, I get Chick-fil-A because we don't have Chick-Filet but yeah, lots of tacos. But where I live at now, it's really weird because it's not real Mexico. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico because it's really heavy European dominance. So they have a lot of Italian restaurants and like steakhouses and stuff, it's really weird. I don't know. REIN: Weird. In America, we don't really have the places where you just don't have a local cuisine so that's just the stuff that you eat, but I guess, in Mexico I would expect to go eat Mexican food a lot. ELYSE: And I do, I do, but I mean, I'm still an American. We have the variety that other countries do not have and so, I still like my Indian, I still like my Thai, I still like my Vietnamese and that's to the point where I really want to come home is when I get tired of eating the same things all the time. [laughs] But MÈrida is a weird city. I don't know. I don't even consider it to be real Mexico and honestly, if it was the first place that I moved to [laughs] because MÈrida is really big with especially the older expats because it's hot. It never gets cold. It's on the beach. So there's a lot of older expats that want to live there and come live there and so, I guess, maybe they might cater to them, but it's really an odd place. Like I've asked Mexicans, I'm like, ìWhere do you go to get tacos?î and they were like, ìWe don't do tacos, tacos will give you the runs.î I'm like, ìWhat?!î [laughs] Meanwhile, when I was in Mexico City, I would step out my front door and there's all kinds of taco carts. Now MÈrida is ridiculously hotót can easily get 110óso there won't be taco carts on the street. But there should be some type of place where I can get decent tacos because I used to literally leave the house and just go to the taco cart and get six tacos and go back up to my house. [laughs] DAMIEN: You described a very interesting way of transitioning to living in Mexico and not transitioning; some things changed and lot of things stay the same, especially when you're there in Mexico City. But you did go from being an auditor to an IT consultant. How did that transition work? ELYSE: Yeah, because people always ask me that. So I guess, when I was like 10 years old, I wanted to know how those websites worked because the internet was just getting started with dial-up and stuff. Showing my age, [chuckles] but I wanted to know how those websites worked and so I taught myself how to code. Shout out to the very first website that taught me. It was Lissa Explains it All and it still exists and it was funny because I had sent the lady a message over a year ago and she just checked her messages and she was like, ìOh, thank you. It still exists.î She's the same age as me. I thanked her and told her I learned how to code because of you. My parents actually thought something was wrong with me because I was 10 years old and I didn't go outside and play that summer. Like, I wanted to learn how to code so I did it and then I progressed to taking classes in high school and college, of course. I won't sit up here and say that I did not get internships because I did, but they were government internships and so not stereotype, but it's true. [laughs] The government stagnates you because they don't get the latest and the greatest, they're slow, there's a bureaucracy and they're like 20, 30 years behind on so much things. So I wanted an internship and not necessarily Google or whatever, but even FedEx would have been fine. [laughs] I didn't find one so I was like, ìOkay, well, whatever, then I'll switch to accounting.î Switched to accounting, accounting was good to me. They actually have entry-level positions and funny enough, I went and worked for the government, though so. [laughs] But it wasn't hard to find a position; they didn't make me jump through all these hoops and all this other kinds of stuffs. I stuck with accounting and became an auditor and then of course, life happened. And that was my next step to Mexico. So then when I got to Mexico, I fell back on my IT skills. I learned about the cloud. One of the first things I built on the cloud was my podcast and so, I learned that on AWS, you can run a podcast for like pennies a month instead of paying Blubrry or something, I don't know how much it is, $25 a month or something like that. So yeah, I did that and then I built an email service on AWS, too. So instead of paying MailChimp $50 a month, it would be free or pennies for AWS to send hundreds of thousands of emails. So I got interested in the cloud that way and then of course, Mexico [chuckles] is a third world countryóit might be second world now I'm not a 100% sure on thatóand so they're behind on a lot of things. I came with this idea that I was going to put them into the cloud. They like to use Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pages to conduct business and my whole thing is if you're going to sell real estate to international people, are you going to look on Facebook Marketplace or Facebook Pages for property? [chuckles] No, you're going to want a website. So I built the websites on AWS using the cloud and then the databases in the background to pull the properties, depending on how big the real estate company was, and that's how I became an IT consultant. To fall back on being a Black American in Mexico and starting your own thing, not to say that America doesn't have a lot of resources, but Mexico has tons of resources to get you started doing business in Mexico. [chuckles] And being Black also helps, too because everybody's curious about you, so. [laughs] DAMIEN: So what I heard in that story was you ran into some really broken interview processes in tech so then you all went off and became an auditor and did that for X number of years and now that you're in Mexico doing your own consulting, it's different. You don't have to deal with the broken interview processes that we have in this industry. ELYSE: Yeah. I have interviewed recently just to see [laughs] and at this point, I kind of want to come back for grad schools because I said, I need to quit playing around and do something with my life, but. [laughs] So I have interviewed, and I don't know if it's gotten worse, but I see that it's really out there, and in comparison to audits and in comparison to say, the government process of interviewing, because I have interviewed at the government Level II for IT, it's really out there. I don't understand why. REIN: What are the tech community is like that you've been a part of in Mexico, or how are they different from a bunch of white dudes with beards getting together in the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco? ELYSE: One of the first people that I had met moving to my second apartment in Mexico City was a programmer. So I asked him about the process and everything and he's like, ìYeah, no one does that here.î So I don't think it's like as gatekeeped in Mexico because you'll see women working in all types of industries, going to work in their little business suits and things like that. [chuckles] Not to say it's equal because sexism is really bad in Mexico. They've literally been having marches for the amount of sexism that that's been going on in Mexico. But you do see women working in these roles and I have not talked to a woman in IT, only males. So I guess, I'm kind of biased on this. [laughs] DAMIEN: Can you talk a little bit about the difference between entering or interviewing in IT versus auditing or government? ELYSE: Yeah. So Iíve interviewed at, I can't remember because it was so long ago, but I want to say it was KPMG. So I have interviewed at the big four and everything like that and of course, they do the are you a culture fit questions. It's more so on are you a culture fit, I guess. They're not asking you what is the difference between a debit and a credit [laughs] in accounting. With IT, they're asking you what is the difference between a join and whatever else in SQL and to spit something off the top of my head like that, that's detrimental to my psyche. [laughs] Because I've done it for years, I might not know the name of it, because it doesn't matter if I've been doing it for years and I couldn't even see it at the entry-level point because they didn't even do that at the entry level point for me. But the government process is very sterile because they're not supposed to be biased. They're supposed to give people with disabilities and women and minorities, equal opportunity. There is no video, usually. Everything's on the phone. There's probably no names on resumes and things like that. Like, they cut all that stuff out so there's no bias in the interview process because if your name is Hardeep, [laughs] you'll have some type of bias, potentially. So the government process is very sterile and then they rate you. It's very different. There's no hoops to jump through because if I have a portfolio of work or I've been working for this employer, then you just basically need to check references at that point, I guess, instead of having me do a coding interview on something that I wouldn't know what it was beforehand; putting me on the spot. DAMIEN: Yeah. I've definitely seen that the gotcha questions of testing esoteric tech knowledge, but I've been on the other side interviewing people and because of the way we managed to structure the interviews, I get to meet the people before looking at their resumes, which I prefer. But I'll do some pairing with the person and then go, ìWell, this person does not know how to write code,î and then ñ like just don't understand the concept of giving instructions to a computer and I go back and I look at their resume and find like 5 years senior software engineer at this company I've heard of. ELYSE: So my question is though, do you think people are faking their portfolios, too? Because I mean, there's no portfolios and in accounting so it's basically their word against yours and like I said, you would check the references to be a 100% sure, but I guess, people can fake references at this point, too. But the background check comes into play because I've heard people say you need to do a video talking about yourself and then you have to have all these ñ you have to have ten projects, contribute to open source, and where does it end? [laughs] REIN: My wife is an accountant, but she's in tax and I really don't understand how you would interview someone for that job because so much of it is looking stuff up all the time. ELYSE: What type of process can we do to where people aren't spending 6 hours doing these interviews? [laughs] REIN: I mean, the tax code is so big that no one can remember it, then it changes. It has changed a lot under Trump. How do you demonstrate expertise in reading and parsing the tax code? That's weird to me. I don't know how you do that. ELYSE: That's why I said. More so I guess, it would be a culture fit because I'm trying to think back to one of my interviews for my auditor interviews, I don't recall them asking me any accounting questions. It was basically personality type questions like, do I want to work with you because every job, you're going to need some type of training to get up to speed and that's the other problem. It was funny because I asked a lady yesterday, I worked for the government so I have clearance, I asked her, ìAre you filling these roles?î [laughs] She said, ìNo, these roles have been open for months,î and I said, ìI'm not trying to get in your business, but I was just curious.î She started stuttering like she wasn't prepared to answer that question and she's like, ìNo, they've been open for forever,î and I'm like, ìYeah, I know they are. That's why I'm askingî because number one, you're looking for a cloud engineer and number two, you're looking for somebody with a top secret clearance. That's probably like one out of a million people on this earth, a billion, too at this point. [laughs] DAMIEN: Thatís an absolutely ridiculous requirement like, it's only reasonable, to hire somebody you think you can get clearance for and then work to get their clearance. To require that sort of thing in advance is absolutely ridiculous. ELYSE: This is what I'm talking about and that's why I asked her because I get these things in my inbox all the timeócloud engineer with a clearanceóand they're like, ìYou need a top secret,î and I'm like, ìWhat's the chance of somebody having a top secret and is a cloud engineer and also knows enough about being in the cloud to fill your requirements?î Because like I said, the cloud is so vast number one, you would have to train someone on a lot of things and a top secret clearance? [laughs] DAMIEN: That dovetails with the other thing you said, the question being in an interview, ìDo I want to work with this person?î and that's actually the final question I use when I'm done with an interview. It's like, ìDo I want to work with this person tomorrow? Do I want to work with them tomorrow? Are they capable of doing the job?î And by capable of doing the job, I don't mean they know everything right now because they've never worked here before. They sure donít know our code base. Also, things are going to change so can they learn? So do I want to work with you and can you learn? ELYSE: Yeah. Not to say that I want to hire somebody that knows nothing and then train them up, which at this point, that might be what you have to do especially when you want some obscure requirements. But my thing is, can this person learn? Are they hungry? That's my whole thing. Are they capable of learning because some people are not capable; [laughs] they'll throw in the towel real, real quick. So can they figure out some things? REIN: You know that thing I said about how accountants are always looking stuff up? Software engineers do that, too. ELYSE: Oh yeah, I know they do and I do it all the time with my own projects. It's like, you're asking me the difference between debits and credits. I can give you a baseline, but at the end of the day, I'm going to look it up to make sure that I got it right. As long as I know it and understand it to an extent. So those little questions on those things kind of insane and going back to what he said, people faking experience. Are you saying that people are faking their portfolios, too or do you not? Because that's the thing, people are saying do a portfolio, but no one has ever looked at mine. [laughs] Even as a contractor doing my own thing, no one has ever asked to see work that I've done before. They're like, ìOkay, well, she sounds good so we're going to hire her.î [laughs] REIN: A lot of people that have worked at big companies don't have portfolios so they can just show people because it's not their work. ELYSE: Yeah, and that's the other thing because I worked for the government and a lot of things that I did was secret so a lot of things I can't talk about. So it's like what am I supposed to say here? [laughs] REIN: As far as I can tell, every industry is just really bad at this, but tech might be one of the worst at actually evaluating human beings. ELYSE: Yeah, and like I said earlier, my sister's in health care and she recently just left to go on a contract to help out for COVID. So I'm asking her, I was like, ìWell, what did they do to see if you were qualified for the job?î She was like, ìWell, they just checked my license and they checked my references and that was it! î That was it. So it's crazy out here and I've had places where they were like, ìWe're going to do seven interviews.î Seven interviews for what?! DAMIEN: The only way to know if a person is capable of doing the job is to do the job with them. To work with them over a course of weeks, months, years. So obviously, references are probably the best, but if you call up a stranger and say, ìHey, this person who used to work for you. Are they good at the job?î They're going to say yes or nothing because they risk litigation, otherwise. I live in Hollywood, you see this in movies where directors, especially top named directors, work with the same cast over and over again because they've worked with that cast, they know how they work. Even not top named directors. If you go to a casting agent, you'll find that they bring in the same people over and over again and the same people get hired because somebody can say, ìOh yeah, I worked with them. They were great.î ELYSE: Yeah. I understand where you're coming from. I do. But for a field that says there's such a shortage, [chuckles] such a shortage, it doesn't line up. DAMIEN: That's the other half of it, too is I can take any reasonable human being and make them into an excellent software engineer. I've done it. Those weren't reasonably human beings; those people were awesome. [chuckles] But I think I can do it with reasonable people, too and I think a lot of our industry does not know how to do that. We don't. There's so much, especially in engineering management, they don't know how to make engineers better engineers or how to make people integrate engineers. So what are you going to do? ELYSE: I don't know, but I guess, IT was started kind of funny. I was a little bit too young to really fully understand, but I know at one point they were just throwing money at the most stupidest things. Maybe that's why these ridiculous requirements have come about because accounting has been around since the beginning of time, medicine has been around since the beginning of time so that's my only thought on that. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah. If you could just solve that problem for us real quick, just right here on the podcast, that'd be great. [laughter] Just go ahead and tell us what to do. DAMIEN: Weíd all appreciate that. ELYSE: I mean, interviewing like I said, at the government where they interview one time because everybody's already on the panel so they can get a feel for you because they're like, ìOkay, well you're going to interview with so-and-so,î and then the second interview, youíre going to interview with so-and-so, the third interview, you're going to interview with so-and-so. Can you just make it one whole thing so everyone can ask their questions, kind of like what we're doing right now and get it over with? [laughs] I mean, that's one of the first steps. [laughs] REIN: If you look at like big companies like Google, they get so many applicants that they mostly just care about saying no to people. They mostly care about weeding out the people they don't want and they'd be happy to say no to people they do want; that's more important to them than saying yes to people. They would say no to someone they do want and say yes to someone they don't want because it's hard to fire people, which is good. But their hiring process is entirely built around saying no as quickly as possible and if Google can't do this with all of the resources they have, what hope do the rest of us have? ARTY: I don't know how useful it is to compare ourselves to Google, though because the problem totally shifts. When you move away from a filtering problem and you turn things around, you've got an attraction problem then instead. I think a better way to frame it is to look at it as how can we put ourselves out there as a company such that we attract the right people that are likely to be a good fit for us? Because you can get a whole bunch of the wrong people, but if you do a really good job at characterizing yourself, your company, your team, and things in a way that really shines and shows through what it is you're about and interested in and what your culture is about, then it makes it easier for the right people to find you. But not have ridiculous requirements. I imagine this Venn diagram with cloud engineer and then top secret security clearance where you've got like this set up for, you can only talk to us if you're a unicorn. Instead of doing that, focus on the things that you really care about and then eliminate all of the impossible to fill the requirements and just focus on the competencies that are actually relevant instead. ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, I don't know because every organization has some type of IT in it. So just like accounting, those probably are the two biggest fields where everybody is going to need it. It really needs to be fixed because everyone needs IT just like everyone needs accounting. ARTY: To your point earlier, in talking about there's a shortage and a supply problem. If that's the problem to solve, then figuring out how we improve education and support and learning for people that are interested in those sorts of fields. How do we support mentorship kinds of opportunities so that you can get more help and support on your journey? ELYSE: Oh no, there's plenty of programs out there. Plenty because I've done them. I've done them 2 years ago and I've done them now, but just like back then, I got discouraged with the process. I mean, if the process is ridiculous, it's going to turn a lot of people off and they're just going to go do something else. So that's another reason why it needs to be fixed. I don't want people to go to school for computer science or whatever, and they don't know anything about this whole process, theyíve got to go through this hazing process, basically and they wasted their time because that literally could have been me, but I got smart on it and I switched to accounting. [laughs] REIN: It seems like if the problem is that getting hired is a lot about who you know and that this is really discriminatory that on the one hand, you should change that by getting better at assessing human performance. But that seems like a really long-term plan that will take decades and so, maybe the thing to do in the short-term is to try to get more people those opportunities to be known and to be a part of that network. ELYSE: Yeah. I don't know because like I said, there's all types of organizations and everything else to help, all of that. There's plenty of that. Where the problem comes into play is like I said, there's such a shortage then why are so many people just out of the loop? Because you can go all up and down Twitter and people are constantly complaining about it. Theyíre constantly complaining about it. I haven't looked to see if there's anything else for accounting or any other field. But like I said, I did two fields alreadyóaccounting and medicineóand obviously, they're not like that, so. REIN: It's really interesting. This is true about capitalism in general. There are a lot of jobs that need people and there are a lot of people that need jobs and it's not efficient at all. ELYSE: Yeah, that's true. But again, I think part of the problem is we can go back to the cloud engineer and the security clearance. How many people on this earth actually have that? [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah. Theoretical efficiencies and capitalism are dependent on people being knowledgeable and rational to things that are not true about human beings, but we can improve that. I love what Arty said about really finding the relevant things and the relevant thing is not you know what a credit or a debit is, you know the difference between a join and a left outer join. Honestly, if I'm hiring somebody, the relevant thing is, do I want to work with you? Are you a pleasure to work with? I can teach you all about IT; I can't teach you to care about your coworkers. ELYSE: Right. [laughs] That is true. DAMIEN: And if I'm dealing with classified material, I need to be able to get people clearances. If I can't do that, I'm ñ yeah, that's not a thing. ELYSE: Yeah, and if you want to talk about the clearance trust. The trust factor, too. I mean, we don't want you out here selling the secrets and giving away credit card numbers and social security numbers. I don't know, but something needs to be fixed because yeah, I don't know and it's definitely not a pipeline problem. It's not a pipeline problem. I'm truly thinking it is the interview process. REIN: Itís also maybe a little bit that the jobs people end up getting suck so much. There are a lot of toxic workplaces and people were treated really poorly. ELYSE: Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm really open to remote work because you don't have to look at people, you don't have to deal with them, and a lot of IT jobs probably need to be a remote so you don't have to go into the office. Especially now. I joke with my father that all the people that's causing all the issues right now are the extroverts. [laughs] Us introverts, we're fine sitting at home and not too much people interaction and stuff. It's all the extroverts. I guess, to an extent, it's probably the extroverts that's doing the hiring process and things like that so they come up with these ridiculous procedures to put people through these hazing processes, too. Recently, I saw job bulletin, it was Scrum master and a Python developer and I'm like, ìA Python developer doesn't want to talk to people like that.î [laughs] We just want to sit behind the computer and code! We're not going to facilitate meetings and do Scrum. You're crazy. I've seen tons of positions like that and I'm just like, ìGone are the days where you could just not have too much people interaction and just code or do whatever in IT.î So I think that might be a part of the problem, too becauseóI don't want to be stereotypical again, butóIT is for those that would just want to sit behind the computer and not really deal with people that much. So I think that's also a part of the problem. Extroverts are trying to get into IT and they probably shouldn't be. [laughs] DAMIEN: So the thing that I'll be reflecting on is really, the ways that I can be fearless. The story Elyse told us felt to me like something had to be done, so she did it and if it has to be done and you do it because there's no room for fear and there's a lot of areas in my life where I have a lot of fear and it's not necessary, I don't have to have it. I could just do it. So I'm going to be reflecting on that. ARTY: The thing I've been thinking about is when you said, ìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î You think about all the limits we put on ourselves and all the things we don't do and you can kind of imagine yourself getting old and looking back at your life and like, ìWhy didn't I do that? Why was I so paralyzed by fear that I didn't take that chance? I didn't do that opportunity. I didn't pick up and move to a different country?î [chuckles] There's so many things in life that we have the opportunity to see yet all those limits hold us back from experiencing those things and why? Why do we let fear grip us in that way, as opposed to really living and experiencing our life? I find it so inspiring that you just picked up and left everything you knew, and moved to a different country without knowing anyone, without having any friends there. You found some stranger that helped find your place, ended up creating work opportunity and stuff with drawing on your skills that you had to make a living, and making the whole thing work and that's so powerful, just to be able to do that. ìYou only have one life, so why are you putting limits on it?î REIN: I have a couple reflections by the first one is that I need to learn more about the history of the transatlantic slave trade outside of the United States so that I don't sound like a dipshit on my own podcast and the second one is that, I think that folks in tech, especially people who look like me, should be intentional about making our networks more inclusive. If that's how the world works, then I think that's what we need to do and also, itíll enrich your lives if you do that because you'll get to it hang out and talk to more people. ELYSE: I will say that I don't think that there is a pipeline problem because I know tons of engineersówomen, Asian, Blackóand we're all minorities in IT and we're pumping through it and like I said, all over just on Twitter alone, there's all types of complaints about the process. Being from accounting was my ñ I don't want to see my original field but the field that I switched to after I found out that computer science was not as fair. There was none of these issues that I ran into. So living in another country for years and just frolicking has changed my perspective on so many things and I hope that the IT industry officially gets it together because they're missing out so much, so much talent. So much talent. Special Guest: Elyse Robinson.
221: Cultivating Strength and Change with Wesley Faulkner
01:59 - Wesley’s Superpower: Connecting With People and Being a Social Chameleon 11:31 - Sharing Responsibility Based on Strengths; Delegating “Weakness” * Strengths Finder 2.0 (https://bookshop.org/books/strengths-finder-2-0/9781531865313) * Positions vs Roles 23:52 - Mission Statements Are Bullsh*t (especially for marginalized people/groups) * False Value Systems * Veni Kunche: Diversify Tech (https://diversifytech.co/) * Greater Than Code Episode 212: Diversify Tech with Veni Kunche (https://www.greaterthancode.com/diversify-tech) “The real barrier is individuals who don’t want to lose power.” 32:16 - Talking Truth to Power: Enacting Change * Systems Thinking: A Primer (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557) * Networking * Running For City Council / Learning How Politics Work * A Promised Land by Barak Obama (https://www.amazon.com/Promised-Land-Barack-Obama/dp/1524763160) * User Research * Accessing People “Strong opinions don’t mean right opinions.” Reflections: Damien: The decommodification of labor and people. John: Finding strengths and leaning into them so you can be the most effective. Casey: We are stronger together. Wesley: Skills are things you aren’t necessarily born with. You can create and cultivate them. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Wesley Faulkner.
220: Safety Science and Failure As An Opportunity For Growth with Josh Thompson
01:48 - Josh’s Superpower: Teaching nearly anything he knows to almost anyone * Fear Remediation 05:04 - Safety Science and Staying Safe While Rock Climbing * 2020 Accidents in North American Climbing (https://americanalpineclub.myshopify.com/collections/aac-publications/products/2020-accidents-in-north-american-climbing) * Accidents are the result of normal work * How Complex Systems Fail (https://how.complexsystems.fail) 17:42 - Transfer of Knowledge from Experts to Non-Experts 23:07 - Root Cause Analysis & Taking Gambles 33:00 - Failure As An Opportunity For Growth * Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice by Cedric Chin (https://commoncog.com/blog/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/) 50:07 - Psychological Safety * William Khan: Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Psychological-Conditions-of-Personal-Engagement-and-Kahn/cbb3887590de9e5dc702b5d2655fbe804669fea0) Reflections: Rein: Operators are always gambling and taking risks. Cognition in Practice by Jean Lave (https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Practice-Learning-Doing-Lave/dp/0521357349) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (https://www.amazon.com/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/0465068782) Mando: How to properly build systems and teams that are friendly to lesser experienced individuals to bring up folx who are earlier in their careers or other industries. Josh: Commemorating team learning experiences. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Josh Thompson.
219: How Are You Doing? with Mando Escamilla
03:19 - Mando’s Superpower: Willingness to Talk About Anything Personal with Others 08:39 - Dealing with Life in 2020/2021 * Rationality vs Non-Rationality * Feeling Lost and Unmoored 18:30 - Finding Anchors * Narrative and Story * Emotion * Song * Rhyme * Repetition * Affiliation Ted Lasso (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10986410/) The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Thousand-Doors-January/dp/0316421995) 34:28 - Being Okay Being Less Productive Sea Shanty TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@nathanevanss/video/6910995345421962498?sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=6902195729617257990&is_from_webapp=v2) 46:47 - Practicing Gratitude For Communities You Do Have; Talking to Kids About Feelings What do you do with the mad that you feel? – Mr. Rogers (https://www.misterrogers.org/videos/what-to-you-do-with-the-mad-that-you-feel/) Sesame Street: Dave Matthews and Grover Sing about Feelings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po5lHYJJQfw) “If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” – Fred Rogers Reflections: Rein: The ability for there to be a higher-level cognitive function that happens after emotional and affective responses and that it is capable of mediating between those responses and action. Mando: Giving a specific name to how he’s feeling right now: lost. Damien: The value of interrogating feelings. “Community is not the sum of its members but the product of their relationships.” – Russell Ackoff This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.
218: Building Bridges with Isa Herico-Velasco
02:12 - Isa’s Superpower: Being a Bridge * RailsBridge (http://railsbridge.org/) * Bridge Foundry (https://bridgefoundry.org/) – They’re Hiring !! 08:56 - Community Learning * Asynchronous Communication * Discord (https://discord.com/) * Cultivating a Leadership Pipeline * Transparency * “Many hands make light work.” 19:16 - Pivoting From Rock’n’Roll to Software Engineering: Software + Music * Gigwell (https://www.gigwell.com/): Talent Booking * Everything Relates to Tech Somehow 27:57 - Grappling with Impostor Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) Reflections: Damien: Community over architecture. Casey: Community and mentorship. Isa: Talking to other engineers re: non-code + community and sustainability. Laurie: Finding new ways to collaborate in a remote/pandemic world. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Isa Herico-Velasco .